That magazine’s website has a nice write-up, “How Harvard University Almost Destroyed Itself,” of my article in Boston mag.

Boston Magazine has a long, shocking piece about how the people running the world’s greatest university almost bankrupted the school through a series of very dumb financial decisions after a decade of unbelievable growth in the endowment. Reading the litany of horror — making bad decisions in the stock market, paying for buildings they couldn’t afford, learning to hate Goldman Sachs — it occurred to me that Harvard has never seemed more like average Americans.

Blogger Derek Thompson writes optimistically:

Harvard’s expansion might slow, but even if the endowment simply stopped growing, the school could continue spending at its current levels for another 20 years.

It’s an odd argument: So far as I can tell, he means that it would take that long to spend the endowment to zero, so Harvard’s good for 20 years anyway. I’m not sure anyone should find that reassuring.