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> Education's value to society and the individual is inherently unquantifiable with today's tools. Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable? More importan

by edanm 5y ago

> Education's value to society and the individual is inherently unquantifiable with today's tools. Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable? More importantly, we live in the real world, in which we need to make actual decisions, which cost money and time. Both policy decisions, like: should we encourage higher education? Should we subsidize it? Extend schooling to 15 grades instead of 12? Etc. But also personal decisions: should I personally pursue a University degree? You can't just handwave decisions like that by saying it's unquatifiable.

tsimionescu 5y ago
> Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable? The fact that we are nowhere near being able to mathematically model individual and societal human behavior at a level that could help us come up with such a quantity. To do so, we would need to have a model which can predict how someone's behavior would change by reading and understanding a particular book, or how much value a new ideology could bring to society times the probability of someone could come up with a new ideology by getting an education. We would need to deeply understand the human mind at the same level we understand the behavior of gases at least. As to how we can then decide how much to spend on education, the answer is somewhat simple: you poll people's opinions of where education is lacking, where it is strong, what kind of resources could help improve it, how important they feel this improvement is. Then you come up with some qualitative goals ("all children should be able to read and write by grade 4"), and then invest money needed to achieve these goals. What you don't do is try to come up with some bullshit a priori monetary value (an education will increase people's salary by this much, times the tax rate, times the number of people => this is how much we should invest), as if you were running an investment bank and not a democratic society. And note that the first example is exactly how people make most decisions in the real world. You use your (currently) unquantifiable subjective preferences to set a goal for something, try to estimate how much it would cost, and then at best you do some computation of "what else could I do with this money/time" and decide based on that whether you should spend the money.

by edanm 5y ago

tsimionescu 5y ago

> Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable? The fact that we are nowhere near being able to mathematically model individual and societal human behavior at a level that could help us come up with such a quantity. To do so, we would need to have a model which can predict how someone's behavior would change by reading and understanding a particular book, or how much value a new ideology could bring to society times the probability of someone could come up with a new ideology by getting an education. We would need to deeply understand the human mind at the same level we understand the behavior of gases at least. As to how we can then decide how much to spend on education, the answer is somewhat simple: you poll people's opinions of where education is lacking, where it is strong, what kind of resources could help improve it, how important they feel this improvement is. Then you come up with some qualitative goals ("all children should be able to read and write by grade 4"), and then invest money needed to achieve these goals. What you don't do is try to come up with some bullshit a priori monetary value (an education will increase people's salary by this much, times the tax rate, times the number of people => this is how much we should invest), as if you were running an investment bank and not a democratic society. And note that the first example is exactly how people make most decisions in the real world. You use your (currently) unquantifiable subjective preferences to set a goal for something, try to estimate how much it would cost, and then at best you do some computation of "what else could I do with this money/time" and decide based on that whether you should spend the money.