ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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What about the recent Martorell and Clark paper on the signaling value of a high school diploma?
http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/557.pdf
Their regression discontinuity estimates (based on last-chance standardized tests) suggest that there is no effect of receiving a diploma conditional on academic skills. Wouldn't the signaling explanation predict a huge effect here? How do you reconcile this with your views?
Has anybody conducted surveys asking bottom 50% grads from bottom 50% colleges whether knowledge learned in college has been useful at their ensuing line of work?
I think the median student fully accepts the signaling explanation of education, they just call it something else.
Yeah I was confused by Tyler's claim too, Bryan. But are you really saying he is that completely off-base, or did he mean that the private-returns-to-education literature accounted for the signaling effect?
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Funny how Bryan's rhetoric here is the opposite of his views on parenting or immigration.
Here he has a strong prior on signaling and says since it hasn't been clearly tested, he sticks by his theoretical intuition.
In contrast, on parenting, he dismisses the objections of others that their specific views of parenting haven't been fully tested (see his concession on untested Asian parenting or on other matters relating to how peer effects are important which is a clue to how parenting might work) and says that the default should be with the literature saying parenting doesn't matter.
On immigration, he dismisses the literature showing the low quality of hispanic immigrants and their lack of convergence to American bourgeois norms on education and income. He dismisses his own work on the irrationality of voters and how low quality immigrants might skew politics, and he disses Americans' preferences for controlling borders on moral grounds. He also won't deal with the problem of welfare exploitation by saying he's against welfare anyway. Concerns about the future -- given current political realities -- are just batted away.
I guess you're only free to dismiss the literature if your priors are just like Caplan's.