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How much of that is correlation and how much is causation? How much is selection effect and how much treatment effect? The average person who is capable of get

How much of that is correlation and how much is causation? How much is selection effect and how much treatment effect? The average person who is capable of getting a Bachelor’s degree but doesn’t is very distant from the average high school graduate. And if you drop out of college after two years because you can’t cut it your labour market outcome is only very slightly better than a high school grad but your debt load of half of a college grad.

dahart 7y ago
That study I put a link to is attempting to answer that very question methodically, and the answer in this study and others is it’s both correlation and causation. Some of the “income premium” you get for having a bachelor’s degree is cultural bias toward education (causation), some of it is having more and broader skills (causation), some of it is the many jobs that require degrees or pay higher with more education (causation), and some portion of it is due to things like whether your parents got degrees or have money (correlation). But, I’m curious, what does it actually matter in this context, if any non-zero portion of it is causation? This thread is discussing whether people are better off getting some education, whether they should spend their UBI income in search of opportunity via education, and whether going to school is a “work disincentive”. (Seem like the opposite to me.) They’re attempting to improve their lot via schooling, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that more education will, statistically, improve their lot at least somewhat.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  If you’re interested in this topic you should read Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education. Getting more credentials can be individually rational but socially wasteful. So there are tons of people working as bank tellers now and there were tons of people working as bank tellers in the ‘70s. Now they all have college degrees. In the ‘70s they were high school graduates. Their degrees don’t make them more productive and they cost them four years of their lives but they couldn’t have gotten the job without them. Some of education’s pay off is privately and socially useful, increases in human capital, some of it is privately useful but socially useless or counter productive, wasteful signaling in an arms race, like that which leads to people who would have stopped with a Bachelor’s a generation ago getting a Master’s now. Insofar as education is socially wasteful we should discourage it, not encourage it, tax it, not subsidize it.
  - dahart 7y ago
    Lucky for us, social waste is not the criteria for taxation, or we’d be dead broke from sharing beliefs on the internet alone. What is your metric of social waste, and why do you think education has enough to worry about compared all the millions of other socially wasteful things we do when not working? Us GDP per capita is not going down, and education rates are going up. Both monotonically since the 70s, despite the supposed degree requirements of bank tellers. That alone — the economy — seems to squarely contradict the notion that school is somehow bad for us. If you’re measuring social productivity in terms of capital, I think you’re failing to account for the increase in income tax the government receives from the average 2x higher salary of educated people. That extra income tax is so much money, it could fund education for every man, woman, and child in the US, and still have 90% of it left for the socially productive spending we do now on such things as maintaining the military industrial complex. We are being taxed for education already, and we are still better off. It seems like you might also be ignoring the social evidence for education in countries where it is subsidized, like Norway, Finland and others.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      US GDP per capita is going up at the same time as education for the same reason the size of the v average dwelling has gone up; Richer people consume more. Education doesn’t make people more productive. More productive people buy more stuff. If you give everyone a Bachelor’s degree they will not become 2x as productive. The people are different. The education is less important than the difference in the people. Education is not making them that much more productive. It’s certifying them as already being more productive. The evidence for the economic effects of evidence is really weak. Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way round. Ghana is a lot more educated now than 1950’s France, and a lot poorer. China’s massive economic growth from the 1980’s to the 2000s was based on a populace that mostly hadn’t finished primary school. Regarding other first world countries the US is far, far richer than them[1] and has a better education system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

dahart 7y ago

That study I put a link to is attempting to answer that very question methodically, and the answer in this study and others is it’s both correlation and causation. Some of the “income premium” you get for having a bachelor’s degree is cultural bias toward education (causation), some of it is having more and broader skills (causation), some of it is the many jobs that require degrees or pay higher with more education (causation), and some portion of it is due to things like whether your parents got degrees or have money (correlation). But, I’m curious, what does it actually matter in this context, if any non-zero portion of it is causation? This thread is discussing whether people are better off getting some education, whether they should spend their UBI income in search of opportunity via education, and whether going to school is a “work disincentive”. (Seem like the opposite to me.) They’re attempting to improve their lot via schooling, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that more education will, statistically, improve their lot at least somewhat.

barry-cotter 7y ago
If you’re interested in this topic you should read Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education. Getting more credentials can be individually rational but socially wasteful. So there are tons of people working as bank tellers now and there were tons of people working as bank tellers in the ‘70s. Now they all have college degrees. In the ‘70s they were high school graduates. Their degrees don’t make them more productive and they cost them four years of their lives but they couldn’t have gotten the job without them. Some of education’s pay off is privately and socially useful, increases in human capital, some of it is privately useful but socially useless or counter productive, wasteful signaling in an arms race, like that which leads to people who would have stopped with a Bachelor’s a generation ago getting a Master’s now. Insofar as education is socially wasteful we should discourage it, not encourage it, tax it, not subsidize it.
- dahart 7y ago
  Lucky for us, social waste is not the criteria for taxation, or we’d be dead broke from sharing beliefs on the internet alone. What is your metric of social waste, and why do you think education has enough to worry about compared all the millions of other socially wasteful things we do when not working? Us GDP per capita is not going down, and education rates are going up. Both monotonically since the 70s, despite the supposed degree requirements of bank tellers. That alone — the economy — seems to squarely contradict the notion that school is somehow bad for us. If you’re measuring social productivity in terms of capital, I think you’re failing to account for the increase in income tax the government receives from the average 2x higher salary of educated people. That extra income tax is so much money, it could fund education for every man, woman, and child in the US, and still have 90% of it left for the socially productive spending we do now on such things as maintaining the military industrial complex. We are being taxed for education already, and we are still better off. It seems like you might also be ignoring the social evidence for education in countries where it is subsidized, like Norway, Finland and others.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    US GDP per capita is going up at the same time as education for the same reason the size of the v average dwelling has gone up; Richer people consume more. Education doesn’t make people more productive. More productive people buy more stuff. If you give everyone a Bachelor’s degree they will not become 2x as productive. The people are different. The education is less important than the difference in the people. Education is not making them that much more productive. It’s certifying them as already being more productive. The evidence for the economic effects of evidence is really weak. Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way round. Ghana is a lot more educated now than 1950’s France, and a lot poorer. China’s massive economic growth from the 1980’s to the 2000s was based on a populace that mostly hadn’t finished primary school. Regarding other first world countries the US is far, far richer than them[1] and has a better education system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...