[stereolambda]

I also don't align with the author ideologically, but I have to protest somewhat. Assuming that the inputs and the model are sound (which I'm not saying they are, going by some other commenters' judgements), the spreadsheets tell us something regardless of whether we subscribe to making policy decisions with pure monetary terms ROI. Mainly that we need a damn good non-monetary arguments to make young people learn something (here I'm thinking of oversaturating the school programs in the country where I reside) and to justify existence of places that say "higher education" and usually charge money but they give their students not much.

I am fully in the "you are a citizen before a homo economicus" camp, but don't actually want to make this an object level discussion about education. Two things:

- A social assertion can be sound and consistent with facts while missing the bigger picture. This means people should tackle it and learn from it, at least on the intellectual discussion level, and not try to bury it.

- Dismissing attempts to get things like formal logic and statistics into politics because it's all "ideologically motivated" is nihilist. Where the methods are sound and applied honestly, they can improve discourse (as a more disciplined kind of argumentation), unless you think you are a genius that perfectly knows how to improve society thanks to casual thinking and social proof.

To be fair, these attempts usually are ruined by ideology, but this is because the attempters ultimately choose ideology and are willing to compromise discipline. To go way back, see the "Specimen demonstrationis politicarum" by the great philosopher G.W. Leibniz, where he promises to mathematically solve the current election of the king of Poland and arrives at the conclusion predictable from knowing who was paying him.

[mvhvv]

I agree it's a positive move to bring formal logic and statistics into other fields, but (at least where I'm from) the social sciences do engage heavily with epistemology. And as a STEM major myself, I'll admit it's often in critical ways that the hard sciences fail.

The problem with many attempts to apply statistics is that even for the best quality science, the conclusion is only ever relative to the foundational assumptions. I don't mean they're intentional manipulations, but that it's very clear that Caplan is so far off the mark here that his work is difficult to take seriously.

I think a common critique of the trolley problem is an apt analogy here. Not an ethical argument about a specific choice, but that the thought experiment itself is flawed. It presents an absurd binary that neatly removes the human experience and incommensurability of individual life and insists on it's own utilitarian nature.

The problem with the spreadsheets, as with the trolley problem is that these kinds of analyses are founded on ad hoc assumptions that conveniently remove important context.

There is always a better approach. There are issues with our education system that don't work for many children, and wages do not correlate evenly with education across the board, but the conclusion that we should therefore slash public education funding and transition high schools to vocational training is doesn't follow from that unless you make those trolley-problem-style simplifying assumptions.