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.If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention.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.I mean jeez, what did he even compare our status quo education system against? Where did the kids go 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?