A typical researcher might make £100,000 a year. £15,000,000 is roughly £1,000,000 a year if invested in the stock market. So you could hire 5 researchers to work full-time, in perpetuity.
Conferences are cool, but do you really think they generate as much research as 5 full time researchers would? As a researcher, I can tell you flat-out the answer is no. I could do much more with 5 people working for me than I could by going to even a thousand conferences.
You can’t always turn more money into more researchers. You need people who can mentor and direct them, and you need to find people who are good fits for the position, and most of the people who are most interesting to you are also interesting to other employers. In general, I don’t think finding salaries for such people was the bottleneck.
Investing money into the stock market and investing money into real estate are similar. In both cases, the value of your capital can rise or fall over time.
The value of both can both rise or fall, but real estate is only an investment when rented out. Otherwise, it’s a durable consumption good. In particular, the EMH* implies the expected value of buying real estate and renting it out must be equal to the expected return on stocks. Otherwise, people would stop sell stocks (driving their price down, and therefore the rate of return up) and then buy real estate to lease it out.
*While it’s entirely plausible the EMH doesn’t hold, no analysis arguing this is presented, and I don’t think that placing bets on certain sectors of the economy is a particularly good idea for a charity. Notably, arguments against the EMH almost all fall on the side of suggesting the housing market is currently overvalued because of structural deficiencies (like the inability to short housing) and subsidies that make buying cheaper for individual homeowners (but not charities)
There’s plenty of real estate investment that does not depend on the real estate being rented out. That’s why laws get passed that require some real estate to be rented out.
One of the attributes of real estate is that it’s a lot less liquid than stocks and economic theory suggests that market participants should pay a premium for liquidity.
Finally, it’s wrong to say that anything with less expected returns than stocks is no investment. People all the time invest money in treasury bonds that have less expected returns.
A typical researcher might make £100,000 a year. £15,000,000 is roughly £1,000,000 a year if invested in the stock market. So you could hire 5 researchers to work full-time, in perpetuity.
Conferences are cool, but do you really think they generate as much research as 5 full time researchers would? As a researcher, I can tell you flat-out the answer is no. I could do much more with 5 people working for me than I could by going to even a thousand conferences.
You can’t always turn more money into more researchers. You need people who can mentor and direct them, and you need to find people who are good fits for the position, and most of the people who are most interesting to you are also interesting to other employers. In general, I don’t think finding salaries for such people was the bottleneck.
Investing money into the stock market and investing money into real estate are similar. In both cases, the value of your capital can rise or fall over time.
The value of both can both rise or fall, but real estate is only an investment when rented out. Otherwise, it’s a durable consumption good. In particular, the EMH* implies the expected value of buying real estate and renting it out must be equal to the expected return on stocks. Otherwise, people would stop sell stocks (driving their price down, and therefore the rate of return up) and then buy real estate to lease it out.
*While it’s entirely plausible the EMH doesn’t hold, no analysis arguing this is presented, and I don’t think that placing bets on certain sectors of the economy is a particularly good idea for a charity. Notably, arguments against the EMH almost all fall on the side of suggesting the housing market is currently overvalued because of structural deficiencies (like the inability to short housing) and subsidies that make buying cheaper for individual homeowners (but not charities)
.
There’s plenty of real estate investment that does not depend on the real estate being rented out. That’s why laws get passed that require some real estate to be rented out.
One of the attributes of real estate is that it’s a lot less liquid than stocks and economic theory suggests that market participants should pay a premium for liquidity.
Finally, it’s wrong to say that anything with less expected returns than stocks is no investment. People all the time invest money in treasury bonds that have less expected returns.
What do you think about MSRI (https://www.msri.org/web/cms) and Simons Institute (https://simons.berkeley.edu/), btw?
Not sure, I don’t know all that much about them, unfortunately.