Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk.
I'm sure his numbers and spreadsheets are correct.
But if you think this is a good argument, a worthwhile argument for educational policy, then JESUS FUCK could you go outside and touch some grass? Please? Go hug someone. Look at the stars. Read a book. Be human. Feel something!
A lot of people choose universities based on which ones have the best parties. Is that even quantifiable? This whole thing seems so ridiculously out of touch with human motivation that what you're saying is correct: It's simply not worth anyone else's time to debunk.
/me looks at teachers, nurses, and truck drivers.
This is one example where academia & credentialing serves an important purpose, even if academia can be pedantic & insular at times.
Wow, that's one of the most dismissive remarks I've seen here in quite a while. It also does not seem like you could possibly believe it yourself. Education is a huge chunk of everyone's life, of course it's important to know the upsides and downsides. The returns are one aspect (I haven't read the book, it honestly sounds depressing, but I'm also intrigued) and calculating those with the highest reasonable precision seems like an important input to me, regardless of whether we like the answer. Why would you dismiss this altogether as not even worth anyone's time to look into?
Now - are there arguments not worth engaging with? Absolutely.
It's a natural thing. If you come up with an implausible sounding thing supported by a very complicated argument then most likely you made a mistake. It is very easy to make mistakes and very hard to find them.
If you have a 1000 page proof that 2*2 is 5 I won't spend my valuable time finding where you slipped up. Now clearly his claim is more nebulous. One has to invest money and time to even understand what the book claims, so then one can invest more time to debunk a spreadsheet?
Caplan isn't some interloper with no knowledge of any of the material he touches on ranting on Twitter. The man has a career as an economics researcher specializing in public-sector work and actually teaches economics at a reasonably prestigious university (I have heard of George Mason). Perhaps we might pause to consider that he may be, in the realm of his specialty, not a complete fool. In general, his work would seem to be worth engaging with by his peers.
With that in mind, it is a little concerning that so many people are so ready and willing to argue with his claims yet none are interested in engaging with his work or methodology. Perhaps they, as you, are dismissive because he reaches conclusions they find so implausible as to be not worth engaging with. Or perhaps because as he alleges, the field simply does not value quantitative argument beyond its ability to get a paper published.
For my own part, I think it would be educational to know which is the case. If the former, I would like to understand if this is politically motivated (and a lot of things are in economics, especially in a policy context). In the latter, it leads me to question just about every claim from the entire field, including Caplan's.
I'm not equipped to evaluate his data or critique his work. I won't make the attempt. I would hope for better of his peers, though.
As you said, it's also worth noting that the community of "distinguished economists" is itself a fairly insular and politically driven field with a lot of ideological assumptions. That's not to say it's all hogwash, but for as much as Economists love to tell you otherwise it's still a soft-science very vulnerable to convenient abuse of statistics.
For what it's worth, I skimmed over the presentation he linked in the article. One of the first claims he makes is:
"Education and ability (IQ, work ethic, etc.) are correlated, so raw numbers give education too much credit."
He then goes on to correct for a "45% ability bias" to income statistics. Without even getting into the problems of correlation vs causation there, it's a perfect example of the foundational assumptions that got his work rejected to begin with.
The title “case against education”, and the subtitle “why the education system is a waste of time and money” makes it feel like it will be about the whole concept of education and it will show, well “why the education system is a waste of time and money”. Turns out he is already backpedaling from that conclusion in the first chapter. He says he doesn’t talk about the kind of education which teaches usefull skills. Surprise surprise, if you remove the good stuff from an endevour what remains won’t be worth much. To quote from the book:
> Lest I be misinterpreted, I emphatically affirm that some education teaches usefull skills, or, as economists put it, “builds human capital.”
“Lest I be misinterpreted” oh no! Maybe you shouldn’t put your “clickbaity” nonsense statement which goes against your stance on the front cover of your book then? Jeez.
And if the author is reading this: please kindly give me back my money and time.
And what percentage of people do those kinds of studies? And for those who do, what percentage of the time was still spent on useless things?
I'm about 15 minutes into a podcast with the author about the book (linked elsewhere in this thread) and from what I got so far, it's indeed about the majority case, not the couple of engineers that obtain applicable knowledge. It's also mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
You're right that it does seem like a youtube title among books and I get the frustration, but you're also exaggerating what the author is saying and posting that version online for everyone else to take home.
You only have to have one flagrantly unprovable assumption to make the whole chain of inference invalid