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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#191

Post by mvhvv »

Kalium wrote: post #135
krisoft wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

When there's a real possibility of meaningful and useful insights, we might consider taking it seriously. For me, this can be linked in part to the person's experience and credibility. 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 p…

The thing is, Caplan is a distinguished economist sure, but he is an interloper when it comes to education.

As you said, it's also worth noting that the community of "distinguished economists" is itself a fairly insular and politically driven field with a lot of ideological assumptions. That's not to say it's all hogwash, but for as much as Economists love to tell you otherwise it's still a soft-science very vulnerable to convenient abuse of statistics.

For what it's worth, I skimmed over the presentation he linked in the article. One of the first claims he makes is:

"Education and ability (IQ, work ethic, etc.) are correlated, so raw numbers give education too much credit."

He then goes on to correct for a "45% ability bias" to income statistics. Without even getting into the problems of correlation vs causation there, it's a perfect example of the foundational assumptions that got his work rejected to begin with.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#192

Post by speedgoose »

sanxiyn wrote: post #28
zwieback wrote: post #7

Has anyone here read the book? I have a hard time imagining that a technical education (e.g. engineering, physics, forestry, chemistry) would be worthless if someone wants to work in that field. Social sciences however... but of course I'm biased there.

I have read the book and it is pretty common sense and reasonable. I recommend you to read the book too.

Arguments that are common sense and reasonable are not necessarily true. The book is not pair reviewed, and I prefer scientific research over a spreadsheet so I will skip.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#193

Post by henrikschroder »

xyzzyz wrote: post #186
henrikschroder wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire subject of this conversation, Caplan's spreadsheet, is exactly his attempt to estimate all of that. Yes, but what I'm saying is that I don't care! People don't care! If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there! My counter-…

That only begs another question: if the point of education is not learning things and building human capital, but rather play and self-expression, why do we put on the charade of classes and exams? If play and self-expression is so important for young adults, why would anyone think that college as it actually exists is the best way for them to get it? Why does the state subsidize college education, instead of private…

> if the point of education is not learning things and building human capital, but rather play and self-expression

Wow, that's the falsest false dichotomy I've seen in a long time.

Por que no los dos?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#194

Post by [deleted] »

jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #171
oehpr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking. 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. Personal…

Isn't most everything in life just piles of multiplication and addition?

[deleted]

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#196

Post by epgui »

robbedpeter wrote: post #29
epgui wrote: post #14

I bet a spreadsheet that thoroughly analyzed the profitability of going out for a run every day would also find a negative ROI.

Then you'd lose that bet. Running, even just a little, results in such clear improvements to general health and lowering of all cause mortality that the spreadsheet creator would have to work really hard to push the effects into the negative, and anything you did to frame running as a negative would be trivially dismissed.

My comment was purely rhetorical, and that was partly my point. The other part of my point is that no matter how carefully you try to account for the costs and benefits of some activity, there are intangibles and benefits that are extremely difficult to convert into dollars (much like the value of a human life when expressed in dollars).

(My comment was not an attempt to refute or disprove the main thesis, but I do think it's important to step back and ask: "what's the point of education? is the point just to make a profit?")

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#197

Post by sbierwagen »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #33
civilized wrote: post #6

Just my dumb opinion here, but... there's something extremely implausible on its face about the idea that a sufficiently complex spreadsheet could calculate the difference in value generated from kids going to school versus kids not going to school. If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention. I imagine a bunch of academics put their fingers to…

I think, in part, Caplan has made a fairly classic error in attempting to figure out the optimal strategy for an individual within an existing system, where small numbers of individuals deviating generally doesn't matter, and then using those results to make a policy recommendation about how to change the system en masse in a way that will radically change the system. His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I mi…

>would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness?

Google had 20k FTEs in 2008, 135k FTEs in 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...

In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later. 115 thousand people, most of them college graduates, did nothing useful for more than a decade. Their primary accomplishment was to inflate house prices in tech hubs.

The United States is not short on college graduates.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#198

Post by lelanthran »

henrikschroder wrote: post #179
xyzzyz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given all of this, it is much easier to calculate if an education is "worth it" or not than in the US market, because you can look at average salary progression in different fields to do a pretty good estimate of whether or not you'll repay your student loan before retirement. It's harder than you think. You also need to take into account probability of actually finishing the degree vs dropping out (which depends o…

> The entire subject of this conversation, Caplan's spreadsheet, is exactly his attempt to estimate all of that. Yes, but what I'm saying is that I don't care! People don't care! If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there! My counter-…

> If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there!

Do you have any data to support your conclusion?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#199

Post by ALittleLight »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #33
civilized wrote: post #6

Just my dumb opinion here, but... there's something extremely implausible on its face about the idea that a sufficiently complex spreadsheet could calculate the difference in value generated from kids going to school versus kids not going to school. If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention. I imagine a bunch of academics put their fingers to…

I think, in part, Caplan has made a fairly classic error in attempting to figure out the optimal strategy for an individual within an existing system, where small numbers of individuals deviating generally doesn't matter, and then using those results to make a policy recommendation about how to change the system en masse in a way that will radically change the system. His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I mi…

"His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes"

Just curious, have you read over his spreadsheets?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#200

Post by vajrabum »

I've built spreadsheets with financial data before for business investment and decision purposes and the idea that any spreadsheet or argument relevant to public or business policy would be value free seems laughable to me. There's always an agenda. Given that, I think the right starting place might be to ask cui bono, who benefits from these policy recommendations?

I'm reminded of the argument and policy prescription coming from that argument that we can't afford decent roads or other infrastructure such as sewage treatment plants in rural and suburban areas with little to no mention of the long term trend of declining taxes on the wealthy and major land owners.

Given that, I don't feel sorry or surprised on behalf of the author that nobody is interested in the construction of their spreadsheet. Nor do I feel the need to take their argument any more seriously on that basis. It seems to me to be a matter of literally just politics. Especially so when I notice that he's a scholar at the Cato Institute and a self described libertarian. So yes, it's no surprise to me that he's advocating libertarian policy. It's also worth noting that he got a prestigious and expensive education with a BA from Cal and a Phd from Princeton.

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