Alex Usher reviews two books on the topic and offers interesting and engaging commentary, but what was of most interest to me was this remark: "The problem is that working from case studies alone tends to blind you to counter-factuals." A counterfactual (usually spelled without the hyphen) is a (generally true) conditional (if-then) statement in which the antecedent (the 'if' part') is false. For example: 'If Mars were bigger, it would have stronger gravity'. Usher writes (correctly, in my view) that overlooking counterfactuals is "a blind-spot of a lot of books". And this is important because we don't really understand things if we can't consider alternatives to what actually happened. If tuition costs had not risen, for example, would there still have been a backlash against the U.S. higher education system? How we answer this question matters. Image: NBC News.
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