Dogpiling on an Education System Supporter

Why he's full of it

Bryan Caplan recently wrote a good response to someone critiquing his book The Case Against Education. Near the bottom of the article there were some arguments relating to the high school system which I would like to comment on.

In his book, Caplan didn’t really address how wasteful the high school system is, instead focusing on the university system. In my book, I wrote the most comprehensive case against the American high school system and similar systems that I am aware of.

The case is broken down into a few main components:

1. It’s historically abnormal (Ch. 1)

2. It’s not lindy, it’s historically new (Ch. 2 part 1)

3. It was created for dubious purposes by ignorant people (Ch. 2 part 1)

4. Evidence points against attending high school having any intrinsic individual benefits (Ch. 2 part 2)

5. High school aged people are mature enough to work instead or attend university (depending on their IQ) (Ch. 3)

6. The idea to the contrary of point 5 was made up by academic fraudsters backed by education system expansionist research funds (Ch. 4)

Like Caplan, I’ve never heard a serious rebuttal of any of these points. The reception of my book is part of what influenced my idea that political views are mostly genetic and “culture” plays a minor to null role. My book was ironclad. It should have experienced exponential spread and overthrown the current education system, if idealist views of history are accurate.

I learned first-hand this doesn’t happen — if people don’t like an idea, they merely shrug it off. “It doesn’t vibe with me, bro.” If you’re lucky you’ll find some people genetically inclined to agree with you and they may use your writings as evidence in online debates where no one has their mind changed substantially on any issues.

Caplan’s book has been more widely read, maybe because it’s better, maybe because people are more inclined to criticize the university system, maybe because he’s more established and had a farther read — but it changed nothing. And as he points out, people just spin up on-the-fly Bullshit^TM (this is an actual academic term now):

Now guess what?  Since the 2018 publication of The Case Against Education, precisely zero people have emailed me about those spreadsheets.  The book enjoyed massive media attention.  My results were ultra-contrarian: my preferred estimate of the Social Return to Education is negative for almost every demographic.  I loudly used these results to call for massive cuts in education spending.  Yet since the book’s publication, no one has bothered to challenge my math.  Not publicly.  Not privately.  No one cared about my spreadsheets.

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.”  [not even trying] Some critics called me a philistine: “Education isn’t about making money; it’s about becoming a whole person.” [bullshit]  Never mind that I wrote a whole chapter against this misinterpretation.  A few critics bizarrely claimed that one recent paper had refuted my entire enterprise [I call this SACing, it’s a form of bullshit].  But as far as I recall, zero critics ever checked my math.

I argue that our critiquer’s arguments in favor of the high school system are Bullshit made up using the powers of motivated reasoning. He begins with:

There are two factors that I think meaningfully change the calculus on society’s return to education that I didn’t see in the book. My hunch is that these make the expected value positive for universal K-12 but not for universal post-secondary:

K-12 is an anti-concept in this discussion. Failure of a guy smart enough to argue about “fat tails” to distinguish high school from learning to read and write in a discussion about the value of education around the age of 18 (late high school age, early university age) is at best motivated reasoning, and at worst dishonest. Bullshit either way.

1. Childcare: as we saw during the school shutdowns during COVID, if kids aren’t in school it significantly impacts parental productivity. Without free public schools, I’d expect we would return to a world where many more families would only have one working parent. I’d guess it would also decrease birth-rates. Maybe some people think this would be a better world, but it would certainly reduce the tax base.

People over 14 don’t need babysitting. This is bullshit.

In a non-agrarian society, my guess is that having a bunch of 12-18yos roaming around not in school would cause lots of problems. You could say that these students should go into the workplace…

12-18 yos is another anti-concept. Also, uninformed hunches are epistemically worthless. The hunch, for instance, could be that you’re an egalitarian and high school looks like a miniature USSR or North Korea, so it appeals to you aesthetically. Hunching is just admitting to motivated reasoning — “it just vibes bad, bro”.

, but without very robust oversight I think we’d see a lot more abuse — while child abuse unfortunately does happen in school settings, schools have created structural advantages that make it easier for them to prevent and catch this versus in the workplace.

This is the same form of bullshit as “but what about socialization.” What should we call this? Whaddaboutism? “But what about child abuse?” What about it? Most child abuse happens in public schools, so my hunch is getting rid of them will reduce child abuse. Not only is child abuse a different topic from the payoff of schools, the guy doesn’t even bring any evidence with him — he just makes stuff up on the fly. “schools have created structural advantages” this is Bullshit. What structural advantages? I could just as easily argue those “structures” are in themselves abuse. It’s obvious this guy starts from the vibe that he likes high schools and goes from there, latching onto anything that sounds vaguely in support of his case. Isn’t that bad faith reasoning?

Formally, the argument is that getting rid of high school will increase the net utility of the nation. So it’s not even an argument that child abuse goes up if school goes down, and that therefore we shouldn’t take it down. Child abuse isn’t the only factor in utility — far from it. If “child” abuse goes up 1% without high schools, so be it. You have a degenerated argument.

I’ve argued that the benefits from getting rid of high school would be so enormous that it follows that weak pre-packaged rejoinders about socialization or abuse are never plausible arguments. High school is so wasteful that whatever minute problems emerge from getting rid of it would be dwarfed by the societal savings from the axing. Those savings could easily fund programs to get rid of the small negatives. For example, social clubs for 14-18 year olds would be much cheaper than high schools, and detecting abuse in apprenticeships would be quite easy in the age of the internet and mass surveillance — 14 is old enough to just record abuse secretly anyway. There is no “anti-abuse structure” that high school has a maximally efficient monopoly on.

2. “Fat tails”: The fact that most kids find most of their classes useless and boring doesn’t automatically mean that the expected value per student is not positive. I took a computer science course in high school and it changed the course of my life and career, but that same course was probably boring and useless for most of the other people in the class.

I don’t know what to call this but it’s definitely motivated reasoning Bullshit. You could say this to any empirical estimate in the literature. I believe the black-white IQ gap is 30 in favor of blacks because there exists a secret encampment of black Yakubs with 9000 IQs that IQ measurers missed. Fat tails, bro.

I guess this is just epistemic nihilism, or an absurd argument, because we just debunked it with a reductio ad absurdum. At this point the guy is signaling (without knowing it) that he’s vibes over reason for sure — what else can you get from this argument?

My uncle took French in high school, went to Paris for a semester in college, met a woman there and lived in France for most of his adult life. French was probably a waste of time for nearly every other student in his class, but for my uncle it was a big deal!

Reddit tier anecdote.

Steve Jobs learning about calligraphy is about as “mickey mouse” of a course as you could get, but it turns out he put that to use in designing the Apple computer — as he says, "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. At an individual level, is the opportunity to take one life-changing course worth sitting through 30 other boring/useless ones? Maybe!

Anotha one …

At a societal level, If the requirement that all students take biology in high school increased the odds by 5% that we would have an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 widely available within 18 months of the virus appearing, that might very well justify keeping the requirement, even if 99.9% of students find it useless.

We’re pouring in some whaddaboutism and strawmanning here too. He’s arguing as if my ideal system is one where nobody receives any education over the age of 14. That isn’t true, I know how to identify people smart enough to contribute to stuff like mRNA vaccines by the age of 14, and I know they’re <20% of the population. This will be used and they will receive an appropriate higher education instead of high school.