Thanks for linking our previous retort to DeBoer. He's so inconsistent, I'm not sure he's worth the time put into all of this! Curious whether people think his contrarian takes are having much influence on the education discourse.
Thanks for having retorted! I do think it's worth doing. It's worth it to disentangle the descriptive claims about what learning is possible from the evaluative claims about whose learning matters and why. It's also worth it to give gap closers in recovery a more constructive path forward!
The two exceptions are when he writes about psychiatric issues and education, where I think he has arguments that are worth fully engaging with. Appreciate you having done so here.
DeBoer is ALWAYS wrong. He can occasionally be amusingly wrong, but that's rare. You do know Freddie's a communist, right? That's a pretty fundamental misapprehension of reality for anyone to make and maintain well into their 40s...
DeBoer is right a lot despite being a Marxist. And he is right about education. Education is like athletics. Sure training and good methodology will make everyone better, but they work even better for the already talented and I can train 100 random people the same for a sport like powerlifting or distance running and the results differences will be massive even if all are equally motivated and all have the best methodology. Cognitive stuff is no different. And in say powerlifting, if everyone in powerlifting all at once puts 10% on their squat, the best are now even better than the second best than they were before. Rank order matters. Education optimists have no answer for this stuff - that positional goods are not the same as absolute goods. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to match everyone with the best education we can since at the individual level it is hard to tell these things up front, but the problem happens when people mistake selection effects for treatment effects. Lots of people who "don't try" in school are just reacting logically to having already figured out they suck at it.
No where is deBoer MORE wrong than on education. He's kinda got smart kids/dumb kids figured out (duh!), but he can't seem to come up with where they come from, why, and how to deal with ability tracks. For a clue, see Pinker's latest: "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..."
FdB has never had to train an employee that can’t read technical writing, but who clearly has the intelligence that they could have learned it because their school sucked.
His endless focus on “relative” education is more about his own biases and ideology than anything to do with education.
The problem with deBoer's analysis is that, being him a socialist (or whatever), he doesn't know how the economy works, and so the analysis makes no sense.
People's salaries/compensations depend, to put it simply, on their productivity level, and the productivity level of the company where they work, and more broadly, of the country.
Two huge components (but not the only ones) are the technological level (do you use 1920s or 2020s equipment to cut the steel in your plant?) and the skills of the employees (is your employee able to use modern office programs on a PC or does he still use the typewriter?).
So even if you have a big disparity where only 5 or 10% of people have high-salary technical/scientific jobs (engineers, software developers, neurologists), the fact that the other 90% knows how to use a computer, for example, is incredibly important.
It's important for their salaries (the higher productivity is the main force that increases salaries) and for the economic growth of societies.
So, in particular for those low-middle skilled office jobs that require reading comprehension, basic numerical skills, the effective use of computer, the more you know, the more you are productive, and the more you are productive the more you earn, generally. And the more the economy will benefit.
Even if the neurosurgeon will earn 10 times more than you. But that's not important, the important thing is that your salary still rises in absolute terms.
Feddie gets this perfectly well. His criticism is that the education optimists are the ones who conflate levels of analysis on this. People who think he denies individuals can learn things aren't reading his pieces - he has a sea of throat clearing in every piece on this. But imagine your job was squatting 500 pounds. And tomorrow everyone starts running cycles of Deca. Your squat might now be 600 pounds but you aren't going to be *better* at your job because the Deca has established a new normal. Libertarians seem to not to know what to do with positional goods. I everyone gets better, nobody gets better. Now for any individual it is logical and good that we educate and try to use the best methodology, motivate people, etc. But we all should keep in mind we are just seeking individual positional gain and our efforts are for nothing if everyone does it successfully.
You've invented a hypothetical job that pays you for 500 pound squats (why?) but then nobody sees any marginal productivity benefit in the fact that you can now do 600? Real jobs do not pay arbitrary amounts to do arbitrary things. Please try to map that onto a real skill/job.
Because its an analogy about positional goods. I think the education optimists that think education has big scalable social effects for underperforming kids simply discount the economics of positional goods and how much education has always been signaling of innate traits rather than treatment effects. Im.a proponent of education (I work in education!) but I appreciate Freddie as a counterpoint to some aspects of the education reformer account.
But this is not how real jobs work, if you and the others in your job/sector get better or more productive, the productivity for that sector increases and salaries too.
This is not a controversial thing to say, it's Econ 101, and it's true for top researchers and for the average office worker.
Absolute skill is important - medicine, engineering, science, - intelligence and absolute skill truly matter. Fields / subfields tend to have a minimum required IQs - people less intelligent than the threshold are unlikely to have expected levels of competence in the field/subfield.
Daughter #3 was relatively academiclly gifted - she did early admission to the University after 10th grade. I observed how she did in her classes and what she found as easy and what she found more difficult. She found the straightforward math to be easy - calculus, differential equations, ..., but the more abstract math to be more opaque. Linear algebra in terms of matrix operations was straightforward, linear algebra proofs were more opaque. I told her - your intelligence is high enough that you could handle a Ph.D. in experimenatl Physics, but funding is difficult, jobs are unstable, and the opportunity cost is high. Go into Engineering. She did her BS and MS in Civil Engineering - structures, and deals with seismic risk issues on the job. You need a high absolute skill level do the work.
To follow one of the more demanding STEM areas you need a relatively high absolute skill level when you start your education - or you will have to take at least a year or two longer to get your skills up to the needed starting level. She did calculus in 10th grade - which had required summer self-study for the two summers before she went to college to get to the requisite level.
I find it weird that people will admit that if I take 100 random 20 year olds and train them like elite powerlifters and they all do exactly what I say and badly want to be elite powerlifters that there will be massive differences in strength results after a year with lots of really low responders and a few really high responders. But then think that cognitive stuff is somehow more egalitarian. And I find it weird they don’t get that people who “don’t try” in school are selecting into the “don’t try” group largely because it is no fun to apply yourself to something you already have figured out you aren’t good at. One can think education is great for helping people find and develop whatever talents they may have and that this is important but also know that the talent has to be there and if everyone tries maximally and you have the best possible methods, you are going to have huge gaps and the same bell curve, although possibly with the whole thing moved to the right. My guess is if everyone were maximally motivated and given the best methods of teaching, the smartest people who get much better and the less smart people just a little better. I am (was) a decent local/state level distance runner and I have a great build for it and wanted it really bad and trained really hard and I was never as fast as some HS kids are in their first two years of running. My wife ran for years because I did and really tried and was never any good. After a running injury she switched to bodybuilding/powerlifting and was immediately awesome and has a 227 bench and 388 deadlift weighing 146 pounds at age 54. and is built like a superhero. Obviously good training methodologies produce better athletes, but if you have been around athletes much you have seen the massive unfairness in genetic talent and all the work in the world won’t overcome it. But we somehow think education is different. And in athletics, the most talented are the ones who benefit the most from training innovation and PEDS. Thinking educational methodologies will solve educational inequality is like thinking Deca or Nandrolone will solve powerlifting inequality. I mean, obviously better methods are better than worse ones at the individual level and everyone can get better than they are if they don’t work at all and have bad training methodologies, but expectations should be modest for impact at scale to move people around in rank order, which is largely what matters for an individual in education.
I've been reading since day 1 - thanks for everything you're putting out. It's insightful, and a necessary part of the conversation. Keep up the good work! I should say that I don't really care for FdB or the inherent merits of relative education, but I think the collective driving towards absolute learning will need some nuance if we are to succeed with it as as a driving principle for economic progress.
For decades, we’ve asked the education system to solve for what are fundamentally the ills of poverty, and that’s an unfair burden. But since public education is universal, free, and taxpayer-funded, it still has a responsibility to mitigate the unequal outcomes our economic system produces (ideally alongside other universal public systems like healthcare, housing, transportation, and social safety net programs).
Absolute learning clearly has value for individuals and for the economy. But in a society with deep, racialized inequality, it cannot be the guiding principle on its own. Poverty in the U.S. is not race-neutral, and neither are its effects. If we pursue “neutral” gains in learning without explicitly addressing how poverty disproportionately harms Black, Latino, and Indigenous students, we are not only not being equitable, but we risk simply reproducing both economic and racial disparities under the banner of progress.
At the same time, reducing education to a race for relative positioning doesn’t serve kids or our long-term prosperity either. The real challenge isn’t choosing between absolute and relative learning. Our challenge is to refuse a framework that forces that tradeoff. We need an education system that grows capability while directly confronting the structural conditions that determine who gets to benefit from that growth in the first place. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I’m increasingly convinced that pretending this tension doesn’t exist is how we keep getting it wrong.
Deboer isn’t wrong that the plurality of people probably on a day to day basis care more about relative learning, particularly students. But it is wise to care about absolute learning. Good employers, hiring managers, colleges, etc are going to care about real skills. Also we are in global competition. So yeah while a student in Boise, might want to study just hard enough not to be average or just above average, I bet if you asked them if they wanted their school to compete with San Francisco, New York, or maybe more importantly Beijing they are going to say yes. We need to step back and see that relative learning is against peers on a global scale and the best way to get there is students learning real skills at a challenging pace.
Yes, we should improve absolute educational performance and we should expect that the most talented end up being rewarded more for things people want done. I agree that improving education for all will generally make everyone better off. At the same time, we should have some humility: the oversized role luck plays should not be discounted. As such, Inequalities will still exist and we shouldn't tell ourselves bog-standard libertarian stories about those who didn't succed. Valuing intellectual excellence doesn't mean ridiculing those wio are unlucky. Nurturing the skills of the most gifted doesn't entail also instilling in those people notions that those who didn't make it are inferior or less than. Luck is cruel but we don't have to be.
I mean what's lacking? Here is the whole entire thing: why does improving educational outcomes for individuals in turn improve their financial situation, which is the entire basis of the education reform movements claims to being a moral movement?
This value is positional not absolute. Your value as an employee is relative to those who your company could reasonably hire to replace you.
The labor market point only goes through if you suppose that raising the floor creates more and better jobs, which it might, but thats an empirical question with mixed results.
If your alternative is that more productivity simply disappears into the aether with no direct or indirect benefit to the business, the worker, or anyone, then you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.
No, my alternative is that absent more competitive pressure in the labor market, the marginal productivity is overwhelmingly more likely to accrue to the employer than to the worker. And the competitive pressures are the thing that's zero sum, not the absolute levels of productivity — which I fully agree, can increase.
So yes, no disagreement that raising the floor improves all up productivity and that extra value arithmetically has to go somewhere. But it takes additional assumptions to conclude that it will flow to labor.
Why would you WANT it to flow to labor, though, given your premises? If improved productivity mostly ends up in the pocket of customers or shareholders, that benefit can then plausibly be redistributed as poverty relief - without destroying the incentives which enabled it.
Good question. Can you elaborate on (i) what in my premises leads you to believe I wouldn't want it to flow to labor, and (ii) why a pre-distributional rather than re-distributional regime would destroy incentives that deliver higher absolute productivity?
On the plausibility point, I'm skeptical. First, the last 50 years of American welfare and taxation policy demonstrate that we don't have a successful track record of redistribution. Second, most Americans prefer pre-distribution over re-distribution b/c of dignity considerations (and rightly so, there's more dignity and self development in it).
If better absolute learning can 1) enhance your value proposition to the one that pays you and 2) teach versatile skills so you can better adapt to opportunities or changing market conditions, I think that's as likely to improve your long term financial condition as education ever could. I guess I'm not sure what kinds of extra guarantees you (or Freddie) were expecting.
Here's a thought experiment for those who are tempted by the "only relative performance matters except for the very top" view:
Suppose a deus ex machina-being waved a wand and made it so that everyone except the top 5% in cognitive ability suddenly got 10 extra IQ points, while the top 5% were unchanged. Would this result in significant economic growth?
By FDB's logic as I understand it, he thinks it would not. I think it would (maybe 10 is the wrong number, or maybe you want a different cognitive ability metric than IQ, but the idea isn't really sensitive to the choice of number or metric). This may be a good crux for clarifying different views about how economic performance depends on human capital.
> The answer relies, crucially, on seeing that deBoer treats meritocracy as fundamentally a system of moral justification rather than of socio-economic incentives.
Philosophers standardly view it as both. Freddie’s primary concern is that a focus on raising the floor just launders an unwillingness to do more rigorous redistribution because we want to see how much we can enable people to improve their own welfare through better education. It’s not only empirically under-motivated to expect raising the educational floor to achieve better downstream social outcomes, it is morally suspect because it forestalls an obligation to act.
I know you will say that we can aim to simultaneously raise the floor in the economic and educational spheres—and I agree—but in Freddie’s defense, suppose we woke up one day and found ourselves in a welfare utopia where the bottom quintile had decent state-sponsored housing, healthcare, and food. In that world, what would be the point of more marginal effort to maximize the educational gains of the untalented? Wouldn’t investments in intelligence and educational outcome look a bit more like investments in athletic outcomes? Where we’re more or less untroubled by unathletic students who decide not to try and reach their full potential?
If you think the economic stakes of educational outcomes are what matter, then specify what those get you and then stipulate that the state provides just that via redistribution. Whatever is the remainder, would be, I’m guessing Freddie would say — morally uninteresting from the standpoint of absolute welfare: like athletic ability.
So then the challenge is — why fret so much about raising the floor if you’ve accepted ex hypothesi that the state could provide all the things you thought raising the floor was essential to secure?
Thanks for linking our previous retort to DeBoer. He's so inconsistent, I'm not sure he's worth the time put into all of this! Curious whether people think his contrarian takes are having much influence on the education discourse.
Thanks for having retorted! I do think it's worth doing. It's worth it to disentangle the descriptive claims about what learning is possible from the evaluative claims about whose learning matters and why. It's also worth it to give gap closers in recovery a more constructive path forward!
Freddie's ouevre can generally be summarized in six words:
Always provocative, frequently interesting, rarely wise.
The two exceptions are when he writes about psychiatric issues and education, where I think he has arguments that are worth fully engaging with. Appreciate you having done so here.
Freddie elides the fundamental (and deadly radioactive) truth destroying public education in the USA.
DeBoer is ALWAYS wrong. He can occasionally be amusingly wrong, but that's rare. You do know Freddie's a communist, right? That's a pretty fundamental misapprehension of reality for anyone to make and maintain well into their 40s...
DeBoer is right a lot despite being a Marxist. And he is right about education. Education is like athletics. Sure training and good methodology will make everyone better, but they work even better for the already talented and I can train 100 random people the same for a sport like powerlifting or distance running and the results differences will be massive even if all are equally motivated and all have the best methodology. Cognitive stuff is no different. And in say powerlifting, if everyone in powerlifting all at once puts 10% on their squat, the best are now even better than the second best than they were before. Rank order matters. Education optimists have no answer for this stuff - that positional goods are not the same as absolute goods. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to match everyone with the best education we can since at the individual level it is hard to tell these things up front, but the problem happens when people mistake selection effects for treatment effects. Lots of people who "don't try" in school are just reacting logically to having already figured out they suck at it.
No where is deBoer MORE wrong than on education. He's kinda got smart kids/dumb kids figured out (duh!), but he can't seem to come up with where they come from, why, and how to deal with ability tracks. For a clue, see Pinker's latest: "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..."
P.S. For deBoer's latest education blathering on his Substack, see: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/was-the-united-states-once-a-global
FdB has never had to train an employee that can’t read technical writing, but who clearly has the intelligence that they could have learned it because their school sucked.
His endless focus on “relative” education is more about his own biases and ideology than anything to do with education.
The problem with deBoer's analysis is that, being him a socialist (or whatever), he doesn't know how the economy works, and so the analysis makes no sense.
People's salaries/compensations depend, to put it simply, on their productivity level, and the productivity level of the company where they work, and more broadly, of the country.
Two huge components (but not the only ones) are the technological level (do you use 1920s or 2020s equipment to cut the steel in your plant?) and the skills of the employees (is your employee able to use modern office programs on a PC or does he still use the typewriter?).
So even if you have a big disparity where only 5 or 10% of people have high-salary technical/scientific jobs (engineers, software developers, neurologists), the fact that the other 90% knows how to use a computer, for example, is incredibly important.
It's important for their salaries (the higher productivity is the main force that increases salaries) and for the economic growth of societies.
So, in particular for those low-middle skilled office jobs that require reading comprehension, basic numerical skills, the effective use of computer, the more you know, the more you are productive, and the more you are productive the more you earn, generally. And the more the economy will benefit.
Even if the neurosurgeon will earn 10 times more than you. But that's not important, the important thing is that your salary still rises in absolute terms.
Feddie gets this perfectly well. His criticism is that the education optimists are the ones who conflate levels of analysis on this. People who think he denies individuals can learn things aren't reading his pieces - he has a sea of throat clearing in every piece on this. But imagine your job was squatting 500 pounds. And tomorrow everyone starts running cycles of Deca. Your squat might now be 600 pounds but you aren't going to be *better* at your job because the Deca has established a new normal. Libertarians seem to not to know what to do with positional goods. I everyone gets better, nobody gets better. Now for any individual it is logical and good that we educate and try to use the best methodology, motivate people, etc. But we all should keep in mind we are just seeking individual positional gain and our efforts are for nothing if everyone does it successfully.
You've invented a hypothetical job that pays you for 500 pound squats (why?) but then nobody sees any marginal productivity benefit in the fact that you can now do 600? Real jobs do not pay arbitrary amounts to do arbitrary things. Please try to map that onto a real skill/job.
Because its an analogy about positional goods. I think the education optimists that think education has big scalable social effects for underperforming kids simply discount the economics of positional goods and how much education has always been signaling of innate traits rather than treatment effects. Im.a proponent of education (I work in education!) but I appreciate Freddie as a counterpoint to some aspects of the education reformer account.
But this is not how real jobs work, if you and the others in your job/sector get better or more productive, the productivity for that sector increases and salaries too.
This is not a controversial thing to say, it's Econ 101, and it's true for top researchers and for the average office worker.
He's just wrong, and incoherent.
Absolute skill is important - medicine, engineering, science, - intelligence and absolute skill truly matter. Fields / subfields tend to have a minimum required IQs - people less intelligent than the threshold are unlikely to have expected levels of competence in the field/subfield.
Daughter #3 was relatively academiclly gifted - she did early admission to the University after 10th grade. I observed how she did in her classes and what she found as easy and what she found more difficult. She found the straightforward math to be easy - calculus, differential equations, ..., but the more abstract math to be more opaque. Linear algebra in terms of matrix operations was straightforward, linear algebra proofs were more opaque. I told her - your intelligence is high enough that you could handle a Ph.D. in experimenatl Physics, but funding is difficult, jobs are unstable, and the opportunity cost is high. Go into Engineering. She did her BS and MS in Civil Engineering - structures, and deals with seismic risk issues on the job. You need a high absolute skill level do the work.
To follow one of the more demanding STEM areas you need a relatively high absolute skill level when you start your education - or you will have to take at least a year or two longer to get your skills up to the needed starting level. She did calculus in 10th grade - which had required summer self-study for the two summers before she went to college to get to the requisite level.
I find it weird that people will admit that if I take 100 random 20 year olds and train them like elite powerlifters and they all do exactly what I say and badly want to be elite powerlifters that there will be massive differences in strength results after a year with lots of really low responders and a few really high responders. But then think that cognitive stuff is somehow more egalitarian. And I find it weird they don’t get that people who “don’t try” in school are selecting into the “don’t try” group largely because it is no fun to apply yourself to something you already have figured out you aren’t good at. One can think education is great for helping people find and develop whatever talents they may have and that this is important but also know that the talent has to be there and if everyone tries maximally and you have the best possible methods, you are going to have huge gaps and the same bell curve, although possibly with the whole thing moved to the right. My guess is if everyone were maximally motivated and given the best methods of teaching, the smartest people who get much better and the less smart people just a little better. I am (was) a decent local/state level distance runner and I have a great build for it and wanted it really bad and trained really hard and I was never as fast as some HS kids are in their first two years of running. My wife ran for years because I did and really tried and was never any good. After a running injury she switched to bodybuilding/powerlifting and was immediately awesome and has a 227 bench and 388 deadlift weighing 146 pounds at age 54. and is built like a superhero. Obviously good training methodologies produce better athletes, but if you have been around athletes much you have seen the massive unfairness in genetic talent and all the work in the world won’t overcome it. But we somehow think education is different. And in athletics, the most talented are the ones who benefit the most from training innovation and PEDS. Thinking educational methodologies will solve educational inequality is like thinking Deca or Nandrolone will solve powerlifting inequality. I mean, obviously better methods are better than worse ones at the individual level and everyone can get better than they are if they don’t work at all and have bad training methodologies, but expectations should be modest for impact at scale to move people around in rank order, which is largely what matters for an individual in education.
I've been reading since day 1 - thanks for everything you're putting out. It's insightful, and a necessary part of the conversation. Keep up the good work! I should say that I don't really care for FdB or the inherent merits of relative education, but I think the collective driving towards absolute learning will need some nuance if we are to succeed with it as as a driving principle for economic progress.
For decades, we’ve asked the education system to solve for what are fundamentally the ills of poverty, and that’s an unfair burden. But since public education is universal, free, and taxpayer-funded, it still has a responsibility to mitigate the unequal outcomes our economic system produces (ideally alongside other universal public systems like healthcare, housing, transportation, and social safety net programs).
Absolute learning clearly has value for individuals and for the economy. But in a society with deep, racialized inequality, it cannot be the guiding principle on its own. Poverty in the U.S. is not race-neutral, and neither are its effects. If we pursue “neutral” gains in learning without explicitly addressing how poverty disproportionately harms Black, Latino, and Indigenous students, we are not only not being equitable, but we risk simply reproducing both economic and racial disparities under the banner of progress.
At the same time, reducing education to a race for relative positioning doesn’t serve kids or our long-term prosperity either. The real challenge isn’t choosing between absolute and relative learning. Our challenge is to refuse a framework that forces that tradeoff. We need an education system that grows capability while directly confronting the structural conditions that determine who gets to benefit from that growth in the first place. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I’m increasingly convinced that pretending this tension doesn’t exist is how we keep getting it wrong.
Deboer isn’t wrong that the plurality of people probably on a day to day basis care more about relative learning, particularly students. But it is wise to care about absolute learning. Good employers, hiring managers, colleges, etc are going to care about real skills. Also we are in global competition. So yeah while a student in Boise, might want to study just hard enough not to be average or just above average, I bet if you asked them if they wanted their school to compete with San Francisco, New York, or maybe more importantly Beijing they are going to say yes. We need to step back and see that relative learning is against peers on a global scale and the best way to get there is students learning real skills at a challenging pace.
Yes, we should improve absolute educational performance and we should expect that the most talented end up being rewarded more for things people want done. I agree that improving education for all will generally make everyone better off. At the same time, we should have some humility: the oversized role luck plays should not be discounted. As such, Inequalities will still exist and we shouldn't tell ourselves bog-standard libertarian stories about those who didn't succed. Valuing intellectual excellence doesn't mean ridiculing those wio are unlucky. Nurturing the skills of the most gifted doesn't entail also instilling in those people notions that those who didn't make it are inferior or less than. Luck is cruel but we don't have to be.
I mean what's lacking? Here is the whole entire thing: why does improving educational outcomes for individuals in turn improve their financial situation, which is the entire basis of the education reform movements claims to being a moral movement?
Making them more valuable to their employer might help
This value is positional not absolute. Your value as an employee is relative to those who your company could reasonably hire to replace you.
The labor market point only goes through if you suppose that raising the floor creates more and better jobs, which it might, but thats an empirical question with mixed results.
If your alternative is that more productivity simply disappears into the aether with no direct or indirect benefit to the business, the worker, or anyone, then you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.
No, my alternative is that absent more competitive pressure in the labor market, the marginal productivity is overwhelmingly more likely to accrue to the employer than to the worker. And the competitive pressures are the thing that's zero sum, not the absolute levels of productivity — which I fully agree, can increase.
So yes, no disagreement that raising the floor improves all up productivity and that extra value arithmetically has to go somewhere. But it takes additional assumptions to conclude that it will flow to labor.
Why would you WANT it to flow to labor, though, given your premises? If improved productivity mostly ends up in the pocket of customers or shareholders, that benefit can then plausibly be redistributed as poverty relief - without destroying the incentives which enabled it.
Good question. Can you elaborate on (i) what in my premises leads you to believe I wouldn't want it to flow to labor, and (ii) why a pre-distributional rather than re-distributional regime would destroy incentives that deliver higher absolute productivity?
On the plausibility point, I'm skeptical. First, the last 50 years of American welfare and taxation policy demonstrate that we don't have a successful track record of redistribution. Second, most Americans prefer pre-distribution over re-distribution b/c of dignity considerations (and rightly so, there's more dignity and self development in it).
If better absolute learning can 1) enhance your value proposition to the one that pays you and 2) teach versatile skills so you can better adapt to opportunities or changing market conditions, I think that's as likely to improve your long term financial condition as education ever could. I guess I'm not sure what kinds of extra guarantees you (or Freddie) were expecting.
Here's a thought experiment for those who are tempted by the "only relative performance matters except for the very top" view:
Suppose a deus ex machina-being waved a wand and made it so that everyone except the top 5% in cognitive ability suddenly got 10 extra IQ points, while the top 5% were unchanged. Would this result in significant economic growth?
By FDB's logic as I understand it, he thinks it would not. I think it would (maybe 10 is the wrong number, or maybe you want a different cognitive ability metric than IQ, but the idea isn't really sensitive to the choice of number or metric). This may be a good crux for clarifying different views about how economic performance depends on human capital.
> The answer relies, crucially, on seeing that deBoer treats meritocracy as fundamentally a system of moral justification rather than of socio-economic incentives.
Philosophers standardly view it as both. Freddie’s primary concern is that a focus on raising the floor just launders an unwillingness to do more rigorous redistribution because we want to see how much we can enable people to improve their own welfare through better education. It’s not only empirically under-motivated to expect raising the educational floor to achieve better downstream social outcomes, it is morally suspect because it forestalls an obligation to act.
I know you will say that we can aim to simultaneously raise the floor in the economic and educational spheres—and I agree—but in Freddie’s defense, suppose we woke up one day and found ourselves in a welfare utopia where the bottom quintile had decent state-sponsored housing, healthcare, and food. In that world, what would be the point of more marginal effort to maximize the educational gains of the untalented? Wouldn’t investments in intelligence and educational outcome look a bit more like investments in athletic outcomes? Where we’re more or less untroubled by unathletic students who decide not to try and reach their full potential?
If you think the economic stakes of educational outcomes are what matter, then specify what those get you and then stipulate that the state provides just that via redistribution. Whatever is the remainder, would be, I’m guessing Freddie would say — morally uninteresting from the standpoint of absolute welfare: like athletic ability.
So then the challenge is — why fret so much about raising the floor if you’ve accepted ex hypothesi that the state could provide all the things you thought raising the floor was essential to secure?