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To put on my wall…
Or at least to post on my blog so others can hold me accountable: [I]f you’ve reached the point where you don’t pay attention to anything that might disturb your orthodoxy, you’re not doing science, you’re not even pursuing a discipline. All you’re doing is perpetuating a smug, closed-minded sect. Paul Krugman, Nobodies of Macroeconomics […]
The Baumol fallacy, from an historian’s view
Time to hike up my trousers and wade into some intellectual flotsam. In my entry on the politics of Scott Walker's anti-unionism, there's a comment demi-thread about the Baumol "cost-disease" argument started by Glen McPhee that I want to bring into a main entry, because the fallacy embedded in it is similar to Tyler Cowen's argument […]
Craftwork academe
Last semester, a doctoral student at USF asked me, what were the methods of historians? I responded by talking in general about the uses of archival materials, publications, oral histories, multimedia, statistical data, all sorts of primary sources … and realized quickly that was not what the student meant or needed. What the student was […]
New York Times reporters and editors fail reading comprehension test
First read this headline: Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say. And the lede: "Taking a test… helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques." Now read the following text: Without the [chosen] passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 […]
“Efficiency” vs. “accountability” in education discourse (one tiny and friable slice)
Like many others, I’ve been enjoying playing for at least a few minutes with the new Google Ngram viewer. So what can one see when you put in the phrases school accountability and school efficiency in the Google Ngram search box? The blue line is the proportionate set of sources in the Google database (by […]