Have you read Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids? He makes a pretty strong argument that middle and upper middle class parents wildly over estimate the effects of more time and money spent on their children.
1) you never see a rational rich person sending their children to inner city public schools and making them pay for their own community college
Socialization of your children does matter, keeping them in desirable company is a good goal since on most measurable matters they have more impact than you as a parent do. Inner city schools aren’t bad because there is little spending on them, indeed rural schools often get less spending on them yet outperform them. The surrounding demographics matter. The culture and incentives working on that demographic matters. We have seen schools have very little measurable impact on those except that more schooling reduces fertility.
Where we don’t agree probably is that the low hanging fruit of more better people and fewer expensive criminals and morons are the fairly large minority of poor children who are brought down by lousy home environments.
We don’t? I mean say there existed a pill that boosted lower class IQs to the national average, wouldn’t you expect to see radical improvement? What if that pill cost thousands of dollars do we disagree providing it for free would still be an incredibly good deal? What if it wasn’t a pill but a shot of retrovirus or subsidy of in vitro fertilization that takes advantage of screening for poor parents coupled with strongly promoting birth control to avoid unplanned pregnancies?
From things like the Terman study we know high IQ people create positive externalities they don’t fully capture. Improvements in the genotype don’t need upkeep and constant reinvestment. If you raised the average IQ of say Japan or Turkey by 15 points, you’d see nearly all of the positive effects of that persist for centuries after the program was ended. If you educate everyone to college level and then suddenly stop you see benefits persist for a generation or two at most. Investments in “nature” radically increase the gains expected from “nurture” too, since the opportunity cost of neglecting the care of a child rise dramatically in relation to the child’s natural talent.
2) you see an overrepresentation of the well off children who were groomed by their parents in the professions and what you might call the rank and file of elite jobs.
You see them successfully preparing their kids for competence at those professions, I see nepotism ensuring slightly less competent people get entry jobs to excellent career tracks because of connections.
I constantly hear of studies like Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects showing significant and persistent gains from early intervention with the right population. In the United States, that self-proclaimed paradigm of the first world.
I recall plenty of studies showing effects of most programs do wear off. The problem is many studies (I’m not commenting on the particular paper you cited) have employed no control group selected on exactly the same basis as the experimental group. This makes it virtually impossible to evaluate the effect of the treatment on gains, and the problem is made more acute by the fact that enrichment studies often pick their subjects on the basis of their being below the average IQ of the population of disadvantaged children from which they are selected. This makes statistical regression a certainty- the group’s mean will increase by an appreciable amount because of the imperfect correlation between test- retest scores over, say, a one- year interval.
1) you never see a rational rich person sending their children to inner city public schools and making them pay for their own community college
Socialization of your children does matter, keeping them in desirable company is a good goal since on most measurable matters they have more impact than you as a parent do.
OK so you have just deepened our understanding of what successful programs applied to poor children must include to make the early intervention worthwhile.
Keep them away from bad company? Hard problem if many kids are bad company.
Perhaps a hard problem in some theoretical world where we have tried and failed. But we don’t even try, what we do instead is tend to try to contain in a very rough way the poor in one place.
In New York City, you are not allowed, essentially, to take disruptive influences out of your classroom. Indeed, if they self-select to not show up, truancy officers will go and bring as many of them back to disrupt the schools as possible.
It would be TRIVIAL to start removing bad company from classrooms in most real public situations. All you would have to do is actually say you were going to do it and start doing it, the low hanging fruit here is rotting on the branches where they are pulled by the weight of the fruit down to the ground.
The thing is the kids who are bad company benefit from being in good company. We feel sorry for them and we thus try to integrate them with other kids as much as possible.
I recall plenty of studies showing effects of most programs do wear off. The problem is many studies (I’m not commenting on the particular paper you cited) have employed no control group selected on exactly the same basis as the experimental group.
I work for Qualcomm, which in the 1990s was told by many professors and competitors that its cellular phone technology was impossible, even by some that it violated the laws of physics. I examined these claims of error and thought they were ludicrous. Since that time, Qualcomm has quintupled its market cap and has over 50% market share in smartphone chip markets.
It is easy to build something wrong. I can “prove” all sorts of technical ideas are without merit by implementing them inefficiently, incorrectly. I can hire you a guy to tune your ferrari for you, and then go out and beat you on the track in my volkswagen. It doesn’t prove ferarris are crap.
From a production standpoint, if you have 20 failed attempts and 2 that succeed, that PROVES the thing can be done. If a lot of people have build early education programs which attempted to abstract out a few features of early education that would matter, and they have failed, but two or three have succeeded, it does not mean the preponderance of the evidence is that early education is useless, it means that most people do it wrong.
If nearly everyone fails at producing a social result and one or two studies do produce it, seems much more likely the one or two studies are wrong about producing the result. Especially if it hasn’t been replicated. This is ignoring that the incentives for academics are far from balanced and that the social scientist in question are very likely to have written the bottom line first just because of their ideological demographics.
THe company I work for spends something like 20% of its revenues on R&D. We recognize that MOST of our approaches don’t work and continue to scurry down all the avenues available to us looking for the few that do succeed.
You cannot find a successful company that does much R&D which would agree that the 1 out of 20 attempts that work is probably wrong. Rather, they generally think that it is the payoff for investigating broadly and deeply the potential solutions for problems which have a high value when solved.
You want a cameral or a neocameral solution? You don’t need to abandon democracy to get it. You just have to convince the republic to support results that work and not to be fooled by the ones that don’t.
Have you read Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids? He makes a pretty strong argument that middle and upper middle class parents wildly over estimate the effects of more time and money spent on their children.
I have heard Caplan talk about it with Russ Roberts. I have no doubt that Bryan Caplan is right at some level of detail, that there are plenty of things that any given upper class parent does that are less effective than others, that as with so many other production processes, there are efficiency gains to be had by bringing scientific approaches to studying the production.
What may be missed is the net. What is the net effect of rich people grooming their kids compared to the baseline of poor children being ignored and only beaten a little, and living in this “good enough” environment you get for almost free? You say nepotism, but I am sure that for 99.999% of jobs I have no idea whether the applicant behaves well because they are actually linearly descended from one of the 100s of millions of people I’d be presumably class allied with, but I have every idea whether their grooming, speech patterns, ability to self-deprecate, ability to approach tense situations with humor, calm, and even deference rise to the levels I am concerned about. I have every idea whether they become defensive when I am testing them. In short, what looks like nepotism to you is primarily me looking for the mix of characteristics that I understand are needed for humans to cooperate deeply and pervasively in a way that goes orders of magnitude what are genes without culture ensure.
Making up numbers (99.9999...%) as hyperbole is considered rude here. It is much less misleading to readers if you say that you are nearly certain. For example I am nearly certain job interviews on top jobs are often gained from social networks and connections someone without parents in those circles wouldn’t have. I’m pretty sure the gains from such connections are nearly zero sum.
If you are hiring for an important job, family matters, because the apple does not fall far from the tree, and because you can always get more information through family connections that through formal sources.
Hiring people that have family connections is apt to be positive sum, because they cannot get away with bullshit, and because their incentives are more oriented to long term benefits.
For example I am nearly certain job interviews on top jobs are often gained from social networks and connections someone without parents in those circles wouldn’t have. I’m pretty sure the gains from such connections are nearly zero sum.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around networks and connections in their hiring, at top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices will tend to evolve by natural selection in the system. I don’t know if you’ve tried to compete with Intel or Samsung or Huawei or Hyundai or Apple or Google, but I can tell you from experience that an astonishing amount of high horsepower resources are devoted to developing and examining metrics for ensuring the most utility from hrigins and promotions possible. If there is a systematic “blind spot,” it is nothing so trivial as the effects of social networks or nepotism, which have been known of as issues for decades or longer, and therefore had the crap studied out of them by competing corporations.
So then, why does it seem we still have social networks and nepotism? The hint I can give you is that Qualcomm’s CEO is the son of its founder. The rumors are that the founder stayed as CEO for years more than he would have liked to because the board kept telling him they would not give the top spot to his won. Finally there came a day in 2006 when the board would and that is when father stepped down in favor of son.
Rampant nepotism, would have been flagrant if the story had been publicized by the company, which it was not. Since that time the company has added about 300 billion in market cap, something like 40%. Earnings and Revenues all tell similar growth stories, the market cap, if a fluke, is not an isolated fluke.
Considering the large number of companies, many public even more private, that have thrived while under family control, I think the case that what is on its face nepotism is actually unproductive is a very hard one to make. I’m sure it is possible to hire a son who doesn’t work out, just as it is possible to tune a ferrari that doesn’t go fast or run an early education system that doesn’t add value or design a CDMA radio system that doesn’t outperform competing TDMA systems.
As more evidence that the nepotism claim may bear more examination in many cases, I continue telling the story of the company I know best. The father had 4 sons, all of whom had jobs at Qualcomm at one time or another. At least one of the sons left the company without ever rising above a mid-level engineering position. The other two who didn’t become CEO are still at the company in middle-high level positions, one is a patent attorney and the other is some sort of business/marketing guy.
My point is if you are going to be iconoclastic, you probably have to go full iconoclast. Don’t ASSUME nepotism as practiced in modern day western republics is antiproductive. I don’t think the evidence will support this.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around networks and connections in their hiring, at top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices will tend to evolve by natural selection in the system.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around race as a factor in hiring, at the top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices tend to evolve by natural selection in the system.
Do you agree with this argument as well? If not, why not?
My point is if you are going to be iconoclastic, you probably have to go full iconoclast. Don’t ASSUME nepotism as practiced in modern day western republics is antiproductive. I don’t think the evidence will support this.
You are right. The incentives of family business can be pretty good, maybe this helps the performance? I do think it isn’t an unreasonable assumption that it results in slightly less competent people get jobs. But then again who will know you better than your relatives?
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around race as a factor in hiring, at the top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices tend to evolve by natural selection in the system.
Do you agree with this argument as well? If not, why not?
I agree corporations will tend to do the more economic thing around race. If many otherwise qualified whites won’t work a companies where blacks have anytthing other than the most menial jobs, and the society is 85% white, then the economic thing to do is to keep your job pool high by not hiring blacks into the jobs that would drive whites out of your job pool. The other economic thing to do is to pay blacks a market wage, where the market wage may have been driven down by the oversupply of blacks for the limited job categories they can be hired in to without comproomising access to the much larger white hiring pool.
“Don’t buy stock in companies because companies are a local optimum.” A nice little homage to the OP, don″t you think? Companies in a racist society will optimize their return with the actual society as a condition constraining the optimum. They are litereally not in the business of operating in the world as it should be or might be or you want it to be, they literally are in the business of operating in the world as it is.
I do think it isn’t an unreasonable assumption that it results in slightly less competent people get jobs. But then again who will know you better than your relatives?
We use “maps” that are simplifications of the actual territory. And so using a map which is not so complex as the real world, an oversimplified standard of competence for a particular job which is characterized by an overly simplified job description will often yield candidates who score higher on the oversimplified metrics than do the actually optimum candidates. And what could be more oversimplified that applying the same term of nepotism to a dictator forcing all businesses in his country to do business with his son-in-law when buying cement as we apply to the process of a brilliant CEO championing one of his four sons as the best possible candidate as his successor, while continuously offering the board the choice of keeping the original brilliant CEO in place until they agree with him about his son.
Making up numbers (99.9999...%) as hyperbole is considered rude here.
If you say so. Lucky for me I am conversing with someone more rational than most who isn’t likely to be tripped up by my accidental rudeness, especially when he can see what I meant anyway. But good to know as I certainly lose more of the audience than I’d like in most of my posts, and I will benefit from creating a list of trigger phrases to avoid.
Have you read Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids? He makes a pretty strong argument that middle and upper middle class parents wildly over estimate the effects of more time and money spent on their children.
Socialization of your children does matter, keeping them in desirable company is a good goal since on most measurable matters they have more impact than you as a parent do. Inner city schools aren’t bad because there is little spending on them, indeed rural schools often get less spending on them yet outperform them. The surrounding demographics matter. The culture and incentives working on that demographic matters. We have seen schools have very little measurable impact on those except that more schooling reduces fertility.
We don’t? I mean say there existed a pill that boosted lower class IQs to the national average, wouldn’t you expect to see radical improvement? What if that pill cost thousands of dollars do we disagree providing it for free would still be an incredibly good deal? What if it wasn’t a pill but a shot of retrovirus or subsidy of in vitro fertilization that takes advantage of screening for poor parents coupled with strongly promoting birth control to avoid unplanned pregnancies?
From things like the Terman study we know high IQ people create positive externalities they don’t fully capture. Improvements in the genotype don’t need upkeep and constant reinvestment. If you raised the average IQ of say Japan or Turkey by 15 points, you’d see nearly all of the positive effects of that persist for centuries after the program was ended. If you educate everyone to college level and then suddenly stop you see benefits persist for a generation or two at most. Investments in “nature” radically increase the gains expected from “nurture” too, since the opportunity cost of neglecting the care of a child rise dramatically in relation to the child’s natural talent.
You see them successfully preparing their kids for competence at those professions, I see nepotism ensuring slightly less competent people get entry jobs to excellent career tracks because of connections.
I recall plenty of studies showing effects of most programs do wear off. The problem is many studies (I’m not commenting on the particular paper you cited) have employed no control group selected on exactly the same basis as the experimental group. This makes it virtually impossible to evaluate the effect of the treatment on gains, and the problem is made more acute by the fact that enrichment studies often pick their subjects on the basis of their being below the average IQ of the population of disadvantaged children from which they are selected. This makes statistical regression a certainty- the group’s mean will increase by an appreciable amount because of the imperfect correlation between test- retest scores over, say, a one- year interval.
OK so you have just deepened our understanding of what successful programs applied to poor children must include to make the early intervention worthwhile.
Keep them away from bad company? Hard problem if many kids are bad company.
Perhaps a hard problem in some theoretical world where we have tried and failed. But we don’t even try, what we do instead is tend to try to contain in a very rough way the poor in one place.
In New York City, you are not allowed, essentially, to take disruptive influences out of your classroom. Indeed, if they self-select to not show up, truancy officers will go and bring as many of them back to disrupt the schools as possible.
It would be TRIVIAL to start removing bad company from classrooms in most real public situations. All you would have to do is actually say you were going to do it and start doing it, the low hanging fruit here is rotting on the branches where they are pulled by the weight of the fruit down to the ground.
The thing is the kids who are bad company benefit from being in good company. We feel sorry for them and we thus try to integrate them with other kids as much as possible.
I work for Qualcomm, which in the 1990s was told by many professors and competitors that its cellular phone technology was impossible, even by some that it violated the laws of physics. I examined these claims of error and thought they were ludicrous. Since that time, Qualcomm has quintupled its market cap and has over 50% market share in smartphone chip markets.
It is easy to build something wrong. I can “prove” all sorts of technical ideas are without merit by implementing them inefficiently, incorrectly. I can hire you a guy to tune your ferrari for you, and then go out and beat you on the track in my volkswagen. It doesn’t prove ferarris are crap.
From a production standpoint, if you have 20 failed attempts and 2 that succeed, that PROVES the thing can be done. If a lot of people have build early education programs which attempted to abstract out a few features of early education that would matter, and they have failed, but two or three have succeeded, it does not mean the preponderance of the evidence is that early education is useless, it means that most people do it wrong.
If nearly everyone fails at producing a social result and one or two studies do produce it, seems much more likely the one or two studies are wrong about producing the result. Especially if it hasn’t been replicated. This is ignoring that the incentives for academics are far from balanced and that the social scientist in question are very likely to have written the bottom line first just because of their ideological demographics.
THe company I work for spends something like 20% of its revenues on R&D. We recognize that MOST of our approaches don’t work and continue to scurry down all the avenues available to us looking for the few that do succeed.
You cannot find a successful company that does much R&D which would agree that the 1 out of 20 attempts that work is probably wrong. Rather, they generally think that it is the payoff for investigating broadly and deeply the potential solutions for problems which have a high value when solved.
You want a cameral or a neocameral solution? You don’t need to abandon democracy to get it. You just have to convince the republic to support results that work and not to be fooled by the ones that don’t.
I have heard Caplan talk about it with Russ Roberts. I have no doubt that Bryan Caplan is right at some level of detail, that there are plenty of things that any given upper class parent does that are less effective than others, that as with so many other production processes, there are efficiency gains to be had by bringing scientific approaches to studying the production.
What may be missed is the net. What is the net effect of rich people grooming their kids compared to the baseline of poor children being ignored and only beaten a little, and living in this “good enough” environment you get for almost free? You say nepotism, but I am sure that for 99.999% of jobs I have no idea whether the applicant behaves well because they are actually linearly descended from one of the 100s of millions of people I’d be presumably class allied with, but I have every idea whether their grooming, speech patterns, ability to self-deprecate, ability to approach tense situations with humor, calm, and even deference rise to the levels I am concerned about. I have every idea whether they become defensive when I am testing them. In short, what looks like nepotism to you is primarily me looking for the mix of characteristics that I understand are needed for humans to cooperate deeply and pervasively in a way that goes orders of magnitude what are genes without culture ensure.
Making up numbers (99.9999...%) as hyperbole is considered rude here. It is much less misleading to readers if you say that you are nearly certain. For example I am nearly certain job interviews on top jobs are often gained from social networks and connections someone without parents in those circles wouldn’t have. I’m pretty sure the gains from such connections are nearly zero sum.
If you are hiring for an important job, family matters, because the apple does not fall far from the tree, and because you can always get more information through family connections that through formal sources.
Hiring people that have family connections is apt to be positive sum, because they cannot get away with bullshit, and because their incentives are more oriented to long term benefits.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around networks and connections in their hiring, at top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices will tend to evolve by natural selection in the system. I don’t know if you’ve tried to compete with Intel or Samsung or Huawei or Hyundai or Apple or Google, but I can tell you from experience that an astonishing amount of high horsepower resources are devoted to developing and examining metrics for ensuring the most utility from hrigins and promotions possible. If there is a systematic “blind spot,” it is nothing so trivial as the effects of social networks or nepotism, which have been known of as issues for decades or longer, and therefore had the crap studied out of them by competing corporations.
So then, why does it seem we still have social networks and nepotism? The hint I can give you is that Qualcomm’s CEO is the son of its founder. The rumors are that the founder stayed as CEO for years more than he would have liked to because the board kept telling him they would not give the top spot to his won. Finally there came a day in 2006 when the board would and that is when father stepped down in favor of son.
Rampant nepotism, would have been flagrant if the story had been publicized by the company, which it was not. Since that time the company has added about 300 billion in market cap, something like 40%. Earnings and Revenues all tell similar growth stories, the market cap, if a fluke, is not an isolated fluke.
Considering the large number of companies, many public even more private, that have thrived while under family control, I think the case that what is on its face nepotism is actually unproductive is a very hard one to make. I’m sure it is possible to hire a son who doesn’t work out, just as it is possible to tune a ferrari that doesn’t go fast or run an early education system that doesn’t add value or design a CDMA radio system that doesn’t outperform competing TDMA systems.
As more evidence that the nepotism claim may bear more examination in many cases, I continue telling the story of the company I know best. The father had 4 sons, all of whom had jobs at Qualcomm at one time or another. At least one of the sons left the company without ever rising above a mid-level engineering position. The other two who didn’t become CEO are still at the company in middle-high level positions, one is a patent attorney and the other is some sort of business/marketing guy.
My point is if you are going to be iconoclastic, you probably have to go full iconoclast. Don’t ASSUME nepotism as practiced in modern day western republics is antiproductive. I don’t think the evidence will support this.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around race as a factor in hiring, at the top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices tend to evolve by natural selection in the system.
Do you agree with this argument as well? If not, why not?
You are right. The incentives of family business can be pretty good, maybe this helps the performance? I do think it isn’t an unreasonable assumption that it results in slightly less competent people get jobs. But then again who will know you better than your relatives?
I agree corporations will tend to do the more economic thing around race. If many otherwise qualified whites won’t work a companies where blacks have anytthing other than the most menial jobs, and the society is 85% white, then the economic thing to do is to keep your job pool high by not hiring blacks into the jobs that would drive whites out of your job pool. The other economic thing to do is to pay blacks a market wage, where the market wage may have been driven down by the oversupply of blacks for the limited job categories they can be hired in to without comproomising access to the much larger white hiring pool.
“Don’t buy stock in companies because companies are a local optimum.” A nice little homage to the OP, don″t you think? Companies in a racist society will optimize their return with the actual society as a condition constraining the optimum. They are litereally not in the business of operating in the world as it should be or might be or you want it to be, they literally are in the business of operating in the world as it is.
We use “maps” that are simplifications of the actual territory. And so using a map which is not so complex as the real world, an oversimplified standard of competence for a particular job which is characterized by an overly simplified job description will often yield candidates who score higher on the oversimplified metrics than do the actually optimum candidates. And what could be more oversimplified that applying the same term of nepotism to a dictator forcing all businesses in his country to do business with his son-in-law when buying cement as we apply to the process of a brilliant CEO championing one of his four sons as the best possible candidate as his successor, while continuously offering the board the choice of keeping the original brilliant CEO in place until they agree with him about his son.
If you say so. Lucky for me I am conversing with someone more rational than most who isn’t likely to be tripped up by my accidental rudeness, especially when he can see what I meant anyway. But good to know as I certainly lose more of the audience than I’d like in most of my posts, and I will benefit from creating a list of trigger phrases to avoid.