Interview
#32 - Bryan Caplan on whether his Case Against Education holds up, totalitarianism, & open borders
- Future subscriber engagement for episodes is expected to remain high even when content is not directly career-related, while attendance at local effective altruism conferences in Australia and the Netherlands requires near-term applications.
- The outlook posits that the education system primarily functions as a conformity signal through excessive hoops and "stickers on the forehead," causing students to prioritize grades over actual learning and leading to the study of material like trigonometry that is foreseeably ultra-unlikely to appear in real life.
- Signaling returns are projected to be substantial, with the "sheepskin effect" showing a wage jump for graduation that exceeds returns for earlier schooling, where a bachelor's senior year is worth about twice the first three combined and a master's degree is approximately 75% signaling.
- Estimated signaling components of degree returns range from 60% under a cautious view to 80% under a reasonable view for bachelor's degrees, while the author plans to publish a book titled "Poverty, Who to Blame" and a non-fiction graphic novel on the ethics and science of open borders.
- Vocational education is identified as superior for at-risk students unlikely to finish school or those prone to incarceration, whereas spending less on general education would be the primary societal implication if the signaling model holds true.
- Employers are expected to interpret forgetting as a demonstration of learning ability rather than failure, and the author estimates that about 10% of federal prisoners are there for immigration offenses with 600,000 people awaiting trial in immigration courts.
- The author holds a moderate 50-50 belief regarding great man theories, specifically assigning an 80% probability that the Soviet Union would still be ruled by Joseph Stalin had his life extension program succeeded.
- Concerns are raised that a global government without external comparison groups could lead to permanent totalitarian realism by removing competition, with the Chinese social credit system viewed as 25% worse than existing totalitarian regimes.
- Nationalist identity is predicted to prevent most people from viewing immigration restrictions as human rights violations, with almost all classmates expected to prioritize their country's side in a war despite claims of being global citizens.
- Policy plans include ratcheting up punishments for domestic violence, with flogging considered potentially more convincing than current methods, and deregulation of housing is expected to yield enormous gains despite low interest from real estate owners in subdividable properties.
- A specific return on investment is forecasted for cultural engagement, where investing 50 hours into opera over the next three years will likely provide enormous replay value and greater pleasure than popular songs.
- Official modern slavery numbers are deemed very misleading due to the inclusion of debt contracts resembling classical indentured servitude, and the author estimates the 1% chance that Eric Hanushek is correct regarding massive social multiplier effects of math and science education.
- The curriculum of primary school is expected to be used by very few people later in life, contradicting parental beliefs, while the author considers the idea that signaling increases with education level correct only on the cautious approach.