The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

by Bryan Caplan

A complementary account: calling any popular view a “fallacy” is socially undesirable—and the human mind is naturally prone to the fallacy of composition. Since education has pretty good selfish returns, humans hastily infer matching social returns; what’s true for the part must be true for the whole, right? Social Desirability Bias deters us from using our firsthand knowledge of the irrelevance of the curriculum to challenge this fallacy—even in the privacy of our own minds. The final story appeals to global elite culture. Non-Western elites straddle two worlds: Western elite culture, and their own traditional cultures. After Western elites fell in love with education in the nineteenth century, they won over Western masses and non-Western elites. Non-Western elites, in turn, gradually spread the gospel of education to their own cultures. The global ubiquity of proeducation sentiment is no more puzzling than the global ubiquity of Abrahamic religions. What’s so bad about Social Desirability Bias? It is the fountainhead of wasteful and counterproductive policies. You know the mechanism. Almost all governments on earth crave popularity. In democracies, leaders who fail to remain popular fail to remain leaders. In dictatorships, leaders who fail to remain popular can cling to power, but cling they must. Either way, leaders have a strong incentive to do whatever’s popular—to be crowd pleasers.