Without education as the one weird trick that can solve all our problems, what can solve all our problems?
That's always what one is bumping up against when they take on education. People are implicitly expecting you have an answer to accomplish what education promises to accomplish, even if it fails to do so.
People don't want to accept that they have eternal problems with no easy or infinitely replicable solutions, and many proposed "solutions" outside of education could be worse.
Embryo selection for higher intelligence wouldn't solve of our problems, but it would solve the ones education is supposed to solve. Biggest technical problem is it would take a minimum of one generation to start seeing major effects.
Embryo selection for supercilious, driveling, midwit, narcissists with no emotional control? Please no! If you are going to do that, you may as well tweak their DNA to induce day-glo hair and obesity as well! Save them the trouble of doing it to themselves later on.
Fortunately, IQ is inversely correlated with all of those things (except midwit, which is just a content-free insult). In theory, if you optimized hard enough for intelligence, you would run into problems eventually. In practice, that's not an issue with today's tech, which would raise avg IQ by something like 10 points. Not an issue.
I've read that embryo selection might only get 2.5 IQ points at current technology, but I'm not an expert. There is also the question of getting everyone to do it and getting them to do it young enough.
Asians already have 105 IQ average and their issues with "education" are worse.
If we could solve the problem of getting more eggs per IVF or somehow being able to get more embryos per egg then indeed you might be able to get pretty high. Like some real science fiction stuff. But it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that is going to get developed and see widespread adoption in a single generation from now (I could be wrong).
Raising general intelligence 10 IQ points from average would produce a biblical plague of midwits, which is not a content-free insult, but a very real syndrome, and an utter plague on the world. Every fulminating ideologue, from Rousseau to Robespierre, from Lenin to Hitler, from Marx to Mussolini, has demonstrated the characteristics typical of midwittery.
For the sake of argument, I would define midwits as people just smart enough to acquire bad ideas, but not smart enough to criticize them, with the result that they simply cannot conceive of those ideas being wrong. This leads them to conclude that anyone who has a different viewpoint is by definition, wrong, and not just wrong, but necessarily stupid and evil as well.
This convinces them that they have the moral imperative to impose their idiot ideologies on the world, and that any dissenters to their plans for everybody must be silenced, and ultimately, murdered wholesale.
I’m sorry, but how can one who still believes in this nonsense that idiots are more likely to reach sound conclusions than average people expect to be taken seriously? There’s no evidence for it outside of memes.
Oct 9, 2023·edited Oct 10, 2023Liked by Arnold Kling
Perhaps it is more palatable rephrased as - the very brilliant among us have their thoughts turned to things too abstruse to want to relitigate common sense notions; too they have a sense of the way in which history and tradition have probably provided the answers we need through long human experience, and the unlikelihood that we will correctly undo that in a lifetime.
The relitigants, of course, would be those middle IQ sorts, who would be flattered by the thought of knowing something "new, better" - that marks them off from those beneath them.
Thus you can get easy agreement - find the 170 IQ person in your life, and somebody who seems kind of dim - neither is likely to entertain the idea that, say, shoplifting and smashing store windows, is a kind of speech, which must be respected or condoned or celebrated.
Idiots are certainly more likely to reach sounder conclusions than midwits simply because all the really stupid ideas are beyond their intellectual grasp, or as George Orwell put it, 'There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.'
Growing up moderately more intelligent than the general population causes the sufferer from that unfortunate condition the conviction that everyone else is completely ignorant, and to an overconfidence in their own ability to solve the world's problems, along with the absurd belief that they are entitled by their inherent superiority to do just that. In short, intelligence can, and does, amply not just foolishness, but arrogance.
Maybe. Certainly it could have a lot of positives. I support it.
But what if the problem education is supposed to solve is that “all children are above average”.
Embryo selection may well make all children above 100 IQ in time. But it can’t make more than 50% of kids above average.
Asians have higher iqs then us and they spend it in zero sum cram school competition for zero sum status positions to the point that they don’t even have children.
That big shift of benefits towards more education that occurred about half a century ago was based more on the failures of organized labor in all sectors that weren't monopolies with no competition. The unions became so greedy they ultimately lost share in competitive markets. The biggest increase was in monopoly government institutions, but government service started requiring college degrees for even the dumb bureaucratic paperwork positions.
I did an engineering economic analysis back around 1960 where I looked at the economic return of education in engineering relative to my HS associates whom had contacts (relatives, etc.) to join the high end unions like boilermakers, plumbers, electricians, longshoremen, etc. I was into fast cars of the 1950's so I knew a lot young men in these areas and they were rich relative to me as a student at the time. Making the assumption that they saved the difference in income between my low level TA and summer income and their union pay and using long term data on engineering income with age I came to the conclusion that a BS degree, at the time, would be about break even by retirement and a MS would be a money looser with a Ph.D. being economic insanity.
Being a bit insane, I went for the Ph.D. and then had a boilermaker working for me on acid rain pollution control experiments (note the lack of discussion about acid rain -- it was solved). His weekly pay check was much larger than my bi-monthly check and he used to joke about it. He was a good guy and never complained to the union when I picked up a wrench and fixed something instead of following the union rules.
In the real world, my associates spent the extra money on fast cars and fast women and didn't save a dime. Meanwhile the job markets for many of these fat unions flattened out and shrank as nuclear power was killed, infrastructure of all kinds had time schedules dictated by environmental activist, most of whom had non-STEM educations and were effective parasites contributing little to the future of humanity.
We also had unions like the UAW with total auto market control with the help of the big three producing the cars of the 70's which didn't last as long as cars from the 60's. (make a car last half as long, you sell more new cars) Then the Japanese entered with quality cars but were forced by the political class to build plants in the US, but that undercut the UAW and their wage premiums.
The shift of unionization monopoly rents from the actual working class to the formally educated ruling bureaucratic class would be a big factor. This "educated" class of bureaucrats isn't nearly as capable of 3-D visualization as any plummer or pipe-fitter.
Re: "[Goldin and Katz] give much empirical attention to the reasonable proposition that a rise in the supply of college graduates relative to non-graduates raises average productivity and reduces the gap between earnings of college graduates and the earnings of non-graduates." — Kling and Merrifield, p. 5
The proposition becomes much less reasonable if:
(a) Selection effects, rather than treatment effects are what cause the wage premium for college graduates. I have in mind the theory that the college degree is a costly signal of individual intelligence/personality (Michael Spence, Bryan Caplan), rather than proof of job skills acquired via college. On this theory, college doesn't make you more productive for career. Instead, it shows that you likely will be 'a quick study' on the job and likely will fit in at the workplace. The theory says that college does not increase productivity, but delays on-the-job training that does increase productivity.
(b) The college degree plays a large role in sorting the population into two social groups/cultures, which Charles Murray calls Belmont and Fishtown. Never the twain shall meet. Dropouts fall behind because dysfunctional norms about career and household-formation develop in Fishtown, even if the fraction of college grads in the population (Belmont) increases and even if college grads compete a lot with one another chasing tech jobs.
I read Goldin's work in that case as making a classic managerial mistake - inputs analyzed as outputs. People who can do things are educated; the years spent doing it are consumed resources. This framing makes sense of FDR putting kids in school when he was also having milk poured on the ground by farmers. Wasting the resource is sometimes the leadership intention. Bragging about it is a benefit in this case, when people can be fooled.
I really like Arnold's more thought-fulled posts, which are seldom as histrionic as many Current Thing posts - I usually appreciate them, and their links, long after they're written.
Without knowing much about Claudia Goldin, it was good to read the A+ Arnold gave on " their contribution to positive economics, meaning the analysis of data. The compilation of statistics on education by cohort is extremely valuable. "
Early in the essay is this % of HS graduates data from the Goldin - Katz book:
"1960 50.5 %
1980 79.3 %
2000 91.3 %"
Real economics needs a lot more analysis of real econ data. As well as understanding the data, and limits of data measurement and data definitions.
In earlier posts, my disagreement with Arnold about inflation is partly because of the definition of inflation as "consumer" prices - so gov't printing money that goes to increased prices of financial assets, making the rich richer faster, isn't part of inflation.
your view is quite understandable, but how much weight was put on the one book you mention vs the overall body of work she has produced or co-authored ? if it the lion's share i get your lack of enthusiasm with regard to the awarding of the Prize to her.
I am not questioning her overall qualifications for the Nobel prize I’m just pointing out how angry and hurt I was that she would not stoop to address my points of criticism
Sorry you are angry and hurt but it seems worth noting that many people make various points of criticism to your substack posts that you don't address ... for understandable reasons. Maybe her reasons are similar.
You’re right stu she treated my published journal article with about as much respect as a substack author treats a random comment. She would not have done that if she thought I had any academic status or power whatsoever.
Steve Sailer has a recent blog post referencing an earlier 2019 piece he wrote discussing critiques of an article Goldin co-authored about the impact of blind auditions on female orchestra musicians. That work seems related to the work for which she was awarded the 'Nobel prize' in economics.
Re: "[Goldin and Katz] make a pitch for more college for more people. If we can induce a young woman to graduate from college and acquire skills, she will enter a higher-skilled job market and earn more than she would have. Moreover, she slightly shifts out the higher-skilled supply curve, and shifts back the lower-skilled supply curve, thus reducing the wage gap between the two markets. By getting more of the stragglers to get more skills, inequality will be ameliorated."—Kling and Merrifield, p. 5.
Might Goldin/Katz's grand strategy for sex equality via massive subsidies for women to complete college be a primrose path? Consider two major empirical social outcomes/trends:
(a) Goldin and Katz ignore a crucial dimension of inequality: the battle of the sexes. If the fraction of college graduates who are women greatly exceeds the fraction who are men, and if college grads insist on marrying college grads ('assortative mating by educational attainment'), then a substantial fraction of women college grads must be incels. Empirically, this emergent trend constitutes a major inequality of outcome among educated women. There is a tension between prudent individual strategy and compositional effects.
(b) Goldin and Katz ignore the long-term impact of major increases in women's college completion on the birth rate (via long delay of family-formation and fertility).
In this book, I don't seem them focused on women specifically. The use of "she" was by Kling and Merrifield, and it was meant to refer to a generic human. The way that "he" was traditionally used in sentences that could refer to either a man or a woman. It was short for "he or she."
See Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko, "The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap," JEP (2006) — an article written for a broad educated audience, at the same time as the book:
The authors briefly address the sex inequality in education outcomes and conclude:
"The source of boys’ higher incidence of behavioral problems is an area of active research and could be due to their later maturation as well as their higher rates of impatience (Silverman, 2003). [... ] In short, a more level and wider playing field for girls enabled them to blossom and to take advantage of higher expected labor market returns to attending college. At the same time, the slower social development and more serious behavioral problems of boys remained and allowed girls to leapfrog over them in the race to college." p. 154
The authors cast boys as the problem, and never question the grand strategy of massive subsidy to the school/college "race".
I have another issue with Goldin. I haven't read everything she's published, but for what I've seen she seems to generalize her results to the whole world.
"...and an altered identity that placed career ahead, or on equal footing, with marriage. Wives were less often secondary workers, the flotsam and jetsam of the labor market. The income and substitution effects of labor supply changed once again, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. No longer was women’s labor supply highly elastic. It was influenced even less than before by husband’s earnings. The earnings of women rose relative to those of men; occupations changed from more traditional ones to those that had been considered nontraditional" (from: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/000282806777212350).
That seems to match the data for Western countries and East Asian countries, but it doesn't match the data for other parts of the world:
I had a lovely interaction with a plumber this week. He grew up around the building trades. I think he went more fully into plumbing via word of mouth locally during the pandemic. I didn't ask his licensing status. His plumber's van was not running, so that seemed not auspicious. But he was great at communicating with me; I spent several hours with him at a property we've bought that had a good deal of plumbing mystery. He figured them out as well as able, though together we made an error in failing to look in a particular place for the mystery valve we knew must be somewhere, if not marked. So we had capped off the line and he had to undo that. Well, it doesn't matter; we fixed a number of things in and out. He was no more than thirty, maybe less, and I expect he is not yet the plumber he will be, yet, if he sticks with it - but his openness and eagerness to help made it hardly matter.
I will say this in no unpleasant spririt: he is American and friendly and I think that can be a great advantage in the trades. I worked with a number of Mexican guys recently, including an older electrician (licensed? who knows, not likely) who seemed smart and kind but was grave and quiet, perhaps having come too late in life to be comfortable speaking English. I say he was smart because he did neat work, he seemed able to read an inspector's report or grasp what the pictures were saying - but ultimately I am not going to be able to write down on that same inspector's report, what exactly he did. There would be no way for us to have that specificity of communication. I thought about calling him back just to go over it, but time is short.
And he was my favorite of those guys. With the others there was my broken Spanish, which they enjoyed bantering, it flattered them; they made no such effort back with English, and repeatedly our lack of ability to communicate caused trouble for the job, and created errors and headaches and waste. My comprehension was better than they imagined, and I understood from things I overheard - teasing things like "ooo, te quiere" as I left, after I had pled with the foreman about something - that my position with respect to them would always be false and uncomfortable.
It came to me with a certain dread that a future without any Americans in the trades - which can seem like a possibility down here so close to Mexico - is actually alarming. It should be easier to get work done; it somehow seems harder now. There was a middle ground, I guess you'd say, from which we benefitted twenty years ago. But: price was not all.
One of the nice things about trades is that they are mobile and you can take a break from them. A lot of women with careers feel like they can't get off the treadmill for a few years when kids are young or move to a new city they would rather raise a family in without resetting their career. Yes, they often overestimate these concerns, but the bottom line is that being in a trade is more fungible and flexible then corporate work.
In fact I know some smart men that have gotten into nursing. If you're willing to travel and work night shifts you can get very rich very young. And the education requirement is not that bad.
The drawback is many nurses weirdly seem to be a bunch of skanks, but there are a lot of good ones.
Congratulations. It is great to see your children flourish! Your daughter is far too smart for college. She has chosen a career which requires deep knowledge and considerable ingenuity to solve real and urgent problems in real time. She won't be up to her ears in debt, and she will always have work.
Without education as the one weird trick that can solve all our problems, what can solve all our problems?
That's always what one is bumping up against when they take on education. People are implicitly expecting you have an answer to accomplish what education promises to accomplish, even if it fails to do so.
People don't want to accept that they have eternal problems with no easy or infinitely replicable solutions, and many proposed "solutions" outside of education could be worse.
Embryo selection for higher intelligence wouldn't solve of our problems, but it would solve the ones education is supposed to solve. Biggest technical problem is it would take a minimum of one generation to start seeing major effects.
Embryo selection for supercilious, driveling, midwit, narcissists with no emotional control? Please no! If you are going to do that, you may as well tweak their DNA to induce day-glo hair and obesity as well! Save them the trouble of doing it to themselves later on.
Fortunately, IQ is inversely correlated with all of those things (except midwit, which is just a content-free insult). In theory, if you optimized hard enough for intelligence, you would run into problems eventually. In practice, that's not an issue with today's tech, which would raise avg IQ by something like 10 points. Not an issue.
I've read that embryo selection might only get 2.5 IQ points at current technology, but I'm not an expert. There is also the question of getting everyone to do it and getting them to do it young enough.
Asians already have 105 IQ average and their issues with "education" are worse.
If we could solve the problem of getting more eggs per IVF or somehow being able to get more embryos per egg then indeed you might be able to get pretty high. Like some real science fiction stuff. But it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that is going to get developed and see widespread adoption in a single generation from now (I could be wrong).
Raising general intelligence 10 IQ points from average would produce a biblical plague of midwits, which is not a content-free insult, but a very real syndrome, and an utter plague on the world. Every fulminating ideologue, from Rousseau to Robespierre, from Lenin to Hitler, from Marx to Mussolini, has demonstrated the characteristics typical of midwittery.
For the sake of argument, I would define midwits as people just smart enough to acquire bad ideas, but not smart enough to criticize them, with the result that they simply cannot conceive of those ideas being wrong. This leads them to conclude that anyone who has a different viewpoint is by definition, wrong, and not just wrong, but necessarily stupid and evil as well.
This convinces them that they have the moral imperative to impose their idiot ideologies on the world, and that any dissenters to their plans for everybody must be silenced, and ultimately, murdered wholesale.
I’m sorry, but how can one who still believes in this nonsense that idiots are more likely to reach sound conclusions than average people expect to be taken seriously? There’s no evidence for it outside of memes.
Perhaps it is more palatable rephrased as - the very brilliant among us have their thoughts turned to things too abstruse to want to relitigate common sense notions; too they have a sense of the way in which history and tradition have probably provided the answers we need through long human experience, and the unlikelihood that we will correctly undo that in a lifetime.
The relitigants, of course, would be those middle IQ sorts, who would be flattered by the thought of knowing something "new, better" - that marks them off from those beneath them.
Thus you can get easy agreement - find the 170 IQ person in your life, and somebody who seems kind of dim - neither is likely to entertain the idea that, say, shoplifting and smashing store windows, is a kind of speech, which must be respected or condoned or celebrated.
Idiots are certainly more likely to reach sounder conclusions than midwits simply because all the really stupid ideas are beyond their intellectual grasp, or as George Orwell put it, 'There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.'
Growing up moderately more intelligent than the general population causes the sufferer from that unfortunate condition the conviction that everyone else is completely ignorant, and to an overconfidence in their own ability to solve the world's problems, along with the absurd belief that they are entitled by their inherent superiority to do just that. In short, intelligence can, and does, amply not just foolishness, but arrogance.
Maybe. Certainly it could have a lot of positives. I support it.
But what if the problem education is supposed to solve is that “all children are above average”.
Embryo selection may well make all children above 100 IQ in time. But it can’t make more than 50% of kids above average.
Asians have higher iqs then us and they spend it in zero sum cram school competition for zero sum status positions to the point that they don’t even have children.
That big shift of benefits towards more education that occurred about half a century ago was based more on the failures of organized labor in all sectors that weren't monopolies with no competition. The unions became so greedy they ultimately lost share in competitive markets. The biggest increase was in monopoly government institutions, but government service started requiring college degrees for even the dumb bureaucratic paperwork positions.
I did an engineering economic analysis back around 1960 where I looked at the economic return of education in engineering relative to my HS associates whom had contacts (relatives, etc.) to join the high end unions like boilermakers, plumbers, electricians, longshoremen, etc. I was into fast cars of the 1950's so I knew a lot young men in these areas and they were rich relative to me as a student at the time. Making the assumption that they saved the difference in income between my low level TA and summer income and their union pay and using long term data on engineering income with age I came to the conclusion that a BS degree, at the time, would be about break even by retirement and a MS would be a money looser with a Ph.D. being economic insanity.
Being a bit insane, I went for the Ph.D. and then had a boilermaker working for me on acid rain pollution control experiments (note the lack of discussion about acid rain -- it was solved). His weekly pay check was much larger than my bi-monthly check and he used to joke about it. He was a good guy and never complained to the union when I picked up a wrench and fixed something instead of following the union rules.
In the real world, my associates spent the extra money on fast cars and fast women and didn't save a dime. Meanwhile the job markets for many of these fat unions flattened out and shrank as nuclear power was killed, infrastructure of all kinds had time schedules dictated by environmental activist, most of whom had non-STEM educations and were effective parasites contributing little to the future of humanity.
We also had unions like the UAW with total auto market control with the help of the big three producing the cars of the 70's which didn't last as long as cars from the 60's. (make a car last half as long, you sell more new cars) Then the Japanese entered with quality cars but were forced by the political class to build plants in the US, but that undercut the UAW and their wage premiums.
The shift of unionization monopoly rents from the actual working class to the formally educated ruling bureaucratic class would be a big factor. This "educated" class of bureaucrats isn't nearly as capable of 3-D visualization as any plummer or pipe-fitter.
Both links go to econlog. Second link probably supposed to go here: https://econjwatch.org/articles/goldin-and-katz-and-education-policy-failings-in-historical-perspective
or here:
https://econjwatch.org/File+download/244/2009-01-klingmerrifield-com.pdf?mimetype=pdf
fixed now. thanks for catching it!
Kling quoting himself:
"they emphasize an estimate of average total number of years of schooling, which they call “educational attainment.”
Yikes! There is so much wrong with such a metric it is hard to know where to begin. I applaud you for actually trying to figure it out.
Re: "[Goldin and Katz] give much empirical attention to the reasonable proposition that a rise in the supply of college graduates relative to non-graduates raises average productivity and reduces the gap between earnings of college graduates and the earnings of non-graduates." — Kling and Merrifield, p. 5
The proposition becomes much less reasonable if:
(a) Selection effects, rather than treatment effects are what cause the wage premium for college graduates. I have in mind the theory that the college degree is a costly signal of individual intelligence/personality (Michael Spence, Bryan Caplan), rather than proof of job skills acquired via college. On this theory, college doesn't make you more productive for career. Instead, it shows that you likely will be 'a quick study' on the job and likely will fit in at the workplace. The theory says that college does not increase productivity, but delays on-the-job training that does increase productivity.
(b) The college degree plays a large role in sorting the population into two social groups/cultures, which Charles Murray calls Belmont and Fishtown. Never the twain shall meet. Dropouts fall behind because dysfunctional norms about career and household-formation develop in Fishtown, even if the fraction of college grads in the population (Belmont) increases and even if college grads compete a lot with one another chasing tech jobs.
I read Goldin's work in that case as making a classic managerial mistake - inputs analyzed as outputs. People who can do things are educated; the years spent doing it are consumed resources. This framing makes sense of FDR putting kids in school when he was also having milk poured on the ground by farmers. Wasting the resource is sometimes the leadership intention. Bragging about it is a benefit in this case, when people can be fooled.
Katz is still alive.
I really like Arnold's more thought-fulled posts, which are seldom as histrionic as many Current Thing posts - I usually appreciate them, and their links, long after they're written.
Without knowing much about Claudia Goldin, it was good to read the A+ Arnold gave on " their contribution to positive economics, meaning the analysis of data. The compilation of statistics on education by cohort is extremely valuable. "
Early in the essay is this % of HS graduates data from the Goldin - Katz book:
"1960 50.5 %
1980 79.3 %
2000 91.3 %"
Real economics needs a lot more analysis of real econ data. As well as understanding the data, and limits of data measurement and data definitions.
In earlier posts, my disagreement with Arnold about inflation is partly because of the definition of inflation as "consumer" prices - so gov't printing money that goes to increased prices of financial assets, making the rich richer faster, isn't part of inflation.
I'm a little confused. Best I can tell Goldin's Nobel is for work on differences in male-female employment. Does this education concern impact that?
your view is quite understandable, but how much weight was put on the one book you mention vs the overall body of work she has produced or co-authored ? if it the lion's share i get your lack of enthusiasm with regard to the awarding of the Prize to her.
I am not questioning her overall qualifications for the Nobel prize I’m just pointing out how angry and hurt I was that she would not stoop to address my points of criticism
Understood; her not responding to you may say something about her character. We can learn lots about people just by little things.
Sorry you are angry and hurt but it seems worth noting that many people make various points of criticism to your substack posts that you don't address ... for understandable reasons. Maybe her reasons are similar.
You’re right stu she treated my published journal article with about as much respect as a substack author treats a random comment. She would not have done that if she thought I had any academic status or power whatsoever.
Steve Sailer has a recent blog post referencing an earlier 2019 piece he wrote discussing critiques of an article Goldin co-authored about the impact of blind auditions on female orchestra musicians. That work seems related to the work for which she was awarded the 'Nobel prize' in economics.
Re: "[Goldin and Katz] make a pitch for more college for more people. If we can induce a young woman to graduate from college and acquire skills, she will enter a higher-skilled job market and earn more than she would have. Moreover, she slightly shifts out the higher-skilled supply curve, and shifts back the lower-skilled supply curve, thus reducing the wage gap between the two markets. By getting more of the stragglers to get more skills, inequality will be ameliorated."—Kling and Merrifield, p. 5.
Might Goldin/Katz's grand strategy for sex equality via massive subsidies for women to complete college be a primrose path? Consider two major empirical social outcomes/trends:
(a) Goldin and Katz ignore a crucial dimension of inequality: the battle of the sexes. If the fraction of college graduates who are women greatly exceeds the fraction who are men, and if college grads insist on marrying college grads ('assortative mating by educational attainment'), then a substantial fraction of women college grads must be incels. Empirically, this emergent trend constitutes a major inequality of outcome among educated women. There is a tension between prudent individual strategy and compositional effects.
(b) Goldin and Katz ignore the long-term impact of major increases in women's college completion on the birth rate (via long delay of family-formation and fertility).
In this book, I don't seem them focused on women specifically. The use of "she" was by Kling and Merrifield, and it was meant to refer to a generic human. The way that "he" was traditionally used in sentences that could refer to either a man or a woman. It was short for "he or she."
See Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko, "The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap," JEP (2006) — an article written for a broad educated audience, at the same time as the book:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.20.4.133
The authors briefly address the sex inequality in education outcomes and conclude:
"The source of boys’ higher incidence of behavioral problems is an area of active research and could be due to their later maturation as well as their higher rates of impatience (Silverman, 2003). [... ] In short, a more level and wider playing field for girls enabled them to blossom and to take advantage of higher expected labor market returns to attending college. At the same time, the slower social development and more serious behavioral problems of boys remained and allowed girls to leapfrog over them in the race to college." p. 154
The authors cast boys as the problem, and never question the grand strategy of massive subsidy to the school/college "race".
I have another issue with Goldin. I haven't read everything she's published, but for what I've seen she seems to generalize her results to the whole world.
"...and an altered identity that placed career ahead, or on equal footing, with marriage. Wives were less often secondary workers, the flotsam and jetsam of the labor market. The income and substitution effects of labor supply changed once again, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. No longer was women’s labor supply highly elastic. It was influenced even less than before by husband’s earnings. The earnings of women rose relative to those of men; occupations changed from more traditional ones to those that had been considered nontraditional" (from: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/000282806777212350).
That seems to match the data for Western countries and East Asian countries, but it doesn't match the data for other parts of the world:
https://www.mangosorbananas.com/p/a-comparison-of-gender-equality-between
https://www.mangosorbananas.com/p/a-comparison-of-gender-equality-between-a38
Not everyone, not every woman, wants to constructs her identity in the same way. Culture matters.
I had a lovely interaction with a plumber this week. He grew up around the building trades. I think he went more fully into plumbing via word of mouth locally during the pandemic. I didn't ask his licensing status. His plumber's van was not running, so that seemed not auspicious. But he was great at communicating with me; I spent several hours with him at a property we've bought that had a good deal of plumbing mystery. He figured them out as well as able, though together we made an error in failing to look in a particular place for the mystery valve we knew must be somewhere, if not marked. So we had capped off the line and he had to undo that. Well, it doesn't matter; we fixed a number of things in and out. He was no more than thirty, maybe less, and I expect he is not yet the plumber he will be, yet, if he sticks with it - but his openness and eagerness to help made it hardly matter.
I will say this in no unpleasant spririt: he is American and friendly and I think that can be a great advantage in the trades. I worked with a number of Mexican guys recently, including an older electrician (licensed? who knows, not likely) who seemed smart and kind but was grave and quiet, perhaps having come too late in life to be comfortable speaking English. I say he was smart because he did neat work, he seemed able to read an inspector's report or grasp what the pictures were saying - but ultimately I am not going to be able to write down on that same inspector's report, what exactly he did. There would be no way for us to have that specificity of communication. I thought about calling him back just to go over it, but time is short.
And he was my favorite of those guys. With the others there was my broken Spanish, which they enjoyed bantering, it flattered them; they made no such effort back with English, and repeatedly our lack of ability to communicate caused trouble for the job, and created errors and headaches and waste. My comprehension was better than they imagined, and I understood from things I overheard - teasing things like "ooo, te quiere" as I left, after I had pled with the foreman about something - that my position with respect to them would always be false and uncomfortable.
It came to me with a certain dread that a future without any Americans in the trades - which can seem like a possibility down here so close to Mexico - is actually alarming. It should be easier to get work done; it somehow seems harder now. There was a middle ground, I guess you'd say, from which we benefitted twenty years ago. But: price was not all.
One of the nice things about trades is that they are mobile and you can take a break from them. A lot of women with careers feel like they can't get off the treadmill for a few years when kids are young or move to a new city they would rather raise a family in without resetting their career. Yes, they often overestimate these concerns, but the bottom line is that being in a trade is more fungible and flexible then corporate work.
This seems like one of the draws of nursing.
Huge.
In fact I know some smart men that have gotten into nursing. If you're willing to travel and work night shifts you can get very rich very young. And the education requirement is not that bad.
The drawback is many nurses weirdly seem to be a bunch of skanks, but there are a lot of good ones.
The nurses were attractive, friendly, generally international young women when I most recently hung out with a family member in the hospital.
Congratulations. It is great to see your children flourish! Your daughter is far too smart for college. She has chosen a career which requires deep knowledge and considerable ingenuity to solve real and urgent problems in real time. She won't be up to her ears in debt, and she will always have work.