Matthew Yglesias: Liberal Lion Part II

Yglesias likes to pretend to be a competent critic of education. He is not.  He is a silly little man making insipid, pseudo contrarian points that support, what this guy correctly calls, neo-liberal reforms.  In addition, as the linked critique of Yglesias points out, he has never taught a course in his life. He also knows next to nothing about what is driving the cost of higher education and, as is his wont, makes Reaganeque arguments about the necessity of providing public goods as if their purpose was making a profit.  He is, in short, incompetent when it comes to discussing this issue and clearly hasn't spent any time educating himself on the reality of higher education.

Yglesias replies to the linked post by arguing that

[w]e could try to debate the difference between this kind of “transparency” and the dream “accountability” model, but I think they amount to the same thing.

The problem here is that the "accountability" model isn't what is being criticized; what is being criticized is this kind of claptrap:

To throw a couple of bold claims out there that probably nobody agrees with, brands, chains, standardization, and replication are some of the most underrated economic phenomena and single-establishment retail businesses among the most overrated. There’s an association between multiple-establishment restaurants and low quality, but I think that if you take a broad view you’ll see that this is both a contingent phenomenon and a waning trend. Darden’s own Capitol Grille chain is excellent and Olive Garden is better than you care to admit. Besides which, all the legitimately first-rate chefs are branding and franchising these days, they’re mostly just a bit hesitant to get entirely above-board about what they’re doing.

 The first, and most obvious, question is underrated by whom?  The economic success and often dire consequences of chains has been one of the most debated issues ever.  Wal-Mart versus main street, supersized us, and so on.  Olive Garden isn't better than I think it is, it is much worse; he most likely knows that.  Osteria Papavero is a stand alone restaurant and it is excellent, because the chef and the staff focus on that restaurant.  If there were three the focus shifts and quality suffers.  As for the first-rate chefs, they aren't trying make seventy bazillion restaurants and they hire and supervise other first-rate chefs trained at top the culinary schools or trained in the finest restaurants in the world.  They are not trying to replicate Olive Garden; they are trying to make replicate their success at creating and running A-list restaurants that spend a lot on products, staff, and etc.

What, you ask, does the Olive Garden have to do with education?   It is the focal point of the famous Yglesias pivot in the course of which he takes a completely unrelated topic and uses it to make a totally inapt analogous argument. To wit:

The point, however, is not to argue the merits of these restaurants but merely to observe that they’re successful. And in particular, they’re successful at exactly what our health care and university systems are terrible at, namely actually balancing cost and quality or even at times finding innovative ways to skimp on quality.

See what he did there?  Education and health care systems ought to be more like for-profit enterprises because for-profit enterprises are successful because they can find "innovative ways to skimp on quality," like fake cheese and the like.  University systems should rely on more fake cheese, say hiring under-qualified instructors, or increasing class room size, or more internet-based education. Hospitals should limit the time patients spent in the hospital or not worry so much about testing, use poor quality drugs, pay staff less, and so forth, both could be cheaper too.

He goes on to argue:

If you look at the trajectory of college tuition, it’s clear that we’re not going to be able to simultaneously stay on that pace and expand the number of people who go to college. But a college degree seems to be very valuable. If it were possible to provide even a fraction of that value to more people cheaply, we’d be making major progress.

Shouldn't the first step in an exercise in lower cost work on disaggregating costs as means of identifying those areas in which cost cost can innovatively be cut? Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way of getting at the what was driving the rising cost of education instead of engaging in faulty neo-liberal criticism that treats not-for profit enterprises as if they ought to be for-profit enterprises when experience with the actually existing world shows that for-profit health care and education institutions quickly become a hot bed or sink hole of crappy products, like the endless pasta bowl?

What has been driving increased cost to education? The rise of the university as the cash cow for administrators.  They earned much more than faculty and, increasing, there are nearly as many of them as there are instructors and, much worse, they are fewer tenure track professors and more ad hoc instructors who earn nearly nothing and who cannot afford, quite literally, to oppose the crazy stuff administrators do

A chart:

Administrators make a lot of money, have assistants, and both have offices.  Although some faculty do very well, most earn considerable less than administrators, and most share an assistant.

Rather than insisting that education follow the Olive Garden model, paying workers less, skimping on quality, and generally crapping all over Italian food, Ygelsias might want to spend ten minutes learning something about what is driving the rising cost of education.

Yglesias might also consider that professors and lecturers spend a great deal of time justifying their work and worrying about how to improve their teaching and assessment practices.  He might also consider that as the state offers ever less funding, faculty have learned to much more with much less.


UPDATE:
Yglesias temporizes

I’m glad that Tom Philpott took the bait on my praise of chain restaurants and went in with a bit of snark:

A few weeks ago, Think Progress star blogger Matt Yglesias penned a paean to mediocre strip-mall chain restaurants, calling for “more Olive Gardens” and deeming the the faux-fancy steakhouse chain Capital Grille “excellent.” So impressed is Yglesias by the food system that he would apparently like to model the education system after it!

Well that’s not really what I said about education, and the Capital Grille is neither mediocre nor located primarily in strip malls. I’ve been to locations in downtown DC and downtown Pittsburg, and their Porcini-Rubbed Delmonico is both delicious and—at $45 a pop—seems genuinely fancy to me.

Two quick points, he did, in fact, argue that education would benefit from the adaptation of Olive Garden like methods.  And his claim about chains was that the provided good food at reasonable prices.  45 bucks for a steak isn't cheap.

The whole post is worth a read because of its stunning incoherence and absurd unprovable assertions.

UPDATE:
What does Yglesias mean by "took the bait"?  Was he intentionally being stupid in order to goad critics to criticize him for being stupid?  Isn't this Limbaugh's preferred method of criticism deflection?  You know when he says something too offensive for even his audiences, Limbaugh will claim to have played the media like a fiddle.  Is this what Yglesias is claiming here:  I wrote something ignorant, illiberal, and generally risible and critics took the bait by pointing out that it was illiberal, ignorant, and generally risible.  Way to go Yglesias and Think Progress by employing him.