Harvard and Yale produce great leaders whether seeded with with rich children or poor children
I find it very strange that you speak of Harvard and Yale educating “children”, but I’m guessing you mean the Yale and Harvard’s of primary school education.
I do however agree it doesn’t much matter if you put rich or poor talented people into those colleges, their graduates will still be quality.
I do hope you realize that many poor children are not talented.
It is merely an excercise in science to determine what the essential features of a rich child’s upbringing are that must be provided by the state to poor children to keep this virtuously productive cycle going, but the good news is we already have such great indications of success in our society.
Oh you probably don’t. No problem I’ll explain it to you. High IQ is useful for climbing out of poverty, this is a robust finding of social science. Poor children are on average dimmer than rich children. In the First world this is probably mostly due to genetics. IQ is mostly heritable. This doesn’t necessarily the causes are genetic differences. But since we also know that above some very low plateau (nearer to mild abuse than mild neglect) education, better nutrition and nearly anything else tried doesn’t show any sustained gains in IQ it is the explanation that best fits the evidence.
I do think that spending rich people’s money to genetically engineer improved chances for poor people’s children is a ridiculously wise investment for a society to make. If I thought the same potential of great gains existed for education, I would support making greater investments into it as well. But I happen to think that formal education beyond the primary school level is mostly a sorting mechanism with elaborate signalling races developing around it. Now don’t get me wrong signalling is necessary, but escalating signalling races are negative sum games because they eat up resources.
I also think primary school education as it currently exists is very badly designed from the perspective of “do no harm to children”, since it is practically designed to introduce conformity, stifle creativity and in general produce very weird socialization patterns (like what is this deal with sorting children into pseudo-military regiments based on their date of manufacture?). There might be good reasons to do so. Maybe such traits are good to have for the average person in our society. Maybe they are bad for the individual but have positive externalities for others. But I’m suspicious since the institutions claim that they are trying their best not to produce many of the effects they quite clearly do create precisely by their efforts.
In many ways primary school’s best function is to serve as free day care that takes advantages of economy of scale (consider the organizational similarity between the average school and the average early 20th century factory). Parents do have to go to work and we believe their children can’t work along side them and learn via apprenticeship as they did in previous eras. Arguably technology could soon make this function of school obsolete. Much of parental & adult supervision can be automated.
Now obviously the parent setting certain limitations on the day care machine before going to work sounds heartless, but describe in your mind a regular school day the same way a anthropologist from a different time would have. Sounds about as heartless to me.
No problem I’ll explain it to you. High IQ is useful for climbing out of poverty, this is a robust finding of social science. Poor children are on average dimmer than rich children. In the First world this is probably mostly due to genetics. IQ is mostly heritable. This doesn’t necessarily the causes are genetic differences. But since we also know that above some very low plateau (nearer to mild abuse than mild neglect) education, better nutrition and nearly anything else tried doesn’t show any sustained gains in IQ it is the explanation that best fits the evidence.
I think these are great examples of where “wisdom” and “preference” smear across each other’s boundaries. The truths you cite above are matters of degree, we probably both agree on that. 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. You assert that here this is probably mostly due to genetics, implying we’ve got the environment “good enough” for either everybody or mostly everybody. 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.
Now as far as I am concerned, the more interesting point is NOT whether the US being a benign enough environment so that poor people with good IQ genes have already climbed out of poverty, or whether there is still plenty of raw human material unexploited. The more interesting point is that we have different preferences in those regards, and we can’t easily separate our judgements on the preponderance of the evidence from our preferences. And in a democracy, I don’t have to convince you necessarily that I am closer to right than you are, I just have to convince some complex mix of people and interests corresponding to what, with other factors, will tend to get me 51% of the vote. My aesthetic preference would be to actually convince you, that would be winning and make me more confident that I was right and not just deluded by my preferences. But by deciding the democracy is beautiful, by having a meta-esthetic, I can enjoy the process whether I am winning or not.
By the way, as far as the conclusion that above a certain fairly low threshold, grooming children for success is wasted, it seems rather telling to me that 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 and 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. Its funny that as many rich people who may believe the children will be fine, they hardly ever apply that reasoning to their own children. If there were some reason to believe that they might be biased against reaching their conclusion that they should pay more taxes to educate poor children, then one might question their objectivity in reaching this “children are robust” conclusion.
But of course, what is this? Just me diving deeper into the wisdom I see that supports the preference I have. If you are half the nerd I think you are, you will have clever and nearly compelling counterarguments to everything I have said.
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.
I also think primary school education as it currently exists is very badly designed from the perspective of “do no harm to children”, since it is practically designed to introduce conformity, stifle creativity and in general produce very weird socialization patterns (like what is this deal with sorting children into pseudo-military regiments based on their date of manufacture?).
First off, it seems to me the PRIMARY advantage of humans over other animals is that we can work cooperatively in highly complex ways in very large groups. I don’t know if you’ve seen how our closest relatives the Chimps and Bonobos do in large groups, its not very inspiring. Humans are a domesticated animal, we have domesticated ourselves. And the domesticated humans appear to be by many measures the most successful creature on the planet, and certainly the most intelligent.
So should it really surprise you that a lot of the effort of school is to train cooperation? Presumably our evolved ability to cooperate is tuned to work up to maybe a hundred or a few hundred humans, before we start, very sensibly killing the strangers and stealing their women and children as slaves, before they do that to us. DNA is only one way to pass stored species knowledge down through the generations, culture is the other. And culture seems to have enhanced human productivity by factors of thousands over what it was when we first picked up the bulk of this genetic design 10,000 years ago.
My 15 and 13 year old daughters have cringed at the thought of being home schooled instead of being allowed to go to their underfunded and not very spectacular in any way suburban california public elementary and middle schools. I think you may be telling a micro story about the bathwater and missing the macro story of the baby. Schools do lots of great things. It is entirely possible they could do much better, but they are already way better than nothing.
My 15 and 13 year old daughters have cringed at the thought of being home schooled instead of being allowed to go to their underfunded and not very spectacular in any way suburban california public elementary and middle schools.
That is probably because they have friends and most of their social circle there. Surprisingly people have had friends and social circles for millennia before schools.
But I happen to think that formal education beyond the primary school level is mostly a sorting mechanism with elaborate signalling races developing around it.
This flies in the face of my experience. And I do believe I can cite evidence against it but it is not from studies per se.
I actually had a very good public school education, in a well off suburban school district in 1960s and 1970s Farmingdale, New York. In addition to this being a well funded district that people moved to for its reputation, I was sorted from 3rd grade through 9th grade into a special program with even better teachers and curriculum aimed at the top 2% in IQ terms of the district.
Even with that excellent background, it was not until Swarthmore College that I understood why missing a day of class could possibly be of any concern (because the pace was so fast). Further, I would estimate that I learned, hard to say, 10X as much science and math in 4 years at Swarthmore than I had in 12 years of Farmingdale.
I then spent 2 years as a technician working with radio astronomers at Bell Labs. Yes, I learned so much there that for a while I would tell people I did my undergrad at Bell Labs. But to be fair, it would probably be more analagous to having done my MS at Bell Labs. My undergraduate education was superb.
I then went to graduate school at Caltech, and surprisingly instead of signalling my sorting, I learned and did independent research, presented my results to the elite, and developed into somebody who could reasonably say that if he didn’t understand a particular physics/astronomy presentation, that it was the presentation that sucked, not me. Yes, I learned LOTS MORE even in graduate school, in math methods and statistics/probability, and quantum mechanics and classical mechanics and, holy of holies, electromagnetics, my own specialization. Oh and in solid state physics, I was working on superconducting devices.
So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school.
Does the possibility exist I could have learned this on the job? Sort of but not really. First off, classes were INTENSE, much harder than job. Second, jobs you tend to learn what you need to do your immediate task, classes front-load you with stuff, some of which you may never use, but lots of which you wind up trotting out over the next 50 years of your career.
So that’s my personal experience. What is the evidence beyond that that school is real, not just signalling?
1) Greatest researchers tend to be at universities. They tend to prefer to work with students and post-docs (still an educational job IMHO). 2) Even the most iconoclastic geniuses in math and science will typically skip lower levels of education, but be brought in at unusually young ages to the highest levels of education. Wolfram graduated with a PhD from Caltech when he was 21 (IIRC) and was hired as a professor by Caltech at that point. Physicists and Mathematicians seem to want people from these programs, and it doesn’t seem to me primarily because they are trying to skip having to make their own decisions on who to work with. 3) I interview for engineering positions at my company. We have information on where applicant came from and what degree we have, but our interviews are still primarily technological tests. We want to know if applicant knows CDMA and LTE and 802.11xxx and GPS and AWGN and dB and Matlab and all the things we associate with people who get stuff done. As a participant with others in the interviewing of others, I have NEVER heard a discussion of the quality of school or which degree the applicant had. It is always a substantial discussion. And our ranks of hires include people with BS and years of experience, as well as MS and PhDs with less work experience. At some level X years of experience seems to equate on average to Y years of higher education. But the point is both experiences are different and both are valuable in employees. We have plenty of PhDs from great places, plenty of PhDs from podunk places and plenty of BSs.
So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school.
Of course you did. But you aren’t thinking opportunity costs here. People learn gobs and GOBS of stuff outside of college and high school. Like this site shouldn’t exist if this wasn’t so. ;)
And since outside of school people they learn stuff they actually use often (they basically are forced to do spaced repetition) or are interested in they arguably retain far more of that. Look at things school is supposed to teach us, like learning a foreign language.
Since I’m linking to Caplan I also recommend you read:
I interview for engineering positions at my company. We have information on where applicant came from and what degree we have, but our interviews are still primarily technological tests. We want to know if applicant knows CDMA and LTE and 802.11xxx and GPS and AWGN and dB and Matlab and all the things we associate with people who get stuff done. As a participant with others in the interviewing of others, I have NEVER heard a discussion of the quality of school or which degree the applicant had.
Remind me what fraction of students go into STEM fields. Then consider if this is true for people who hire say lawyers.
I think generally rejecting education as not cost effective is too clever by half.
If it was purely signalling, surely we would see interesting less expensive (in time and money) alternatives to send the signals, our economy is rather creative and adaptable in other ways.
Further to attribute my experiences in STEM to “but it might be different in STEM, what about the Lawyers?” If school is valuable in STEM but not in other things, make the case.
Further, we know school is valuable beyond signaling in business. Companies will hire people and PAY them to get MBAs. Not a result you’d expect if the MBA was primarily a signalling device.
I don’t think either of us has the last word on this question, and it will likely be useful to think about how to make education more valuable. But sometimes things ARE as they seem, probably, actually, more often than not.
Even if Education is not uniformly the most efficient way to spend effort, if it is needed to produce resources, if it triples the value of 1⁄2 the people who go through, it pays for itself on average pretty quickly. Yeah it would be nice to fine tune it and squeeze more return and have less waste, but it would be a mistake to claim it was useless and then have to say “but maybe not for MBA” “but maybe not for STEM” I can tell you for finance, accounting, I think you’ll be making exceptions, and rather than accept the claim on its face that things are not as they seem and then walk it back to maybe they are in this narrow case, maybe overall things ARE as they seem, but there are a few exceptions.
So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school.
Of course you did. But you aren’t thinking opportunity costs here.
Well, yes I am. I quit a job as a technician at bell labs to go get my PhD at Caltech. As much as I was learning as a tech at Bell Labs, I was not going to be given my own projects to pound on, was not even allowed to write my own papers by my boss (this varied across bosses at bell labs, mine published work I had contributed to without my name on the publications, telling me I was getting paid as a tech and if I wanted my name on pubs I should go to grad school). I was not going to go to the insanely great classes I attended at Caltech, although I was able to attend a class a semester at nearby Rutgers at grad level in physics.
I came out of grad school and got a job as a professor at a research university. Seven years as a techician in the 10 area of Bell Labs and I would have still been a technician. I might have moved in to development and been a 2nd class citizen member of techical staff.
You can tell me that you know better than the technical leadership in universities and at bell labs whether the MS and PhD are “worth it,” but I don’t believe you and have no reason to believe you without some evidence, just as I believe the people who went to medical school over the people who tell me I can cure my cancer with peach pit extracts, vegan diets, cleanses and vitamins.
The preponderance of the evidence is that people making micro decisions choose education, people making hiring decisions, choose the educated and even pay to educate their employees. To convince me that the market is systematically failing to this extent, you will need evidence beyond assertion and iconoclasm.
I should make it clear, I recognize I am sort of a poster boy for when education would make sense, in terms of being extra smart and in terms of the kinds of jobs I like to do. But your assertion of signalling value only “forgot” about STEM, MBAs, and people who want to be professors, and doesn’t address the market failures of such seemingly efficient businesses as Bell Labs, Caltech, and Qualcomm in finding value in the educations of the educated and not just in their educability.
I find it very strange that you speak of Harvard and Yale educating “children”, but I’m guessing you mean the Yale and Harvard’s of primary school education.
I do however agree it doesn’t much matter if you put rich or poor talented people into those colleges, their graduates will still be quality.
I do hope you realize that many poor children are not talented.
Oh you probably don’t. No problem I’ll explain it to you. High IQ is useful for climbing out of poverty, this is a robust finding of social science. Poor children are on average dimmer than rich children. In the First world this is probably mostly due to genetics. IQ is mostly heritable. This doesn’t necessarily the causes are genetic differences. But since we also know that above some very low plateau (nearer to mild abuse than mild neglect) education, better nutrition and nearly anything else tried doesn’t show any sustained gains in IQ it is the explanation that best fits the evidence.
I do think that spending rich people’s money to genetically engineer improved chances for poor people’s children is a ridiculously wise investment for a society to make. If I thought the same potential of great gains existed for education, I would support making greater investments into it as well. But I happen to think that formal education beyond the primary school level is mostly a sorting mechanism with elaborate signalling races developing around it. Now don’t get me wrong signalling is necessary, but escalating signalling races are negative sum games because they eat up resources.
I also think primary school education as it currently exists is very badly designed from the perspective of “do no harm to children”, since it is practically designed to introduce conformity, stifle creativity and in general produce very weird socialization patterns (like what is this deal with sorting children into pseudo-military regiments based on their date of manufacture?). There might be good reasons to do so. Maybe such traits are good to have for the average person in our society. Maybe they are bad for the individual but have positive externalities for others. But I’m suspicious since the institutions claim that they are trying their best not to produce many of the effects they quite clearly do create precisely by their efforts.
In many ways primary school’s best function is to serve as free day care that takes advantages of economy of scale (consider the organizational similarity between the average school and the average early 20th century factory). Parents do have to go to work and we believe their children can’t work along side them and learn via apprenticeship as they did in previous eras. Arguably technology could soon make this function of school obsolete. Much of parental & adult supervision can be automated.
Now obviously the parent setting certain limitations on the day care machine before going to work sounds heartless, but describe in your mind a regular school day the same way a anthropologist from a different time would have. Sounds about as heartless to me.
I think these are great examples of where “wisdom” and “preference” smear across each other’s boundaries. The truths you cite above are matters of degree, we probably both agree on that. 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. You assert that here this is probably mostly due to genetics, implying we’ve got the environment “good enough” for either everybody or mostly everybody. 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.
Now as far as I am concerned, the more interesting point is NOT whether the US being a benign enough environment so that poor people with good IQ genes have already climbed out of poverty, or whether there is still plenty of raw human material unexploited. The more interesting point is that we have different preferences in those regards, and we can’t easily separate our judgements on the preponderance of the evidence from our preferences. And in a democracy, I don’t have to convince you necessarily that I am closer to right than you are, I just have to convince some complex mix of people and interests corresponding to what, with other factors, will tend to get me 51% of the vote. My aesthetic preference would be to actually convince you, that would be winning and make me more confident that I was right and not just deluded by my preferences. But by deciding the democracy is beautiful, by having a meta-esthetic, I can enjoy the process whether I am winning or not.
By the way, as far as the conclusion that above a certain fairly low threshold, grooming children for success is wasted, it seems rather telling to me that 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 and 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. Its funny that as many rich people who may believe the children will be fine, they hardly ever apply that reasoning to their own children. If there were some reason to believe that they might be biased against reaching their conclusion that they should pay more taxes to educate poor children, then one might question their objectivity in reaching this “children are robust” conclusion.
But of course, what is this? Just me diving deeper into the wisdom I see that supports the preference I have. If you are half the nerd I think you are, you will have clever and nearly compelling counterarguments to everything I have said.
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.
First off, it seems to me the PRIMARY advantage of humans over other animals is that we can work cooperatively in highly complex ways in very large groups. I don’t know if you’ve seen how our closest relatives the Chimps and Bonobos do in large groups, its not very inspiring. Humans are a domesticated animal, we have domesticated ourselves. And the domesticated humans appear to be by many measures the most successful creature on the planet, and certainly the most intelligent.
So should it really surprise you that a lot of the effort of school is to train cooperation? Presumably our evolved ability to cooperate is tuned to work up to maybe a hundred or a few hundred humans, before we start, very sensibly killing the strangers and stealing their women and children as slaves, before they do that to us. DNA is only one way to pass stored species knowledge down through the generations, culture is the other. And culture seems to have enhanced human productivity by factors of thousands over what it was when we first picked up the bulk of this genetic design 10,000 years ago.
My 15 and 13 year old daughters have cringed at the thought of being home schooled instead of being allowed to go to their underfunded and not very spectacular in any way suburban california public elementary and middle schools. I think you may be telling a micro story about the bathwater and missing the macro story of the baby. Schools do lots of great things. It is entirely possible they could do much better, but they are already way better than nothing.
That is probably because they have friends and most of their social circle there. Surprisingly people have had friends and social circles for millennia before schools.
This flies in the face of my experience. And I do believe I can cite evidence against it but it is not from studies per se.
I actually had a very good public school education, in a well off suburban school district in 1960s and 1970s Farmingdale, New York. In addition to this being a well funded district that people moved to for its reputation, I was sorted from 3rd grade through 9th grade into a special program with even better teachers and curriculum aimed at the top 2% in IQ terms of the district.
Even with that excellent background, it was not until Swarthmore College that I understood why missing a day of class could possibly be of any concern (because the pace was so fast). Further, I would estimate that I learned, hard to say, 10X as much science and math in 4 years at Swarthmore than I had in 12 years of Farmingdale.
I then spent 2 years as a technician working with radio astronomers at Bell Labs. Yes, I learned so much there that for a while I would tell people I did my undergrad at Bell Labs. But to be fair, it would probably be more analagous to having done my MS at Bell Labs. My undergraduate education was superb.
I then went to graduate school at Caltech, and surprisingly instead of signalling my sorting, I learned and did independent research, presented my results to the elite, and developed into somebody who could reasonably say that if he didn’t understand a particular physics/astronomy presentation, that it was the presentation that sucked, not me. Yes, I learned LOTS MORE even in graduate school, in math methods and statistics/probability, and quantum mechanics and classical mechanics and, holy of holies, electromagnetics, my own specialization. Oh and in solid state physics, I was working on superconducting devices.
So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school.
Does the possibility exist I could have learned this on the job? Sort of but not really. First off, classes were INTENSE, much harder than job. Second, jobs you tend to learn what you need to do your immediate task, classes front-load you with stuff, some of which you may never use, but lots of which you wind up trotting out over the next 50 years of your career.
So that’s my personal experience. What is the evidence beyond that that school is real, not just signalling?
1) Greatest researchers tend to be at universities. They tend to prefer to work with students and post-docs (still an educational job IMHO).
2) Even the most iconoclastic geniuses in math and science will typically skip lower levels of education, but be brought in at unusually young ages to the highest levels of education. Wolfram graduated with a PhD from Caltech when he was 21 (IIRC) and was hired as a professor by Caltech at that point. Physicists and Mathematicians seem to want people from these programs, and it doesn’t seem to me primarily because they are trying to skip having to make their own decisions on who to work with.
3) I interview for engineering positions at my company. We have information on where applicant came from and what degree we have, but our interviews are still primarily technological tests. We want to know if applicant knows CDMA and LTE and 802.11xxx and GPS and AWGN and dB and Matlab and all the things we associate with people who get stuff done. As a participant with others in the interviewing of others, I have NEVER heard a discussion of the quality of school or which degree the applicant had. It is always a substantial discussion. And our ranks of hires include people with BS and years of experience, as well as MS and PhDs with less work experience. At some level X years of experience seems to equate on average to Y years of higher education. But the point is both experiences are different and both are valuable in employees. We have plenty of PhDs from great places, plenty of PhDs from podunk places and plenty of BSs.
Of course you did. But you aren’t thinking opportunity costs here. People learn gobs and GOBS of stuff outside of college and high school. Like this site shouldn’t exist if this wasn’t so. ;)
And since outside of school people they learn stuff they actually use often (they basically are forced to do spaced repetition) or are interested in they arguably retain far more of that. Look at things school is supposed to teach us, like learning a foreign language.
Since I’m linking to Caplan I also recommend you read:
The Present Value of Learning, Adjusted for Forgetting
Why Is the National Return to Education So Low?
Does High School Algebra Pass a Cost-Benefit Test?
Remind me what fraction of students go into STEM fields. Then consider if this is true for people who hire say lawyers.
I think generally rejecting education as not cost effective is too clever by half.
If it was purely signalling, surely we would see interesting less expensive (in time and money) alternatives to send the signals, our economy is rather creative and adaptable in other ways.
Further to attribute my experiences in STEM to “but it might be different in STEM, what about the Lawyers?” If school is valuable in STEM but not in other things, make the case.
Further, we know school is valuable beyond signaling in business. Companies will hire people and PAY them to get MBAs. Not a result you’d expect if the MBA was primarily a signalling device.
I don’t think either of us has the last word on this question, and it will likely be useful to think about how to make education more valuable. But sometimes things ARE as they seem, probably, actually, more often than not.
Even if Education is not uniformly the most efficient way to spend effort, if it is needed to produce resources, if it triples the value of 1⁄2 the people who go through, it pays for itself on average pretty quickly. Yeah it would be nice to fine tune it and squeeze more return and have less waste, but it would be a mistake to claim it was useless and then have to say “but maybe not for MBA” “but maybe not for STEM” I can tell you for finance, accounting, I think you’ll be making exceptions, and rather than accept the claim on its face that things are not as they seem and then walk it back to maybe they are in this narrow case, maybe overall things ARE as they seem, but there are a few exceptions.
Well, yes I am. I quit a job as a technician at bell labs to go get my PhD at Caltech. As much as I was learning as a tech at Bell Labs, I was not going to be given my own projects to pound on, was not even allowed to write my own papers by my boss (this varied across bosses at bell labs, mine published work I had contributed to without my name on the publications, telling me I was getting paid as a tech and if I wanted my name on pubs I should go to grad school). I was not going to go to the insanely great classes I attended at Caltech, although I was able to attend a class a semester at nearby Rutgers at grad level in physics.
I came out of grad school and got a job as a professor at a research university. Seven years as a techician in the 10 area of Bell Labs and I would have still been a technician. I might have moved in to development and been a 2nd class citizen member of techical staff.
You can tell me that you know better than the technical leadership in universities and at bell labs whether the MS and PhD are “worth it,” but I don’t believe you and have no reason to believe you without some evidence, just as I believe the people who went to medical school over the people who tell me I can cure my cancer with peach pit extracts, vegan diets, cleanses and vitamins.
The preponderance of the evidence is that people making micro decisions choose education, people making hiring decisions, choose the educated and even pay to educate their employees. To convince me that the market is systematically failing to this extent, you will need evidence beyond assertion and iconoclasm.
I should make it clear, I recognize I am sort of a poster boy for when education would make sense, in terms of being extra smart and in terms of the kinds of jobs I like to do. But your assertion of signalling value only “forgot” about STEM, MBAs, and people who want to be professors, and doesn’t address the market failures of such seemingly efficient businesses as Bell Labs, Caltech, and Qualcomm in finding value in the educations of the educated and not just in their educability.