@_John_Handel My worry isn't that students are being instrumental but not instrumental enough. Too many I interact with don't think you even need skills as such to get ahead, at least not those colleges offer.
@gabrielwinant Wouldn't we get people then complaining that no one ever gets failed? And wouldn't the consequences of getting a fail be so bad that the binary wouldn't even be meaningful? I mean I went to a school with no grades, so it might just be better to skip to comments without pass/fail.
@_John_Handel Even if every ‘capitalist overlord’ took ethically-minded humanities classes, there’s no reason to expect 'maturation' when they're graded on mastering an academic essay genre, not acting ethically. Unless maturational limits = not writing term papers.
@adam_tooze Isn’t a lot of this downstream from the Clinton/Carville moment? An entire generation of political actors thought they’d encountered some eternal gravitational force rather than a particular assemblage of forces and extrapolated a theodicy from it?
@gabrielwinant Skeptical about that. Need a very very large glut? Oil would need to be more than cheap—need to be super & persistently cheap to affect invst decisions. At that point US shale gets wrecked too.
@GeorgeSelgin I guess I’m asking whether we can view BoE 1797- 1821 as analogous to all the Fed today. The BoE was still trying to achieve monetary stability then while not promising to convert sterling into gold, yet sterling remained a liability on its balance sheet. Quite similar to today?