No one cared about my spreadsheets
Just my dumb opinion here, but... there's something extremely implausible on its face about the idea that a sufficiently complex spreadsheet could calculate the difference in value generated from kids going to school versus kids not going to school.<p>If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention.<p>I imagine a bunch of academics put their fingers to the wind and made wild guesstimates, and Caplan took it all very literally as some sort of sound foundation to evaluate education as a whole.<p>I mean jeez, what did he even compare our status quo education system <i>against?</i> Where did the kids <i>go</i> in the counterfactual no-education scenario? Did the kids all go home to an infinite supply of stay-at-home moms? Did they go to extended daycare, all the way up to age 18? What did they do with all that time?