Great post. Here's my oversimplification - the supreme remedy factor for the individual (and thus collectively), you identify in your solutions for the individual = the family. Rob Henderson's post today helps amplify this point.
This is an excellent oversimplification. Family is the first step to promote lifelong learning, but how exactly does the family help? First, let’s summarize this post.
How do we stop learning, individually and collectively?
Individual barriers
-Innate Limitations
-Bad Health
-Bad People to Copy
-Lack of persistence
-Lack of new experiences
-Lack of time
-Closed Mind
Barriers to Collective Learning
-Repression
-Dogmatism
-Disorder
-Bad ideas able to win
Why Learning Matters (a lot)
- “The title Learning Economics has a double meaning. It suggests a book that is intended to have educational value. However, it also refers to the economy itself as a system for learning…Economic growth is due primarily to the accumulation and successful application of knowledge.
- “This concept of economic growth as a learning process, which might receive offhand mention in mainstream textbooks, is central to the thinking here…
- “I am obsessed with individual and social learning
So Arnold is focused on individual and social learning, but his perspective is probably constrained unnecessarily by economic themes. The economist has an important and historically undervalued role, but economic thinking is too narrow and analytical rather than poetic and compelling. Does Arnold’s latest book Three Languages succeed more than his other books because it is less narrowly economics oriented?
Next steps
1. Buy and read Arnold’s book Learning Economics
2. Incorporate into Arnold’s “Learning narrative” - the family narrative as a remedy, with the goal of motivating lifelong learning with special emphasis on Good People to Copy.
Adding to Arnold’s perspective, my version of the family narrative would borrow from
A)The importance of family within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (minus the supernatural stuff)
B) Peter Gray’s wisdom on the importance of play and amateurism
C) Bryan Caplan’s self-help prescription, noting similarities between his favorite self-help book, How to Win Friends, and the Bible (in the telling of anecdotes about real or fictional people)
D) Thales Academy Top 15 Outcomes and Bob Luddy’s book The Thales Way, which can be thought of as secular religion or plan of character education for primary and secondary schools.
E) Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice, can be thought of as secular scripture
F) Russ Robert’s Adam Smith and Wild Problems books (sophisticated economic thinking)
G) James Otteson’s Adam Smith books, which are updated versions of TMS
H) Greg Lukianoff’s prescription in Canceling books, especially CBT
I) John Wooden’s book Lifetime of Observations
J) Richard Vedder’s book Restoring the Promise, minus much of the policy prescriptions
K) Wisdom from various athletes, especially endurance athletes
L) Dana Gioia’s wisdom on poetry, music, literature
M) Wisdom from American history, the Founding, the Constitution
N) John Miller’s book QBQ
O) Many biographies, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglas, etc
Integrate all of this into a book to help guide families, individuals, schools, neighborhoods, etc.
Answer, in a nutshell...... "Learning requires motivation". Anyone who has been a schoolteacher knows that lack-of-motivation (at least in the formal schooling context) is a vast ocean.
A good question would be "Why haven't auto-didacts taken over the world yet?" and that is the answer. Applying that to people who are not so good at teaching themselves and you can easily see why the current US educational model (butts in seats, poor quality teaching, huge grading curves, just pass students through, etc.) doesn't do much good.
Students ask two questions reliably, especially when young: "What do I need this for in real life?" and "Will this be on the exam?" The first is a really good question a teacher needs to be able to answer; the second is what happens when you are only hitting the absolute bare minimum motivation to learn.
People who are blesssed with a natural curiosity (whether in the genes or in the upbringing) do not ask "What do I need this for in real life?".... they just WANT to know things for its own sake. Unfortunately I think such people will always be the exception; whatever educational 'system' is in place.
Agreed, but even the most curious of people have a limit as to what they can know and how much time they can spend to learn it. A lot of stuff taught in class really is pointless on the level of "Ok class, let me tell you the names and personalities of every cat I have owned", and others are more like "You don't really use this in real life, but you need to understand it to learn this other thing you will learn." The latter is good to teach and telling students why they need to know it helps motivate them; the former is obviously bad. As the teacher, having an answer helps to differentiate between those things that are trivia only you care about and what actually is worth talking about.
One example I found in college for example was in calculus. Every advanced science student, social or natural, needs calculus, but it is always taught by math majors. That's a problem because the mathematicians care about the math for itself, but most of their students care about the math for how they are going to use it as a tool. As a result students slog through a lot of "this is the theory of how derivatives work" when all they really need is "This is how you calculate and use them, and this is when not to try and use them." The result is that the students only kind of can use derivatives but often lose sight of the important aspects of their use in the sea of other stuff.
And that's math... it gets a LOT worse in less technical fields :D
I was thinking more along the lines of your auto-didact. In fact I am pondering doing a future essay on my own Substack on the subject of de-schooling society (including some reference to Illych of course).
Oh, yea that makes sense. Although, one might say that auto-didacts ask the question but already know the answer is "because it is interesting!" There are lots of things that don't meet that criteria and so don't get any attention from them.
Lots of people want to know things for their own sake, but those are often things schools don't care about. Why your local football team hasn't been winning and what it should do to win more. Anything about Taylor Swift. What Metallica's best album was and why. Who is a better actor of some pair. How to succeed at a certain video game. The many varieties of Hummel figurines. The possibilities are endless.
Re: "the biggest, most durable organizations that generate high costs and low benefits are non-profits and governments."
Arnold, please consider addressing a fact that is prima facie puzzling, given your argument: The very industry that specializes in learning — the education industry — comprises mainly not-for-profit orgs and enrollments in public schools (public:private ratio = 10:1 in the US) and in public universities (ratio = 3:1 in the US).
People mistrust the profit motive especially in the education industry. Why?
People mistrust local competition (but embrace Tiebout sorting) in the education industry. Why?
People stack the deck against for-profit educational institutions, via the major advantage of tax exemption for not-for-profit schools, and stack the deck against private schools all stripes via major local taxpayer subsidies of public schools. Why?
People rarely apply relevant new knowledge to improve education (experiment, evaluate, evolve). Why?
People respond to ineffectiveness in education by compounding inefficiency. If an education intervention doesn't work (the null hypothesis), then the answer is to double down on resources for such interventions. Why?
Tough questions about voter psychology, political economy, and the education industry!
The really weird thing about education is that it assumes "the consumer" doesn't know what the product is. Not only doesn't the consumer know, but by definition, the consumer cannot know. She is not (yet?) educated. So who knows? Well, most people assume it is the people doing the educating. So they have tremendous leeway.
Many industries involve asymmetric information (consumer ignorance), but comprise mainly for-profit firms. For example, unlike the good old days, few motorists know much about automotive diagnostics—but I have never seen a not-for-profit auto repair firm or a public auto repair org. And it seems that regulation is relatively light in the auto repair industry. You get the idea. The education industry is a puzzle, no?
Maybe I'm too close but it just doesn't seem that puzzling to me. Perhaps I should think more deeply. Is it time dependence? Once government provided "free" schools, schools that weren't free withered. And government schools pretty much by definition were non-profit. So why would governments provide schools? Popular demand? People came to believe that schools were necessary to create good citizens, to provide children the skills and knowledge they needed to succeed in the world. How spontaneous was that and how much a result of marketing by pro-schooling people?
Certainly, most people don't know how to repair their own cars. But the service that is provided by repair shops is fairly well-defined. "The front wheels pull to the right and make a weird sound." You then get the car back and see if the wheels still pull or make a weird noise. "Education" generally involves entrusting a youngster to a "school" for six or seven hours every day for 180 days for many years. The school then tells you whether the youngster is educated by giving you periodic grades (a "report card") and eventually a diploma. If they say the kid is more or less educated, who are you to disagree?
Your second paragraph points out that the payer (parent or taxpayer) can't check quality in education. For-profit firms (e.g., USNWR ratings/rankings) sell quality checks. There are some external metrics of individual education (e.g., standardized tests). Imperfect, to be sure, but not noise.
Schools and universities tend to eschew external metrics of their performance. I have never seen, say, a Department of Economics that requires its students take the Econ GRE when they declare the Major, and then again when they complete the Major. The incentives of the test-takers would be imperfect, to be sure. But the exercise would shed some independent light on quality of education (value added).
The quality-control issues don't seem to entail that schools need be not-for-profit or public.
(There are lots of complications. For example, the customer is also an input to her own and her classmates' education. But the prevalence of not-for-profit and public institutions remains an analytical puzzle, I think—although the historical argument from path dependence has bite.)
My intuition is that part of the solution to the puzzle is entangled with the question: "What about the children?" There is a custodial aspect to formal education of minors. People seem especially to mistrust the profit motive when there is anxiety about entrusting minors to orgs (whose employees are strangers). The custodial aspect is entwined with inculcation of values.
But I want to second-guess my intuition. Counter-evidence: In recent years, the daycare industry has grown through for-profit firms.
You highlight path-dependence, reinforced by subsidies. This does seem to be a major cause.
I get what you are saying but it's either a little misstated or maybe even wrong. Degrees are almost all from public institutions or non-profits but education encompasses far more from a large variety of skill training, hobby training, books on an immense number of topics (including but far from limited to those used in degree granting institutions), continuing education required for licensing, on-the-job training and surely many more which almost all are neither public nor non-profit. And substack?
"People mistrust the profit motive especially in the education industry. Why?" Two words: Trump University. For education that is tightly focused on vocational goals, for-profit education often works fine. (I walk by a for-profit hairdressing school on my way to and from work; it is reputable and the students seem satisfied with what they get.) Being for-profit also works fine for publishers of books and other educational materials. It seems to break down with teaching, because the ethos of teaching is different from the ethos of maximizing monetary profit. Tutors are an exception, probably because of their tight focus.
The “market” doesn’t really exist, it is communication fiction, often composed of legal fictions. Humans exist, and join together to build stuff, grow stuff, make stuff, and do stuff—based on humans making individual moral decisions of what to. Those decisions are always influenced by the decisions of others.
What entrepreneurs learn, in the market, is whether the stuff being made can be sold to customers at a profit. If not, they stop making it and start trying to sell something else. Their earning money is based on them learning to sell stuff folk actually buy.
I’m disappointed not to see any education reform that pays students to learn. 20 days times 9 months times 10$ = $1800 which could easily be spent paying students daily for showing up with good behavior, and completing homework and test questions to demonstrate knowledge. Most of most people’s working lives are dominated by doing stuff for money. Which is mostly good—peaceful, voluntary, honest. Money would likely motivate poor students more, both those with less cash and those with lower IQs & grades.
This and other experiments should be tried to maximize the Learning of the students, NOT the education given. Too much ed, like development aid, is measured by cash spent. We need as a society to measure what is learned, and be willing to invest more if, and only if, a change produces better results.
My parents, when I first started school, paid me a dollar for every A I got on a report card. For a 6 year old, that was a big deal. So, in the 2nd grade, I started forging my report card.
I am not sure how I would react to my kids doing that. On the one hand I try to punish dishonesty, but on the other I would be kind of proud they figured out how to work around the system :D
Yea, I think it would take me a moment to collect my thoughts, then say something along the lines of "I had better never catch you doing anything like this again." So far the girls have never noticed that I am not strictly saying "Don't ever do that again" and hopefully when they are older I can explain the notion that they did a good job of recognizing what mechanism actually gets them what they want, and that is an important skill, but their methodology is deceiving their customer, as it were, and that is very bad.
Paying for performance seems to have some disincentive effects, seeming to remove intrinsic motivations. The research is a bit fuzzy (I wouldn't be willing to bet on it being true) but I would be worried that it applies more solidly when it comes to learning, and students would quickly adapt to optimize to get money and not learn.
That said, it would be worth trying at a high level, not paying for mere attendance but performance on standardized tests or the like. Paying for mastery of material or skills might well work.
I actually support paying for non-disruptive attendance, especially K-3, tho thru whole K-12, to allow a teacher to penalize bad behavior with less money for that day, including warnings beforehand. Taking away a benefit is a good disincentive threat which can more easily used by less powerful teachers. Teachers need a wider range of disciplinary responses to disruptions.
The problem there is that it incentivizes what we don't care about (showing up). What we care about is measured learning, which attendance can help but isn't necessary to achieve and is a really low bar to measure.
I also am not sure that young kids will really grasp "I am docking you 2$ today for your bad behavior" especially as the parents are going to be the ones collecting the money and making decisions about attendance overall. It might be worth trying, but I think social controls are the only thing that works really well with younger children, and that requires teachers with good classroom management and parents that demand good behavior.
"For a 6 year old, that [dollar] was a big deal" - you saw Yancey. That was twice a year, this would be ... weekly? monthly? daily? Money TO the student, by default. Allow opt-out (require parental consent and additional responsibility.)
I very much DO care about showing up AND not mis-behaving. For low IQ, non-college bound folk, the majority of below avg IQ folk, learning how to be with others and not misbehave is likely the biggest lesson/ habit that is taught, practiced in school.
Behavior is more of a habit than a 'learning', but for at least half the folks. this practiced/ learned habit of behaving well with strangers is the THE most important result of education.
Measuring low education results because of low IQ is NOT so interesting, tho learning to read is a huge deal.
I am not saying paying will definitely not work, just saying I am not optimistic. My kids get really excited about their money too, in part because we worked hard to set up a frame work that emphasizes the value of money. At the same time, however, generally kids don't get much opportunity to spend their own money, and what they can spend is limited. How many kids today can walk to the store themselves? How much of what they want to buy is readily available for the prices they could afford? Look at this like this, how much do young kids want for things because they are short on petty cash vs their parents not allowing it? If they have to save the money to get anything they care about, will that work for kids who are so short term focused that behaving themselves in school is a problem? Or will they decide it is impossible to get anything worthwhile and so trying to get the money is worth less than just doing what they feel like at the moment?
If your goal is "put the kids with other kids and teach them how to get along" that's fine, sure reward that with cash. If that is the educational outcome you care most about that will work. It won't work if what you care is learning other skills, and might take away from the learning of those skills if they are not incentivized as well, and if you don't design the whole system to avoid student satisficing on lower priority or easier to achieve incentives. It is a complicated and difficult thing, which is generally why "just pay people more" doesn't work really well to get better performance in most situations.
That doesn't mean it won't work better on some margins than the current system (which is broken for other reasons as well) but there are lots of reasons to think it might not work out. It probably should be tested, however.
Learning requires motivation indeed; and most people are motivated to learn the wrong things.
Girard's mimetic desire - that we also learn 'what to value' is extremely important.
The diversity of people ensures that most people are chasing things which are unsuitable for them and also not good for the system. The salience of metric over target means that many people are attempting to gain the reward through what is essentially shortcuts - Anyone who is motivated to 'game the system' is already chasing the wrong things, from a system perspective. As was wisely said, the root of all evil is premature optimization, and this shows up in the phrase 'low hanging fruit.' Mimesis also leads to many people chasing the same thing even when total substitutes are easily available - fads, for example.
[Book title] is a profoundly illuminating exploration of communication in America’s political landscape. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. Political discussions do not lead to agreement. Instead, most political commentary serves only to increase polarization.
This book could not be timelier, as Americans - whether as media pundits or while conversing at a party - talk past one another with ever-greater volume, heat, and disinterest in contrary opinions.
[Book title] is an accessible, precise, and insightful guide to lowering the barriers coarsening our politics. This is not a book about one ideology over another. Instead, it is a book about how we communicate issues and ideologies and how language intended to persuade instead divides. Arnold Kling offers a way to see through our rhetorical blinders so that we can incorporate new perspectives, nuances, and thinking into the important issues we must together share and resolve.
Forget everything you've ever read about starting an Internet business. Forget the moon-shot IPO's. Forget Silicon Valley and venture capital. The start-ups featured in Forbes, Fortune, and The Industry Standard represent only a sliver of what is happening on the Internet.Under the Radar tells the story of Web companies that bear little resemblance to the cash-burning businesses that were the media darlings before the Internet bubble burst. In this distinctive and timely guide, Arnold Kling, an experienced "Netstrapper" who sold his Internet start-up for 85 million, introduces the reader to more than two dozen business founders-all of whom launched their sites without venture capital-whose stories inspire and instruct. Kling advises Internet entrepreneurs not to waste time trying to woo big-time investors obsessed with billion-dollar jackpots. Instead, he offers clear, tough-minded coaching on every important aspect of building a real Internet enterprise -from evaluating business ideas to finding the best partners and making wise use of web technology. His step-by-step plan produces solid businesses that are free from market turbulence and investor control, making it easy to operate "under the radar."
In [book title], economist Arnold Kling argues that the way we finance health care matches neither the needs of patients nor the way medicine is practiced. The availability of premium medicine, combined with patients who are insulated from costs, means Americans are not getting maximum value per dollar spent. Using basic economic concepts, Kling demonstrates that a greater reliance on private saving and market innovation would eliminate waste, contain health care costs and improve the quality of care. Kling proposes gradually shifting responsibility for health care for the elderly away from taxpayers and back to the individual. The idea of matching the health care funding system to needs is very simple, Kling writes. The very poor and the very sick need help paying for health care. The rest of us do not.
The roots of the 2007–2008 financial crisis go back several decades. Could the catastrophe have been prevented? In this study, economist Arnold Kling presents a short but thorough history of financial markets and regulations as they pertain to the crisis. He looks at the role that housing policy, capital regulation, industry structure, innovation, and monetary policy played in creating the bad bets, excessive leverage, domino effects, and 21st-century bank runs that characterized the crisis. This study contextualizes the different factors that led to the crisis, draws meaningful lessons for anyone who wants to understand how the financial crisis came into being, why its impact was so devastating, and what policymakers should be thinking about as they redesign the financial regulatory system. This 2015 edition includes a new preface by the author, in which he reflects on how well his ideas have fared six years later.
Ours seems to be the age of the Partisan Hack. Looking over the list of best-selling books or the roster of columnists at top-drawer newspapers, success appears to correlate with mean-spirited attacks and heavy-handed rhetoric. Whatever happened to logical analysis of economic policy designed to illuminate as opposed to rabble-rouse? When I was young, economists Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson wrote regularly for a major news magazine. They wrote to educate and to persuade. If their columns were to appear among today's journalistic mudball fights, they would seem as quaint and unfamiliar as opera would be to a pop-music audience. I have ambitious I want you to find this book to be intellectually powerful but easily readable. You should encounter new ideas, including positions on major issues of economic policy that will challenge your thinking. The examples should feel fresh and contemporary, enabling you to see how economics can be used to understand the present and to envision the future. This book attempts to express what I call passionate reasonableness. By reasonable, I do not mean centrist, indecisive, or compromising to settle differences. I mean taking positions on public affairs based on facts, knowledge, and intelligent analysis of the consequences of policy proposals. I mean trying to persuade rather than mock those who take a different point of view. I mean trying to appeal to rather than insult the intelligence of the average reader. I am trying to fill the gap left in popular economic journalism today, as pundits seek to entertain and inflame but fail to educate and enlighten. Economic textbooks also fail to fill this gap. Unfortunately, the standard texts aretoo dry, technical, and old-fashioned to serve the purpose. In addition to an absence of reasonableness, today's economic journalism lacks perspective on technological dynamism. When I gaze into the future, I see rapid economic and technological change. While the economy as a whole will grow rapidly, the majority of today
In [book title], Arnold Kling provides a blueprint for those who are skeptical of political and financial elitism. At the heart of Kling's argument is the growing discrepancy between two phenomena: knowledge is becoming more diffuse, while political power is becoming more concentrated.
Kling sees this knowledge/power discrepancy at the heart of the financial crisis of 2008. Financial industry executives and regulatory officials lacked the ability to fathom the complexity of the system that had emerged. And, in response, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, said that they required still more power, including $700 billion to purchase "toxic assets" from banks.
Kling warns that increased concentration of power is a problem, not a panacea, for our modern world and suggests reforms designed to curb the growth of government and allow citizens greater control over the allocation of public goods.
Since the end of the second World War, economics professors and classroom textbooks have been telling us that the economy is one big machine that can be effectively regulated by economic experts and tuned by government agencies like the Federal Reserve Board. It turns out they were wrong. Their equations do not hold up. Their policies have not produced the promised results. Their interpretations of economic events -- as reported by the media -- are often of-the-mark, and unconvincing. A key alternative to the one big machine mindset is to recognize how the economy is instead an evolutionary system, with constantly-changing patterns of specialization and trade. This book introduces you to this powerful approach for understanding economic performance. By putting specialization at the center of economic analysis, Arnold Kling provides you with new ways to think about issues like sustainability, financial instability, job creation, and inflation. In short, he removes stiff, narrow perspectives and instead provides a full, multi-dimensional perspective on a continually evolving system.
The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. Over the last few decades, economists have begun a revolutionary reorientation in how we look at the world, and this has major implications for politics, policy, and our everyday lives. For years, conventional economists told us an incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world with all of its uncertainties, unknowns, and ongoing evolution.
What economists left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology that propel economies forward. Economists did not describe the dynamic process that leads to new pharmaceuticals, cell phones, Web-based information services-forces that fundamentally alter how we live our daily lives.
Economists also left out the negative forces that can hold economies back: bad governance, counterproductive social practices, and patterns of taking wealth instead of creating it. They took for granted secure property rights, honest public servants, and the willingness of individuals to experiment and adapt to novelty.
Kling mentions Henrich and Laland. Henrich's relevant book is The Secret of Our Success, well-written if a bit long. Laland's is Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind. Alas, it is not so well written.
“On the economy as a learning system, I now boil that down to experimentation, evaluation, and evolution. That is, a society must run a lot of experiments—think of start-up businesses or new initiatives from incumbent firms.”
In the Stone Age, experimentation was probably discouraged. Trial-and-error learning is not advisable when error could well mean injury or death. Thomas Edison famously failed over 1,000 times before finding a useful filament for his lightbulb. Caveman Edison would have starved long before falling 1,000 times.
Wealth buys us second chances, thousands of second chances. So, wealth is a necessary prerequisite for society to run a lot of experiments. And because wealthy societies can afford more experiments, they will advance more quickly than poorer ones.
On the downside, great wealth can breed hubris and moral hazard as it drives the cost of risk-taking down, or worse, allows the wealthy to shift the cost to others.
Information - you touch on this a couple times and maybe this isn't something you want in your list as a specific item but I'd say a huge factor in human learning is our ability to record and share information. People who have access to the best information and use it effectively do very well.
Bad people to copy - when I hear this I think lazy, doing the minimum, drugs, crime, gambling, etc. It doesn't have to be this. It can also be trying really hard but not knowing how to practice to be better. Learning from the very best can greatly enhance improvement. Many or most people with very little singing ability can be trained to sing quite well. That's true of most activities. In most cases only world class requires more than just very good training.
Hear me out. I have an inchoate notion that school - much truncated in its possession of kids' time!! - could be given over to teaching them "what to admire".* It would be a better use of the time of the incurious, the ordinary; and in its breadth would prompt the curious to go further.
An example: I believe science education, *after* the elementary school basics - which for me would have a much greater emphasis on the local, e.g. the making of a leaf book (after a trip to an aroboretum, not your apartment complex, have some discernment, people) - which is all most of us are going to remember anyway, would be better taught as the History of Science.
(If this sounds crazy - note that the great period of innovation starting roughly with the Renaissance, is enacted by auto-didacts and crazy experimenters whose schooling if they had any was mostly, here's what some Greeks and Romans did/said - and this persists all the way through the 19th century; it's commonplace to read 19th century educators complain about this odd curriculum.)
I am my own example in this. I was quick with the performance of math, but never once *saw* math, never grasped it beyond the pencilling in of an answer. As an adult though, I discovered a fondness for reading math books, and yes, while I am now able to go a certain distance into the actual math - I think even for those who cannot, it would be instructive to feel a part of this heritage/history, to understand something more about how we got here.
Ditto chemistry. I found redox equations boring. I found the structure of the atom interesting but it turned out that what I thought based on my schooling, was basically all wrong or completely misguided in the impression it left (shells). Whatever. I was no good in the lab. (I recall a particularly boring couple hours photographing with an actual camera the movement of a ball and deriving from it the equation of gravity. Like, it would have pretty amusing to be like, it doesn't hold up! I knew it! Which since I was terrible in the lab was eminently possible. This was part of an effort to get us to inculcate and worship the scientific method, in case we needed to use it sometime - in case it seemed mysterious. AS IF THE INTEREST LAY IN THE METHOD. What a pedagogical error.)
An old book encountered in adulthood called "The History of Chemistry" enthralled me however. The parade of personalities, the movement from one discovery to another, the progress made by aristocrats and then industrialists (dyes!). I felt something similar with that blog AK linked to the other day, about steam and pressure and vacuum advances from earliest times.
I was never going to be a chemist nor are most people. I learned more about chemistry in that one book than I did in high school, which admittedly was an indifferent public school in Houston, Texas 35 years ago. But still.
If it's not obvious, I think the plan to make a child basically recapitulate/recreate in his lessons and in his little school experiments, all the history of science in 12 years, as though he himself were a little scientist - is not working out for the masses. It didn't work out for me at all, and I am not unusually stupid.
*This process would, I think, have the ancillary benefit of instilling humility in both the brainy and the slow of brain. Like most people here, I imagine, I don't have the experience of sitting in a classroom for 12 years being considered the dumb one. That sounds like a terrible foundation for life. Demoralizing. It doesn't seem like a lesson that needs be driven home that long - you are average! You are less than average! I mean, jeez. It sounds like torture. And I say that as someone who found school torturous for wholly other reasons. A curriculum that emphasizes the achievements of others - not the little achievements of the classroom, like getting an A on a calculus test when you honestly couldn't have described calculus in a sensible paragraph, as a representation of the world - would democratize things. Children, heed what those who came before you have done. You are being initiated into something. The degree to which you want to take it - is up to you. Even if you don't go far - it is yours too!
I should add that I had a wonderful teacher, Ms. Doris Countee, in that high school whose approach to teaching science resulted in all I remember of those entire 4 years: going to the coast to collect crabs and stuff for our aquariums, going onboard a research vessel to get a feeling for that environment, going to look at sea turtles, having a vet come and spay a cat for us, going to the medical center to view cadavers and watch DeBakey in the operating theater.
I mean, I didn't really learn anything, but it was fun and probably opened some kids' eyes to things they might aspire to.
It also speaks to my other opinion which is that field trips should be much more the norm. I have the sense down here that they are much less common than they were when I was a kid. Because the Big State Test or something.
Sadly, unless teaching of economics has changed it can be quite boring but should not be. I was schooled on Samuelson for a full year of just learning the text and regurgitating. Were it not for the requirement of reading Friedman Capitalism and Freedom, and Robert H. Worldly Philosophers i would have found learning economics to be just a task of learning graphical and numerical analysis and calculations. Can lay similar criticism re intermediate Macro.
The point: Most teaching does not connect the dots if you will to classroom teaching to the real world; so maybe the fault lies not so much with would be learners but with the teachers who look to convey knowledge to students.
Could go on say same about calculus and others areas of math as well as history. Memorization, regurgitation for a great many a task like taking out the garbage; some will willing do it others will balk , but do it nonetheless.
Parenting number one should be about teaching values and the imprinting of that takes place at very young age.
Great post. Here's my oversimplification - the supreme remedy factor for the individual (and thus collectively), you identify in your solutions for the individual = the family. Rob Henderson's post today helps amplify this point.
This is an excellent oversimplification. Family is the first step to promote lifelong learning, but how exactly does the family help? First, let’s summarize this post.
How do we stop learning, individually and collectively?
Individual barriers
-Innate Limitations
-Bad Health
-Bad People to Copy
-Lack of persistence
-Lack of new experiences
-Lack of time
-Closed Mind
Barriers to Collective Learning
-Repression
-Dogmatism
-Disorder
-Bad ideas able to win
Why Learning Matters (a lot)
- “The title Learning Economics has a double meaning. It suggests a book that is intended to have educational value. However, it also refers to the economy itself as a system for learning…Economic growth is due primarily to the accumulation and successful application of knowledge.
- “This concept of economic growth as a learning process, which might receive offhand mention in mainstream textbooks, is central to the thinking here…
- “I am obsessed with individual and social learning
So Arnold is focused on individual and social learning, but his perspective is probably constrained unnecessarily by economic themes. The economist has an important and historically undervalued role, but economic thinking is too narrow and analytical rather than poetic and compelling. Does Arnold’s latest book Three Languages succeed more than his other books because it is less narrowly economics oriented?
Next steps
1. Buy and read Arnold’s book Learning Economics
2. Incorporate into Arnold’s “Learning narrative” - the family narrative as a remedy, with the goal of motivating lifelong learning with special emphasis on Good People to Copy.
Adding to Arnold’s perspective, my version of the family narrative would borrow from
A)The importance of family within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (minus the supernatural stuff)
B) Peter Gray’s wisdom on the importance of play and amateurism
C) Bryan Caplan’s self-help prescription, noting similarities between his favorite self-help book, How to Win Friends, and the Bible (in the telling of anecdotes about real or fictional people)
D) Thales Academy Top 15 Outcomes and Bob Luddy’s book The Thales Way, which can be thought of as secular religion or plan of character education for primary and secondary schools.
E) Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice, can be thought of as secular scripture
F) Russ Robert’s Adam Smith and Wild Problems books (sophisticated economic thinking)
G) James Otteson’s Adam Smith books, which are updated versions of TMS
H) Greg Lukianoff’s prescription in Canceling books, especially CBT
I) John Wooden’s book Lifetime of Observations
J) Richard Vedder’s book Restoring the Promise, minus much of the policy prescriptions
K) Wisdom from various athletes, especially endurance athletes
L) Dana Gioia’s wisdom on poetry, music, literature
M) Wisdom from American history, the Founding, the Constitution
N) John Miller’s book QBQ
O) Many biographies, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglas, etc
Integrate all of this into a book to help guide families, individuals, schools, neighborhoods, etc.
Answer, in a nutshell...... "Learning requires motivation". Anyone who has been a schoolteacher knows that lack-of-motivation (at least in the formal schooling context) is a vast ocean.
A good question would be "Why haven't auto-didacts taken over the world yet?" and that is the answer. Applying that to people who are not so good at teaching themselves and you can easily see why the current US educational model (butts in seats, poor quality teaching, huge grading curves, just pass students through, etc.) doesn't do much good.
Students ask two questions reliably, especially when young: "What do I need this for in real life?" and "Will this be on the exam?" The first is a really good question a teacher needs to be able to answer; the second is what happens when you are only hitting the absolute bare minimum motivation to learn.
People who are blesssed with a natural curiosity (whether in the genes or in the upbringing) do not ask "What do I need this for in real life?".... they just WANT to know things for its own sake. Unfortunately I think such people will always be the exception; whatever educational 'system' is in place.
Agreed, but even the most curious of people have a limit as to what they can know and how much time they can spend to learn it. A lot of stuff taught in class really is pointless on the level of "Ok class, let me tell you the names and personalities of every cat I have owned", and others are more like "You don't really use this in real life, but you need to understand it to learn this other thing you will learn." The latter is good to teach and telling students why they need to know it helps motivate them; the former is obviously bad. As the teacher, having an answer helps to differentiate between those things that are trivia only you care about and what actually is worth talking about.
One example I found in college for example was in calculus. Every advanced science student, social or natural, needs calculus, but it is always taught by math majors. That's a problem because the mathematicians care about the math for itself, but most of their students care about the math for how they are going to use it as a tool. As a result students slog through a lot of "this is the theory of how derivatives work" when all they really need is "This is how you calculate and use them, and this is when not to try and use them." The result is that the students only kind of can use derivatives but often lose sight of the important aspects of their use in the sea of other stuff.
And that's math... it gets a LOT worse in less technical fields :D
I was thinking more along the lines of your auto-didact. In fact I am pondering doing a future essay on my own Substack on the subject of de-schooling society (including some reference to Illych of course).
Oh, yea that makes sense. Although, one might say that auto-didacts ask the question but already know the answer is "because it is interesting!" There are lots of things that don't meet that criteria and so don't get any attention from them.
Lots of people want to know things for their own sake, but those are often things schools don't care about. Why your local football team hasn't been winning and what it should do to win more. Anything about Taylor Swift. What Metallica's best album was and why. Who is a better actor of some pair. How to succeed at a certain video game. The many varieties of Hummel figurines. The possibilities are endless.
Required but not sufficient alone.
Re: "the biggest, most durable organizations that generate high costs and low benefits are non-profits and governments."
Arnold, please consider addressing a fact that is prima facie puzzling, given your argument: The very industry that specializes in learning — the education industry — comprises mainly not-for-profit orgs and enrollments in public schools (public:private ratio = 10:1 in the US) and in public universities (ratio = 3:1 in the US).
People mistrust the profit motive especially in the education industry. Why?
People mistrust local competition (but embrace Tiebout sorting) in the education industry. Why?
People stack the deck against for-profit educational institutions, via the major advantage of tax exemption for not-for-profit schools, and stack the deck against private schools all stripes via major local taxpayer subsidies of public schools. Why?
People rarely apply relevant new knowledge to improve education (experiment, evaluate, evolve). Why?
People respond to ineffectiveness in education by compounding inefficiency. If an education intervention doesn't work (the null hypothesis), then the answer is to double down on resources for such interventions. Why?
Tough questions about voter psychology, political economy, and the education industry!
The really weird thing about education is that it assumes "the consumer" doesn't know what the product is. Not only doesn't the consumer know, but by definition, the consumer cannot know. She is not (yet?) educated. So who knows? Well, most people assume it is the people doing the educating. So they have tremendous leeway.
Thanks for your comment, Roger.
Many industries involve asymmetric information (consumer ignorance), but comprise mainly for-profit firms. For example, unlike the good old days, few motorists know much about automotive diagnostics—but I have never seen a not-for-profit auto repair firm or a public auto repair org. And it seems that regulation is relatively light in the auto repair industry. You get the idea. The education industry is a puzzle, no?
Maybe I'm too close but it just doesn't seem that puzzling to me. Perhaps I should think more deeply. Is it time dependence? Once government provided "free" schools, schools that weren't free withered. And government schools pretty much by definition were non-profit. So why would governments provide schools? Popular demand? People came to believe that schools were necessary to create good citizens, to provide children the skills and knowledge they needed to succeed in the world. How spontaneous was that and how much a result of marketing by pro-schooling people?
Certainly, most people don't know how to repair their own cars. But the service that is provided by repair shops is fairly well-defined. "The front wheels pull to the right and make a weird sound." You then get the car back and see if the wheels still pull or make a weird noise. "Education" generally involves entrusting a youngster to a "school" for six or seven hours every day for 180 days for many years. The school then tells you whether the youngster is educated by giving you periodic grades (a "report card") and eventually a diploma. If they say the kid is more or less educated, who are you to disagree?
Your second paragraph points out that the payer (parent or taxpayer) can't check quality in education. For-profit firms (e.g., USNWR ratings/rankings) sell quality checks. There are some external metrics of individual education (e.g., standardized tests). Imperfect, to be sure, but not noise.
Schools and universities tend to eschew external metrics of their performance. I have never seen, say, a Department of Economics that requires its students take the Econ GRE when they declare the Major, and then again when they complete the Major. The incentives of the test-takers would be imperfect, to be sure. But the exercise would shed some independent light on quality of education (value added).
The quality-control issues don't seem to entail that schools need be not-for-profit or public.
(There are lots of complications. For example, the customer is also an input to her own and her classmates' education. But the prevalence of not-for-profit and public institutions remains an analytical puzzle, I think—although the historical argument from path dependence has bite.)
My intuition is that part of the solution to the puzzle is entangled with the question: "What about the children?" There is a custodial aspect to formal education of minors. People seem especially to mistrust the profit motive when there is anxiety about entrusting minors to orgs (whose employees are strangers). The custodial aspect is entwined with inculcation of values.
But I want to second-guess my intuition. Counter-evidence: In recent years, the daycare industry has grown through for-profit firms.
You highlight path-dependence, reinforced by subsidies. This does seem to be a major cause.
I get what you are saying but it's either a little misstated or maybe even wrong. Degrees are almost all from public institutions or non-profits but education encompasses far more from a large variety of skill training, hobby training, books on an immense number of topics (including but far from limited to those used in degree granting institutions), continuing education required for licensing, on-the-job training and surely many more which almost all are neither public nor non-profit. And substack?
"People mistrust the profit motive especially in the education industry. Why?" Two words: Trump University. For education that is tightly focused on vocational goals, for-profit education often works fine. (I walk by a for-profit hairdressing school on my way to and from work; it is reputable and the students seem satisfied with what they get.) Being for-profit also works fine for publishers of books and other educational materials. It seems to break down with teaching, because the ethos of teaching is different from the ethos of maximizing monetary profit. Tutors are an exception, probably because of their tight focus.
The “market” doesn’t really exist, it is communication fiction, often composed of legal fictions. Humans exist, and join together to build stuff, grow stuff, make stuff, and do stuff—based on humans making individual moral decisions of what to. Those decisions are always influenced by the decisions of others.
What entrepreneurs learn, in the market, is whether the stuff being made can be sold to customers at a profit. If not, they stop making it and start trying to sell something else. Their earning money is based on them learning to sell stuff folk actually buy.
I’m disappointed not to see any education reform that pays students to learn. 20 days times 9 months times 10$ = $1800 which could easily be spent paying students daily for showing up with good behavior, and completing homework and test questions to demonstrate knowledge. Most of most people’s working lives are dominated by doing stuff for money. Which is mostly good—peaceful, voluntary, honest. Money would likely motivate poor students more, both those with less cash and those with lower IQs & grades.
This and other experiments should be tried to maximize the Learning of the students, NOT the education given. Too much ed, like development aid, is measured by cash spent. We need as a society to measure what is learned, and be willing to invest more if, and only if, a change produces better results.
My parents, when I first started school, paid me a dollar for every A I got on a report card. For a 6 year old, that was a big deal. So, in the 2nd grade, I started forging my report card.
I am not sure how I would react to my kids doing that. On the one hand I try to punish dishonesty, but on the other I would be kind of proud they figured out how to work around the system :D
My father definitely knew how to react, unfortunately for me.
Yea, I think it would take me a moment to collect my thoughts, then say something along the lines of "I had better never catch you doing anything like this again." So far the girls have never noticed that I am not strictly saying "Don't ever do that again" and hopefully when they are older I can explain the notion that they did a good job of recognizing what mechanism actually gets them what they want, and that is an important skill, but their methodology is deceiving their customer, as it were, and that is very bad.
Paying for performance seems to have some disincentive effects, seeming to remove intrinsic motivations. The research is a bit fuzzy (I wouldn't be willing to bet on it being true) but I would be worried that it applies more solidly when it comes to learning, and students would quickly adapt to optimize to get money and not learn.
That said, it would be worth trying at a high level, not paying for mere attendance but performance on standardized tests or the like. Paying for mastery of material or skills might well work.
I actually support paying for non-disruptive attendance, especially K-3, tho thru whole K-12, to allow a teacher to penalize bad behavior with less money for that day, including warnings beforehand. Taking away a benefit is a good disincentive threat which can more easily used by less powerful teachers. Teachers need a wider range of disciplinary responses to disruptions.
The problem there is that it incentivizes what we don't care about (showing up). What we care about is measured learning, which attendance can help but isn't necessary to achieve and is a really low bar to measure.
I also am not sure that young kids will really grasp "I am docking you 2$ today for your bad behavior" especially as the parents are going to be the ones collecting the money and making decisions about attendance overall. It might be worth trying, but I think social controls are the only thing that works really well with younger children, and that requires teachers with good classroom management and parents that demand good behavior.
"For a 6 year old, that [dollar] was a big deal" - you saw Yancey. That was twice a year, this would be ... weekly? monthly? daily? Money TO the student, by default. Allow opt-out (require parental consent and additional responsibility.)
I very much DO care about showing up AND not mis-behaving. For low IQ, non-college bound folk, the majority of below avg IQ folk, learning how to be with others and not misbehave is likely the biggest lesson/ habit that is taught, practiced in school.
Behavior is more of a habit than a 'learning', but for at least half the folks. this practiced/ learned habit of behaving well with strangers is the THE most important result of education.
Measuring low education results because of low IQ is NOT so interesting, tho learning to read is a huge deal.
I am not saying paying will definitely not work, just saying I am not optimistic. My kids get really excited about their money too, in part because we worked hard to set up a frame work that emphasizes the value of money. At the same time, however, generally kids don't get much opportunity to spend their own money, and what they can spend is limited. How many kids today can walk to the store themselves? How much of what they want to buy is readily available for the prices they could afford? Look at this like this, how much do young kids want for things because they are short on petty cash vs their parents not allowing it? If they have to save the money to get anything they care about, will that work for kids who are so short term focused that behaving themselves in school is a problem? Or will they decide it is impossible to get anything worthwhile and so trying to get the money is worth less than just doing what they feel like at the moment?
If your goal is "put the kids with other kids and teach them how to get along" that's fine, sure reward that with cash. If that is the educational outcome you care most about that will work. It won't work if what you care is learning other skills, and might take away from the learning of those skills if they are not incentivized as well, and if you don't design the whole system to avoid student satisficing on lower priority or easier to achieve incentives. It is a complicated and difficult thing, which is generally why "just pay people more" doesn't work really well to get better performance in most situations.
That doesn't mean it won't work better on some margins than the current system (which is broken for other reasons as well) but there are lots of reasons to think it might not work out. It probably should be tested, however.
If you keep learning bullshit propaganda you just keep getting dumber and dumber, ie covid!
Poor teaching, sometimes: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/16/why-dont-schools-teach-debugging-or-more-fundamentally-fundamentals/
Although that may be implicit in the bad people to copy subheader.
Learning requires motivation indeed; and most people are motivated to learn the wrong things.
Girard's mimetic desire - that we also learn 'what to value' is extremely important.
The diversity of people ensures that most people are chasing things which are unsuitable for them and also not good for the system. The salience of metric over target means that many people are attempting to gain the reward through what is essentially shortcuts - Anyone who is motivated to 'game the system' is already chasing the wrong things, from a system perspective. As was wisely said, the root of all evil is premature optimization, and this shows up in the phrase 'low hanging fruit.' Mimesis also leads to many people chasing the same thing even when total substitutes are easily available - fads, for example.
Can you match the book descriptions below with these Arnold Kling books?
Learning Economics (2004)
Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care (2006)
Under the Radar: Starting Your Internet Business without Venture Capital (2002)
The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides (2017)
Specialization and Trade: A Re-Introduction to Economists (2016)
Not What They Had in Mind: A History of the Policies That Produced the Financial Crisis of 2008 (2009)
From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity (2009)
Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy (2009)
Book Description 8
[Book title] is a profoundly illuminating exploration of communication in America’s political landscape. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. Political discussions do not lead to agreement. Instead, most political commentary serves only to increase polarization.
This book could not be timelier, as Americans - whether as media pundits or while conversing at a party - talk past one another with ever-greater volume, heat, and disinterest in contrary opinions.
[Book title] is an accessible, precise, and insightful guide to lowering the barriers coarsening our politics. This is not a book about one ideology over another. Instead, it is a book about how we communicate issues and ideologies and how language intended to persuade instead divides. Arnold Kling offers a way to see through our rhetorical blinders so that we can incorporate new perspectives, nuances, and thinking into the important issues we must together share and resolve.
Book Description 7
Forget everything you've ever read about starting an Internet business. Forget the moon-shot IPO's. Forget Silicon Valley and venture capital. The start-ups featured in Forbes, Fortune, and The Industry Standard represent only a sliver of what is happening on the Internet.Under the Radar tells the story of Web companies that bear little resemblance to the cash-burning businesses that were the media darlings before the Internet bubble burst. In this distinctive and timely guide, Arnold Kling, an experienced "Netstrapper" who sold his Internet start-up for 85 million, introduces the reader to more than two dozen business founders-all of whom launched their sites without venture capital-whose stories inspire and instruct. Kling advises Internet entrepreneurs not to waste time trying to woo big-time investors obsessed with billion-dollar jackpots. Instead, he offers clear, tough-minded coaching on every important aspect of building a real Internet enterprise -from evaluating business ideas to finding the best partners and making wise use of web technology. His step-by-step plan produces solid businesses that are free from market turbulence and investor control, making it easy to operate "under the radar."
Book Description 6
In [book title], economist Arnold Kling argues that the way we finance health care matches neither the needs of patients nor the way medicine is practiced. The availability of premium medicine, combined with patients who are insulated from costs, means Americans are not getting maximum value per dollar spent. Using basic economic concepts, Kling demonstrates that a greater reliance on private saving and market innovation would eliminate waste, contain health care costs and improve the quality of care. Kling proposes gradually shifting responsibility for health care for the elderly away from taxpayers and back to the individual. The idea of matching the health care funding system to needs is very simple, Kling writes. The very poor and the very sick need help paying for health care. The rest of us do not.
Book Description 5
The roots of the 2007–2008 financial crisis go back several decades. Could the catastrophe have been prevented? In this study, economist Arnold Kling presents a short but thorough history of financial markets and regulations as they pertain to the crisis. He looks at the role that housing policy, capital regulation, industry structure, innovation, and monetary policy played in creating the bad bets, excessive leverage, domino effects, and 21st-century bank runs that characterized the crisis. This study contextualizes the different factors that led to the crisis, draws meaningful lessons for anyone who wants to understand how the financial crisis came into being, why its impact was so devastating, and what policymakers should be thinking about as they redesign the financial regulatory system. This 2015 edition includes a new preface by the author, in which he reflects on how well his ideas have fared six years later.
Book Description 4
Ours seems to be the age of the Partisan Hack. Looking over the list of best-selling books or the roster of columnists at top-drawer newspapers, success appears to correlate with mean-spirited attacks and heavy-handed rhetoric. Whatever happened to logical analysis of economic policy designed to illuminate as opposed to rabble-rouse? When I was young, economists Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson wrote regularly for a major news magazine. They wrote to educate and to persuade. If their columns were to appear among today's journalistic mudball fights, they would seem as quaint and unfamiliar as opera would be to a pop-music audience. I have ambitious I want you to find this book to be intellectually powerful but easily readable. You should encounter new ideas, including positions on major issues of economic policy that will challenge your thinking. The examples should feel fresh and contemporary, enabling you to see how economics can be used to understand the present and to envision the future. This book attempts to express what I call passionate reasonableness. By reasonable, I do not mean centrist, indecisive, or compromising to settle differences. I mean taking positions on public affairs based on facts, knowledge, and intelligent analysis of the consequences of policy proposals. I mean trying to persuade rather than mock those who take a different point of view. I mean trying to appeal to rather than insult the intelligence of the average reader. I am trying to fill the gap left in popular economic journalism today, as pundits seek to entertain and inflame but fail to educate and enlighten. Economic textbooks also fail to fill this gap. Unfortunately, the standard texts aretoo dry, technical, and old-fashioned to serve the purpose. In addition to an absence of reasonableness, today's economic journalism lacks perspective on technological dynamism. When I gaze into the future, I see rapid economic and technological change. While the economy as a whole will grow rapidly, the majority of today
Book Description 3
In [book title], Arnold Kling provides a blueprint for those who are skeptical of political and financial elitism. At the heart of Kling's argument is the growing discrepancy between two phenomena: knowledge is becoming more diffuse, while political power is becoming more concentrated.
Kling sees this knowledge/power discrepancy at the heart of the financial crisis of 2008. Financial industry executives and regulatory officials lacked the ability to fathom the complexity of the system that had emerged. And, in response, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, said that they required still more power, including $700 billion to purchase "toxic assets" from banks.
Kling warns that increased concentration of power is a problem, not a panacea, for our modern world and suggests reforms designed to curb the growth of government and allow citizens greater control over the allocation of public goods.
Book Description 2
Since the end of the second World War, economics professors and classroom textbooks have been telling us that the economy is one big machine that can be effectively regulated by economic experts and tuned by government agencies like the Federal Reserve Board. It turns out they were wrong. Their equations do not hold up. Their policies have not produced the promised results. Their interpretations of economic events -- as reported by the media -- are often of-the-mark, and unconvincing. A key alternative to the one big machine mindset is to recognize how the economy is instead an evolutionary system, with constantly-changing patterns of specialization and trade. This book introduces you to this powerful approach for understanding economic performance. By putting specialization at the center of economic analysis, Arnold Kling provides you with new ways to think about issues like sustainability, financial instability, job creation, and inflation. In short, he removes stiff, narrow perspectives and instead provides a full, multi-dimensional perspective on a continually evolving system.
Book Description 1
The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. Over the last few decades, economists have begun a revolutionary reorientation in how we look at the world, and this has major implications for politics, policy, and our everyday lives. For years, conventional economists told us an incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world with all of its uncertainties, unknowns, and ongoing evolution.
What economists left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology that propel economies forward. Economists did not describe the dynamic process that leads to new pharmaceuticals, cell phones, Web-based information services-forces that fundamentally alter how we live our daily lives.
Economists also left out the negative forces that can hold economies back: bad governance, counterproductive social practices, and patterns of taking wealth instead of creating it. They took for granted secure property rights, honest public servants, and the willingness of individuals to experiment and adapt to novelty.
Kling mentions Henrich and Laland. Henrich's relevant book is The Secret of Our Success, well-written if a bit long. Laland's is Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind. Alas, it is not so well written.
“On the economy as a learning system, I now boil that down to experimentation, evaluation, and evolution. That is, a society must run a lot of experiments—think of start-up businesses or new initiatives from incumbent firms.”
In the Stone Age, experimentation was probably discouraged. Trial-and-error learning is not advisable when error could well mean injury or death. Thomas Edison famously failed over 1,000 times before finding a useful filament for his lightbulb. Caveman Edison would have starved long before falling 1,000 times.
Wealth buys us second chances, thousands of second chances. So, wealth is a necessary prerequisite for society to run a lot of experiments. And because wealthy societies can afford more experiments, they will advance more quickly than poorer ones.
On the downside, great wealth can breed hubris and moral hazard as it drives the cost of risk-taking down, or worse, allows the wealthy to shift the cost to others.
Information - you touch on this a couple times and maybe this isn't something you want in your list as a specific item but I'd say a huge factor in human learning is our ability to record and share information. People who have access to the best information and use it effectively do very well.
Bad people to copy - when I hear this I think lazy, doing the minimum, drugs, crime, gambling, etc. It doesn't have to be this. It can also be trying really hard but not knowing how to practice to be better. Learning from the very best can greatly enhance improvement. Many or most people with very little singing ability can be trained to sing quite well. That's true of most activities. In most cases only world class requires more than just very good training.
Hear me out. I have an inchoate notion that school - much truncated in its possession of kids' time!! - could be given over to teaching them "what to admire".* It would be a better use of the time of the incurious, the ordinary; and in its breadth would prompt the curious to go further.
An example: I believe science education, *after* the elementary school basics - which for me would have a much greater emphasis on the local, e.g. the making of a leaf book (after a trip to an aroboretum, not your apartment complex, have some discernment, people) - which is all most of us are going to remember anyway, would be better taught as the History of Science.
(If this sounds crazy - note that the great period of innovation starting roughly with the Renaissance, is enacted by auto-didacts and crazy experimenters whose schooling if they had any was mostly, here's what some Greeks and Romans did/said - and this persists all the way through the 19th century; it's commonplace to read 19th century educators complain about this odd curriculum.)
I am my own example in this. I was quick with the performance of math, but never once *saw* math, never grasped it beyond the pencilling in of an answer. As an adult though, I discovered a fondness for reading math books, and yes, while I am now able to go a certain distance into the actual math - I think even for those who cannot, it would be instructive to feel a part of this heritage/history, to understand something more about how we got here.
Ditto chemistry. I found redox equations boring. I found the structure of the atom interesting but it turned out that what I thought based on my schooling, was basically all wrong or completely misguided in the impression it left (shells). Whatever. I was no good in the lab. (I recall a particularly boring couple hours photographing with an actual camera the movement of a ball and deriving from it the equation of gravity. Like, it would have pretty amusing to be like, it doesn't hold up! I knew it! Which since I was terrible in the lab was eminently possible. This was part of an effort to get us to inculcate and worship the scientific method, in case we needed to use it sometime - in case it seemed mysterious. AS IF THE INTEREST LAY IN THE METHOD. What a pedagogical error.)
An old book encountered in adulthood called "The History of Chemistry" enthralled me however. The parade of personalities, the movement from one discovery to another, the progress made by aristocrats and then industrialists (dyes!). I felt something similar with that blog AK linked to the other day, about steam and pressure and vacuum advances from earliest times.
I was never going to be a chemist nor are most people. I learned more about chemistry in that one book than I did in high school, which admittedly was an indifferent public school in Houston, Texas 35 years ago. But still.
If it's not obvious, I think the plan to make a child basically recapitulate/recreate in his lessons and in his little school experiments, all the history of science in 12 years, as though he himself were a little scientist - is not working out for the masses. It didn't work out for me at all, and I am not unusually stupid.
*This process would, I think, have the ancillary benefit of instilling humility in both the brainy and the slow of brain. Like most people here, I imagine, I don't have the experience of sitting in a classroom for 12 years being considered the dumb one. That sounds like a terrible foundation for life. Demoralizing. It doesn't seem like a lesson that needs be driven home that long - you are average! You are less than average! I mean, jeez. It sounds like torture. And I say that as someone who found school torturous for wholly other reasons. A curriculum that emphasizes the achievements of others - not the little achievements of the classroom, like getting an A on a calculus test when you honestly couldn't have described calculus in a sensible paragraph, as a representation of the world - would democratize things. Children, heed what those who came before you have done. You are being initiated into something. The degree to which you want to take it - is up to you. Even if you don't go far - it is yours too!
I should add that I had a wonderful teacher, Ms. Doris Countee, in that high school whose approach to teaching science resulted in all I remember of those entire 4 years: going to the coast to collect crabs and stuff for our aquariums, going onboard a research vessel to get a feeling for that environment, going to look at sea turtles, having a vet come and spay a cat for us, going to the medical center to view cadavers and watch DeBakey in the operating theater.
I mean, I didn't really learn anything, but it was fun and probably opened some kids' eyes to things they might aspire to.
It also speaks to my other opinion which is that field trips should be much more the norm. I have the sense down here that they are much less common than they were when I was a kid. Because the Big State Test or something.
Sadly, unless teaching of economics has changed it can be quite boring but should not be. I was schooled on Samuelson for a full year of just learning the text and regurgitating. Were it not for the requirement of reading Friedman Capitalism and Freedom, and Robert H. Worldly Philosophers i would have found learning economics to be just a task of learning graphical and numerical analysis and calculations. Can lay similar criticism re intermediate Macro.
The point: Most teaching does not connect the dots if you will to classroom teaching to the real world; so maybe the fault lies not so much with would be learners but with the teachers who look to convey knowledge to students.
Could go on say same about calculus and others areas of math as well as history. Memorization, regurgitation for a great many a task like taking out the garbage; some will willing do it others will balk , but do it nonetheless.
Parenting number one should be about teaching values and the imprinting of that takes place at very young age.