The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness — in Both Public Health and Public Schooling

I published this op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News two years ago, in the early stages of the pandemic.  Here’s a link to the original. If anything, its relevance is even more apparent now than it was in 2020.  Consider the enormous shipping and trucking backlogs that clogged up our economic system at the tail end …

Niall Ferguson — How Complexity Trumps History

This blog post is a recent essay by Niall Ferguson published in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. The prompt for the essay is the current surge in inflation and the difficulty of trying to predict how this round of inflation will develop over time.  But the most interesting part is the way …

The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness

I published this op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News two years ago, in the early stages of the pandemic.  Here’s a link to the original. If anything, its relevance is even more apparent now than it was in 2020.  Consider the enormous shipping and trucking backlogs that are clogging up our economic system, and …

Preface to the Chinese Edition of A Perfect Mess

This post is the text of the preface I just wrote for the Chinese translation of my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of the American System of Higher Education.  The translators are Professor Sun Bi and research assistant Liu Zitai from the School of Education at South China Normal University.  It will be …

Larry Cuban — Rockets Are Complicated but Schools Are Complex; Thoughts about Educational Exceptionalism

In this post, I want to explore a vivid image developed by Larry Cuban to characterize the peculiar nature of teaching and learning in schools.  Scholars have frequently argued for a form of educational exceptionalism that sees schooling as a social structure that is distinctive from the normal patterns of bureaucratic organization that one sees …

The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness: A Brief for Resilience through Redundancy

{This piece was originally published in the San Jose Mercury News in July, 2020. Here's a link to the original.] The current covid-19 pandemic has shown a lot of things that are wrong in American society, including terrible leadership, a frail social safety net, and a lack of investment in public goods.  But one that …