Can we cite third world nations and past human history? Or do you want a detailed list of every time that lack of education or information negatively affected individuals, regions, economies, or governments? The list would be several billion lines long and no human could possibly compile it. I'm sure r/AskHistorians could give you a list of some of the more entertaining examples if you're interested.

OP didn't just assert that education has a value, but that it is "almost invaluable." In this context, we're talking about the marginal returns from more education compared to the marginal costs. I'm asking for evidence that, for our society, the marginal benefit from more education exceeds the marginal cost.

Just in economic terms, the value of education is pretty clear:

https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-educatio...

The value in terms of other benefits (which save financially and in other, more difficult to measure ways) is also pretty clear:

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/lm46.pdf

That's the end of the free research I'll do to prove you wrong, because frankly, it's extremely obvious to me and everyone else here that you're a troll and education is valuable to society and has a positive return on investment. Use google yourself, do a thorough investigation, or you aren't worth a damn.

It also occurs to me that you don't understand the meaning of the word "invaluable". Here's help: https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/invaluable

The BLS chart shows correlation, not causation. The question is not whether people with college degrees make more money, but whether college actually provided something that inherently increased their earning capacity (beyond the signaling value of college).

In Germany, the plurality of kids finish school at Grade 10. Does it make our economy better and more competitive that we make kids endure school through Grade 12, and now are increasingly pushing them to do it through Grade 16? Or is it just a zero sum game?

Education system != Education

Libraries allow for all types of education, not just institutionalized education. This helps facilitate learning. I shouldn't have to provide you any stats that show that gleaning wisdom from the past attempts of others can result in learning. And to cut through the web of semantic bullshit you are building here, learning is absolutely invaluable.

> shows correlation, not causation

Oh boy, I guess I'm the one who has to tell you that causality can't actually be proven with regards to real events ever, and that correlation and repeated experiments don't conclusively prove anything, they just give us some very good authority with which to make a claim. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but it can suggest it very strongly.

And again, here you are arguing about university education in a discussion about libraries.

If what you're looking for is a brief overview of education as development vs signaling I would point here:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/976932046638538752.html

It's written by an education economist as a response to Bryan Caplan's recent book and I think it'll help give a basic notion of what people in the field think (and some understanding of the research.)

I also think a definition of 'invaluable' as 'unable to be valued' instead of 'infinite value' is necessary here. I see in another comment you've commented that opportunities shouldn't be locked behind golden gates. Even those of us who think education has a high value agree with that!

Furthermore the original comment mentions education and information. Surely you agree that information has value. But if I sat down and tried to read one of your amicus briefs it'd probably be difficult for me to understand and I'd almost certainly miss important details. So how do you learn to understand them? Education.

>Does it make our economy better and more competitive that we make kids endure school through Grade 12, and now are increasingly pushing them to do it through Grade 16? Or is it just a zero sum game?

I'm gonna quote from that link above.

In fact, signaling almost certainly is productive. Sure, in the simplest signaling model where there's only one job, education signaling is zero-sum (if you get ahead it's at the expense of others). But as soon as you introduce multiple, different, occupations, that changes! For a basic example of this, say you have two occupations, each with room to employ half the population, "Simple" and "Complex." In Simple, everyone produces 1. In Complex, smarties (half the pop) produce 4 and everyone else produces 0. In extreme-land where there's no signaling, people are basically assigned to jobs randomly, everyone gets paid a wage of 1, and average production is .51 + .5(.54+.50) = 1.5.

Now introduce a completely wasteful, no-HC education signal. Ed is free for smarties, but it costs 3 for everyone else because they'd have to hire tutors. Now, employers know who the smarties are, and they all get Complex jobs. Others get Simple jobs. Production is .51 + .5(4) = 3. Smarties get a wage of 4 and others get a wage of 1. Others don't bother going to school - they'd get a wage bump of 3 but they'd spend it all on school anyway, so why bother?

Here, signaling alone doubled production (this approach is generally called "matching"). There's a reason we call signaling outcomes the "second-best" outcome in game theory, and not "the really awful outcome" - because it can increase efficiency over NOT having the signal.

All of which is to say that education is some part signaling, some part development and mostly made up of parts that are impossible to distinguish between the two with current research methods. But even considering that it's still not a zero-sum game. And all of this is only considering the narrow range of economistic thinking about education, once you go from the frame of educating workers to educating citizens it gets even more important (and even more tangled.)

>The BLS chart shows correlation, not causation.

I mean this is almost philosophical but how would you ever distinguish actual causation there? I got involved in a thread here the other day about distinguishing environmental from genetic effects and the basic answer there was that researchers currently aren't able to distinguish certain effects. I suspect the answer here is similar

What will you give in exchange for that evidence? A differing opinion with sufficient evidence to back it, or merely a less-wrongian meta-comment on styles of discussion?

The former is valuable. The latter is worse than uninteresting.

> Citation needed.

Ask a librarian.

Isn't this like asking a cosmetic surgeon if you need a nose job?

Is a librarian going to give me sound statistical research, or regurgitate shibboleths about the importance of education?

There's something ironic about a lawyer and university employee decrying education. Perhaps we should hit you over the head a few times until you forget everything you've ever learned and see how well the rest of your life turns out?

Nothing ironic about it. Lawyers in the U.S. typically need seven years of education (a four-year college degree, and a three-year JD). In the U.K., they manage with a 3 to 4-year LLB. In the U.S., everyone is required to go to high-school through grade 12. In Germany, 40% of people finish at grade 10. Both the U.K. and Germany manage to have world class economies with substantially less education than the U.S. The U.S. is over educationalized, and part of the reason is that people are inundated with pablum like "education is almost invaluable."

We were talking about the value of libraries and education, not university education.

I should come clean, I'm also a university employee. I do agree with you that we require too much formal education in many cases, and would add that the financial cost of university education in the US is outrageous. However, education, independent of universities, clearly has great value. Libraries in particular are very cheap; a single library can service many thousands of people with only a few employees.

Personally, I'd like to see industry embrace educational resources like Coursera, so we can move away from the expensive, often predatory university model that locks many fields behind golden gates.

I agree with you 100%. However, I also think that libraries are one way that you can compensate for a lack of a formal education, and as pointed out here, they often serve as a physical refuge from the world that is important for learning. For example, I think that libraries should stock more textbooks in addition to regular books. Textbooks are, typically, a) very expensive, and b) very hard to track down, especially if they are older.

Democracy can't function (at least not well) without an educated populace with access to information.