The Ledger, every show

“So, basically, it seems like we'd go and replace a lot of teachers from, you know, better schools, and with master's degrees, and with more experience, with just enthusiastic, fun, young teachers. You know, maybe people haven't even finished high school.”

“I think the best would be separation of school and state. And just get government out of education entirely.”

“Well, if you go and do well in your Aristotle class, your foreign language class, this, though useless in terms of what you will do, it is impressive. It is convincing. It's a way of selling people on your value as a worker.”

“I've got data on knowledge of history, government, science, and foreign languages, in addition to literacy and numeracy. Literacy and numeracy, at least there's a credible story, but the other things that I just mentioned, there if you go and look at what adul…”

“In the book I review what educational psychologists have determined about this, and the main result is that most of this learning how to learn or learning how to think stuff is wishful thinking. Most of the time when someone learns a subject, the most that the…”

“I've looked at least some of the research, and it seems like the idea that if there's a lot more school choice, this will raise test scores a lot, ah, doesn't seem to be true.”

“The main thing known is none of, like, the obvious social science measures of teacher quality predict teacher quality. So, having credentials from better schools, or having more credentials, or even more experience, none of the standard things that are in the …”

“The striking thing is that the existing system has almost no interest in this research.”

“The signaling function of education is on an emotional level, at least very deeply grasped, and so there's almost no pressure from anyone in the system to actually improve genuine learning.”

“The system where they cut overall spending by a third, and then reallocate, say, half of the money that we currently spend in junior and high school to vocational education. That seems like a very, very reasonable revision.”

“And normally when third world countries spend a lot of money on tertiary education, often you, like, you wind up getting something more like the Egyptian result, where I think the government employs like 80% of college graduates. And of course, and you need th…”

“If you look at the original case, it actually said that not only is IQ testing legally suspect, but educational credential hiring legally suspect.”

“There is this treadmill or rat race effect where for any one individual that would give them more opportunities, and that's true, but if you go and give a whole generation more opportunities, the result is just that employers jack up the educational expectatio…”

“And the current one where we try to keep virtually every American kid on the college track is one that doesn't work out for about two thirds of kids.”

“Signaling explains why students cheat. And I'm like, yeah, of course, but it never occurred to me until you told me, yeah, the whole point, you know, you cheat in order to impersonate a good student, so you want to be treated like an A student even though you'…”

“The main result is that the measured effect of national education on national income is much smaller than the effect of personal education on personal income, which fits very nicely with the signaling story and does not fit really with any other story out ther…”

“There's a fundamental difference between shopping and voting. When shopping, if you make a mistake, you pay the price. Where in voting, if you make a mistake, you were just tipping the scales a little bit towards all of society having a worse outcome.”

“Rather than thinking about democracy as a supermarket, think of it more about as like a common pool of water that is also our trash disposal system. And so people simultaneously are throwing in all of our intellectual garbage, but it's also where we drink.”

“Looking better than other people is a great way to advance yourself, but it is not a way for society to advance.”

“People are very bad at applying what they've learned. Especially without external prompting, so there's a lot of experimental evidence where you'll teach, for example, either math and science or science and math, and you'll sort of randomly assign which order …”

“Even after you throw the whole kitchen sink in, every possible adjustment anyone's ever thought of, There still seems to be this lingering and substantial labor market reward of education that is unexplained by anything other than you've got the credential.”

“Intelligence tests are, you know, quite predictive, but personality tests, at least for labor market outcomes, don't seem all that predictive”

“Parents aren't that concerned about getting their kids test scores up. So they may want them to have high SAT scores, but in terms of state standardized tests, most parents don't care about that stuff very much. And instead, they're mainly concerned about gett…”

“In terms of competitiveness, there's much better in 1950 to be a high school dropout because in those days there were so many high school dropouts that there just wasn't that much of a stigma against it. And the reason is precisely that the higher the educatio…”

“In terms of how much it matters for diplomas in Silicon Valley, I think a crucial is just like getting the first meeting.”

“If you take signaling seriously, the really good thing about vocational education is it seems like it's much less about impressing others. In fact, there may even be a little bit of a stigma against it, and more about acquiring actual concrete practical skills…”

“The answer seems to be practicing that specific job. You know, the way that you get to be a good pilot Is not by taking a critical reasoning class. It's by, you know, getting in the simulator, getting in the cockpit, and learning to deal with a thousand differ…”

“I have a blanket announcement. If you think that I'm saying something ridiculous, let's form a bet on it. And like, I'm sticking my neck out. I am always open to bets”

“This is one of my heuristics, by the way, is you're putting more weight on results people don't want to find.”

“Fake being smart, that's hard. But on the other hand, fake being conscientious on a test, that's something where anyone can do it.”

“First of all, there's quite a bit of research on just the selfish gains to the individual student, so even for students that do go into college, there's still pretty good evidence that, you know, vocational education in the long run rates your earnings and emp…”

“When there's no money on the table, people form their beliefs in a very emotional way. But this is not a fixed trait of human nature. It's not like they have to be emotional. Rather, they're selectively emotional and in ones where there's some real stakes, som…”