I didn't need to call anything out by name- we weren't having a citation battle. You just plain can't frame this stuff appropriately, that's not my fault. You let me know when you've attended lectures in the memorial series for the former university president with a doctoral student in economics in the process of defending their dissertation that cites the guy, then we can discuss when and whether it's necessary to
Nobody asked for your life story.
name drop. I'll give you a hint: only one of the two people referenced has a last name that starts with 'B.'
If I mention the Philips curve, that doesn't mean I'm name-dropping Bill Philips. Many (most?) economic concepts have a name tied to them, and when you talk about them, nobody assumes you're talking about the person behind them. Besides, when I referenced the capital B, there was literally only one relevant name in that page you gawked at, not two, and that was only to get you to actually read the material rather than just do a control-f. Why you're doing this here, I have no idea, but it doesn't even matter.
Let me make this easier for you: my public food bank will spend all of my donation as well. If that donation was big enough they install a sink to wash the produce, I'd indeed expect someone to consider its value to the clients,
And what would you say if they used it to install a hot tub for the staff? That's basically what's happening at a lot of these institutions. Besides, this still isn't relevant to Baumol, which is the whole reason you even went down this rabbit hole.
not arrive at a conclusion to which their political position is a necessary precondition.
I specifically excluded politics in my first post. The only relevance it has is in whether the government should be putting tighter limits on student loans. That's it. You know another reason I say that? A few weeks back I was dating a woman who graduated from Cal Tech, and she was telling me about how some of her classmates were spending student loan money on completely ridiculous stuff, like using it to buy a brand new car in one case. If somebody does something THAT stupid with their loans, there is zero reason for the taxpayers to bail them out. Full stop. It would likewise make a lot of sense to reduce the loan amounts to encourage borrowers to choose less expensive schools.
But it won't surprise me at all 10 years from now when the employees are paid twice as much while distributing the same amount of food.
Unless you're sitting here trying to argue that Baumol explains all, or even a slight majority, of why modern students are spending a lot more on their education than their parents did, then this is a totally moot point. Not only are you fixated purely on the tuition cost which is only one of four reasons I alluded to in my post, but you're also assuming that all the money is being spent wisely, which goes back to the original question I posed: Is it worth the cost?
But continue grasping at straws.