When Bryan Caplan started writing The Case Against Education, he expected to confront a massive research literature claiming that education definitely has a massive effect on economic growth:
Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that — despite overwhelming pro-education bias — the massive research literature on education and growth hadn’t found much of anything. Contrary to conventional stories about the positive externalities of education, mainstream estimates of education’s national rate of return were consistently below estimates of education’s individual rate of return. Just as the signaling model predicts.
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New ideas are the root of progress. People today live far better than they did in 1800 because people today know far more than they did in 1800. Earth in 1800 contained all the materials required to make an airplane or iPad. But until the right ideas came along, the materials lay fallow. Why did mankind have to wait so long for the right ideas to arrive? Part of the answer is that ideas, once created, are cheap to copy. As a result, innovators glean only a sliver of the value they create.
These truisms lead straight to a stirring sermon on “Education, Foundation of a Dynamic Society.” While most students are not creative, heavy K-12 investment fertilizes society’s creative potential by giving everyone the mental tools to innovate. Heavy investment in colleges and universities, similarly, brings top students up to the research frontier and provides innovation leaders with employment and funding. If consistently investing 10% of national income in education elevates the annual growth rate from 1% to 2% without any further benefits, the social return is a hefty 11%.
Unfortunately, this stirring sermon is wishful thinking.
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While the evidence is messy, education seemingly does less for countries than individuals. At the national level, it’s not clear that education increases living standards at all, much less that education makes countries’ living standards increase at a faster rate. If you can’t tell if your machine moves, you may safely assume it’s not a perpetual motion machine.
Not safe to assume that *spending on education* and *actual education* are correlated very well.
Has anyone ever thought that giving “the tools to innovate” to people who shouldn’t have them might produce terrible effects on society? Actually, a very inelegant way of trying to allocate resources — by brute-forcing them — and the disgraceful results show.
Bryan Caplan, we love you like a brother, but have you ever heard of a place called Hong Kong?
It is the year 2025. Are centrally planned government-sponsored carceral schooling facilities staffed by depressed unhealthy underfucked fat midwit middle-aged divorcées the best mechanism of intergenerational information transfer?
Most children ought to be out of school by 8th grade. And some do not benefit from that and ought to be released earlier.
Roo_ster says:
That’s what Soviet school was by the end (also sucky, molding and bloating, but nowhere near so aggressively). Three stages: Junior, Middle, Senior.
Junior school did not look like anyone expected the kids to actually learn anything at all beyond basic literacy and numeracy, the rest is just some PE and excuses to keep them busy for a few hours and saddle with homework.
Middle school is the most of it, with basic physics, and what not.
Senior school was optional, mostly intended as generic rounded preparation for higher education. Those who didn’t go for it went into professional schools and would get basic professional training by the time the boys get mobilized (i.e.18).