Dani Rodrik Doesn't Think Much of "Mr. Kristol"

Dani Rodrik has been waiting a long time--decades, in fact--to give William Kristol a grade:

Mr Kristol, you get a C in economics!

I think that Dani is being really generous: a C is a real gift here.

Most interesting, perhaps, is Dani's report of William Kristol's teaching methodology, which appears to have involved giving lots of unmotivated Cs to a man who is the finest political economist of my generation. It is an interesting method--but I would classify it not as a way of teaching but as an exercise in Herrschaft...

Comments

[Gene O'Grady]

Not directly germane to this wonderful piece but suggested by it, can anyone tell me if Harvey Mansfield has always been the fool he seems to be, or did he once have something to say, or at least interesting questions to ask?

Some people are wrong but make you uncomfortable with your own preconceptions; Mansfield only seems to serve to make me more smug about them.

[Tomas]

How shocking! A man who cannot write is unable to read and, by extention, grade. One might even be lead to the conclusion that he is, and always was, a rightwing hack.

[pgl]

Maybe graduate student Mr. Kristol did not realize what a gem he had as an undergraduate student. Seriously - given Kristol's writings et al. he is as dumb as he is arrogant.

[pgl]

Maybe graduate student Mr. Kristol did not realize what a gem he had as an undergraduate student. Seriously - given Kristol's writings et al. he is as dumb as he is arrogant.

[otto]

"to a man who is the finest political economist of my generation"

Let's not overdo it. There's a lot of competition to be the finest political economist of your generation, Brad, and I'd be rather surprised if Rodrik - fine scholar that he is - was at the top of it.

[Rob]

Thing is, I can imagine Kristol sitting there smugly as he handed out Cs pretending himself to be the guardian of Harvard picturing himself as John Houseman in The Paperchase.

[Q the Enchanter]

Actually, those Cs were a benefit, as they made Rodrik's As all the more scarce (which is to say, more valuable). See, e.g., Center for Biological Diversity v. Pirie, http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/02/ding-dong-the-w.html.

[Michael Sullivan]

Not that I have any respect whatsoever for Kristol, but isn't it possible that Rodrik's papers were, in fact, mediocre, despite him turning out to be a top notch economist?

Now it seems far more likely, given what I've seen of Kristol's public writing, that he was downmarking for ideological disagreement (As a typical Trotskyite, he'd be wanting to keep the fold politically correct).

But without reading the papers, do we really know? It's possible for brilliant people to nonetheless do poor work as a student.

[Michael Sullivan]

Not that I have any respect whatsoever for Kristol, but isn't it possible that Rodrik's papers were, in fact, mediocre, despite him turning out to be a top notch economist?

Now it seems far more likely, given what I've seen of Kristol's public writing, that he was downmarking for ideological disagreement (As a typical Trotskyite, he'd be wanting to keep the fold politically correct).

But without reading the papers, do we really know? It's possible for brilliant people to nonetheless do poor work as a student.

[Maurice Lanselle]

Michael Sullivan has a good point, even if it only concerns the "disclosure" part of Rodrik's note and not Kristol's mendacity, which Rodrik only censures for ignorance (or lack of research) and furthermore Rodrik "discloses" his own possible bias. He is probably too kind. The obvious question: is the TA there to teach, or only to discourage younger challengers?

Perhaps Rodrik believes that Kristol did not give constructive criticism, only "judgment", censure. At what point did Kristol exercise authority but not responsibility? Shouldn't he, wasn't it his job and his duty, to guide Rodrik to improved paper-writing?

A traditional exercise in marketing is (or was) the "analysis of the Nielsen" stats; marketing managers would send them back for re-writes until the neophyte had given the right spin. Re-writes.s.s.s*, after feed-back.

So was Kristol already incapable of delivering on his responsibilities (teaching), or is Rodrik more recalcitrant than we suspect?

[Alex P.]

Who says Rodrik is a top notch economist? He has been wrong time after time on most globalization issues. Rodrik is often fun to read, but can someone site Rodrik's major contribution to the field?

[Julian Elson]

Grr... this is a pet peeve of mine. The unavoidable dialogue about real earnings decline always gets sidetracked by complaints about the deflator not taking hedonic improvement in goods into account, even though nowadays they make their best attempt to do just that.

It's like:

Salviati: Compensation for high school educated people has, in fact, declined in real terms since 1980.

Simplicio: No, no it hasn't. You see, these numbers don't take into account the the cheap availability of high quality consumer electronics and the improvements in the quality of goods and services.

Salviati: Well, the BLS now *does* try to factor hedonic adjustments into their CPI estimates, so this complaint probably lost a lot of its relevance when they started doing that over a decade ago or something. Moreover, cheap cell phones really won't help you send your kids to college.

Simplicio: Bear in mind that some products simply didn't exist in 1980, and couldn't be had for any amount of money. You can try to estimate the CPI basket from 1980 and the CPI basket from 2008, with the 2008 one filled with new products, through some form of chain-weighting, but ultimately we can't know how much such products represent a real improvement in people's lives, so even the hedonic adjustments to CPI can't really capture their value.

Salviati: So are you just going to say that the invention of iPods makes compensation estimates incomensurable? That there would be no hedonic adjustment to CPI high enough to make inflation anything but understated? Is a worker paid $10,000 a year in 2008 better off than one paid $100,000 a year in 1980, because the 1980 worker simply couldn't buy an iPod?

Simplicio: Well, I don't know if I'd go that far, but I nonetheless believe that high school workers today are better compensated than in 1980, and that hedonic adjustments by people estimating CPI are too low (although how much too low, I'm not sure), and that if it were done correctly, high school educated earners would definitely be shown to be better off.

(Salviati slits his wrists in despair)