No one cared about my spreadsheets
econlib.org
econlib.org
Of course not, almost none of the significant disagreement in the broad public debate on policy is about details of quantitative analysis, it's about value propositions that frame (among other questions) what quantitative analysis is even relevant.
If you publish an academic paper with quantitative analysis, academics will tear into the details of analysis (maybe, if the fact question it addresses is considered important to other people in the field.) If you publish a work aimed at a popular audience and intended as policy advocacy, and it's full of heavy quantitative analysis, you haven't understood the domain you are operating in.
Long-form heavily analytical work does have a role in informing policy debates, but that role is in wonkish intrafactional debates among policy types within the group that already agrees with you on values.
This is how it should work, but at least in the type of fields that we're talking about here, in practice this doesn't happen. I've published seminal papers in my field which have been cited hundereds of times. Not even the peer reviewers (let alone any reader) double checked my calculations.
As will, incidentally, spending too much time on any software you need to develop. Like, say, unit tests or ensuring it's maintainable. Or maintaining it at all, really.
"They tweak standard return calculations to get another publication – then move on with their lives."
I will go even as far as to say that the quantitative does not matter. Or more specifically, it is there only to provide an excuse for promoting a specific agenda. It is depressing, but this is where we are.
I saw few exceptions to that rule.
One side effect of the economisation of education is the desire to quantify and standardise "academic quality". For example, setting minimum pass rates for modules, which ultimately leads to declining assessment standards. Or "value added" as a major criterion for educational success, i.e. how much students improve as opposed to how well they did overall (leading to universities taking on many students who are actually not fit for study, because as long as they graduate, much "value" is added for them).
Education has a value beyond money, and in countries where education is free or low cost (like Germany) it is often organised around providing the student with the opportunity to learn, rather than focusing on graduating as many students as possible. It is in the responsibility of the student to make use of the resources provided, rather than the responsibility of the provider to satisfy a paying customer. Students who graduated from such universities often are more capable of independent thinking in my experience.
I'm a big fan of education.
However, when education is subsidized, you're implicitly making the decision that it's more important to pay for that education than to pay for e.g. more help for the homeless, more money for healthcare, etc.
That might be the correct decision! But it is a decision.
There is no way around the idea that education, like everything else, costs resources, time and money, that can be spent on other things. It's a totally valid thing to wonder whether it's the best use of that money there is.
Judging the benefit of education only on the financial bottomline is bound to underestimate its real value.
For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on. Therefore it is in the interest of a democratic country that citizen have access to education, and that they can afford it.
> when education is subsidized, you're implicitly making the decision that it's more important to pay for that education than to pay for e.g. more help for the homeless, more money for healthcare, etc.
Education is correlated with health and longevity. Also, educated people are more likely to make sane life decisions and plan ahead. Therefore, by subsidising education, one likely reduces the number of homeless and the cost of public health.
But none of this is expressed in the calculation that measures the "value" of education by the personal financial gain an individual can achieve. Therefore I argue that this measure is not suitable to measure the value of education.
I agree, that would be a very short-sighted calculation. Luckily, that's not even close to the calculation that Bryan Caplan did and is talking about.
I'm not sure if we're actually disagreeing or arguing past each other. Bryan Caplan wrote a book about whether education is "worth it", in many senses - both the personal "is it worth it for me" aspect, but also the "is it worth it for society" aspect. He delved into multiple different topics as part of this question - including, I believe, questions like the ones you raise. (It's been a while since I read his book).
You are not fundamentally disagreeing with the notion of calculating the value of education. You're disagreeing with a specific calculation that you think I (or someone else) did, but which isn't the actual calculation done by anyone.
> For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on.
It has worked pretty well for the last 2,500 years with voters possessing extremely questionable education. The main issue is whether a democracy has a culture of being graceful in both political victory and defeat.
> Education is correlated with health and longevity.
Correlation is not causation. Wealthy people tend to be healthy, long-lived and well educated. It might not be the education as much as having enough wealth for leisure and health.
Early democracies often restricted the right to vote to specific parts of the population.
Also if anything has become clear in the last 5 years it’s that educated people are much less likely to be deceived by false populist promises.
I would like to hear more about this democracy that has lasted 2500 years please.
In the article he mentions that he gets this type of criticism on his book, despite the fact that he spent chapters on these exact kind of questions. Painstakingly including those things is what the whole thing is about.
And now he gets the criticism despite putting that in the article!
Additionally, I am reading a back and forth between Bryan and Noah Smith[1]. The main thing that stands out, is that after putting forth such a quantitative focused text on the topic, Bryan seems to resort to an idealogical back and forth with Noah. If you are going to put all this effort into building an excel model that makes your case, why are you not using that as your first line of defense?
Quite frankly, I don't think either Noah or Bryan really make convincing arguments. But that is because the debate between "human capital" and "signaling" is such a squishy topic, and no amount of data analysis or philosophical reasoning is really going to change the debate any time soon.
[1] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/sheepskin-effects...
I’m predisposed to saying education is insanely beneficial though. I want everyone to have all of it for free.
Jason Brennan (another libertarian) wrote the book Against Democracy. So these two books should be policy companions.
Which also goes to show how nefarious this assertion of yours is: all people have to do in order to suppress people’s right to participate in a democracy is to defund education and the civil square. Then people become “not informed enough” to process “complex information” (as if our elected representatives seem capable of that… but whatever).
Not everywhere. Next to no homeless people here in Scandinavia yet education is universally available at almost no cost to the student.
The US is richer both in absolute terms and per capita so lack of money is presumably not the reason for the difference.
It's totally possible that education is more important than all other uses for that money. It's likely true to some extent, because that's what the country has effectively decided to do.
But that comparison has to be made, either implicitly or explicitly, because that money is either going to education or to something else. There's literally no way to not make a decision about this topic.
Also worth noting: money is just a meaningless abstraction designed by the rich to extract value from the poor (without money, the rich and the poor don't even exist). If you're really concerned about welfare of people, abolition of money and private property is a question worth raising and studying seriously.
But, your point still stands; what they dont have is an ability to push a button and wipe out the human race within 15 minutes, and fleets of stealth bombers flying low over every sporting event (support the troops you commie). All while the population struggles to figure out how many points their team will have if they score a field goal to add to the 7 points they scored in the first half.
For the most part governement spending is finite and there is only so much total money that can be dished out. Exepct for in crisis (Covid / War / Great Recession / Election time) of course and then the magic money tree is found in the back yard.
Hmm I wonder why such a cold and rich region has no homeless people...
Ironically, the same people who would complain about free education, would complain 10x over more money for the homeless or healthcare.
That's pretty country-dependent, and is a caricature of most serious people. (Unfortunately lots of people actually do fall into that caricature).
E.g. Bryan Caplan is a libertarian, and while I don't think he personally supports a universal basic income, supporting a UBI is a fairly common libertarian position.
And on top of that, you can also reform how homelessness works in your country. In Germany, having a home is a fundamental right, why is it not in America? By burderning the government with sheltering you and giving you a postal address, a lot of hurdles for reentering the job market are simply taken away, reducing the need to spend much.
I should add that changing things to make them more effective also costs money.
I'm not comparing against education with money for the homeless, specifically. It was just an example that money can be spent on other things we value, and we have to decide what we value more. There's not way around it - you're either spending money on education, or on something else (or just reducing taxes).
Of course if you can show that education causes less homelessness, that makes it an obvious "win". (Though I think that you're not grappling with Bryan Caplan's actual argument.)
> And on top of that, you can also reform how homelessness works in your country. In Germany, having a home is a fundamental right, why is it not in America?
If the assumption is that I'm from the US, I'm not.
But solving homelessnes is kind of besides the point I was making anyway :)
Oh I see. The previously uneducated Scizophrenic people bootstrap themselves off the street by virtue of having read Homer.
I doubt that education can directly fix homelessness.
The monetary value itself is useful to everybody who makes a decision. A student at least invests their own time into that education. Shouldn't they know how valuable that education is to decide if it's worth their time?
The problem is not the evaluation. Students seek graduation instead of education because they need access to that social network of alumni. A monetary value makes that demand visible.
But I think the real value of education can't be expressed in monetary terms alone. Educated people tend to live longer and healthier. They tend to make more rational financial decisions and plan their lives with more foresight.
In a democracy it is essential that the voting population is educated and able of processing complex information, otherwise it stops functioning.
Regarding the value of education. If it has a value, why can't it have a monetary value? At one point in your life, you have shifted the majority of your time from learning to making money. You can only make that decision rationally if you have put a monetary value on your education.
It would be nice if that was the case, but we don't expose the value to them. We expose a cost to them, with a profit margin included, completely detached from any value that might possibly accrue years down the line. And we expose it in the form of a never-ending debt. That is a specific choice that society has made, and not the only one available.
Germany: 111 Nobel Laureates
University of Columbia: 83 Nobel Laureates
The whole country struggled to produce just a little more than one American university. They may think more independently, but it seems that it was so independent as to fail to advance human knowledge much more than a single American university.
In other words adding up all Nobel laureates by Country would yield the number of total laureates. Adding by alumni, past and present positions (at all universities) would yield a high multiple of total laureates, because the vast majority of laureates would not have spend their whole life at one institution.
For example: Horst Ludwig Störmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Ludwig_St%C3%B6rmer
German scientist, but point goes to University of Columbia
Also, the number of Laureates in sciences relates more to the funding of research rather than the quality of education. Any affiliation with a US institution gives you better access (in the short or long run) to research funding.
There are a good few European countries above the US.
i.e. is a Peace Laureate the same value in showing the superiority of a particular university as a Chemistry Laureate or even Literature Laureate?
The list looks very different if you take that into account.
Love that the Faroe Islands is at the top with one prize.
New York Yankees: 27 World Series Championships.
Really makes you think.
Has the university produced the Nobel laureates, or are they merely currently based there?
Also, producing Nobel laureates is not the primary goal of education. Independent thinking is a skill that is useful to everyone, in many areas of life.
> It’s hard to avoid a disheartening conclusion: Quantitative social science is barely relevant in the real world – and almost every social scientist covertly agrees. The complex math that researchers use is disposable. You deploy it to get a publication, then move on with your career. When it comes time to give policy advice, the math is AWOL. If you’re lucky, researchers default to common sense. Otherwise, they go with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves. Empirical social science teaches us far more about the world than pure theory. Yet in practice, even empirical researchers barely care what empirical social science really has to teach.
It rings true with me even in casual discussions with peers when talking about social issues.
It's effective. Nobody listens.
The fallacy of "general management" means that general managers, who have a background in finance and cost/benefit, are not receptive to the idea that deep knowledge is extremely involved in leadership and decision making.
Because then they'd be out of a job.
> It's effective. Nobody listens.
This is exaggerated but in the right direction. Consider A/B testing. We know that works. We know how. It’s been a big deal for well over a decade. And it’s still not standard. There are large, profitable companies that sell direct to consumers that don’t do it who would reliably, predictably get a 10% bump in profits off of doing it.
But it does grow. Selling things on the internet isn’t as competitive as highly liquid, transparent financial markets but people do pick up $100 bills lying on the street eventually.
Toyota and GM have had widespread vehicle recalls in recent types. I wouldn't put that down to "4 wheeled transportation devices being intrinsically bad."
1) The people who do the math are too busy read these articles and books.
2) Amazon has 15 phd economists running a single structural model of consumer behavior. They use it to inform feature changes.
I remember my manager in finance telling me that he would readily use a “mickey-mouse-in-a-box” as a model if it made him money.
Business decisions are far simpler: both sides of a decision can be analytically boiled down to the same units (dollars/cents) and compared (more money = better than).
> Learn why students hunt for easy As and casually forget most of what they learn after the final exam
We know why, ok? And focusing on "the primary function of education" is like focusing on the primary function of cars, and concluding that traffic accidents contribute to the economy. It reads like a libertarian disguised as a utilitarian who dreams of the 19th century.
He wrote a whole book about this. A very detailed book.
The input numbers (in meta.xlsx) come from imperfect samples of the real world with non-zero error -- often quite a bit higher than 0 -- which is compounded pretty far in some cases. I don't think any person actually can actually evaluate these studies, which is a major problem with this entire idea and is a fundamental problem with any overly-quantitative solutions to problems.
“I took the countless papers that start with the standard return estimates and tweak them with one novel complication. Then I merged all the tweaks that seemed convincing to me* to get final policy-relevant numbers”
So, the model was adjusted from tweaks created by one person, and then those tweaks were evaluated by the same person, not on objective criteria, but on what seemed right.
I also guess the author at the start had ideas about the quality of each of the “countless papers that start with the standard return estimates” and used them to pick those he included in the model.
I don’t see how that could ever lead to an objective model, even if the author started this exercise unbiased.
Well, that and the idea that education is just to make money... I'm sure there are dozens of beneficial returns he left out, like more educated people voting for parties that are less likely to screw them over.
If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention.
I imagine a bunch of academics put their fingers to the wind and made wild guesstimates, and Caplan took it all very literally as some sort of sound foundation to evaluate education as a whole.
I mean jeez, what did he even compare our status quo education system against? Where did the kids go in the counterfactual no-education scenario? Did the kids all go home to an infinite supply of stay-at-home moms? Did they go to extended daycare, all the way up to age 18? What did they do with all that time?
This is not an attempt to defend the system as it exists now but I think Caplan does a much better job outlining a problem than making his case for a solution.
His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing his work'. I think Caplan is trying to highlight that despite the fact that many challenged his conclusions, almost nobody challenged his logic or calculations.
When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math.
But he didn't reduce it to a spreadsheet, he wrote a very thorough book.
>"When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math."
I am not sure what you think Caplan says. His book is mostly about the signalling and human capital models of education. The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings, so Caplan calculates the financial impact of various degrees, and then figures out how much is attributable to the various factors.
Hermitian909 said "the spreadsheets are flawed by not including calculations for these additional levels of effect," and that claim seems pretty compelling: the calculations may be perfectly accurate and also perfectly useless because they say nothing about greater societal effects if everyone changed their behavior.
The problem of individual strategy given the current system vs the question of what the system should be is a classic one, and the latter is far more complicated to compute. The "Moneyball"/baseball stats revolution shows a bit of this: as the things that were initially undervalued were no longer undervalued, "smart teams" had to continue changing. The system wasn't static.
You say he talks about those things in his book in addition, but you can't call that "showing his work" if the work shown doesn't include the most relevant parts.
The spreadsheet and book are complementary; you won't really understand either without reading both. In order to understand 'the work', you also have to know the question and the final answer.
In the same manner that a mature thinker uses logic first, then feels. An immature one may think, yet never also run the thoughts through the "feels department".
Google had 20k FTEs in 2008, 135k FTEs in 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...
In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later. 115 thousand people, most of them college graduates, did nothing useful for more than a decade. Their primary accomplishment was to inflate house prices in tech hubs.
The United States is not short on college graduates.
This is just like...obviously false. Google photos (initially part of G+, but spun off into its own thing) as a sort of obvious product example. Not to mention any one of hundreds of products in the cloud org, or like an entire hardware business.
It's also kind of silly to imply (as you are) that launching a new product is the only useful thing. I'd expect iterating on and improving existing products to also be valuable? Like so much of the startup focus is on execution over ideas, but I guess not here.
*closes Chrome tab on my Android phone, opens another website hosted on Google Cloud Platform*
Copy of Safari.
>android
Copy of iOS
>GCP
Copy of AWS.
Cloning an existing product needed, at the absolute most, a staff of a hundred each. If you want to be wildly excessive, add 900 useless middle managers and developer relations people.
Then what were the other 112,000 full time Google employees doing? What one hundred and twelve business critical new products were they engaged in?
"Nothing"? Then why did they need to have college degrees?
Okay. I know people like to shit on Google. But this is beyond the pale. Google Cloud by itself is a lot larger than a huge number of entire companies.
Just curious, have you read over his spreadsheets?
I remember being part of online community for a game (starsector, if you're interested) and a user had taken it upon themselves to create effectiveness measurements for the weapons in the vanilla game and in mods. To do this, they created a spreadsheet that mapped out damage per second, range, energy cost, points to use... ect. Numbered them all together, and ranked them with each other.
Personally, I thought this was a valuable contribution. Plenty of mods go off the deep end with the kit they added to the game, so to me, this seemed like a valuable tool to help keep their kit in line.
But the author? They thought what they had produced was an unassailable statement of fact.
Many people came forward, including me, countering that the actual simulation of the game is substantially more complex than the pile of multiplication and addition they had cobbled together. But like OP's article, those criticisms weren't specifically addressing the formulas themselves, so the author didn't really consider them.
This is a bit of a puerile example of course, I bet Mr. Caplan is substantially better at multiplication than my hobbyist friend trying to categorize weapons in a silly space ship game.
That's the most interesting part of this for me - nobody's saying "you're missing some important factors, and let's add them." People are saying, "I don't know that you included all the factors, so I am going to go back to reading opinion columnists for whom 'factor' is not a word."
Has everyone thought about the fact that the alternative to spreadsheets is policymakers putting their hands on their hips and saying, "Yep, $30k sounds about right for this month?"
Ok, so I’ll say it. Caplan doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And neither did the people who he asked to check his spreadsheets.
What he is trying to do, in an informal hand-waving way, is something known as causal inference. There are formal, robust ways to do causal inference, which Caplan is not using. No amount of checking his arithmetic or adding more factors is going to fix that.
This would be a good place to start: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2943670/
> Has everyone thought about the fact that the alternative to spreadsheets is policymakers putting their hands on their hips and saying, "Yep, $30k sounds about right for this month?"
Well, I can’t speak for everyone else, but I don’t think about that because what you claim as fact is actually a false dilemma. The actual alternative is to do good science using the correct methods.
But my hobbyist friend lacked what I think is important here. The humility to see that the piles of multiplication for the handwavey guesses that they are. Caplan's spreadsheets, to me, made his argument more persuasive. But still not that persuasive. My priors already have education being a net benefit as highly probable, and I'll update, but not much.
This seems rational to me.
How'd you get those priors?
Basically, Mount and Blade in space but frankly, I think it's a better take on the formula. Excellent modding community (though I'm upset that the Knights Templar and Blackrock mods are still not updated...)
https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-ed...
I kinda think this is exactly part of the point he is making.
Education's value to society and the individual is inherently unquantifiable with today's tools. Maybe someday we will have a mathematical model of the human mind and a theory of socio-economics that can actually handle such things, but we are extremely far from anything of the sort.
You say that education's value is "unquantifiable" but that's not quite even wrong. The question isn't "What is the ineffable value of education?" But rather, "How much should we be spending on education?" and that is perfectly quantifiable. Indeed, we spend some quantity of money on education currently - should we spend more or less?
You don't have to quantify the expected value in order to decide on costs - this is only done as a reductionist homo economicus type model.
For a more direct example, when deciding to go watch a movie, do you do some computation of how much your net worth will increase by virtue of seeing the movie, and compare that to the ticket price? Or are you simply acting on practically unquantifiable subjective feelings of enjoyment about the movie, and comparing the price to entirely different goods (e.g. you probably wouldn't go if the ticket price is 10000$, because you can buy other things you feel are much more enjoyable/important with that kind of money).
Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable?
More importantly, we live in the real world, in which we need to make actual decisions, which cost money and time. Both policy decisions, like: should we encourage higher education? Should we subsidize it? Extend schooling to 15 grades instead of 12? Etc. But also personal decisions: should I personally pursue a University degree?
You can't just handwave decisions like that by saying it's unquatifiable.
The fact that we are nowhere near being able to mathematically model individual and societal human behavior at a level that could help us come up with such a quantity. To do so, we would need to have a model which can predict how someone's behavior would change by reading and understanding a particular book, or how much value a new ideology could bring to society times the probability of someone could come up with a new ideology by getting an education. We would need to deeply understand the human mind at the same level we understand the behavior of gases at least.
As to how we can then decide how much to spend on education, the answer is somewhat simple: you poll people's opinions of where education is lacking, where it is strong, what kind of resources could help improve it, how important they feel this improvement is. Then you come up with some qualitative goals ("all children should be able to read and write by grade 4"), and then invest money needed to achieve these goals.
What you don't do is try to come up with some bullshit a priori monetary value (an education will increase people's salary by this much, times the tax rate, times the number of people => this is how much we should invest), as if you were running an investment bank and not a democratic society.
And note that the first example is exactly how people make most decisions in the real world. You use your (currently) unquantifiable subjective preferences to set a goal for something, try to estimate how much it would cost, and then at best you do some computation of "what else could I do with this money/time" and decide based on that whether you should spend the money.
Are you kidding me? I would look at the damn spreadsheet. Nothings preventing you from building extremely intesting ML to objectively quantify artwork, and if you’ve created a reliable measure to compare the two I would want to see what you’ve created.
What sort of a closed minded attitude is it to say “why would I bother looking into the facts that support a conclusion I am not willing to believe could possibly be true”
It's not about not believing the conclusion itself, my point is that it's absurd to claim there is a meaningful objective sense in which the Mona Lisa is better or worse art than the Oddisey. The question itself is meaningless. Of course you can invent a model which assigns some quantitative art goodness value to pieces of art - your model could say "the more color it has, the better the artwork": perfectly objective, entirely useless.
I'd suggest reading the article again as I think you've missed the critical point: the data points in one direction, and he has provided mountains of it. It doesn't align with what you've been told all of your life, so instead of looking at the data you argue from the basis of ignorance by engaging what you feel to be "common sense". In doing so, you are doing the exact thing the author is writing about.
However with no auditing, we don’t know whether Brian’s did, or even approached the level of complexity needed to in his calculations. He tried to bring math to a subject that is typically argued through rhetoric and that’s respectable enough.
When Caplan released the spreadsheet and asked people to "check his math" I am pretty sure what he was really asking was for people to test that exact conditional.
Sure, in some vague far away future where we can predict human behavior through maths, it is probably possible, though likely forever intractable. But we are so obviously too far from that for it to be worthwhile to check a spreadsheet.
On the other hand, I think it's a reasonable point that if we disagree with him, go find the parameter he's chosen wrongly or forgotten, since it must exist somewhere if he's wrong.
On the third hand, that's probably unfairly much to ask of your audience, since it requires auditing work that took a year.
This particular referendum was lost, but the next prevailed.
We do not allocate money to education intelligently.
As an aside, the comparison engine provided by the Federal Education Budget Project appears to have been taken down.
[My Illinois town's] Schools have again placed a sales tax increase before the voters for the April 7th election. Voters should reject this increase after reviewing the financials below.
In Iowa, the average 2013 teacher salary is $33,226. The Illinois average, however, is $37,166, which is above the national average of $36,141. Illinois teachers are (more than) fairly compensated.
On a local focus, the Federal Education Budget Project lists the [nearby Iowa] Community School District budget for 2012 (which likely includes local option tax funds) as $174,000,000, which served 16,955 students for a per-student cost of $10,262.
[My town's] budget for the same period was $76,568,000 and served 6,622 students, for a per-student cost of $11,562.
[Our neighboring Illinois town's] budget for the same period was $78,817,000 and served 7,429 students, for a per-student cost of $10,609 per student.
[Our nearby Illinois town's] academic performance is solidly ahead of [my town] - [our nearby Iowa town's] scores 70% and 66% proficient in the 2011 "No Child Left Behind" [high school] reading and math tests, while [my nearby Illinois town] respectively scores 46.9% and 53.8%, and [my town] trails the pack at 30.1% and 25.9%. [My nearby Iowa town] achieves performance dominance while spending $347 less per student than [my nearby Illinois town], and $1,300 less per student than [my town].
[My town's] schools should not ask for larger budgets, but instead trim costs and increase performance to match our nearby peers. If [my town's] schools cannot meet these standards, then perhaps we should consider outsourcing the maintenance of [my town's] schools to the [nearby Iowa town], which appears both more capable and thrifty by all measures. [My town's] students deserve better.
Such that, in large, I would expect areas that have poor families to, in fact, be more expensive to educate than areas with well off families. Many of the kids are literally having to catch up. Not just learn the curriculum, but catch up on a lot of learning they never had access to.
"Do better, or perish" is the way of small businesses. Where most of them fall into the perish scenario.
We had Iowa towns that were in the 90%s.
No, I cannot compare them, you are right, these people were exactly where they should have been.
Is this sentiment perhaps a bit biased, especially for what I am paying.
(Yes, I live in one of the most affordable places in the U.S.)
I rented one of my houses to such a family, but that is a story for another time.
...I will say also that our 8th grade scores put the other districts to shame (among the highest levels in the area), but the high school was our downfall.
Where are you getting these numbers? According to BLS, median pay for elementary and high school teachers are respectively $60,660 and $62,870 per year.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-...
EDIT: There is actually more granular information available as well. Fewer than 10% of elementary school teachers earn less than 40k per year. Probably fewer than 5% earn as much as or less than the 36k number you quoted for national average.
That said, since it was done in spreadsheet, it would be easy for a relatively non-technical person to tweak the numbers to refute the author's argument (sidenote: only in the world of hacker news would people think python is more accessible).
I think the lack of interest in reviewing the spreadsheet reflects how people with education department degrees protect their jobs and win public policy arguments: they prefer to argue that ROI is not a relevant concept for education investment (even if it is at the core of virtually every other type of investment analysis).
If there is no return or even return sought then it can’t be called an investment. It’s just spending on part-time prison for kids.
Sure, its very likely people don't want to engage with something that is saying they are doing inefficient/useless work.
But the author's premise is literately "I've crunched the numbers and people don't care" on a subject that would be my go-to example for an incalculable ROI. You could make an argument for an individual, but that's not what the education department or society at large is doing.
Just for starters, at a national scale over decades, there are no unbiased units to measure with. Next i'd like to agree on how we deal with the correlation between 'Patents that changed society' and 'Patent authors being generally higher educated'.
Maybe you can argue for a decent proxy for these things, or their irrelevance. But since i only have so much time, I'll assume your excel sheet is correct in how it processes the input, and instead argue on what the input should be in the first place.
I mean, we make lots of policies around education all the time. Subsidizing or not subsidizing various stages of education. Forcing or not forcing kids to go to school. Etc.
What are we basing these decisions on? The idea that "just a spreadsheet" isn't enough raises the question- what is? What is better than a serious academic doing heavy research on the topic, combining various fields of study, and actually sitting down and quantifying and doing math to get actual results, and then publishing them?
I think this is a more serious way to make policy than most ways it gets done, which mostly consists of people arguing without having research or spreadsheets to back them up, but rather relying on much more on feelings.
> If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention.
The book got a lot of attention. But all the attention, both positive and more commonly negative. But nobody actually challenged the calculations - they used hand-wavy statements for or against it, but didn't acutally bother dealing with the numbers themselves. That's his point.
> I mean jeez, what did he even compare our status quo education system against? Where did the kids go in the counterfactual no-education scenario? Did the kids all go home to an infinite supply of stay-at-home moms? Did they go to extended daycare, all the way up to age 18? What did they do with all that time?
I mean, he wrote an entire book about this. You can read it. It's not like he didn't provide answers for these questions.
If he can't accept a spreadsheet showing a positive impact of education, why would the world accept a spreadsheet showing a negative impact of education.
Caplan is definitely the type of person who would either rewrite on not write the book in that case.
But this an implausible question anyway, because it’s not like you get this far into a project without an idea of what the evidence is telling you, waiting to press a button and out if it’s actually Good or Bad.
Your comment doesn't actually answer anything lol - he would - or wouldn't and you say both
- rewrite the book or
- not have written the book to begin with.
>Don’t get me wrong; The Case Against Education drew plenty of criticism. Almost none of it, however, was quantitative. Some critics appealed to common sense: “Education can’t be anywhere near as wasteful as Caplan claims.”
"There's no point in looking at it, because it can't be calculated."
Exactly. I suspect no one cares about his spreadsheets because who's gonna waste their time on such a flawed proposition.
The danger in both spreadsheets and in computational notebooks is you can include a lot of mathematically true and/or statistically consistent conclusions that are filled with assumptions that haven't been correlated or even agreed to by voters or policymakers.
For anyone making a bold claim like post-high-school education doesn't promote future earnings, their burden is to come up with macroeconomic examples or even models that are consistent. Just writing a book and a spreadsheet doesn't cut it, which is another way to say, they aren't making their claim in an educated way that modern economists use.
"Key feature of the signaling model: At the margin, signaling raises pay but not productivity, so social return<selfish (“private”) return.
Policy implication: Even selfishly lucrative education may be socially wasteful rent-seeking.
If ignoring signaling is sole flaw in existing return to education literature, true social return roughly equals mainstream social return*(1-signaling share)"
Really he's just saying something we all kind of know. Diploma's are more often than not a ticket to ride in a certain class of society, not an education technology that increases productivity. So why is there government support and subsidy for something that has private, but not much public benefit?
But, if you read my earlier point, arguing these things through a book and spreadsheets is what think-tanks do, not what scientists do.
(just being curious)
What sort of education is Caplan talking about? Primary, secondary, tertiary? The title seems to imply all education, but I guess that is not the case?
Does he talk about the benefit to society or the ROI for an individual? Again the title seems to imply it's about the overall benefit to society, but from what people are writing here it seems to be about the question if investing in a college education is a financial decision.
Can someone who read the books clarify these points, because I would be interested in the book if it is actually about the benefit to society and education in general, but if it is just about personal decisions then I don't care much and would consider the book a waste of time with a click-bait title.
He praises vocational schools in some other countries, where only a minority of students go to college and therefore employers don't demand college degrees for simple jobs like they do in the US.
The spreadsheet he mentions, that he complains nobody ever looked at, includes the costs and benefits to both society and individuals. I didn't read the spreadsheet either, but in the book he says that the cost-benefit analysis is positive for smart individuals (if you can go to college and get a degree you should go, for selfish financial reasons) but negative for societies because of all the subsidies.
I had a look at the spreadsheets but I don't clearly see what are the factors that go into his calculation of benefit to society calculation except for crime rates. I mean how about R&D necessary to grow the economy, competitive advantages for attracting immigrants, participation in democracy ...
He sees higher education as a luxury good. Something that rich societies do when they become rich, because they are rich.
If you look at some of the top comments in this thread you might see some evidence in favor of his position. Most people are not trying to justify education spending because of practical concerns about growing the economy and attracting skilled immigrants[1]. They are saying that education has a higher value that cannot be measured in traditional economic terms[2].
[1] By the way, hasn't higher education traditionally been used to restrict immigration? They don't let you work in many rich countries if you don't have a college degree, and some rich countries have point-based systems that deduct points if you don't have a college degree. That sounds a lot like college attracts skilled immigrants, but if you look at the glass half empty it also discourages a lot of skilled immigrants who for some reason or another can't get a college degree.
[2] The author then spends many pages discussing social desirability bias and how people are reluctant to argue against maximizing spending for good things even long after the good thing reaches diminishing returns.
Regarding education being a luxury good, I agree you could argue that some of the comments here consider it that. However, that does not mean it is this way from a societies point of view.
Regarding your points: [1] My argument was more, that immigrants typically try to go to places where they envision a better future, for themselves, but importantly also for their children. Thus a society that offers good education for future children is obviously attractive. I do agree that education is used as a restriction to immigration, or better more modern societies do not have so much need for unskilled labor, but want skilled immigrants. I guess another point for getting an education, it lets you emigrate to other countries much more easily. [2] Sure, that's a general point about everything not just education. However, it is also still unclear if we have reached diminishing returns for education.
I have many disagreements with Caplan, particularly on economics, but I found it a worthwhile read.
Even so much as a survey is hard to properly reproduce, definitely more than a day's worth of work if you need to go out and find a random pool of surveyees. Opening up a spreadsheet in your favorite software sounds fairly approachable by comparison, assuming it has no fancy university-level mathematics in it.
Whether it is fun to talk to people for a survey vs. sit through pages of arithmetic is a whole other question, though.
His point was that, if you take the trouble to disagree with him (you being another academic, a reporter, etc), then you should also actually grapple with the numbers. Which I think is valid.
I don’t want to sound cynical, and this certainly isn’t ideal from a “cultivate a vibe of intellectual humility and curiosity” perspective, but is it a surprise to anyone but the author that laypeople didn’t take to a thorough critique of his work?
I'm biased since I don't know spreadsheets at all, but I think Python code would have been far more reviewable.
“I used the tool that obfuscates my work that I’m trying to get others to review and buy in on because I consider myself hopeless at clearer tools and don’t want to even try. Why will no one engage with my obfuscated work?”
I mean even he admits he made and corrected a ton of mistakes in his beast of excel. It’s absurd to think anyone would want to wade through that mess.
Intentional or not, if one makes it impractical and unreasonable to crosscheck ones work then critics shouldn’t be expected to unravel it to point to the internal error. They only need to point to external evidence in the contrary.
Programmers might have an easier time checking a program for bugs than a spreadsheet, but most economists aren't programmers, right? The stereotype I have, at least, is that the experts for this domain are happier in spreadsheets than python. And it seems to me that the main issue for this sort of think would come from economics rather than programming issues.
Social sciences however... but of course I'm biased there.
He also says that having any degree is "worth it" to an individual, monetarily. It's just not worth it to society to require everyone to have education they don't use.
While I understand the source of this statement and why people often say this, I'm not entirely sure I agree with this, at least anecdotally.
For example, I have a degree in Theater. Which, on the surface, doesn't transfer well to, say, software engineering or law or accounting or teaching or social work.
But is that really true? To pick a popular theatre-related discipline, consider what an actor does:
- They show up on time (to scenes, to rehearsal, to performances)
- They can memorize vast amounts of material in a relatively short period of time verbatim
- They work well with others
- They work well individually
- They can take direction
- They can take constructive criticism
- They meet deadlines under pressure (the show must go on!)
- They can put themselves in other people's shoes (Method acting, ftw)
- They know how to do research (how does a 1940s soldier talk, dress, walk, act?)
- They are comfortable speaking in front of groups
- They can speak clearly and enunciate appropriately (especially good in a remote world with fuzzy tech!)
And so on and so forth...
I don't really care what industry you're in, those are desirable qualities for ANY hiring manager! I would be THRILLED if candidates metaphorically walked through the door with evidence of those skill sets under their belt! This is the holy grail of "soft skills" that everyone looks for, whether you're a doctor or a restaurant manager or a postal worker.
I've had a lot of jobs in my career, but I've never in my life walked onto a job and known everything I need to know. There's a LOT of on the job training -- so much that I might as well be taking a boot camp at every new job!
And so from that perspective, someone who walks in with a theater or really any kind of arts or social science degree and a modicum of Python under their belt is a very, very attractive hire to me. I can teach you our framework of choice and how to run tests and how to use Jira, but I don't have time to teach you how to learn or how to communicate or how to take direction.
Anyway, my two cents.
The question is just how much of education is testing for skills that were there all along, and how much is actually taught. Caplan says that all evidence points to that it's almost all A, and very little B. If true, spending several years and very large amounts of money just for one person to get ahead in a zero-sum game is not very beneficial to society as a whole.
Which I think is the author’s point.
With your surprising and well written example, I realize he's not an exception. There's great value there. And I now fully agree with you.
> And so from that perspective, someone who walks in with a theater or really any kind of arts or social science degree and a modicum of Python under their belt is a very, very attractive hire to me. I can teach you our framework of choice and how to run tests and how to use Jira, but I don't have time to teach you how to learn or how to communicate or how to take direction.
You fully changed my mind.
Being able to multiply matrices by hand is nice, but there's software for that. Soft skills or a rigorous thought process is very hard to find.
> - They show up on time (to scenes, to rehearsal, to performances)
> - They can memorize vast amounts of material in a relatively short period of time verbatim
> - They work well with others
> - They work well individually
> - They can take direction
> - They can take constructive criticism
> - They meet deadlines under pressure (the show must go on!)
> - They can put themselves in other people's shoes (Method acting, ftw)
> - They know how to do research (how does a 1940s soldier talk, dress, walk, act?)
> - They are comfortable speaking in front of groups
> - They can speak clearly and enunciate appropriately (especially good in a remote world with fuzzy tech!)
> I don't really care what industry you're in, those are desirable qualities for ANY hiring manager!
Of those 11 skills, 9 are skills you'd need for any engineering postgrad degree, and 7 are skills you'd get in any engineering undergrad degree. From the hiring managers PoV, with the engineering graduate you also get a lot of other nice skills, like problem-solving complex problems, understanding complicated systems, etc.
> I would be THRILLED if candidates metaphorically walked through the door with evidence of those skill sets under their belt!
They do - that's what the postgrad engineering degrees are - evidence of possessing those skills you mentioned, and using them.
Not saying you're wrong about what a good theater student does, but a disproportionately large number of arts students I've met seemed to treat their degree as a three year long bludge that allows them to delay taking on adult responsibilities.
Far fewer people go into mechanical engineering or physics because they want to sit around smoking weed all day.
At least in my line of (admittedly quite "dirty") work, I'd choose someone with experience at McDonalds or Kmart over an arts grad any day of the week.
Half of Finnish people between 35 and 44 have a degree, whereas only 7% of people in that age range from South Africa do, so South Africa must be much better off than Finland.
If South Africa suddenly had as many degree holders as Finland, it wouldn't suddenly become Finland.
It's not something that can be reduced to metrics except possibly on the scale of entire countries over timespans of multiple generations, and even then the effects are probably not seperable from countless other factors because there are no two or more otherwise identical countries to act as the controls.
This assumes that "facing ideas" happens in school and not the real world, which is questionable on both sides.
A few people learn a few things the hard way, and everyone else ignores their annoying crying.
/sarcasm (but not 100%.)
BTW, what is the value of a university degree is to someone's self-worth?
Which made me realize even in my CS degree all the "useful" courses could fit into one semester and the rest was just learnt the old fashioned (read: medieval) apprentice way - osmosis from being around other practitioners.
Paraphrasing the great Yogi - thing change yet so much remains the same.
A collaborative auditing effort could involve some further documentation of what the origin datasources mean, how the sheets process and transform that information, and how to interpret the results produced.
[1] - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.htm...
For them your whole enterprise is also "one recent paper". And yours is the one with extraordinary claims.
I only skimmed the spreadsheets and my criticism isn't quantitative so feel free to ignore it. For one thing signaling provides value, so just treating it as useless isn't fair. You can argue it's not worth it at the current prices, but at some price over 0 it would be worth it.
For another thing there's a lot of nonlinear special cases that you throw out of window by looking at aggregates. Scientists and engineers don't grow on trees. For example imagine we save 30 years of education spending but we don't have quantum mechanics and relativity. Are we better off?
Unicorns in education have crazy high potential value and can be used to justify a lot of wasted spending.
Lots of people do things they know is bad for them, more data hasn't stopped anyone from making their own decision, while I do see the potential benefits.
The argument you're making seems to just dismiss the idea without substantiating why it's not important to try and factor in all the factors to reach a conclusion.
For example, if I spent less money would that also count as more profitable? Does it also take into consider what activity was replaced by running?
Spending 30 min less on HN and replacing it with running, or just moderate walking, could very well result in less expenses if one takes medical spending into consideration.
And I think that's what Caplan is asking people to do. Go over his definitions and what was included and see if it makes sense.
Between that and running injuries, car/bike accidents, skin cancer, etc, it probably wouldn't be tooo hard to show that running is not worth it.
Mind you, I'm NOT MAKING THAT ARGUMENT, I'm just saying it's probably easier to do than you imagine.
One conclusion is "Results suggest that cartilage recovers well from a single running bout and adapts to repeated exposure. Given that moderate evidence indicates that running does not lead to new lesions, future trials should focus on clinical populations, such as those with osteoarthritis."
My understanding is the evidence for walking is much stronger than running given the assumption that an "active lifestyle" is a goal, rather than just living longer.
I have to laugh. No it’s not. It’s not like healthy people just from the fact that they are healthy have some odd quirk of occasionally randomly tripping into a 30min run without any say in the matter.
Regular running causes an improvement in health.
Improved health does not cause regular running.
(My comment was not an attempt to refute or disprove the main thesis, but I do think it's important to step back and ask: "what's the point of education? is the point just to make a profit?")
It struck me that comment was excellent and insightful, and was only possible because both the commenter and myself were once taught something that neither of us uses in our day jobs, and may never have learned through any normal self-driven persuit.
The more I hear about this book the more ignorant it sounds. The benefits of having a significant, as large as possible, portion of everyone being at least somewhat educated on a wide range of basic ideas (not facts so much) isn't quantifiable. It's effects are in countless infinite small thimgs that no one can tally.
It's not good enough that some small percent of people would always be educated, because those people still have to interact with everyone else. We already have a bad enough problem of people simply not even understanding what other people say, and therefor not crediting or respecting it at all and going with their feelings on everything.
The cherry on top is you haven't even read the book or looked at the spreadsheet, which is precisely the authors point. You are one of the many people who heard something about the book, made assumptions about it, and then decided the book must be ignorant. Bravo!
Part of learning is to deciding which parts to ignore. The book is rejected on it's face because its core claim is essentially "I solved a major issue in another field by reducing it down to the one I know", which is a big red-flag for crank claims.
The article's focus on spreadsheets is part of why it's so easy to brush it aside. The author doesn't realise that the fidelity of the spreadsheet is less important than their own ideological assumptions.
It's possible they cover this in detail in the book, but it's not in this article, nor in any description of the book I've encountered. If something appears as crank-science on it's face (and is getting little traction), then why waste your time on it?
It's good practice to read the ones you're commenting on.
You don’t give “evidence” when drawing a conclusion, you have a set of assumptions and from there there’s usually only one logical way to go.
Imagine asking for “evidence” 1+1 equalled 2. You could be given a “proof” but there’s no “evidence”.
Even if there were some magical set of data that could “prove” something, humans are not and can not be rational creatures; because time is finite, you must cut off data collection somewhere, even though technically the very next bit of information collected could completely change the measured outcome.
Of course the author’s spreadsheets were ignored; of course people cut off their data collection before getting to them. It’s such an absurd notion, the idea of precisely quantifying value of education, that spending time trying to understand what the inputs were to this spreadsheet is a waste if time for… well, anyone.
The set of people with the time and the expertise necessary to evaluate the author’s math on its merits is apparently zero. That isn’t a “bad” thing.
True. So you support the policy of giving every citizen 2 billion$ and 40 years to dedicate to nothing but studies. Since obviously society as a whole will necessarily benefit much more than that cost right? Or can we agree that any resonable estimate of the benefit to society of education will at least put it less than that level? If so, then you do believe it is qanrifiable, you just don’t like the conclusion of his estimate of the value because you want it to be higher than he calculate it being.
If the price of education is quantifiable and the debt for it enforceable, then the benefit better be quantifiable.
The answer is to reduce the cost of education.
The price of education is far cheaper in so many other countries.
America's just a shit hole.
Well, I just started studying to get a degree in something I have already worked, and let me tell you, it is extremely fulfilling and enjoyable in ways I could not have imagined.
And I don't say it is easy or trivial, I have to prepare for exams and stuff. But just looking from the perspective of the actual experience, it is great.
And having worked for some micromanaging if-I-pay-you-you're-my-slave unpleasant bosses in the past, no, hard disagree. Work now is good, but it was not good twenty years ago when I started.
Having said that, I am in Europe. Other places should offer different experiences.
To make an analogy, we don't go back to Maxwell's writings or his calculations to figure out if his electromagnetic theory is true (within its domain of applicability). If no other scientific work were ever connected to Maxwell's, we still wouldn't know if it's true, or at least, his equations would merely be amusing factoids. His equations gained truth and value, along with a list of limitations, through their predictive power and track record.
It sounds good to say that you can't argue with the data, but you can certainly argue with how the data was picked.
No one had previously even bothered to check the numbers before it became a fundamental tenet of the field.
This doesn't make any sense. It's not a matter of some formula using bad maths, it's the fact that maths isn't applicable to something so obviously subjective
I'm surprised it needed debunking at all when the premise is so obviously and immediately flawed
So it just gets dismissed as “not even wrong” unfairly or not.
Does it make a good argument that doesn't rely on that kind of thing, or did I make the right call?
(Weinersmith's part, though I probably hold positions very similar to him on most issues, just looked... not even near the edge of being compelling, from what I could tell in the couple summaries I looked at)
(emphasis mine, highlighting in the author's own words enough wiggle room to potentially undermine for the purposes of general policy whatever number comes out of said estimates; if you pick and choose the conditions, you can get any arbitrary value as an estimate; I'm not arguing his estimate is not valid, it very likely is - but only under the author's choice of values)
The bit I was unclear about is where the predictive modelling takes place. I can see the raw numbers and how they've been composed across the main variables like education spending, education level, workforce participation and income, social benefit from workforce participation, and cost of crime.
But I'm not seeing how the model itself is predictive. Where would I look to see the effect of dropping education spending by 50%. How does that impact crime rates and costs? What about the generational effects of deeply-connected criminal families and their children vs having more opportunities to participate and contribute to innovation etc.
Does the model assume a linear relationship, i.e. n times the number of criminals = n times the crime rate = n times crime costs, or does it account for network effects such that n times the criminals have n^n crime rate, and crime costs are n^n - and is there a point where criminal justice processes break down and crime breaks out?
Anyway save from writing a novel, it seems like the author did some homework to pull the various numbers together but I think some high level diagram of their model, inputs, calculations and outputs would be a better way to capture interest. Analysing something like this is a job, relying on the kindness of friends and internet strangers seems like a funny thing to get caught up on when the author themselves acknowledged the time and energy they had to spend pulling all of this together.
I'm maybe going out on a limb but the lack of interest probably doesn't indicate that no one cares about the numbers, nor must it indicate people would rather use emotional intuition, just that there's probably better and more complete models out there used by social scientists and economists that follow tried and tested conventions that take many more factors into account, not my wheelhouse though, if no such standard models exist I'd be very surprised.
They are easier for the average person to grasp and play around with than is python.
Almost any person who works in an office, can download a spreadsheet, look at the formulas, and then change a single cell and immediately see the results.
This screams stubbornness and a lack of willingness to push past a small barrier to me. Maybe unwarranted, but that also makes me less willing to accept his ideas. Who knows what evidence, lead, etc. was met with the same laziness?
The best tools to use are the tools you know. Would you rather they had spent an inordinate amount of time putting together a hacky script that doesn't work/barely works? I believe if they did that, the comments section here would be picking their code apart for not using industry standard design patterns and for being worse than a new intern's code.
Spreadsheets can accomplish the same thing and are more accessible to most people than a script full of one letter variables and no modules.
I think you can only say that you’ve chosen not to engage with this these arguments, not that you’ve rejected them as that would require engaging with them.
It’s the modeling assumptions that drive the results, and this is what people rightfully focus on.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/no...
He says the education researchers who might audit this don't because Bryan is an outsider in that field.
There's no real outcome where it's helpful for the auditor. They don't get paid. No one got tenure checking over someone's Rogue Outsider Spreadsheet.
People doing economic analysis should understand incentives.
What he has actually discovered is the same thing that makes writing quality scientific code so difficult - no one cares but you, so those unit tests your writing need to bring you some inner satisfaction.
For all we know it's just game theory. By doing X (pretending to be surprised, posting about how nobody cares about the math), the other party might do Y in response (someone is triggered enough and does go through the work). It might not add up economically, but that might be lost from sight. Or maybe it does add up now that publicity is in the mix.
(I don't necessarily believe that the author is truly being deceptive, but neither would I argue they must necessarily have understood one economic area because of work in another; if I'm understanding your point correctly.)
For what it's worth, I did not know this, so your comment was helpful to me at least. I did not realize it matters whether you're "in the field" or not, thinking that good contributions are welcomed equally as being good contributions.
It's not necessarily 'in the field' - I, for example, happily review things from economists, ecologists, epidemiologists, computer scientists, or mathematicians.
It's more "Here's my massive, probably undocumented spreadsheet - thoughts?" has a very low Bayesian prior for "Worth my time".
The author just seems to misunderstand the relativity of ideology. In particular they bemoan their critics as "..go[ing] with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves", but they don't acknowledge that their own findings obviously require some major ideological assumptions founded in neoliberalism.
Critics aren't concerned about the correctness of the spreadsheets, because calculating the value of education as ROI requires assuming that all metrics are objectively (and abstractly) quantifiable, which is simply laughable (in my option). Even ignoring the ideological assumptions you have to make to quantify things like self-actualisation and it's impact on quality-of-life, there's an obvious issue here:
How does education affect our political and cultural landscape? Assuming the math is right and reducing education funding improves the national budget while increasing some measure of quality-of-life, then what's the long-term impact?
The democratic process is fundamentally reliant on the quality of information available to voters. Epistemology doesn't come for free, and "common-sense" is rife with biases. We already have widespread problems with low-information voting, so what happens when we stop teaching critical theory because it's not profitable?
I am fully in the "you are a citizen before a homo economicus" camp, but don't actually want to make this an object level discussion about education. Two things:
- A social assertion can be sound and consistent with facts while missing the bigger picture. This means people should tackle it and learn from it, at least on the intellectual discussion level, and not try to bury it.
- Dismissing attempts to get things like formal logic and statistics into politics because it's all "ideologically motivated" is nihilist. Where the methods are sound and applied honestly, they can improve discourse (as a more disciplined kind of argumentation), unless you think you are a genius that perfectly knows how to improve society thanks to casual thinking and social proof.
To be fair, these attempts usually are ruined by ideology, but this is because the attempters ultimately choose ideology and are willing to compromise discipline. To go way back, see the "Specimen demonstrationis politicarum" by the great philosopher G.W. Leibniz, where he promises to mathematically solve the current election of the king of Poland and arrives at the conclusion predictable from knowing who was paying him.
The problem with many attempts to apply statistics is that even for the best quality science, the conclusion is only ever relative to the foundational assumptions. I don't mean they're intentional manipulations, but that it's very clear that Caplan is so far off the mark here that his work is difficult to take seriously.
I think a common critique of the trolley problem is an apt analogy here. Not an ethical argument about a specific choice, but that the thought experiment itself is flawed. It presents an absurd binary that neatly removes the human experience and incommensurability of individual life and insists on it's own utilitarian nature.
The problem with the spreadsheets, as with the trolley problem is that these kinds of analyses are founded on ad hoc assumptions that conveniently remove important context.
There is always a better approach. There are issues with our education system that don't work for many children, and wages do not correlate evenly with education across the board, but the conclusion that we should therefore slash public education funding and transition high schools to vocational training is doesn't follow from that unless you make those trolley-problem-style simplifying assumptions.
This rings true much more generally unfortunately. My profession is sexy maths. But when the rubber meets the road, decision makers broadlly -- like policy makers narrowly -- will revert to something much simpler.
I'm reminded of the argument and policy prescription coming from that argument that we can't afford decent roads or other infrastructure such as sewage treatment plants in rural and suburban areas with little to no mention of the long term trend of declining taxes on the wealthy and major land owners.
Given that, I don't feel sorry or surprised on behalf of the author that nobody is interested in the construction of their spreadsheet. Nor do I feel the need to take their argument any more seriously on that basis. It seems to me to be a matter of literally just politics. Especially so when I notice that he's a scholar at the Cato Institute and a self described libertarian. So yes, it's no surprise to me that he's advocating libertarian policy. It's also worth noting that he got a prestigious and expensive education with a BA from Cal and a Phd from Princeton.
The fundamental claim of the book is that currently, the "western education model" is not (really) about skill accumulation or increasing the utility that an individual can provide society. Instead, our current "western education model" is about signalling a workers productivity to potential employers. That is the thesis of the book, as spelled out in the introduction of the book.
I downloaded the spreadsheets[1] that the author talked about.[2] I've reviewed them for about an hour, in between reading, and my take is that no one cares about the spreadsheets because they're INCREDIBLY basic. In short, the spreadsheets are a collection of statistics about the outcomes of students who complete various levels of education. It shows income earned per year of education completed, for a number of different hypothetical students (excellent students, poor students, etc). The numbers aren't particularly shocking on their face, and the spreadsheets don't have anything like a single cell on the first sheet labeled "SMOKING GUN, WOW" to catch your attention. Instead, the general point from the statistics is that we see unusual jumps in the expected compensation of students at various "round numbers", such as jumps at 12 years of education completed (finished high school), and 16 years of education completed (finished undergraduate). The author seems to take these as strong proof for their original point that the value of education is in "signalling", not in increasing a persons ability.
My fundamental issue with this is that this data, as I've read it, could be understood a different way than "education is just a social signal". By my reading, this data could just as well be "western hiring markets are wildly under-valuing the abilities of folks who narrowly miss common landmark achievements". I believe that's also an idea worthy of study, but I don't see it addressed in any of the authors writing, or in the book.
[0] - https://eddierockerz.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/the-case-ag...
[1] - https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/compensationcleanfinal.x...
[2] - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.htm...
But this is where his math runs against common sense. If you are an employer and see a student that dropped out of college without a very good reason, then that is a very strong negative signal. Even if you as an employer believe that education on its own provides valuable benefits to your employees, this does not mean you’d take a risk on someone that dropped out. There are sufficiently few of them that you can just not risk it.
This is an argument for Caplan’s signaling theory, not against it. You literally said that whether or not a job applicant graduated is a very strong signal to employers.
Caplan is walking on a bit of a tightrope. He is arguing that colleges provide minimal education benefits, and that its primary value is in the signaling provided by the degree.
But if Caplan is correct, why would someone drop out in their senior year? If the only real benefit is the degree, and if the degree comes with a lifetime of increased wages, surely a rational actor would stick it out. I think this is where his argument has some cracks.
The first possible explanation for the dropouts is that college provides additional value to society by filtering out those who can handle the process vs those who can't. This is "filtering" not "signaling". Caplan does not model this value to society anywhere. And second, is that it is likely that more learning (or life experience, or whatever) is happening at college than Caplan is giving credit for. i.e. if some students are dropping out of college, than that likely means some students are struggling (but succeeding) to graduate, and likely learning some valuable lessons in the process.
A big enough employer could absorb these people with little fanfare, and use them to test the hypothesis. We read stories every day of business leaders who identify misconceptions in markets, and run with them to the bank.
Over time, this would in turn correct the wage gap.
Someone who doesn't finish high school, without a good reason, in our society which says finishing high school is important... simply failed to finish. They're more likely to fail to finish other things. The rational free market views that negatively.
If we lived in a society which expected people to get a 12-year hula-hooping certificate by the age of 18, you'd expect those with the certificate to be more employable. The employers in that world aren't irrational, the society is.
I can certainly get on board with the former, and if that’s Caplan’s argument, I might have to add his book to my reading list.
Edit: I get that the two critiques I described are difficult to separate in practice, but maybe this will clarify for anyone who might be willing to share their read or Caplan’s argument: it’s the difference between “university is more or less fine, but people should have to pay their own way” vs. “we need to find ways to reduce the real costs of education and/or better socialize the benefits, so that more people have access to education because education is itself a worthy goal”
If that doesn't make sense to you, imagine an alternate universe, where employers greatly value completing the Appalachian Trail, Continental Divide Trail, Pacific Crest Trails, and other great American hiking trails. People who hike through entirety of one or more of them are highly valued on the job market, as this clearly shows that they have patience, grit, spatial ability, following through with commitments to the very end etc. In that alternate universe, we'd have entire industry of check points on the trails, with proctors ensuring that people actually dutifully hike the entire thing without cheating, and issuing diplomas of completion at the finish line. A good number of people greatly enjoy hiking, so they'd love to be able to hike non stop for a few years. Many others couldn't care less about hiking, but will still somewhat enjoy their time on the trail, thanks to people they meet there, and unique experiences they have. Others will slog through, despising the entire exercise, but persisting because it will look good on their resume.
In all, people who do finish the trails will clearly benefit, but only through the virtue of existence of people who do not finish them, not through anything inherent to the things they learn or experience on the trails themselves. If everyone finished the trails, the society would not be better off compared to the scenario where nobody finished the trails. In fact it would probably be worse off, because we'd have millions of people spending years of their life on useless activity (notwithstanding some small percent of them enjoying it). Caplan argues that in our society, college is kinda like the trails.
https://theconversation.com/excel-errors-the-uk-government-h...
But this sentence stood out when I scanned the web page:
> How unpleasant school is compared to work.
That was very much not my experience and my working life was pretty good too. Am I an outlier? Or just lucky that I didn't grow up in the US?
On personal note... I for one did not go through higher education for the money. I did I so that I could alter my "social status". So for me it is not about my financials or really myself at all; it is about how other people perceive me.
But his statement is true.
Numbers, research, facts and logic rarely change opinions or drive policies. It is a miracle when they do
Of course we must spend more on educating everyone. So anything that says that we shouldn't is wrong on its face. Of course of course.
As an example, much of the trouble we are in today is caused by insufficient education. Climate change denial, avoiding vaccinations, electing idiots as leaders, religious fundamentalism, wars and conquests, lack of rationality in decision making (ahem!) — all these effects would be lessened if we were better educated and more rational.
Unless you model the entirety of human civilization in your spreadsheets, they just aren't enough.
I didn't read the book, regrettably, so I'm not sure if that's besides the point, but the value of education is a sum of many values for the society as whole that seems a bit hard to put a numerical value on in a spreadsheet. I think the reductionism is kind of obvious.
What if it were 300 cents instead?
I’d give away all of my current net worth and take out a loan for $1 million from loan sharks and give that away too for a functional fusion reactor recipe, pending some questions about whether they will be able to sell the recipe again, do we actually have the materials to build the device and I’d want my nuclear engineer friend and lawyer to review the terms.
I showed it to an i-banker friend that I respected. He barely glanced at the spreadsheet, but offered one thing:
"It's not about how detailed your model is; the most important thing is what your assumptions are."
I was floored. No one cares about spreadsheets for a tech startup, but it turns out even when you're trying to get a brick & mortar, cashflow business off the ground, still no one cares about spreadsheets.
That's probably what folks are reacting to here: the author is ultimately making an point by taking a set of assumptions and using those to derive the point. It seems like the argument is about the assumptions, not the calculations.
In case anyone's curious, here's the model in question. It was for a ping pong social club with food & beverage in NYC:
Base model: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8amviwttxsq09b/The%20Push%20BK%20...
Sensitivity analysis: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vcw1un7usubb5vb/Sensitivity%20Anal...
So the bankers are just asking themself if they want you are the type of person worth losing $200k per month over and what's the chance you could make the idea work.
Your "downside" being positive also might be a red flag, if the bankers feel like making money in New York City really is as hard as people say. To a NYCer anyone saying "you will make money no matter what" sounds like a hustler.
I use "angel" in quotes here because this was intended to be a cashflow business, not a high-growth company.
And here the discussion is mostly based on people's assumptions about those assumptions.
Full breakdown, with direct links to the spreadsheets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30368620
This is a contentious strain within Marxism because of the way it contorts some of Marxism's basic ideas to its own ends. The main one being Lenin's theory of "labor aristocracy." If you're not familiar with this, it's the idea that the working class in first world countries is effectively "bribed" by their national bourgeoisie through wages higher than those available for the same types of jobs in developed countries.
Maoism Third-Worldism extends this concept by claiming that, actually, first world laborers are not exploited _at all_. No matter how bad workers in developed countries have it, their class interests are fused with those of the national bourgeoisie and their share of imperial "superprofits" means that they effectively belong to the same class category as the latter. I'm simplifying somewhat, but this is the basic idea, and it's proven through hundreds and hundreds of spreadsheets. If you leaf through a book like Zac Cope's Divided World, Divided Class, half the book is citations, charts, and tables.
Now I admit I am a bit of a dilettante here, but to my knowledge there have been no serious attempts made to challenge the vast quantitative efforts made by Third-Worldist writers. This is at least partially explained by the fact that Marxist audiences tend to be a bit less quant-focused than their peers in mainstream economics (to put it lightly). Still, it upends some of the most basic contentions of Marxist analysis, so you'd expect there to be a more lively debate over all those charts and graphs. Right?
I claim there's a larger issue at play here: most people are driven to ideas within social sciences for basically pathological reasons. The ideas agree with them on some basic level, and the research is largely a pretext for legitimizing those ideas or creating a sort of ideological playing field for its adherents. People aren't drawn to Marxism or any of its sub-sub-ideologies because they started reading Capital on whim one day and found its ground-up arguments on the commodity form compelling, any more than libertarians start from a blank slate and are "woken up" by reading Hayek cover-to-cover.
So if you propose a wildly heterodox idea within one of these fields, no amount of math is going to help you. Most people, even academics within the same area of research, will either be drawn the idea - in which case, great, there's math to "back it up" - or repelled by it and dismiss it out of hand.
I'll show my hand here by saying the author's idea sounded kind of dumb to me so I didn't look at the spreadsheets.
Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk.
I'm sure his numbers and spreadsheets are correct.
But if you think this is a good argument, a worthwhile argument for educational policy, then JESUS FUCK could you go outside and touch some grass? Please? Go hug someone. Look at the stars. Read a book. Be human. Feel something!
A lot of people choose universities based on which ones have the best parties. Is that even quantifiable? This whole thing seems so ridiculously out of touch with human motivation that what you're saying is correct: It's simply not worth anyone else's time to debunk.
/me looks at teachers, nurses, and truck drivers.
This is one example where academia & credentialing serves an important purpose, even if academia can be pedantic & insular at times.
Wow, that's one of the most dismissive remarks I've seen here in quite a while. It also does not seem like you could possibly believe it yourself. Education is a huge chunk of everyone's life, of course it's important to know the upsides and downsides. The returns are one aspect (I haven't read the book, it honestly sounds depressing, but I'm also intrigued) and calculating those with the highest reasonable precision seems like an important input to me, regardless of whether we like the answer. Why would you dismiss this altogether as not even worth anyone's time to look into?
It's a natural thing. If you come up with an implausible sounding thing supported by a very complicated argument then most likely you made a mistake. It is very easy to make mistakes and very hard to find them.
If you have a 1000 page proof that 2*2 is 5 I won't spend my valuable time finding where you slipped up. Now clearly his claim is more nebulous. One has to invest money and time to even understand what the book claims, so then one can invest more time to debunk a spreadsheet?
Caplan isn't some interloper with no knowledge of any of the material he touches on ranting on Twitter. The man has a career as an economics researcher specializing in public-sector work and actually teaches economics at a reasonably prestigious university (I have heard of George Mason). Perhaps we might pause to consider that he may be, in the realm of his specialty, not a complete fool. In general, his work would seem to be worth engaging with by his peers.
With that in mind, it is a little concerning that so many people are so ready and willing to argue with his claims yet none are interested in engaging with his work or methodology. Perhaps they, as you, are dismissive because he reaches conclusions they find so implausible as to be not worth engaging with. Or perhaps because as he alleges, the field simply does not value quantitative argument beyond its ability to get a paper published.
For my own part, I think it would be educational to know which is the case. If the former, I would like to understand if this is politically motivated (and a lot of things are in economics, especially in a policy context). In the latter, it leads me to question just about every claim from the entire field, including Caplan's.
I'm not equipped to evaluate his data or critique his work. I won't make the attempt. I would hope for better of his peers, though.
The title “case against education”, and the subtitle “why the education system is a waste of time and money” makes it feel like it will be about the whole concept of education and it will show, well “why the education system is a waste of time and money”. Turns out he is already backpedaling from that conclusion in the first chapter. He says he doesn’t talk about the kind of education which teaches usefull skills. Surprise surprise, if you remove the good stuff from an endevour what remains won’t be worth much. To quote from the book:
> Lest I be misinterpreted, I emphatically affirm that some education teaches usefull skills, or, as economists put it, “builds human capital.”
“Lest I be misinterpreted” oh no! Maybe you shouldn’t put your “clickbaity” nonsense statement which goes against your stance on the front cover of your book then? Jeez.
And if the author is reading this: please kindly give me back my money and time.
Now - are there arguments not worth engaging with? Absolutely.
You only have to have one flagrantly unprovable assumption to make the whole chain of inference invalid