Harvard's choice to do belt-tightening while sitting on a $41 billion endowment nicely shows how austerity is fundamentally a ritual performance meant to overwrite a moral narrative onto the set of priorities where money is more important than lives

In theory, the purpose of an endowment is to allow an institution to operate indefinitely even through financial shocks and downturns; in practice, the institution spends down its own operations to allow the endowment to keep growing undisturbed

Along with Congress' insistence on loans and means-testing and "stimulus" rather than straight universal cash relief, it betrays a deep inability or refusal to understand the economic disaster the world is going through, where the whole standard story of cause and effect is moot