remove the word academic from the equation and what do you loseCaplan has set himself against the values that are the incredibly fragile preconditions for all academic debate
and that's pretty narrow-minded, although of course he's just riffing. aaronson's politics tend to get in the way an awful lot, considering it's a physics blog mostly for physics. the adage about sticking to what you're good at comes to mind. anyway, his objections mostly miss the point. mentions anti-research, doesn't mention the reproducibility crisis; claims that the system built for smart people is good at producing more smart people despite the obvious possibility that he's reasoning backwards, etc. unimpressiveBut in any future I can plausibly imagine where the government actually axes education, the savings go to things like enriching the leaders’ cronies and launching vanity wars.
Lately I've learned to feel less bad about not reading these "policy" books. Sure, it's arguably better to read every chapter of Capital in the Twenty-First Century than look at animated gifs, but by consuming a variety of reviews, blog arguments, and interviews I can get a pretty good idea of the contents (as well as I would remember some time after reading, anyway) and also a rounded view of how the arguments were received and criticized. Mainly, I can enjoy exposure to a lot more books, and when the content-to-length ratio seems high enough I'll read it anyway. Caplan got a lot of traction in the circles I follow, and some from a wider audience; he wished for more in Leftist Lessons of The Case Against Education. I picked this review because it gave the most complete synopsis of the book that I have seen, and was also remarkable for the way the book anticipated the objections in the review. The wishful thinking about where Ed dollars could be better spent seems like a weak point on both sides.