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Just my dumb opinion here, but... there's something extremely implausible on its face about the idea that a sufficiently complex spreadsheet could calculate the

• joebob42 5y ago
  On a certain level I might agree. On the other hand, I think it's a reasonable point that if we disagree with him, go find the parameter he's chosen wrongly or forgotten, since it must exist somewhere if he's wrong. On the third hand, that's probably unfairly much to ask of your audience, since it requires auditing work that took a year.
  • chasil 5y ago
    Several years ago, I wrote against a local option sales tax for schools with some uncomfortable data. This particular referendum was lost, but the next prevailed. We do not allocate money to education intelligently. As an aside, the comparison engine provided by the Federal Education Budget Project appears to have been taken down. [My Illinois town's] Schools have again placed a sales tax increase before the voters for the April 7th election. Voters should reject this increase after reviewing the financials below. In Iowa, the average 2013 teacher salary is $33,226. The Illinois average, however, is $37,166, which is above the national average of $36,141. Illinois teachers are (more than) fairly compensated. On a local focus, the Federal Education Budget Project lists the [nearby Iowa] Community School District budget for 2012 (which likely includes local option tax funds) as $174,000,000, which served 16,955 students for a per-student cost of $10,262. [My town's] budget for the same period was $76,568,000 and served 6,622 students, for a per-student cost of $11,562. [Our neighboring Illinois town's] budget for the same period was $78,817,000 and served 7,429 students, for a per-student cost of $10,609 per student. [Our nearby Illinois town's] academic performance is solidly ahead of [my town] - [our nearby Iowa town's] scores 70% and 66% proficient in the 2011 "No Child Left Behind" [high school] reading and math tests, while [my nearby Illinois town] respectively scores 46.9% and 53.8%, and [my town] trails the pack at 30.1% and 25.9%. [My nearby Iowa town] achieves performance dominance while spending $347 less per student than [my nearby Illinois town], and $1,300 less per student than [my town]. [My town's] schools should not ask for larger budgets, but instead trim costs and increase performance to match our nearby peers. If [my town's] schools cannot meet these standards, then perhaps we should consider outsourcing the maintenance of [my town's] schools to the [nearby Iowa town], which appears both more capable and thrifty by all measures. [My town's] students deserve better.
    • Jill_the_Pill 5y ago
      The comparison is meaningless without knowing the needs of the two districts. Are the students in the thriftier district from wealthier households, for example, needing less support from school? Are there more ESL speakers in the costlier district? More students requiring special education? Are the buildings older, requiring more expensive upkeep? Some expenses don't break down to per-student or per-teacher. It's nice to say "trim costs and increase performance," but if a constellation of needs makes improved learning more costly in that context, you're stuck with it.
      • chasil 5y ago
        My district does have an influx of people from Africa, I will admit. I rented one of my houses to such a family, but that is a story for another time. ...I will say also that our 8th grade scores put the other districts to shame (among the highest levels in the area), but the high school was our downfall.
        • baldeagle 5y ago
          like this generation migrated from Africa? Cause that seems awful close to saying that folks that had many systems tilted against them for a long time aren't up to par with folks that had systems working for them. As a higher post pointed out, catching up takes more resources than coasting on the hand downs from systems of generations past.
          • chasil 5y ago
            My relationship with them lasted many years, lasted through the pandemic, and they left angry. I am selling the house that I rented to them, and putting it into stocks. I don't know if this makes me a bad person, but I did want something better out of the experience at some point. That's past. I would not recommend rental property, but most of you know this by now. Nothing like being young and foolish.
    • taeric 5y ago
      I'm at a loss for how trimming budget can ever really lead to increased performance. "Do better" is not a plan. And if you are behind, as in most areas of life, things are more expensive to catch up. I'm not aware of any case where this is not the way of things. Such that, in large, I would expect areas that have poor families to, in fact, be more expensive to educate than areas with well off families. Many of the kids are literally having to catch up. Not just learn the curriculum, but catch up on a lot of learning they never had access to. "Do better, or perish" is the way of small businesses. Where most of them fall into the perish scenario.
• SllX 5y ago
  Well, is it calculable? If yes, then a sufficiently complex spreadsheet ought to be able to do the job. However with no auditing, we don’t know whether Brian’s did, or even approached the level of complexity needed to in his calculations. He tried to bring math to a subject that is typically argued through rhetoric and that’s respectable enough.
  • civilized 5y ago
    Counterfactuals can be calculated, but the results will depend on other counterfactuals. There's no getting away from speculating about counterfactuals. If the speculative estimates that went into Caplan's spreadsheets were essentially made up, then it's garbage in garbage out.
    • SllX 5y ago
      Sure, but I’m not making that call, nor endeavoring to although I might look at these spreadsheets when I have some time. Just pointing out that if this is calculable, then a sufficiently complex spreadsheet ought to be able to do the job.
    • thetallstick 5y ago
      > If the speculative estimates that went into Caplan's spreadsheets were essentially made up When Caplan released the spreadsheet and asked people to "check his math" I am pretty sure what he was really asking was for people to test that exact conditional.
      • civilized 5y ago
        I think he actually believes the math. The person who would do it as a troll, as a reductio ad absurdum against the inputs, is me. Except I'm too lazy.
      • 8note 5y ago
        Debugging spreadsheets is pretty notoriously difficult for showing that it does the expected thing, let alone figuring out what assumptions have been made and how valid they are
• nickff 5y ago
  You should listen to the EconTalk interview with Caplan about the book. He talks about the relative importance of each factor, the uncertainties, and the logic behind it all. He makes quite a compelling case. https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/ https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-ed...
• Hermitian909 5y ago
  I think, in part, Caplan has made a fairly classic error in attempting to figure out the optimal strategy for an individual within an existing system, where small numbers of individuals deviating generally doesn't matter, and then using those results to make a policy recommendation about how to change the system en masse in a way that will radically change the system. His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes, for example, would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? If it did, how would that effect overall quality of life for average Americans? I don't find compelling answers to these questions in his spreadsheets (nor his book). This is not an attempt to defend the system as it exists now but I think Caplan does a much better job outlining a problem than making his case for a solution.
  • nickff 5y ago
    >" His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes, for example, would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? If it did, how would that effect overall quality of life for average Americans? I don't find compelling answers to these questions in his spreadsheets." His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing his work'. I think Caplan is trying to highlight that despite the fact that many challenged his conclusions, almost nobody challenged his logic or calculations.
    • Brian_K_White 5y ago
      Probably because any attempt to even reduce the topic to a spreadsheet is a case of "not even wrong". When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math.
      • nickff 5y ago
        >"Probably because any attempt to even reduce the topic to a spreadsheet is a case of "not even wrong"." But he didn't reduce it to a spreadsheet, he wrote a very thorough book. >"When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math." I am not sure what you think Caplan says. His book is mostly about the signalling and human capital models of education. The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings, so Caplan calculates the financial impact of various degrees, and then figures out how much is attributable to the various factors.
• lozenge 5y ago
  If the spreadsheet showed education was a net positive, would Caplan accept this and rewrite the book, or would he go looking for more factors and adjustments that could "correct" its result. If he can't accept a spreadsheet showing a positive impact of education, why would the world accept a spreadsheet showing a negative impact of education.
  • jdminhbg 5y ago
    > If the spreadsheet showed education was a net positive, would Caplan accept this and rewrite the book Caplan is definitely the type of person who would either rewrite on not write the book in that case. But this an implausible question anyway, because it’s not like you get this far into a project without an idea of what the evidence is telling you, waiting to press a button and out if it’s actually Good or Bad.
    • stevemk14ebr 5y ago
      > either rewrite on not write the book in that case Your comment doesn't actually answer anything lol - he would - or wouldn't and you say both
      • ask_b123 5y ago
        The parent is saying that if the data pointed otherwise he would either: - rewrite the book or - not have written the book to begin with.
• donohoe 5y ago
  You could just look at the data in the spreadsheet instead of speculating? I kinda think this is exactly part of the point he is making.
  • civilized 5y ago
    Or you could.
    • mjfl 5y ago
      • thekashifmalik 5y ago
        lmao This cracked me up more than it should have!
        • ask_b123 5y ago
          Honest question, why is this funny?
      • civilized 5y ago
        My keyboard and mouse are broken. This is actually true. I'm typing this on a phone.
    • luma 5y ago
      The person to which you are responding isn't asking a bunch of questions that, presumably, was answered by the author in the OP. You were. I'd suggest reading the article again as I think you've missed the critical point: the data points in one direction, and he has provided mountains of it. It doesn't align with what you've been told all of your life, so instead of looking at the data you argue from the basis of ignorance by engaging what you feel to be "common sense". In doing so, you are doing the exact thing the author is writing about.
  • tsimionescu 5y ago
• onos 5y ago
  Just want to point out that this challenge seems to be that the whole field / approach is unlikely to work. Perhaps. Still, presumably some of those challenging him specifically are in the field and they should be expected to explain why the math he carried out was wrong.
• ekianjo 5y ago
  You are representing exactly the point that Caplan is making.
• oehpr 5y ago
  I was just thinking. I remember being part of online community for a game (starsector, if you're interested) and a user had taken it upon themselves to create effectiveness measurements for the weapons in the vanilla game and in mods. To do this, they created a spreadsheet that mapped out damage per second, range, energy cost, points to use... ect. Numbered them all together, and ranked them with each other. Personally, I thought this was a valuable contribution. Plenty of mods go off the deep end with the kit they added to the game, so to me, this seemed like a valuable tool to help keep their kit in line. But the author? They thought what they had produced was an unassailable statement of fact. Many people came forward, including me, countering that the actual simulation of the game is substantially more complex than the pile of multiplication and addition they had cobbled together. But like OP's article, those criticisms weren't specifically addressing the formulas themselves, so the author didn't really consider them. This is a bit of a puerile example of course, I bet Mr. Caplan is substantially better at multiplication than my hobbyist friend trying to categorize weapons in a silly space ship game.
  • jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
    Isn't most everything in life just piles of multiplication and addition?
    • trialtrial1 5y ago
      in the same way that most of tennis is hitting a ball back and forth, yeah
      • deleted 5y ago
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    • deleted 5y ago
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  • whatshisface 5y ago
    Doesn't asking that Caplan spend one second longer on his calculations automatically rule out everything else that anyone has ever said about the subject? That's the most interesting part of this for me - nobody's saying "you're missing some important factors, and let's add them." People are saying, "I don't know that you included all the factors, so I am going to go back to reading opinion columnists for whom 'factor' is not a word." Has everyone thought about the fact that the alternative to spreadsheets is policymakers putting their hands on their hips and saying, "Yep, $30k sounds about right for this month?"
• IIAOPSW 5y ago
  This is just judging the tool as a roundabout ad hominid. I bet if he did the exact same calculation in a jupyter notebook, and exported his results as a pdf and did the type setting with LaTeX, you wouldn't handwave away the very premise as intractable. There's no limits to the computational complexity of a spreadsheet. Turing completeness is obviously there (just make a cellular automata). Even requiring the "code" to be not-esoteric, spreadsheets are no more crippled than a given scripting language.
  • librarianscott 5y ago
    But in practice, spreadsheets are usually used for "brainstorming" in a research question to pose some possibilities, while jupyter is used for creating an executable paper for an actual scientific discussion. The danger in both spreadsheets and in computational notebooks is you can include a lot of mathematically true and/or statistically consistent conclusions that are filled with assumptions that haven't been correlated or even agreed to by voters or policymakers. For anyone making a bold claim like post-high-school education doesn't promote future earnings, their burden is to come up with macroeconomic examples or even models that are consistent. Just writing a book and a spreadsheet doesn't cut it, which is another way to say, they aren't making their claim in an educated way that modern economists use.
    • IIAOPSW 5y ago
      Your assessment that the claim is "post-high-school education doesn't promote future earnings" shows that you have wholly not understood (and perhaps not even tried to understand) what Caplan has actually claimed. With such a foundational mischaracterization, your critique of the appropriateness of his data, assumptions and calculations is without merit. If you don't feel like reading the book, you can read the slide show linked in the blog. You would only need to go as far as page 1 to see he was not disputing future earnings potential. Here's the money quote: "Key feature of the signaling model: At the margin, signaling raises pay but not productivity, so social return<selfish (“private”) return. Policy implication: Even selfishly lucrative education may be socially wasteful rent-seeking. If ignoring signaling is sole flaw in existing return to education literature, true social return roughly equals mainstream social return*(1-signaling share)" Really he's just saying something we all kind of know. Diploma's are more often than not a ticket to ride in a certain class of society, not an education technology that increases productivity. So why is there government support and subsidy for something that has private, but not much public benefit? http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.pdf http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.pdf
• catothedev 5y ago
  Making a DCF analysis for education is going to be extremely murky. That said, since it was done in spreadsheet, it would be easy for a relatively non-technical person to tweak the numbers to refute the author's argument (sidenote: only in the world of hacker news would people think python is more accessible). I think the lack of interest in reviewing the spreadsheet reflects how people with education department degrees protect their jobs and win public policy arguments: they prefer to argue that ROI is not a relevant concept for education investment (even if it is at the core of virtually every other type of investment analysis).
  • nyokodo 5y ago
    > ROI is not a relevant concept for education investment If there is no return or even return sought then it can’t be called an investment. It’s just spending on part-time prison for kids.
  • athrowaway3z 5y ago
    I think you're to harsh with saying it reflect the state of mind of educational departments, and far to lenient with 'extremely murky'. Sure, its very likely people don't want to engage with something that is saying they are doing inefficient/useless work. But the author's premise is literately "I've crunched the numbers and people don't care" on a subject that would be my go-to example for an incalculable ROI. You could make an argument for an individual, but that's not what the education department or society at large is doing. Just for starters, at a national scale over decades, there are no unbiased units to measure with. Next i'd like to agree on how we deal with the correlation between 'Patents that changed society' and 'Patent authors being generally higher educated'. Maybe you can argue for a decent proxy for these things, or their irrelevance. But since i only have so much time, I'll assume your excel sheet is correct in how it processes the input, and instead argue on what the input should be in the first place.
• voiper1 5y ago
  Your first line sounds very similar to one of his paragraphs: >Don’t get me wrong; The Case Against Education drew plenty of criticism. Almost none of it, however, was quantitative. Some critics appealed to common sense: “Education can’t be anywhere near as wasteful as Caplan claims.” "There's no point in looking at it, because it can't be calculated."
• arpanetus 5y ago
  Have you seen the data as well to judge like that? (just being curious)
• edanm 5y ago
  > Just my dumb opinion here, but... there's something extremely implausible on its face about the idea that a sufficiently complex spreadsheet could calculate the difference in value generated from kids going to school versus kids not going to school. I mean, we make lots of policies around education all the time. Subsidizing or not subsidizing various stages of education. Forcing or not forcing kids to go to school. Etc. What are we basing these decisions on? The idea that "just a spreadsheet" isn't enough raises the question- what is? What is better than a serious academic doing heavy research on the topic, combining various fields of study, and actually sitting down and quantifying and doing math to get actual results, and then publishing them? I think this is a more serious way to make policy than most ways it gets done, which mostly consists of people arguing without having research or spreadsheets to back them up, but rather relying on much more on feelings. > If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention. The book got a lot of attention. But all the attention, both positive and more commonly negative. But nobody actually challenged the calculations - they used hand-wavy statements for or against it, but didn't acutally bother dealing with the numbers themselves. That's his point. > I mean jeez, what did he even compare our status quo education system against? Where did the kids go in the counterfactual no-education scenario? Did the kids all go home to an infinite supply of stay-at-home moms? Did they go to extended daycare, all the way up to age 18? What did they do with all that time? I mean, he wrote an entire book about this. You can read it. It's not like he didn't provide answers for these questions.
• retube 5y ago
  > I mean jeez, what did he even compare our status quo education system against? Where did the kids go in the counterfactual no-education scenario? Did the kids all go home to an infinite supply of stay-at-home moms? Did they go to extended daycare, all the way up to age 18? What did they do with all that time? Exactly. I suspect no one cares about his spreadsheets because who's gonna waste their time on such a flawed proposition.