Good news:

Rafael Yglesias took the top fiction honor Friday at the 30th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes for his novel “A Happy Marriage,” while Dave Eggers won the current interest award for “Zeitoun,” about a Syrian immigrant swept up in the chaos of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Congratulations!

Watching the UK debate last week, I was a bit surprised by the tone of the conversation around the British nuclear weapons program. Both David Cameron and Gordon Brown lit into Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg for not wanting to further invest in it, and Brown in particular clearly seemed to see this as a winning issue for him. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but as my colleague Max Bergmann writes Britain’s “independent” nuclear deterrent is really quite useless and from the perspective of the UK’s relationship with the United States it would be much better for us for the British to reduce spending on nuclear weapons and focus on maintaining its high-quality conventional forces.

This sounds like a character the world can do without:

Paul Schaefer, a former Nazi corporal and founder of a cult-like community in Chile, has died in prison aged 88. He was in jail serving a 20-year sentence for sexually abusing children at the Colonia Dignidad, some during Chile’s military dictatorship. The former Baptist preacher established the colony in southern Chile in 1961, after fleeing Germany to escape separate child abuse charges.

He had close ties to Chile’s elite during Gen Augusto Pinochet’s rule. Schaefer denied allowing Chile’s secret police to use the enclave as a centre for torturing left-wing dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.

It seems like you’re always learning something new and discreditable about Pinochet’s regime.

In contrast to the SEC’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs, I really don’t understand what Carl Levin is driving at with the Goldman Sachs emails he’s releasing. Basically they show that some units of the company felt it was likely that the housing market would collapse, took financial positions that would pay of if it did collapse, and therefore made money. What’s wrong with that?

If you’re looking for a real policy issue in this area, the problem seems to me to be that it’s unduly difficult for an ordinary person to do what Goldman did and take a short position on housing. It’s at least possible that if everyone who was skeptical about the housing market in 2005-2006 had some way to put their money where their mouth was, that the bubble wouldn’t have inflated so high.

Anya Kamenetz has a very good article in the American Prospect based on her new book DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education:

College tuition has been outpacing inflation for decades. Between 1990 and 2008, tuition and fees rose 248 percent in real dollars, more than any other major component of the consumer price index. Raising the Pell grant’s maximum doesn’t address this underlying problem. Constant transfusions of public money help keep the patient alive but do not stop the bleeding.

What’s to be done about dropout rates and outstanding student-loan debt that currently totals over $730 billion, or $23,200 per graduating senior in 2008? At first, I stood with progressives who say the federal government should increase grants and rein in the parasitic student-loan business. But while the student-loan industry has been part of the problem, and more grants are part of the solution, there is more to this story.

As she lays out, the only viable solution is to find ways to apply technology to the problem. And she details a number of innovative and promising steps along these lines. But this still does leave us with the question of whether online learning can replace the credential offered by a degree from a reputable university. Ezra Klein is skeptical and therefore says he “see[s] the DIY U concept applying more to lifetime learning, where accreditation is less important, than to post-high school learning, where you’re largely trying to separate yourself out from an undifferentiated mass of job applicants.”

I think that’s too defeatist. As indicated in the passage I excerpted, there’s a really critical policy problem here. We need to find ways to apply technology to the formal aspects of higher education and not just to lifetime learning. That means developing real metrics of learning. Right now the main reason a degree from Harvard is valuable is that people know it’s hard to get in to Harvard. But by the same token, the reason Harvard is able to be selective is that people think a Harvard degree is valuable so lots of folks apply. That’s a system that discourages entrepreneurship, makes it impossible to tell who’s teaching effectively, and worse makes it actually counterproductive for schools to find ways of serving more people. We need to start measuring actual learning and performance which means, yes, more reliance on standardized tests.