Review of "Moneyball"

A great book and a fun read in which famed author Michael Lewis provides the inside story about the Oakland A's ability to outperform their low salaries and how their mercurial GM, Billy Beane, has developed their model for success. The basic story is the use of scientific thinking (starting with Bill James in this case) to find value in players that the market wasn't recognizing. In 2002, that meant an emphasis on offense, particularly by focusing on on-base percentages (walks are encouraged, steals and bunts are not).

As with many of these "social science for the masses" books that I've been reading lately, this one's well written and compelling. I'm just not sure how much it translates into the world I live in. Baseball has tons of performance-based information, huge amounts of money, and a real "market" in which things (in this case people) can be traded. Education has none of these.

But let's say you wanted to create something similar in the world of higher education to what Billy Beane has done with the A's. You'd need a highly centralized administrative system that generated a lot of data, much of it new (such as nationally comparable student evaluation information, nationally comparable student motivation information, nationally comparable pre and post tests, and so on). Then you'd have to charge a premium for a "premium" product to generate the additional revenue needed. Finally, you'd probably have to make all of the profs part-time adjuncts so that you'd have the freedom to let them go if they didn't meet the very high cutoffs that you're looking for.

All of that looks way too much like the University of Phoenix model for the comfort of most people. But I guess that's the point. If there were an acceptable way to do the Billy Beane approach, then there wouldn't be value to be gained in this particular marketplace, because lots of people would be doing it. Very few people in baseball think Billy Beane is on to anything substantive, which is why Billy Beane can continue to succeed.