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.
> If you publish an academic paper with quantitative analysis, academics will tear into the details of analysis
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.
If it's publish or perish, double checking numbers of a paper will help you do the latter much more than the former.
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.
Isn't the real problem the economisation of education? The desire to express the value of education in monetary terms is really only useful for those running education businesses, like e.g. many of today's universities in the US ans UK.
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.
> Isn't the real problem the economisation of education? The desire to express the value of education in monetary terms is really only useful for those running education businesses, like e.g. many of today's universities in the US ans UK.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Judging the benefits of anything only on the financial bottom line is risky. Many extremely valuable things are valuable because they are cheap to the point of irrelevancy. Which is why it is a valid question to ask whether the resources are worth it.
> 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.
> 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.
Agree with the basic premise that the main political division is not between “right” and “left” but “educated people” (ie progressive college-educated) vs “uneducated people” (the working classes.)
Disagree that it’s clear who is right. We will have to wait 20-30 years to see. (Personally I think the working classes are wiser than the progressive elites, but that’s just one opinion..)
The last two years have shown that the educated portion of the population was just as easily deceived by false populist promises, and just as easily provoked into channelling their frustrations onto an undeserving scapegoat.
> 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.
I would like to hear more about this democracy that has lasted 2500 years please.
> Judging the benefit of education only on the financial bottomline is bound to underestimate its real value.
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!
The effects of education on democratic participation, workforce participation and public health are all explicitly assessed in Caplan’s book, particularly chapter 6. This comment tends to prove the point he makes in the article: “Quantitative social science is barely relevant in the real world … 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.”
I am digging through his book and it reads to me like a healthy dose of ideology littered with references to sociology papers that would likely not survive replication.
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.
Of course it is. If literally nobody wants to hear your answer, you might well (to use an example from a previous article) replace your audience with a rock saying “it’s not true. Go away.”, and have the same effect.
I’m predisposed to saying education is insanely beneficial though. I want everyone to have all of it for free.
> For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on.
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).
> 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,
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.
I wasn't saying that it's either education or specifically helping the homeless. I'm saying it's a tradeoff between spending on education, vs. spending on other things. If homelessness isn't a problem, great! There are still other ways to spend the money. Maybe raise the standard of living of the poorest 10% by giving them a UBI. Maybe build nicer gardens. Maybe just have lower taxes!
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.
Abolish police and military, and suddenly you'll have plenty of funds for your UBI or whatever cool system you'd like to invest in.
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.
> Abolish police and military, and suddenly you'll have plenty of funds for your UBI or whatever cool system you'd like to invest in.
Abolish police and then what? Who will enforce any kinds of laws? Or do we just revert to having nothing?
Abolish the military and leave every country at the mercy of any invader that comes along? I can certainly understand the idea of not spending as much money on the military, but how can anyone that has heard of any amount of history take seriously the idea that a country like the US can just abolish its military without it being in catastrophic danger?
> Also worth noting: money is just a meaningless abstraction designed by the rich to extract value from the poor
That's... a pretty bold statement.
But I'm curios. What do you mean? If the abstraction of money didn't exist, what would happen exactly? In some sense you are right that money is just an abstraction, it's just an abstraction for the fact that there are limited resources that everyone wants.
Maybe you and me, and our neighbors, as a community. Why would we concentrate police powers in the hand of a specialized militia answering only to the psychopaths in government? Cops are never here when we need them to protect actual people, but they always show up and mess everything up when things were getting better.
Laws are written in a social context. You can break laws without harming anyone, in which case nobody in your neighborhood may mind (and maybe some people would like to repel that law at the next general assembly). If some people think you are harming others, then there are many ways to try and find an arrangement to the situation and repair any wrongdoing (see also: reparative/transformative justice).
Of course, some extreme cases require use of violence to control a person who's physically endangering others. Why would we make a job out of it, though? Concentrating those powers and responsibilities into a finite set of hands sounds like a fragile system that can be abused.
See also: past HN threads about the positive outcomes of not involving police for mental episodes, accounts/studies of indigenous systems of justice (such as in Chiapas), and academic research on the abolition of prisons (Angela Davis, Gwenola Ricordeau).
> how can anyone that has heard of any amount of history take seriously the idea that a country like the US can just abolish its military without it being in catastrophic danger?
The US is the catastrophic danger to many countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc). By dismantling the US military industrial complex, we'd be doing a lot to promote peace and stability across the entire globe. The USA is still by far the largest military in the world and has helped countless coup d'État and assassinations. If only those, the war files released by Wikileaks and the recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan should be good examples of the military producing the exact opposite of its stated goals.
> If the abstraction of money didn't exist, what would happen exactly?
It depends on a wide variety of social/cultural factors. There's not a one-size-fits-all way of life, and each community may adopt different approaches to property and commercial exchanges. But in my opinion and experience taking away the abstraction allows us to focus on actual concrete problems.
For example, think about housing: by reasoning in terms of money, you reach the conclusion that we need more investment in new housing. By thinking without money, you can notice empty dwellings outnumber homeless people > 10-to-1, so the question becomes: if we have enough housing for everyone, why would we let people be homeless?
If you abolish money how will I ever be able to obtain a new computer with which to read Hacker News?
Money makes it possible for me to exchange my time, effort, and expertise for good produced using someone else's time, effort, and expertise. Without money or something that is so similar as to deserve the same name that is not practical except for the very rich and powerful.
This whole thread is in response to Bryan Caplan complaining that no one is actually engaging with the quantitative analysis he did in the form of a spreadsheet.
As far as I can tell scandinava has all the alternate uses you mention and more, plus the education.
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.
> 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
Ironically, the same people who would complain about free education, would complain 10x over more money for the homeless or healthcare.
> 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.
Paying a lot of money into education prevents homelessness! Educated people are more likely to find an income than people who have less knowledge of the world. And it's not only purely educating people, it's also about providing supportive services, such as job finding programs, mental health counseling, etc etc. By spending more on education you may spend less on homeless right now but you can prevent people from becoming homeless.
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.
The same argument applies if you pick a different alternative, though. Money you choose to spend on education (with all its knock-on effects in homelessness, public health, employment, and so on) is money you can't spend on street cleaning, road maintenance, whatever, but also the investment you're making via education in the future homelessness problem is money you can't spend on acute homelessness problems today that can't be reached by education because it's too late for the people involved.
Then you need to make your spending on these other problems more effective. Give tenants more rights to stay in a home, give people more job security, make mental health programs cheaper and target vulnerable populations. Etc.
...and the same argument applies again. It doesn't matter how effective they are, the same logic applies: money you spend on thing A cannot then be used on thing B. That is a choice.
I should add that changing things to make them more effective also costs money.
But can you then spend anything? Because spending anything is also a decision on what is more important? By the argument you propose, spending money seems immoral. But spending money on education and homelessness isn't immoral in most moral frameworks, hence the argument must be faulty. Something must be spend and that means allocating how much to spend on what. Preventing future harm on countless people is morally better than preventing current harm on countable people, hence it must be better to prioritize improving the situation in the future before improving the current situation. In conclusion, we ought to spend on education first (or preventative measures in general), then on everything else.
> Because spending anything is also a decision on what is more important?
Yes, that is literally true. Or at least, it's true in a rational economic framework, which is the most common shared fiction when people are discussing these things. When a rational actor spends $X, that means they expect to receive a value of more than $X. Between two things that cost $Y, the rational actor will prefer the one with a higher net present value.
The decision that society makes about allocation of money is equivalent to a decision of how to represent the intangible portions of the value of a given investment so that the things we as a society deem important have enough money spent on them.
> But spending money on education and homelessness isn't immoral in most moral frameworks, hence the argument must be faulty.
"Giving benefits only encourages dependence on the state and discourages people from improving their own situation" is a very frequent argument from conservative types. One assumes it's made in good faith.
From upthread:
> It's a totally valid thing to wonder whether it's the best use of that money there is.
You have a particular answer to that question in your head, and that's fine. It does not invalidate the question, nor guarantee that the assumptions leading to your conclusion are universal in time or space.
> By spending more on education you may spend less on homeless right now but you can prevent people from becoming homeless.
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 :)
I have the same theory about healthcare. If you put the cost burden 100% on companies (copays, drugs, everything) they will lobby for sensible changes to the system. Sidestepping the glacial pace of reform we find ourselves in now where normal people are picked off one by one.
I believe the same way about taxes. As long as over 50% of the population makes low contribution to actual federal budget, they don't care much about how the money is spent unless it impacts an ideology - which allows forevermore government spending.
That may have been true if much of the cost of education was not artificial, like non-free manuals (as in free software) or paying for non-open access journals.
This is a problem with much of mainstream economics. Start by defining everything worth measuring as the things you can measure, then build elaborate models around those measurements, then declare success when your models yield an output. Finally, influence policy to try get more of one measurable and less of another.
>Isn't the real problem the economisation of education? The desire to express the value of education in monetary terms is really only useful for those running education businesses, like e.g. many of today's universities in the US ans UK.
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.
> The monetary value itself is useful to everybody who makes a decision.
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.
Of course you need educated people for a democracy. That's why the old generation dedicates enough funds to educate the next generation.
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.
Fair point. So what's your evaluation of the real value of education?
I don't see how I can answer your questions in a short comment because they depend very much on individual circumstances. E.g. nowadays you have to be able to read to make informed decisions. But with the rise of text to speech synthesis, and information available as videos and memes, there is no need to receive a formal education to be informed.
Then again, how valuable is analytical and critical thinking? That depends on the democracy. If people live in an established democracy with established institutions, they just have to choose the outcome, i.e. where the government is going to spend money. Then no further education is needed.
In general, the value of education follows supply and demand and depends on the environment. If you were the only educated person among cavemen, then your education is worth the world because you can make all the difference. On the other hand, if you are the proverbial philosophy major working at a fast food restaurant, what's the value of that education?
> Shouldn't they know how valuable that education is to decide if it's worth their time?
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.
> Students who graduated from such universities often are more capable of independent thinking in my experience.
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.
Those numbers can't be compared one is number of nobel prizes by the country they were born at. The other number of people who were at some point at Columbia University, i.e. alumni, faculty (past and current)... who won a Nobel prize sometime in their career. The total number of nobel prize winners counting the way the Columbia winners are counted would add up to many more than counting by country.
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.
It would be interesting to see the split:
Out of 83 Nobel Laureates, how many gained their education in University of Columbia? How many were professors that moved to University of Columbia after receiving their education somewhere else?
Also Arthur Ashkin (2018 Physics) only did his BS in Columbia. I guess everyone is counting that way, but this method of counting surely favours prestigeous, highly sought after, universities.
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.
I believe that, in the 40s and 50s the occupying forces intentionally drained the research capabilities of Germany (as part of a larger push draining industrial capabilities). Hence I would expect Germany to be kneecapped in their Nobel laureate production for a significant part of the last century.
> 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.
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.
I disagree, insofar in that qualitative social science is ineffective.
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.
> I disagree, insofar in that qualitative social science is ineffective.
> 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.
It's more of a case that bad science was made, rather than "this type of science is bad."
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."
It depends how deep and far-reaching it is. Cars in the 60s caused smog and used leaded fuel, so they were all pretty bad at the same time. Perhaps the field needs a similar size of transition as the change to unleaded (too many "leading questions" perhaps).
Applying results from social sciences has the problem of weighing costs and benefits (policy X helps with A but hurts B). But how much 'A' do you need to get to outweigh the loss in 'B'?
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).
Discussion might have been a bit easier if he'd just listed the assumptions and the model underlying the calculations. But the Amazon blurb of the book shows that the author isn't really interested in that
> 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.
> Discussion might have been a bit easier if he'd just listed the assumptions and the model underlying the calculations. But the Amazon blurb of the book shows that the author isn't really interested in that
He wrote a whole book about this. A very detailed book.
If it's all in there, what's the point of discussing the spreadsheets? You won't care about that unless you disagree with the author yet make the exact same assumptions. So it's almost 100% certain you'd argue assumptions and modeling before the actual calculations. Doesn't seem very rocket-science-y to me.
I have read his spreadsheets, so here's my critique. (And I will say that, throwing all the spreadsheets out the window, I still agree broadly with many points to some extent.)
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.
Yeah I wouldn't look at his numbers for the simple reason that it's a predictive model that's presumably chock full of fudge factors and educated guesses. It's pretty trivial to tweak it (he even admits he did that) to get the result you want. And he clearly has a result that he wants.
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.
Just my dumb opinion here, but... there's something extremely implausible on its face about the idea that a sufficiently complex spreadsheet could calculate the difference in value generated from kids going to school versus kids not going to school.
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?
I think, in part, Caplan has made a fairly classic error in attempting to figure out the optimal strategy for an individual within an existing system, where small numbers of individuals deviating generally doesn't matter, and then using those results to make a policy recommendation about how to change the system en masse in a way that will radically change the system. His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes, for example, would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? If it did, how would that effect overall quality of life for average Americans? I don't find compelling answers to these questions in his spreadsheets (nor his book).
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 spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes, for example, would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? If it did, how would that effect overall quality of life for average Americans? I don't find compelling answers to these questions in his spreadsheets."
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.
>"Probably because any attempt to even reduce the topic to a spreadsheet is a case of "not even wrong"."
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.
> 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 what about the partying, making friends for life, and learning to be an adult?
What about care-free student life as a carrot to incentivise young adults to go into careers that might not be good for them personally, but good for society?
Or how about letting people have careers that are personally fulfilling, but not economically productive?
Taking a year abroad to study in the middle of whatever university education you're in is a financially stupid decision. And yet, one I recommend every single student to do, because it's fun.
A million years ago when I was nearing the end of high school, we all talked about which university educations were financially the best, and worst. Which educations "paid for themselves", and which ones didn't. Everyone knew. And then we all picked whatever we personally liked and thought we would enjoy working with in the future.
Caplan might be 100% right. And also 100% irrelevant.
If you read his book, like it was already suggested to you a couple of times, you'd know what he says about "care-free student life". This way, you would be able to address his actual positions, instead of arguing against a version of Caplan you've conjured in your mind, based on a single blog post and a few HN comments.
> [S]chool inculcates many attitudes that, regardless of their moral worth, impede on-the-job success. If you’re preparing kids for their adult roles, a year of work experience instills more suitable discipline and socialization than a year of school.
> The imperfect overlap between the school ethic and the work ethic is especially blatant in modern American colleges. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.98 Since the early 1960s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. (...)
> What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa frostily remark in their Academically Adrift:
>> If we presume that students are sleeping eight hours a night, which is a generous assumption given their tardiness and at times disheveled appearance in early morning classes, that leaves 85 hours a week for other activities. . . . What is this additional time spent on? It seems to be spent mostly on socializing and recreation.
> A week in modern college is a great way to teach students that life is a picnic:
>> A recent study of University of California undergraduates reported that while students spent thirteen hours a week studying, they also spent twelve hours socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies, and three hours on other forms of entertainment.
> Instead of making students conform and submit, college showers students with acceptance. This doesn’t merely fail to prepare students for their future roles; it actively unprepares them. College raises students’ expectations to unrealistic heights, leaving future employers the chore of dragging graduates back down to earth.
His book discusses your other points too, I strongly recommend it.
> > What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression.
If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.
> > What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression.
> If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.
Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account so GP posted evidence that the book/study does indeed address your concerns.
Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed, to wit - that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.
>> Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account
> No, I did not.
So how exactly is the reader supposed to interpret this statement of yours:
> So what about the partying, making friends for life, and learning to be an adult?
>
> What about care-free student life as a carrot to incentivise young adults to go into careers that might not be good for them personally, but good for society?
When someone looks at a study and says "What about $FOO", they generally mean "Why is $FOO not addressed?", and not "Your conclusions about $FOO are wrong".
> The imperfect overlap between the school ethic and the work ethic is especially blatant in modern American colleges. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.98 Since the early 1960s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. (...)
? So your sentence does not make logical sense to me? Did you mean before the 1960s people would spend 40h _plus_ studying. Because the way you write it is that fifty years ago college was 40h (in-class and studying), and now it is 27h in class + 14h studying (41h) so nothing changed.
I believe the author meant "old.class + old.study = 40" vs "new.class + new.study = 27" (where new.study = 14). It took me a re-read to come to that conclusion.
Ah ok, I see now how this can be read that way. Anyway I question the math. Fulltime enrolment is 15 credits which typically is considered 45h of work a week (1h in-class + 2h studying). What we also shouldn't forget is that on top of that students typically have a job as well.
I'm not sure I agree, I think school does an excellent job at instilling subservience/deference to authority that a year of on the job training, while effective, cannot quite replicate. What's learnt easily is often forgotten easiy, and I think that applies to the levels of compliance we need for the modern workforce.
There appears to be a bunch of people defending Caplan in this discussion, but most of that defence boils down to "read the entire book!"
No, I'm not going to do that. And if you've read the entire book, and think I'm an idiot at this point, you are free to say so and disengage from this discussion.
But the reason I'm so dismissive of his work is that the conclusion is ridiculous and the premise inherently flawed because education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.
And the reason I'm dismissive of the defenders is that no-one seems to be able to come up with a succinct rebuttal to the criticisms fielded by me and others in this discussion other than "read the entire book!"
I think it's fair to say it's easy to over focus on the quantifiable, but arguably we also fail on even qualifying what exactly we concretely are trying to do. Like, what's the real purpose of school? Does it actually serve the goals that we often talk about - is it readying students to be good, engaged citizens, or particularly good workers? Of course, a simple numeric score would just be the fraction of the goals achieved / every goal, and that'd certainly capture something important about the education system.
> education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.
Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeling are inherently flawed and must lead to ridiculous conclusions?
- To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph--
The person you were arguing with is saying that it's a compelling reason to not use the model because, I quote, the conclusions of the model are "batshit insane".
Where I'm from, universities don't charge tuition, but you still get a small allowance as a student, and you can add on to that with a student loan to cover living costs. Loan interest and repayments are the same for everyone and based on your salary, it's all backed by the government, and if you don't pay back your loans before the age of 65, your loan is forgiven.
Given all of this, it is much easier to calculate if an education is "worth it" or not than in the US market, because you can look at average salary progression in different fields to do a pretty good estimate of whether or not you'll repay your student loan before retirement. These calculations are routinely done by unions and career guides and university recruiters, and the usual suspects are worth it; STEM education, medicine, MBAs etc, while the more liberal-artsy you get, the more likely you are to never ever repay your student debt and therefore be a "bad" investment of educational budgets.
And you know what? I'm fine with that. I'm fine with government subsidizing all of these "bad" educational programmes. For the fun of it. For the hell of it. Because some people like it. I am happily paying taxes so that someone else can get an education in ancient Peruvian anthropology with a minor in medieval French poetry for the absolute sheer fucking delight of it.
The goal of society is happiness, not productivity.
> I am happily paying taxes so that someone else can get an education in ancient Peruvian anthropology with a minor in medieval French poetry for the absolute sheer fucking delight of it.
Oh, I love this. What a droll, dull world without this attitude. Many of our societies are rich beyond imagination; we have more than enough to support all sorts of activities which don’t directly increase someone’s wealth.
It’s one thing about a rich society without a public safety net: people are more jealous and resentful of perceived freeloaders, i.e., anyone not directly employed in the increase of capital.
> Given all of this, it is much easier to calculate if an education is "worth it" or not than in the US market, because you can look at average salary progression in different fields to do a pretty good estimate of whether or not you'll repay your student loan before retirement.
It's harder than you think. You also need to take into account probability of actually finishing the degree vs dropping out (which depends on your individual ability, preferences, and other aspects), likelihood of actually getting a job in the field after completing a degree (e.g. there are many more people with a diploma in History than there are jobs in that field), job satisfaction (some jobs tend to have much lower or higher job satisfaction than others, which often is not clear to high-schoolers, and which results in wide discrepancies of monetary compensation, to make up for low or high job satisfaction), and other things too.
The entire subject of this conversation, Caplan's spreadsheet, is exactly his attempt to estimate all of that.
> The entire subject of this conversation, Caplan's spreadsheet, is exactly his attempt to estimate all of that.
Yes, but what I'm saying is that I don't care! People don't care! If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there!
My counter-argument isn't rational or analytical or quantifiable, it's irrational! Emotional! Caplan might be correct. But boring.
That only begs another question: if the point of education is not learning things and building human capital, but rather play and self-expression, why do we put on the charade of classes and exams? If play and self-expression is so important for young adults, why would anyone think that college as it actually exists is the best way for them to get it? Why does the state subsidize college education, instead of private businesses, which offer 4 year programs specifically designed to allow attendees have lives full of fun and joy, without stressing them with memorizing of useless (to them) facts that they'll permanently forget as soon as they leave the examination room? I mean, I have a lot of good ideas for a 4 year self-actualization program, why won't government give people non-dischargeable $100k+ loans to attend it?
> If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there!
It's entirely possible for Caplan to be correct about his material analysis, and that still not be the right conclusion.
If the government doesn't subsidise education, then anything that doesn't promise a return is financially debilitating. Personal choice can't exist when your ability to eat and pay rent rely upon you making a specific decision.
If you don't believe that humanities education has any kind of broader social value, then that's a whole other argument to make.
>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.
So I was quite intrigued when I read the post initially and thought this is about the sociatal implications of education. I thought his "conclusions" go squarely against what I know about education, i.e. there are strong historical and geographical correlation with education, gdp, child mortality rates, child birth rates etc. (most actually correlate more with female education than male education), Roslings work is a good reference here. I was considering reading the book to see what the calculations are and how they refute those correlations.
Now from what you're saying, he actually wrote a book with a click-bait title and which is about something very different from what the title implies (I guess "on the financial return of investment of a college education" would not have gotten the attention he wanted). And now he is complaining that education researchers are not engaging? I mean first, as far as I know most education research is not primarily interested in the financial ROIs of education (which is also highly country dependent), but if anything with the broad sociatal implications, but why should even those that might be interested engage if judging by the title Caplan is mainly interested in artificial controversy.
As a side note, why is this even economics, I would have more put this under business/MBA type calculations. Maybe I'm biased by the German system where economics is Volkswirtschaftslehre and Business is BWL, i.e. economics is to do with the economy of countries/states/peoples?
> I was considering reading the book to see what the calculations are and how they refute those correlations.
He talks about this stuff too, for example, as education is correlated with health, he also estimates health benefits in his return to education calculations.
The problem with many correlations that you mention is that they are, indeed, just correlation. There is scant evidence on there being casual relationship, or, for that matter, the direction of causality (eg., couldn’t it be that more prosperity allows people to consume more formal education, rather than formal education bringing about prosperity?).
> Now from what you're saying, he actually wrote a book with a click-bait title and which is about something very different from what the title implies (I guess "on the financial return of investment of a college education" would not have gotten the attention he wanted). And now he is complaining that education researchers are not engaging?
Financial return to education is just one chapter of his book. The book is actually really detailed, and covers multitude of aspects. In fact, in the very blog post you are commenting under, Caplan in explicitly says:
> Some critics called me a philistine: “Education isn’t about making money; it’s about becoming a whole person.” Never mind that I wrote a whole chapter against this misinterpretation.
Of course, nobody expects you to actually have read his book before you can express an opinion about topics it concerns, but maybe, before accusing him of clickbait and stirring artificial controversy, or his alleged bitterness that ed researchers are not engaging (he’s not even saying that, by the way), at least read the article you’re commenting under.
> As a side note, why is this even economics
This is a trend in academia over past decade or two. Basically, the traditional social science fields are so degenerate, dysfunctional, and ideologically rigid, that a lot of quantitatively-minded people who are keenly interested in social science topics, but are repelled by the reality of academic environment, instead flock to Economics, where rigor is higher, and ideology is less rigidly constraining.
>> I was considering reading the book to see what the calculations are and how they refute those correlations.
> He talks about this stuff too, for example, as education is correlated with health, he also estimates health benefits in his return to education calculations.
> The problem with many correlations that you mention is that they are, indeed, just correlation. There is scant evidence on there being casual relationship, or, for that matter, the direction of causality (eg., couldn’t it be that more prosperity allows people to consume more formal education, rather than formal education bringing about prosperity?).
Actually there is plenty of evidence that there is a causal relationship, again Rosling is a good resource. There are many countries who moved out of poverty by investing heavily in education, Sweden (where Rosling was from is one of them). I think when there is such a significant correlation if you want to dismiss it you need to bring some pretty good arguments.
>> Now from what you're saying, he actually wrote a book with a click-bait title and which is about something very different from what the title implies (I guess "on the financial return of investment of a college education" would not have gotten the attention he wanted). And now he is complaining that education researchers are not engaging?
>Financial return to education is just one chapter of his book. The book is actually really detailed, and covers multitude of aspects. In fact, in the very blog post you are commenting under, Caplan in explicitly says:
> Some critics called me a philistine: “Education isn’t about making money; it’s about becoming a whole person.” Never mind that I wrote a whole chapter against this misinterpretation.
But that part wasn't my point, my point was is it good for society.
> Of course, nobody expects you to actually have read his book before you can express an opinion about topics it concerns, but maybe, before accusing him of clickbait and stirring artificial controversy, or his alleged bitterness that ed researchers are not engaging (he’s not even saying that, by the way), at least read the article you’re commenting under.
Hold up, I've simply based my assessment of what you said:
> 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.
Now you're saying that this isn't the case and accuse me about jumping to conclusions. I actually am interested in the book, now that you said it is not just about personal ROI.
> But that part wasn't my point, my point was is it good for society.
I believe the point might be that it's perhaps not so simple as "good for society" or "bad for society". Water is good for a human right up until the point that they drown in it. Does this make water good for humans, bad for humans, or is a binary answer too simple?
> 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.
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.
>"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.
Because a majority of people are "feelers" (by nature) - they feel first, then run it through reasoning. An immature person of this nature would feel first, and then never proceed to use logic.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
You're already down all three, because Chrome was first released in 2008, and Android was also released in 2008, and GCP was apparently released in 2008 as well. Who knew?
*taps terminal with a Pixel phone using Google Pay, uploads selfie to Google Photos, plans a trip in Google Flights and saves the itinerary in Google Drive*
And to be fair with GCP, it's not like they released every single offering in 2008, at least I'd assume. Just like how AWS started with I think just a few things like S3 and EC2.
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?
This is rich. If Google refused to grow it would have become another Yahoo. Chrome was launched in 2008 and was barely usable. Do you think it could have remained anywhere near dominant in ads, search and lot more if it stayed at 20k people?
> In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later.
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.
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.
Doesn't asking that Caplan spend one second longer on his calculations automatically rule out everything else that anyone has ever said about the subject?
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?"
> nobody's saying "you're missing some important factors, and let's add them.
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.
> 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.
The practice is not the “do good science using the correct methods”. The practice is “call for increased education spending for *waves hands* reasons”. Listen, this is the old Internet trick: people show up demanding rigorous models and evidence when they see something they don’t like, but what they like they demand nothing of.
Ha. It's a trick to point out that there are well-known, easy-to-understand, rigorous models to measure this kind of this, which the author has declined to use?
Why bother with spreadsheets at all then? If the author is going to do a bunch of arithmetic to convince us that some conclusion is correct, shouldn't we ask that he actually perform relevant and useful arithmetic?
1 + 3 = 4 See? I just proved that we should spend eleventy brazillion dollars on K12 education next year.
Okay, so is his claim that "nobody cared about my spreadsheets" is simply incorrect, because people cared very much about them, by pointing out that they are useless, because they are not doing causal inference ... or what's going on? :o
> but has anyone looked at the spreadsheet yet to see for themselves? I think we're proving him right so far, haha.
But we aren't.
The author has described his method in words. My contention is that the method he described does not pass the bar for good science. If my contention is correct, then it simply does not matter what is or is not in his spreadsheets.
Here's an analogy: If I told you that I determined the safest car on the road by measuring the distance to the moon, and that I had very very good spreadsheets for measuring the distance to the moon, would you really bother to check my spreadsheets?
I don't think you would. I think you would (correctly) say, "Hey, that's a really dumb way to figure out the safest car on the road and I'm not going to bother to check your math."
Now, I don't think that the author has done something quite that orthogonal to his stated goal, but I also don't think it's close enough that I want to bother checking his math.
That's ... not a fallacy. It's simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in action. (Eg. if your Bayesian prior is already edukashion gud, and someone says giv muniez to teacherz, you can say yes, ok, dollar. But if someone says no no, it's a waste of resources you can say okay the burden of proof is on you now, have fun.)
I'm not claiming it's a fallacy, my dude. I'm claiming it's a trick.
Since the prior is uninformed, it's obvious this isn't "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" since both claims are extraordinary. It’s just that one is political desirous. Ain’t fooling nobody with the attempt at rational cover.
Caplan shouldn't be surprised at the reception of his work, because people have this prior.
Of course as you say high priests of rationality examine their own biases as they reach for the book, and by the time they flip it to read the recommendations on the back they are already empty vessels for unadulterated pure non-chill-filtered high-octane data and nothing else. But most people working in public policy are just lowly humans. :/
How much evidence you'd demand to change your mind depends on whether your prior was 50%, 90% or 99.999999999%. You shouldn't need more evidence to change back to 50/50 than it took to get you to your current beliefs - otherwise you'd have two equal cases and prefer the one you heard earlier for no reason other than that you heard it first.
Of course. I'm simply saying that Caplan shouldn know that people are entrenched in the pro-education position (because this is the norm for centuries, because nigh certainly everyone who is in the education policy sphere has gone through many years of the usual schooling and higher ed, and virtually all of these policy experts are pro-education).
Plus it seems despite his many spreadsheets his model is not able to do causal inference, which means his tables are very verbose narrations or appendices to his arguments in prose, and not a decisive proof.
> to change your mind
Unless one is in a state of 100% confirmation bias then ideally every little piece of evidence counts. Sure, we are not perfect walking-talking sentient infinite resolution mathematical distributions, so in practice we simply discard a lot incoming information, as we have meta-(meta?)-heuristics that we depend on. (Eg. if our friends and family and the news and even random blogs claim X we start to take it seriously, but still, if it doesn't really affect us our attention won't bother. And so on.)
And you know what? Just like with my hobbyist friend, I thought the spreadsheet they made were a valuable contribution! I thought it was BETTER than just guessing. Heck I know it was because so many mods in starsector bring in unintentionally broken equipment and make the game easy. Using their spreadsheet on those mods showed clear heuristics that indicated what in practice seemed to be true.
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.
Brian's schtick boils down to pointing out that sometimes, economists say things over and over again just because they, themselves, have heard them said over and over again - with the added trick (making it much more valuable) of proposing something better-researched than what they keep repeating. I guess that's my point, that this may be one of those. It'd be usual for him if it was.
BTW - Starsector is an excellent, truly amazing game, and the absurd amount of data that a single run can produce also makes it a great candidate for anyone who wants to do Data Science/AI on things in the game.
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...)
You should listen to the EconTalk interview with Caplan about the book. He talks about the relative importance of each factor, the uncertainties, and the logic behind it all. He makes quite a compelling case.
If someone said they came up with a spreadsheet that quantitatively proves that Homer's Odyssey is a worse piece of art than the Mona Lisa, would you go through their quantitative analysis, or simply dismiss their argument on the face of it?
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.
Are you saying you wouldn't take a look at this spreadsheet? I definitely would. Though I don't think it's possible it would certainly be interesting to see someone try, and if it failed to be interesting I could entertain myself by writing a comment explaining how they had failed.
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?
The discussion of how much money to spend on education should not be done based on some expected value of education. It should instead be done by polling various interested parties on how they feel about current the current education system, what resources they are missing (if any), what types of spending are not producing useful results etc.
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).
> Education's value to society and the individual is inherently unquantifiable with today's tools.
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.
> If someone said they came up with a spreadsheet that quantitatively proves that Homer's Odyssey is a worse piece of art than the Mona Lisa, would you go through their quantitative analysis, or simply dismiss their argument on the face of it?
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”
> 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.
The person to which you are responding isn't asking a bunch of questions that, presumably, was answered by the author in the OP. You were.
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.
Well, is it calculable? If yes, then a sufficiently complex spreadsheet ought to be able to do the job.
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.
Counterfactuals can be calculated, but the results will depend on other counterfactuals. There's no getting away from speculating about counterfactuals. If the speculative estimates that went into Caplan's spreadsheets were essentially made up, then it's garbage in garbage out.
> If the speculative estimates that went into Caplan's spreadsheets were essentially made up
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.
Debugging spreadsheets is pretty notoriously difficult for showing that it does the expected thing, let alone figuring out what assumptions have been made and how valid they are
I think the interesting point is that apparently very few people even tried. I don't know how everyone is dancing around that in this thread but that's what Caplan seems fascinated by in this blog post. He's not saying he's right because nobody checked them, or that everyone ought to have. He's fascinated that nobody chose to challenge his conclusions on quantitative grounds. And he gives some anecdotes that suggest that this is because people in the field are not interested in crafting optimal policy -- which does almost by definition require some amount quantitative approaches -- they are interested in publishing.
I think he actually believes the math. The person who would do it as a troll, as a reductio ad absurdum against the inputs, is me. Except I'm too lazy.
Sure, but I’m not making that call, nor endeavoring to although I might look at these spreadsheets when I have some time. Just pointing out that if this is calculable, then a sufficiently complex spreadsheet ought to be able to do the job.
No, why would you expect something like "the value of education" to be calculable? Do you think the value of art is calculable?
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.
Several years ago, I wrote against a local option sales tax for schools with some uncomfortable data.
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.
I'm at a loss for how trimming budget can ever really lead to increased performance. "Do better" is not a plan. And if you are behind, as in most areas of life, things are more expensive to catch up. I'm not aware of any case where this is not the way of things.
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.
I'm not even sure what you are suggesting, to be honest. My point was that if you want scores to improve, you will have to pay more. Pretty much period. You don't get improvement, at any level, for free. Certainly not by cutting funding.
Keeping the same level of funding will at best tread water. Likely, the area will fall, though. And I certainly wouldn't be comfortable pushing that outcome.
I am the last person, hired in 2000, that has stayed with our division/site within our company, who enjoys what they do (Oracle DBA).
Everyone hired since has been gone within 3 years.
We are hiring the wrong people, and I'm starting to quietly state that fact. We need to hire people with an appreciation of computing history, specifically with a desire to learn VMS and OS2200.
In the same way, education needs to hire the "dedicated long-haulers."
These people are probably not in their 20s. Maybe, but likely not.
They need to proselytize, and they need to be efficient.
I acknowledge that such people do not come cheap, but they are the point of the infrastructure.
If you're going to maintain ancient legacy systems and refuse to modernise, then really your inability to attract talent is your company's own fault. I love computing history, but a career in computing is a learning pathway too.
If your staff are only learning skills they can't apply elsewhere, they're going to feel trapped. I left my last position as a systems integrator because I wasn't learning anything other than how to slap together off-the-shelf solutions and bullshit clients.
If you want new people to stay and you can't teach them skills that are valuable elsewhere, then you need to pay exceptionally well and reassure your staff that their jobs are stable. Ideally including contractually obligated recurring pay increases.
For someone with a 40 year career ahead of them, anything less will always feel like a risky dead-end.
I'm not sure how this is the same, honestly. I'm assuming most of the folks that left went to more expensive places, but got higher salaries, too? Many probably left to go where they feel they have a better chance at building a family?
Such that, I'm not sure how this works. They should count their luck that they have you happy to be there. But luck only goes so far. Or are my above assertions wrong and you think the people that left made a wrong choice for them?
And my assertion on the cost of education is a bit more nuanced. Specifically, I posit that if you transplanted the teachers from the good schools straight into your school, grades probably would not change. It takes more than just the teachers. Even transplanting the administration would likely not do much. The low performing school doesn't need the same level of skill as the well performing one. It needs better. And more.
Management talent, I would push, is largely a myth. I'm sure it matters more than I'd give it credit, but so does a lot of capital cost in infrastructure and support that are invisible in your numbers.
And again, industry largely fails and goes bankrupt. Education and townships are not things I would feel comfortable pushing that outcome for.
Also... Offshore movements were pushed not by shrewd management, but by shopping around for cheaper labor. Not sure how that is relevant here?
My understanding is that industrial management only works for certain employments, mainly non-knowledge employment. Learning/education is 100% knowledge, which has performed poorly when offshored for cheaper, at least in my knowledge-based field. You get into knowledge debt, which then needs to be paid down, which costs more than actually having bought good talent in the first place...
So, same thing- if you need to catch up you need to pay more...
This makes about as much logic to me as saying you can hire a junior engineer and expect the quality of a senior engineer if you have a senior manager.
I agree that capital allocation and management are real and valuable skills, but it doesn't require any significant amount of talent to move industry offshore. It's simply shopping around for the cheapest price that meets requirements and writing up a contract.
Ignoring any potential ethical concerns, offshoring only tends to work financially for short-term tasks that don't require long-term understanding of past work. You mentioned in your previous comment that your department is struggling to find engineers that are willing to stick around long-term to work on your legacy systems. How do you square those two ideas?
Are you suggesting that education should be shifted offshore? Or that lower budgets would attract more talented managers?
The comparison is meaningless without knowing the needs of the two districts. Are the students in the thriftier district from wealthier households, for example, needing less support from school? Are there more ESL speakers in the costlier district? More students requiring special education? Are the buildings older, requiring more expensive upkeep? Some expenses don't break down to per-student or per-teacher. It's nice to say "trim costs and increase performance," but if a constellation of needs makes improved learning more costly in that context, you're stuck with it.
My district does have an influx of people from Africa, I will admit.
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.
like this generation migrated from Africa? Cause that seems awful close to saying that folks that had many systems tilted against them for a long time aren't up to par with folks that had systems working for them. As a higher post pointed out, catching up takes more resources than coasting on the hand downs from systems of generations past.
> 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.
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.
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.
Making a DCF analysis for education is going to be extremely murky.
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).
I think you're to harsh with saying it reflect the state of mind of educational departments, and far to lenient with 'extremely murky'.
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.
> Just my dumb opinion here, but... there's something extremely implausible on its face about the idea that a sufficiently complex spreadsheet could calculate the difference in value generated from kids going to school versus kids not going to school.
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 the spreadsheet showed education was a net positive, would Caplan accept this and rewrite the book, or would he go looking for more factors and adjustments that could "correct" its result.
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.
> If the spreadsheet showed education was a net positive, would Caplan accept this and rewrite the book
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 first line sounds very similar to one of his paragraphs:
>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."
> 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?
Exactly. I suspect no one cares about his spreadsheets because who's gonna waste their time on such a flawed proposition.
Just want to point out that this challenge seems to be that the whole field / approach is unlikely to work. Perhaps. Still, presumably some of those challenging him specifically are in the field and they should be expected to explain why the math he carried out was wrong.
This is just judging the tool as a roundabout ad hominid. I bet if he did the exact same calculation in a jupyter notebook, and exported his results as a pdf and did the type setting with LaTeX, you wouldn't handwave away the very premise as intractable. There's no limits to the computational complexity of a spreadsheet. Turing completeness is obviously there (just make a cellular automata). Even requiring the "code" to be not-esoteric, spreadsheets are no more crippled than a given scripting language.
But in practice, spreadsheets are usually used for "brainstorming" in a research question to pose some possibilities, while jupyter is used for creating an executable paper for an actual scientific discussion.
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.
Your assessment that the claim is "post-high-school education doesn't promote future earnings" shows that you have wholly not understood (and perhaps not even tried to understand) what Caplan has actually claimed. With such a foundational mischaracterization, your critique of the appropriateness of his data, assumptions and calculations is without merit. If you don't feel like reading the book, you can read the slide show linked in the blog. You would only need to go as far as page 1 to see he was not disputing future earnings potential. Here's the money quote:
"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?
Hacker News is more about having a discussion of, usually, tangentially topics to the link someone has posted. But if you wish to discuss some of Caplan's theories such as "“Conventional education mostly helps students by raising their status,” let's analyze that... (1) the post-secondary education in various countries differs a lot, (2) there are countries where "status" means a full bureaucracy class, other countries where it means ability to get a license such as a veterinary license, other countries where status means certain religious or tribal affiliations, or countries like the U.S. where status means graduating from certain colleges but not others (3) most studies conclude that education increases the macroeconomic productivity of an economy whether or not it raises individual statuses, (4) there are actually advantages to government raising the statuses of more individuals in some countries (such as having a stable middle class that isn't reactionary to politicians), etc.
But, if you read my earlier point, arguing these things through a book and spreadsheets is what think-tanks do, not what scientists do.
I have not read the book (it's the first time I heard about it), but I'm confused by what the title of the book seems to imply and what people here say about the book. I suspect that much of the discussion here seems to boil down to the same misunderstandings.
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.
Caplan is talking about all education, but he says each kind has different value. In short he believes k-12 is useful as daycare, and college is useful as a signal of how smart and hard working and conformist you are. He believes those benefits are not worth the massive subsidies. Moreover, the signalling thing doesn't work if everyone is pushed to go to college because it turns into a Red Queen's race.
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.
So what is his argument to dismiss the high correlation between many economic indicators and education spending both historically and geographically?
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 ...
The usual argument when a correlation goes against your theory is to say "aha! but what if the causation goes the other way?" and that's pretty much what the author does.
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.
The problem with the argument of turning around the causality is that there are several examples of countries to have spend significantly on education to then move out of poverty, i.e. where the poverty only reduced after the focus on education. I think you need to come up with some convincing cases that show why the causality should be reversed.
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.
It seems quite plausible to me that both of these can be true at the same time:
- A certain baseline level of education will make a massive difference, especially e.g. literacy education in a society where parents are almost all illiterate so organic transfer of literacy skills across generations isn't really a thing.
- Much current education spending in first world countries is providing a truly terrible return on investment.
With the caveat that it's been a few years: while he touches on primary education, he spends more time on secondary. The focus is less on individual ROI, but societal efficiency and policy: the core premise being that most secondary education is poor at increasing "human capital" (marketable skills, retained knowledge), and is instead valuable to employers because a college diploma is predictive for desirable hiring traits: conscientiousness, conformity, and grit.
I have many disagreements with Caplan, particularly on economics, but I found it a worthwhile read.
If you want people to look at your work (of any sort) it has to be at least marginally reader approachable. Novel thinking wrapped in a huge ball of spreadsheets isn’t that. Per authors own words it takes whole day author guided tour to get through it.
On the other hand, I often see studies where I'm quite curious to reproduce it and I just can't. Just today: saw a 2007 study from a university finding a correlation between sleep quality (deep sleep phase duration) and exposure to a GSM-frequency signal for 3 hours (a long, but not unusual/absurd, phone call) before sleep, even though the participants could not tell better than chance whether they had been exposed... would love to see if that reproduces even though the p value was not bad, but I just don't have the people nor the radiation calibration equipment nor the sleep lab nor anything.
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.
He also wrote an entire book on the subject, and gave numerous talks on the subject. It's very easy to hear the main parts of his argument without grasping with spreadsheets.
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.
Caplan’s approach was not particularly novel thinking, it was just thorough. He used existing studies, tools, and paradigms to calculate the returns to different educations.
So in other words, the kind of thing that typically is suited to academic peer review?
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?
Unfortunately, however, peer review in these fields extremely seldom involve someone actually checking the code/all the calculations/the underlying data.
these days, research papers have figures and tables that automatically generated with knitr/R or similar systems. that is the future. can spreadsheets do that?
> Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.
I'm biased since I don't know spreadsheets at all, but I think Python code would have been far more reviewable.
That bad justification for choosing a very wrong tool for the job does not instill confidence for other logic employed by the author.
“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.
With a spreadsheet you can see the result of each computation, and you can easily manually tweak values if you want to play around.
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.
You will find many economists that have some programming ability, just like in any other field nowadays: It's too useful an analytical skill. What they will do, however, is work on, say, a Jupyter notebook, which is as easier to fiddle with as a spreadsheet once you have basics of programming down, while getting rid of almost every disadvantage the spreadsheet has. You will find this in industry too: The researcher building the model is using the notebook, and then there's no need for an excel to code translation: The important bits can just be copied over directly.
There are dozens of examples in the wild of python code getting reviewed, corrected, and enhanced. I’m not a spreadsheet expert. Does that even happen for spreadsheets?
The most high-profile story is some grad students at UMass getting ahold of the spreadsheets powering the calculations in a high-profile economics paper by Reinhart and Rogoff about national debt levels, and finding elementary errors that destroyed the work.
Has anyone here read the book? I have a hard time imagining that a technical education (e.g. engineering, physics, forestry, chemistry) would be worthless if someone wants to work in that field.
Social sciences however... but of course I'm biased there.
I have read the book. He says that engineering degrees are basically the one exception. They're like trade schools. Also, e.g. a social science degree is useful if you're going to be a social science professor/academic, but otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable.
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.
> otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable.
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.
This is all in line with the author's point. Having an education does demonstrate that you have soft skills like punctuality, conscientiousness, etc. Being able to filter on those criteria is valuable to the employer and that employee alike.
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.
It's a bit more terse than I'd have put it, but I was about to reply along the same lines when I reloaded and saw your comment. While the supermarket employee (for those who don't know Target, it's a USA-specific thing afaik) might not be able to prove some of those things like doing research for a 1940s soldier costume, it's indeed not that hard and doesn't need a university study. Many of GP's points will be much harder to prove than to learn in the first place. And so I would also conclude that years of study might just not be required to start doing the job. Trying to be respectful of an actor's skill, since I truly don't think I could do that job well (or at least not without months or years of trying, and even then idk), it also doesn't strike me as requiring deep study. That's just not required for showing up to work on time (I'm cherry-picking one of the points here, to be fair).
Even for IT there's an argument to be made that it's super easy to learn 80% at home and do maybe some hands-on work in a lab with 500 virtual computers (that you wouldn't easily setup by yourself in a realistic manner), then go into the job. After a magazine got me started on HTML with a 3-page explanation at 12yo, things just started rolling from there and I was basically always ahead of what I was expected to know by year x of the study because I had already done stuff out of personal interest. Don't need an N-year study there, either. Engineering (in the sense of building a bridge that stands 100 years) is probably different though.
I had a bias against art degrees, but the one person I work with and who's had the most impact has... a theater degree, plus another art degree I forgot. Or maybe philosophy? I thought he was just an exception.
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.
> 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!)
> 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.
Community theater productions are reasonably common in the US. Many of them are amateur, in the sense of being put on by people who are not paid full-time theatrical professionals.
While I think that a lot of you learned can be transferrable, many of your points weaken your argument. Things like "they show up on time", "they work well with others", "they can take direction". I mean, common, almost anything you do has these.
Sure! You're 100% correct! But two quick points here:
1) I wasn't advocating necessarily for a degree, but specifically in rebuttal to the idea that non-STEM majors aren't useful in STEM areas, and
2) One of the benefits of a college degree is that you now have a physical piece of paper that says "I started and finished a 4+ year-long project that proves I can do all of those things," whereas folks without a degree don't have that "proof". I'm NOT saying that you NEED it, but it's useful social proof that says "Hey, I can do all of the things in that list, and here's something that more or less proves it."
But yes, you're right. I could arbitrarily pick History as a major and give you a different but equally impactful list of soft skills that you learn while getting a degree in History! I was specifically pushing back on the parent's assertion that the social sciences (and arts) don't transfer to other domains, which I think is a patently absurd statement.
I dont have issue that much with your larger point. But, you could have picked part time job in supermarket and you would get "be on time", "work well individually", "take direction" or "communicate with people". You could have take any sport (whether collective or individual) and got those too.
>To pick a popular theatre-related discipline, consider what an actor does:
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.
> 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.
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.
Perhaps it would be. I don't find it at all silly to guess that if a critical percentage of everyone were made to confront more ideas and and generally be made more aware and thoughtful, that the eventual result is more civilized behavior between members.
I certainly don't think it helps the situation to use the historical and current state of thimgs as some excuse not to bother trying. You can't create better civilization be decree or force. It can only happen when enough percentage of the population does it for themselves, and they don't when they are ignorant or bubbled.
No one said that, or anything remotely like that or that implies that.
I guess you have a PhD and embody the "exhibit A" counter example eh? Educated yet no better than the uneducated at communication and comprehension.
Or let me guess, you only took technical classes. As close to 100% stem as the system would let you.
I don't really want to make personal attacks like that but this kind of comment is exactly an example of the topic. What field on what spreadsheet gets what number increased or decreased by one to quantify the cost of this sort of lack of understanding?
I've never heard of the book until this thread. How does he define "worth" to society? That seems like a big issue that I wouldn't think it related to proving the math wrong?
Arguments that are common sense and reasonable are not necessarily true. The book is not pair reviewed, and I prefer scientific research over a spreadsheet so I will skip.
The book is not peer reviewed, yes, but it meticulously cites (peer reviewed) social science research for most of its claims. I did spot checks and citations are good. (Through checks would be full time work. 1/7 of the book is dedicated to references.)
What are the quanta of having some % of all societies members be some % more thoughtful people than they would have been had they never had to face ideas in school?
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.
What are the quanta of having some % of all societies members be some % more thoughtful people than they would have been had they never had to face ideas in school?
This assumes that "facing ideas" happens in school and not the real world, which is questionable on both sides.
Technical education is not different. Everybody knows that every kind of education in every field is bad for the world. Demonstration: with absolutely zero education we wouldn't have had roads, guns, world wars, hundred of millions and possibly billions of deaths. So education is bad.
My bias is also to think that social science degrees are not as useful as technical degrees. My guess is that we'd be much better off in adding real science (including some humility) to those degrees, rather than abolishing them. I'd prefer incremental improvement over revolution.
BTW, what is the value of a university degree is to someone's self-worth?
I have been interviewing a ton lately for software developers and it invokes a visceral reaction to see students with a technical education spend two years and tens of thousands of dollars getting a masters degree in "data science". These folks basically spend two years learning what they can pick up in a few coursera and youtube classes which is basically how to "operate" scikit learn.
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.
For anyone looking for a statistical analysis auditing challenge: the author links to an article[1] where they made the spreadsheets in question (questioning the return-on-investment from education) public.
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.
> A few critics bizarrely claimed that one recent paper had refuted my entire enterprise.
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.
Might just be me, but I genuinely wish there was reliable data on everything like this. I'd love to know that someone did a proper study, found that it's not damaging to the knees if you're between BMI such-and-such and run between x and y kilometers every day, that it has health benefits a, b and c, but that of course you have to invest time amount z which one might use also for swimming which then has another value. Then you can just weigh what you enjoy more against the benefits.
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.
Actually, I think this is a decent thought experiment. IMHO it would depend a lot of what is included and not included and what definition of profitability we used.
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.
Then you'd lose that bet. Running, even just a little, results in such clear improvements to general health and lowering of all cause mortality that the spreadsheet creator would have to work really hard to push the effects into the negative, and anything you did to frame running as a negative would be trivially dismissed.
People who can run every day are much healthier than people who can't run every day. People who continue to be able to run every day beyond middle age are exceptionally healthy compared to their peers. It's really hard to disentangle the cause from the effect.
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.
Um, there actually are peer-reviewed studies which address things like running and health. For example, "The Influence of Running on Lower Limb Cartilage: A Systematic Review and Meta‐analysis," Sports Medicine (2022) 52:55–74 [1]
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.
> It's really hard to disentangle the cause from the effect.
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.
I'm a life scientist: it's true that physical exercise has a causal effect on positive health outcomes. However, if you believe demonstrating cause is simple, you don't know enough about science or statistics. It's extremely difficult.
My comment was purely rhetorical, and that was partly my point. The other part of my point is that no matter how carefully you try to account for the costs and benefits of some activity, there are intangibles and benefits that are extremely difficult to convert into dollars (much like the value of a human life when expressed in dollars).
(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?")
In another HN post recently a commenter said something about the stock market, and they invoked an image of people collecting money from Brownian movement.
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.
You are providing zero evidence that there is any value to your experience about reading a clever comment comparing Brownian motion and the stock market. Not even qualitatively. You are already an incredibly rare person who would equate such things, so I think it's very odd that you think this concept could apply to the general population.
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!
Assumptions and reductions are always required, there is no researcher in the world that reads every book or paper released in their field, and for those that do read voraciously, only a tiny fragment of that is remembered or understood on the grounds that the author intended.
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?
I read the article, and I even read through the presentation linked in the article. I didn't read the book, but I'm also not giving a qualitative review of the book.
I'm talking about why people don't think it's worth engaging with to begin with. It's not that his critics are afraid or incapable of engaging with him, but that he's being dismissed out of hand because (regardless of whether it's true or not) he presents as a crank who doesn't appear to understand the field he's attempting to critique.
There's an infinite supply of cranks in the world, and it's usually good practice to avoid engaging with them.
> I'm talking about why people don't think it's worth engaging with to begin with.
But that's not what the author is talking about in his article - you did read it, right? His book is drawing criticism from people who haven't read it. It's fine to choose not to engage with something, but if you're going to comment on it you should read it.
Yes, like I said, I read the article, and I read the linked notes. The article was not really about people criticising his book without reading it, the article was about not engaging in qualitative criticism of his spreadsheets.
Caplan indirectly mentions a paper criticising him, and his dismissal is that it doesn't acknowledge the math.
It's entirely reasonable to comment on why you're choosing not to dedicate your time to something. Especially when the thing to be analysed relies on fundamentally incommensurable values.
FWIW, from actually reading his notes and the extracts of the spreadsheets he quickly dips into a number of flaky assumptions and uses them to apply "corrective biases" which make it very easy to dismiss without wasting time on arduous numerical analysis.
The obsession with “evidence
“ is killing discourse.
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.
When conclusions are far outside reality, one must question the process and axioms from which it was generated. Reasoning from false premises can be strongly supported analytically.
> 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.
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 benefit is not quantifiable then how is it possible to draw the conclusion that there is a benefit (or negative impact on the same token) in the first place?
If the price of education is quantifiable and the debt for it enforceable, then the benefit better be quantifiable.
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.
Honestly I haven't read the book or checked the spreadsheets, but neither of them answer the question: Are the findings true? Are they of value?
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.
I have not read the book, nor looked at the spreadsheets. But as someone who knows a bit about argumentation, I have to point out that, often, if you are forced to argue about the specific data, you have already lost the argument. Data (and quantitative arguments) are appealing because they appear to be "un-biased", but the person picking the numbers has already set the terms of the debate. Someone else might point out that a set of numbers measure some things accurately, but not everything. One might point out that averages (perhaps, on average, many college students learn little more than they learned in high school) obscure the extremes (for some groups, particularly poor people with poorly educated parents, high school and college are far more efficient paths for improving quality of life than any alternative).
It sounds good to say that you can't argue with the data, but you can certainly argue with how the data was picked.
This reminds me of the debunking of the Losada ratio, which was purportedly the precise ratio of positive to negative emotions you should experience to be mentally and emotionally healthy: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-...
No one had previously even bothered to check the numbers before it became a fundamental tenet of the field.
> which was purportedly the precise ratio of positive to negative emotions you should experience to be mentally and emotionally healthy
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
I’ve read a few of his books, this and the “open borders” one. I think the problem is it’s kind of “preaching to the choir” for people who are already ideologically aligned. As in, the solutions he advocates, despite being backed up with lots of numbers, are not actually convincing anyone who wasn’t already receptive.
So it just gets dismissed as “not even wrong” unfairly or not.
The "open borders" book was recommended to me by a friend, but I passed after reading in a summary that my uninformed intuition about the bad economic effects of the policy on at least some large-ish fraction of existing citizens of rich countries was considered correct by Caplan, that he was relying on some kind of compensation to make these folks whole, in a world in which this plan was made reality. Seeing as we've rarely done a good job of this in the past, that sure looked like a great way to convince me open borders were not a good idea, from the perspective of most people already living in rich countries.
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)
Not really. If you put it all together Caplan's world would be a United States with a population of 5 trillion uneducated people. This would propel us to unimagined and unprecedented wealth somehow.
> The most novel feature of my return to education calculations was that I tried to count everything that matters. 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.
(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)
I had a similar reaction. I haven't heard of the author or their modelling prior, so haven't had much time to process the data, but I thought I'd bite, and took a look at some of the spreadsheets.
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.
This might be a knee-jerk reaction, but perhaps the reason nobody reported errors in the spreadsheets is because spreadsheets aren't easily auditable, which is one of the reason many dislike spreadsheets being used for this purpose.
To all the people who are criticizing the author doing it in Python, I think spreadsheets are actually superior to this for public policy.
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.
I'll repeat what I wrote above: Discussion might have been a bit easier if he'd just listed the assumptions and the model underlying the calculations. What can you learn from modifying a single cell? Very little. Just the (hidden) model's sensitivity to that parameter with the rest staying equal.
“ Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.”
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?
Learning a new programming language when you aren't a professional programmer isn't a small barrier.
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.
> 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?
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.
I agree with his arguments at a surface level, but I don’t accept that his analysis was rigorous. Especially because his spreadsheet is monolithic and impossible to double-check.
Honestly, as a researcher in another field who on occasion gets asked to "audit" people's thoughts, it's a return on investment problem. Doing something carefully enough to actually be worthwhile is (especially for someone's wall of madness spreadsheet) many hours of work.
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.
> People doing economic analysis should understand incentives.
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.
"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".
With a grain of salt, as someone who has not read the spreadsheets (and has no interest in doing so).
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 also don't align with the author ideologically, but I have to protest somewhat. Assuming that the inputs and the model are sound (which I'm not saying they are, going by some other commenters' judgements), the spreadsheets tell us something regardless of whether we subscribe to making policy decisions with pure monetary terms ROI. Mainly that we need a damn good non-monetary arguments to make young people learn something (here I'm thinking of oversaturating the school programs in the country where I reside) and to justify existence of places that say "higher education" and usually charge money but they give their students not much.
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.
I agree it's a positive move to bring formal logic and statistics into other fields, but (at least where I'm from) the social sciences do engage heavily with epistemology. And as a STEM major myself, I'll admit it's often in critical ways that the hard sciences fail.
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.
> ...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.
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've built spreadsheets with financial data before for business investment and decision purposes and the idea that any spreadsheet or argument relevant to public or business policy would be value free seems laughable to me. There's always an agenda. Given that, I think the right starting place might be to ask cui bono, who benefits from these policy recommendations?
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.
Well, if you're going to throw down the gauntlet like that Mr. Caplan, how can I resist! I began by actually looking at this authors spreadsheets, then looking at their claims, and ultimately, I downloaded a copy of their book[0] to review what that book says. So here's the info:
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.
This is a good point. Caplan makes a huge deal about the fact that a students that drops out one semester before finishing the degree takes a huge penalty to their salary. This is what he calls the “sheep skin effect”. He claims that because such a student gets almost all of the education, their penalty must correspond to the signaling component.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think the term "negative signal" muddies the water here.
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.
> But if Caplan is correct, why would someone drop out in their senior year?
That doesn’t matter. We don’t have to walk the hypothetical parts along with one person. If your value increases linearly with education and there is no signaling effect, you could drop out 10min before graduation, and your salary would end up being the same as someone who went the last 10min and got the diploma.
Obviously that’s not the case. And some signaling is present, because people who do half a masters degree don’t end up making significantly more than those who stopped after the bachelors and got a job, because half a masters worth of learned experience isn’t even worth a fraction of half of the work of having the diploma.
I am not assuming that at all. The requirements to get a diploma are more than just learning in class. It involves navigating a complex bureaucracy, long term planning, and a certain level of maturity. It is entirely possible that someone could plod along for 7 semesters while having no better chance at graduating than someone who dropped out in the first year. But someone who struggles in school but still manages to push through and get a degree has demonstrated a sufficient level of growth and maturity to warrant extra consideration from future employers. Caplan thinks the degree is a meritless signal, and he thinks his "sheepskin effect" analysis proves this. And I am saying that his "sheepskin effect" requires analysis data from the college dropouts, but the fact that college dropouts exist at all implies more social value to the degree than he lets on. In fairness, he does try and address the potential "ability bias" of the sheepskin effect in his book, but I found it not particularly convincing (the study he referenced controls for standardized test scores, which seem tautological as college students have already been "sorted" to a high degree by those same scores).
> And some signaling is present
I am not arguing that signaling is not present. I am arguing against Caplan's theory that +90% of the value of the degree is signaling. If you read his book, he spends some time explaining that the ratio of the value of "human capital" vs "signaling" of a college degree is a key factor in whether or not college has social value. He claims that college is almost entirely "signaling", and therefore has negative social value. And he tries to use his spreadsheet analysis about the "sheepskin effect" to prove this. But what we are saying in this thread is that he is hiding some ideologically driven assumptions in his analysis. Someone else hypothesized that the effect could be due to an inefficient hiring market. I am arguing that the obtaining the degree in and of it self is a merit worthy accomplishment valued highly by the market. And others still could argue that maybe job candidates do not post partial educational experiences on their resume for fear of negative signaling. All of these could be partially true, or none of these could be true. It doesn't really matter. They all are plausible arguments for why the sheepskin effect exists and their isn't sufficient evidence to disprove their plausibility.
Feel free to counter anything I said with ideological arguments. But be warned that doing so merely proves the point I am trying to make. The entire point of this thread was to figure out why no one audited Caplan's spreadsheet. The most common argument, was that the spreadsheet is irrelevant if the analysis was stitched together with ideological assumptions. Your math can be correct, but someone with a different world view will interpret the meaning of those numbers differently than you will. And some of us took a look at his spreadsheet, and instead of a "smoking gun" we got exactly what we expected. A bunch of squishy formulas using squishy data trying to control for squishy variables and at the end a fairly large leap in how to interpret the results.
It provides more than one signal: a signal that you have obtained desireable knowledge and sensibilties from your education, and a signal that you can be relied on to complete something. The fact that the latter overshadows the former in a world where degree bearers are abundant is unsurprising and tells us precisey nothing we didn't already know.
Ah, but if Caplan's signaling hypothesis is true, it creates an arbitrage opportunity. I'm thinking hypothetically and in broad terms. Take that N-1 dropout. If that person is worth more to a business than their market wage, then a savvy business person would have a profit motive to hire them for more than their market wage, but less than their known value, resulting in a win for the worker and the employer.
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.
If his signaling hypothesis is true, employers are reading the signal correctly.
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.
Indeed, the question really boils down to what the signal symbolizes. I think the implication at the time was that it was an "empty" signal, in that the last semester of your education can't be the source for 100% of its value. Professional football and basketball teams are happy to hire you before you finish your degree, if you're any good. ;-)
Also, I don't know the extent to which this is an issue, but the US has a distinction between workers who have to be paid an hourly wage, and those who are "exempt," and one of the allowable criteria is whether the job requires a college degree. Comparing the value of hourly and salaried employees requires knowing how much they actually earn.
You’ve just struck gold.
This is the business model of a lot of Indian IT consulting businesses. No one cares about a master or bachelors degree when out-sourcing work, as long as the job gets done. But you can significantly lower the pay of such people even when they are way more experienced and better than even master grads.
Figured someone who has read the book might see this and be able to answer a question — to what extent is Caplan’s critique of the U.S.-model of widespread-ish resource-intensive higher education tied and the credentialing problem it “solves,” and how much is a critique of higher education in toto?
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”
It's more like, "university is good for most individual who actually complete it, but in aggregate, it is a net loss to the society, both when people pay their own way, and even more so when society subsidizes it".
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.
I love this analogy. On its face, my assumption would be that keeping this trail ritual would be of immeasurable value to the society merely as a shared challenge, myth, and meeting place for all members of the society. At the very least, it's something to do, to aspire to, to measure oneself against, etc. I'm curious now to read the book to see if it addresses this idea.
Uneducated people would not bother with investigating something like that and why would educated people try to undermine their own choices? It is not in their interest to do so.
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.
Interestingly, while it's entirely possible that the spreadsheets, through their abstruseness, hide incorrectness; current policy recommendations just try things by assuming outcomes. The conclusion is pre-determined, so evidence isn't really acquired.
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.
I’m intrigued, but it may be a while before I look at the book and spreadsheets. But there is definitely a point when education becomes a net loss. Current US education system might be an example. You can make a lot of conclusions from current US economy. E.g. look at Tesla stock. It means something, but it will take decade to learn who is right about what it means.
I work with data and make nice presentations. With the same data i'm able to make compeling and accurate arguments for whatever point of view. Pro, or against something, i can come up with a story for anything.
I don't care about your spreadsheets. But it's not because I don't care about quantitative assessments, it's because I believe you can't measure everything quantitatively (and put in monetary terms, and make decisions based on that).
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.
This is a great example of how money and market does not encompass all of life.
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.
For every dollar you put in this box, I’ll put ten cents into a scholarship fund for poor children in your country then burn the dollar. How many dollars do you put into the box?
Would I rather spend money on scholarships for poor children or buy the recipe for a functional net-positive fusion reactor from aliens? How much recipe does each of my dollars get?
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 know this is besides the point but even if we didn't have the materials, just knowing what materials we lack and that they are possible is monumental and would be worth tens of billions of dollars.
The main reason I couldn't care less about spreadsheets: I have no desire to open a goddamn spreadsheet. Why didn't he just use a sqlite database or something?
I love the irony in all the comments here criticizing his spreadsheets and arguments by people who have clearly not read the book or looked at the spreadsheets.
I once spent a long time building a pretty detailed pro forma model to raise money for a brick and mortar business in a spreadsheet. It was beautifully formatted, comprehensive, and appeared convincing. I patted myself on the back for training myself as an investment banker in 3 months.
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:
Your spreadsheets look nice! I think if I was a banker I would be thinking "okay but what if no one shows up and wants to buy". All the spreadsheets say is that you will lose at least $140k (probably more if you didn't include everything or were too optimistic) per month if and until you got some solid sales coming in.
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 mean, I did download the spreadsheets and (skim) read the book after reading the parent article. TL;DR is that the spreadsheets are solid and unsurprising, though his interpretation of said spreadsheets seem to be the part that makes me ask "hmmm, I'm not sure if that follows from the evidence."
There's a strain of Marxism called Maoism Third-Worldism. (This relates to the article -- I'm getting to it.)
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.
This reminds me of people online who construct gigantic walls of bad faith argument text and insist that it's up to everyone else to "debate them" and spend hours deconstructing their argument.
Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk.
For what it's worth, after spending a little bit of time looking at his intro and conclusions, it appears to me that he is actually not arguing in bad faith. His assumption is that the purpose of an education is to raise your future earnings potential, and that the higher your salary is, the better for society you are.
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.
Policy arguments are based entirely on economic considerations. I don’t remember anyone bringing up parties while discussing student loans or charter schools.
Another example: arxiv.org proofs of P != NP, FTL, perpetual motion, grand unified theory, etc. The signal-to-noise ratio of crackpots to experts is just too darn high.
This is one example where academia & credentialing serves an important purpose, even if academia can be pedantic & insular at times.
> Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk.
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?
> 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.
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?
When there's a real possibility of meaningful and useful insights, we might consider taking it seriously. For me, this can be linked in part to the person's experience and credibility.
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 thing is, Caplan is a distinguished economist sure, but he is an interloper when it comes to education.
As you said, it's also worth noting that the community of "distinguished economists" is itself a fairly insular and politically driven field with a lot of ideological assumptions. That's not to say it's all hogwash, but for as much as Economists love to tell you otherwise it's still a soft-science very vulnerable to convenient abuse of statistics.
For what it's worth, I skimmed over the presentation he linked in the article. One of the first claims he makes is:
"Education and ability (IQ, work ethic, etc.)
are correlated, so raw numbers give education too much
credit."
He then goes on to correct for a "45% ability bias" to income statistics. Without even getting into the problems of correlation vs causation there, it's a perfect example of the foundational assumptions that got his work rejected to begin with.
You can have an opinion about everything, but others are not obliged to like it and/or give you a platform for it. Baseless opinions are not interesting to read, and if there is a base for it, then that would be worth posting. Also, not sure why you're afraid of troll responses given that your comment is literally trolling (merriam webster, definition 2c).
So i bought his book (10 pounds down the drain, I will never get back) I’m barelly in the first chapter and already feel cheated.
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.
> He says he doesn’t talk about the kind of education which teaches usefull skills.
And what percentage of people do those kinds of studies? And for those who do, what percentage of the time was still spent on useless things?
I'm about 15 minutes into a podcast with the author about the book (linked elsewhere in this thread) and from what I got so far, it's indeed about the majority case, not the couple of engineers that obtain applicable knowledge. It's also mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
You're right that it does seem like a youtube title among books and I get the frustration, but you're also exaggerating what the author is saying and posting that version online for everyone else to take home.
Here is a good example: a Japanese mathematician claims he proved the abc conjecture, with an enormous, complex, and totally novel approach. After it was ignored for a long time due to this, it took other mathematicians months of efforts to go through it. And they finally found that not only was the proof incorrect, at least some also think the approach is fundamentally misguided.
You quoted the wrong part if you’re after the dismissiveness. Declaring someone’s argument is in “bad faith” is unimpeachable. You can counter “no, I genuinely believe this” - but that’s just more bad faith argument! It’s an iron-jawed and unconquerable tool to deploy against any argument you do not want to engage with.
Now - are there arguments not worth engaging with? Absolutely.
well like one example would be if the author's study is predicated on the notion that salaries are optimally allocated, but you suspect that the hidden term representing misallocation of labor is actually quite large. In other words, you have to consider the possibility that degrees are not a perfectly honest signal, and that people are not always paid exactly according to their productivity.
You only have to have one flagrantly unprovable assumption to make the whole chain of inference invalid
But people are criticizing his result. His complaint is not "Nobody read my book or looked at my spreadsheets" but instead "People are disagreeing with my conclusions, but not my logic." If his case wasn't worth arguing about then people wouldn't be arguing with him. Given that they are arguing it's interesting to note that they aren't doing it by arguing quantitatively.
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.