Schooling is not equal to Education

These two stories give me a chance to make some points about schooling:

This from Robina Hanson's blog overcomming bias:

Human capital offers an interesting case study in theory versus data. Just as most people think it obvious that medicine deserves most of the credit for health gains, most people think it obvious that education deserves most of the credit for human capital gains. Do-gooders the world over have for centuries "known" that what the poor really need is more medicine and education (and religion and art).

We theorists will tell you that, yes productive people tend to be better educated, but there are many possible explanations for wealth-education correlations. For example, schooling could be a credible signal of ability, or school could be consumption that the rich can better afford.

Most who study education are data-crunchers with little patience with such abstract theorizing. But until recently they were troubled by the fact that data on nations across time seemed to show a negative relation between wealth and education, even after controlling for measures of physical capital! For example, see this 2001 Pritchett paper.

This from the Wal Street Journel:

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?
Finland's teens score extraordinarily high on an international test. American educators are trying to figure out why.
By ELLEN GAMERMAN
February 29, 2008; Page W1

Helsinki, Finland

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don't start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most productive workers.


Points:

What is valuable education

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.

What are the returns to schooling

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. 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.

How much instruction in needed

The un-schoolers are matching schools with minimal instruction and input. 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.

Is it possible to educate those who do not care to learn

To paraphrase Murray Rothbard 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.

Human brain's up take of information and what we learn

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.

Old Age is Mostly not Treatable - Medicare is the Stupidest Program Imaginable!

• Medical care for the elderly yields the least bang for the buck of any medical care.
• Since it is only part of the market the program has little ability to control costs.
• Free care for mothers and infants would make far more sense.
• I believe that the program started because the medical establishment was taking to much of the inheritance of the American people but the program did not address the problem, it just shifted the payment to the tax paying population.
  
  Study after study shows that medical care for the elderly has very little benefit for health. In fact some studies have shown medical care for the elderly to have a negative impact on life expectancy and quality of life (see the work of Robin Hanson). One study showed that people who choose hospice on average actually lived longer that those who chose more aggressive care.
  
  If the US government was the sole buyer of medical care they would have some power to affect price. They could set price for procedures which might cause rationing but they could push prices down, but because Medicare is only about one third of the market they have to pay close to the market price.
  
  Now if the politicians who enacted Medicare where truly interested in helping people the best bang for buck in healthcare is in care for mothers and infants. Care for mothers and infants can yield sizable benefits in quality life years.
  
  So why did Medicare get enacted? I see two reasons. First there was a real problem in that people whose parents became too ill for them to care for would hand their parents off to the medical establishment who would treat them to a level that would put large cost burden on the families. Secondly the elderly reliably vote in large numbers and Most will consume medical care at some point. Young people (in the child bearing years) do not vote in large numbers and only a small percent need the care as most babies are born healthy.
  
  And so we have Medicare and the medical establishment takes over people lives at the end and often does more harm than good.
  
  A related story to show in real life an alternative to excessive care in late life
  
  My mother (86 years old) has always had an attitude of trying to avoid doctors. For years we (the family) have tried to get her to go to regular doctors appointments. She resists saying that they always find something wrong. She will go if she is very sick. Once after much prodding she went to a doctor and asked about a symptom of having frequent bowel movements. She was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease. They gave her prescriptions for meds which she took for a while but the meds made her feel worse that the frequent bowel movements so she stopped taking them. Now she avoids certain foods and she says that the symptoms have lessened. She is now all the more determined to avoid doctors. After many years of trying to encourage her to get regular care I have begun to wonder if her way is not the better way. One thing that she fears is the medical establishment taking over her life at the end.
  
  My mother has always said that doctors are fine if you have something that there is a cure for but there is no cure for the disease of old age. Some times it seems that it is better for old people to not know all the diseases that they have. If the symptoms can be treated great but the treatments should be balanced against the harm that they do.
  
  From talking to my parents and their friends all that most old people care about is the expense. In fact once their health makes them unable to care for themselves they often prefer to die so they do not much care about the quality of care. Often it is family and the medical establishment that give them care that they do not want. That is why they strongly support medicare. It is not that they demand the care it is that they It back to the orgional problem they do not want the medical establishment to steal their money by giving them care that they do not want.

This Blog

In this blog I would like to focus on questioning underlying assumptions that most people do not often consider. For example there is a debate about how to improve education in America. A point in the debate is how to improve the test scores of American children. Since I would like to question some of the assumptions inherent in debate I would ask are these tests relevant to life, if not why do we care if our students do less well than students elsewhere. I would question another assumption by examining whether better schooling will help improve people lives or not. It may seem like the answers to these questions are simple but I still think that they are worth examining. I will in the process consider the assumptions against some radical alternatives and look at what actual data says. In this Blog I would like to identify this type of assumption and examine them.