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".

When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math.

>"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.

So what does he say about care-free student life?

> [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.

> Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed

No, the entire point of me asking about it is because I think it has value to people making educational choices.

> that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.

Yes, and the way the study addresses this is batshit insane, unless you are an unfeeling utilitarian robot.

>> 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".

You said

> "What about $FOO"

but you meant

> "Your $FOO conclusions are wrong"

Is this correct?

> 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.

Do your own homework?

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--

- O Captain! My Captain!

Right. But I didn’t assert that all things can be gainfully modeled.

I suggested that the non-specific incompleteness of a model isn’t a compelling reason not to use the model.

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".

If Caplan is right it should be a personal choice not subsidized by government

That sounds like a utilitarian dystopia.

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 the point of education is not learning things and building human capital, but rather play and self-expression

Wow, that's the falsest false dichotomy I've seen in a long time.

Por que no los dos?

> 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!

Do you have any data to support your conclusion?

I would, with a straight face, suggest everyone is wrong and the real purpose of education should be building better voters.

> The goal of society is happiness, not productivity.

Who are you to decide?

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.

> It's entirely possible for Caplan to be correct about his material analysis, and that still not be the right conclusion.

How do the critics know that it is not the right conclusion? Where are their numbers that support their conclusion.

Look, I understand research is hard and that it may occasionally result in an incorrect conclusion from the data that was gathered. It happens.

But it is not logically consistent to call the conclusion wrong when there is no data to support that position.

>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.

Look at new papers on NBER, for example:

https://www.nber.org/papers

Half of them is just social science dressed as economics. That’s why Econ departments are growing.

>> 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".

>would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness?

Google had 20k FTEs in 2008, 135k FTEs in 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...

In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later. 115 thousand people, most of them college graduates, did nothing useful for more than a decade. Their primary accomplishment was to inflate house prices in tech hubs.

The United States is not short on college graduates.

> 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.

Haha you're so right, I can't think of anything at all.

*closes Chrome tab on my Android phone, opens another website hosted on Google Cloud Platform*

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?

lol so true

*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.

>chrome

Copy of Safari.

>android

Copy of iOS

>GCP

Copy of AWS.

Cloning an existing product needed, at the absolute most, a staff of a hundred each. If you want to be wildly excessive, add 900 useless middle managers and developer relations people.

Then what were the other 112,000 full time Google employees doing? What one hundred and twelve business critical new products were they engaged in?

"Nothing"? Then why did they need to have college degrees?

> Each one of those needed, at the absolute most, a staff of a hundred.

Ah yes, this is why AWS is noted for employing only 100 engineers, and Apple employs 200 across its browser and OS divisions.

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.

"His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes"

Just curious, have you read over his spreadsheets?

Yes

I was just thinking.

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.

This would be a good place to start: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2943670/

> Has everyone thought about the fact that the alternative to spreadsheets is policymakers putting their hands on their hips and saying, "Yep, $30k sounds about right for this month?"

Well, I can’t speak for everyone else, but I don’t think about that because what you claim as fact is actually a false dilemma. The actual alternative is to do good science using the correct methods.

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

>shouldn't we ask that he actually perform relevant and useful arithmetic?

This is a great point, but has anyone looked at the spreadsheet yet to see for themselves? I think we're proving him right so far, haha.

> 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.

It's not a cover, it's an explanation :)

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.

This seems rational to me.

>My priors already have education being a net benefit as highly probable, and I'll update, but not much.

How'd you get those priors?

I guess just a life of listening to people, like economists, who were in more knowledgable positions than I, repeatedly saying it over and over again.

I'm in no personal position to otherwise say boo.

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...)

Isn't most everything in life just piles of multiplication and addition?

in the same way that most of tennis is hitting a ball back and forth, yeah

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.

https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-ed...

You could just look at the data in the spreadsheet instead of speculating?

I kinda think this is exactly part of the point he is making.

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).

It's not reasonable to liken the decision making processes of deciding to go see a movie and determining government funding priorities for education.

> 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.

> Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable?

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.

Or you could.

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.

My keyboard and mouse are broken.

This is actually true. I'm typing this on a phone.

lmao

This cracked me up more than it should have!

Honest question, why is this funny?

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 a certain level I might agree.

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.

Our high school scores for English and math were 30.1% and 25.9%.

We had Iowa towns that were in the 90%s.

No, I cannot compare them, you are right, these people were exactly where they should have been.

Is this sentiment perhaps a bit biased, especially for what I am paying.

(Yes, I live in one of the most affordable places in the U.S.)

I'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.

What I would say to your assertion is this.

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 makes more happen for less.

That's what we expect, as industrial management moved our industry offshore.

Education has no right of excusal. Perform.

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?

Why would anyone who has the talent to "make more happen for less" stay in education considering the abysmal pay?

The best management hires the right people for the job to be done, and retains them.

More importantly it fosters them, and gives them the spaces that they need for this to happen.

The best management overlooks the things that do not infringe on the job to be done.

The best management negotiates rather than imposes terms, on all subjects outside of the task.

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.

My relationship with them lasted many years, lasted through the pandemic, and they left angry.

I am selling the house that I rented to them, and putting it into stocks.

I don't know if this makes me a bad person, but I did want something better out of the experience at some point. That's past.

I would not recommend rental property, but most of you know this by now. Nothing like being young and foolish.

> 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.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-...

EDIT: There is actually more granular information available as well. Fewer than 10% of elementary school teachers earn less than 40k per year. Probably fewer than 5% earn as much as or less than the 36k number you quoted for national average.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252021.htm#nat

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).

> ROI is not a relevant concept for education investment

If there is no return or even return sought then it can’t be called an investment. It’s just spending on part-time prison for kids.

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.

> either rewrite on not write the book in that case

Your comment doesn't actually answer anything lol - he would - or wouldn't and you say both

The parent is saying that if the data pointed otherwise he would either:

- rewrite the book or

- not have written the book to begin with.

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.

You are representing exactly the point that Caplan is making.

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?

http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.pdf

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.

Have you seen the data as well to judge like that?

(just being curious)