25.7% of respondents speak a language other than English. Within this sample, 41.5% claim to speak the other language “very well.” Within this sub-sub-sample, just 7.0% say they learned to speak this foreign language in school. If you multiply out these three percentages, you get 0.7%. The marginal product of two years of pain and suffering per high school graduate: less than one student in a hundred acquires fluency. (And that’s self-assessed fluency, which people almost surely exaggerate).

If you lower the bar from “very well” to “well” the picture remains grim: merely 2.5% of GSS respondents claimed to reach this level of foreign language competence in school.

An education professor who studies foreign language acquisition wrote to him in agreement:

I finally had the opportunity to conduct a study in which I could measure how much of a language that monolingual US students mastered after 1, 2, and 3 years of Spanish courses in high school by using a standardized measure normed with native Spanish speakers. The short answer, as you said, is not much at all.

Caplan’s homeschooled sons became fluent in Spanish — by doing ten times as much as normal students.

>Almost no one learns how to speak a foreign language very well in school.

Is he writing about the Western world in general, perhaps about one specific country? Does he have a data set of students?

>Going from zero to fluency is ultra-rare, but I’ve seen it happen.

Did he document his observations at all, or is he relying on memory?

>During my eight years in college, I spent many thousands of hours reading about economics, politics, and philosophy.

Did he have the leisure to spend eight years in college because he got merit scholarships or because he had rich parents?

>Since high school, I’ve spent over ten thousand hours writing.

Lots of people have spent tens of thousands of hours on writing. Some of them are productive. Many of them are semi-successful hucksters.

>When young people ask me, “How can I be like you?“ my first thought is, again, do ten times as much.

Caplan comes across as a salesman using vague anecdotes to look for more customers.

>Ten times as much of what, exactly? The answer is usually: Whatever you already think the crucial ingredient is.

That is horrible advice. If young people are coming to Caplan and they want to succeed, they don’t know what the crucial ingredient is, and Caplan is not responsible for his failures. Caplan can give bad advice to young people and then ignore the ones who fail.

>“Why can’t I get ahead in my career? I strive to study and emulate my role models.” Great idea; you just need to multiply your effort by a factor a ten.

This leaves out the questions of whether the role models are appropriate, whether the world’s circumstances have changed, etc. For example, John D. Rockefeller managed to succeed (by leveraging his psychopathic traits), and possibly some budding psychopaths managed to succeed by imitating him, but that does not prove he is an effective role model in the 21st century.