Tag: Bryan Caplan

The alleged college-admissions bribery ring exposed earlier this week has something to enrage everyone. Or, if that wouldn’t do the trick, parents could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe coaches at elite schools to designate applicants as desired athletes, thus circumventing the minimum requirements for grades and test scores. This scandal is a staggering indictment of higher education, and American education policy generally. For both groups, and for everyone between the two extremes, the pressure to get kids into the best college possible — and then figure out how to pay for it — is a source of incredible anxiety. But the scandal goes beyond just these issues. George Mason economics professor Bryan Caplan, in his book The Case Against Education, makes a compelling case that most of the value in diplomas from elite colleges isn’t in the education they allegedly represent but in the cultural or social “signaling” they convey. Would you rather have the knowledge that comes with taking a survival-training course, or just the piece of paper that says you took the course? Now, ask yourself: Would you rather have the Yale education without the diploma, or the diploma without the education? The more complex we make a system, the more it rewards people with the resources — social, cognitive, political, or financial — to navigate it. You’re never going to create a system where some parents won’t do anything and everything to help their kids.

Empirical researchers are studying this--Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is one very important contribution--and as a way of organizing our thinking on rhetorical and political division I think Arnold Kling's short book The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides is especially insightful. He considers three groups in American politics: liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Liberals frame issues in terms of the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Conservatives frame issues in terms of the struggle between civilization and barbarism. Libertarians, meanwhile, frame issues in terms of the struggle between liberty and power (or coercion). These different framings lead us to different ways of thinking about policy issues. How, then, do we understand what is happening along the border, and how do we understand the political rhetoric and division regarding the migrant caravan? For conservatives, the struggle between barbarism and civilization is also obvious. The rights-emphasizing libertarian can point to the exercise of force along the border as illegitimate interference with voluntary interaction between migrants and those who wish to hire them, rent to them, care for them, or otherwise associate with them. Instead of jumping right to the assumptions of stupidity and ill will, Kling suggests that we first seek to really understand one another's ways of framing the issue, and not just superficially.