A recent Paul Krugman column made a puzzling assertion about education:
The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.
It’s hard to know what precisely he’s saying here, but he seems to be trying to imply that education has “inevitably suffered” because of a lack of government spending.
Any such implication would be difficult to defend. As you can see in the above graph (from an Education Next article by Arthur Peng and James Guthrie), education spending has skyrocketed in real terms precisely during the period during which, according to Krugman, our politics were “dominated” by an anti-government-spending view. So what’s the counterfactual here — how much more does Krugman think we should have been spending?
C’mon Stuart… quit spouting this ideological propaganda from the thinly-veiled partisan group — the so-called “National Center for Education Statistics!!”
Your facts (insert Stephen Colbert accent here) may indicate that spending has gone up, but my gut tells me that schools are wildly underfunded! You go ahead and believe your facts if you must .. I trust my heart!!!
I think most people stopped paying attention to Krugman quite a while ago. He was a great economist. Here is how economist Steven Landsburg put it:
Abjure speculation; collect facts. Well done, National Center for Education Statistics. Krugman = armchair economist.
[...] In a recent post Stuart referenced a NY Times column by Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman. In his column Professor Krugman asserted that the reason for our nations mediocre education performance over the past 30 years is a lack of resources. He claims that as a nation we have given in to our anti-tax tendencies and allowed our children to suffer. He further argues that in order to bring our great nation back from the brink, Congress must pass another big stimulus package. This time around the stimulus dollars should be aimed directly at state and local governments to make sure our education system survives the financial crisis. [...]