Me? I love ‘em, especially roasted with a bit of rosemary.

• Cut sprouts in half down the middle
• Heat some olive oil and a little butter in a skillet on medium low
• Place sprouts face down in one layer
• Sprinkle a handful of pine nuts on top
• Go have a glass of wine
• In about 15 minutes, lift out sprouts, sprinkle with salt and pepper
• Toss the now-golden nuts, butter and sprouts together.
Bottoms of sprouts will be brown and sweet and the tops keep their crunch.

This experiment has been tried, by Josef Stalin, Napoleon Bonaparte and their heirs, justified to some extent by the eighteenth-century experience of go-ahead academies and stagnant universities. It wasn’t a disaster, but both France and the ex-Soviet empire have concluded that it works less well than dual-purpose (Humboldtian) universities. The French CNRS is now SFIK largely a way of funding university-based research teams. Governments are bad at picking winners in research, and a competitive arms-length allocation of research funds is more efficient. The arm’s-length part implies basing researchers in largely autonomous institutions, which universities are by historical accident, aka tradition.

The practical case here is stronger than the theory, for the original Humboldt argument is idealist b/s. My debating points are:
1. Research training is a part of education, and has to be delivered by people who are practising the trade they are teaching. (You can of course hive this function off into specialist academies; but these are still educational institutions.)
2. During their tertiary education, it’s important for as many students as possible to be exposed, even briefly, to the practice of genuine research (the core of truth in Humboldtian idealism): an argument against the specialised academies.
3. Research is fun and should pay an accountability tax to teaching and public information – it doesn’t matter which, and different researchers have different comparative advantages in the spectrum. The converse is not generally true.
4. The vice of teaching is fossilisation; the vice of research is narrowness. A well-run dual system on Madisonian lines has a reasonable chance of limiting the damage.

vince52: Please go Galt. You overestimate your easy replaceability.

So a tuition increase of $2-3K a year by a deeply bankrupt state is “quick, ignorant, and heartless”? How much is the state subsidy per UC student? 20K? I admit I don’t know the number, but I am about to finish paying for three non-California college educations for my California kids, and I can tell you that I paid at least $25K per student per year for the privilege of not sending them to a place where Michael O’Hare teaches.

And how much higher are my taxes supposed to be, Mr. Public Policy Knowitall? At least half of my income goes to federal and state income taxes, Social Security, Medicare, property taxes and sales taxes. At some point earners start to lose interest in earning more, and we’re close to that point.

Your post makes many true and insightful points, yet devolves into a ridiculous partisan tantrum. I’m left with the sense that California’s decisionmakers must have been sitting in your classroom for the past few decades.

Wonderful post, thank you.

I see, Democrats had nothing to do with this mess. Actually Democrats have turned a hatred of free markets and the results thereof into an ideology. They were the main contributors to the economic policies that let to the bubble an bust of the bubble.

BTW, markets work and the government interventions into markets we’ve had over the past 20 years or more are finally bearing fruits.

Here’s a little tidbit written over 60 years ago by someone who has, according to you, made a worship of markets: “Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to “buy” houses that they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared with other things. They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly overexpansion. In brief, in they long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment.” – Henry Hazlitt

Sounds like his “ignorance” predicted things a lot better than your enlightened hatred of free markets.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of predicting this mess. Government has been following almost every possible stupid economic policy it could over the past twenty years and continues to do so. Using the exact bad policies that got us into this mess to try to get us out.

I happen to know a hell of a lot more than you on economics, and for the most part Republicans have very little faith in free markets. They too go along with you in an “ignorant and idiotic worship of” the state.

“My generation and the next owe my students a big transfer of wealth entrusted to us by our parents and grandparents for that purpose;”

There is no pool of capital saved up by our parents and grandparents upon which to feed the teachers and heat the schools. In fact, the entire country is being run as a giant ponzi scheme, where our parents and grandparents have been living of a pool of capital being saved by their children for their own retirement. Once those children reach retirement age that pool of real capital will have been consumed and we will be left with the government printing presses to feed our aging population. Good luck eating federal reserve notes.

Also, look, U Cal is huge and Cal state is huger and the community colleges add up. The logic of charging full tuition is appropriate for a small price taking benificent entity. By subsidizing university education California can drive down the return to a university degree and obtain a more equal income distribution. Any entity with market power should consider the effect of its actions on prices and the Californian public education behemoth has a lot of market power in the California labor market.

I’d say basing aid on loans is a mistake. My view is that labor income is not well correlated with the social usefulness of labor. In fact, I think that people choose points tangent to an indifference curve such that lower income is compensated by a greater sense of social usefulness *and* that their perceptions of social usefulness are not negatively correlated with social usefulness. You seem to agree as you mentioned poets and public defenders. A poll tax makes people care more about income. So does a loan contract.

I’d go for a system where in lieu of tuition the state requires repayment proportional to income (a sort of consensual income surtax). That’s because I think the incentive effects of a flat tax are better than the incentive effects of a poll tax totally aside from the desirability of equal incomes. Oh and, by the way, with my approach the post repayment plan incomes of university graduates would be more equal.

According to my calculations in 2007 we had undergraduate fees at UC set at 100% of the actual per-student cost of providing undergraduate education. Since then fees have jumped a lot higher. That calculation was based on an earlier faculty time-use study and it included the faculty’s own assessment of how much research contributed to instruction.

Would some other experts please look into this and see what they think of the calculation?