Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Probably because any attempt to even reduce the topic to a spreadsheet is a case of "not even wrong"." But he didn't reduce it to a spreadsheet, he wrote a very thorough book. > "When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math." I am not sure what you think Caplan says. His book is mostly about the signalling and human capital models of…
>I am not sure what you think Caplan says. His book is mostly about the signalling and human capital models of education. The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings, so Caplan calculates the financial impact of various degrees, and then figures out how much is attributable to the various factors. So I was quite intrigued when I read…
He talks about this stuff too, for example, as education is correlated with health, he also estimates health benefits in his return to education calculations.
The problem with many correlations that you mention is that they are, indeed, just correlation. There is scant evidence on there being casual relationship, or, for that matter, the direction of causality (eg., couldn’t it be that more prosperity allows people to consume more formal education, rather than formal education bringing about prosperity?).
> Now from what you're saying, he actually wrote a book with a click-bait title and which is about something very different from what the title implies (I guess "on the financial return of investment of a college education" would not have gotten the attention he wanted). And now he is complaining that education researchers are not engaging?
Financial return to education is just one chapter of his book. The book is actually really detailed, and covers multitude of aspects. In fact, in the very blog post you are commenting under, Caplan in explicitly says:
> Some critics called me a philistine: “Education isn’t about making money; it’s about becoming a whole person.” Never mind that I wrote a whole chapter against this misinterpretation.
Of course, nobody expects you to actually have read his book before you can express an opinion about topics it concerns, but maybe, before accusing him of clickbait and stirring artificial controversy, or his alleged bitterness that ed researchers are not engaging (he’s not even saying that, by the way), at least read the article you’re commenting under.
> As a side note, why is this even economics
This is a trend in academia over past decade or two. Basically, the traditional social science fields are so degenerate, dysfunctional, and ideologically rigid, that a lot of quantitatively-minded people who are keenly interested in social science topics, but are repelled by the reality of academic environment, instead flock to Economics, where rigor is higher, and ideology is less rigidly constraining.
Look at new papers on NBER, for example:
Half of them is just social science dressed as economics. That’s why Econ departments are growing.