David Brooks says
I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school. The influences that lead so many to do so are much deeper and more complicated than anything that can be grasped in an economic model or populist slogan.
I don’t pretend to include all influences, but when I was but a wee pup I tried to build a model that captured what David is talking about and show that it does make sense to drop out of high school when lots of factory jobs are lost.
The response I got was universally: cute but no cigar.
I’ll link to my old paper here.
There is a lot of throat clearing at the beginning, but if you care about Brook’s point specifically then jump to page 18.
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Tuesday ~ February 14th, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Becky Hargrove
Local community is everything, in terms of potential wealth links from education. Anyone who has a sentimental commitment to a specific place that has no viable way to honor education is socially disadvantaged, if they love knowledge. My father was a prime example of that, and like him I continued education for the love of learning itself.
Tuesday ~ February 14th, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Michelle
Absolutely. And one of the best ways to concentrate wealth is through social stratification, which obfuscates information between groups and provides less competition for existing honeypots.
Even better, you can blame the losers at this game by pretending that they made their decisions by using the same information that the winners had access to, yet deliberately choosing the losing position through some moral failing.
Tuesday ~ February 14th, 2012 at 6:00 pm
Becky Hargrove
Michelle,
We have our own familial examples. A few days ago, Karl wondered why I wanted to enlist economists in the work that the layperson could be doing. Indeed, why can we not be our own sources of knowledge? Thirty years ago I supplied healthy examples of food for my mother, ten years ago I sent her herbs that could help her. She did not pay much attention to either assistance, either time. But today she looks for those foods and herbs because Dr. Oz is talking about them on television.
Tuesday ~ February 14th, 2012 at 8:32 pm
Michelle
I didn’t see that post, but it appears to me that Karl overestimates the desire most laymen have to pursue economic theory as a hobby.
And while an easy way out for us would be to judge this lack of desire as a moral failing of the laymen in question, it could just as easily be theorized that they simply prefer, based on the information available to them and their own analysis of the situation, to spend their allotted (and precious) resource of time on other things.
Tuesday ~ February 14th, 2012 at 3:29 pm
RickR
As I understand what you are saying, when a lot of factory jobs are lost, the apparent value of pursuing further education locally decreases ) by reducing the apparent value of that education (further education won’t help me get a good job). Since the local information indicates a low benefit to further education, it is locally rational to forgo that further education.
But this local information can be mistaken. You appear to be talking about local rationality based on inadequate or misleading local data, while Brooks is talking about more global rationality based on more accurate global data. Thus even if you are right Brooks is not wrong, since the apparent disagreement seems to be a disagreement between two different definitions of “rational”, or “makes sense”.
Wednesday ~ February 15th, 2012 at 1:40 am
Al
Aren’t standardized tests a solution to the problem of incomplete information?