Snake Oil Effect

Over the weekend I finished reading Richard Overy's The Twilight Years, a very well-done discussion of intellectual movements in interwar Britain. One of his points is that the response to the perceived crises during this period relied on  all manner of ill-informed and inapt use of science in the hopes of finding solutions.  Eugenics relied on misunderstood notions of race and biology, for example.[1] Overy sheds a great deal of light on this tendency in a variety of contexts rand the books is well worth reading.

In this vein, Matthew Yglesias, whose grasp of economics is open to debate, argues of people interested in educational reform in response its "crisis" that he

know[s] a lot of people, especially people working in or around academia, find this kind of talk unpleasant. But people thinking about education really do need to confront the Baumol problem.

The Baumol Effect or Disease, as it is actually called, for those not interesting in clicking, is that educators', artists', and others' salaries rise without any connection to increased productivity. Leaving aside, except for this comment, the fact that there is no connection between increased productivity and increased salaries as evidenced by the stagnant wages among more "productive" workers, there is no reason on earth to think of education as an issue whose reform is best served by the application of economists' paradigms.

Indeed, given that the rise of thinking about social and political arrangements like an MBA or an economist hasn't been especially helpful, see, for example, the current state of America's economy, which -- after thirty years or so of Neoliberalism -- is a mess. There is every reason to accept that thinking about social and political arrangements in this manner is counter productive, if your goal is a more equatable and substantively democratic society.

It is also the case that as applied to higher education the assumption here is that educators' salaries drive costs. It is now no secret that, particularly in the humanities, administrators rely increasingly on adjunct faculty to lower costs, the number of students per teacher continues to rise, faculty are increasingly pressured to use "distance" learning to increased their "productivity," resources dedicated to faculty research is in decline, even as faculty members are expected to engage in more service and administrative tasks without any decrease in their other responsibilities.

It's not, in other words, that people find this kind of argument "unpleasant" but rather they find it to one side of the problem and one more example of people who know nothing about education guiding its reform in ways that are counter productive.

When you get right down to it, rather like Scott Walker, Yglesias, and his ilk are blaming the workers for most of the problems people like Walker, Yglesias, and his ilk caused and offering more of the same snake oil as the necessary cure.

[1] For a really useful discussion of Nazi racial science and eugenics more generally see Eric Ehrenreich's The Nazi Ancestral Proof. In the interest of full disclosure, I know Ehrenreich and spent a great deal of time with him in Berlin while he was researching and am mentioned in the acknowledgments.