Dartblog

The Chancellor of the University of Illinois, Richard Herman, who wanted little more than trickling tributaries of Chicagoan richesse to swell his institution’s accounts in exchange for a greased-up admissions track for the seed of the wealthy, has resigned. He shall be replaced by someone who does it in a cleverer way.

UPDATE: Readers, en détresse, ask whether this column now adopts what would for us be a phantasmagoric view: that there be no favor for the children of institutional underwriters over the laity. Probably there should be; the benefits of major gifts redound to poor applicants years on, to an amplified effect. But where the public is pecuniarily raided in advance of some puttering purpose better served by private operators—schooling, say— then use of the resulting contraption must be equitably granted to all, being equally purchased by all. (But, o, not that, either!)

Planning economies is such a stubborn task.

I needed to introduce a prominent person to a group of 150 or so last spring, and in doing so I found myself quoting from the preface of some late edition of The Road to Serfdom, which preface was composed by Professor Bruce Caldwell, director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke. It’s a brilliant essay. In it Caldwell offers this 1937 quotation, from an L.S.E. colleague of Hayek’s, a man called Lionel Robbins:

“Planning” is the grand panacea of our age. But unfortunately its meaning is highly ambiguous. In popular discussion it stands for almost any policy which it is wished to present as desirable. … When the average citizen, be he Nazi or Communist or Summer School Liberal, warms to the statement that “What the world needs is planning,” what he really feels is that the world needs that which is satisfactory.