He won the highest awards in computer science, psychology, and economics

Wednesday, July 15th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIf David Epstein had to choose a single thinker whose work most influenced Inside the Box, it would be Herbert Simon:

Simon was trained as a political scientist, but a handful of disciplines claim him. He won the highest award in computer science (the Turing Award), and in psychology (Outstanding Lifetime Contributions), and in economics—the Nobel Prize. When a graduate student once asked Simon to explain his mastery of multiple fields, Simon replied that he was actually just fanatically exploring a single topic: how humans make decisions.

The fanaticism began with a class project in 1935, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago writing a term paper on public recreation in Milwaukee.

[…]

The public works department had recently upgraded playgrounds with new equipment and attractive landscaping, and wanted the budget to prioritize maintenance of the beautiful new grounds. The school board, on the other hand, wanted to prioritize hiring staff to lead activities at the playgrounds.

[…]

As he later wrote: “My previous study of economics provided me with a ready hypothesis: Divide the funds so that the next dollar spent for maintenance will produce the same return as the next dollar spent for leaders’ salaries.” But he saw no evidence that anyone actually viewed the decision in that manner. In the end, the school board had more influence over the budget, and so maintenance took a back seat. The organizational structure determined the choice, not some perfect calculus that weighed options for the next dollar.

[…]

“Now I had a new research problem,” he wrote. “How do human beings reason when the conditions for rationality postulated by neoclassical economics are not met?”

[…]

Rather than “maximize,” or make the best choice from all available alternatives, Simon showed that humans must “satisfice”: Consider a limited menu of options and choose one that is “good enough.” He later used computers to simulate the process of real human thought, which led him to co-create the first true AI program in 1956.

[…]

Simon always had the same breakfast (bowl of oatmeal, half grapefruit, black coffee), and lived in the same house for forty-six years. He didn’t agonize over keeping his options open. When he had to make a decision, he considered a few alternatives, sometimes solicited advice, chose, and then remained open to lessons but not to dwelling on regret. “I was never aware that he changed his mind or re-thought options after deciding on something,” Katherine wrote. “Once made, his decision stuck.” Simon knew maximizing was unrealistic, and so he eagerly satisficed, saving anxiety and cognitive bandwidth anywhere he could. He expertly avoided Fredkin’s paradox—the notion that the more similar our options, the less choosing between them matters, but the harder choosing between them is. Thus, we are likely to spend the most energy on the least-important decisions. “The best is enemy of the good,” Simon wrote. One might be tempted to accuse him of a lack of ambition, if not for his trophy case.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

The car and the telephone allowed for the bureaucratization of coercion

Tuesday, July 14th, 2026

The car and the telephone, Kulak argues, allowed for the bureaucratization of coercion:

If you look at the orders given to British Captains and Admirals during the Napoleonic wars, these orders were often shockingly cursory. Sometimes only 1-2 sentences would be the whole of the Admiralty’s direction to a ship’s Captain for months at a time.

[…]

These orders were not so simple because the task was simple, but because it was COMPLEX and skilled British Captains needed the greatest of discretion with which to act. They were weeks if not months out from new orders, and the admiralty weeks if not months away from news of occurrences on the other side of the world.

[…]

You see this not only in the royal navy, but also on the American frontier, where Marshalls, Sheriffs, Mayors, and US Army Captains often wielded power to rival knights and dukes in the old world, and ran not inconsiderable risk in doing so.

[…]

What the invention of the Automobile and telephone did was it changed all of that. By increasing the speed of reaction times from days to minutes or hours, and by increasing the speed of communications from days or weeks to seconds, the very nature of authority changed.

Before applying something such as the income tax would be an unfeasibly dangerous proposition. A simple modicum of non-compliance would require tax agents to go out, and even if they went out in force, they’d probably be disappeared very quickly, with the only lead being that they disappeared between Thursday and Sunday and were vaguely going to be present in some area or county. It might take another 4 days after they were noted missing to get someone out there to check on them.

[…]

Whereas before trustworthy, competent, literate, moral Ethically predictable, men who were capable of distant travel, dynamic decision making, and enforcing their decisions with violence were the major limiting factor in the depths of state control that is possible… And such men were inherently prideful and had class interests around their rights as high status free gentlemen and their places of respect within the communities they administered; Former Colonel Washington LED the rebellion against the Crown… Whereas before you had to deal with all of that, Now you could use Anyone.

Indeed the modern state invariably chooses for it’s regulators and inspectors sexually failed women, the disabled, the sexually isolated or despised, and the racially and ethnically outcast. All explicitly BECAUSE they are of the lowest status without the state (what do you think Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means? It mean selecting people for being low status without the state) and will obey basically anything the state demands because, unlike the violent competent men of discretion who could do anything else or go anywhere and assume a leadership role, the DEI bio-slop who fill the government bureaucracy are complete nobodies without their jobs.

[…]

Unlike the earlier generations of lawmen, these infinitely expanding regulators need never actually enforce anything themselves, they need only send messages or “reach out” and if at any point they feel the slightest physical threat, they can call the police who are empowered to make ZERO decisions but are still capable of violence, and of calling in an endless stream of more police officers, tactical teams, and Helicopters should you prove resistant.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 4 Comments »

None of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger

Sunday, July 12th, 2026

Kulak notes that western powers are playing with fire when they use assassination against non-western powers:

On August 20, 2022, 29 year old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. The bomb, it was widely agreed, had been intended for her father the famed/infamous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin ( whose works are now shockingly hard to get in English and appears on my “Real Banned Books List”), and while there were lots of deflections and denials, it was fairly widely agreed the plot had been carried out with US and UK backing by Ukrainian aligned insurgents and agents within Russia.

Indeed many US aligned “Journalists”, “Open Source Intelligence” types, Bellingcat associated influencers, and other CIA aligned carve outs openly CELEBRATED the death of Daria, since she had been involved in Putin aligned political youth organizing.

Of course, the fact political volunteers and door knockers have NEVER been considered legitimate military targets, nor the fact the real target was a PHILOSOPHER and everything he had ever done would have been perfectly legal to do even within the United States under the auspices of the first amendment… that somehow never occured to these commentators. Nor the wider US intellectual class, and somehow neither did the natural logical conclusion.

Russia is by and large NOT run by its political organizers and academics. You could probably kill 1000 Russian university professors and it wouldn’t unbalance the Russian state too extraordinarily. Russia is run by a combination of old Soviet secret policemen, gangsters, and crooked/”reformed” oligarchs all attempting to reorganize themselves into a somewhat respectable upper-class, with a blend of impressive and farcical results.

Before he was killed in an internal power struggle the former head of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin embodied this, turning from a St. Petersburg gangster, to a prisoner, to a (definitely money laundering) caterer for the presidential palace, to the head of a PMC mercenary company. Every prominent person in Russia has a career like this Right down to Putin going from a KGB officer, to a gangster/political fixer, to president… Every elite member of russian society is basically leading a life ripped right from Grand Theft Auto IV, complete with the eternal struggles of trying to “go legit” and formalize everything as a normal upper-class elite, to being dragged back into gangsterism or even soviet power struggles by their complex past.

Put simply the actual Russian Elite are not people very intimidated by assassination. They’ve all known people to be killed in power struggles, espionage, and criminal altercations, and are used to the anxiety that death might wait for them around the corner. And the US and Ukraine lashing out at academics who might be intimidated doesn’t really affect them.

However, if the Russian state did the logical tit-for-tat escalation and responded in kind… that would shake America to its knees. America actually IS run by its academics, political organizers, and bureaucrats. And almost none of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger.

Killing a Russian Academics daughter did very little to the Russian state… It’d be a very different story for Russia’s armed agents to do the same in America and kill Chelsea Clinton, daughter of current Columbia professor Hillary Clinton.

It’s be a very different story if Russia assassinated Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, husband of former under-secretary of state Victoria Nuland. Or any number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton political philosophers or International Relations commentators, or members of their family.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their educations

Wednesday, July 8th, 2026

More than 440 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, or about a quarter of the total, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years, according to an estimate by the Huron Consulting Group:

The federal government is promising to streamline the process through which struggling colleges are taken over by healthier competitors, for instance. States are ramping up protections for consumers when campuses close anyway, and there is a proposal to do the same thing at the federal level. Lawsuits are multiplying, brought by students and employees against schools that closed. And institutions are trying to identify new sources of revenue.

Twenty-two states now make private higher education institutions pay into “tuition recovery” funds, typically requiring that a percentage of tuition collected be put aside in state accounts from which students could be compensated if the colleges close. While many of these funds were started to protect students at for-profit schools, nearly half have been extended to nonprofit degree-granting colleges.

[…]

In Massachusetts, where 26 colleges have shut down since 2014 and a 27th has announced that it will close at the end of this year, a state law now requires private colleges and universities to provide financial reports to anyone who wants to see them. Regulators have begun conducting annual reviews to determine and publicly disclose whether institutions are at imminent likelihood of failing.

[…]

Meanwhile, legal firms have started filing lawsuits on behalf of students, faculty and staff of colleges that have already closed, generally accusing them of fraud and breach of contract. Three class-action federal lawsuits have been brought against the University of the Arts in Philadelphia alone, which shut down abruptly in 2024.

[…]

So much attention has begun to be focused on college closures that the Education Department has produced instructions for students about what to do if it happens to them. “Try not to panic,” it advises.

That might be hard, considering that fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their educations, according to the most comprehensive study of this, by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Many of those who do continue lose credits they’ve already earned and paid for, and fewer than half ultimately earn degrees. The 442 colleges Huron projects to be endangered have a collective enrollment of 670,000 students.

Consumers whose colleges close can at least apply to get their federal loans forgiven through two existing routes: the Borrower Defense to Repayment and the Closed School Discharge programs. But that shifts the debt onto taxpayers, who have already had to cover billions of dollars in loans that will never be repaid.

[…]

Agnes Scott College in Georgia started in June to rent out three historic homes it owns. Sweet Briar College in Virginia sells hydroponic lettuce grown in its greenhouses. The University of California, Davis, has launched a line of products from the olives it cultivates for research. The University of Alaska sells permits to harvest firewood from forests it owns. New Mexico State University has licensed its brand for coffee, whiskey and tequila; Mississippi State University for cigars; and the University of Nevada, Reno, for beef jerky.

Posted in Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

Rather than plunging the government into bankruptcy, it immediately had the opposite effect

Tuesday, July 7th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinDouglass North argued, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), that the roots of the Industrial Revolution could be found in Great Britain’s seventeenth-century Glorious Revolution:

The Glorious (or “Bloodless”) Revolution established a bill of rights and strengthened Parliament at the expense of the monarch. The king couldn’t just renege on loans or confiscate his subjects’ property during a crisis as he had in the past. The crown, in effect, faced a market chief. Rather than plunging the government into bankruptcy, it immediately had the opposite effect. Like entrepreneurs in Lusaka playing the trust game, people were willing to lend the government money because they expected it would be paid back. With more incentive to lend and invest, England’s economy grew. Not coincidentally, economic growth in Europe took off first in countries where parliaments became strong.

[…]

North and two colleagues identified laws that apply uniformly to elites as the first precursor in the creation of an “open access order,” a state in which rules of commerce and politics don’t depend on a citizen’s identity. Open access orders contrast with “natural states,” which operate more like smaller tribal communities, with enforcement of rules dependent on personal status.

As basic as this might sound today, open access orders have only existed on Earth for about 150 years.

North got off to an interesting start:

He was accepted at Harvard at the same time that his father became the head of MetLife on the West Coast, so North chose instead to attend the University of California, Berkeley. During his time at Berkeley, North was a member of Chi Phi fraternity. In 1942, he graduated with a general B.A. in the humanities. Although his grades amounted to slightly better than a “C” average, he managed to complete a triple major in political science, philosophy and economics. That same year, he entered the US Merchant Marine Academy, graduated a year later and went to sea for three years as a deck officer.

A conscientious objector in World War II, North became a navigator in the Merchant Marine, traveling between San Francisco and Australia. During that time, he read economics and picked up his hobby of photography. He taught navigation at the Maritime Service Officers’ School in Alameda during the last year of the war, and struggled with the decision of whether to become a photographer or an economist.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

Saturday, July 4th, 2026

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Let us celebrate the 250th anniversary of the original Secession Day:

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

Socialists have a long history of denying that other socialists are socialists

Tuesday, June 30th, 2026

How socialist was Germany under National Socialism?, Bryan Caplan asks:

I first started pondering Nazi economic policy during the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Since the end of World War II, mainstream culture had energetically covered Nazi crimes, but largely gave the Soviet bloc a pass. Yet in the late 80s and early 90s, a long list of long-forgotten Soviet crimes loudly entered the Western conversation: Lenin’s coup against Russia’s first democratic government; Stalin’s agricultural collectivization; the Gulag; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; the Katyn massacre; mass deportations to Siberia; and more. Once there was widespread recognition that self-righteous Soviet socialists had committed many Nazi-level crimes, the etymology of “Nazi means ‘National Socialist’” intrigued me. If the world’s most famous brand of socialists turned out to be total monsters, could the world’s most famous brand of monsters turn out to be total socialists?

[…]

After all, socialists have a long history of denying that other socialists are socialists. In the late 1920s, for example, the Comintern started insisting that so-called “social democracy” was actually “social fascism,” the “moderate wing of fascism.” Democratic socialists, for their part, routinely retroactively strip revolutionary socialists of their socialist credentials once things turn ugly enough. Stalin wasn’t really socialist, Mao wasn’t really socialist, and neither is North Korea.

Upshot: Even if the Nazis were the sincerest of socialists, mainstream socialists would almost certainly deny them the label regardless of the facts.

[…]

Germany had fairly high economic freedom before World War I. This collapsed during World War I and the subsequent hyperinflation. By modern standards, Germany 1916-1923 would be virtually the most socialist country on Earth — though remember that due to lack of credible data, Fraser doesn’t score Cuba, Eritrea, or North Korea.

After the end of the hyperinflation, German economic freedom briefly recovers, peaking at 6.6 right before the Great Depression. Then there’s a total collapse. When the Nazis take over in 1933, Germany is already down at 4.1. If it were a modern country, that would be just freer than Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela.

Measured in rank order, Nazi Germany keeps falling, hitting rock bottom — #166 out of 166 — by 1936. But in absolute score, Nazi Germany falls every single year, from 3.6 in 1934 to 0.7 in 1945.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

Ukraine understands Russia in ways that Western services never fully can

Friday, June 26th, 2026

Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 exposed deep weaknesses inside Ukraine’s security services, including the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU):

In 2015, the CIA helped support the creation of the SBU’s Fifth Directorate, a specialized unit that combined counterintelligence and special operations. According to reporting by The New Yorker, the unit developed networks of agents inside occupied territory, conducted surveillance operations and carried out some of Ukraine’s earliest covert actions against Russian proxy forces.

[…]

Among the officers who emerged from this period was future HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov.

The Times reported in February 2024 that Budanov served in Unit 2245, an elite military intelligence formation that worked closely with the CIA after 2015. The unit specialized in recovering Russian military equipment, communications systems and other material that could be analyzed by both Ukrainian and American intelligence services.

The intelligence gathered from captured Russian equipment provided valuable insight into Moscow’s capabilities while helping deepen cooperation between Ukrainian and American services.

Budanov was later wounded while conducting operations against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine and received rehabilitation at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the United States. He would go on to lead Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.

Officers trained during the years immediately following Crimea now occupy senior leadership positions throughout Ukraine’s intelligence and security services.

[…]

A December New York Times investigation noted that CIA officers and US military planners had assisted Ukraine in refining its campaign against Russia’s energy sector.

Rather than attacking refineries indiscriminately, planners reportedly focused on hard-to-replace components. In one case, a CIA expert identified a critical refinery coupler whose destruction could leave a facility offline for weeks.

The same logic reportedly informed Ukraine’s campaign against Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, the network of aging vessels used to export sanctioned Russian oil around the world.

[…]

Following the public confrontation between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025, Washington temporarily suspended intelligence cooperation with Kyiv, raising concerns about the future of US support.

However, The Times reported that CIA Director John Ratcliffe successfully argued for maintaining the agency’s presence inside Ukraine despite broader political disagreements over military aid. The CIA reportedly retained personnel in the country and expanded funding for several Ukraine-related programs.

The decision reflected a reality often overlooked in discussions about Western assistance: Ukraine also provides value to the United States. As Bogan put it, “Ukraine understands Russia in ways that Western services never fully can.”

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields

Sunday, June 14th, 2026

On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned against the establishment of a “military-industrial complex,” but he also warned about a scientific-technological elite:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Posted in Policy, Science | 1 Comment »

These little monsters have plagued livestock and humans in tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas for centuries

Friday, June 12th, 2026

Oh, good, Polimath quips, screwworms are back:

Unlike most flies that lay eggs in dead and rotting organic matter, the Newworld Screwworm lays eggs in the open wounds and mucus membranes of living animals. The maggots then eat the animal (or human!) alive. Its scientific name is cochleomyia hominivorax which literally means “man-eating snail”.

These little monsters have plagued livestock and humans in tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas for centuries. This includes the southern US, the Caribbean, and most of Central and South America. The devastation of these terrible creatures amounted to billions of dollars of yearly damage on top of the fact that they are extremely gross and cause massive human and animal suffering.

[…]

In the 1930’s, Raymond Bushland and Edward Knipling were studying the screwworm in Texas where it was devastating livestock herds. These two scientists proposed and developing the “sterile insect technique” (SIT), which involves breeding the insects, sterilizing them with radiation, and releasing them into the wild. Because the female screwworm fly mates only once, if she mates with a sterile male fly any eggs she lays will not produce maggots.

This has the immediate benefit of stopping the maggots from killing livestock but also has the long term benefit of eradicating these little assholes. Of course this would mean intentionally breeding sterile flies on an industrial scale and releasing millions of them into the wild. So that is what they decided to do.

In 1954, this strategy was tested on a small island of Curaçao. The screwworm was eliminated from the island in the space of seven weeks.

Over the next 30-40 years, the there was a major push for screwworm eradication in North America. It was driven out of the US in the 60’s. With enormous international cooperation, they were pushed out of Mexico and Belize in the 80’s and eradication was pushed down to Panama by the 1990’s.

By a happy accident of geography, Panama was an excellent choke-point for the screwworm eradication. We could effectively maintain a screwworm border in Panama with a minimal effort because the geographic area to sterilize was physically small and politically stable. This also meant that screwworm control could be maintained through limited screwworm production facilities based in Panama and managed by COPEG, a joint commission between Panama and the US. COPEG is an institution specifically founded to maintain control over the screwworm barrier in Panama.

[…]

But then something went wrong.

Apparently in 2022, the screwworm barrier was breached. I say “apparently” because there seems to be wide agreement that 2022 is when this happened but no one can point to an event or any form of data about when this happened. The year 2022 seems to be a backward extrapolation from the fact that in 2023 there were 6,500 screwworm cases in Panama. Since then, cases have spread up through Central America and into Mexico.

[…]

It seems very likely that unchecked northward migration of livestock herds in 2022-2023 was a big factor in this ongoing disaster. Expert entomologists have looked at the pattern with exasperation and concluded that this is really the only plausible explanation since the flies themselves simply do not spread that quickly on their own. They were almost certainly transported via unchecked northward migration of people and animals.

My frustration with this is less about how it started and more about how it has gone on for so long unchecked. I have a long-standing grudge against people who think that the good things we enjoy in a rich first-world civilization just landed here by accident and are not the result of relentless efforts from determined people who take very seriously the responsibility of holding back the chaos of nature red in tooth and claw.

Some group of people were in charge of holding the line on the screwworm barrier. They failed.

[…]

The screwworm barrier in Panama cost $15 million a year. This is zero dollars to the US government. This program was basically free and it protected an entire continent from billions of dollars of yearly damage.

Posted in Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

But most people don’t use the Internet for spiritual enrichment

Monday, June 8th, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanIn Latin, Bryan Caplan notes (in The Case Against Education), “alma mater” means “nourishing mother”:

A rich metaphor. A nourishing mother doesn’t merely teach you practical skills or help you land a well-paid job. She nurtures your whole person, teaches you right from wrong, and shows you the magic of life.

[…]

I sincerely take the humanist critique to heart. For all my iconoclasm, I love ideas and culture. “Impractical” ideas and “uncommercial” culture are my life.

[…]

Old-school humanists nevertheless overstate their case. Education definitely can be good for the soul. But that hardly shows actually existing education achieves this noble end. In practice, education often turns out to be a neglectful or abusive mother rather than a nourishing one.

[…]

Modern education’s staunchest fans don’t nourish their souls by watching YouTube videos of average teachers. No one does.

[…]

Once everyone can enrich their souls for free, government subsidies for enrichment forfeit their rationale. To object, “But most people don’t use the Internet for spiritual enrichment” is actually a damaging admission that eager students are few and far between. Subsidized education’s real aim isn’t to make ideas and culture accessible to anyone who’s interested, but to make them mandatory for everyone who isn’t interested.

[…]

Today’s adults are the product of over a decade of mandatory exposure to abstract ideas and high culture. If educational force-feeding worked well, most educated adults would adore these nerdy realms—and eagerly tap the Internet to revisit them. To understate, they rarely do. “Kim Kardashian” gets about twenty times as many Google hits as “Richard Wagner” and about two hundred times as many as “David Hume.”

[…]

First: the humanist case for education subsidies is flimsy today because the Internet makes enlightenment practically free. Second: the humanist case for education subsidies was flimsy all along because the Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience. Behold: when the price of enlightenment drops to zero, enlightenment remains embarrassingly scarce.

[…]

Education can’t be responsible for more than 100% of the high culture our society consumes.

Let’s start with books. Consumer demand is shockingly low overall: Americans spend 0.2% of their income on all reading materials, barely more than $100 per family per year. Americans used to spend more on reading but never spent much: back in 1990, well before the rise of the web, reading absorbed 0.5% of the family budget. Today’s Americans spend about four times as much on tobacco and five times as much on alcohol as they do on reading. Within this small pond, high culture is no big fish.

[…]

By and large, literature teachers fail to “get through” to their captive audiences: they rarely spark love of reading, much less love of the genres they urge their students to admire.

In music, pop culture’s victory over high culture is even more decisive. The Three Tenors in Concert is the best-selling classical album ever. With twelve million copies sold, it does not even break into the top fifty albums of all time. Looking at overall sales, classical music is only 1.4% of the U.S. music market. Country is eight times as popular, and rock/ pop over thirty times as popular.

[…]

Even if American schools cause all U.S. consumption of classical music, their combined efforts boost its market share only from 0% to 1.4%.

[…]

Anyone reading this book is probably a bird of a different feather. You may even remember the names of the teachers who opened your eyes to the finer things in life. I owe my love of classical music to Mr. Zainer (General Music, seventh grade), and my love of literature to Mrs. Ragus (Honors English, eleventh grade). A quick look at the basic facts, however, shows our experiences are abnormal. The vast majority of our classmates emerge from years of cultural force-feeding with their aesthetic palates unchanged.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

Making kids study irrelevant material for a decade-plus is timelessly dysfunctional

Saturday, June 6th, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanIn backward nations, youths work, Bryan Caplan notes (in The Case Against Education), while in advanced nations, youths study:

As civilization advances, the young spend ever more years sequestered from paid employment. The modern fear is that work might interfere with school, never that school might interfere with work. These rules are so ingrained they seem like laws of nature.

The logic is elusive. As society evolves, teaching the young different occupations is common sense. Teaching them no occupations and hoping they adapt to the job market after graduation is not. It doesn’t matter how futuristic our society becomes. Making kids study irrelevant material for a decade-plus is timelessly dysfunctional.

[…]

Sticking with the classic curriculum instead of trying to forecast the job market is looking for your keys under the streetlight because it’s brighter there. Sure, teach the genuinely general skills: reading, writing, math. But otherwise, schools should make educated guesses about future career opportunities, measure students’ aptitudes, then expose them to plausible occupations.

[…]

Visualize a world where 16-year-olds have real job skills and earn enough to provide for themselves. Visualize a world where academically uninclined preteens look up to apprentices instead of delinquents. Visualize a world where students find their lessons either practical or interesting.

[…]

Instead of fearing a dystopian future, we should gawk at our dystopian present. In modern societies, achievement-oriented kids spend almost two decades in school. Most find the curriculum dreadfully dull. During this drawn-out ordeal, students are either poor or financially dependent on their parents. When they finally join the “real world,” graduates apply only a sliver of what they studied.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

Most academic classes amount to vocational training for ultrarare vocations

Thursday, June 4th, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan The objection that the vocational track teaches students specific skills they need for their first job, while the academic track teaches students general skills they need for every job, is confused, Bryan Caplan argues (in The Case Against Education):

While literacy and numeracy are genuinely general skills, most academic classes amount to vocational training for ultrarare vocations.

[…]

“Traditionalists” want to train everyone for long-shot, prestigious careers like author, historian, political scientist, translator, physicist, and mathematician. So-called vocationalists want to train students for careers they’re likely to enter. The traditional route is painless for educators: teach your students whatever your teachers taught you. The vocational route is painful for educators: to follow it, we must keep tabs on student aptitudes and the job market.

[…]

What’s the point of prepping students for the economy of 2015, when they’ll be employed in the economy of 2025 or 2050? Fair enough, but this is no argument for old-school academics. Ignorance of the future is no excuse for preparing students for occupations they almost surely won’t have. And if we know anything about the future of work, we know that demand for authors, historians, political scientists, translators, physicists, and mathematicians will stay low.

The crowd-pleasing objection to vocationalism, though, is not epistemic, but egalitarian. Placing everyone on the academic track seems more equal than sorting children by “aptitude” and assigning them to “suitable” training. You could say equality is already an illusion; despite the fiction of college prep for all, colleges count only honors and A.P. as the genuine article.

[…]

Keeping bored, resentful kids on the academic track backfires. Instead of “downshifting” to vocational training, they settle for unskilled labor—or worse. Remember: about 20% of Americans never earn a standard high school diploma.

[…]

Historically, teachers trained students for three specific professions: the clergy, law, and medicine. The modern curriculum is more versatile but has changed far less than educators like to think. Today’s schools prepare students for careers as authors, poets, mathematicians, scientists, artists, musicians, historians, translators, and professional athletes. Yet the fraction of students who enter these occupations is trivial. Contrary to popular proeducation rhetoric, schools devote little time to “general skills.” Instead, students spend their days training for jobs few want and even fewer get.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

School is not vocational education’s only venue

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanSchool is not vocational education’s only venue, Bryan Caplan points out (in The Case Against Education):

If learning job skills in the school is good, wouldn’t learning job skills on the job be better? Unfortunately, we have an innocuous yet infamous label for kids learning job skills on the job: “child labor.”

Civilized adults recoil at the name. Children with joy in their hearts don’t belong in gray workshops, toiling all day long, cogs in the machine. They’re kids, not robots! Well, unless the gray workshop is called a “school” and the cogs earn zero wages.

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Federal regulations do more than exclude minors from dangerous jobs. Outside of family businesses, farming, newspaper delivery, and performing arts, work for kids under 14 is all but prohibited. U.S. federal law caps 14-and 15-year-olds’ work at three hours a day on school days and eighteen hours a week on school weeks. Plenty of states have stricter regulations. Under California law, 16-and 17-year-olds may not work without school permission or more than four hours on a school day.

When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future.

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The silliest objection is that businesses “exploit” our children, handing them a pittance for their toil. No one expects schools to pay their students; the training kids receive is payment enough. Why hold firms to a higher standard? College students ferociously compete for unpaid internships because training is valuable compensation—and total compensation, not cash alone, is what counts.

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When researchers compare working students to comparable nonworking students, work has a clear upside and no clear downside. Early job experience has durable dividends, boosting postgraduation earnings by 5, 10, or even 20% for at least a decade.

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Since the minimum wage doesn’t vary by age or experience, we shouldn’t worry that youths will be “exploited.” We should worry that youths—especially Poor Students—won’t be hired at all. Under current law, untrained workers must produce the cost of their training plus $7.25 an hour to be profitably employed. Quite a catch-22, especially for slow learners: you need training to become a productive worker, but firms won’t train you unless you already are a productive worker.

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Unpaid internships survive because authorities hypocritically fail to enforce the letter of the law. As long as interns are college students or recent college grads learning a college-like job, government turns a blind eye. If McDonald’s hired unpaid trainees, prosecution would be swift. Unlike orthodox observers, I hasten to add, I say we need more hypocrisy. Instead of ending the unofficial exemption for college interns, we should grant it to everyone.

What else should policy makers do? Deregulate and destigmatize child labor. Early jobs are good for kids and good for society. Parental oversight isn’t a perfect way to root out abuses, but we rely on it in virtually every other sphere of life. Parents can make their kids devote their childhoods to sports and music—no matter how much they hate playing. Parents can sign their kids up for mountain climbing. Parents can take their kids to dangerous countries. Holding nonfamilial employment to stricter standards than mountain climbing is senseless.

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What about setting up a formal apprenticeship system? The best regimes are jewels, but they’re notoriously difficult to emulate. Most countries can’t be Germany.

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Before using taxpayer dollars to jumpstart apprenticeships, government should get out of the way and take stock of all the opportunities the labor market provides.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

Vocational ed stands out because it prepares students for common jobs

Sunday, May 31st, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanBryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education) why vocational education rules:

In proponents’ eyes, vocational education raises pay, reduces un­employment, and increases high school completion. Research, though a bit sparse, supports proponents on all counts. Core insight: vocational students are typically “academic underachievers” before entering the vocational track. The right metric isn’t, “How do vocational students compare to average students?” but rather, “How do vocational students compare to comparable students who didn’t study a trade?” Vocational ed fares well by this metric. It raises pay more than academic coursework. It reduces unemployment more than academic coursework. It even boosts high school graduation: the academically uninclined are less prone to quit school when they don’t detest all their classes. Vocational education even seems to deter crime. Those who search for the most lucrative mix of academic and vocational education normally discover students are too academic for their own good. Most will earn more if they replace some—but not all—of their standard courses with vocational alternatives.

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What fraction of vocational ed’s selfish benefits stem from signaling? The lowest estimates, strangely, come from vocational education’s critics. Many inadvertently set its signaling share below zero. How so? Critics fear that vocational education bears a stigma.

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In this scenario, vocational education enriches society more than it enriches vocational students. Society gains the extra productivity, but students capture the extra productivity less the stigma.

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Vocational ed stands out because it prepares students for common jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States has roughly 900,000 carpenters, 700,000 auto mechanics, and 400,000 plumbers. Classic college-prep classes like literature, foreign language, and history fall short because they prepare students for rare jobs. The whole U.S. employs only 129,000 writers, 64,000 translators, and 3,800 historians.

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Conventional education mostly helps students by raising their status, but average status cannot rise. Vocational education mostly helps students by building their skills—and average skill can rise.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 3 Comments »

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