Very interesting and I like the central point that cash transfers aren’t an automatic win and are therefore worth studying, which I hadn’t considered to the same extent before.
On the education stuff, it seems like a lot of these problems could be solved if jobs were allocated based on the results of a standardized exam rather than years of schooling or some similar metric. I’m not talking about one run by schools, because it’s likely the process wouldn’t be trustworthy, I’m talking about when you advertise a job that requires reading, writing, or filing skills, you test for these skills with a written exam. Encouraging governments and other large employers to act in this way would surely encourage students (and parents) to actually learn rather than simply attend school as a box-ticking exercise.
We should also expect this to mean that countries such as Australia and China that heavily weight a national exam system when advancing students at crucial stages will have less corrupt educational systems than countries like the US which weight locally assessed factors like grades heavily.
(Of course, there can be massive downsides to standardization as well.)
I’d find this pretty surprising based on my knowledge of the Canadian (Albertan) & British education systems. Does anyone have evidence for standardized exams decreasing “corruption”?
(Ben, I’m not sure exactly what you meant by corruption here—do you mean grades that don’t match ability, or lazy teaching, or something else?)
Very interesting and I like the central point that cash transfers aren’t an automatic win and are therefore worth studying, which I hadn’t considered to the same extent before. On the education stuff, it seems like a lot of these problems could be solved if jobs were allocated based on the results of a standardized exam rather than years of schooling or some similar metric. I’m not talking about one run by schools, because it’s likely the process wouldn’t be trustworthy, I’m talking about when you advertise a job that requires reading, writing, or filing skills, you test for these skills with a written exam. Encouraging governments and other large employers to act in this way would surely encourage students (and parents) to actually learn rather than simply attend school as a box-ticking exercise.
We should also expect this to mean that countries such as Australia and China that heavily weight a national exam system when advancing students at crucial stages will have less corrupt educational systems than countries like the US which weight locally assessed factors like grades heavily.
(Of course, there can be massive downsides to standardization as well.)
I’d find this pretty surprising based on my knowledge of the Canadian (Albertan) & British education systems. Does anyone have evidence for standardized exams decreasing “corruption”? (Ben, I’m not sure exactly what you meant by corruption here—do you mean grades that don’t match ability, or lazy teaching, or something else?)
One simple example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation
More generally, things like the profusion of makework designed to facially resemble teaching, instead of optimizing for outcomes.