Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…How would you go about measuring the amount of context of somebody who went to college? Is there something you can point to that says, “Oh, clearly they're getting some context, otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to do this”? I think if you meet enough people who didn't go to college, you'll see the difference, on average. Stressing the word average. Now there are papers measuring positive returns to higher education. I don't think they all show it’s due to context, but I am persuaded by most of Brian's arguments that you don't remember the details of what you learned in class. Oh, you learn this about astronomy and Kepler's laws and opportunity costs, etc. but people can't reproduce that two or three years later. It seems pretty clear we know that. However, they do learn a lot of context and how to deal with different personality types. Would you falsify this claim, though, that you are getting a lot of context? Is it just something that you had to qualitatively evaluate? What would have to be true in the world for you to conclude that the opposite is true?…

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