A quarter century of getting it right in education: worldwide successes and continuing challenges

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Notes

1. See, for example, the classic book The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, first published in 1962.

2. Hanushek edited a book in 1995 with Jeffrey Banks, Modern Political Economy: Old Topics, New Directions (Banks and Hanushek 1995) in which they and 10 other authors evaluate the government–market interactions in many different markets.

3. The 1978 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to a psychologist, Herbert Simon. He was described in a press release as an ‘economist – in the widest sense of the word …’ He did not believe that the typical modern entrepreneur or CEO operated as a rational, self‐interested profit‐maximizer. Informational assymetries within firms and the demands of diverse constituencies (including family) may lead to less‐than‐perfect solutions to managerial problems; ‘satisficing’ may better describe managerial decisions than profit‐maximizing. While many economists were disappointed that an academic economist was not awarded this prize in 1978, Simon’s work has been very influential in recent years. The Nobel Prize in 2001 went to three economists – George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz – whose insights into informational and institutional constraints on markets have led to a better understanding of how markets work and how policies can be shaped in different institutional settings to achieve more efficient and equitable solutions to social problems.

4. Barack Obama’s primary economic advisor is Austen Goolsbee, a professor of economics in the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He was described by Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and university professor, as ‘mainstream with a dash of creativity. … These are people who think new thoughts – within the mainstream, new without a capital N’ (Dorning 2007). Goolsbee is a tax policy expert with market‐based solutions well grounded with insights from experimental and behavioural economics.