No one cared about my spreadsheets

> Wow, that's one of the most dismissive remarks I've seen here in quite a while. It also does not seem like you could possibly believe it yourself.

It's a natural thing. If you come up with an implausible sounding thing supported by a very complicated argument then most likely you made a mistake. It is very easy to make mistakes and very hard to find them.

If you have a 1000 page proof that 2*2 is 5 I won't spend my valuable time finding where you slipped up. Now clearly his claim is more nebulous. One has to invest money and time to even understand what the book claims, so then one can invest more time to debunk a spreadsheet?

Well, if you're going to throw down the gauntlet like that Mr. Caplan, how can I resist! I began by actually looking at this authors spreadsheets, then looking at their claims, and ultimately, I downloaded a copy of their book[0] to review what that book says. So here's the info:

The fundamental claim of the book is that currently, the "western education model" is not (really) about skill accumulation or increasing the utility that an individual can provide society. Instead, our current "western education model" is about signalling a workers productivity to potential employers. That is the thesis of the book, as spelled out in the introduction of the book.

I downloaded the spreadsheets[1] that the author talked about.[2] I've reviewed them for about an hour, in between reading, and my take is that no one cares about the spreadsheets because they're INCREDIBLY basic. In short, the spreadsheets are a collection of statistics about the outcomes of students who complete various levels of education. It shows income earned per year of education completed, for a number of different hypothetical students (excellent students, poor students, etc). The numbers aren't particularly shocking on their face, and the spreadsheets don't have anything like a single cell on the first sheet labeled "SMOKING GUN, WOW" to catch your attention. Instead, the general point from the statistics is that we see unusual jumps in the expected compensation of students at various "round numbers", such as jumps at 12 years of education completed (finished high school), and 16 years of education completed (finished undergraduate). The author seems to take these as strong proof for their original point that the value of education is in "signalling", not in increasing a persons ability.

My fundamental issue with this is that this data, as I've read it, could be understood a different way than "education is just a social signal". By my reading, this data could just as well be "western hiring markets are wildly under-valuing the abilities of folks who narrowly miss common landmark achievements". I believe that's also an idea worthy of study, but I don't see it addressed in any of the authors writing, or in the book.

[0] - https://eddierockerz.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/the-case-ag...

[1] - https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/compensationcleanfinal.x...

[2] - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.htm...

I agree with his arguments at a surface level, but I don’t accept that his analysis was rigorous. Especially because his spreadsheet is monolithic and impossible to double-check.

In another HN post recently a commenter said something about the stock market, and they invoked an image of people collecting money from Brownian movement.

It struck me that comment was excellent and insightful, and was only possible because both the commenter and myself were once taught something that neither of us uses in our day jobs, and may never have learned through any normal self-driven persuit.

The more I hear about this book the more ignorant it sounds. The benefits of having a significant, as large as possible, portion of everyone being at least somewhat educated on a wide range of basic ideas (not facts so much) isn't quantifiable. It's effects are in countless infinite small thimgs that no one can tally.

It's not good enough that some small percent of people would always be educated, because those people still have to interact with everyone else. We already have a bad enough problem of people simply not even understanding what other people say, and therefor not crediting or respecting it at all and going with their feelings on everything.

I mean, I did download the spreadsheets and (skim) read the book after reading the parent article. TL;DR is that the spreadsheets are solid and unsurprising, though his interpretation of said spreadsheets seem to be the part that makes me ask "hmmm, I'm not sure if that follows from the evidence."

Full breakdown, with direct links to the spreadsheets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30368620