{"id":2811,"date":"2010-12-02T11:51:19","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T15:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2811"},"modified":"2010-12-02T11:51:19","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T15:51:19","slug":"dualities-of-the-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2811","title":{"rendered":"Dualities of the day"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have a bipartisan consensus that the short-term deficit should be made smaller and the long-term deficit should be made bigger even when all the economic logic points in the opposite direction.<\/em><\/p>\n

via Yglesias » Tax Cut Mania<\/a>.<\/p>\n

"But we need to appreciate that we have two deficits," [Andy] Stern says. "A fiscal deficit, and an investment deficit. A family under stress would think hard before they didn’t invest in their kid’s education. A company under stress would think hard about not investing in new equipment that it needed. I wanted to show you can invest as well as cut."<\/em><\/p>\n

via Ezra Klein – Andy Stern takes on America's second deficit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Matthew Yglesias is under the quaint belief that policy should be determined by logic. (I agree with him, but I'm a professional historian, so quaint isn't a problem for me.) Stern specifically mentioned education as one of the investments, but I think a federal investment budget would almost certainly be focused on capital projects (and sometimes Capitol projects). And while it's a grand idea, it really is a grand idea whose time is probably not now. <\/p>\n

What's increasingly clear is that we're facing about half a decade of severe crunches in all sorts of things economic and fiscal. We may have escaped another depression, but we're still left with the aftermath of a financial crisis. Even if our national politics weren't as crazy as a goat in a kitchen, a world economic crisis means any large country's economy is vulnerable to influential bad actors (hi, China!) or just plain blundering (hi, Ireland and ECB!). Even after the relatively mild recession of the early 1990s, childhood poverty measures in the U.S. kept rising for several years after<\/em> the end of the recession. <\/p>\n

Educational consequences? I expect we'll see increasing general pain for a few years, restricted capacity for several more, and also geographic variation in pain and capacity from various states' budget crises, as well as local problems (depending on the extent of local funding of schools). On the other hand, institutional trends are also important and can lead to surprising changes in the long run. So, after all is said and done about the Digital Learning Council (and I'll say more about it when it's not the end of the semester for me), a proof-of-concept project focused on blended instruction during the summer might kill two birds with one stone–addressing the summer learning gap and providing a testbed for broader distance-learning issues. I'm also hoping for some toned-down debates over teacher evaluation policies so some work can get done out of the limelight and temptation for crazy talk of various sorts. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have a bipartisan consensus that the short-term deficit should be made smaller and the long-term deficit should be made bigger even when all the economic logic points in the opposite direction. via Yglesias » Tax Cut Mania. "But we need to appreciate that we have two deficits," [Andy] Stern says. "A fiscal deficit, and […]<\/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":[11,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-Jl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811","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=2811"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2813,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811\/revisions\/2813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}