And it would be weird for marginal education to be bad in exceptional basket cases like Haiti, bad in well-to-do countries like the US, but good in the middle.
This seems like a weird claim in a context where you (a) haven’t given any evidence that education is bad in the US and (b) all your examples of education being bad are demonstrating education being much worse than in most of the US.
It’s not that I don’t think education in the US is partly a positional good, but like, I definitely learned stuff in school. I’m a lot more willing to believe that the terrible schooling you cite is predominantly or even exclusively a positional good than that US schooling is.
I think it’s sufficiently obvious not to need justification and you can tell from just looking, but Bryan Caplan wrote a book on it. Slate Star Codex has also written extensively about how silly mass college education as implemented in the US is.
It’s not obvious just from looking and I’ve had to have long arguments with people to be convinced that there exists a large-scale problem in U.S. education. (I was very lucky, of course, though in retrospect I see how I too was significantly harmed in some ways, though I still maintain that I also got a hell of a lot of value out of school.)
I mean, it’s important to distinguish “it’s not obvious from looking” and “most people don’t seem to have noticed”. It’s often the case that the majority have not noticed things that a minority can see with fairly simple evidence, due to mechanisms like asymmetric info markets, power dynamics in society, and from many others.
I’m not entirely convinced that distinction exists. I would say that in general if certain information (whether object-level information or background knowledge) is not readily available to most people, then insights requiring that information are not obvious from looking.
That said, I can imagine the distinction existing, and yet even if it does I don’t think “education in the US is Just Bad” is in the category “obvious from looking but most people just haven’t noticed”. “the value of higher education in the US has a large signaling component” is fairly obvious from looking (to people who have interacted with relevant parts of the education system and/or labor market), but “ALL or nearly all of the value of ALL or nearly all mainstream education in the US is from signaling”/”the public school system’s existence is net negative” is not obvious at all; if true (which I’m not really convinced of) it requires evidence to prove.
likewise it can be obvious from looking that one’s particular school experience was net positive or net negative, but generalizing from one example is a bad idea
(in my case it’s not clear whether my school experience was net positive or net negative, so nothing is obvious at all, honestly)
You might be right. I note the claim Benquo made was regarding marginal education, and that doesn’t require all of education to be bad, just all the extra qualifications that are trying to become the norm (i.e. qualification inflation). My hot take is that probably if most people looked at its effects in their own lives they’d judge it to be bad, yet they seem to not notice this when people chant the political slogans in favour of ‘a good education’.
This is maybe sort of a nitpick, but:
This seems like a weird claim in a context where you (a) haven’t given any evidence that education is bad in the US and (b) all your examples of education being bad are demonstrating education being much worse than in most of the US.
It’s not that I don’t think education in the US is partly a positional good, but like, I definitely learned stuff in school. I’m a lot more willing to believe that the terrible schooling you cite is predominantly or even exclusively a positional good than that US schooling is.
I think it’s sufficiently obvious not to need justification and you can tell from just looking, but Bryan Caplan wrote a book on it. Slate Star Codex has also written extensively about how silly mass college education as implemented in the US is.
It’s not obvious just from looking and I’ve had to have long arguments with people to be convinced that there exists a large-scale problem in U.S. education. (I was very lucky, of course, though in retrospect I see how I too was significantly harmed in some ways, though I still maintain that I also got a hell of a lot of value out of school.)
I mean, it’s important to distinguish “it’s not obvious from looking” and “most people don’t seem to have noticed”. It’s often the case that the majority have not noticed things that a minority can see with fairly simple evidence, due to mechanisms like asymmetric info markets, power dynamics in society, and from many others.
I’m not entirely convinced that distinction exists. I would say that in general if certain information (whether object-level information or background knowledge) is not readily available to most people, then insights requiring that information are not obvious from looking.
That said, I can imagine the distinction existing, and yet even if it does I don’t think “education in the US is Just Bad” is in the category “obvious from looking but most people just haven’t noticed”. “the value of higher education in the US has a large signaling component” is fairly obvious from looking (to people who have interacted with relevant parts of the education system and/or labor market), but “ALL or nearly all of the value of ALL or nearly all mainstream education in the US is from signaling”/”the public school system’s existence is net negative” is not obvious at all; if true (which I’m not really convinced of) it requires evidence to prove.
likewise it can be obvious from looking that one’s particular school experience was net positive or net negative, but generalizing from one example is a bad idea
(in my case it’s not clear whether my school experience was net positive or net negative, so nothing is obvious at all, honestly)
You might be right. I note the claim Benquo made was regarding marginal education, and that doesn’t require all of education to be bad, just all the extra qualifications that are trying to become the norm (i.e. qualification inflation). My hot take is that probably if most people looked at its effects in their own lives they’d judge it to be bad, yet they seem to not notice this when people chant the political slogans in favour of ‘a good education’.