Marian Tupy: Hello and welcome to Human Progress Podcast. Today I’m speaking with professor of economics at George Mason University, Bryan Caplan He’s also a best selling authority and he writes his blog on substack at betonit.ai. Brian, welcome.
Bryan Caplan: Fantastic to be here. Marian.
Marian Tupy: Well, I appreciate your time. I recently came across one of your blog posts posted about two weeks ago called Educational Austerity and Progress Studies. And in it you were talking about the connection between economic growth, economic development and education, or lack of it. So I thought maybe we could have a quick conversation about that. But before we start, maybe I could ask you a broader question. What is economic growth? Why is it important? And where does it come from?
Bryan Caplan: Economic growth is the rate of change of GDP or some other measure of economic well being. So, that’s the… So let’s see, the first question was, what is economic growth? Yeah. So just the change in economic well being. Usually we do it with GDP. And then the next question was, what?
Marian Tupy: Where does it come from and why is it important?
Bryan Caplan: All right. Yeah. So the next question, where does it come from? There are a lot of stories that people tell. So traditionally people said, well, it comes from capital accumulation. There’s also an idea, well, it comes from getting better quality labor. But the usual view is that when you really go to the numbers, neither of these things can really explain anywhere close to the full change. And so most of it has got to be from technological progress, broadly defined. So that is in fact the main difference between the world of today and the world of 2000 years ago. It’s not that we’ve got more machines or even better labor, but rather that we have figured out how to combine those ingredients into this incredible array of stuff that we’ve got, this cornucopia that we’ve got down at the store or on Amazon.
Marian Tupy: In fact, in your piece, you say you distill it to a single word, which is ideas.
Bryan Caplan: Yes, that’s right. And then your last question was?
Marian Tupy: Why is it important?
Bryan Caplan: Why is it important? Yes. So here’s the answer. In any given year, it seems like getting another 1% growth couldn’t make much difference. You could barely even notice it. And yet, as many people have pointed out, when you compound an extra percentage point of growth per year over the course of 100 years, it’s the difference between poverty and riches. And if you say, I don’t really care about riches, the key thing is that riches allow you to buy everything. Riches are what allows you to buy free time. Riches are what allows you to buy culture. Riches are what allow you to save your child from worms. So when someone says, I don’t care about riches, really, they are in a way saying, I don’t care about human well being at all. Because we use that to get everything that we’re looking for, really.
Marian Tupy: Right. So to summarize, economic growth is an increase in wealth. It comes from new ideas, new technologies, and ultimately it is highly correlated with things that we like in life including better infrastructure, better hospitals, and so on and so forth.
Marian Tupy: Absolutely.
Marian Tupy: So the second question is, I guess going to the nub of the matter, what is the purported or supposed relationship between education and growth?
Bryan Caplan: The normal view is that education is the crucial determinant of growth. Education is what goes and turns unskilled humans in kindergarten into the skilled workers of the modern economy. This is an idea that you’ll get not just from politicians and teachers and parents in the general public, but it’s also crucially, one that is standardly taught to economic students. If you take a class in intro economics or intermediate or macro or education or labor, they will constantly talk about how it’s really important to have lots of education, because education is the way that we build human capital.
Marian Tupy: And so, so the steps are here, education, human capital, new ideas, more growth, more good things in life.
Bryan Caplan: That’s one of the versions. I think the more common one is actually just education leads to human capital, which immediately leads to better workers who then use existing technology. The idea that you mentioned where the high education workers then come up with new ideas, I think most people realize that’s only happening at the tails anyway. So that’s not what they would say is what’s happening for the typical college grad. The typical college grad isn’t going to invent anything or cure anything, but they’re still capable of being a valuable cog in the machine. The machine which is built in the mind’s eye of someone who is a true deep innovator.
Marian Tupy: Right, right. So the standard definition is slightly different. Which is to say if you have a highly educated workforce, they can work with more sophisticated machinery and things.
Bryan Caplan: Yes, right. I mean, the idea is that you don’t need to be able to invent a new idea to be able to use it, but you do need to have a lot of human capital. You don’t need to have developed a new cure from cancer to apply that cure from cancer, but you do need to be highly skilled. You can’t just go to someone who’s illiterate and enumerate and say, okay, now let me show you how you cure cancer.
Marian Tupy: Fair enough. So that’s the inference. What does the evidence actually show?
Bryan Caplan: Here’s the funny thing. So I have a book called The Case Against Education. And I’m not going to be coy about this. I expected to find that education was overrated. I had a lot of reasons for thinking that. But I definitely believe that a lot of other people research this would be saying that they had clear evidence that education raised economic growth. What surprised me was that I read all the mainstream work on this and they were struggling. And there was a big debate about like, how come we’re not finding what we know to be true, which is that education is the crucial cause of economic growth. My reaction is maybe you’re finding the truth. Maybe you’re actually discovering what I have suspected for a lot of other reasons, which is that most of what you learn in school is irrelevant in the real world. And the main reason why education pays the labor market isn’t that it’s a factory for building human capital, rather it’s a certification machine for stamping people. Good worker, great worker, not so great worker. The slogan that I came up with after the book came out is people like to think about education as being a way of building skill, but actually it is the… But actually it’s more like a passport to the real training which happens on the job.
Marian Tupy: Right, so this is sort of a distillation of your signaling model.
Bryan Caplan: Right. Well, I mean, a little arrogant to call it my model because people came up with this stuff around the time I was in kindergarten and got Nobel prizes for it. But say my innovation was I… And the economist who was taking it most seriously and defended it as the largely true model, whereas the theorists have mostly put it out and said, isn’t it interesting that this could be so theoretically?
Marian Tupy: Right. So you are, by going to university, spending all that time there, spending a lot of money, you’re basically achieving two things. You are offering to your employer a sign that you are intelligent enough to go through a first rate or second rate university, and secondly, that you’re conscientious enough to do so.
Bryan Caplan: I mean, what I say in the book is you’re showing intelligence, you’re showing conscientiousness, and you’re also showing sheer conformity, just sheer willingness to bow down before society and say, yes, I accept things as they are. And you may say, well, why do people want that? Well, there’s no I in team. Most jobs require you to follow a chain of command in order to actually achieve the goal of the group. So while on some level I don’t like this conformity, but on a deeper level I got to say, yeah, for most purposes it’s really important that people are team players.
Marian Tupy: So in a world which is dominated by reason, efficiency, and we don’t have to pretend about things, would you go as far as to, say, give kids an IQ test and maybe a personality test at five and based on that, identify among them the kids who are going to be the stars, innovators or intellectuals and things like that?
Bryan Caplan: That’s an interesting point. I would say that personality tests, though, they’re a lot better than most economists think. They’re not that good. And any case, the other thing is that when kids are five, it’s not like they’ve got some really productive job they could be doing anyway. So I’d say that the opportunity cost of having kids be in school during those ages is real low. They’re going to be getting daycare one way or the other. I think that we do spend too much time just boring them to death with stuff that they don’t really need to know. But I would probably put it at a somewhat later age, you know, probably somewhere around the age of 12 is where I’d say…
Marian Tupy: Well, to me that was still kids. To me that was still kids. Yeah.
Bryan Caplan: Yes, yes. 5 and 12, though are really different actually. So 12, you know, 12 is, I mean, the IQ part actually is very reliable even at a young age. Fives may be a little bit young, but probably seven. The conscientiousness is one where I think it’s better to wait a bit longer to see what’s happening. But yes, something like at the age of 12, I think it is reasonable to start trying to track people. Of course, the current system does have quite a bit of tracking, but Americans really don’t like the idea of tracking for anything important too early. And I’ve honestly got to say this is really a very strange scruple. We should take a look and see how often does it happen that someone gets mistracked if you use the tracking at that early age. And I think the answer is tracking is never perfect, but it’s probably already really good by the age of 12.
Marian Tupy: And so depending on one score on IQ tests or personality tests, then you would allow the free market companies to basically bet for, for the, for superstars and create some sort of market.
Bryan Caplan: So that’s another great point. So I mean, honestly, what I say is in really free market, all of these tests would just be advisory and parents would decide what they want to do. In a way, it’s more important to have standardized testing when you’re spending taxpayer resources. And since taxpayers are paying for it, it’s normal for people to say, oh, I always want the best for my kid, and then use the standardized test to say, well, given that taxpayers are paying for this, we should try to exert some fiduciary responsibility and see that they got good value. We’re not going to go and spend really valuable resources on someone whose prospects are one in a thousand of succeeding.
Marian Tupy: Get it. Get it. So, moving on, I want to read you something that you wrote, and I would like to try to explain it in a very simple language. Contrary to conventional stories about the positive externalities of education, mainstream estimates of education’s national rate of return were consistently below estimates of education’s individual rate of return. What does it mean?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, great question. Okay, so there’s a general idea of calculating a rate of return, and it’s basically a measure of how good of an investment is any particular thing that you might try to do. So, for example, you might try to calculate what’s the rate of return of putting extra insulation on my house or putting in new windows. Right? So this is already being done for a lot of areas. Economists have a notable contribution, especially starting with Gary Becker, of saying, why don’t we do that for education too, and figure out we’ve got all these costs that we put into giving someone an education, we’ve got a bunch of payoffs, what they get out, and then how good is that number? Right. When you do this from the point of view of just an individual person, then it’s pretty common to get estimates of 10% inflation adjusted rate of return. In my book, I say this is probably too high, but you can bring it down to maybe 7 or 8%, something like that, 6%. But there’s another additional thing that you can do here. So usually we’re thinking about if you go and send a person to school for another year, how much do their earnings go up? So how much do the earnings of that student go up? But macroeconomists have said, well, we can think about this in a country too.
Bryan Caplan: So what if we send a whole country to school for an extra year? What if we raise the education of the whole workforce in a country by a year? How much does that enrich the country by? How much does the income of the country go up by? And really what that quote is saying is that even the high estimates of how much a year of education reaches a country are typically like half of what it does for an individual. And then a lot of the estimates are really rock bottom, saying send the whole country to year for an extra. Send the whole country to school for an extra year and national income rises by like 1% or 2% versus, like I said, like 6, 7, 8, 10% for an individual. So it really looks like education does a lot more for the individual student than it does for a country.
Marian Tupy: So thinking about this some more, would the trade off here, would the calculation be that it takes X trillions of dollars to take the entire country and put through another year or two of schooling, whereas all of that labor force could be employed in the economy created value?
Bryan Caplan: Well, let’s see, in principle, this could totally work. I mean, really what I’m talking about is this. We have good evidence that sending a kid to school is a reasonable way to make them richer later in life. A lot of people then want to say, it follows that a reasonable way to make a country richer is to send the whole country to school for a larger amount of time. In both cases, you’ve got some costs. Of course, the costs are a lot bigger for educating a country than educating an individual. But we also got benefits. And you would figure that the benefits of educating a country would be also be a lot bigger than the benefits of educating an individual. Rate of return is basically the ratio of benefit to cost. How much better does the whole country get compared to how much you gave up? And what the empirical work of people who are quite desperate to get a big answer for how much does education help a country normally is, is, wow, it’s actually really strangely, disappointingly small. What are we doing wrong? And really what I said is, I think, don’t think you’re doing anything wrong other than assuming you know the answer.
Marian Tupy: Based on what you said so far, it would seem that the basic problem is a confusion between education as commonly understood, and innovation or creativeness on the other side. So, meaning, just because you took a class in chemistry does not mean that you will be good at drug development. Is that a fair summary of what you argue?
Bryan Caplan: Yes, and that’s, I would say, if anything, an understatement. To have any prospect of coming up with anything useful in chemistry, you’ve got to be top of your class, not just in high school, but probably at some very top school. And you’ve got to make it into graduate school and go through all these steps. In the 19th century, there were just independent inventors, but those days really are long gone. Just the amount of investment that’s needed to be able to do this is just so incredibly high. So yeah. Now the main thing here is that you may say, well, how are you at measuring education? The answer is social scientists almost always measure it by what you and I are doing right now, sitting in chairs. The way we measure is how many years did you sit in a chair in a school building? These are what are called input based measures. Why do it that way? Well, because it’s easier. They’re looking for their keys under the streetlight because it’s brighter there. But also, of course, to really start asking serious questions about output versus input immediately puts you in conflict with the whole educational system, definitely with teachers unions, because how dare you go and start asking whether we are really succeeding in anything that we claim that we’re trying to do.
Bryan Caplan: How dare you measure output or quality? And that really is the question. What you can say that we found in the research is that the actual effect of sending a whole country to school for another year on the innovativeness of that society or the creativity of that society, or the entrepreneurialness of that society, it very well might just be zero. There’s so little connection. Maybe there is some small effect, but it’s just a lot less than people naively assume. Because people are just so quick to think that educating a country is going to have the same effect at the national level as educating the individual. Because they’re forgetting that a lot of what the individual gets out of education is the stamp. A stamp is a way for one person to get ahead in life. Stamping whole country is not a way for a country to get ahead. Because what happens when there’s more stamps in general is you get credential inflation where you just need more and more degrees in order to get the same job that your parents and grandparents got with less. Right now I’m actually looking at my older sons applying to PhD programs.
Bryan Caplan: Back when I was doing it 30 years ago, you went straight from undergraduate to graduate school. You’ve got some letters, some tests, and it just wasn’t that hard to get into top programs in those days compared to now. Now most of their competition is doing a two year pre doc before they can even apply. And then instead of the program lasting four years like it did for me, it’s lasting six years. So you’re doubling the number of years that people have to slog through and the actual change in the ability to do the job at the end. Maybe they’re a bit better, but they spend twice as many years in this graduate training process. Most of this is just… We just keep adding on further, further barriers to finally getting to the real world where you can actually get practical experience. Although, to be fair, academics really never get practical experience.
Marian Tupy: Get it. So, zooming out again, let’s talk a little bit about innovations. You know, if… If education and innovation doesn’t mean the same thing, where do new ideas come from? Are we talking about a very small group of individuals who share certain characteristics, as we discussed at the beginning of this podcast? And if so, can we identify them? And should we perhaps encourage them with funding and attention, or will they spontaneous emerge, like Elon Musk, say?
Bryan Caplan: Right. So I would say that it’s exaggerated to say that the innovation is only coming from a few people, because that’s really focusing on the biggest changes. But once you appreciate the role of innovation, and I know you do, Marian, because I’ve read your superabundance, there are a lot of improvements in life that are happening in a small scale in millions of different ways. Every time someone opens up a new kind of restaurant, that’s not the thing that we think of as revolutionary R&D. And yet so much of our improvement in living standards comes from all of these small acts of entrepreneurship which add up to a total transformation of our way of life. When I was in high school, there’s really only three kinds of restaurants. You’ve got American, you got Italian, and you got Chinese. And that’s about all that existed. Now we have this cornucopia of different kinds of cuisine. And the same goes for so many other simple, humble products where you say, well, like, dog collar is just a dog collar. And then you’re like, no, actually dog collars come in now 100 more varieties than they did back when Bryan was growing up in the ’80s.
Bryan Caplan: But for the really revolutionary stuff, so for new vaccines or for new business models or new forms of energy, things like that, that is coming from very special people. Some of it is coming from people with very strong hard science backgrounds. Although even there, I think a lot of what’s going on and a lot of the reason why we see so little effective education on economic growth is that academia sucks up a lot of the talent into impractical areas of purely academic interest. And contrary to a lot of wishful thinking, it is not true that if a professor just thinks about whatever he’s curious about, there will be inevitable technological spillovers or side effects. Most stuff that fascinates academics just is totally impractical. All the way down and never turns into anything useful ever. See a lot of high level math? Like, what do you do with it? We do more high level math. Isn’t that cool? It’s like, well, maybe for you it is, but if we didn’t have these academic jobs, you’d probably be an industry doing something that actually benefited humanity generally rather than just entertaining a special group of elites. In terms of whether we can pinpoint the superstars, it’s easy to go and say that the, the really big innovation is going to come from a small percentage of the population that we can identify, that we are capable of identifying.
Bryan Caplan: I think it’s very reasonable to say that almost all of the really big ideas are coming out of the top 1 or 2% of IQ, for example. But within that group, then it is quite a bit harder. Probably the most relevant study, actually. Never hear of the termites?
Marian Tupy: No.
Bryan Caplan: All right, so there was a psychologist named Terman who in California, and I believe the 1920s, he actually saw that there was a standardized test administered to all of the kids in the state of California school system. And then he managed to go and get data on, I think, the top 100 scores. So the top hundred kids in the whole state of California in that year. And he followed them through life. And in his honor, these kids are named the termites. And there’s been a lot of research on the termites. One of them was Shockley, who invented this. No, actually, hold on. Actually, Shockley was like number 103. He just missed being in the termites. He was real close, but the inventor of, I guess the semiconductor, if I understand the technology he was real close, but he wasn’t quite in the group, if I remember correctly. But yes, that group did have an incredible record of achievement, although a lot of them didn’t achieve much of anything. So they had many times, maybe a thousand times the normal population rate of stellar success while still having a lot of people that were not especially successful.
Bryan Caplan: Being the 1920s, vast majority of the women didn’t do anything really impressive. Right. Very different time and different circumstances. So maybe they became moms for future geniuses. But they did not do anything very notable themselves, with only a few exceptions. Anyway so I’d say that just doing these kinds of tests is a good way of identifying the most promising people in terms of what’s the best thing to do with them. Well, so there’s what you can do with them, given the current system and the current system, 90% of kids go to public schools and at minimum, just to go and have systems of tracking where you basically let them skip a bunch of stuff that they already know or could easily learn and let them advance as rapidly as they’re capable of going so that they don’t waste precious time to be very supportive of skipping ahead. Again, if there’s a kid that doesn’t feel ready to be in College when he’s 12, even though he’s a super genius, all right, fine, let him stay with his friends. But a lot of people like that feel very isolated from their own age group and it makes sense just to advance them ahead and as far as their talent will capable will take them.
Bryan Caplan: Once you’re talking about a private system, then I would say, look, the main thing is to let parents know we do have tests that are capable of identifying very special high performing kids and it is reasonable if your kid is doing well, to go and test and to find out, is it just me thinking my kid is awesome or is it really true that my kid is a superstar? And then for the benefit of that child and society, then to least have a norm of it’s fine to go and accelerate kids that are capable of doing it way beyond their usual level? I mean, also I have a personal view which is that our society is very open to the idea of the STEM prodigy, but we are very closed to the idea of there being a prodigy in say, history. And I think that there are history prodigies. I have met kids that had a deep, not just a broad, but a deep understanding of history by the time they’re 13 or 14. And the fact that people think it’s crazy to just put them in a PhD program in history just because they’re 14 years old, I don’t think that’s crazy.
Bryan Caplan: Like, why not? Like he has an incredible aptitude. Why not skip that kid ahead and let him become a star? Which there was an earlier period when we were more open to prodigies and I think that we really should be because we owe them so much. And it’s also just as a good parent just to say, look, maybe he wants to just be a 12 year old despite the fact that he is a physics genius. Maybe he doesn’t want to just be a regular 12 year old. Maybe he wants to be with a peer group of geniuses and let’s pave the way for him if that’s what he wants.
Marian Tupy: Now, as you know, there is a lot of debate over whether innovation comes from tiny little innovations at a time. And a lot of people working on something that must come together or alternatively, whether there’s a great man or great woman theory of innovation that’s besides the point of this podcast. Maybe you can revisit it some other time. But I assume that in general you are supportive of the idea that the more people you have, the more likely it is that one of them is going to turn into the next Elon Musk and so on.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, absolutely.
Marian Tupy: One other thing on that. So suppose that in the 2060s we are going to start seeing a declining world population and so forth. Do you think that AI is going to step? AI or AGI specifically could do what the human brain right now does, which is to come up with new ideas. Not just summarizing ideas like LLMs do, but coming up with new ideas. Do you think that that could potentially allow us to continue innovating even if population starts declining?
Bryan Caplan: Could? Absolutely. Will is the only interesting question. Or really what’s the probability or what fraction of the population loss can AGI’s make up? It’s really hard. So there was a long period where people who are working on AI kept over promising and under delivering. I personally would hear extravagant claims and I check them out and say they weren’t true. And then finally about two years ago they started actually being correct. And I was as shocked as anyone because like you guys have been exaggerating for 30 years. Like wait, you’re not exaggerating anymore? Wow, that’s amazing because you’re exaggerators. But and also like I’ve never. This is just really impressive. I actually have a bet out which I’m probably going to lose and that’s embarrassing because I have otherwise a perfect betting record of 23 for 23 for my public bets. But you know, like basically I think GPT. GPT 3.0, I gave it an exam and it got a D and then I think it was was maybe it was 3.5. It got a D anyway so like 4.0 it went from a D to an A and my eyes bugged out and like oh my God, like this is actually a huge improvement.
Bryan Caplan: It’s not like they’re going up one grade per generation of AI. Now that said, the fact that they’ve managed to have an incredible achievement does not mean that they’re just going to have a whole series of incredible achievements. This is possible and like I’m more open now than I was in the past. But yes, this idea that it’s still basically just an awesome compiler of what has already been said rather than truly coming up with new stuff. I think that there for now, there’s a lot to that. I would not say it’s impossible for it to get better, a lot better. But I would also not say it’s anything guaranteed. Let’s see. I mean, the other thing worth pointing out is that we’ve had by many measures falling rates of innovation despite rising population. So Charles Jones has written on this and the idea is we’ve discovered a lot of low hanging fruits. We have to basically keep multiplying our efforts to maintain the same rate of growth. I think that’s at least one plausible story anyway. Although the other one that’s also pretty plausible is that we have doubled the number of people that we call researchers, but really only the best ones count and the other ones are kind of just fake.
Marian Tupy: So that would be another example of inflation. Yes, I want to be respectful of your time, so I’m just going to ask a couple of questions, please to answer them yes or no, that sort of thing, and let you go. So given that much of the money on education is spent poorly or alternatively it’s even counterproductively, what should we do with the money? Should we just give it to the taxpayers or should we do something else with it?
Bryan Caplan: So I’m totally on board with giving to taxpayers or this point honestly just paying down the national debt. We badly need austerity. We are driving at 100mph towards a brick wall. There’s still time to change course and get our foot on the brakes. We’ve got to go and start reducing spending by a lot. And one of the easiest ways of doing that is just to spend less on education, which really I think we got very good evidence that people have greatly exaggerated its benefits. And then we can at least avert this terrible crisis, which otherwise I think is pretty inevitable. I mean, it’s always a problem just because it’s like, well, tell me the date when the crisis happens. Like, yeah, if I knew that I wouldn’t be sharing it. I’d be betting everything on it. But even so, countries cannot keep spending at this level and letting deficits get or letting debt rise to this share indefinitely without having a collapse.
Marian Tupy: Last question for you, and that is you do have admitted that education matters to the individuals in a sense that at the very least they are able to work with more sophisticated technology than if they were completely ignorant. Is there a difference in terms of education, the power of education to accomplish something positive between developed and developing world? In other words, if you had to choose in educating either People in rich countries or poor countries in order to achieve the most good for the world. Who would it be?
Bryan Caplan: Gee, I mean, both systems have such terrible problems. Poor countries have a severe problem with teachers even showing up. They, on paper, have very large numbers of years of education. So I think Haiti now is around where France was in 1960. But mostly this is just a way of just throwing more money at a corrupt system that doesn’t do its job, doesn’t even teach basic literacy and numeracy. And the idea that we just give them more money that will fix it, say no, that’s just highly unlikely. On the other hand, we’ve also got a bunch of garbage happening in rich countries too. It’s true that at least we generally get literacy and numeracy. Although if you read my book, there’s maybe a quarter of adult Americans where they’re pretty iffy on literacy and numeracy. I mean, honestly…
Marian Tupy: Insofar, for example, that people in developed countries have access to the sophisticated technology, then giving them the kind of education that enables them to interact with that technology may produce better outcomes than… No?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, well, I mean, what I’d say is that’s all pretty much wishful thinking because that’s not what actually happens in third world schooling systems. The way that people in the third world are learning technology is the way that almost all normal people learn anything, which is by doing this is so underappreciated, people will be thinking the schools are what are going to teach the skills. Like, is that what happened in your school? Does this fit your firsthand experience? Talk to other people, does it fit their experience? Or is it that people actually learn by doing? A slogan I like is professors learn from lectures. That’s it, right? People learn by doing. So, yeah, just going and throwing money at a system and then saying, oh, go and teach them technology, it’s really just a total Hail Mary pass. Wishful thinking. I mean, if you were just to go and say, or you have to spend it one way or the other, I guess I would say spend more on thorough education just because at least they’ll probably get some better daycare out of it and they need the daycare. But yeah, I mean, honestly, these are just terrible choices. And the much better option is to have austerity to stop wasting taxpayer money.
Marian Tupy: Seems to me, and based on what you said, we are doing the exact opposite. We are keeping people in the educational system for many, many, many years.
Bryan Caplan: Oh yeah.
Marian Tupy: Whereby they’re not necessarily learning anything new or anything useful, whereas what you would want to do is to put them to work early on where they can learn skills and where they can really excel.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So it would be much better if people started adult life at a much earlier age. They’re totally ready for it. There’s no reason why 13 or 14 year olds should not be working. Of course, yes, they need to learn more stuff, but one of the best ways to get them to actually teach or actually learn stuff, especially kids that hate school, and there’s a lot of kids that hate school, is to make it practical, to make it part of something where they see concrete results and they make money. If you go and read biographies or autobiographies of people in earlier eras, it is amazing how far people got at such young ages. It’s like by the age of 15, Malcolm X had had like four different jobs. He’d been all over the country. This is a much better world than the world that we’re in. Many people listen to me and they say, oh, it’s so dystopian. And like, look, it’s the system that we have that’s dystopian, where someone has to sit in a classroom until they’re 30 listening to some boring windbag talk about something that he doesn’t even know how to do. And a much better society is one where people just become independent adults at a younger age.
Marian Tupy: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. This was fascinating and wish you all the best. Thank you.
Bryan Caplan: Wish you all the best too, Marian. Keep up with the Superabundance.