The government IS the lender. Try to keep up

I'm sure "zero coursework on teaching" is accurate, but I'd ask what kind of doctoral program he attended that did not have significant TA orientation nor plenty of interaction with faculty leading the courses about didactics.

We will when they're part of the federal government.

See, I avoided pointing out your bias leading to your conclusions earlier, because I figured you'd write it off as if you were just explaining someone else's idea. But the hot tub remark makes it your own. When you've already decided, without looking at it, that there's no value added, of course it's only waste. Well done. God forbid someone asks for some data pertaining to perceived value from actual consumers- they'd probably just mess it up by telling you access to a hot tub is worth more than $0 to them.

I didn't need to call anything out by name- we weren't having a citation battle. You just plain can't frame this stuff appropriately, that's not my fault. You let me know when you've attended lectures in the memorial series for the former university president with a doctoral student in economics in the process of defending their dissertation that cites the guy, then we can discuss when and whether it's necessary to name drop. I'll give you a hint: only one of the two people referenced has a last name that starts with 'B.'

Let me make this easier for you: my public food bank will spend all of my donation as well. If that donation was big enough they install a sink to wash the produce, I'd indeed expect someone to consider its value to the clients, not arrive at a conclusion to which their political position is a necessary precondition. But it won't surprise me at all 10 years from now when the employees are paid twice as much while distributing the same amount of food.

Two problems: 1) relative to enrollment. Did you deal with the reality of increased enrollment? No? 2) They're not mutually exclusive. If you want to say universities are to blame, you've got to show that it's more relevant. Which begs the question- you have to assume it's the driver to show it's the driver. Leading to 3) Baumol is good on empirical data across a huge swath of the economy and at least a half a century. And I guess 4) Martin and Hill, the most prominent of the academics to try to address that overlap, make tons of questionable assumptions in the higher education environment. Like various student support expenditures being a result of that revenue rather than an investment in value- like the reduced suicide rates for college students. They don't attempt to even assign a value to what any parent on the unlucky side of the status quo ante would probably call priceless. There are others.

I know you *want* to believe you're better educated and smarter on these issues. More power to you

You've convinced me. Demand only comes into play when there's a lack of it. That is indeed how you know that it *is* the evil auction houses that have driven up the price of Monets.

And you're also right about all the things we measure about the medical economy- it's a giant typo when the BLS says "While the weight of each CPI medical care related index is determined by out-of-pocket spending, price change reflected by the indexes measure the total reimbursement to medical care providers." They just left out the part where they use outcomes, regional care, times to care, and many more to adjust that figure so that it reflects actual changes in spending power like an inflation figure would. Because it's their first day explaining methodology, maybe.

it's quite devastating to be called an idiot by such a brilliant and knowledgeable thinker. Especially one who can so smartly reference money supply, because of course when we've been talking about inflation, what we're actually interested in is checking account balances, not the change in purchasing power of an actual dollar over time.

If GDP per hour worked is now over $100 in the US, how can you be so sure $50/hr minimum is "no answer"?

The writer does not explore any of those ideas. Discussing educational productivity changes is not relevant when the question is the *relative* productivity. The "chart" doesn't even fucking *try.* If we got way worse at literally everything else, that data would look the same, yet the result would be education becoming relatively less expensive. Not to mention there's not a single word on demand- you know, one of the two things that determine price in classical economics. Is your allegation that hasn't changed, or that it doesn't matter? Yet you still think it's somehow the institution's fault. Monets have gone up a zillion percent- must be the evil auction houses.

No additional context was necessary if you had the faintest idea what's going on. How much more clear could "we only measure what we actually spend" be? If we spent twice as much on massages, or TV's, we wouldn't say "TV inflation 100%." We'd ask how many TV's. We'd ask what quality of TV. We don't do this with health care: we only measure what we actually spend. That's why there's only one issue: we have no idea if there actually is any inflation, or if it's half or twenty times what we measure.

You're doing an excellent job of rationalizing your political beliefs. Keep it up- I'm sure the people that already agree with you will find it quite sound.

I get it. You can chastise someone for failing to blame universities for educational inflation without even establishing what that inflation actually is. You need not figure the effect of differing labor productivity, nor higher demand, nor increased amount and quality of knowledge conferred, nor lower public support, nor anything, really. I'm the one full of shit because I believe, like every qualified economist everywhere, that every human activity that fails to improve in efficiency at the average rate must become relatively more expensive than everything that does.

There *aren't* a lot of things at play in medical inflation. There's only one, and I mentioned it just to show how poorly informed and educated you are in matters like this: we only measure what we actually spend. There isn't even the slightest attempt to measure a change in spending power. Spend $4.8T or so on ivermectin for literally everything medical next year, and nothing else: congratulations, medical inflation was -2%. But hey, I guess I'm the idiot for not recognizing the 'lot of things at play' in spite of nobody being able to say in play for *what.*

That's a lot of words to show you still haven't thought about this to any depth. Why would "capture the productivity of the rest of the economy" have anything to do with the productivity of the sector itself?

I need look no further than your reference to the productivity of various types of instructors to know you're not engaging this: the clear implication is that I believe the measure of productivity is the number *graduates.* Is there anything in your long, irrelevant quote to suggest they're graduating more students? Or that they're not still paying total faculty more in nominal terms? (They are.) Or that any real reduction in wages isn't still well less than overall labor productivity?

You could absolutely say that the underlying economic forces are too complicated to come to a definite conclusion, but then you'd have to admit that blaming institutions for some evil or stupidity is also remiss. Let me ask this: are you also so limited in your macroeconomic knowledge you believe you can assign fault for medical inflation as well?

The administrative costs, as services not subject to capturing those same economy-wide productivity gains, are just the same symptom, not a cause or explanation.

I did tell you, but because you believe you already know everything about this, you didn't actually stop and think about it. Citing "inflation-adjusted tuition rates" back at me could not make that more clear.

You're citing the wrong evidence- the "massive student debt problem" might be a non-issue if we charged interest consistent with the government's borrowing cost. If Germany sends one more student to school, they're doing it at their long-term bond rate. We, on the other hand, add at least 2% to that.

If Trump had any sense, he'd just acknowledge the government-profitable interest rate markup of 2.05-4.6% and the government-profitable disbursement fees of 1.057-4.228% on these loans, tell Congress to eliminate them and have the Department of Education recalculate balances based on actual repayment histories and actual Treasury borrowing rates, and tell any borrower that still has a problem that it's their problem. Because then it would be, instead of this situation where we call people that don't like paying a special tax on their debt "deadbeats."

Why would those institutions have been to blame for costs advancing above inflation? Do you have some idea of how they're supposed to capture the productivity gains of the rest of the economy? Maybe by stuffing your capstone senior seminars with 95 students? Or convincing the students, their parents, the faculty, and future prospective employers that that's actually the way they want it? How?