Today is Capital Day again, a day to celebrate physical, social, and especially human capital, the added productivity from experience and training. Human capital offers an interesting case study in theory versus data. Just as most people think it obvious that
dear sirI am student and i have a request.I want new BARRO & LEE statistic about HUMAN CAPITAL or every statistics that you think i can use it.please send them for me.sencerely yours
Hal, yes, it requires expertize in statistics to evaluate claims of statistical analyzes. Prediction markets might cut through this cloud, at least to some extent.
Seems like this debate like many others boils down to a rather arcane dispute over the use of statistics. The questions of what variables should be dependent or independent, which should be controlled in regression analysis, and so on are technical and important but relatively opaque to those who have not mastered these tools.
Last week the TierneyLab NY Times blog wrote about a paradoxical result where the more lay people viewed themselves as informed about global warming, the less concerned they felt on the issue. Reading the paper linked from the blog revealed that this was not the only paradoxical result. Contrary to previous findings in the literature, the study found greater levels of global warming concern among white males versus females and minorities. And even more surprisingly, they found greater levels of concern among Republicans than among Democrats!
The answer seemed to be a control variable introduced in the analysis tied to "ecological values". Controlling for this element gives you backwards results for many other variables that would be correlated with that attribute. This can seemingly explain most or all of the surprising results from the analysis.
Is this a valid technique? Or bad use of statistics? I can't say but it does illustrate how important it is to understand the details of how things are being analyzed in order to put the results into perspective. And it further illustrates how opaque and esoteric these matters become, especially problematic for issues that impact on the larger world of politics and policy.
More education spending means more taxes and maybe less spending on physical capital. In a diminishing returns case should we not all agree that at some point spending on education would have a negative effect on economic growth? So then the argument is about at what point we go negative not if we ever go negative.
If you look at individuals, I am convinced that some students would be much better off if the money spent to school them was instead spent on physical capital that was then given to them. A poor student with 12 years of schooling will generally do less well that a poor student with 3 years of schooling and his own bulldozer and trailer to carry it to jobs.
Most children, with individual instruction, can be taught to read, write and do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in a very short period of time. So the returns on further instruction may start to decline rapidly a very low level of instruction.
If human brains take up information at a fixed pace is it not possible that the useless information that we learn in school in order to make the grade squeezes out some other learning that might be more valuable in our lives? Rather than trying to teach children more maybe we should try to teach them more useful things.
Education, skills and knowledge seem to me to be very valuable in general but schooling is only valuable to the individuals who do better than average and to a certain extent to employers for grading people. IMO schooling is more about testing than teaching. If one looks at school objectively it seems that one would come to this conclusion. School helps with some useful skills like reading and arithmetic but it teaches very little information that will be useful to the students in life. Students would seem to better of watching myth busters than in a class.
Richard Vedder has found that the statistics by state shows that those states that increase education spending faster have slower economic growth than similar states that increase education spending slower.
The un-schoolers are matching schools with minimal instruction and input.
It seems that if a child does not want to learn and if his parents do care if he learns or not, the child will not learn in school or out of school.
Alex could be talking about many things. For example, he might be saying that liberalizing the Cuban economy would benefit only the wealthiest Cubans while leaving the vast majority of Cubans at the current level of poverty. Something like that.
Alex, I've never heard a politician say that, though I agree there is little clear data to support it. I comment on what I notice, and I haven't seen much on that subject.
Robin, are you ever going to do a post that goes something like "Politicians frequently suggest that letting rich people get even richer is a small price to pay for higher economic growth; however, there has usually been very little data to support this. In fact, here's a study that suggests the opposite"?
It's always "If you torture the data enough, NO HEALTH INSURANCE FOR YOU!!" or (like this one) "Here's some data that disagrees with me; perhaps I'll decide it's no good? That'll do it!"
dear sirI am student and i have a request.I want new BARRO & LEE statistic about HUMAN CAPITAL or every statistics that you think i can use it.please send them for me.sencerely yours
Hal, yes, it requires expertize in statistics to evaluate claims of statistical analyzes. Prediction markets might cut through this cloud, at least to some extent.
Seems like this debate like many others boils down to a rather arcane dispute over the use of statistics. The questions of what variables should be dependent or independent, which should be controlled in regression analysis, and so on are technical and important but relatively opaque to those who have not mastered these tools.
Last week the TierneyLab NY Times blog wrote about a paradoxical result where the more lay people viewed themselves as informed about global warming, the less concerned they felt on the issue. Reading the paper linked from the blog revealed that this was not the only paradoxical result. Contrary to previous findings in the literature, the study found greater levels of global warming concern among white males versus females and minorities. And even more surprisingly, they found greater levels of concern among Republicans than among Democrats!
The answer seemed to be a control variable introduced in the analysis tied to "ecological values". Controlling for this element gives you backwards results for many other variables that would be correlated with that attribute. This can seemingly explain most or all of the surprising results from the analysis.
Is this a valid technique? Or bad use of statistics? I can't say but it does illustrate how important it is to understand the details of how things are being analyzed in order to put the results into perspective. And it further illustrates how opaque and esoteric these matters become, especially problematic for issues that impact on the larger world of politics and policy.
TGGP, that isn't in my plans.
Floccina, your views are plausible, but so are opposite views. We need clearer data to distinguish them.
More education spending means more taxes and maybe less spending on physical capital. In a diminishing returns case should we not all agree that at some point spending on education would have a negative effect on economic growth? So then the argument is about at what point we go negative not if we ever go negative.
If you look at individuals, I am convinced that some students would be much better off if the money spent to school them was instead spent on physical capital that was then given to them. A poor student with 12 years of schooling will generally do less well that a poor student with 3 years of schooling and his own bulldozer and trailer to carry it to jobs.
Most children, with individual instruction, can be taught to read, write and do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in a very short period of time. So the returns on further instruction may start to decline rapidly a very low level of instruction.
If human brains take up information at a fixed pace is it not possible that the useless information that we learn in school in order to make the grade squeezes out some other learning that might be more valuable in our lives? Rather than trying to teach children more maybe we should try to teach them more useful things.
A few points:
Education, skills and knowledge seem to me to be very valuable in general but schooling is only valuable to the individuals who do better than average and to a certain extent to employers for grading people. IMO schooling is more about testing than teaching. If one looks at school objectively it seems that one would come to this conclusion. School helps with some useful skills like reading and arithmetic but it teaches very little information that will be useful to the students in life. Students would seem to better of watching myth busters than in a class.
Richard Vedder has found that the statistics by state shows that those states that increase education spending faster have slower economic growth than similar states that increase education spending slower.
The un-schoolers are matching schools with minimal instruction and input.
It seems that if a child does not want to learn and if his parents do care if he learns or not, the child will not learn in school or out of school.
"If you torture the data enough, NO HEALTH INSURANCE FOR YOU!!"
Thank you! That was the funniest thing I've read on a blog in months.
Robin, are you going to do regressions with more controls?
Alex could be talking about many things. For example, he might be saying that liberalizing the Cuban economy would benefit only the wealthiest Cubans while leaving the vast majority of Cubans at the current level of poverty. Something like that.
Alex, is the trickle down economy model, what you are talking about?
Alex, I've never heard a politician say that, though I agree there is little clear data to support it. I comment on what I notice, and I haven't seen much on that subject.
Robin, are you ever going to do a post that goes something like "Politicians frequently suggest that letting rich people get even richer is a small price to pay for higher economic growth; however, there has usually been very little data to support this. In fact, here's a study that suggests the opposite"?
It's always "If you torture the data enough, NO HEALTH INSURANCE FOR YOU!!" or (like this one) "Here's some data that disagrees with me; perhaps I'll decide it's no good? That'll do it!"