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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

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
    > Education is not making them that much more productive. It’s certifying them as already being more productive. How do you measure productivity? And (asking again, since you didn’t answer) how do you measure social waste? Where is the evidence of your claims? If what you claimed is true, then if the rate of education were to go up, then the income premium for education would go down, because you’re saying the income premium is correlation and not causation of education’s effect on society. But education rates have been going up for the last 50 years and the income premium for education is stable, despite more people being educated. Why? > Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way around Your argument is that education is an economic drain. Where is the evidence of that? Even if true that wealth precedes education (and citation is needed there), your argument here is contradicting your earlier argument that education is socially wasteful - countries are getting richer and staying richer with increased education rates, regardless of whether it’s causation or correlation. Ghana is an outlier with political issues not representative of most of the world, it doesn’t prove much about education. China’s massive economic growth coincides with an increase in education, framing it as being “based” on an uneducated populace because their education rate was lower at the start seems like it’s dodging the inconvenient fact that their education rates have risen while their economy has grown? Why are you so convinced that education is not even part of the cause for their economic growth, or anyone else’s? You seem to be claiming that education teaches nothing of economic value, does not help people personally gain any skills, does not help people improve their productivity? Is that what you’re saying, and if so why?

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
  > Education is not making them that much more productive. It’s certifying them as already being more productive. How do you measure productivity? And (asking again, since you didn’t answer) how do you measure social waste? Where is the evidence of your claims? If what you claimed is true, then if the rate of education were to go up, then the income premium for education would go down, because you’re saying the income premium is correlation and not causation of education’s effect on society. But education rates have been going up for the last 50 years and the income premium for education is stable, despite more people being educated. Why? > Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way around Your argument is that education is an economic drain. Where is the evidence of that? Even if true that wealth precedes education (and citation is needed there), your argument here is contradicting your earlier argument that education is socially wasteful - countries are getting richer and staying richer with increased education rates, regardless of whether it’s causation or correlation. Ghana is an outlier with political issues not representative of most of the world, it doesn’t prove much about education. China’s massive economic growth coincides with an increase in education, framing it as being “based” on an uneducated populace because their education rate was lower at the start seems like it’s dodging the inconvenient fact that their education rates have risen while their economy has grown? Why are you so convinced that education is not even part of the cause for their economic growth, or anyone else’s? You seem to be claiming that education teaches nothing of economic value, does not help people personally gain any skills, does not help people improve their productivity? Is that what you’re saying, and if so why?