Unbelievable.
dispatch from Bryan Caplan’s new book pic.twitter.com/knnBSr5MQX
— Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) March 2, 2018
So history, social studies, art, music, foreign languages, and communications are all “fat”, total wastes of time.
If you’re like me, you have no idea who Bryan Caplan is, so you’ll have to look him up on Wikipedia (see? It is useful). There you’ll learn that he is an economist, a field that I notice is not on his list of useless ideas, coincidentally. But you will also discover this revelation.
After having long shed a youthful infatuation with the works of Russian American writer Ayn Rand and her philosophical system of Objectivism, in 2004 Caplan wrote in his essay ‘An Intellectual Biography’, “I rejected Christianity because I determined that it was, to be blunt, idiotic. I rejected Objectivism and Austrianism, in contrast, as mixtures of deep truths and unfortunate mistakes. Let me begin with the deep truths. The Objectivists were right to insist that reality is objective, human reason able to grasp it, and scepticism without merit. They correctly hold that humans have free will, morality is objective, and the pursuit of self-interest typically morally right.”
Oh. A godless Randian. Is anyone surprised?
If I were cutting programs, I’d start with the inter-collegiate sports.
I think all the pseudo sciences like, oh I don’t know, astrology and economics should be banned from the schools. Music, non competitive sports, and the other “hates” listed above are what make life worth living. Musn’t teach the kids about that!!
Who needs foreign languages? If English was good enough for
Jesus ChristAyn Rand, it’s good enough for the rest of us.What’s left besides math, sciences, and reading/grammar? Auto shop. Gym class. Business, as long as you stick with the make money/marketing aspect and steer clear of providing historical context.
Ah, he wants US schools to only train students to work in a trade, starting when they are 5, and he wants them to be trained without developing any ability to take those skills to foreign markets, or to understand the context of what one has learned, or whether it’s even accurate. He doesn’t want students to learn to analyze social trends in order to better anticipate what skills they may need down the road. He doesn’t want them to have a background which would allow them to anticipate or even observe the consequences of their actions. Just be productive little drones, that’s all those damn kids are good for.
The idea of what students will or won’t use in adulthood is tragicomically flawed, to use his phrase. My mother spent her life insisting she had never used the Algebra she had to take, but I witnessed her using it every week in the grocery store; it’s how she know how to do proper price comparisons based on package size!
The only class I can say with any certainty that I have never used is square dancing. That I only took because there was absolutely no other PE class offered at night, so I couldn’t take a PE class that was useful to me at that time. I did find my bowling class that I took years earlier for my first PE credit to be useful whenever I wanted to relax and enjoy myself. Even so, I do not believe my square dance class was wasted. Did I gain something out of it that I can point to and say, yeah, that part? No, but I believe there is a value to learning, even if you never “use” it, because it broadens you as a person. So I know what an alamande left is, and it does me no practical good at all, but just knowing that I know that has some value.
The problem is that people have different ideas of useful, and some students find those arts, humanities, etc, classes useful, if only because they consider those things important to a full life even if not particularly to wealth generation.
How can you actually be an economist without a firm grounding in history? I would have thought that knowledge of economic history was a sine qua non for the field, in the same way knowledge of mathematics is for physics.
I suppose you can be a really bad economist without any knowledge of history. And as an added bonus you won’t be aware of how bad an economist you actually are!
Tangent–
inklast @5: You had a whole class on square dancing? We only had it in middle school as a “rhythm” component to gym, to go with, iirc, our “flexibility” (gymnastics), “endurance” (running),”competition,” and “teamwork” (all other sports).
Um. He’s making a social argument in a book, which presumably required at least art, communications – and if he’s lucky, foreign language – to get from manuscript to published product. Not to mention that he had to learn how to write.
So, after having a life-changing event reading the works from someone in the Humanities, he then goes on to write a book about studying most of the humanities is a waste of time.
What. A. Maroon.
I’ve had classes in history, social studies, art, music, foreign languages, and communications, but somehow I escaped any formal training in economics. I guess that’s why I don’t understand people like Bryan Caplan.
It might not come up in our jobs, but some of us use knowledge of history and social studies every time we vote. We don’t vote for Rand worshippers, though.
Can you imagine teaching kids something that may not be immediately turned into capitalist profit? Oh the horrors, especially if those things may give them the tools to ask critical questions or get information from outside the USA that has not been carefully selected and rearranged to fit a certain message?
Also, apparently this wasn’t peak Caplan yet: https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/969409594773696513
Christ, I am so tired of people ragging on art. Humans breathe art of all kinds, every single day. Art works of all kinds, photography, paintings, drawings, cartoons, sculpture and so on; most people find themselves quite dependent on music, then there are movies and books. All kinds of art. Where the hell would we be without it?
cartomancer @6
I’m pretty sure a lack of grounding in history is a prerequisite, otherwise economists wouldn’t still be trying to sell trickle down and tax cuts.
The mildly deranged penguin points out he has it all sideways. Instead of listing classes which he does or doesn’t like, he should list classes she claims everyone needs: Care and Feeding of Penguins, Care and Feeding of Cheese, and Eliminating Peas.
Re: Onamission5 @ #4…
My great-uncle, Charles O. Heydt, went to work as an office boy at the age of 13. He did pretty well. As a result, putting his name into Google turns up quite a bit of material, though mostly because of who worked for…John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
On the more general topic… Milton Freidman was horrified that his son and daughter both spent quite a bit of time in activities that couldn’t be used a “backup” careers in case of need. This was probably driven by the same impulse that lead Mario Savio to say “never trust anyone over 30”. Living through or growing up in the Great Depression had a profound effect on many peoples attitude toward work, economics and related issues. Mostly the fear that the wolf was never far from the door and contingency planning was a necessity.
America seems more and more to be a nation of unsupervised infants.
As distasteful as these quotes seem I was interested in looking this book up on Amazon and I read the first review. I’ll pick one choice quote from it but I thought the review as a whole was insightful. “While the author argues that he is not the philistine he may appear to be at first sight, he does argue that most students are philistines and that they have very little interest in the traditional elements of the liberal arts core curriculum.” As an educator, PZ, you must have a lot of experience with students who memorize the material flawlessly for a test and forget most of it a few weeks after the test or class is over. Out of all the Americans who take the aforementioned subjects, how many of them actually listen to Mozart or Beethoven (not saying you absolutely have to listen to those two but they would undoubtedly be taught in music classes) or know a language other than English? People spend thousands of dollars to learn and subsequently forget subjects they themselves admit to not caring about. Surely something needs to fixed.
npb596:
Well, yeah, we need to teach people to value these subjects, and create a culture that promotes their use and appreciation. I find it hard to think of a topic that a reasonably intelligent person wouldn’t find interesting and enriching, if it’s taught well. The problem is raising reasonable people and teaching them well.
Art, (natural) history, and so on, combined to communicate — about ancient Cephalopods —
Artist resurrects obscure fossils in gorgeous living colour:
Trying to stay vaguely on-topic here, the excerpted interview does touch on teh loonytarian’s gibbering:
Re: npb596 @ #19…
When I was a student, I was a philistine on those subjects. But then…I was in an Engineering program and for me, a two quarter sequence in the humanities was one quarter of Archaeology and one quarter of Physical Anthopology (English 1A, 1B would have qualified as well). The common Engineering student reference to most of the traditional liberal arts or humanities subjects was “fuzzy studies”. That didn’t mean that the engineering students thought they should be eliminated, though.
As for Beethoven and Mozart,,,despite never taking any music classes since the completely useless ones in junior high, I listen to–and appreciate–them all the time. Particularly since one of the normal features on the station I stream as an alarm clock is “Motzart in the Morning” every weekday at 9 AM. I grew up with a lot of Gilbert & Sullivan in the house, plus other classical music. At the moment, what is playing a Vivaldi peice.
As long as you stay within the neoclassical orthodoxy, or “Austrian” economics, it’s a positive advantage. If you want to actually understand how economies work, of course, a broad and deep knowledge of history is essential.
The value of a given course isn’t always in the content of the course, but in something possibly tangential that you take away from it and apply in your own life. A few examples from my own education:
–Junior high typing (along with earlier piano lessons) gave me decent keyboarding skills, which constitutes about 60% of my job these days.
–Our 11th grade US history teacher was a PhD historian (and debate team coach) who taught me more about how to structure and support an argument than any other teacher I’ve had.
–On the last day of an art history the professor, who specialized in urban architecture, took us on a walking tour of Hyde Park (Chicago) and showed us how it was designed to keep people from surrounding neighborhoods out.
And then there’s this:
I wonder how you decide whether you have free will or not. Or, for that matter, what free will means.
But I thought I’d let Google Translate have a go at his Wikipedia profile.
“After the protests of Russian-American Adib Einlender and his philosophers’ protest against the controversy of young people, Kaplan said to the education law in 2004: “I rejected Christianity, I denied objection and objection, And misery, and emphasized skepticism on objections, sincere purposes, and humanitarian beliefs and knowledge. It is clear that the human need for free, ethical, and self-seeking is a moral right.”
I guess I’m just used to economists who pay close attention to economic history, what with my best friend and beloved being one and all. That, and being an historian I suppose they’re the only ones who ever bother to talk to me.
If this guy is what the rest are like then I doubt I’m missing out on much.
What is it with these times that we keep spawning and endless supply of these turd blossoms.
If you want to “improve” education, you should try to improve it for the students. You should try to make it something that kids actually want to do. Not a Dickensian workhouse where they slog through the required work and then suffle home in their grey depressing uniforms.
This guy – wants to cut history, social studies, music and foreign languages = What an asshole.
The trouble is it’s not that simple. People like me exist. I love stories and love reading (and even got in frequent trouble for reading during class), but I hate hate HATED (with a capital every fucking letter of the alphabet) literature classes. I liked reading the stuff I had chosen, the stuff in the school curriculum was a slog. I literally could not read more than one paragraph per sitting of The Great Gatsby, it was like slogging through a waist deep bog. My mind was so glazed over and unmotivated that at the end when the book was commenting about Gatsby’s death I was like “Wait, what!?!. When the fuck did that happen?” and had to back track a couple pages to find it.
It’s not something that could be pinned on any teacher. Between middle and high school I had several teachers, and I had no problems with any of them. A couple of them would still be in my top list of favorite or most memorable teacher. Didn’t help when it came to getting through their class though. No matter who taught it or how, literature was consistently an unpleasant for me. Even the one teacher in senior year who bent over backwards for me to make it as easy as possible to pass was not enough to make it bearable.
I am convinced that a major contributing factor to my depressive meltdown just before my last semester of high school was my choice to take “Enriched English” (the AP track classes) instead of the lower class. My 8th grade teacher talked me into it by saying that someone intelligent like me would be bored in the lower class. I know he meant well, but that had to have been the single worst piece of advice I have ever gotten in my life. I ended up failing a semester in junior year, and had to double up on Lit classes the first semester of senior year. That sent me over the edge. I basically stopped going to school midway through the year and completed my Lit requirements through an online correspondence course (I’d already done all the mandatory classes and had the necessary credits). It took a couple of years for me to even start being able to emotionally recover from that. Even 10 years on the memory still makes my eyes water.
And it’s not an anti-art thing either, since I was in band (clarinet) for 5 years and only stopped because I didn’t like having to go to camp for marching band. I would go to events where a few students from a bunch of schools spent a full day practicing some songs, then the next day the band would play a recital. That stuff was great fun.
There is an enormous difference between exploring a topic on your own terms and being required to go through it on someone else’s terms. I have no prejudice toward the people who do enjoy that stuff, but it’s very much not my thing. I cannot even begin to imagine what sort of changes you would have to make for Lit class to not be a hell-hole for me.
Pretty much the only good thing I ever discovered in all of my literature classes is Edgar Allen Poe. Literally everything else is gone, willfully purged down the memory hole to bury the trauma.
When you encounter a suspected libertarian, you may want to start searching with my Critiques Of Libertarianism site.
Here’s what I have for Bryan Caplan:
“Yet another creative, ideological, bomb throwing recipient of right-wing welfare at the Koch-funded George Mason University Economics Department and Mercatus Center. A master of the Gish Gallop, assembling fire-hose sprays of weak academic studies, cherry-picked information, bad argument and other propaganda.”
Along with a dozen criticisms of him and his work.
Man I read the first line as ‘cutting the fat from circumcision’. I need more sleep.
I don’t know, what is playing that Vivaldi piece?
If there aren’t too many instrumental lines, my money’s on a cephalopod.
So what shall we call this? A social-inefficiency curriculum, with apologies to Durkheim? Because this sounds like the kind of thing I’d expect to hear from China or North Korea, not the US.
He reminds us why they call economics the dismal science (a phrase coined by a historian, BTW).
@13 Good grief. What am utterly odious human being.
A friend of mine attended a very prestigious art school and wound up with enough requisite computer experience to parlay into a high falutin’ tech job. Steve Jobs himself took useless classes in calligraphy which famously had no benefit to himself or society.
And for value of foreign language;
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/language.html
“The learning of another language expands one’s abstract capacity and vision. Personally, I speak four—or rather three-and-a-half—languages: English, French, Russian and the half is German, which I can read, but not speak. I found this knowledge extremely helpful when I began writing: it gave me a wider range and choice of concepts, it showed me four different styles of expression, it made me grasp the nature of language as such, apart from any set of concretes.”- Ayn Rand
Yet in that essay “Global Balkanization” she thinks bilingual countries are inferior to single language dominated countries and touts her preference for English. People who wish to maintain cultural identity through language are tribalists. Folk-art is empty nonsense and Rand decries tax money spent on “ethnic females swishing their skirts in old Spanish dances which were not too good even when they were new.”
Talk about undercutting the value of my first quote. Learning some Spanish and German gave me a new perspective on English in “red pill” veil lifting way. And the cultural melange of the parts of the US and other multicultural bastions has dissolved entrenched cultural closure to an extent. I think this parallels in the chapter ““The Art of Contradiction: WHAT DIVERSITY OFFERS” in the book Nonsense by Jamie Holmes. Quoting:
“One literature review found that twenty of twenty-four studies comparing bilinguals with monolinguals revealed a bilingual advantage for creativity. Its author, psychologist Lina Ricciardelli, suggested that the advantage depends on bilinguals’ high proficiency in both languages.”
I think cultural exchange has been a boon to human civilization overall. Some of it is insensitive appropriation, but most is beneficial diffusion. Didn’t the west get some of the classics back with value added commentary via Muslims? That may have aided Renaissance growth of humanism and flourishing.
I wonder if Objectivist acolytes refuse to learn contemporary Latin dances because Balkanization.
@Mark Dowd, 28: I’m sorry for your plight, that sounds awful. But you must admit that it’s pretty rare to find literary fiction so unpleasant it traumatises you. (I don’t mean to be flippant — I can’t empathise at all, having never had a comparable experience even though I hated school overall. But I don’t doubt that it was genuinely miserable for you.)
I’m sure there are some “extreme” personalities that will never be able to even tolerate certain subjects, no matter how we present them, for one reason or another. But I don’t think that’s at all common — certainly not common enough that we’d have to structure the education system around avoiding it. And we can make allowances for them the same way we already (try/ought to) do for students with other traumata or learning disabilities.
What is it with these assholes who say the socialists want everyone to be living in drab, identical 20 square meter concrete boxes, when their ideal educational system would lead to the same result? You’re not allowed to learn any skills that aren’t directly useful to the service of capital. No looking at the world critically and thinking about how things could be better for everyone, just accept your place and produce, slave.
Unless you’re already rich that is. Then you can do whatever you want.
Why is fat a bad thing?
Re: leerudolph @ #31…
I don’t recall what specific piece it was, save that it was “…for diverse instruments”, so I suppose a cephalapod would be a distinct possibility.
What I find amusing about Vivaldi is how some people skirt around exactly what his day job was all about. He taught music at a “school for ‘orphaned’ young women”, with the idea of getting them enough education to marry well. What usually *isn’t* stated is that they were, primarily, the by-blows of noblemen. In any case, Vivaldi composed pieces for whatever instruments his students were good at that year, so there’s a lot of variation.
Re: hemidactyus @ #35…
See “The Languages of Pao” by Jack Vance.
When I was young and stupid, I hated a lot, and I mean a lot, of my education. I hated to learn foreing languages, because I was lousy at it. I hated learning typewriting for the same reason. I loved reading, but I loathed literary classes because my teacher was an art snob of first water. I loved all the sciences and math, but I had no use for history.
However during the course of my life I found almost all of it usefull to some degree, with the exception to gym classes and ski-courses, which to this day seem to be only included so assholes can bully and degrade nerds in an official setting.
The point is, that while it is safe that you will ever need only a fraction of what you learn in school, you can never know in advance which one it will be. I thought that languages will be useless because I have no intention to travel – now I work in a foreign country and my knowledge of four languages comes handy. I thougth typewriting is useless, but with the rise of computers it became more handy than ever. etc. etc.
@Mark Dowd #28:
Including George Orwell?
What a great example of taking things out of their context. Kaplan’s argument against public education might be flawed, but it certainly cannot be reduced to this ridiculous interpretation.
He is not saying fine arts, foreign language, or social sciences(which include economics) are useless. Rather he is arguing about the usefulness and wisdom of forcibly teaching it to kids who do not want them, have no interest in them, and forget the whole thing two hours after the test. It is an undeniable fact that we forget most of what we are taught in the school. So “is this the best we can come up with?” is a valid question.
@24
Kaplan actually addresses this. He cites research that show that the amount of this “residual learning” is minuscule. He also tackles the idea of “exposing” kids to arts and social sciences through public education and argues that the amount of exposure is much less that usually claimed.
I have not read his book and I cannot say how well his claims are backed by data. But his arguments warrant more scrutiny than thoughtless rejection.
I have never used calculus in my life since I’ve graduated from college. I can still do derivatives in a polynomial, but the last time I used anything outside of basic algebra was to convince the pizza place that I should be in their free pizza delivery area using the Pythagorean Theorem.
On the other hand, I use my knowledge of a broad spectrum of art and literature in my job every day (librarian). And while I’m not fluent in any language besides English, because I studied Spanish I can help Spanish-speaking patrons to some degree.
So which course, exactly, was fat and I didn’t need to know it? Which class was I wasting time on? When should we have decided that, and how? And that’s even assuming his premises, which is that “useful” courses are the ones that we make money with, which I categorically reject.
All the ones that taught you to ask questions.
</snark>Citation needed….. I thawt I saw a L&B (liar and bullshitter).
@47
Actually no, it is not needed because I just reiterated what I understand from his claims! I did not say I accept or reject those claims. There is a difference between misrepresenting someone’s work or taking it out of context and accepting the whole thing.
@47
You can google him. If you want to start on the opposite side of him, start with comment 29 in this thread and read the first link on that page where Noah Smith gives a rebuttal to some of the claims he has made.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-11/college-isn-t-a-waste-of-time
It should suffice to show that Kaplan’s arguments are not as simplistic as some commenters think to be.
You can also listen to the man himself as he talks about what he is saying:
https://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts/case-against-education
Sorry Raak, either you cite the source in your original post, or why the fuck should I believe a word you say?
And any further posts are now ignored….
The sentence that immediately follows the passage PZ quotes in the OP; (link)
I have no desire to read or hear anything more from the man (BTW, Caplan, not Kaplan), simplistic or not.
It sounds like the claim is still that teaching them is useless, and what you’ve done here is offer a couple of reasons why that claim is being made.
It looks like three reasons on the page, but it’s actually two, since “do not want them” and “have no interest in them” apparently mean the same thing. It’s not obvious how any of it is supposed to support the conclusion; but in any case, that is all that’s happening here, as far as I can tell: saying it’s useless (contrary to your assertion that some other type of claim is being made) and saying why it is thought to be so, with some rather suspicious and contorted reasoning.
A solution then is to teach them more of this material, not less. The amount of things remembered will be larger (if that’s what matters), whatever fraction that may be of the total content which is taught. If we were to teach less and consequently even less is remembered, that would not give us a result that anybody who cares about quality education (and uses such questionable criteria to evaluate it) would be looking for.
However, as I just indicated, it’s also not clear to what extent memorization should play a role in our thinking about this matter in the first place. I may not need to remember a large number of specific things taught to me in 7th grade social studies, in order to get something out of it. It seems to be true that I’ve gotten something valuable, if I learn how (not necessarily what) to think about such things and if I have a better general understanding of the subject matter than I did before. I don’t need to recall a long list of dates and names and other such trivialities, for example, then be tested on my ability to regurgitate this data at will, in order to say it was an important/valuable/useful educational experience. That’s simply not what I would say an important/valuable/useful educational experience is like.
As for whether kids want it or not, the ignorant can’t give us reliable guidance about what is worth knowing. Teachers (and any others who are more knowledgeable) are naturally in a much better position to make such decisions, however incomprehensible or implausible it may seem to those who aren’t in that position. They may whine about it a lot, as children (or for instance libertarians) are apt to do, but that is not a serious argument for or against any such thing.
@51
As it is your absolute right. But at the same time you don’t get to misrepresent what he says and then pat yourself on the back for refuting the imaginary arguments you don’t know about and you have not read. I don’t see what Rand’s politics has to do with this either.
Raaak, fine, no shut the fuck up until you put up. If you won’t put or shut up, we have your number as liar and bullshitter.
And liberturds are the scum of the Earth, to be ignored. Never link to such idiotological sites if you want to be taken seriously.
That is of course assuming that the amount remembered is proportional to the amount taught. I doubt that’s true, but it’s an empirical question either way. If we found that it isn’t true, then a proclamation that it’s “an undeniable fact that we forget most of what we are taught” is just a bunch of noise and can be safely ignored.
raaak @53: That sentence informs us of Caplan’s view of society. It colours anything he has to say about society, so it has everything to do with this. He is either a juvenile idiot or a paid shill.
@52
I cannot argue on Caplan’s side simply because I have not read his book and I am not an expert in the field. But this post and so many of the comments were such huge straw men.
I think uselessness should be interpreted in the context of gained benefits from education compared to taxpayer spent money on it. I am positive that he does not claim that studying humanities or social sciences is useless. He is a tenured economics professor for God’s sake!
Well, I seriously doubt this claim given that you have not given any source for it. I think Caplan’s claim (which he says there is research on) that remembering is more related to how much you engage with the material after you learn it, is more accurate and closer to reality.
Also, he has never claimed that education has zero benefits. Rather, he is saying that the actual yield of the system is far below ideals proponents of the current system purport it to be. So yes, I think he admits that it is a good thing that kids learn literacy, numeracy, and a bunch of other soft skills in schools. But this learning comes at a very hard price, and takes a very long time and has sub-par quality.
@54
Nerd of redhead,
Take a look at comment 49 for a start.
@56
This is exactly what the likes of Prager, Shapiro, Peterson, etc claim when they want to engage with the left on any topic: that their counterpart has some ulterior motive in denying God, advocating a policy, or whatever position a person on the left might take.
Well, everyone may have ulterior motives. But reducing ALL debate to ulterior motives is…not helpful, and is not interesting to me. In fact, it is the most boring thing one could say in response to an argument no matter how bad that argument might be.
It is amazing that saying that an argument a tenured economics professor puts forward may warrant some scrutiny is met with such defiance.
Well, OK! Don’t read him! Who cares? You can believe what you want.
This is an absurd situation. I think the quote in the tweet which is repeated on this blog is out of context. And I have provided some context for it to the best of my knowledge. I cannot do much better because I am not an expert in the field and I certainly have not accepted Caplan’s case against education. But I cannot “explain” him to people who do not want to read a word he has said and at the same time claim that all he has said is BS because Rand!
raaak @59: Sure, lots of people say that about their opponents. Some with more justification than others. For me, “laissez-faire capitalism is indeed the only just social system”, or “climate change is a hoax”, are deal-breakers. These people have no arguments, or have arguments that have been comprehensibly trounced repeatedly. Life is too short. If you think these idiots have anything worth listening to, good luck to you.
“comprehensively”.
So now it’s taxpayers like author dude, and it’s not the schoolchildren, who have concerns about the usefulness of something, which we’re meant to care about. This group should think they will get more use out of spending their wealth differently, so they should want to gut education (and perhaps many other taxpayer-funded programs/institutions).
This argument does not end with a conclusion like “… and that’s why we’ll wind up with a better educational system, as I believe I have shown — because we gutted it!” That certainly wouldn’t follow.
It ends with “I’m a selfish and short-sighted fuck who wants to hoard all of my loot, more than I want a well-educated population.” But we as a society shouldn’t let that happen.
Argument from incredulity. Does it sometimes happen that a person shoots themselves in their own foot? Yes, it does happen. And now it’s your turn to say “b-b-but it’s their own foot for God’s sake!” and recognize how pointless that is as an argument that it didn’t (or can’t) happen.
Also, because, as you claim, it’s in comparison to taxpayer money, the utility of it need not be zero, merely less than the utility of that money. Is it conceivable to you that an economics professor might care more about how much income they get to keep after taxes? I certainly don’t have a hard time believing that, although of course I also don’t share this professor’s priorities and think his arguments look like shit.
That may be, but there is no proposal here. Some kids will engage more with some material, some with other material, some have all sorts of reasons (external to the education system) why they’re not engaging much with some or any material. Removing chunks from the curriculum, or reducing their scope, does not seem to be a way to make kids engage with it more than they are now. Maybe I’m just not using my imagination here, but yet again, I don’t see how you get from A to B.
The non sequiturs keep piling up … I see random complaints that might sound reasonable or coherent or relevant to education, but they do not properly connect to the concrete proposals that are ostensibly being derived from them (when one can even find an actual proposal in this fucking mess of an argument, beyond the usual “fuck you, I’ve got mine”).
What the fuck are “soft skills”? And which other ones are supposed to be “hard”?
Rich people like him can pay the price. They just don’t want to, because they want a new boat, for fuck’s sake. And as a taxpayer, I don’t give a shit about that.
Yes, and reducing the time spent on it will not improve things in the educational system. Again, author dude just wants a new boat, and he doesn’t want his taxes spent on other shit. What’s improved here is not the educational system, but the amount of money he stuffs under his fucking mattress. That’s what “useful” to him, more than the educations of some whiny know-nothing kids, just as you said above.
What’s the par for this hole supposed to be? Who made this fucking course anyway?
The second one is an obvious falsehood. The first one is an ideological statement which depends on the definitions and the philosophical leanings of the person. I don’t see how you equate these two. It is like saying 2+2=5 and Kantian moral philosophy are equally wrong! It is meaningless to even compare the two.
I still fail to see what all this has to do with a bunch of economic arguments pertaining to the costs and benefits of education system.
Does Caplan know that Rand herself was a history major?
@63
consciousness razor,
You are trying so hard to do what exactly? It looks like you think if you can refute my understanding of Caplan’s claims, it somehow shows that his work is not worth looking at! Instead of going through all this trouble, just don’t read it. God! Look, no one is asking you to accept him as your savior or something. If you really want to prove that I am wrong, you need to show that the tweet was not really out of context, not argue against Caplan’s positions (which you only know about from what I have written here)
No it is not from incredulity. I think I read somewhere that he is a big fan of Shakespeare. So he is into this stuff. Also, if you bothered to read his writings on other subjects, you would have known that he actually has a good command of history. But I keep forgetting. You don’t want to learn anything about him or his work because Rand!
Where did I say there is? Where did I claim that he was proposing a better system? I even said that with little knowledge I have from his work and the rebuttals, I have *not* accepted his claims.
I only said the tweet which was repeated on this website was out of context. He is not saying education is totally useless or the poor don’t have the right to be educated or humanities are evil (he is different than Jordan Peterson you know) or any other outlandish claims attributed to him in this blog post or in comments.
Presumably, you came here to correct the people here, and I want to be sure that I understand your interpretation of it. I’m participating in that conversation. It definitely has not made me more interested in his work, because making sense of your presentation of the work (whether or not it’s accurate) is awfully difficult.
Isn’t it worth reading? I would’ve assumed that you thought it had merit.
You likewise don’t have to read this thread. How would you take it, if that were my response to you?
But like you said, he’s more interested in keeping his own wealth, more than he is interested in guaranteeing that other people can benefit from it as he did. That is what is not very useful to him, or so he thinks. And you thought it was worth your time to come and here and correct on this critical point, since it is technically distinct from believing it’s “totally useless.”
That’s an unusual position to take, but you can have it. It still doesn’t imply he values education, in the sense that non-assholes have in mind when they discuss the value of education. So this is just a case of equivocating, meaning it still doesn’t follow as a coherent argument. But however we’re supposed to understand this load of sophistry and bullshit, I don’t think it’s going to help anybody very much with anything. So, let me pose the question to you — what exactly are you trying to do here?
“The fat emerges in kindergarten: history, social studies, art, music, foreign language.”
I wish! My grandparents spoke a foreign language, which they felt they shouldn’t speak with their children or grandchildren. I didn’t study it until years later – too late. In kindergarten, I learned rudimentary English, math, and being a decent person.
I recently saw one of my father’s report cards from elementary school, during WWII. It explicitly mentioned the teaching of democratic values and the democratic system. If ever there was a need for social studies and history, it’s now – the threat is within.
Yes. But it is proving to be such an absurd endeavor. I am not interested in promoting Caplan or his ideology. It is just that the questions he puts forward are more difficult and cannot be dismissed out of hand. There are serious critiques of his work. I have read some of them and they make a lot of sense. What doesn’t make sense is this defiant attitude even after pointing out that a scholar’s work is backed by research, data, and logical reasoning.
So I am confused about what the next step should be in this absurd situation. Should I quote his work sentence by sentence and you refute each? Isn’t that “reading” his work? Why is it soooooo hard to admit that someone’s arguments are more sophisticated than originally thought. I am not even defending him and you are already writing long ass comments in my (actually Caplan’s) rebuttal.
What do you mean by “Keeping his wealth”? So whenever you think your government does not spend your tax money in the best possible way, you only want to keep your own wealth? Is it absolutely impossible for you or anyone else to have some other reason when complaining about taxes rather than keeping their own wealth?
If you bothered to read what he says instead of repeatedly guess what he says, you would have seen this for example:
or
I apologize for such long quotes But what other way do I have to argue that he is not saying what you say he is saying? You have put me in an impossible situation in which I lose anyway because you simply refuse to read “anything” he has said or written. So you are always right because you can attribute whatever you want to him and refute it easily.
*hyperventilating* This is so stupid .
(As an aside, I HATE CAPITALISM.
Students – The universe emerged billions of years ago. Life on earth is recent, humans and other animals extremely so. There’s no cosmic force deciding your fate or our collective fate. You don’t have to become part of this system. You choose your own future, and you can learn from what people before you have done. Study and learn from the past. You’ll be great.)
Good night.
No argument is as remotely effective as confidently stating something is stupid and then going on an incoherent rant about a non-relevant ideological issue. This is actually the problem with humanities: everybody thinks their own misguided and ideologically motivated opinion is equivalent with longstanding and well-researched positions of experts on any given subject. So much for the claim that we need humanities in schools when we can’t even respect those sciences because of our politics. This is not too far from what happens on the right with regards to climate science (and all other sciences!) We don’t need to listen to experts on the field because a guy on TV confidently told us all of it is a hoax.
Such sad and…familiar trolling.
You know someone’s high on capitalism when they go “Ugh all these kids are learning about useless things like culture and not how to be a useful wage slave :(“
Sure, I am trolling because I wrote something about the complexity of a controversial issue trying to say it is not as simple as initially thought. That is trolling. But attacking fucking capitalism as if it has anything to do with anything here is not trolling, not at all. Is this the opposite day or something?
Anyways, please don’t let me stop you lecturing the “students”.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Hahahahahahaha.
Ha.
“Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and frequent contributor to Freakonomics as well as publishing his own blog, EconLog. He is a self-described economic libertarian.”
“Caplan’s anarcho-capitalist views were discussed by Brian Doherty in his book Radicals for Capitalism and in Reason magazine. One frequent criticism of Caplan is an accusation that he has engaged in historical negationism by claiming that anarcho-capitalists have a better claim on the history of anarchist thought than mainstream left-anarchists. Despite this, Caplan has criticized one of the most notable examples of an anarchist-inspired society, revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, in an essay entitled ‘The Anarcho-Statists of Spain’.”
LOL. Yes, obviously, capitalism has nothing to do with anything here. (Also, what a fucking dipshit.)
I mean that you write a book telling people about how “useless” a bunch of academic subjects are, which if true would lead me to think we should not have these “useless” things nearly as much in the schools. Because I wouldn’t want schools filled up with something like that. And in this context we’re supposed to understand “useless” like this: not that the items so described have no use, but that the tax money spent on them is more useful to that taxpayer than the subjects in question are useful to the taxpayer, while learned by people other than the taxpayer, namely children currently in schools. They don’t want to learn it, by which you actually mean that taxpayers don’t want to pay for it.
But granted, it wouldn’t have to result in tax cuts. That money could still be collected and used elsewhere, not kept by individual taxpayers. But that is I what I had assumed, when you said that we should be comparing the benefits of teaching those subjects to the amount that taxpayers are spending on them. It’s just that the logic is so thoroughly fucking screwed already, that I didn’t take that detail into consideration when I chose to word it that way.
What you quote is the asshole saying something, but it is not something that indicates his deep appreciation for the value of education. He just associates it with fucking jobs. That’s pure fail on your part, raaak.
I will quote it again:
Why do there need to be jobs associated with it? Did you ever learn that Julius Caesar was assassinated? Do you remember? I bet you did. There aren’t any jobs in the field of CaesarGettingStabbed-ology or whatever the fuck. It’s just a fucking fact about a significant moment in European history, one of the many things that you should have learned about, if we’re going to say that you’ve grown into an adult having received a decent education in our society. That’s what we do with our children. It does serve them well, and they should not be deprived of it, even if no jobs of any kind will ever result in it.
Anyway, if the author were the sort of person who did value education on its own, because its value to human beings doesn’t depend on a connection to a fucking career path, then that isn’t sort of thing they would say. This is evidence against the claim, so probably you would’ve been better off not citing it at all.
By the way… Do you know why I sample things on a tasting menu? Because I want to eat some fucking food. Maybe I’ll like it or maybe not. The only way to find out is to try. But I don’t do it because I expect to end up with a job. That would just be absurd.
By the way, maybe Caplan could inform Putin of the bullshit view that “anarcho-capitalists have a better claim on the history of anarchist thought than mainstream left-anarchists,” so the FSB can start torturing them instead.
Oh – cr, while you’re around, I thought you might be interested in this article (the British-competitiveness framing is obviously not something I support).
@78
consciousness razor,
I think you are confusing the enrichment someone gains from studying music, arts, history, etc with the actual economic benefits that person receives from studying those subjects. Caplan is not against arts, music, history or social sciences, not by a long shot. His other work and the quotes I have given in the previous comment clearly shows that. Stating that by investing in these subjects it is harder to find a job in today’s job market is not equivalent to saying history is useless in the sense that it enriches one’s life!
So we still can say OK, we spend all this money and resources to enrich the lives of children and expand their thinking so they can make more informed choices. That is great and again, Caplan agrees that it is a great ideal. But he is arguing that the reality in schools is far from that ideal despite the sheer amount of money flowing into the education system.
Now, where we begin to differ is the solutions. He probably advocates the libertarian solution (delegating all education decision to the individual) while I certainly think that is also not such a great and dreamy thing to do. In any case, his claims and work are far from the caricature painted here. I am shocked that it is so hard to admit! Why? Because he is a libertarian? Or has said in some point that he likes Rand? Even if what your take of him is to the point (he does not value education at all) which I don’t think it is btw, it STILL does not warrant automatic rejection of his ideas much less misrepresenting what he has said.
In case it wasn’t clear enough from the references @ #77, Caplan in 2009: “Be a Koch Fellow: The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation is still taking applications for spring Internships in D.C. The deadline: December 4th. If you’re a student who’d like to get paid to talk about the kinds of things you read on econ blogs, it’s a sweet and edifying deal.”
But I mean sure, nothing you could learn in history or the social sciences could help you to put Koch Fellowships in critical context.
Hee.
from SC’s link in #80:
Ouch. Not a very optimistic note to end on, was it?
You should probably take the UK’s situation, even in decline, and make it 100 times worse, to get a rough sense of our problems in the US. But I bet that applies to many parts of our education system.
raaak @69: You seem to think that your quotes from that interview tell us something we neglected or glossed over. To me, they are exactly what I would expect from a capitalist stooge like Caplan; education as career training, to grease the wheels of commerce as efficiently as possible. Nothing subtle or complex there at all. Music: pie in the sky. Reading, writing and arithmetic: good job skills!
Lmao, an randroid economist lambasting colleges for not preparing students to be productive wage slaves has nothing to do with capitalism, apparently.
and who really needs reading, writing and arithmetic?
You just need to do as you’re told. The Boss can do all the thinky stuff.
Wait, so we should let kids decide what they want to learn based on what they like?
First of all: kids really don’t have a clue about the million things they could learn. Indeed, one of the current trends in teaching is to confront them with a wide variety of options, especially in the humanities, and then let them choose. Guess what my 12th grade chose? Shakespeare…
Second: let me introduce you to the German concept of Allgemeinbildung: a set of skills and knowledge that everybody should have in order to be able to participate fully in society.
This includes literary skills. Why? Because we are creatures made of language. Right now I’m drudging through Death of a Salesman. I cannot say that I like it, and I’m the teacher. Still, the things I’m teaching my students go way beyond the story of an old man who thinks too highly of himself and a society that discards him once he has outlived his usefulness.
I’m teaching them to analyse texts and relationships, to work with language, to carefully make an argument. I’m trying to keep it interesting, doing freeze frames and group work etc. Yet, if they come out of it thinking “I never want to hear anything about Arthur Miller again” it’s still fine. They will still have learned tools they need in life.
Can we do better? Totally. But assessing education by the profit argument is simply wrong.
Ha, haha, ha
Anecdotal point to back up Giliell@88:
My middle kid was supremely uninspired by academics until he found himself enrolled in a particular mandatory history class. Something about that class woke his brain right up. He’s been on a history binge for a few years now and his interest hasn’t waned, in fact, it has increased. His grade recently filled out their schedules for next school year and he’s applying for not one, not two, but three dual-enrollment courses with the local college, all on topics of history. He’s pretty sure, as a high school sophomore, he has found his college major. None of that would have been possible, I suspect, without the school district’s apparently onerous and unwarranted requisites. He didn’t know he had an interest in or gift for learning history until someone shoved him into a class and made him study the material. I can’t tell you what it means to witness one’s child who “hates school” be inspired by a field of study and find he doesn’t hate school so much after all.
@88,
Gillel,
I seriously don’t understand what you are doing. I am just saying he is a serious scholar. Writing long comments with multiple references in my response will not show that he is not a serious person or a quack (he might be a capitalist stooge as so keenly observed in @85 and elsewhere in this thread, but whatever.)
So step back and think about it for a second. You are seriously criticizing him to prove that he is not worth of being taken seriously? That doesn’t make any sense.
That being said, you have not read other comment carefully. So here we go again:
First of all, read his fucking book if you are so curious about his ideas on this. I have not read it. I am not an expert and I really don’t know! But I think he addresses this in his analysis. His argument is not so much about “how” people should be educated. Rather, it is about “how much”. The students may not know what they want. But certainly learning huge amount of information and forgetting most of it a short time after school is not ideal either.
At least understand what the man says before criticizing(?) him!
Again, if you bothered to read his and others’ economic arguments, you would see that how they calculate the total cost. I just don’t see how your statistics proves different. If anything, you are actually supporting his argument. He is also claiming that the quality of services in schools are low despite huge investments. So I leave finding the total amount of money (public and private) that goes into the education system as an exercise to you.
@89,
Onamission,
For what it’s worth, Caplan admits that schools have this benefit. He argues afterwards that what actually happens in schools on average is far from the ideal case you have described.
@85,
Rob,
See @78. I have nothing further to say on this.
raaak
That much is obvious.
Depends on what you mean by “taken serious”.
Do you mean “worthy of spending my limited time on his ideas”? In that case nothing I have seen so far has convinced me that he has anything actually interesting to say on the topic.
If you mean “somebody I should keep in mind because he’s further trying to streamline education for the benefit of capitalist production” then yes, he must be taken serious.
I’m not really interested in capitalist economists’ calculation of education costs as they have goals fundamentally opposed to mine.
BTW, Giliell
Serious scholar who might be (actually certainly is) a capitalist stooge? You mean like the serious scholars who denied the harm of smoking, or leaded gasoline, or climate change? Yeah. we need lots more of those. The Koch brothers think so, anyway.
@93
Giliell,
Did you read a word in this thread before you commented? YES! That was the whole point. He is an expert in the field. You can agree or disagree with him. But to do so, you will need expert knowledge or at least you need to understand what he says.
I also have certain amount of fucks to give whether you take him seriously or not. I have provided enough context to show that his arguments warrant more scrutiny. Your defiance to even consider something is depressing and alarming at the same time. But in the end, it is up to you. At least, on the one point you raised, I showed that you had misunderstood the actual claim.
Then there is Google in which you don’t need to demonstrate your ignorance of economics and be proud of it at the same time. It is where you can spend time actually learning something instead of spending time attacking me for pointing out that you have misunderstood things.
Right, please enlighten me with socialist (or anarcho-syndicalist) cost calculation of education. You understand that cost is a number? Right? While you are at it, give me the total cost of healthcare too. I am genuinely curious.
@94,
Rob,
OK. But the whole point is he is more serious than **YOU**. You can dismiss him. But you don’t get to claim you totally know what he says because Koch (it was Rand a few comments ago! I guess we will get to Adam Smith if we continue this long enough)
Haha, capitalist buffoon falls back to a courtier’s reply. Typical.
@97,
Porivil,
What? To make matters for your keen fallacy-seeking mind more clear, please note that the point is not that he is an expert and you are not. The point is that the bar to claim that you can dismiss someone out of hand in a serious field (not flat earth science) is a rather high one. You need to demonstrate that you have understood their arguments. No one here could do that. The typical argument in this thread is like this:
1- I know B.C has nothing important or thought-provoking or worth studying to say. On topic X, he says Y which is oh-my-God, so terrible and ignorant.
2- No. Actually on topic X, he says Z not Y.
3- But he is a capitalist stooge.
I leave finding the fallacy in this line of argument as an exercise to you.
Save it for someone that cares, stooge.
raaak @96: Oh, was I supposed to choose one of Koch or Rand? I didn’t know they were incompatible.
Given what I do know about him, I don’t care what he says. No matter how erudite, deeply thought, or finely reasoned his arguments, he is a mouthpiece for a profoundly vile worldview. He is serious in the same way tertiary syphilis is serious.
As already pointed out, Caplan is associated with the Koch Brothers. And those guys just want their taxes cut and regulations removed. To obtain that goal, they spend millions and millions since the 1970ies, founded think tanks and foundations like the Cato Institute.
And they are not alone, other billionaires weaponized their pseudo-philanthropy as well, e.g. by creating so called Beachheads at universities, which was one of their main goals. I highly recommend the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer (a journalist for the New Yorker), who researched this rarely investigated topic.
I just found this article https://www.huffingtonpost.com/connor-gibson/to-charles-koch-universit_b_9090404.html , that quotes from her book –
The Olin Foundation’s executive director, William Simon, explained at the time [1978] how long-term funding of the Beachhead schools would pay off later, in the form of better political capital.
‘Ideas are weapons—indeed the only weapons with which other ideas can be fought.’ He argued, ‘Capitalism has no duty to subsidize its enemies.’ Private and corporate foundations, he said, must cease ‘the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of politics, economics and history are hostile to capitalism.’ Instead, they ‘must take pains to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists and writers who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty,’ as he put it. [p.102]
(Excuse me, this is my first comment on this blog, and I have not worked out how to properly quote here.)
It really is frustrating, how libertarian ideas that benefit the few and hurt the many are entering the main stream. The billionaire donors obviously achieved their goal and changed the discourse. In their views, social science and the arts are a hotbed for lefties, who are out to grab their money.
And critical thinking, that one might learn at school, especially in the social sciences, is the tool to understanding politics – for instance the connection between Koch Industries pollution (and its consequences for the environment, health and safety) and the funding of anti-EPA and climate denial groups and politicians by the Koch brothers. A social science major has the tools to discern the truth which could qualify for the career of journalist. There are already to many journalists that act as mere mouthpieces of the powerful.
As anecdotal evidence, exhibit A, me. I (German, from a working class background) did not love school, and lots of topics bored me (but I saw their value). I am sure, that I forgot most of what I learned. But I learned a lot and got interested in things that otherwise may not have entered my life.
One of them was history. And some topics got me so interested, that I read more about them in my spare time. And Charles Koch s fears came true – I learned about inequality from Ancient Greece to the serfs in the Middle Ages to the inhumane, dangerous work and housing conditions of the workers in the Industrial Age, when Capitalism was unshackled and the regulatory, welfare state did not exist. And I learned that it was the struggle of (unionized) workers that effected the change.
By the way, there is one way to steal that leisure time (potential reading time) away from kids, whilst preparing them for their lives as a drone –
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/newt-gingrich-thinks-school-children-should-work-as-janitors/248837/
Pray tell, why was that not implemented? Seemingly, freedom and individualism are just slogans (or should only benefit the rich). Ultimately, free market radicals and tax haters seem to hardly have a more benign view of humanity (at least the common people) than Stalinists. They share a quasi religious, totalitarian mindset.
Sure, schools should be reformed. Here are my ideas.
(US) Schools should teach evolution and sex ed. Home schooling and religious schools should be banished, because of their goal of (yeah, I say it) brainwashing. Religion should be taught just in context of history, with emphasis on comparative religion (meaning, many religions, including those that are not practiced anymore). The dominance of standardized tests has to go, instead critical thinking and genuine interest in subject matters should be fostered.
Subjects like history should be less date fixated – does one really have to know by heart, in which year Caesar defeated the Gauls in Alesia? I think it is more important to know why he did it, what the impacts where, how the Roman society worked (and, if possible, the Gaulish), how people lived, what they thought. And to learn to compare our own society, its shortcomings and achievements, with the past. To draw conclusions, learn about ethics (e.g. about slavery, the small landholding senator class versus the poor).
Those reforms could benefit society as a whole, not only the rich capitalists.
Damn, I just saw how long my comment is! Sorry, I won t do that again.
raak
Yes, and unlike you, I even had my brain turned on.
Well, fuck no he isn’t. He’s an economist. He has no expert knowledge on education. I know it is very fashionable right now to hire economists for everything, looking at everything from an economist’s point of view, but that doesn’t actually mean that this is a good idea.
So why are you commenting on anything here since you have failed demonstrating any rudimentary understanding of education?
No, you actually didn’t. You made a claim (there is a “sheer amount of money flowing into education”) and when confronted with evidence that the claim is ridiculous you fell back on “he doesn’t mean it that way, he means it in a different way”
Where did I demonstrate ignorance of economics? I said I reject the economists’ view on what education should be about.
Again, you have done no such thing. Also, before this post I wasn’t attacking you but your argument. Obviously you failed so catastrophically in your language classes that it is no wonder that you keep claiming you did things when you clearly didn’t.
Meep. This is where I get to call you names. I said I’m not interested in their calculations because their goals differ from mine. Yep, cost is a number. The question is what it is supposed to signify and what you want to achieve. I reject the premise that school and education are there to produce people who can be used instantly and profitably in a capitalist system, hopefully without asking too many questions.
But apparently they succeeded with you.
@100,
Rob,
So you think being exposed to an idea is the same as being exposed to a disease. So tell me, where do you draw the line? I mean, is there anything out there that you disagree with and is not a disease? Just name one person or one idea you disagree with but is not a disease to escape from.
Every kid who gets pressured into giving up art and pursuing a more “productive” job is a failure of us as a society to appreciate the value of those pursuits, not a fucking goal.
I’d definitely rather have a nation full of artists than a nation full of economists, that’s for damn sure.
Alesia? What Alesia?
Sorry.
Couldn’t resist.
To quote write “blockquote” between “größer als” and “kleiner als” , to end add a / in front of the blockquote.
Giliell,
You are embarrassing yourself. I am not talking about that ridiculous thing you said about costs. I was talking about this:
So you did not know what his argument was about and you still went on a paragraph-long rant. And then you completely ignored that he had addressed what you thought he had not addressed and he was saying something you didn’t know about.
Please understand. I am not questioning your expertise. My problem is with your defiance. It is funny. If I quote one sentence from Caplan, you jump to respond to it and show how stupid it is. But if I tell you to go read the rest of the quote, you will write long angry rants to prove that you don’t need to. Then just one more quote, and we go again. Fuck with that. I am not here to spoon-feed Bryan Caplan’s works to you. Don’t read him. Who cares.
Great! So you are against the idea of looking at education from an economic perspective. I would have no problem with you if you just stated this and shut up. But no, you had to write this:
and this:
Pathetic.
raaak @103:
If that’s what you read, you’re flailing desperately. I’ve been exposed to Koch/Rand “ideas”, and they are toxic to everyone except the privileged few. I draw the line at intellectual cover for nasty profit-motivated arseholes.
OK, I’ll play your silly game. Albert Einstein, and his notion that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory.
I deny it. I was in fact given a book for Christmas, with a title something like “All the things you learned at school and then forgot”. Glancing through it, I’d forgotten very few of them. So I gave the book away and forgot the exact title.
Now my experience may not be typical. But there are many intermediate states between immediately having some information or skill at your fingertips, and having completely forgotten it. I doubt whether Caplan could show that his claim is actually true.
@107,
OK. But here’s the thing. You cannot reject another Physicist’s ideas on any issue (even quantum mechanics) based on a quote of them stating “I like Einstein and I am heavily influenced by him”. That statement has absolutely nothing to do with if their ideas are valid about anything at all.
But you see the name Bryan Caplan. You rush to Wikipedia and find that there is a quote in which he says he likes Rand. Therefore you conclude that you can absolutely dismiss EVERYTHING the man says and call it a disease!
For all you people’s claims that humanities and social sciences are needed sooooo much, you actually show very little respect for these fields. Look. Those fields have their own complexities, OK? Extracting a quote from fucking Wikipedia and trying to use it as a cudgel does not do anything for you in this debate except showing the depth of your ignorance and your disrespect for humanities.
I am done with you btw.
You could conceivably do that and be wrong. But given how much more there is to read and think about than anyone has time for, rejecting out of hand the ideas of someone fuckwitted enough to take Ayn Rand seriously is an excellent heuristic.
BTW, I’m not sure what your point was w.r.t. Einstein. Einstein was, after all, one of the greatest scientists of all time, while Rand was a shit-for-brains sociopath.
@108,
KG,
You are right. He admits that point. He also acknowledges that there are so many anecdotal examples to the contrary. But his claim is that he is talking about the average person finishing school. As you have stated yourself, your case might as well be an exception.
Also, he doesn’t say that people forget absolutely everything. The thing is the more you teach a bunch of material to someone, the more they forget. So the question of “how much to teach someone” is a valid and serious and thought-provoking question, at least for me.
My own anecdotal experience is more in line with what Caplan describes. I learned a lot (I mean a lot) of material during school and I learned many of it my own. No one crammed it down my throat. But I do not have a very good grasp even on the material I learned on my own now. I am good with the material I had to engage with after school. The rest faded very quickly even those I waded deeply into.
raaak @109:
Much more than a quote, and not in wikipedia.
‘Bye!
KG,
And see how overtly using that heuristic has led to embarrassing nonsensical arguments from people in this thread. You are right it is a fucking heuristic not an absolute proof. It will serve you well to keep that in mind.
Someone seems to be putting a lot of effort into defending a point they “don’t really care about”.
Strange is the mind of the capitalist stooge, I suppose.
From a review of Caplan’s book:
The most embarrassingly nonsensical arguments I’ve seen on the thread have been yours. Basically, amounting to the argument from authority: Caplan is a professor of economics, so he must be worth taking seriously.
And the smuggest condescension as well.
I wonder whatever became of HarvardMBA.
@KG,
You are a little bit late. I posted the same link at @49.
So no, it is not an argument from authority. It is the argument that go read the fucking thing when it is pointed out to you that your initial take was not quite to the point. I am actually glad that you are doing what I spent so much time to convince people to do and met with incredible defiance! That is why I take your responses to me with a grain of salt. I understand that you need to attack me even if you are not sure why.
And KG,
I actually expected comments like yours when I made my first comment (@43). We are at 118 and you are actually the first commenter who has bothered to read something on the subject before insisting that it is totally absolutely 100% worthless!
I don’t know what to make of this. It is absurd and depressing.
I kind of agree with the points Noah Smith raises in his piece. I think there are problems with Caplan’s emphasis on signaling theory of college. At the same time, I don’t think here is the place we can have that discussion.
“I am just saying he is a serious scholar.”
His comment about education, combined with his libertarian background, provide ample evidence against that assertion. Libertarianism is, after all, the “philosophy” where you are required to check your intellect and integrity at the door and adopt the philosophy of a spoiled 5-year old: “I got mine and I want yours, so screw you.”
@raaak, 109
If they are quoted saying “I like Deepak Chopra and I am heavily influenced by him”, then you absolutely could reject that person’s ideas on physics without any further reading. Rand is of the same quality on the topic of economics.
My daughter has 1st class honours in neurobiology with an academic excellence award thrown in. This is her facebook art page
https://m.facebook.com/phaedra.stevens.9/albums/364756570277247/
Bryan Caplan is an ignorant jerk.
Raaak
But he’s not? There actually are people who study education and educational policy; Caplan is not one of them. He is pontificating way outside of his lane.
Anyone else noticed how Raaak is declaring they haven’t read the guys stuff and then arguing how everyone else should have bothered to read the stuff before criticising it. So Raaak supports things before reading them instead?
DanDare @124: Raaak isn’t supporting Caplan. They’re attacking uninformed criticism of him. That’s fine, but raaak seems to think that education is somehow independent of public policy/ideology. Raaak seems to think that financial and ideological ties to an odious worldview can (should?) be put aside because Caplan is a “serious” scholar. I disagree strongly with those points, but I don’t think or assume that raaak is arguing in bad faith.
raaak
You seriously need to stop winning arguments against what you think people said and engage in what they’re saying. You’re not doing that. Maybe it’s simply your reading comprehension, who knows?
@ Giliell 105, thanks for the help! Also, yes, I thought about Asterix, too. And I agree with the importance of “Allgemeinbildung” that you brought up in comment number 88.
I want to add to my own comment (101.), that right wing regimes often have no interest in educating the public. Even lesser known regimes like Salazars Portuguese Estado Novo were known for their disdain for education. Knowledge, in the eyes of those people, should be a privilege of the wealthy elite. Lots of Portuguese only had a few years of school, instead, young teenagers entered the workforce early. Illiteracy was very high. Knowledge is power, therefore common people should be deprived of it. Additionally, an uneducated populace is easier to manipulate, more gullible. Be it Creationism or insane anti-state slogans like “Taxation is theft” – the lesser educated are more prone to believe it.
If a discussion about education is concentrating on money and “efficiency”, alarm bells should ring. Just like “human capital” and other oh so rational sounding buzz words, “efficiency” was introduced into the mainstream by neo-liberal (and fellow traveler) free market radicals. Now people are not even aware of it anymore, it is so normal to use pseudo-economic words to describe society and human behavior.
Beware of those books, that want to introduce more “efficiency” into education, ecology or the welfare state. Here is an example: Charles Murray’s (the “Bell curve” guy) book “Losing Ground” from 1984. It was funded by the Manhattan Institute, a “think tank” that wants to “develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility” (Wikipedia). I.e., they want to “free” the market on behalf of the wealthy and the common people have the “individual responsibility” to take up any miserable, underpaying job, pay for unaffordable, substandard health care, beg if they can’t find even a working-poor job, and eventually die on the curb.
Murray’s thesis in his book was that social welfare programs increase poverty instead of decreasing it. The New York times called it “a budget-cutter’s bible”. Connect the dots.