If Caplan is right it should be a personal choice not subsidized by government
Where I'm from, universities don't charge tuition, but you still get a small allowance as a student, and you can add on to that with a student loan to cover living costs. Loan interest and repayments are the same for everyone and based on your salary, it's all backed by the government, and if you don't pay back your loans before the age of 65, your loan is forgiven.
Given all of this, it is much easier to calculate if an education is "worth it" or not than in the US market, because you can look at average salary progression in different fields to do a pretty good estimate of whether or not you'll repay your student loan before retirement. These calculations are routinely done by unions and career guides and university recruiters, and the usual suspects are worth it; STEM education, medicine, MBAs etc, while the more liberal-artsy you get, the more likely you are to never ever repay your student debt and therefore be a "bad" investment of educational budgets.
And you know what? I'm fine with that. I'm fine with government subsidizing all of these "bad" educational programmes. For the fun of it. For the hell of it. Because some people like it. I am happily paying taxes so that someone else can get an education in ancient Peruvian anthropology with a minor in medieval French poetry for the absolute sheer fucking delight of it.
The goal of society is happiness, not productivity.
It's harder than you think. You also need to take into account probability of actually finishing the degree vs dropping out (which depends on your individual ability, preferences, and other aspects), likelihood of actually getting a job in the field after completing a degree (e.g. there are many more people with a diploma in History than there are jobs in that field), job satisfaction (some jobs tend to have much lower or higher job satisfaction than others, which often is not clear to high-schoolers, and which results in wide discrepancies of monetary compensation, to make up for low or high job satisfaction), and other things too.
The entire subject of this conversation, Caplan's spreadsheet, is exactly his attempt to estimate all of that.
Yes, but what I'm saying is that I don't care! People don't care! If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there!
My counter-argument isn't rational or analytical or quantifiable, it's irrational! Emotional! Caplan might be correct. But boring.
Wow, that's the falsest false dichotomy I've seen in a long time.
Por que no los dos?
Do you have any data to support your conclusion?
Oh, I love this. What a droll, dull world without this attitude. Many of our societies are rich beyond imagination; we have more than enough to support all sorts of activities which don’t directly increase someone’s wealth.
It’s one thing about a rich society without a public safety net: people are more jealous and resentful of perceived freeloaders, i.e., anyone not directly employed in the increase of capital.
Who are you to decide?
If the government doesn't subsidise education, then anything that doesn't promise a return is financially debilitating. Personal choice can't exist when your ability to eat and pay rent rely upon you making a specific decision.
If you don't believe that humanities education has any kind of broader social value, then that's a whole other argument to make.
How do the critics know that it is not the right conclusion? Where are their numbers that support their conclusion.
Look, I understand research is hard and that it may occasionally result in an incorrect conclusion from the data that was gathered. It happens.
But it is not logically consistent to call the conclusion wrong when there is no data to support that position.