My son is 6, and I see much of his future education as totally wasteful. The main themes he will learn is that Civil Rights and Diversity are the most important things to know. I beg to differ, even if I agree that diversity in thought is a good thing and civil rights are a good thing. I'm going to tell my kid a trick to getting good grades: write about Martin Luther King/Harriet Tubman/Halle Berry--teachers will be much more reluctant to criticize you than if you use Andrew Carnegie or John Wayne. As a phd, I can see my kid learning what he needs to know online without any credentials, because I am confident that I know what is useful to know. Additionally, if you have some money, so your child isn't desperate for a job out of school, the need for education as a signal decreases and he can be much more efficient in allocating time to learning as opposed to posturing, regardless of his IQ.
Bryan Caplan at EconLib notes that IQ takes a short shrift in econ, and that much of education is signalling. I would say that's an understatement. If IQ, and its genetic influence on future generations, was a chemical like mercury, you would have a Nobel Prize on the discoverer, and every social policy would anticipate its effects. But IQ is genetic, and it's really unfair because--gasp--stupid parents increase the chances are the kid will be stupid too, ceteris paribus. I agree that it would be nicer if life gave every baby a clean break, no overhang because of their parents, but if that were so, then sexual selection may have never generated any preference towards IQ because women who liked smart men would have just as smart babies as women who liked dumb men. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, it's not clear that genetic egalitarianism (ie, that the genetic contribution to intelligence is unrelated to parent's intelligence), is consistent with the evolution of an intelligent species like homo sapiens.
So while I agree that life not being fair is a bummer, I also think that if life were fair in the sense of every child having the same innate 'ability', we probably wouldn't be communicating over the internet.
IQ is relevant for four reasons: it is stable over a lifetime, important (it 'explains' income, crime, etc.), heritable (40-80%), and varies systematically by groups (income or race). Economists try to avoid one of these facts, and thus imply that we are all fundamentally the same, so any differences in results must be the effect of current or prior discrimination. But facts are stubborn, so the question is, how badly do you want to be popular?
Bryan Caplan at EconLib notes that IQ takes a short shrift in econ, and that much of education is signalling. I would say that's an understatement. If IQ, and its genetic influence on future generations, was a chemical like mercury, you would have a Nobel Prize on the discoverer, and every social policy would anticipate its effects. But IQ is genetic, and it's really unfair because--gasp--stupid parents increase the chances are the kid will be stupid too, ceteris paribus. I agree that it would be nicer if life gave every baby a clean break, no overhang because of their parents, but if that were so, then sexual selection may have never generated any preference towards IQ because women who liked smart men would have just as smart babies as women who liked dumb men. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, it's not clear that genetic egalitarianism (ie, that the genetic contribution to intelligence is unrelated to parent's intelligence), is consistent with the evolution of an intelligent species like homo sapiens.
So while I agree that life not being fair is a bummer, I also think that if life were fair in the sense of every child having the same innate 'ability', we probably wouldn't be communicating over the internet.
IQ is relevant for four reasons: it is stable over a lifetime, important (it 'explains' income, crime, etc.), heritable (40-80%), and varies systematically by groups (income or race). Economists try to avoid one of these facts, and thus imply that we are all fundamentally the same, so any differences in results must be the effect of current or prior discrimination. But facts are stubborn, so the question is, how badly do you want to be popular?
HedgeFundGuy - am 2006-06-11 02:14
Mike Linksvayer (guest) meinte am 11. Jun, 06:41:
My son is 6, and I see much of his future education as totally wasteful.If this is true of his next 12 years it is your fault. Choices are available.
David Friedman (guest) meinte am 11. Jun, 09:41:
Why waste twelve years?
Given your views of conventional schooling, why do you plan to submit your son to it? In many states--in particular in California, where I live--you are free to home school your children. We do.
Paul N (guest) meinte am 11. Jun, 16:05:
1) For the very motivated, school may be less useful than the alternative. But 99% of kids would learn less if left to their own devices. They are going to choose Xbox over Wikipedia every time. The point is that school is for the average kid not the exceptional one.2) I feel like your description of schools is hyperbolic. Do you really feel your education was wasteful? I learned a lot in every grade, stuff I wouldn't have learned on my own, even though it was usually too easy for me.
3) My impression from talking to teachers is that they have to spend 95% of their time ramming basic math and reading skills down their kids' throats to make sure they pass standardize tests. I don't know how much brainwashing they're able to do.
4) I agree education is signaling - it shows you can get stuff done. Degrees in many fields take lots of work. You can't bullshit your way to an engineering degree, at least not where I went to school.
5) Like it or not, there are several types of intelligence. (Sure, they are somewhat correlated, but I think it's misleading to say IQ explains income.) I have been in industry only a short time, but I see only a weak correlation between IQ and success, esp. at management. (I can imagine how you might perceive a higher correlation, since I'm sure IQ is quite important for mathy stock data-analysis stuff, but that's only a small portion of what people do in the world.) Certain people are just good at working hard, organizing things, motivating and coordinating others, coming up with new ideas, etc., and this seems to me to have little to do with IQ. When I think about all the kids I knew growing up who were like freakishly smart, they're mostly unsuccessful burnouts. The doctors and lawyers out of my classmates are all the less-than-brilliant ones who were really obnoxious, obsessed about their grades, would bug the teacher constantly for ways to get extra credit, etc., and worked really hard.
Anyway I agree the 1960s "blank slate" model of human nature still persists in people's minds to an annoying degree today, esp. among less educated professionals (elementary school teachers?), but I do think things are slowly getting better.
AleksJ meinte am 11. Jun, 22:25:
The need for socialization
I share your feelings about the educational system: there is a lot of indoctrination, a lot of irrelevant material, and a lot of waste of time. And, there is not much hope to change anything. While home schooling is a possibility, my experience of having skipped two grades reminds me of the soft skills one learns when being in the company children of approximately the same age: leadership, teamwork, communication.The best solution I could conceive is for like-minded families to move in together and form a new community. Given that, one can attempt to develop a better future for one's children. Perhaps it's time to start organizing on this front. The congestion and prices of metropolitan areas is not very family-friendly, and internet allows one to perform work from somewhere else.
The real problem is developing a robust source of income for the community, and establishing a critical mass of people that will form the nexus and maintain some sort of an invite-only approach to community growth. It is time to start getting organized.
George (guest) meinte am 12. Jun, 01:27:
Economists and IQ
It's true that the acronym IQ doesn't show up in most economics article. But there are so many issues in economics where adding IQ or differences in innate abilites across races adds little or nothing. I think it's less a question of avoiding the topic than people like you who are unhappy that everyone else doesn't share your fixation on this one variable (especially highlighting the racial differences in IQ).
A lot of this fixation of IQ (and how some researchers supposedly ignore its implication) glosses over many issues like measurement error, lack of data in many situations, the unresolved flynn effect, IQ itself being a proxy for innate ability, etc.
HedgeFundGuy antwortete am 12. Jun, 03:38:
If a martian saw modern economics, he would find the hypothesis that IQ explains much of the cross-sectional variation in income to be underevaluated. It's not the only thing to be sure, and there are many exceptions, but IQ is still treated like the wayward son a family doesn't talk about.As per education of my kids (I have 2), I just see much of the school day addressing ephemeral topics in trendy issues. I don't have the enthusiasm for homeschooling, but I figure if my kids can learn math, statistics, chemistry, biology, literature, history, and writing, and then be involved socially with a group (band, football, chess, whatever), he'll be in fine shape, even if he doesn't get a college degree, let alone an advanced degree. In hedge funds, many successful people started in the pits and have pretty limited schooling. The smart ones are successful in spite of this, because it's so meritocratic. In an information economy life will become more meritocratic going forward.
Lastly, as I went through a good phd program, I personally worked with many students who I know are much smarter than me. There were problem sets, and some kids were just much more clever than me in logic, mathematics, statistics, etc. Some of these smartypants didn't make good academics because they couldn't come up with their own research. But some did, and they are now professors at good schools. The great thing about life is it's not one dimensional, and so if you try hard enough, and you are reasonably intelligent, you will find something you can do better than most people, and you can thrive. I don't sweat the thought that my kids might not be the smartest in their class, but I do want them to intelligently address their journey finding their niche in life. Signalling, and the dominant PC curricula, seem wasteful in that regard.
