 Hello my friends and welcome to the 85th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Happy Easter! This episode I'm talking with Dr. Brian Kaplan, who is professor of economics at George Mason University And we're talking about his new book, The Case Against Education. A plus for the book title. Dr. Kaplan was last on the show back in episode four. So he was one of the very first guests that I had on Patterson Pursuit And it's great to have him back on. And we're talking about the question, should everybody go to college? It's a question near and dear to my heart. I've got some pretty extreme views on the topic. Dr. Kaplan is much more moderate views than I do, but compared to the mainstream he actually has some pretty radical ideas and suggestions. I'm sure you guys will enjoy our conversation. If you want to pick up a copy of his book, you can find it at the show notes page this week which is stevedashpatterson.com One announcement before we start. I'll be doing a live Q&A this April 25th at 7 Eastern for everybody. It's not just for my patrons. Usually I do the live stream Q&A for patrons but this is going to be open to any listeners the show or the YouTube channel or social media or whatever it is. If you've got some questions about metaphysics and epistemology or the philosophy of math or my travels or politics whatever you want to talk about if you've got a question for me I will try to answer it on April 25th. All right. I hope you guys enjoy my conversation with Dr. Brian Kaplan. All right, Dr. Brian Kaplan. Thanks so much for coming back on Patterson and Pursuit. Thanks a lot for having me. So last time you were on the show was almost two years ago and yeah, we were talking about anarchism and we even mentioned then the case against education. So it's great that I've been ready for it and it's great that almost two years later now it's out in print. Congratulations on that by the way. Thanks very much. So what I want to start is with a general claim that you encounter everywhere, especially in America, maybe the West at large and it's the idea that in order to have a successful career or even a successful life you have to go get some education whether it's definitely got to be high school. That's not even up for debate but really if you can make it work to go get your BA, go get a BA. If you can get any higher education above that, definitely go get that. It's always going to pay off. No questions asked. I know my dad kind of had this perspective growing up and my brother and I went to the same college and it was like look I know you guys are frustrated with going there but it's just going to pay off because that's the way the world works. What do you think about that? It's overstated but basically true. So what I say in the book is that the main problem for college paying off is just whether or not you'll finish. So and here's the thing is that finishing is quite predictable. The best predictor of future performance is past performance. So if you did poorly in high school then you're probably not going to be able to finish college and in that case I say it's not a good investment. On the other hand though if you are someone with a high probability finishing then even after making a lot of different adjustments that make sense to make still looks like you're getting a quite nice finished return. Now it's not true that there's no other way to be successful in the United States. That's crazy. If you go and look at the whole distribution of earnings you'll see people who are very successful with high school degrees or even dropouts. It's just that it's a lot less likely and furthermore it does seem to be partly causal. That's important. I see partly but so it does seem that on average if you go to college and finish this will actually cause you to have higher earnings on average although again your mileage may vary and yes and you can go and find exceptions and the exceptions are not phenomenally rare but still if you're just trying to gamble sensibly then I would advise people that are likely to finish college to do it unless they got some great other idea. So why is that the case? Because I think back on my college education and the conversations I've had with people who are not too impressed with their education and we didn't really learn very much in my case I have a B in political science and I like to say 90% of what I learned was just garbage anyway. However it did help me get my first job. Of course. As frustrating as that is so what's going on here? Why is it on the one hand it seems to be that what you learn in college in many cases is not really applicable to the real world and people forget it a lot of times and yet it seems like going and getting your degree still has some kind of financial benefit to it. Yeah so it's the great contrast between the limited learning and the large earning that you're getting and this is really the heart of the book. So there's something called the signaling model of education and it says that one reason why education pays is that you are impressing employers you're jumping through hoops you get certification you get stamps in your forehead and this is impressive. Of course there's also the simpler story that you go to school that you go to school and they pour skill into you and again I don't I certainly don't deny that you got literacy numeracy you you learn that in school use that in the job but what about all the other stuff right that 90% that you're talking about and that's where I bring in the signaling story and say a lot of what's going on in school is just that you are being you're convincing employers of your worthiness for job training right it's true you have it actually acquired much in way skills but you say hey look at me I finished my political science like all right I'll give you a chance kid right whereas if you had dropped out right before the last final exam then you then you probably would just be having your application thrown in the trash. Now when you say that there's a lot of people who are going to get their feathers ruffled and they're going to say no no no no no that's very that's very crude you're taking all the beauty out of the educational system by saying it's not about the skills that you learn it's not about preparing you in a practical way it's just putting a stamp on your forehead you got to back that up I mean like the the idea at least I was certainly taught this and I'm sure a lot of people were is like it's all about becoming enlightened like you go into the school kind of a savage and you encounter all these ideas and the professors and the situation it enlightens you and then you're just like more productive because of it like a better employee because of it right that mean there's so many different things you can be talking about there but let's just you know like just to start there's well when are you going to use the actual course material in real life and that by that test then people usually like yeah well yeah probably never every now and then someone will give a bizarre story about how well once in my whole life I used something that I learned in a political science class and so that means the whole process worthwhile right and you know so like in the book I actually tell this anecdote there's a guy who said look it turned out it was really useful for me to learn French in high school like oh it was he says yeah because once I was at Charles de Gaulle airports and there was an announcement that my flight was moved to a different gate or something like that and and if I didn't speak French I would have missed that and I would have missed my flight like so it was worth spending three or four years studying French in high school to avoid missing one flight decades later that sounds like a great deal to me come on right so that's where I go and when I compare this these arguments to the show horrors you know we're the only the other show reality show about people who have like giant stacks of phone books and they're like filling their house and again if you go and ask people like well why can't we just throw it out the standard answer of these people is I might need it right I might need it and it's like well strictly speaking I guess that's true there is a chance you'll need your trash maybe you'll need a phone book toe to crush an intruder right and that'll be just what you needed at that very time but come on that is not a sensible reason to do to hoard phone books right and a sensible person weighs the probability and the cost before when they're doing this stuff so I'd say the same thing for course material now another story that people have is that right sure fine you're right you caught us you're not going to use political science in real life but they say you're learning how to learn you're right critical thinking skills right you know this is an interesting story it's one that teachers generally just assumed to be true but there is a whole discipline that studies this and tries to measure it's called educational psychology and what I say if you go and read them they're very pessimistic about these arguments they just don't find much evidence that is true yeah and my for my own bias and my own personal experiences in the circle of people that I keep around me the idea that students are learning critical thinking skills is totally bizarre there's not critical thinking skills from the students and I'd say there's not a lot of critical thinking skills being demonstrated from even the professors yeah it's like the idea that you're learning something from this group of people that maybe they don't even manifest the skill themselves it's completely ridiculous to me yeah I mean so since you were talking about being a devil's advocate let me play devil's advocate against myself here okay and right and you can say all right look compared to what all right you may say college students barely engage in critical thinking but you know how little critical thinking high school students engage in right and I do talk about research on this and it is true that if you give you know plausible tests of critical thinking thinking and especially the ones I like are ones where they don't tell you to do critical thinking that just give you problems and see what you do with them right well you'll see the people with more education generally get higher scores on these tests but here's the interesting thing in the research now I will break character and go back to being me is that they generally find that there's very little improvement between freshmen and senior years right so what's going on is rather that the people with better critical thinking skills more likely to be uh to advance to the next stage but it doesn't seem like they're actually being transformed in the process rather they're just using the advantages that they arrived that they had when they arrived exactly and that so how do you try to sort out that question is it the case that the people who go into college are naturally those that are going to have some greater ability versus they actually learn something there like is that how do you even approach trying to answer that well I mean what researchers usually do is they try to get a measure of how good you were when you started and then compare it to how good you are when you finished so that's so that's so that study that I was mentioning did exactly that another approach that I use is this we just go and measure the totality of what adults know and then say school could not have caused more than 100 of that okay all right and for many subjects this will give you the answer of people school teaches essentially nothing because adults know essentially nothing about the subject even subjects where people spend years studying in school so the one that I think is most shocking is for foreign languages uh so typically a typical high school student in the U.S. will do two years if you're going to college probably three years or even four years and yet if you go and and actually just ask American adults whether they learn to speak a foreign language very well under one percent say yes under one percent so you know and this is what we're talking about they spent five weeks in school on it and they and they don't didn't learn to speak it very well we're talking about years and years and yet people by their own admission their own self evaluation which of course tends to be inflated say that they just didn't learn to speak it very well and we can see very very similar things for history for civics for science if basically if you give American adults the easiest conceivable questions on these subjects I mean just just stretch your imagination what is the dumbest question I can ask about these subjects like and again I'm talking you know like a like a literal question that is that is included in one of the main surveys is does the earth go around the sun or the sun go around the earth questions like this you know like on average Americans will be able to get half of them right roughly so do you put stock in something like that and that's hard that's hard to conceive that it is actually the case that half of the people we're talking I don't know if that were generalized public 150 million people don't know that the earth goes around the sun yeah so again that's what that's one where you might think people are just hastily not answer the question but now I mean like in any of like we like like do antibiotics kill viruses another question on the science test right all right everything is radioactive that's another that's a fun one true or false false actually true everything's radioactive that makes me think though that maybe I could see an answer to those questions being answered that way is to say that people treat those things as a game as it's like a it's like satirical what if humor like ah what the heck yeah sure and if everything's radioactive whatever I'm going to go grab some coffee after this don't care yeah so again it's true that they don't care very much but that's reflects the reflective of the knowledge that they don't have right you know they don't have knowledge because they don't care I know despite and despite the fact that they remain to study this for years in almost any education program in America I know I mean to say I'm being optimistic here I'm thinking maybe they don't care about this the questionnaire yeah maybe they're like yeah they know the answer they're giving close answers for fun I'm hoping that there's yeah there's there's a few trolls but now I mean I don't think that's that's likely to be true you know like for any significant degree I'm getting it like there's you know there's a whole there's whole body research on when do people lie to researchers right and basically people lie when the question's uncomfortable and awkward but on the other hand if their pride's on the line if it's I you know you know I want to impress people people try interesting like you know like you know here's a funny thing IQ IQ tests are predictive even though there's generally no financial war for doing well on that IQ test right and you like and what's going on it's like people don't want to look stupid it's it's embarrassing I'll say like I don't like taking IQ tests because like I'll be I'll feel embarrassed if I don't do well enough it's like I'm smart right and then like no you're not oh man so don't give me the test so you also mentioned so that was the one hypothesis or the one way of testing what people learn the first one that you mentioned was you know testing it before and then after and I think about my own experience again and I'm sure there's a lot of people's experience is when I went in I got to start college young I started when I was 16 and I didn't really care that much about getting gonna A's I would say I was getting like B's and whatever it was fine I was interested in the martial arts doing other things but I had a girlfriend at the time that was a straight A student and she came to the school that I went and was getting straight A's and I thought you know what I think that's a good idea I kind of like this idea stuff a lot I think I'm gonna start getting straight A's and so I started becoming a straight A student but that's not because of the educational system so if somebody went in and saw my performance coming in and then went out so my performance coming out they would go oh look you know we we we have changed this Steve Patterson now he's a critical critical thinker he wasn't before but that's just not true at all it's a totally unrelated experience about a personal relationship that you know changed that changed my grades I mean even even in your story it seems like when you decided to become a straight A student you probably started learning more right uh I so here's what I did is I learned how to regurgitate very well so I learned how to get A's now yeah I don't exactly equate that with learning but I guess it's learning one learning one thing yeah I mean you know like I mean here's the like even even just regurgitation requires a lot of knowledge and and just being able to tell professor what he wants to hear requires a lot of knowledge okay yes you know like knowing like you know my my philosophy professor is a utilitarian so he's going to want a utilitarian answer right most people could not do that right most people could not successfully tell the teacher what he wants to hear because they're so clueless like and I'm already talking about most college students I don't think if you if you went and told the college students but like for typical ethics class before the finals and all right kids remember professor is a utilitarian so tell what he wants to hear like uh that's really helpful but my point saying that though is that if somebody were trying to try to gauge my intelligence or by you know whatever metric going into college it would look very different coming out of college but that's because I was my values changed you know right right any of you probably actually an intelligence test wouldn't say that you had gone up and hurt very much but a knowledge test would right and you know that's that's at least sort of the low bar for what education is supposed to accomplish is just to enhance your knowledge of the subject you studied one of the main results that I'm talking about is actually there's like for most subjects there's little sign even that low bar is passed again it's likely that people knew more material on the day the final exam but again like the reason why I focus on what adults know is that there's no reason for employers to pay you for what you used to know so if you want to say that education raises earnings by teaching people stuff you need to show that the knowledge is retained into adulthood and that's what we really rarely see or seeds just to a very small degree for most subjects right you've got a great analogy in the book where you say it's like the difference between a sculptor and an appraiser so the the idea is you know you've got the the Michelangelo Michelangelo is the person who's sculpting the the beautiful statue versus the person that comes afterwards and says you know puts a price sticker on it says that is a nice piece of art that's there so what is the function that you know the professors are playing are they sculpting the students or are they just appraising them yes and you know what I say so you're both but more appraising the sculpting yes you know especially if you're understanding why do people with more education make so much more money then the appraising seems much more important you realize like most of the stuff you study you'll never use again so how important could it really be now I think when you were mentioning like you know like the transformation another totally different story is just to say forget intellectual matters entirely let's focus on the socialization the discipline and so on that's being that's being instilled in school and this is where my answer is alright well compared to what compared to being locked in a closet then school is giving great socialization a discipline but that's not normally the alternative to school right the normal the normal alternative school throughout history and around the world is work and work provide socialization work provides discipline I'd say probably better socialization much better yes if you're trying to train someone to be a worker yes I I strongly agree and in fact I'm still coping with some of the habits I formed in college so I would have said prior to going to college that habits yes exactly yeah I became much lazier because I could get away with it because now I was like oh I get graded by these people who have really low standards so I can just wait until literally can wait till an hour before class flip through all the reading to I know I can say the right thing get the stamp and that's that's effective while you're in college but when you get out of the real world that's a really bad habit to have yeah I mean so what's kind of funny to me is that modern k-12 at least it tortures you and works you pretty hard right so you know like you know modern k-12 kids they are like you know like they're working a lot of hours and they're not you know that you know they're not learning much but they're still going and jumping through hoops all day every day like you know they they're like stuck in these classes where they have to deal with these tough social situations and that kind of thing but then you go to college and then it's a party right so you know like in the book I talk about other your research on how much time to student to college students today actually spend doing academic work of any kind and it's just not much anymore right so like you know in the 60s it would have been like 40 hours a week now it's down to like 27 hours a week so like a fall of a third right so and then of course your only actually school's only in session for like 30 weeks of the year so you know like you know like my general story is if high school is building up your you know your discipline and socialization then college is kind of tearing out tearing it back down again and then like you get released and you're like and you're just like a beach bum practically yeah that certainly conforms to my own personal experiences I would say and there was in fact there was a there was this story when I was going to school that college was incredibly hard and the students were overstressed and like they would make you know essentially petitions for themselves oh the poor student worker there was a class I took on meditation and relaxation and and literally I'm not exaggerating you were allowed to fall asleep in class because you were so tired from all of the difficult work that people would just zonk and and everybody got an easy a because you didn't want to add to the stress that would be too ironic so it was like oh it'll also be kind of funny you say you suck at meditation you're meditation's terrible who taught you to meditate practice homework kid okay so there's there's one part of the the signaling theory the signaling theory the signaling theory that I find really helpful for for understanding what's going on in college and I wish I knew when I was in college because it would have resulted in a lot less anger like I really did not like my undergraduate experience and it's the idea that one of the things that the professors appraise for is you might say general intelligence or something like that at least and another one is conformity yeah so that was a big one that I think is very much true that in order to make it through the system you have to have some measure of conformity and you have to be able to jump through people's hoops even when you know it's just busy work and it's utterly ridiculous it was incredibly hard for me to do because I don't have that psychological characteristic I'm the non conformist this was like pulling teeth to get through it but then I think about the workplace and I go you know it is true to say that conformity is a valuable trait from an employer standpoint like I make a difficult employee I have to be self-employed because I'm not a conformist so I think there's there's definitely something true in this idea that college weeds out the people who are more conformist kind of worker B mentality versus like the independent entrepreneurial types yeah so this is a you know a crucial part of the book because there is the question we'll find all right so people go you know get education to go and signal all this great stuff but why can't you signal it in some other way why is there such a shortage of alternatives and again if it were just a matter of signaling intelligence you could say fine give them a test takes three hours it was a matter of work ethic you could say fine like you know just make them work for a while but you could do that in lots of different environments but if you're signaling can if one of the things you're signaling is conformity and if you happen to be in a society like ours where where everyone knows you're supposed to go and get your bachelor's degree then it's very hard to come up with any alternative because when you go and say look I'm going to signal my conformity in a in a weird way in a novel original creative innovative way like there's a catch 22 that doesn't signal conformity it signals non-conformity right so there's what the way what I call locked in syndrome where once it is just standardly accepting your society that you know that ever that you're supposed to do this the person that doesn't do what they're supposed to do looks like it looks like a very bad risk and employers are nervous and again what's interesting about this is it's very sociological if you're in a country like I believe England where college lasts three years you only have to do three years and that's fine because that's the normal thing if you're in a country where it's four years then you got to do four years if you're a country where doctors have to do a bachelor's degree before medical school then you better do it too but there's other countries where you can go straight from high school to medical school and then those countries that's okay so the conformity is crucial and yeah you're right so I mean like you know people often say well like employers looking for people think outside the box and like well depends upon which position you're in first of all right you know you don't like receptionist who thinks outside the box or like an assembly line worker who thinks outside the box it's like no like that's not we're looking for it's disruptive but in any case even if you are in a more important or material role still there's a big limit to how much non-conformity you want you don't want someone who says you know what I think I should be the CEO and you should be the worker that's my new system it's like that's person is very disruptive and it's hard to get stuff done so yeah like like businesses are generally their team sports and people need to work together in order to get stuff done and you know it's frustrating if you're a non-conformist and doesn't feel very fair but you know like well there are other people in the world and there is a reason why they're doing this and like even non-conformists benefit a lot from the conformity of others because there's corn in the grocery store if like if everyone involved in the corn industry who are big non-conformists like how much corn could there possibly be it's like well there'd be a thousand different kinds of corn but maybe like one stock each or something like that because like they just wouldn't wouldn't work it into a like a nice clean system so right now I self-identify as a non-conformist also how as to how I got a PhD despite all this is because I'm a very selective non-conformist I'm someone who says well like what's the system exactly what do I have to do what can I weasel out of I'm very very strategic in that way but you know like you know honestly I don't think I'd want to hire me for a normal job right I mean maybe yeah so yeah I wouldn't want to hire me either I didn't yeah yeah yes yeah well you know I wouldn't blame me if you said you don't want to hire me I can totally I totally get that you know seeing it like I love non-conformist a lot of my best friends are non-conformists but you know the ones who are very non-conformist there's no way I would hire them right and and again striking like a lot of my favorite people you know like the super smart people very creative but who underperformed academically and they're they're fun I love them yeah and don't want don't want to hire them and and what's the the the explanation for them underperforming academically you know if somebody's a non-conformist it says that you know I'm going to class and I am not learning and everybody's a buffoon and I'm not you know the professor has no idea what he's talking about therefore I'm okay with a C like I respect that I think good for you but it's going to show up you know on the record is oh he didn't put you know because it's when you say he didn't perform well academically it's hard not to translate that as oh well he's not so intelligent or he's not so bright you know that's how deep these these traits these like associations are I feel like yeah well me and what so what I say is that education that signals this package of traits it signals a package of intelligence work ethic and conformity and if you meet someone who has two out of three and low educational achievements you usually you know usually assume and correctly I would say that the person is probably really bad in the third thing so if there's someone who's got brains and they're hard working but they dropped out of high school it's like well they must be have like some kind of horrible defiant issue a defiance issue right or again if there's someone who is you know hard working and conformists but they don't do well then it's like man this person is probably very slow because it's not like you could just go and like do the work and like the and the person has no trouble doing that but they're still failing how could that be yeah yeah so this is where I really think some of your positions and like my ideas about higher ed in particular like college education phd education are going to well I want to know what you think so if it's true that part of what the academic process is is selecting for those who are high on the conformity trait and it's the case that we assume that the academy the professors the teachers are these intellectuals who are you know doing their own independent research to try to grasp the truth seems like we have some tension there if we want like truth seekers you'd think you'd want the people that weren't high on the conformity and that's certainly I reveal my bias that was certainly my perspective it's why I'm doing what I'm doing I very much care about the truth seeking but I'm don't fit in the academy because I think I do see group think like massive group think in all of these different areas that I'm studying I don't want anything to do with it yeah so an optimist could say well don't worry about it because conformity conformity actually makes the incentive to do good work even greater because it's already a community of truth seekers so basically yeah so basically if you start off with the community of truth seekers then conformity genuinely leads to more to more truth-seeking like as everyone sits around to go oh my god there are other truth seekers here I better be a truth seeker to really really important and if you want to look at the most functional parts of academia you might even think that's true so like physics or math okay right you know so if you go into math and you've got hey I've got my new creative ideas on math it's like um yeah well we think that's ridiculous you're a silly person and because and that's where the conformity pressure is probably going to work worth the best so you remember you've got some purported alternate theorems so maybe you disagree with that very much actually I was just gonna say math and physics uh there is the extreme group think but about some really important issues which are still open for a debate yeah I mean that's one where like you know if a professional mathematician or physicist disagrees with me then like you know I you I I've seen I've seen the them strut they're strut their stuff so well compared to me that I would just consider extreme hubris on my part to disagree with them but I have to make I have to interject Mike I used to have the same perspective and I guess I am assuming that's because you've not investigated the philosophy of mathematics because there are particular claims made about the nature of infinity that I think very reasonable people can object to and when they actually hear the claims of the orthodox mathematicians they're like hang on a second yeah you really believe that's true yeah so yeah so I have read Mike humor's book uh you know approaching infinity but I'll say I mean yeah I just don't care about philosophy mathematics at all right I mean like you know like I'll only read one book about it because Mike humor wrote it but other than that you know so again I'm talking about like a mathematician says here's a problem here's how you solve it and like like for me to go and say oh no you don't like I mean to me this is like like you know I mean I can't you know there's never been a time when I disagreed with a mathematician like a professional mathematician and on something like that I mean you know I guess like one sort of like occasionally in a textbook you'll find a typo or something like that yeah it's usually not about the theorems and the proofs as much as the framing of the what is a number yeah yeah I mean to me math is is the theorems and the proofs and that other stuff is just a distraction I don't care yeah I don't know um but yeah but anyway but then you have all the other areas where the conformity does is not working very well right so you know social sciences humanities and that's one where you could imagine one where you start off with a big truth seeking ethos but I just generally don't see it I mean so like my own field of economics I think it's relatively healthy but still crummy right so you know like and it's one where I've studied enough for enough years and again there's just enough things that seem like that I was to say look it's clearly wrong and like like the evidence is just isn't really being addressed and again like that's really like you know like you know the case against education like this is going against the consensus of education economists who generally don't take signaling seriously any in the book I did try to compile all the evidence about why they're wrong right and and and there I do see the conformity the conformity is is of course the big reason why most people believe it because most people don't look at that much evidence right most researchers only study a small corner of the world and they sort of figure if someone else has done the real job of collating the evidence and I say yeah like almost no one's doing that job now that seems like a really big deal I mean if this is the area that you're studying and you've done a massive compilation of research and you see how myopic other researchers are is that not a a dire critique really of the system from the purely you know romantic perspective that you know academia should be about truth seeking and that type of thing yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah I mean it's it's quite damning you know like I would also say that you can do the compared to what argument and say like who's actually doing better work on the correlation between education and ideology is like hmm I guess nobody nobody uh yeah so when you get into the book I rely very heavily on academic research and you know my general approach is like the narrower and more boring the question is the more trustworthy the research gets right so you know like if it's like you know like what's the correlation between like education and marital status or something like that you know you read the work and this is to me this is very little sign of anything other than of anything other than truth seeking you might just say there's sort of like laziness or myopia but again if the question is very narrow the myopia is not a problem just like you know like you know like when I'm holding up like like you know this book right to my eyes all right well it doesn't matter that I'm myopic because I'm looking at something close by so it's it doesn't screw me up but yeah on like bigger questions anything where there's a big political slant and you know anything where people want a certain answer anything where there's just sort of receive wisdom you know again like then like in for social sciences humanities this is where I'd say the system is very disappointing again like like are there areas where people that are that are non-experts are actually better than experts I think that there are ones where the ideology becomes so overwhelming so I mean like like you like this is probably less true today than it used to be but you know like just on an issue like gender differences this is one where there's so much ideology saying that it can't that there can't be big biological gender differences yet common sense says there are right and this is stuff where I just think the common sense is right and the researchers are just so desperate to not find that result in many cases again I think things have improved quite a bit so like you know and common sense is getting is you know is you know like you know it's getting more more of its voice heard and of course as you might expect when people start doing real scholarship on it they'll find wow common sense does look right yeah go figure women are different wow or you know or or another one that's it's going to be a big deal for me coming up so you know you're so me like the well you know so the project after the one after the next one is a book on poverty and this is one where again there's sort of there's like an there's like an elite view that poverty is just caused by external circumstances and then there's a common sense view of it's a lot of it's caused by bad behavior and you know and again this is one where I think that the bad behavior story is greatly underrated yep right and but at the same time I'll say if you go and and read academic research carefully a lot of times there's someone who produces a ton of evidence which supports the common sense view but then sort of at the end of the last chapter they they will say now of course this all confirms that social forces are very important and it's like hmm I mean that sounds like what you like you could have written that regardless of the last chapter would have been the same regardless of what you found when you actually looked at the world so I'm going to be very I'm very pleased by all the stuff that you did when you were actually looking at the world but now when you go and tell me what to think about your results that's where I'm going to discount your view a lot because you seem like it seems like there's it's so important to you to get a different answer right and I wonder if that's reflective of their own personal beliefs or if it's the reflective of the kind of institutional bias that maybe they're not maybe going to cause some more ruffling of feathers if they actually follow their conclusions to their logical end yeah so like both things are going on I think ultimately most people are conformist and so you don't need like people there's not that many people who are deliberately toning things down to avoid getting people upset at them I think there's just a lot more people who just drunk the Kool-Aid and they they genuinely believe it but but you know sometimes when you talk to people after after I've talked to researchers off the record they will go and say things and they'll say you know say well why do you say that in the book you're like well yeah I didn't say the book because I didn't want everyone to yell at me yeah well you know although there's other people who will say like you talked to them and you understand I'm surprised you did say it they'll say well I just tried to be very diplomatic about it not do not to use words that would upset people and you know and by the way of course they like so I think it's very important to be self-referential about these arguments you're making Steve so like honestly like you know so I have a lot of ideological views and I am self aware of this and I don't want to be a crummy person who just goes and force feeds the world into my ideology machine and comes out with it comes out with a certain answer for sure so so I do try to have a lot you know I have a lot of safeguards that I put in which again like ultimately like you might say still don't work and like if someone read the book and say this still seems like a big a big ideological work I would say well maybe I should try harder but I mean if I could just talk a little bit about you know some of the things that I did in order to yeah to try to try to try to try to self-police for sure so I mean so like one thing is like for every topic you know like I would just like go to Google scholar industry or try to try to look through the like you know the top 200 hits on each topic topic by topic so try to break it into small topics where and then and then when you're thinking about the topic don't try I like consciously say don't try to go and figure out like reason backwards what's the answer I want to make my book right to make it up for my book instead just each case is going read a big pile of stuff and say well on topic number 173 what do people what do people who have looked who have looked carefully the numbers think about it and and then I just try to assemble the book you know by snapping together all of these sub exercises all the sub researcher or a sub research research research pieces of research rather than just trying to reason backwards what is it that I want to find so yeah yeah like when I'm doing like this learning how to learn thing I mean okay on some level I know right well I kind of need the answer to be that there's not very much but at least do my best to put that aside and just say all right but forget that and certainly don't go and search for people that agree with that conclusion instead search search on the topic so search on the topic and try to do that so that's one big thing that I do so and you know another thing is that you like each time bill right before I write a section I reread everything that I've read and then also try to read a bunch of other things at the very last minute and then as I write the section I try to have the stack of directly relevant papers right there when I write it's all right and so that's that's that's another check so basically at the time that I'm writing any given page of the book that is where I will I will know more about the topic at that on that day than I ever will than I ever have before and ever will again right so so that's that's something else that I'm doing and then the other the last thing that I do is like so when I had a good draft I actually had my my RA get the email addresses of every living person that I cite right or at least try sometimes there's people that you just can't find but I think he was able to find maybe 80% of the email addresses of people who are alive sometimes actually email them and turns out they're dead but I bet you got that basically email every single person that I can find that I cite and and say look I cite you know like you know this is my book I cite your work I'd be happy to give you the entire book to read or I could just go and tell you what sections where I cite your work and then you tell me whether I've accurately summarized your work and I really did do this and I think so I'd say probably about 15% 15% of the people that I email go and write me back and and then you know and like whatever they have an issue with how I'm summarizing their work or anything or anything else you know I try to take that account of course if it's just general comments I try to take that into account but I kind of expect people to disagree with with a general perspective but what I really take seriously is a researcher who says you have you have misstated my conclusion right now that hardly ever happened right but but again that you know like and especially if you're being interdisciplinary as I am so I mean this book is not just about economic based upon economic research it's based upon you know sociology based psychology you know education you know the field of education so I try to go and overcome the problem of the autodidact that there's stuff that is known but not written down in other fields by going and approaching people as much as I can right now again I'm aware there's a bunch of problems with this probably people who like me are more likely to write back and I'm aware of that but you know I tried I really did so so that last section is interesting you mean to say that you sought out some type of peer review that wasn't the formal peer review system you personally I bring that I say that facetiously because when I wrote my first book on philosophy I got a bunch of flack from academics who said oh this is not officially peer review there's no way it could be high quality and I said no no there are people there are philosophers who I very much respect who I did personally correspond with for the same reasons that you did and I got I value their feedback and I incorporated into the book so I think that's a much way stronger process of peer review than the actual you know the formalized one yeah I mean you like so your thing is harder for an external reader to verify that it really happened right and they're also concerned that you're only talking to people who agree with you right um but you know so you know like like um you like honestly like like like you know listening to what you said what I would do is drop the philosophers I respect thing and just send it to a ton of people here's the thing though you say that they won't they won't read it well they won't read it but even if they do um to be honest I'm so deeply unimpressed by the state of modern philosophy and modern thinkers in general that uh it's presumptuous but most likely it's going to be terrible feedback it's going to be criticisms of me as a person it's going to be not understanding the topic that I'm talking about like um so I had a I had a a professor review the book and it was a it was a nightmare and revealed that there was an incredible myopia even in somebody reviewing the book talking about logic and like the different the different laws of logic difference between propositional logic and other things where it was like criticisms of my work that are just factually wrong and if the individual was more aware of their own field those criticisms would have been made so I have I have such low respect for in general your average phd that I really don't care that much about their feedback because I just see over and over they don't really know what they're talking about yeah I know that sounds there again but yeah you know I mean like I mean I feel the same way but a lot of time is but I humble myself and do it anyway you know so like honestly like you know like you know like like you like you know like if you know like if I were actually criticizing someone in print I like I like it again like you know like you know especially if it's you know for a book or something like that like even when I think that they're an idiot or they're crazy like I try to I go out of my way to go and send it to them and say like well what do you say about this just and again just you know like the natural human tendency is arrogance yeah I know this because I there isn't a time in my life when people didn't call me arrogant from the earliest age I you know like you like you like you like and so on the one you know like I don't think my personality is likely to change but you still like you know like like if you really want to seek the truth you've got to go and say yeah well I am arrogant and and like of course that inclines me to think I'm right regardless so let me go and try to go and do a bunch of checks which my own personality tells me are totally unnecessary yeah and that's what makes me nervous and makes me want to do it and I think I need to do it anyway and I and like you know it's bitter for me like like the way that I read feedback generally is when I receive it I don't even read it at first I just print it and put it in a stack yeah and then I go and read it all on like two or three terrible days of my life when I just go and read this stuff and like oh man like they're like they don't like this they don't like that I mean so partly it's just I mean it's just you know like I need to get in a state of mind where I'm ready to be criticized but also I think that it's very helpful to go and read a bunch of criticism at once and then you can go and compare see is it are there patterns or like you know a bunch of people say I'm wrong about something or just this person with a different complaint yeah for sure I mean criticism is massively important and I I don't you know I don't respect the people I respect because they agree with me I respect because I think they actually know what they're talking about and I deeply value criticism but I think what in this just in that short exchange I think that's the difference between a little bit more conformity and non-conformity because truly deep down I do not respect the actual understanding of the people who are supposed to be knowledgeable and at least my areas of philosophy and the things that I talk about and so the the analogy for me is imagine I'm writing about you know some topic in ethics or whatever and I get a whole bunch of theologians and pastors from the local area who say Steve you know we've looked at what you've said and we have these criticisms and it's like okay I hear you I hear your words but I've also very familiar with these ideas of the what the pastors the pastor criticism I grew up in that and I just don't think it's very good I think all of them like systemically yeah they're not good so so maybe there's going to be a few pastors that I think I respect and we'll listen to the rest of them really I don't find their commentary sophisticated yeah so you know I find that was helpful is like narrowing the question down so you know like you know I wouldn't say I would you know like you know Luther and pastor if I wouldn't take as well like put my stock in his answer the question was Luther good right but on the other hand it's like you know if the question were narrow down to like you know like what were the main disagreements between Luther and his wife on theology right if you've got down to a question like that narrow or you know or like you were like what was the topic of this debate that Luther had with some other you know with you know like something you know some bishop on a certain day again like you know as you get it narrower and narrower more and more on myopic that's where I just trust people more yeah sometimes you'll just find that someone is a purported expert but they don't seem to know any specific facts and then you're like my god this is terrible yeah and that was one of the realizations I had when I was in college and I knew a fraction like I didn't have a decade of independent research that I've been doing that I would there was one economist on campus who I spoke with who I somehow in my year and a half or two when I was there of researching economics at the time I knew more than he did I was aware of more theories than he did like he had heard of the Austrian school of economics but he was like oh yes that if I were in Austria and I wouldn't have a job oh and then we talked about some of the ideas and he was like totally clueless I'm thinking if it's the case that me I know more than the professor how is that possible this guy clearly cannot know what he's talking about because I don't know what I'm talking about but I know more than he does so I've had that that type of realization and it's not just in economics it's a lot of areas it's like if you demonstrate that you know less than I do there is no possible way that you can know what you're talking about because I don't well unless you there's some areas he knows more than you do in some areas where you know more than he does of course which yeah so oh yeah so I don't think it's a blanket statement yeah yeah yeah so you know so well which is all you know very likely true you know there's there are a lot of professors that I talked to where they have giant blind spots and yet I still value talking to them because in the area where they where they were they actually specialized they know their stuff sure and you know I can I can think of them as a weak thinker overall just because they're like they're so narrow but you know like like honestly like just in terms of the learning in general you could either focus on what people don't know or what they do know find a lot I get a lot more out of people if I say well like what what is this guy good at if anything and you know like yeah it's like there are some people who are just who just suck across the board but you know there's like there's not that many who are that bad you know so you know like it's like it's more of a matter of well what is what is your thing okay that's your thing okay so I figure that you would know a lot about world history as a historian but you just don't and you don't even pretend to so or what you know about is the history of Albania all right well that's interesting let's talk about Albania then so this is a great segue then for the feedback that you have received so far I guess I have two questions one how far outside the mainstream are you with the conclusions in the book like you said signaling theory is not very popular but it seems so clearly correct it's so airtight right I don't know how much outside the mainstream is and two what's the feedback you've actually received specifically on the book from your your fellow academics right so there's a few different mainstream to think about so there's mainstream like educational labor economics and there I think that I am way outside so let me know like in terms of how important I think signal educational signaling is compared to like the whole distribution I think of at least the 90th percentile of maybe the 95th or even the 99th now there was actually one survey of just economists in general not specialists but economists in general and there I don't there my views are actually not so extreme so there may be in like in the 75th or 80th percentile but now this is you know like I have all section in the book saying this is pretty nerve-wracking for me because it's the people who know the most about the subject who disagree with me the most yeah and people who have you know who are smart and generally informed but don't actually study the specific issue agree with me more so it seems like there's a a transition where you start off agreeing with me and then you learn more than you disagree with me right and then I have to say yeah but if you learn even more then you'll come back to agree with me yeah so you know like what's going on a lot of it is just that I'm much more interdisciplinary than most economists so I I mean I really take seriously evidence in psychology sociology and education not just what economists do most economists who do education just have zero interest in learning yeah all all they do is want to measure the effect of education on earnings and then call that human capital it's like well hold on maybe there's another story which now again the funny thing is you might say well how can your view really be so extreme when Michael Spence won a Nobel Prize for the signaling model of education and the answer is he won a prize for the model he didn't win a prize for any actual empirical work which he didn't do on it and again sort of like there's there's a weird situation in economics where the signaling theory has very high status some of the most prominent economists in the world have written papers on it but in the realm of actual empirical work what explains the world education the real world that's where the status is very low right and you know so we can like like that that is you know like you know it's it's it's it's a it's a conundrum for me but again I just try to face it head on and to say what's going on is that there is that there's a big double standard you know first of all there's a big double standard where the small amount of empirical research that's gone on in economics people generally if it turns out the right way then they say aha signaling is crushed and it turns out the wrong way then they say we need to do more research or there's something wrong with the data right so and I and I document a couple different cases where you can really actually see people even in print admitting well this is coming out the wrong way so why all right so there's so there's that you know then I think there's just like you know economists just have a general bias against common sense arguments and I and I think common sense is where we should always start not necessarily where we should finish but at least if we just begin by looking around and saying look you don't use most of the subjects that are taught in school in the job so what's going on right that to me is an argument that's important and not decisive but it's convincing and I think a lot of economists would just skill suddenly oh you can't say that bah bah and like no not bah serious it's a serious argument I mean I I think what you're saying is correct and I'm not surprised in the slightest that if you've done interdisciplinary work then your conclusions are I think reasonably going to air away from whatever the orthodoxy of that particular discipline is because I've seen it in my in my own research like it just that is the common thread in every area that I've studied is there's the minority school some heterodox school that's not orthodox they seem to get the fundamentals right they seem to have the right perspective and for and it synthesizes nicely with another like heterodox school there's like a whole world view I feel like that you can kind of piece together here that disagrees with all of the the orthodoxies but are actually very much internally consistent and I think have a better methodology I think the myopia that problem of is really really bad like the method I would say it's a methodological error for your colleagues the way that you've described them doing their work that's a really really bad process for trying to discover truth I mean so your approach may be good too I would describe my approach very differently I would say that I tried to beat mainstream economists with mainstream psychologists for example I don't go and try to find some heterodox psychologists and then use them to criticize economists I try to find like normal boring vanilla psychologists and say look this is just what a normal person who looks at the evidence concludes and not just want a whole lot of them you know so I still do will read the heterodox people but again like you like you like like I usually try to focus on questions narrow enough where just think like normal boring vanilla people are normally right and on the other end the like heterodox people are more cooks again you so like you have my general view is like you know heterodoxy is better as a general as a general view than as and then for any specific issue I mean like for it for any of you if I want to find out like you know what happened at the Battle of Kirkuk right this is one where I would go and find like a boring mainstream person who specialized in that area I wouldn't I wouldn't go I wouldn't go and find like who are the radical in really really innovative Kirkuk Kirkuk Kirkuk Kirkuk people you know so I like that's where I'm like hmm that sounds like it's such a narrow issue that I would just distrust someone who had who had it was like oh you gotta understand it was totally never but I mean maybe that person's right but but again like when it's that narrow that's and especially if the person has it has a big ideological ax to grind that's where I don't trust them but yeah like like if you were to if someone says like I've got a different general story of what was happening in the First World War that's where I'll say well that's it that's more interesting and that's one where it's much easier to believe that person is right because there's a whole ideology of what the story has to be yeah and and it's and it's not one where studying all the particular cases automatically lends itself to an answer it's one where it requires judgment and it requires a detachment from one society to really do well on this thing then any of them if there's sort of one like general general heterodox attitude that I really do it that I strongly approve of its detachment from one's own society yeah like if you really want to understand it forget that you're an American who lives in Virginia who's like you know who's like who's white who's male or has this background or was race Catholic or Jewish or whatever just screw all that stuff and just think yourself as a Martian right and you know and I and I do try to I do try to put this in there you know people make fun of me on Twitter for being a Martian and it's like look this is not what comes from my heart I this is a something I cultivate yeah deliberately consciously I'm trying to be like a Martian even though it hurts because this is what I think gets you to the truth no I agree and I don't think there's too much disagreement with kind of the way that I'm approaching things and you are well I guess probably in practice there it's very different but I agree that the larger the more abstract the more theoretical the more openness to heterodoxy there is especially when the other common trait I see when talking with experts like yourself is that a lot of times when you get to a certain level of knowledge in your own field there's a lot there's some tends to be a lot of distrust about the foundations have the foundations of that field actually been properly established is the methodology of economics actually properly established or in mathematics is a good one what are the actual foundations of mathematics given the overturn that happened at the turn of the 20th century like those when you get to a certain level you start seeing that those are really important and largely unsolved issues and so when you look around and see a bunch of work that's being produced given those same assumptions it all seems dubious it's like well that might be true if it's the case that these ideas were sorted out but those were never sorted out properly yeah I mean when economists talk about the foundations of economics this is where I'll just say you can safely ignore them because they don't know anything about it they never studied it they don't read anything about it they're just going and and you know using the fact that they studied a subject with that has the same word in the title you know I studied economics doesn't mean like economics and the foundations of economics are two totally different things right and you could be a great practicing economist and just have completely ignorant views about like epistemology and like and of course they generally do but you know like to me what I say is you know like well then forget what their abstract claims about what the foundations are look at what they really do right so you know I'll say you know like there's you know there's like Milton Friedman's you know like methodology positive economics which again generally most economists have never even looked at much less read but they have sort of a quick summary that they've heard and they then they'll pair it off if the if you know if things get if you have epistemology comes up but I'll say you look like you know ignore all that stuff what do you actually do as an economist and it's nothing to do like it's nothing like what Milton Friedman talked about Milton Friedman didn't do what Milton Friedman talked about that's good because if you if you follow the the epistemological recipe like you couldn't be like like your work would be terrible so like like look at what people do not what they say right and you know but you know like here's the good news people can do great work even though their general theory is terrible so for people that are interested in reading your book and reading more of your work in general where can they get a copy I'd recommend just go to amazon it's only 20 bucks so can you afford not to buy the case against education I think not certainly not well I think uh that's uh that's a great note to end the conversation on and we went a little bit over I super appreciate your time um this has been really interesting and uh hopefully I'll be back on the show thanks very much uh continue your search this sounds like a great idea all right that was my conversation with Dr. Brian Kaplan hope you guys enjoyed it now there's something special about GMU George Mason University I've been to a lot of campuses all around the world now and can't say I'm particularly impressed with uh most of them but there are definitely some bright bulbs at George Mason so credit where credits do they're doing some good work there all right that's all I've got for you today talk to you guys next week