No one cared about my spreadsheets

The author just seems to misunderstand the relativity of ideology. In particular they bemoan their critics as "..go[ing] with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves", but they don't acknowledge that their own findings obviously require some major ideological assumptions founded in neoliberalism.

Critics aren't concerned about the correctness of the spreadsheets, because calculating the value of education as ROI requires assuming that all metrics are objectively (and abstractly) quantifiable, which is simply laughable (in my option). Even ignoring the ideological assumptions you have to make to quantify things like self-actualisation and it's impact on quality-of-life, there's an obvious issue here:

How does education affect our political and cultural landscape? Assuming the math is right and reducing education funding improves the national budget while increasing some measure of quality-of-life, then what's the long-term impact?

The democratic process is fundamentally reliant on the quality of information available to voters. Epistemology doesn't come for free, and "common-sense" is rife with biases. We already have widespread problems with low-information voting, so what happens when we stop teaching critical theory because it's not profitable?

Caplan isn't some interloper with no knowledge of any of the material he touches on ranting on Twitter. The man has a career as an economics researcher specializing in public-sector work and actually teaches economics at a reasonably prestigious university (I have heard of George Mason). Perhaps we might pause to consider that he may be, in the realm of his specialty, not a complete fool. In general, his work would seem to be worth engaging with by his peers.

With that in mind, it is a little concerning that so many people are so ready and willing to argue with his claims yet none are interested in engaging with his work or methodology. Perhaps they, as you, are dismissive because he reaches conclusions they find so implausible as to be not worth engaging with. Or perhaps because as he alleges, the field simply does not value quantitative argument beyond its ability to get a paper published.

For my own part, I think it would be educational to know which is the case. If the former, I would like to understand if this is politically motivated (and a lot of things are in economics, especially in a policy context). In the latter, it leads me to question just about every claim from the entire field, including Caplan's.

I'm not equipped to evaluate his data or critique his work. I won't make the attempt. I would hope for better of his peers, though.

I remember being part of online community for a game (starsector, if you're interested) and a user had taken it upon themselves to create effectiveness measurements for the weapons in the vanilla game and in mods. To do this, they created a spreadsheet that mapped out damage per second, range, energy cost, points to use... ect. Numbered them all together, and ranked them with each other.

Personally, I thought this was a valuable contribution. Plenty of mods go off the deep end with the kit they added to the game, so to me, this seemed like a valuable tool to help keep their kit in line.

But the author? They thought what they had produced was an unassailable statement of fact.

Many people came forward, including me, countering that the actual simulation of the game is substantially more complex than the pile of multiplication and addition they had cobbled together. But like OP's article, those criticisms weren't specifically addressing the formulas themselves, so the author didn't really consider them.

This is a bit of a puerile example of course, I bet Mr. Caplan is substantially better at multiplication than my hobbyist friend trying to categorize weapons in a silly space ship game.

I'm sure his numbers and spreadsheets are correct.

But if you think this is a good argument, a worthwhile argument for educational policy, then JESUS FUCK could you go outside and touch some grass? Please? Go hug someone. Look at the stars. Read a book. Be human. Feel something!

A lot of people choose universities based on which ones have the best parties. Is that even quantifiable? This whole thing seems so ridiculously out of touch with human motivation that what you're saying is correct: It's simply not worth anyone else's time to debunk.