{"id":1733,"date":"2009-10-06T01:11:27","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T05:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1733"},"modified":"2009-10-06T01:11:27","modified_gmt":"2009-10-06T05:11:27","slug":"dozens-of-veblens-a-handful-of-heckmans-not-one-keynes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1733","title":{"rendered":"Dozens of Veblens, a handful of Heckmans, not one Keynes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Skimming the Ryan Lizza portrait of Larry Summers<\/a>, reading Paul Krugman’s focus on the size of the stimulus<\/a>, and listening to Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics<\/i> while driving around Tampa this week makes it clear to me that outside the bubble that is Fox News and talk radio, Krugman, Romer, and a number of other liberal economists are at heart technocrats: when they looked at the Great Recession, they saw an output gap that government could and should fill. This isn’t socialism; this is Keynes. (As Krugman notes in passing in Return<\/i>, Keynes was someone who believed in capitalism, in contrast to plenty of others who thought differently in the 1930s.) When you think there’s a technical fix, you’re not a revolutionary. And Krugman definitely thinks there’s a technical fix to be had here.<\/p>\n

Despite whatever else one might say about the dominance of economic policies by anti-empirical rationalists, freshwater Austrians, and other odd critters, Gertrude Stein’s quip doesn’t have a foothold: there is a there there somewhere. But we are far from there in education. There are a number of erudite, smart commentators on education, and while I try to learn from all of them, there is no Keynes. There are a number of technical savants in different corners of education, the education equivalents of James Heckman (and, heck, Heckman’s helped out with small heaps of his talent focused on education), but there is no Keynes. And there are people who would like to or pretend to be systemic analysts like Keynes, but there is no Keynes. <\/p>\n

In part as a result, when people debate education policy, it quickly slides into attacks on politics and posturing and whatnot. Now, of course people criticize Krugman for his politics and accuse him of posturing, but it’s easy to see his technocratic leanings and from whence they come. There is no equivalent in education. Maybe there shouldn’t be, but at least as a consequence, maybe we should stop pretending that there is a macro technocratic field in education. There just isn’t. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Skimming the Ryan Lizza portrait of Larry Summers, reading Paul Krugman’s focus on the size of the stimulus, and listening to Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics while driving around Tampa this week makes it clear to me that outside the bubble that is Fox News and talk radio, Krugman, Romer, and a number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-rX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}