I suppose things could have changed in the intervening decades, but am skeptical, and I'd love to see someone follow today's money.

People who gave towards the sports teams targeted all of it, and donated nothing towards the rest of the university. But even with those donations, and wherever other sports income there was, it didn't cover the increasingly high salaries and capital costs.

Long ago, in the mists of time, I spent 1991 at an American university on sabbatical. That gave me access to US-wide faculty publications, and one such had a very interesting article that, for most universities at the time, sports was a parasite that drained money from the rest of the Academy.

Apropos of nothing in particular going on right now. Nope.

This should be pretty clear evidence, if anybody still needed it, that an economy based on the need for constant expansion is eventually going to collapse.

For exactly this reason, even though my TBR is pretty big, if I have good reason to think I will enjoy a trilogy based on what people tell me about the first book, or what I know about the author, I keep buying each book even though I might not get to them for a long time.

An agent wouldn't let a writer get away with such cartoon villains.

I seem to recall, some months ago, someone posted a meme that says, in statements of this sort that talk about effects on "the economy" substitute "rich people's yachts"

I'm sure there are some reasonable arguments that could be made for differences, but the common thread is increasing your profits at a cost to the rest of the society you inhabit.