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This new kind of celebrity is the ultimate costume ball, far more exclusive and decadent than even the most potent magnates of Hollywood’s studio era could have dreamed up.

after decades of widening income gaps, unequal distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives (and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

changes in global temperature year to year, even decade to decade, have little meaning in tracking a long-term trend like the impact on temperature of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

the apparent slowdown has led to numerous assertions that “global warming has stopped.”

If you enjoy being able to speak your mind publicly and practice (or abstain from practicing) the religion of your choice, please think of this Memorial Day as more than a beachside, grill-side day off from work. Attend a local ceremony; thank a veteran; reach out to the family of a deployed or wounded service member.

When I wrote in August 2015 that Mr. Trump was a cartoon version of every left-wing media stereotype of the reactionary, nativist, misogynist right, I thought that I was well within the mainstream of conservative thought — only to find conservative Trump critics denounced for apostasy by a right that decided that it was comfortable with embracing Trumpism.

relatively few of my listeners bought into the crude nativism Mr. Trump was selling at his rallies.

What they did buy into was the argument that this was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton. You simply cannot overstate this as a factor in the final outcome

Even among Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of betrayal.

In this binary tribal world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles.

If everything — the Supreme Court, the fate of Western civilization, the survival of the planet — depends on tribal victory, then neither individuals nor ideas can be determinative.

As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas, to parties, to tribes, to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.

For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton — that he was a secret Muslim, that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.

In this political universe, voters accept that they must tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse; the stakes are such that no qualms can get in the way of the greater cause.

When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection retribution.

And then, there was social media. Unless you have experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics. In my timelines, I found myself called a “cuckservative,” a favorite gibe of white nationalists; and someone Photoshopped my face into a gas chamber. Under the withering fire of the trolls, one conservative commentator and Republican political leader after another fell in line.

we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.

That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored

We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.

This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.

Students sometimes argue that their talents have improved so dramatically that they are deserving of higher grades. Past studies, however, have found little evidence of this.

While it’s true that top schools have become more selective, the overall universe of students attending college has gotten broader, reflecting a wider distribution of abilities and levels of preparation, especially at the bottom. College students today also study less and do not appear to be more literate than their predecessors were.

Plus, of course, even if students have gotten smarter, or at least more efficient at studying (hey, computers do help), grades are arguably also supposed to measure relative achievement among classmates.

Affirmative action also sometimes gets blamed for rising grades; supposedly, professors have been loath to hurt the feelings of underprepared minority students. Rojstaczer and Healy note, however, that much of the increase in minority enrollment occurred from the mid-1970s to mid-’80s, the only period in recent decades when average GPAs fell.

That first era, the researchers say, can be explained by changes in pedagogical philosophy (some professors began seeing grades as overly authoritarian and ineffective at motivating students) and mortal exigencies (male students needed higher grades to avoid the Vietnam draft).

The authors attribute today’s inflation to the consumerization of higher education. That is, students pay more in tuition, and expect more in return — better service, better facilities and better grades. Or at least a leg up in employment and graduate school admissions through stronger transcripts.

some universities have explicitly lifted their grading curves (sometimes retroactively) to make graduates more competitive in the job market, leading to a sort of grade inflation arms race

But rising tuition may not be the sole driver of students’ expectations for better grades, given that high school grades have also risen in recent decades. And rather than some top-down directive from administrators, grade inflation also seems related to a steady creep of pressure on professors to give higher grades in exchange for better teaching evaluations.

It’s unclear how the clustering of grades near the top is affecting student effort. But it certainly makes it harder to accurately measure how much students have learned. It also makes it more challenging for grad schools and employers to sort the superstars from the also-rans

Lax or at least inconsistent grading standards can also distort what students — especially women — choose to study, pushing them away from more stingily graded science, technology, engineering and math fields and into humanities, where high grades are easier to come by.

Without collective action — which means both standing up to students and publicly shaming other schools into adopting higher standards — the arms race will continue.

Today, the “common” interpretation of the recent past is thus composed of the manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them (Jewish, Polish, Serb, Armenian, German, Asian-American, Palestinian, Irish, homosexual…) marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood.

The resulting mosaic does not bind us to a shared past, it separates us from it. Whatever the shortcomings of the national narratives once taught in school, however selective their focus and instrumental their message, they had at least the advantage of providing a nation with past references for present experience. Traditional history, as taught to generations of schoolchildren and college students, gave the present a meaning by reference to the past: today’s names, places, inscriptions, ideas, and allusions could be slotted into a memorized narrative of yesterday. In our time, however, this process has gone into reverse. The past now acquires meaning only by reference to our many and often contrasting present concerns.

the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed

Today, the opposite applies. Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears.

What is significant about the present age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have abandoned not merely the practices of the past but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.

In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war. There is a reason for this. I

Until the last decades of the twentieth century most people in the world had limited access to information; but—thanks to national education, state-controlled radio and television, and a common print culture—within any one state or nation or community people were all likely to know many of the same things.

it was precisely that claim, that “it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good,” which until very recently distinguished democracies from dictatorships. We pride ourselves on having defeated the “evil empire” of the Soviets. Indeed so. But perhaps we should read again the memoirs of those who suffered at the hands of that empire—the memoirs of Eugen Loebl, Artur London, Jo Langer, Lena Constante, and countless others—and then compare the degrading abuses they suffered with the treatments approved and authorized by President Bush and the US Congress. Are they so very different?

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today

the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

That same contrast may account for the distinctive quality of much American writing on the cold war and its outcome. In European accounts of the fall of communism, from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, the dominant sentiment is one of relief at the closing of a long, unhappy chapter. Here in the US, however, the story is typically recorded in a triumphalist key.5

For many American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth century is that war works. Hence the widespread enthusiasm for our war on Iraq in 2003 (despite strong opposition to it in most other countries). For Washington, war remains an option—on that occasion the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort.6

Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a misidentification of the enemy.

This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with “Islamofascists,” “extremists” from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant “Islamistan,” who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy “our way of life”—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.

How else are we to explain our present indulgence for the practice of torture? For indulge it we assuredly do.

“But what would I have achieved by proclaiming my opposition to torture?” he replied. “I have never met anyone who is in favor of torture.”8 Well, times have changed. In the US today there are many respectable, thinking people who favor torture—under the appropriate circumstances and when applied to those who merit it.

American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and “exceptional” circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and “terrorists,” between “us” and “them”—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur “never again.” So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war’s indefinite continuance.

But there's another reason as well: Every time computers break some new barrier, we decide—or maybe just finally get it through our thick skulls—that we set the bar too low.

the best estimates of the human brain suggest that our own processing power is about equivalent to 10 petaflops. ("Peta" comes after giga and tera.) That's a lot of flops, but last year an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was clocked at 16.3 petaflops.

in Lake Michigan terms, we finally have a few inches of water in the lake bed, and we can see it rising. All those milestones along the way—playing chess, translating web pages, winning at Jeopardy!, driving a car—aren't just stunts. They're precisely the kinds of things you'd expect as we struggle along with platforms that aren't quite powerful enough—yet. True artificial intelligence will very likely be here within a couple of decades. Making it small, cheap, and ubiquitous might take a decade more.

In other words, by about 2040 our robot paradise awaits.

“GMO will make Ghanaian farmers poor” and “Our Food Under Our Control!!!”

Monsanto is also part of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a group of private corporations tasked by the G8 to invest in solutions to African hunger over the next decade.

Hating Monsanto is “a luxury when you’re surrounded by food 24/7,” writes one defender, who argues that spreading negative sentiment against the company actually “impedes global economic growth.” Even Britain’s Environmental Secretary, Owen Paterson, said organizations fighting the spread of GMOs are “absolutely wicked” and “cast a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world.”

But African farmers also have very legitimate concerns about Monsanto’s reputation for investigating, suing, and ruining farmers who try to save GM seeds.

ood Sovereignty Ghana warns against the “control of our resources by multinational corporations and other foreign entities,” and the “avaricious calculations behind the proposition that food is just another commodity or component for international agribusiness.”

they call for “collective control over our collective resources.”

ontroversial GM golden rice, which is supposed to pump up Vitamin A levels in regular rice to make it more nutritious, could well be a promising use of technology

However, golden rice is still mainly theoretical after a decade of research.

hunger is not caused by a food shortage but by “a lack of purchasing power and/or the inability of the rural poor to be self-sufficient.”

“I’ve been a programmer for 13 years, and I’ve always been one of the only women and queer people in the room. I’ve been harassed, I’ve had people make suggestive comments to me, I’ve had people basically dismiss my expertise. I’ve gotten rape and death threats just for speaking out about this stuff.”

“We see these stories, ‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and engineering?’ and there’s all these complicated answers like, ‘School advisers don’t have them take math and physics,’ and it’s probably true,” said Lauren Weinstein, a man who has spent his four-decade career in tech working mostly with other men, and is currently a consultant for Google.“But I think there’s probably a simpler reason,” he said, “which is these guys are just jerks, and women know it.”

once programming gained prestige, women were pushed out. Over the decades, the share of women in computing has continued to decline. In 2012, just 18 percent of computer-science college graduates were women, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

Some 1.2 million computing jobs will be available in 2022, yet United States universities are producing only 39 percent of the graduates needed to fill them, the N.C.W.I.T. estimates.

an engineer at Pinterest has collected data from people at 133 start-ups and found that an average of 12 percent of the engineers are women.

Twenty percent of software developers are women, according to the Labor Department, and fewer than 6 percent of engineers are black or Hispanic. Comparatively, 56 percent of people in business and financial-operations jobs are women, as are 36 percent of physicians and surgeons and one-third of lawyers.

“It makes a hostile environment for me,” she said. “But I don’t want to raise my hand and call negative attention toward myself, and become the woman who is the problem — ‘that woman.’ In start-up culture they protect their own tribe, so by putting my hand up, I’m saying I’m an ‘other,’ I shouldn’t be there, so for me that’s an economic threat.”

“Many women have come to me and said they basically have had to hide on the Net now,” said Mr. Weinstein, who works on issues of identity and anonymity online. “They use male names, they don’t put their real photos up, because they are immediately targeted and harassed.”

“It’s a boys’ club, and you have to try to get into it, and they’re trying as hard as they can to prove you can’t,” said Ephrat Bitton, the director of algorithms at FutureAdvisor, an online investment start-up that she says has a better culture because almost half the engineers are women.

Writing code is a high-pressure job with little room for error, as are many jobs. But coding can be stressful in a different way, women interviewed for this article said, because code reviews — peer reviews to spot mistakes in software — can quickly devolve.

“Code reviews are brutal — ‘Mine is better than yours, I see flaws in yours’ — and they should be, for the creation of good software,” said Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and author. “I think when you add a drop of women into it, it just exacerbates the problem, because here’s a kind of foreigner.”

But some women argue that these kinds of initiatives are unhelpful.“My general issue with the coverage of women in tech is that women in the technology press are talked about in the context of being women, and men are talked about in the context of being in technology,” said a technical woman who would speak only on condition of anonymity because she did not want to be part of an article about women in tech.

he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)

It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.

Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.

Author advances, except for the biggest names, have slumped sharply since the 2008 financial crash, declining by more than half, according to one recent survey. It’s hard to imagine that the quality of manuscripts from writers who have been forced either to eat less or write faster isn’t deteriorating.

Despite some recent good news, the number of independents has been halved in the last two decades, and the chain stores that survive increasingly employ part-time, unskilled staff.

With falling advances, writing is evermore dominated by people who don’t need it to earn a living: Tenured academics and celebrities spring to mind. For these groups, burnishing a résumé or marketing a brand is often as important as satisfying the reader.

Cyril Connolly caustically described the book reviewer as having “a whole-time job with a half-time salary,” a job “in which the best in him is generally expended on the mediocre in others.” Today, it’s more of a part-time job with no salary.

or more personal interactions, many have turned to social reading sites such as Goodreads or LibraryThing.

to express discomfort at the attrition of expert opinion is not to defend the previous order’s prerogatives. Nor is it elitist to suggest that making the values and personnel of such professional hierarchies more representative is preferable to dispensing with them

Librarians, described by the novelist Richard Powers as “gas attendant[s] of the mind,” saw a national decrease in their numbers of nearly 100,000 over the two decades to 2009. Two-thirds of public libraries reported flat or decreasing budgets in 2012.

book buyers today are deciding to play it safe, opting to join either the ever-larger audiences for blockbusters or the minuscule readerships of a vast range of specialist titles. In this bifurcation, the mid-list, publishing’s experimental laboratory, is being abandoned.

Mr. Trachtenberg understood the centrality of the university as a physical place. New structures were a visceral sign of progress. They told visitors, donors and civic leaders that the institution was, like beams and scaffolding rising from the earth, ascending. He added new programs, recruited more students, and followed the dictate of constant expansion.

the American research university had evolved into a complicated and somewhat peculiar organization. It was built to be all things to all people: to teach undergraduates, produce knowledge, socialize young men and women, train workers for jobs, anchor local economies, even put on weekend sports events. And excellence was defined by similarity to old, elite institutions. Universities were judged by the quality of their scholars, the size of their endowments, the beauty of their buildings and the test scores of their incoming students.

John Silber embarked on a huge building campaign while bringing luminaries like Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel on board to teach and lend their prestige to the B.U. name, creating a bigger, more famous and much more costly institution. He had helped write a game plan for the aspiring college president.

GWU is, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit organization. Best example: study abroad. Their top program, a partnering with Sciences Po, costs each student (30 of them, on a program with 'prestige' status?) a full semester's tuition. It costs GW, according to Sciences Po website, €1000. A neat $20,000 profit per student (who is in digging her/himself deeper and deeper in debt.) Moreover, the school takes a $500 admin fee for the study abroad application! With no guarantee that all credits transfer. Students often lose a partial semester, GW profits again. Nor does GW offer help with an antiquated, one-shot/no transfers, tricky registration process. It's tough luck in gay Paris.Just one of many examples. Dorms with extreme mold, off-campus housing impossible for freshmen and sophomores. Required meal plan: Chick-o-Filet etc. Classes with over 300 students (required).This is not Harvard, but costs same.Emotional problems? Counselors too few. Suicides continue and are not appropriately addressed. Caring environment? Extension so and so, please hold.It's an impressive campus, I'm an alum. If you apply, make sure the DC experience is worth the price: good are internships, a few colleges like Elliot School, post-grad.GWU uses undergrad $$ directly for building projects, like the medical center to which students have NO access. (Student health facility is underfunded, outsourced.)Outstanding professors still make a difference. But is that enough?

Mr. Trachtenberg, however, understood something crucial about the modern university. It had come to inhabit a market for luxury goods. People don’t buy Gucci bags merely for their beauty and functionality. They buy them because other people will know they can afford the price of purchase. The great virtue of a luxury good, from the manufacturer’s standpoint, isn’t just that people will pay extra money for the feeling associated with a name brand. It’s that the high price is, in and of itself, a crucial part of what people are buying.

Mr. Trachtenberg convinced people that George Washington was worth a lot more money by charging a lot more money. Unlike most college presidents, he was surprisingly candid about his strategy. College is like vodka, he liked to explain.

The Absolut Rolex plan worked. The number of applicants surged from some 6,000 to 20,000, the average SAT score of students rose by nearly 200 points, and the endowment jumped from $200 million to almost $1 billion.

The university became a magnet for the children of new money who didn’t quite have the SATs or family connections required for admission to Stanford or Yale. It also aggressively recruited international students, rich families from Asia and the Middle East who believed, as nearly everyone did, that American universities were the best in the world.

U.S. News & World Report now ranks the university at No. 54 nationwide, just outside the “first tier.”

The watch and vodka analogies are correct. Personally, I used car analogies when discussing college choices with my kids. We were in the fortunate position of being able to comfortably send our kids to any college in the country and have them leave debt free. Notwithstanding, I told them that they would be going to a state school unless they were able to get into one of about 40 schools that I felt, in whatever arbitrary manner I decided, that was worth the extra cost. They both ended up going to state schools.College is by and large a commodity and you get out of it what you put into it. Both of my kids worked hard in college and were involved in school life. They both left the schools better people and the schools better schools for them being there. They are both now successful adults.I believe too many people look for the prestige of a named school and that is not what college should be primarily about.

In 2013, only 14 percent of the university’s 10,000 undergraduates received a grant — a figure on a par with elite schools but far below the national average. The average undergraduate borrower leaves with about $30,800 in debt.

When I talk to the best high school students in my state I always stress the benefits of the honors college experience at an affordable public university. For students who won't qualify for a public honors college. the regular pubic university experience is far preferable to the huge debt of places like GW.

Carey would do well to look beyond high ticket private universities (which after all are still private enterprises) and what he describes as the Olympian heights of higher education (which for some reason seems also to embitter him) and look at the system overall . The withdrawal of public support was never a policy choice; it was a political choice, "packaged and branded" as some tax cutting palaver all wrapped up in the argument that a free-market should decide how much college should cost and how many seats we need. In such an environment, trustees at private universities are no more solely responsible for turning their degrees into commodities than the administrations of state universities are for raising the number of out-of-state students in order to offset the loss of support from their legislatures. No doubt, we will hear more about market based solutions and technology from Mr. Carey

I went to GW back in the 60s. It was affordable and it got me away from home in New York. While I was there, Newsweek famously published a article about the DC Universities - GW, Georgetown, American and Catholic - dubbing them the Pony league, the schools for the children of wealthy middle class New Yorkers who couldn't get into the Ivy League. Nobody really complained. But that wasn't me. I went because I wanted to be where the action was in the 60s, and as we used to say - "GW was literally a stone's throw from the White House. And we could prove it." Back then, the two biggest alumni names were Jackie Kennedy, who's taken some classes there, and J. Edgar Hoover. Now, according to the glossy magazine they send me each month, it's the actress Kerry Washington. There's some sort of progress there, but I'm a GW alum and not properly trained to understand it.

This explains a lot of the modern, emerging mentality. It encompasses the culture of enforced grade inflation, cheating and anti-intellectualism in much of higher education. It is consistent with our culture of misleading statistics and information, cronyism and fake quality, the "best and the brightest" being only schemers and glad handers. The wisdom and creativity engendered by an honest, rigorous academic education are replaced by the disingenuous quick fix, the winner-take-all mentality that neglects the common good.

I attended nearby Georgetown University and graduated in 1985. Relative to state schools and elite schools, it was expensive then. I took out loans. I had Pell grants. I had work-study and GSL. I paid my debt of $15,000 off in ten years. Would I have done it differently? Yes: I would have continued on to graduate school and not worried about paying off those big loans right after college. My career work out and I am grateful for the education I received and paid for. But I would not recommend to my nieces and nephews debts north of $100,000 for a BA in liberal arts. Go community. Then go state. Then punch your ticket to Harvard, Yale or Stanford — if you are good enough.

American universities appear to have more and more drifted away from educating individuals and citizens to becoming high priced trade schools and purveyors of occupational licenses. Lost in the process is the concept of expanding a student's ability to appreciate broadly and deeply, as well as the belief that a republican democracy needs an educated citizenry, not a trained citizenry, to function well.Both the Heisman Trophy winner and the producer of a successful tech I.P.O. likely have much in common, a college education whose rewards are limited to the financial. I don't know if I find this more sad on the individual level or more worrisome for the future of America.

This is now a consumer world for everything, including institutions once thought to float above the Shakespearean briars of the work-a-day world such as higher education, law and medicine. Students get this. Parents get this. Everything is negotiable: financial aid, a spot in the nicest dorm, tix to the big game. But through all this, there are faculty - lots of 'em - who work away from the fluff to link the ambitions of the students with the reality and rigor of the 21st century. The job of the student is to get beyond the visible hype of the surroundings and find those faculty members. They will make sure your investment is worth it

My experience in managing or working with GW alumni in their 20's or 30's has not been good. Virtually all have been mentally lazy and/or had a stunning sense of entitlement. Basically they've been all talk and no results. That's been quite a contrast to the graduates from VA/MD state universities.

More and more, I notice what my debt-financed contributions to the revenue streams of my vendors earn them, not me. My banks earned enough to pay ridiculous bonuses to employees for reckless risk-taking. My satellite tv operator earned enough to overpay ESPN for sports programming that I never watch--and that, in turn, overpays these idiotic pro athletes and college sports administrators. My health insurer earned enough to defeat one-payor insurance; to enable the opaque, inefficient billing practices of hospitals and other providers; and to feed the behemoth pharmaceutical industry. My church earned enough to buy the silence of sex abuse victims and oppose progressive political candidates. And my govt earned enough to continue ag subsidies, inefficient defense spending, and obsolete transportation and energy policies.

as the parent of GWU freshman I am grateful for every opportunity afforded her. She has a generous merit scholarship, is in the honors program with some small classes, and has access to internships that can be done while at school. GWU also gave her AP credits to advance her to sophomore status. Had she attended the state flagship school (where she was accepted into that exclusive honors program) she would have a great education but little else. It's not possible to do foreign affairs related internship far from D.C. or Manhattan. She went to a very competitive high school where for the one or two ivy league schools in which she was interested, she didn't have the same level of connections or wealth as many of her peers. Whether because of the Common Application or other factors, getting into a good school with financial help is difficult for a middle class student like my daughter who had a 4.0 GPA and 2300 on the SAT. She also worked after school.The bottom line - GWU offered more money than perceived "higher tier" universities, and brought tuition to almost that of our state school system. And by the way, I think she is also getting a very good education.

This article reinforces something I have learned during my daughter's college application process. Most students choose a school based on emotion (reputation) and not value. This luxury good analogy holds up.

The entire education problem can be solved by MOOCs lots and lots of them plus a few closely monitored tests and personal interviews with people. Of course many many people make MONEY off of our entirely inefficient way of "educating" -- are we even really doing that -- getting a degree does NOT mean one is actually educated

As a first-generation college graduate I entered GW ambitious but left saddled with debt, and crestfallen at the hard-hitting realization that my four undergraduate years were an aberration from what life is actually like post-college: not as simple as getting an [unpaid] internship with a fancy titled institution, as most Colonials do. I knew how to get in to college, but what do you do after the recess of life ends?I learned more about networking, resume plumping (designated responses to constituents...errr....replied to emails), and elevator pitches than actual theory, economic principles, strong writing skills, critical thinking, analysis, and philosophy. While relatively easy to get a job after graduating (for many with a GW degree this is sadly not the case) sustaining one and excelling in it is much harder. It's never enough just to be able to open a new door, you also need to be prepared to navigate your way through that next opportunity.

this is a very telling article. Aimless and directionless high school graduates are matched only by aimless and directionless institutes of higher learning. Each child and each parent should start with a goal - before handing over their hard earned tuition dollars, and/or leaving a trail of broken debt in the aftermath of a substandard, unfocused education.

it is no longer the most expensive university in America. It is the 46th.Others have been implementing the Absolut Rolex Plan. John Sexton turned New York University into a global higher-education player by selling the dream of downtown living to students raised on “Sex and the City.” Northeastern followed Boston University up the ladder. Under Steven B. Sample, the University of Southern California became a U.S. News top-25 university. Washington University in St. Louis did the same.

I currently attend GW, and I have to say, this article completely misrepresents the situation. I have yet to meet a single person who is paying the full $60k tuition - I myself am paying $30k, because the school gave me $30k in grants. As for the quality of education, Foreign Policy rated GW the #8 best school in the world for undergraduate education in international affairs, Princeton Review ranks it as one of the best schools for political science, and U.S. News ranks the law school #20. The author also ignores the role that an expanding research profile plays in growing a university's prestige and educational power.

And in hundreds of regional universities and community colleges, presidents and deans and department chairmen have watched this spectacle of ascension and said to themselves, “That could be me.” Agricultural schools and technical institutes are lobbying state legislatures for tuition increases and Ph.D. programs, fitness centers and arenas for sport. Presidents and boards are drawing up plans to raise tuition, recruit “better” students and add academic programs. They all want to go in one direction — up! — and they are all moving with a single vision of what they want to be.

this is the same playbook used by hospitals the past 30 years or so. It is how Hackensack Hospital became Hackensack Medical Center and McComb Hospital became Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center. No wonder the results have been the same in healthcare and higher education; both have priced themselves out of reach for average Americans.

a world where a college is rated not by the quality of its output, but instaed, by the quality of its inputs. A world where there is practically no work to be done by the administration because the college's reputation is made before the first class even begins! This is isanity! But this is the swill that the mammoth college marketing departments nationwide have shoved down America's throat. Colleges are ranked not by the quality of their graduates, but rather, by the test scores of their incoming students!

The Pew Foundation has been doing surveys on what students learn, how much homework they do, how much time they spend with professors etc. All good stuff to know before a student chooses a school. It is called the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE - called Nessy). It turns out that the higher ranked schools do NOT allow their information to be released to the public. It is SECRET.Why do you think that is?

The article blames "the standard university organizational model left teaching responsibilities to autonomous academic departments and individual faculty members, each of which taught and tested in its own way." This is the view of someone who has never taught at a university, nor thought much about how education there actually happens. Once undergraduates get beyond the general requirements, their educations _have_ to depend on "autonomous departments" because it's only those departments know what the requirements for given degree can be, and can grant the necessary accreditation of a given student. The idea that some administrator could know what's necessary for degrees in everything from engineering to fiction writing is nonsense, except that's what the people who only know the theory of education (but not its practice) actually seem to think. In the classroom itself, you have tremendously talented people, who nevertheless have their own particular strengths and approaches. Don't you think it's a good idea to let them do what they do best rather than trying to make everyone teach the same way? Don't you think supervision of young teachers by older colleagues, who actually know their field and its pedagogy, rather than some administrator, who knows nothing of the subject, is a good idea?

it makes me very sad to see how expensive some public schools have become. Used to be you could work your way through a public school without loans, but not any more. Like you, I had the advantage of a largely-scholarship paid undergraduate education at a top private college. However, I was also offered a virtually free spot in my state university's (then new) honors college

My daughter attended a good community college for a couple of classes during her senior year of high school and I could immediately see how such places are laboratories for failure. They seem like high schools in atmosphere and appearance. Students rush in by car and rush out again when the class is over.The four year residency college creates a completely different feel. On arrival, you get the sense that you are engaging in something important, something apart and one that will require your full attention. I don't say this is for everyone or that the model is not flawed in some ways (students actually only spend 2 1/2 yrs. on campus to get the four yr. degree). College is supposed to be a 60 hour per week job. Anything less than that and the student is seeking himself or herself

This. Is. STUNNING. I have always wondered, especially as my kids have approached college age, why American colleges have felt justified in raising tuition at a rate that has well exceeded inflation, year after year after year. (Nobody needs a dorm with luxury suites and a lazy river pool at college!) And as it turns out, they did it to become luxury brands. Just that simple. Incredible.I don't even blame this guy at GWU for doing what he did. He wasn't made responsible for all of American higher ed. But I do think we all need to realize what happened, and why. This is front page stuff.

I agree with you, but, unfortunately, given the choice between low tuition, primitive dorms, and no athletic center VS expensive & luxurious, the customers (and their parents) are choosing the latter. As long as this is the case, there is little incentive to provide bare-bones and cheap education.

Wesleyan University in CT is one school that is moving down the rankings. Syracuse University is another. Reed College is a third. Why? Because these schools try hard to stay out of the marketing game. (With its new president, Syracuse has jumped back into the game.) Bryn Mawr College, outside Philadelphia hasn't fared well over the past few decades in the rankings, which is true of practically every women's college. Wellesley is by far the highest ranked women's college, but even there the acceptance rate is significantly higher than one finds at comparable coed liberal arts colleges like Amherst & Williams. University of Chicago is another fascinating case for Mr. Carey to study (I'm sure he does in his forthcoming book, which I look forward to reading). Although it has always enjoyed an illustrious academic reputation, until recently Chicago's undergraduate reputation paled in comparison to peer institutions on the two coasts. A few years ago, Chicago changed its game plan to more closely resemble Harvard and Stanford in undergraduate amenities, and lo and behold, its rankings shot up. It was a very cynical move on the president's part to reassemble the football team, but it was a shrewd move because athletics draw more money than academics ever can (except at engineering schools like Cal Tech & MIT), and more money draws richer students from fancier secondary schools with higher test scores, which lead to higher rankings - and the beat goes on.

College INDUSTRY is out of control. Sorry, NYU, GW, BU are not worth the price. Are state schools any better? We have the University of Michigan, which is really not a state school, but a university that gives a discount to people who live in Michigan. Why? When you have an undergraduate body 40+% out-of-state that pays tuition of over $50K/year, you tell me?Perhaps the solution is two years of community college followed by two at places like U of M or Michigan State - get the same diploma at the end for much less and beat the system.

In one recent yr., the majority of undergrad professors at Harvard, according to Boston.com, where adjuncts. That means low pay, no benefits, no office, temp workers. Harvard.Easily available student loans fueled this arms race of amenities and frills that in which colleges now engage. They moved the cost of education onto the backs of people, kids, who don't understand what they are doing.Students in colleges these days are customers and the customers must be able to get through. If it requires dumbing things down, so be it. On top of tuition, G.W. U. is known by its students as the land of added fees on top of added fees. The joke around campus was that they would soon be installing pay toilets in the student union. No one was laughing.

You could written the same story about my alma mater, American University. The place reeked of ambition and upward mobility decades ago and still does. Whoever's running it now must look at its measly half-billion-dollar endowment and compare it to GWU's $1.5 billion and seethe with envy, while GWU's president sets his sights on an Ivy League-size endowment. And both get back to their real jobs: 24/7 fundraising,Which is what university presidents are all about these days. Money - including million-dollar salaries for themselves (GWU's president made more than Harvard's in 2011) - pride, cachet, power, a mansion, first-class all the way. They should just be honest about it and change their university's motto to Ostende mihi pecuniam! (please excuse my questionable Latin)Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess - if they do, it's thanks to the professors, adjuncts and the administrative staff, who do the actual work of educating and keep the school running.

When I was in HS (70s), many of my richer friends went to GW and I was then of the impression that GW was a 'good' school. As I age, I have come to realize that this place is just another façade to the emptiness that has become America. All too often are we faced with a dilemma: damned if we do, damned if we don't. Yep, 'education' has become a trap for all too many of our citizen.

I transferred to GWU from a state school. I am forever grateful that I did. I wanted to get a good rigorous education and go to one of the best International Affairs schools in the world. Even though the state school I went to was dirt-cheap, the education and the faculty was awful. I transferred to GW and was amazed at the professors at that university. An ambassador or a prominent IA scholar taught every class. GW is an expensive school, but that is the free market. If you want a good education you need to be willing to pay for it or join the military. I did the latter and my school was completely free with no debt and I received an amazing education. If young people aren't willing to make some sort of sacrifice to get ahead or just expect everything to be given to then our country is in a sad state.We need to stop blaming universities like GWU that strive to attract better students, better professors, and better infrastructure. They are doing what is expected in America, to better oneself.

"Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess." How could it possibly be otherwise??? I am glad that you are willing to give credit to teachers and administrators, but it is not they who "do the actual work of educating." From this fallacy comes its corollary, that we should blame teachers first for "under-performing schools". This long-running show of scapegoating may suit the wallets and vanity of American parents, but it is utterly senseless. When, if ever, American culture stops reeking of arrogance, greed and anti-intellectualism, things may improve, and we may resume the habit of bothering to learn. Until then, nothing doing.

Universities sell knowledge and grade students on how much they have learned. Fundamentally, there is conflict of interest in thsi setup. Moreover, students who are poorly educated, even if they know this, will not criticize their school, because doing so would make it harder for them to have a career. As such, many problems with higher education remain unexposed to the public.

I've lectured and taught in at least five different countries in three continents and the shortest perusal of what goes on abroad would totally undermine most of these speculations. For one thing American universities are unique in their dedication to a broad based liberal arts type education. In France, Italy or Germany, for example, you select a major like mathematics or physics and then in your four years you will not take even one course in another subject. The amount of work that you do that is critically evaluated by an instructor is a tiny fraction of what is done in an American University. While half educated critics based on profoundly incomplete research write criticism like this Universities in Germany Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and Japan as well as France have appointed committees and made studies to explain why the American system of higher education so drastically outperforms their own system. Elsewhere students do get a rather nice dose of general education but it ends in secondary school and it has the narrowness and formulaic quality that we would just normally associate with that. The character who wrote this article probably never set foot on a "campus" of the University of Paris or Rome

The university is part of a complex economic system and it is responding to the demands of that system. For example, students and parents choose universities that have beautiful campuses and buildings. So universities build beautiful campuses. State support of universities has greatly declined, and this decline in funding is the greatest cause of increased tuition. Therefore universities must compete for dollars and must build to attract students and parents. Also, universities are not ranked based on how they educate students -- that's difficult to measure so it is not measured. Instead universities are ranked on research publications. So while universities certainly put much effort into teaching, research has to have a priority in order for the university to survive. Also universities do not force students and parents to attend high price institutions. Reasonably priced state institutions and community colleges are available to every student. Community colleges have an advantage because they are funded by property taxes. Finally learning requires good teaching, but it also requires students that come to the university funded, prepared, and engaged. This often does not happen. Conclusion- universities have to participate in profile raising actions in order to survive. The day that funding is provided for college, ranking is based on education, and students choose campuses with simple buildings, then things will change at the university.

This is the inevitable result of privatizing higher education. In the not-so-distant past, we paid for great state universities through our taxes, not tuition. Then, the states shifted funding to prisons and the Federal government radically cut research support and the GI bill. Instead, today we expect universities to support themselves through tuition, and to the extent that we offered students support, it is through non-dischargeable loans. To make matters worse, the interest rates on those loans are far above the government's cost of funds -- so in effect the loans are an excise tax on education (most of which is used to support a handful of for-profit institutions that account for the most student defaults). This "consumer sovereignty" privatized model of funding education works no better than privatizing California's electrical system did in the era of Enron, or our privatized funding of medical service, or our increasingly privatized prison system: it drives up costs at the same time that it replace quality with marketing.

There are data in some instances on student learning, but the deeper problem, as I suspect the author already knows, is that there is nothing like a consensus on how to measure that learning, or even on when is the proper end point to emphasize (a lot of what I teach -- I know this from what students have told me -- tends to come into sharp focus years after graduation).

Michael (Baltimore) has hit the nail on the head. Universities are increasingly corporatized institutions in the credentialing business. Knowledge, for those few who care about it (often not those paying for the credentials) is available freely because there's no profit in it. Like many corporate entities, it is increasingly run by increasingly highly paid administrators, not faculty.

GWU has not defined itself in any unique way, it has merely embraced the bland, but very expensive, accoutrements of American private education: luxury dorms, food courts, spa-like gyms, endless extracurricular activities, etc. But the real culprit for this bloat that students have to bear financially is the college ranking system by US News, Princeton Review, etc. An ultimately meaningless exercise in competition that has nevertheless pushed colleges and universities to be more like one another. A sad state of affairs, and an extremely expensive one for students

It is long past time to realize the failure of the Reagonomics-neoliberal private profits over public good program. In education, we need to return to public institutions publicly funded. Just as we need to recognize that Medicare, Social Security, the post office, public utilities, fire departments, interstate highway system, Veterans Administration hospitals and the GI bill are models to be improved and expanded, not destroyed.

George Washington is actually not a Rolex watch, it is a counterfeit Rolex. The real Rolexes of higher education -- places like Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke, the Ivies etc. -- have real endowments and real financial aid. No middle class kid is required to borrow $100,000 to get a degree from those schools, because they offer generous need-based financial aid in the form of grants, not loans. The tuition at the real Rolexes is really a sticker price that only the wealthy pay -- everybody else on a sliding scale. For middle class kids who are fortunate enough to get in, Penn actually ends up costing considerably less than a state university.The fake Rolexes -- BU, NYU, Drexel in Philadelphia -- don't have the sliding scale. They bury middle class students in debt.And really, though it is foolish to borrow $100,000 or $120,000 for an undergraduate degree, I don't find the transaction morally wrong. What is morally wrong is our federal government making that loan non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, so many if these kids will be having their wages garnished for the REST OF THEIR LIVES.There is a very simple solution to this, by the way. Cap the amount of non-dischargeable student loan debt at, say, $50,000

The slant of this article is critical of the growth of research universities. Couldn't disagree more. Modern research universities create are incredibly engines of economic opportunity not only for the students (who pay the bills) but also for the community via the creation of blue and white collar jobs. Large research university employ tens of thousands of locals from custodial and food service workers right up to high level administrators and specialist in finance, computer services, buildings and facilities management, etc. Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland system employ more people than any other industry in Maryland -- including the government. Research universities typically have hospitals providing cutting-edge medical care to the community. Local business (from cafes to property rental companies) benefit from a built-in, long-term client base as well as an educated workforce. And of course they are the foundry of new knowledge which is critical for the future growth of our country.Check out the work of famed economist Dr. Julia Lane on modeling the economic value of the research university. In a nutshell, there are few better investments America can make in herself than research universities. We are the envy of the world in that regard -- and with good reason. How many *industries* (let alone jobs) have Stanford University alone catalyzed?

What universities have the monopoly on is the credential. Anyone can learn, from books, from free lectures on the internet, from this newspaper, etc. But only universities can endow you with the cherished degree. For some reason, people are will to pay more for one of these pieces of paper with a certain name on it -- Ivy League, Stanford, even GW -- than another -- Generic State U -- though there is no evidence one is actually worth more in the marketplace of reality than the other. But, by the laws of economics, these places are actually underpriced: after all, something like 20 times more people are trying to buy a Harvard education than are allowed to purchase one. Usually that means you raise your price.

Overalll a good article, except for - "This comes on the heels of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s “Academically Adrift,” a study that found “limited or no learning” among many college students." The measure of learning you report was a general thinking skills exam. That's not a good measure of college gains. Most psychologists and cognitive scientists worth their salt would tell you that improvement in critical thinking skills is going to be limited to specific areas. In other words, learning critical thinking skills in math will make little change in critical thinking about political science or biology. Thus we should not expect huge improvements in general critical thinking skills, but rather improvements in a student's major and other areas of focus, such as a minor. Although who has time for a minor when it is universally acknowledged that the purpose of a university is to please and profit an employer or, if one is lucky, an investor. Finally, improved critical thinking skills are not the end all and be all of a college education even given this profit centered perspective. Learning and mastering the cumulative knowledge of past generations is arguably the most important thing to be gained, and most universities still tend to excel at that even with the increasing mandate to run education like a business and cultivate and cull the college "consumer".

As for community colleges, there was an article in the Times several years ago that said it much better than I could have said it myself: community colleges are places where dreams are put on hold. Without making the full commitment to study, without leaving the home environment, many, if not most, community college students are caught betwixt and between, trying to balance work responsibilities, caring for a young child or baby and attending classes. For males, the classic "end of the road" in community college is to get a car, a job and a girlfriend, one who is not in college, and that is the end of the dream. Some can make it, but most cannot.

as a scientist I disagree with the claim that undergrad tuition subsidizes basic research. Nearly all lab equipment and research personnel (grad students, technicians, anyone with the title "research scientist" or similar) on campus is paid for through federal grants. Professors often spend all their time outside teaching and administration writing grant proposals, as the limited federal grant funds mean ~%85 of proposals must be rejected. What is more, out of each successful grant the university levies a "tax", called "overhead", of 30-40%, nominally to pay for basic operations (utilities, office space, administrators). So in fact one might say research helps fund the university rather than the other way around. Flag

It's certainly overrated as a research and graduate level university. Whether it is good for getting an undergraduate education is unclear, but a big part of the appeal is getting to live in D.C..while attending college instead of living in some small college town in the corn fields.

Democratic supporters of safety net programs can use Jencks’s finding that poverty has dropped below 5 percent as evidence that the war on poverty has been successful.

At the same time liberals are wary of positive news because, as Jencks notes:It is easier to rally support for such an agenda by saying that the problem in question is getting worse

The plus side for conservatives of Jencks’s low estimate of the poverty rate is the implication that severe poverty has largely abated, which then provides justification for allowing enemies of government entitlement programs to further cut social spending.

At the same time, however, Jencks’s data undermines Republican claims that the war on poverty has been a failure – a claim exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 quip: “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

Jencks’s conclusion: “The absolute poverty rate has declined dramatically since President Johnson launched his war on poverty in 1964.” At 4.8 percent, Jencks’s calculation is the lowest poverty estimate by a credible expert in the field.

his conclusion — that instead of the official count of 45.3 million people living in poverty, the number of poor people in America is just under 15 million — understates the scope of hardship in this country.

Jencks argues that the actual poverty rate has dropped over the past five decades – far below the official government level — if poverty estimates are adjusted for food and housing benefits, refundable tax credits and a better method of determining inflation rates. In Jencks’s view, the war on poverty worked.

using a relative measure shows that the United States lags well behind other developed countries:If you use the O.E.C.D. standard of 50 percent of median income as a poverty line, the United States looks pretty bad in cross-national relief. We have a relative poverty rate exceeded only by Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Israel (which has seen a big increase in inequality in recent years). And that rate in 2010 was essentially where it was in 1995

While the United States “has achieved real progress in reducing absolute poverty over the past 50 years,” according to Burtless, “the country may have made no progress at all in reducing the relative economic deprivation of folks at the bottom.”

the heart of the dispute: How severe is the problem of poverty?

Kathryn Edin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, and Luke Schaefer, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, contend that the poverty debate overlooks crucial changes that have taken place within the population of the poor.

welfare reform, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act), which limited eligibility for welfare benefits to five years. The limitation has forced many of the poor off welfare: over the past 19 years, the percentage of families falling under the official poverty line who receive welfare benefits has fallen from to 26 percent from 68 percent. Currently, three-quarters of those in poverty, under the official definition, receive no welfare payments.

he enactment of expanded benefits for the working poor through the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit.According to Edin and Schaefer, the consequence of these changes, taken together, has been to divide the poor who no longer receive welfare into two groups. The first group is made up of those who have gone to work and have qualified for tax credits. Expanded tax credits lifted about 3.2 million children out of poverty in 2013

he second group, though, has really suffered. These are the very poor who are without work, part of a population that is struggling desperately. Edin and Schaefer write that among the losers are an estimated 3.4 million “children who over the course of a year live for at least three months under a $2 per person per day threshold.”

ocusing on these findings, Mishel argues, diverts attention from the more serious problem of “the failure of the labor market to adequately reward low-wage workers.”To support his case, Mishel points out that hourly pay for those in the bottom fifth grew only 7.7 percent from 1979 to 2007, while productivity grew by 64 percent, and education levels among workers in this quintile substantially improved.

After all, four decades of social pressure and sometimes coercive enforcement have deeply engrained the one-child norm into Chinese identity — and it may well take as many decades to root it out. And given the economic realities associated with raising a child in modern China, a second child could be an expensive luxury, reserved largely for the wealthy.

Chinese culture has long valued children above all things. Families with large broods were seen as exceptionally fortunate — because more offspring are signs of wealth, or meant more hands to work for the family.

having two or fewer children was a patriotic duty that ensured the nation would have enough resources for all

one child has become a social standard, with the consequence that for every household, a single son or daughter is now doted upon by two parents and four grandparents, showered with material possessions, pushed to excel academically and entrusted with the entirety of a family's hopes and expectations.

Americans spend about $13,600 per year on each child they have. That's about 27% of the median U.S. household income. Chinese spend around $3,745 per year on their kids — or about 50% of China's median household income. Almost three-quarters of that money goes toward education and enrichment; it's seen as an investment in the future

most of China's 140 million rising middle-class families feel they simply can't afford the financial burden of raising more than one. Which is why China's attempted doubling down on childbirth may ultimately have little near-term effect on Chinese demographics.

The affluent have always been able to pay the penalties for multiples. Fong points out that the three richest men in China all have more than one child. But for middle class families, simply removing penalties isn't enough. "I think many will be resistant to have second children unless the measures are accompanied by financial relief — tax breaks, scholarship guarantees, things like that.

Will second children simply be a luxury of the wealthy? And if so, how will that impact Chinese society?My prediction: Within a few years, no Chinese millionaire's Mercedes will be fully complete without two baby seats in back, and Bugaboo Donkey double strollers will become the new Prada bags.

And while empirical evidence is important and we need more of it, the data almost never speak for themselves – a point amply illustrated by recent monetary events.

chwinger, as I remember the story, was never seen to use a Feynman diagram. But he had a locked room in his house, and the rumor was that that room was where he kept the Feynman diagrams he used in secret.

What’s the equivalent of Feynman diagrams? Something like IS-LM, which is the simplest model you can write down of how interest rates and output are jointly determined, and is how most practicing macroeconomists actually think about short-run economic fluctuations. It’s also how they talk about macroeconomics to each other. But it’s not what they put in their papers, because the journals demand that your model have “microfoundations.”

The Bernanke Fed massively expanded the monetary base, by a factor of almost five. There were dire warnings that this would cause inflation and “debase the dollar.” But prices went nowhere, and not much happened to broader monetary aggregates (a result that, weirdly, some economists seemed to find deeply puzzling even though it was exactly what should have been expected.)

What about fiscal policy? Traditional macro said that at the zero lower bound there would be no crowding out – that deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and that fiscal multipliers would be larger than under normal conditions. The first of these predictions was obviously borne out, as rates stayed low even when deficits were very large. The second prediction is a bit harder to test, for reasons I’ll get into when I talk about the limits of empiricism. But the evidence does indeed suggest large positive multipliers.

The overall story, then, is one of overwhelming predictive success. Basic, old-fashioned macroeconomics didn’t fail in the crisis – it worked extremely well

In fact, it’s hard to think of any other example of economic models working this well – making predictions that most non-economists (and some economists) refused to believe, indeed found implausible, but which came true. Where, for example, can you find any comparable successes in microeconomics?

Meanwhile, the demand that macro become ever more rigorous in the narrow, misguided sense that it look like micro led to useful approaches being locked up in Schwinger’s back room, and in all too many cases forgotten. When the crisis struck, it was amazing how many successful academics turned out not to know things every economist would have known in 1970, and indeed resurrected 1930-vintage fallacies in the belief that they were profound insights.

mainly I think it reflected the general unwillingness of human beings (a category that includes many though not necessarily all economists) to believe that so many people can be so wrong about something so big.

. To normal human beings the study of international trade and that of international macroeconomics might sound like pretty much the same thing. In reality, however, the two fields used very different models, had very different intellectual cultures, and tended to look down on each other. Trade people tended to consider international macro people semi-charlatans, doing ad hoc stuff devoid of rigor. International macro people considered trade people boring, obsessed with proving theorems and offering little of real-world use.

does microeconomics really deserve its reputation of moral and intellectual superiority? No

Even before the rise of behavioral economics, any halfway self-aware economist realized that utility maximization – indeed, the very concept of utility — wasn’t a fact about the world; it was more of a thought experiment, whose conclusions should always have been stated in the subjunctive.

But, you say, we didn’t see the Great Recession coming. Well, what do you mean “we,” white man? OK, what’s true is that few economists realized that there was a huge housing bubble

True, a model doesn’t have to be perfect to provide hugely important insights. But here’s my question: where are the examples of microeconomic theory providing strong, counterintuitive, successful predictions on the same order as the success of IS-LM macroeconomics after 2008? Maybe there are some, but I can’t come up with any.

The point is not that micro theory is useless and we should stop doing it. But it doesn’t deserve to be seen as superior to macro modeling.

And the effort to make macro more and more like micro – to ground everything in rational behavior – has to be seen now as destructive. True, that effort did lead to some strong predictions: e.g., only unanticipated money should affect real output, transitory income changes shouldn’t affect consumer spending, government spending should crowd out private demand, etc. But all of those predictions have turned out to be wrong.

Kahneman and Tversky and Thaler and so on deserved all the honors they received for helping to document the specific ways in which utility maximization falls short, but even before their work we should never have expected perfect maximization to be a good description of reality.

But data never speak for themselves, for a couple of reasons. One, which is familiar, is that economists don’t get to do many experiments, and natural experiments are rare

The other problem is that even when we do get something like natural experiments, they often took place under economic regimes that aren’t relevant to current problems.

Both of these problems were extremely relevant in the years following the 2008 crisis.

you might be tempted to conclude that the empirical evidence is that monetary expansion is inflationary, indeed roughly one-for-one.

But the question, as the Fed embarked on quantitative easing, was what effect this would have on an economy at the zero lower bound. And while there were many historical examples of big monetary expansion, examples at the ZLB were much rarer – in fact, basically two: the U.S. in the 1930s and Japan in the early 2000

These examples told a very different story: that expansion would not, in fact, be inflationary, that it would work out the way it did.

The point is that empirical evidence can only do certain things. It can certainly prove that your theory is wrong! And it can also make a theory much more persuasive in those cases where the theory makes surprising predictions, which the data bear out. But the data can never absolve you from the necessity of having theories.

Over this past decade, I’ve watched a number of economists try to argue from authority: I am a famous professor, therefore you should believe what I say. This never ends well. I’ve also seen a lot of nihilism: economists don’t know anything, and we should tear the field down and start over.

Obviously I differ with both views. Economists haven’t earned the right to be snooty and superior, especially if their reputation comes from the ability to do hard math: hard math has been remarkably little help lately, if ever.

On the other hand, economists do turn out to know quite a lot: they do have some extremely useful models, usually pretty simple ones, that have stood up well in the face of evidence and events. And they definitely shouldn’t defer to important and/or rich people on polic

: compare Janet Yellen’s macroeconomic track record with that of the multiple billionaires who warned that Bernanke would debase the dollar. Or take my favorite Business Week headline from 2010: “Krugman or [John] Paulson: Who You Gonna Bet On?” Um.The important thing is to be aware of what we do know, and why.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

there are plenty of behaviors that require self-control that have held steady or even improved in recent decades

Cigarette smoking has fallen sharply since the Mad Men days.

Alcohol consumption peaked in 1980 and has fallen back to the same level as 1960

Seat belts,

are now used by 9 out of 10 motorists.

the ratio of household consumption to household net worth just hit a postwar low: In 2018 consumption was 13.2 percent of net worth, down from 16.3 percent in 1946.

it isn’t clear that savings habits have worsened since World War II.

Nevertheless, like every generation before us, we crave more self-control.

science shows that helping people do better in the internal tug-of-war of self-control depends on creating the right external environment.

some temptations require hard paternalism

some choices are not in our best interest. Taxing, regulating, restricting or even banning especially addictive drugs may lead to more freedom

Cellphones and soda

the benefits of constraining access may, in some cases, justify the costs

we recommend nudges — subtle changes in how choices are framed that make doing what’s in our long-term interest more obvious, easier or more attractiv

deploy science-backed strategies that make self-control easier.

putting temptations out of sight and out of reach:

disabling apps that, upon reflection, do more harm than good.

Anything you can do to put time and effort between you and indulgence makes self-control easier.

if you get a conservative economist who isn’t a charlatan and crank, you are more or less by definition getting someone with no influence on policymakers. But that’s not the only problem.

But even among conservative economists who didn’t go down that rabbit hole, there has been a moral collapse – a willingness to put political loyalty over professional standards.

the intellectual decadence. In macroeconomics, what began in the 60s and 70s as a usefully challenging critique of Keynesian views went all wrong in the 80s, because the anti-Keynesians refused to reconsider their views when their own models failed the reality test while Keynesian models, with some modification, performed pretty well.

By the time the Great Recession struck, the right-leaning side of the profession had entered a Dark Age, having retrogressed to the point where famous economists trotted out 30s-era fallacies as deep insights.

The second problem with conservative economic thought is that even aside from its complete lack of policy influence, it’s in an advanced state of both intellectual and moral decadence – something that has been obvious for a while, but became utterly clear after the 2008 crisis.

We saw that most recently in the way leading conservative economists raced to endorse ludicrous claims for the efficacy of the Trump tax cuts, then tried to climb down without admitting what they had done. We saw it in the false claims that Obama had presided over a massive expansion of government programs and refusal to admit that he hadn’t, the warnings that Fed policy would cause huge inflation followed by refusal to admit having been wrong, and on and on.

What accounts for this moral decline? I suspect that it’s about a desperate attempt to retain some influence on a party that prefers the likes of Kudlow or Stephen Moore.

no, you don’t see the same thing on the other side. Liberal economists have made plenty of bad predictions – if you never get it wrong, you’re not taking enough risks – but have generally been willing to admit to and learn from mistakes, and have rarely been sycophants to people in power. In this, as in so much else, we’re looking at asymmetric polarization.

Am I saying that there are no conservative economists who have maintained their principles? Not at all. But they have no influence, zero, on GOP thinking. So in economics, a news organization trying to represent conservative thought either has to publish people with no constituency or go with the charlatans who actually matter.

And I think that’s true across the board. The left has genuine public intellectuals with actual ideas and at least some real influence; the right does not. News organizations don’t seem to have figured out how to deal with this reality, except by pretending that it doesn’t exist

the real problem here is that media organizations are looking for unicorns: serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence. Forty or fifty years ago, such people did exist. But now they don’t.