Year: 2019

It\’s also the source of one of the liveliest insults to the field of economics, that economics is \”a `science\’ of complaisant interpretations, apologies, and projected remedies.\” Veblen also argues that this isn\’t because economists and other academics have been paid off, but only because they have been selected and trained for their narrow intellectual horizons. Here\’s Veblen (the direct critique of economics starts in the third paragraph):

Critics of the latterday university policies have from time to time called attention to an apparent reluctance on the part of these academic scientists to encounter present-day facts hand-to-hand, or to trace out the causes to which current conditions are due. Distempered critics have even alleged that the academic leaders in the social sciences are held under some constraint, as being, in some sort, in the pay of the well-to-do conservative element; that they are thereby incapacitated from following up any inquiry to its logical conclusion, in case the conclusion might appear to traverse the interest or the opinions of those on whom these leaders are in this way pecuniarily dependent.

Now, it may be conceded without violence to notorious facts, that these official leaders of science do commonly reach conclusions innocuous to the existing law and order, particularly with respect to religion, ownership, and the distribution of wealth. But this need imply no constraint, nor even any peculiar degree of tact, much less a moral obliquity. It may confidently be asserted, without fear of contradiction from their side, that the official leaders in this province of academic research and indoctrination are, commonly, in no way hindered from pushing their researches with full freedom and to the limit of their capacity; and that they are likewise free to give the fullest expression to any conclusions or convictions to which their inquiries may carry them. That they are able to do so is a fortunate circumstance, due to the fact that their intellectual horizon is bounded by the same limits of commonplace insight and preconceptions as are the prevailing opinions of the conservative middle class. That is to say, a large and aggressive mediocrity is the prime qualification for a leader of science in these lines, if his leadership is to gain academic authentication. …

A single illustrative instance of the prevalence of this animus in the academic social sciences may be in place. It is usual among economists, e.g., to make much of the proposition that economics is an \”art\” — the art of expedient management of the material means of life; and further that the justification of economic theory lies in its serviceability in this respect. Such a quasi-science necessarily takes the current situation for granted as a permanent state of things; to be corrected and brought back into its normal routine in case of aberration, and to be safeguarded with apologetic defence at points where it is not working to the satisfaction of all parties. It is a \”science\” of complaisant interpretations, apologies, and projected remedies.

The academic leaders in such a quasi-science should be gifted with the aspirations and limitations that so show up in its pursuit. Their fitness in respect of this conformity to the known middle-class animus and apprehension of truth may, as it expediently should, be considered when their selection for academic office and rank is under advisement; but, provided the choice be a wise one, there need be no shadow of constraint during their incumbency. The incumbent should be endowed with a large capacity for work, particularly for \”administrative\” work, with a lively and enduring interest in the \”practical\” questions that fall within his academic jurisdiction, and with a shrewd sense of the fundamental rightness of the existing order of things, social, economic, political, and religious. So, by and large, it will be found that these accredited leaders of scientific inquiry are fortunate enough not narrowly to scrutinize, or to seek particular explanation of, those institutional facts which the conservative common sense of the elderly businessman accepts as good and final; and since their field of inquiry is precisely this range of institutional facts, the consequence is that their leadership in the science conduces more to the stability of opinions than to the advancement of knowledge.

The result is by no means that nothing is accomplished in this field of science under this leadership of forceful mediocrity, but only that, in so far as this leadership decides, the work done lies on this level of mediocrity. Indeed, the volume of work done is large and of substantial value, but it runs chiefly on compilation of details and on the scrutiny and interpretation of these details with a view to their conformity with the approved generalizations of the day before yesterday, — generalizations that had time to grow into aphoristic commonplaces at a date before the passing generation of businessmen attained their majority.

Utilitarianism is notoriously inept with decisions where the number of persons is at issue. (In this area, it must be conceded, eptness is hard to come by.) Maximizing the total happiness requires continuing to add persons so long as their net utility is positive and is sufficient to counterbalance the loss in utility their presence in the world causes others. Maximizing the average utility allows a person to kill everyone else if that would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average. (Don’t say he shouldn’t because after his death the average would drop lower than if he didn’t kill all the others.) Is it all right to kill someone provided you immediately substitute another (by having a child or, in science-fiction fashion, by creating a full-grown person) who will be as happy as the rest of the life of the person you killed? After all, there would be no net diminution in total utility, or even any change in its profile of distribution. Do we forbid murder only to prevent feelings of worry on the part of potential victims? (And how does a utilitarian explain what it is they’re worried about, and would he really base a policy on what he must hold to be an irrational fear?) Clearly, a utilitarian needs to supplement his view to handle such issues; perhaps he will find that the supplementary theory becomes the main one … 

Nozick died back in 2002. I met him once, briefly, two decades before that, when I was teaching a summer course in political philosophy to high school students at the Phillips Andover summer session.  My memory of the encounter is that  I stuttered through an attempt to tell him how much I enjoyed Anarchy, State and Utopia, and he was very kind.

Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) is probably best-remembered as the author of the (fabulously good) Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels and stories. But she also received first-class honors modern languages and medieval literature from Oxford in 1915, before women were officially awarded degrees, and later in life also published books of poetry, theology, and a well-regarded translation of Dante\’s Divine Comedy. In 1948, she wrote an essay titled \”The Lost Tools of Learning\” (available various places on the web). A quick taste:

\”Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart? …

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of `subjects\’; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished.

This complaint from Sayers strikes me as having an uncomfortable amount of truth. Yes, it may underestimate the extent to which people have always been susceptible to a propaganda rooted in emotion-laden words. But it seems to me as if the targeting and sophistication of propaganda is increasing. Conversely, it is not clear to me that people have over time become correspondingly better at dealing with these issues, and it is not clear to me that those who have higher levels of formal education are better at dealing with them, either.

The solution offered by Sayers in her essay is magnificently irrelevant: as student of medieval literature, she recommends a return to the principles of the Trivium and the Quadrivium in classical education. I suspect Sayers of recommending for others what would have worked well for her–but she was quite far from being a typical student or person.

A famous theorem in economics states that a competitive enterprise economy will produce the largest possible income from a given stock of resources. No real economy meets the exact conditions of the theorem, and all real economies will fall short of the ideal economy—a difference called \”market failure.\” In my view, however, the degree of \”market failure\” for the American economy is much smaller than the \”political failure\” arising from the imperfections of economic policies found in real political systems. The merits of laissez-faire rest less upon its famous theoretical foundations than upon its advantages over the actual performance of rival forms of economic organization.

Of course, this view is reminiscent of the famous comment by Winston Churchill (in a speech before the House of Commons on November 11, 1947) defending democracy on the grounds that it at least beats the alternatives. Churchill said:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Such broad characterizations always deserve some pushback. For example, \”democracy\” in the real world typically comes with many safeguards against direct rule by immediate decisions of the population: the rules for how political representatives are elected, dividing power among branches of government, constitutions that set certain limits on what democratically-elected representatives can decide, and so on. These rules vary in substantial ways across nations that would be fairly classified as \”democracies.\” Similarly, countries that would be fairly classified as market economies have many safeguards against the unfettered domination by market forces, and such rules vary considerably across countries.

But pushback to the pushback is fair game, as well. Looking around the world, we don\’t have any examples of countries with successful model of state-run economic organization that have consistently over the long-term provided a higher level of standard of living or faster growth than the many countries with  market-based systems–that is, not just a different set of constraints and rules to a fundamentally market-oriented economy, but a genuinely different model where the economy is run primarily through the political system. That fact tends to confirm Stigler\’s suggestion that real-world political failures in economic management can be severe.

Simon delivered the lecture, and said:

I should like to tell you a true story, culled from [Charles] Babbage\’s writings, about the history of the computer. I like this story because it illustrates not only my earlier point about the many mutual relations of the professions in our field, but also because it gives the underdogs like myself-trained in \’soft\’ fields like economics and political science something we can point to when the superior accomplishments of the natural sciences become too embarrassing for us. As you will see, this story shows that physicists and electrical engineers had little to do with the invention of the digital computer–that the real inventor was the economist Adam Smith, whose idea was translated into hardware through successive stages of development by two mathematicians, Prony and Babbage. (I should perhaps mention that the developers owed a debt also to the French weavers and mechanics responsible for the Jacquard loom, and eonsequently for the punched card.)

The story comes from a French document, which Babbage reproduces in the original language. I give it here in translation:

\”Here is the anecdote: M. de Prony was employed by a government committee to construct, for the decimal graduation of the circle, logarithmic and trigonometric tables which would not only leave nothing to be desired from the standpoint of accuracy, but which would constitute the most vast and imposing monuinent of calculation that had ever been executed or even conceived. The logarithms from 1 to 200,000 are a necessary and essential supplement to this work, It was easy for M. Prony to convince himself that even if he associated with himself three or four experienced collaborators the longest reasonable expectation of the duration of his life would not suffice to complete the undertaking. He was preoccupieed with this unhappy thought when, finding himself before a bookstore, he saw the beautiful edition of Adam Smith published in London in 1776. He opened the book at random and chanced upon the first chapter, which treats of the division of labor and where the manufacture of pins is cited as example.

Hardly had he perused the first pages when, by a stroke of inspiration he conceived the expedient of putting his logarithms into production like pins. He was giving, at this time, at the Ecole Polytechniques, some lectures on a topic in analysis related to this kind of work–the method of differences and its applications to interpolation. He went to spend some time in the country and returned to Paris with the plan of manufacture that has been followed in the execution. He organized two workshops which performed the same calculations separately, and served as reciprocal checks.\”

The anecdote is footnoted to Charles Babbage\’s 1832 book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, on p. 45. It is quoted by Babbage from an 1820 work  Note sur la publication, propose par le gouvernement Anglais des grands tables logarithmiques et trigonometriques de
M. de Prony. Simon and Newell then resume in their own voice:

It was Prony\’s mass production of the mathematical tables, in turn, that suggested to Babbage that machinery could replace human labor in the clerical phases of the task, and that started him on the undertaking of designing and constructing an automatic calculating engine. Although the complete absence of electrical and electronic components, and his consequent dependence on mechanical devices, robbed him of full success in the undertaking, there is no doubt that he understood and invented the digital computer–including the critically important idea of a conditional transfer operation. It would be hard to imagine a more appropriate illustration of the unexpected ways in which human knowledge develops … 

W.H. Auden wrote a poem delivered to Phi Beta Kappa graduates at Harvard University in 1946 called \”Under Which Lyre.\” It contains a line often clipped and quoted, without context: \”Thou shalt not sit/ With statisticians nor commit / A social science.\” The full poem is at the link, but here are the stanzas surrounding the line about committing a social science, which also speak to rebellious academics:

Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis
On education,
Thou shalt not worship projects nor
Shalt thou or thine bow down before
Administration.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.

Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Nor, above all, make love to those
Who wash too much.

Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views.

What is Auden up to here? Adam Kirsch offered a short and readable exegesis of the context in \”

Those of us who edit for a living, and especially those of us whose working-place value-added comes about by subtracting from the length of early drafts, will appreciate the comments of best-selling writer Stephen King in his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (quoting here from the third edition in 2000).

On the value of having a good editor (p. 13):

The next time you read about a \”bridge to nowhere\” or a giant infrastructure project that started and then stalled, you may wish to mutter to yourself  teh \”Iron Law of Megaprojects: Over budget, over time, over and over again.\” It\’s a coinage of Bent Flyvbjerg. For an overview of his arguments, you can check this Cato Policy Report (January 2017), which in turn is based on this article from the Project Management Journal (April/May 2014). In the Cato report, Flyvbjerg writes:

Megaprojects are large-scale, complex ventures that typically cost a billion dollars or more, take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders, are transformational, and impact millions of people. Examples of megaprojects are high-speed rail lines, airports, seaports, motorways, hospitals, national health or pension information and communications technology (ICT) systems, national broadband, the Olympics, largescale signature architecture, dams, wind farms, offshore oil and gas extraction, aluminum smelters, the development of new aircrafts, the largest container and cruise ships, high-energy particle accelerators, and the logistics systems used to run large supply-chain-based companies like Amazon and Maersk.

For the largest of this type of project, costs of $50-100 billion are now common, as for the California and UK high-speed rail projects, and costs above $100 billion are not uncommon, as for the International Space Station and the Joint Strike Fighter. If they were nations, projects of this size would rank among the world’s top 100 countries measured by gross domestic product. When projects of this size go wrong, whole companies and national economies suffer. …

If, as the evidence indicates, approximately one out of ten megaprojects is on budget, one out of ten is on schedule, and one out of ten delivers the promised benefits, then approximately one in a thousand projects is a success, defined as on target for all three. Even if the numbers were wrong by a factor of two, the success rate would still be dismal.

A common comeback to the Iron Law of Megaprojects is that if we pay attention to it, we will be so dissuaded by costs and risks of megaprojects that nothing will ever get done. Alfred O. Hirschman offered a sophisticated expression of this concern in his 1967 essay, \”The Hiding Hand.\”  Hirschman argued there there is rough balance in megaprojects: we tend underestimate the costs and problems of megaprojects, but we also tend to underestimate the creative with which people address the costs and and problems that arise. (This is of course similar to the classic argument that without a dose of irrational \”animal spirits,\” leading entrepreneurs to ignore risks and difficulties of starting a business, there there would be too little entrepreneurship provided.) Hirschman wrote:

We may be dealing here with a general principle of action. Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature o[ the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be. 

Or, put differently: since we necessarily underestimate our creativity it is desirable that we underestimate to a roughly similar extent the difficulties of the tasks we face, so as to be tricked by these two offsetting underestimates into undertaking tasks which we can, but otherwise would not dare, tackle. The principle is important enough to deserve a name: since we are apparently on the trail here of some sort of Invisible or Hidden Hand that beneficially hides difficulties from us, I propose \”The Hiding Hand.\” 

What this principle suggests is that, far from seeking out and taking up challenges, people are apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge–because the task looks easier and more manageable that it will turn out to be. As a result, the Hiding Hand can help accelerate the rate at which men engage successfully in problem-solving: they take up problems they think they can solve, find them more difficult than expected, but then, being stuck with them, attack willy-nilly the unsuspected difficulties–and sometimes even succeed. 

In the last few years, I have evolved a habit for that time in August when I head off for  vacation and other end-of-summer plans. I leave behind a series of scheduled daily posts about topics in economics, academia, and writing or editing that are usually based on historical essays and writings which caught my eye at some point. This year, I\’ll start with some thoughts about the 1885 address given by Alfred Marshall, \” The present position of economics.  An inaugural lecture given in the Senate House at Cambridge, 24 February, 1885.\”

The occasion for the lecture was that Henry Fawcett, the previous Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, had died, and Marshall was his successor in the position. The lecture is notable for many lovely turns of phase. As one example, it\’s the source of the comment that \”the most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves, who keeps in the back-ground the part he has played, perhaps unconsciously, in selecting and grouping them.\”

But Marshall\’s lecture also has an oddly contemporary feel. In 1885, socialism was on the rise in England, and economics was often criticized for assuming too much rationality and being unwilling and unable to addressing real social problems. Thus, Marshall\’s lecture has several underlying currents. He wants to acknowledge that the socialists of his day are pointing to real problems, while arguing that their answers are not likely to be useful in addressing those problems. He wants to define what is at the core of the subject of economics. He wants to explain that economics is a useful mechanism for looking at social policies, but also that economics is limited in the answers it can give. He suggests that economics should be helpful where it can, and then should shut up.

Here\’s Marshall on the socialists of his time:

The perfectibility of man had indeed been asserted by Owen and other socialists. But their views were based on little historic and scientific study; and were expressed with an extravagance that moved the contempt of the business-like economists of the age. The socialists did not attempt to understand the doctrines which they attacked; and there was no difficulty in showing that they had not rightly apprehended the nature and efficiency of the existing economic organization of society. It is therefore not a matter for wonder that the economists, flushed with their victories over a set of much more solid thinkers, did not trouble themselves to examine any of the doctrines of the socialists, and least of all their speculations as to human nature.

But the socialists were men who had felt intensely, and who knew something about the hidden  springs of human action of which the economists took no account. Buried among their wild rhapsodies there were shrewd observations and pregnant suggestions from which philosophers and economists had much to learn. … Among the bad results of the narrowness of the work of English economists early in the century perhaps the most unfortunate was the opportunity which it gave to socialists to quote and misapply economic dogmas. …

Why should it be left for impetuous socialists and ignorant orators to cry aloud that none ought to be shut out by the want of material means from the opportunity of leading a life that is worthy of man? Of those who throw their whole souls into the discussion of this problem, the greater part put forth hastily conceived plans which would often increase the evils that they desire to remedy: because they have not had a training in thinking out hard and intricate problems, a training which is most rare in the world …

What is the core of economics that can offer some assistance in thinking through these hard and intricate problems? Marshall notes that when people think about the main intellectual contribution of Adam Smith, they often point to what we now refer to as the \”invisible hand\” idea–that when people act in their own self-interest–though hard work, innovation, shopping for desired goods and services–they will often benefit the social welfare. However, Marshall argues that in fact, Smith\’s key insight was something quite different: \”His work was to indicate the manner in which value measures human motive.\” In other words, Smith started the process of drawing linkages between the ways that people act and the monetary incentives they face in terms of prices and wages–which is what makes human motives into something measurable. Marshall thought this idea was the true core of economic thinking:

But it is becoming clear that the true philosophic raison d’ệtre of the [economic] theory is that it supplies a  machinery to aid us in reasoning about those motives of human action which are measurable. In the world in which we live, money as representing general purchasing power, is so much the best measure of motives that no other can compete with it. … 

When in this world we want to induce a man to do anything for us, we generally offer him money. It is true that we might appeal to his generosity or Nature in the indicative mood and her ethical laws in the imperative sense of duty; but this would be calling into action latent motives that are already in existence, rather than supplying new motives. If we have to supply a new motive we generally consider how much money will just make it worth his while to do it. Sometimes indeed the gratitude, or esteem, or honour which is held out as an inducement to the actions may appear as a new motive : particularly if it can be crystallised in some definite outward manifestation; as for instance in the right to make use of the letters C.B., or to wear a star or a garter. In this world such distinctions are comparatively rare and connected with but few transactions; and they would not serve as a measure of the ordinary motives that govern men in the acts of every day life.

Marshall emphasizes that just because economics is often focused on selfish and self-regarding behavior, in the sense of how behavior responds to monetary incentives, this is not a claim that selfish behavior is good or worthwhile. Instead, economics is a mechanism for thinking through the how these monetary incentives will affect behavior. Marshall uses the term \”organon,\” which has fallen out of use, but is defined as \”a means of reasoning or a system of logic.

But though in wording our economic organon this idea of measurability should be always present, it should not, I think, be prominent. For practical purposes, and in order to keep the better our touch of real life, it will be best to go on treating it as chiefly concerned with those motives to which a money price can be directly or indirectly assigned. But motives that are selfish or self-regarding have no claim to more consideration than others except in so far as they may be more easily measurable and may more easily have a money-price assigned to them. The organon then must have reference to an analysis of the positive motives of desire for different goods, and of the negative motives of unwillingness to undergo the fatigues and sacrifices involved in producing them.

Marshall makes the subtle but ever-useful point that when it comes to social problems and public public policy, economics has an important role to play in figuring out the direction and size of likely outcomes, and perhaps especially in pointing out that certain proposals are unlikely to have the effects that are promised. But he also emphasizes that economics doesn\’t provide answers. Instead, he argues that economics should help where it can, and then economics should shut up. In particular, economics in Marshall\’s view should not get in the way of or push out any other kinds of knowledge or common sense, and when economists given an overall opinion, they should always be clear to separate the actual economics from their own personal judgments.

In nearly every important social problem, one of these component parts has to do with those actions and sacrifices which commonly have a money price. This set of considerations is almost always one of the hardest, one of those in which untutored common sense is most likely to go wrong. But it is fortunately one of those which offer the firmest foot-hold to scientific treatment. The economic organon brings to bear the accumulated strength of much of the best genius of many generations of men. It shows how to analyse the motives at work, how to group best genius of many generations of men. them, how to trace their mutual relations. And thus by introducing systematic and organized methods of reasoning, it enables us to deal with this one side of the problem with greater force and certainty than almost any other side; although it would have probably been the most unmanageable side of all without such aid. Having done its work it retires and leaves to common sense the responsibility of the ultimate decision; not standing in the way of, or pushing out any other kind of knowledge, not hampering common sense in the use to which it is able to put any other available knowledge, nor in any way hindering; helping where it could help, and for the rest keeping silence.

Sometimes indeed the economist may give a practical decision as it were with the authority of his science, but such a decision is almost always merely negative or critical. It is to the effect that a proposed plan will not produce its desired result; just as an engineer might say with authority that a certain kind of canal lock is unsuitable for its purpose. But an economist as such cannot say which is the best course to pursue, any more than an engineer as such can decide which is the best route for the Panama canal. 

It is true that an economist, like any other citizen, may give his own judgment as to the best solution of various practical problems; just as an engineer may give his opinion as to the right method of financing the Panama canal. But in such cases the counsel bears only the authority of the individual who gives it: he does not speak with the voice of his science. And the economist has to be specially careful to make this clear; because there is much misunderstanding as to the scope of his science; and undue claims to authority on practical matters have often been put forward on its behalf.

A choice to make a good or service \”free\” to consumers has various tradeoffs. It makes the good or service easier to consume for those who could not otherwise afford it. It creates a need for higher government taxes or borrowing. Perhaps more subtle effects are that changing the nature of who pays will also tend to change the quality of the service. In the case of higher education students, if you (or your family) is paying tuition, the level of effort you give, your choice of courses, and the pressure you feel to finish a degree within a certain amount of time are all going to shift. In the case of providers of higher education, if attracting government funds is the pathway to survival, then the institutions will be inclined to follow the lead of government–rather than the desires of students–in choices about who and how many to admit, what to teach, how to staff courses, where to locate branch campuses,whether to expand into online education, what courses to offer, what counts for a passing grade and a graduation requirement, and more.

Some of these changes from switching to \”free\” higher education may be desirable, while others are less so. My point is that it would be blinkered to imagine that a switch to \”free\” higher education won\’t also lead to an array of other changes. In a similar spirit,  Jason D. Delisle and Preston Cooper offer a short essay on \”International Higher Education Rankings: Why No Country\’s WHY Higher Education System Can Be the Best\” (American Enterprise Institute, August 2019). As they note:

A government that pays for a greater share of each student’s college education can afford to send fewer of those students to college, resulting in lower overall degree attainment. Similarly, without the ability to raise revenue through tuition, colleges may have fewer resources to spend on each student’s education.

The theme of their exercise is to use OECD data on high-income countries to point out some tradeoffs between higher education attainment, total resources, and public subsidies. This seems to me like a useful start in thinking about the many tradeoffs that would be involved in \”free\” higher education.