Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

There is no question that much of what counts as the educational part of college is digitisable and nearly endlessly duplicable. Texts and papers fall into this category, as do lectures and demonstrations. In the past, the economics of universities were based on provision of these things; books and experts were scarce, and so it made sense to gather students in one place, in proximity to those things, in order to learn from them. If this is all that underpins the modern institute of higher education, then it is only a matter of time until it vanishes. But it may be the case that aura is more important than pieces of information where colleges are concerned. It could be that the key value is in being in a room with an expert and other interested students, in participating in dorm-room bull sessions, in napping on a pile of texts in a musty old library, and in running naked across the quad at three in the morning. These things can't be digitised and infinitely replicated. If the primary

The current economic crisis has followed Keynesian theory to a T and those economists who have either never learned Keynes (because their professors told them it was a discredited theory) or spent their careers ridiculing Keynes are having a difficult time, to say the least, accepting, let alone graciously accepting, that they were wrong.