It's like the man has never heard of path dependence:

But higher education policy isn't like that at all. Helping the average 18 year-old learn more is a totally valid goal of higher education policy. Helping below-average 18 year-olds learn more is a totally valid goal of higher education policy. If the powers-that-be think it's useful to ability-rank 18 year-olds for pedagogical purposes, then perhaps that's correct. But the second stage of the college sorting process where more resources are expended on a UC Berkeley student than a community college student doesn't have any justification. That unfairness permeates the entire system. And because the system is unfair, there's no way to incorporate race (or not incorporate it) or to replace race with class or geography or anything else that will produce a fair outcome. [Italics mine]

First, I'm surprised to hear that there's no way to make an unfair process fair, if the system as a whole is unfair. That should put a stop to most social justice movements.

Second, there's a perfectly rational explanation for why resources are spread disproportionately. It's the same reason older colleges and universities tend to have more resources and more prestige: time helps to generate the perception of being better through creating a history of actually being better. The University of Michigan is the highest-ranked college in Michigan because it had more resources, and earlier, which makes it easier and more straightforward to continue giving it resources. After all, starting up a new university is massively resource-intensive (which is why there aren't a lot of new universities), and those resources are generally better used at a place that has demonstrated the ability to use them well. That UC Berkeley is better than a community college is no surprise--it's a historical-institutional matrix working out in a perfectly rational manner.

Third, let's assume the claim, and see what it gets us. If the problem in the system is unfairness in directing disproportionate resources to some small set of people, then there was no more unfair act in any state than the establishment of its first public university: by definition, the state gives unfair advantage to some small proportion of people, and everyone else is excluded from the good; if your first class was four or eight people, as at Michigan, there could be no justifiable way of picking out the worthy. This would mean that the Morrill Land Grant Acts were unjust and unfair, since they did not mandate equal educational outcomes for everyone.

Fourth, it's a remarkably clear example of walking right into the trap Nozick sets in Anarchy, State and Utopia: an educational system cannot be fair unless it is, at every moment, ensuring a fair outcome for everyone. But the only way to do this is through constant and deep intervention, which I would imagine people might find objectionable.

Detroit is Not Pittsburgh Minus Research Universities

Matt Yglesias' claim that the difference between Pittsburgh and Detroit one has major universities downtown and the other does not sounds plausible, since it describes one dimension on which the two cities are different. (It neglects other relevant phenomena, like Pittsburgh being in Pennsylvania and Detroit being in Michigan, which might explain the underlying dynamic better, but never mind). But the claim itself is unsustainable. To wit:

The argument is false because high-level universities do not save even their neighborhoods: the University of Chicago can barely (and with marginal success) gentrify Hyde Park, and has close to no impact on the adjacent neighborhoods. USC is in an unsafe part of LA. The status of each school, its medical campus, research facilities, etc, is unable to sustain even a small urban environment.

The argument is false because it gets the causality backward: New York City has Columbia, NYU, and a host of other smaller colleges and universities, but no one would be so foolish as to argue that the universities themselves played some role in drawing people to New York. Indeed, one could plausibly argue the causality runs the other way: the universities are successful because the city is successful.

The argument is false because the growth and size of cities has nothing to do with the universities it contains. The top ten cities by population: New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose. How many of these depend, in substantial part, on the presence of a university?

The argument is false because it can't even be bothered to compare two comparable things: Detroit, even now, has over twice as many citizens as Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh requires two major research universities; by Yglesias' logic, this would require Detroit to have four--not just moving the University of Michigan to Detroit for some reason.

Which leads us to the thing the argument might prove: is mid-sized cities--say 100,000-300,000 or so--the presence of a few major research universities might be enough to function as an economic driver for the area. That would explain Ann Arbor's ability to resist Michigan's economic downturn, and the ability of the Triangle to keep steady in North Carolina--three major research universities support an industrial base.

Additional Thoughts on Fixing

Two possibly contradictory thoughts on the nouveau appreciation of fixing as opposed to buying:

1. The vogue towards learning to fix the things you've bought might be an extension of upper-class appropriations of lower-class necessities as markers of authenticity. For example: smoking. There are two classes of people who still smoke: the working class, for whom they serve the same appetite-suppressing and energy-giving purpose as always, and those for whom cigarettes are a good affectation because it allows you to seem cool and buy or acquire nifty accessories. There's a line of criticism that affecting the habits of the working class for these purposes is a kind of mocking--witness that AV Club Hatesong article on "Thrift Shop", the gist of which being "there are people who have to buy their actual clothes from thrift shops, what gives you the right to be a dick about the stuff there?"--affectation to give perceived credibility, and so fundamentally unserious. The person who fixes because buying's not an option and the person who fixes because it seems like it'd be cool to do and if it goes badly you can just get a replacement are fundamentally different, and the latter doesn't bring about the ethos of the fixer but rather the dabbler. And there's nothing wrong with being a dabbler! But it's still different.

1bis. see also Pulp's "Common People".

2. I believe I saw this attributed to James Poulos on twitter, and so will at least provisionally give him credit for the idea: it's also possible that the purpose of hipsterdom, of which fixing is a part, is a generational response to declining standards of living. We may well end up making less than our parents. Rather than living an unsustainable lifestyle, we switch to inefficient but sustainable behaviors. Fixing et al still get an unjustified cachet, but get it as a means of softening the economic blow. 

Fix Thyself

The idea of a fixer movement is interesting, but I'm not sure it makes sense. The reason most people don't attempt to fix things is that they have made a reasonable and correct assessment of the costs involved. If my coffeemaker breaks, I have two options: to buy a replacement, or to assemble the parts and the knowledge needed to fix it myself. Life is short, and even if the replacement parts can be procured easily and are somewhat less expensive that the item being fixed (not always the case), the time required to gain the knowledge to fix it makes the whole thing too costly. The availability of an inexpensive replacement is a bonus.

Mostly, though, the framework appears too general. It's not a question of fixing or replacing: I can fix something myself, or pay someone else to fix it, or replace it altogether. Each will be appropriate at different moments, depending on the thing broken and the frequency with which it might break.

The culture of fixing-by-oneself makes sense when replacements are prohibitively expensive, or there is value added by learning how to solve a problem that might arise with some frequency. Cars fall into the former category. I held off purchasing a new car for two or three years after I could have afforded to buy a new one because I had built up a reserve of knowledge about how the old one functioned: I knew which problems I could solve myself, which were minor, and about how much a repair might cost for those that were severe. Buying a new car has meant giving up all that knowledge. But, one tinkers there because fixing a car oneself is much (much) cheaper than having someone else fix it; replacement is not usually an option in these cases. The other end of the spectrum is the example Jacobs gives--replacing outlets in the house. It's worthwhile knowledge to have because it's a problem likely to come up repeatedly, and by picking up the knowledge, one can shift the work away from professionals and save both time and cost.

But there are also situations where replacements are prohibitively expensive but problems arise with such infrequency that it makes sense to have someone else fix it: Jacobs' garage door is one; HVAC problems seem like another (I have a few basic fixes that I know, which might solve low-level problems; if it's July and the air conditioner is out, I'm calling a professional). The person who comes to fix it is going to be (one hopes) a technician who has genuine knowledge of the situation, and has practiced it in a wide variety of contexts, or exactly the sort of person we ostensibly want to support (dignity of manual labor and all that). In these instances, the trade-off in saved time and knowledge makes opting out of fix-it-oneself the sensible move.