Tag Archives: Paul Krugman

March 6, 2012, 5:16 pm

College for All: Obama’s Higher-Education Agenda, Part 3 of 8

President Obama’s agenda for higher education includes the goal of having nearly all Americans receive at least one year of formal education beyond high school. For shorthand, he has often referred to this extra year as “college,” which has prompted controversy. College for all? He referred to this in his January 24 State of the Union address as part of “the basic American promise,” namely:

if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.

What this means is a matter of some dispute. According to the New York Times, “almost 70 percent of high-school graduates in the United States enroll in college within two years of graduating.” Is that figure too low? When Obama addresses this issue he sometimes sounds like he is enunciating a general principle that all or nearly all should go to…

March 30, 2011, 10:24 am

Cronon’s Whirlwind

By Peter Wood

Last week Stephan Thompson, deputy executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, filed an Open Records Law request asking the University of Wisconsin to turn over copies of e-mails from William J. Cronon, a tenured professor of environmental history. The request appears to have been prompted by Professor Cronon’s political activism. On March 15, Cronon published a long blog post titled “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here).”

And on March 21 he published “Wisconsin’s Radical Break” as an op-ed in The New York Times. Both the blog post and the op-ed criticized Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and conservatives in general. The response from the Wisconsin Republican Party has been widely interpreted as a political reprisal, and I see no reason to disagree. Peter Schmidt’s account in the Chronicle …

March 8, 2011, 1:32 pm

If Even Krugman Says It …

By Peter Wood

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize economist and fixture of the New York Times op-ed page, has been a steadfast supporter of President Obama’s efforts to improve the U.S. economy through massive deficit spending. His only criticisms have been in the direction that the stimulus packages have not been large enough. In his March 7 op-ed, however, Krugman hits an astonishing new note. In effect, he discovers his inner Richard Vedder: He expresses doubt that “education is the key to economic success.”

Krugman’s key observation is that as more and more white-collar, middle-class jobs fall victim to automation, the value of a college education as a means of securing a middle-class income has begun to fade. In addition to automation, Krugman says that telecommunications have “made it possible to provide many services at long range,” and that work performed by highly educated workers is…