It’ll make more sense when you start thinking of the economics profession as a priesthood.
Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
121–130 of 163 posts
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees. > Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so t…
Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably…
There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in the terms of the economics profession.
Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the past would be so much poorer without people willing to engage with Assyriology. I'd like to see STEM-maximalists argue that one engineering field or another is somehow more difficult than ANE studies.
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
universe is infinite, brains are finite. ergo, brains find compression irresistible, to the point of self-dosing reward juice when a delightful morsel of smartly collapsed reality is encountered. even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is biased toward obligate compression.
I believe saying that our mental models are mere models and not reality would be a bit shorter, profound and usefull :)
maybe, but I try to avoid (or at least subordinate) phasing that implies a dualist distinction between the real and the mental. even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right?
such contextualization does indeed impair portability...
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably…
There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in the terms of the economics profession. Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the past would be so much poorer without people willing to engage with Assyriology. I'd like…
Similarly a lot of stuff that falls under the STEM umbrella is completely useless. I have spent months and years of my life working on difficult math problems a bunch of which will probably never have any real-world application.
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees. > Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so t…
Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably…
Congrats on getting a job as a mathematical physicist! Among my cohort (which includes a few maths/physics double degrees) that makes you something of a unicorn.
If you take a moment to revisit my post, you'll notice I never mentioned difficulty. I'm well aware that some non-STEM degrees are incredibly complex and I make no claim to any ability in those areas for myself.
I also never made any value judgement about courses being "greater" or "lesser". That's a subjective call and ymmv.
I absolutely don't discount all non-STEM degrees as being 'useless' and there's plenty of insight and wisdom to be had from people with a deep understanding of history, or comparative culture, or any number of fields.
And yet I still feel it's a grave disservice to tell the average high school student that they should go to university for the sake of it, even if that means specializing in glazing techniques in 14th century French pottery or whatever other navel-gazing pursuit, while your insane U.S. tuition fees are extracted from them.
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably…
There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in the terms of the economics profession. Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the past would be so much poorer without people willing to engage with Assyriology. I'd like…
Well yeah, it's nice to be independently wealthy and spend your life studying whatever takes your fancy, and if you can afford to do so then good on you.
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably…
Congrats on getting a job as a mathematical physicist! Among my cohort (which includes a few maths/physics double degrees) that makes you something of a unicorn. If you take a moment to revisit my post, you'll notice I never mentioned difficulty. I'm well aware that some non-STEM degrees are incredibly complex and I make no claim to any ability in those areas for myself. I also never made any value judgement about co…
Well I don't have a permanent job, I'm an adjunct, and not based in the US so maybe I experience a slightly different job market to your cohort.
I was mainly focusing on the line "targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees", which seems to heavily imply that the non-stem options are a lesser choice for those for whom stem is too difficult.
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#128Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being a big push to get more people into college with the assumption that it would benefit society. Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? What if the incentives created lots o…
I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle). Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not…
Everyone "can handle" arbitrarily much busywork. Whether the lights are on or anything is happening intellectually is another story. I would like to see every American teenager have that experience, but my experience was that in high school, the very top of the class caught glimmers of it occasionally.
I think when you send "everyone" to college, it's going to be no different for them than high school was for "everyone" (and for the smart kids in their less-special subjects): chug through the tedium with as little of your brain as possible, while away the hours and the months until you get to something you actually care about. That's a reasonable way to warehouse teenagers while their parents are at work, but 18-22 year olds could plausibly be doing something else.
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
But does education need to look like universities and colleges? Education used to look (for most people) like apprenticeships, which is more like a tutoring approach without study of anything unnecessary to your trade. Maybe a better system in modern times would be a combination of mentoring with official recommendations and travel (to broaden horizons).
How would you study history, philosophy, or ethics, then? Those classes covered things which I have never encountered in my _trade_, but which formatively affected my views on how one should treat others (or treat oneself). I feel like the stereotypical "liberal arts" education, in which one studies things that are not just focused on your trade, has an intrinsic value which is hard to articulate.
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library”
Of course not everyone is autodidactic so the path is not for everyone, but it is indeed quite possible to acquire this kind of knowledge/humanity outside of the university structure.
Alternatively: everyone should read the classics.
Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking over the list of top billionaires, well under half appear to have been passive beneficiaries of birth randomness.
Is this supposed to be reassuring? From a societal standpoint, we should design a system that rewards the behavior we want to see. No one has given me any evidence that "being born to someone rich" is actually the thing we want to reward in our tax code.
It’s not clear that the tax code is rewarding that in a significant way. You might argue it’s failing to punish it enough for your taste, which is a fine discussion to have.
When I look over the top 10 here, 9/10 are on that list from being overwhelmingly self-made and I want what 8 of those have created to exist. (I think lots of other people self-evidently want LVMH to exist, even though I don’t care either way. Same with L’Oreal though that’s also the one that’s not self-made.)