Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No one cared about my spreadsheets

econlib.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 413 posts

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#101

Post by burrows »

Demiurge wrote: post #97
burrows wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every dollar you put in this box, I’ll put ten cents into a scholarship fund for poor children in your country then burn the dollar. How many dollars do you put into the box? What if it were 300 cents instead?

What if it were a recipe for a functional fusion reactor?

Would I rather spend money on scholarships for poor children or buy the recipe for a functional net-positive fusion reactor from aliens? How much recipe does each of my dollars get?

I’d give away all of my current net worth and take out a loan for $1 million from loan sharks and give that away too for a functional fusion reactor recipe, pending some questions about whether they will be able to sell the recipe again, do we actually have the materials to build the device and I’d want my nuclear engineer friend and lawyer to review the terms.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#102

Post by chasil »

taeric wrote: post #95
chasil wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our high school scores for English and math were 30.1% and 25.9%. We had Iowa towns that were in the 90%s. No, I cannot compare them, you are right, these people were exactly where they should have been. Is this sentiment perhaps a bit biased, especially for what I am paying. (Yes, I live in one of the most affordable places in the U.S.)

I'm not even sure what you are suggesting, to be honest. My point was that if you want scores to improve, you will have to pay more. Pretty much period. You don't get improvement, at any level, for free. Certainly not by cutting funding. Keeping the same level of funding will at best tread water. Likely, the area will fall, though. And I certainly wouldn't be comfortable pushing that outcome.

Management talent makes more happen for less.

That's what we expect, as industrial management moved our industry offshore.

Education has no right of excusal. Perform.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#103

Post by 8note »

thetallstick wrote: post #20
civilized wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterfactuals can be calculated, but the results will depend on other counterfactuals. There's no getting away from speculating about counterfactuals. If the speculative estimates that went into Caplan's spreadsheets were essentially made up, then it's garbage in garbage out.

> If the speculative estimates that went into Caplan's spreadsheets were essentially made up When Caplan released the spreadsheet and asked people to "check his math" I am pretty sure what he was really asking was for people to test that exact conditional.

Debugging spreadsheets is pretty notoriously difficult for showing that it does the expected thing, let alone figuring out what assumptions have been made and how valid they are

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#104

Post by analog31 »

sgdjgkeirj wrote: post #81
lelandbatey wrote: post #73

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 t…

This is a good point. Caplan makes a huge deal about the fact that a students that drops out one semester before finishing the degree takes a huge penalty to their salary. This is what he calls the “sheep skin effect”. He claims that because such a student gets almost all of the education, their penalty must correspond to the signaling component. But this is where his math runs against common sense. If you are an emp…

Ah, but if Caplan's signaling hypothesis is true, it creates an arbitrage opportunity. I'm thinking hypothetically and in broad terms. Take that N-1 dropout. If that person is worth more to a business than their market wage, then a savvy business person would have a profit motive to hire them for more than their market wage, but less than their known value, resulting in a win for the worker and the employer.

A big enough employer could absorb these people with little fanfare, and use them to test the hypothesis. We read stories every day of business leaders who identify misconceptions in markets, and run with them to the bank.

Over time, this would in turn correct the wage gap.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#105

Post by frazbin »

lucb1e wrote: post #34
Legion wrote: post #23

This reminds me of people online who construct gigantic walls of bad faith argument text and insist that it's up to everyone else to "debate them" and spend hours deconstructing their argument. Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk.

> Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk. 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. Education is a huge chunk of everyone's life, of course it's important to know the upsides and downsides. The returns are one aspect (I haven't read the book, it honestly sounds depressing, but…

well like one example would be if the author's study is predicated on the notion that salaries are optimally allocated, but you suspect that the hidden term representing misallocation of labor is actually quite large. In other words, you have to consider the possibility that degrees are not a perfectly honest signal, and that people are not always paid exactly according to their productivity.

You only have to have one flagrantly unprovable assumption to make the whole chain of inference invalid

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#106

Post by taeric »

chasil wrote: post #102
taeric wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure what you are suggesting, to be honest. My point was that if you want scores to improve, you will have to pay more. Pretty much period. You don't get improvement, at any level, for free. Certainly not by cutting funding. Keeping the same level of funding will at best tread water. Likely, the area will fall, though. And I certainly wouldn't be comfortable pushing that outcome.

Management talent makes more happen for less. That's what we expect, as industrial management moved our industry offshore. Education has no right of excusal. Perform.

Management talent, I would push, is largely a myth. I'm sure it matters more than I'd give it credit, but so does a lot of capital cost in infrastructure and support that are invisible in your numbers.

And again, industry largely fails and goes bankrupt. Education and townships are not things I would feel comfortable pushing that outcome for.

Also... Offshore movements were pushed not by shrewd management, but by shopping around for cheaper labor. Not sure how that is relevant here?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#108

Post by hibikir »

bee_rider wrote: post #85
BurningFrog wrote: post #15

> Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations. I'm biased since I don't know spreadsheets at all, but I think Python code would have been far more reviewable.

With a spreadsheet you can see the result of each computation, and you can easily manually tweak values if you want to play around. Programmers might have an easier time checking a program for bugs than a spreadsheet, but most economists aren't programmers, right? The stereotype I have, at least, is that the experts for this domain are happier in spreadsheets than python. And it seems to me that the main issue for th…

You will find many economists that have some programming ability, just like in any other field nowadays: It's too useful an analytical skill. What they will do, however, is work on, say, a Jupyter notebook, which is as easier to fiddle with as a spreadsheet once you have basics of programming down, while getting rid of almost every disadvantage the spreadsheet has. You will find this in industry too: The researcher building the model is using the notebook, and then there's no need for an excel to code translation: The important bits can just be copied over directly.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#110

Post by PuppyTailWags »

chasil wrote: post #102
taeric wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure what you are suggesting, to be honest. My point was that if you want scores to improve, you will have to pay more. Pretty much period. You don't get improvement, at any level, for free. Certainly not by cutting funding. Keeping the same level of funding will at best tread water. Likely, the area will fall, though. And I certainly wouldn't be comfortable pushing that outcome.

Management talent makes more happen for less. That's what we expect, as industrial management moved our industry offshore. Education has no right of excusal. Perform.

My understanding is that industrial management only works for certain employments, mainly non-knowledge employment. Learning/education is 100% knowledge, which has performed poorly when offshored for cheaper, at least in my knowledge-based field. You get into knowledge debt, which then needs to be paid down, which costs more than actually having bought good talent in the first place...

So, same thing- if you need to catch up you need to pay more...

This makes about as much logic to me as saying you can hire a junior engineer and expect the quality of a senior engineer if you have a senior manager.

Post reply on HN