Efficiency vs. Equality

Back in October, I was baffled to see Jacob Weisberg at Slate lose his cool over an effort by Internet entrepreneur — and libertarian — Peter Thiel to make kids consider not going to (or at least not finishing) college.

Weisberg’s description of the program: “The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school.”

Sounds promising to me, but Weisberg flipped out, calling it an “appalling plan to pay students to quit college” and a “nasty idea” without ever quite telling us why. It’s not as if Thiel was paying kids to become prostitutes or divorce their parents, or something most of the culture would believe was self-evidently bad. Weisberg, however, treats dropping out of college as being on that level of so-bad-I-don’t-need-to-explain-why-it’s-bad.