UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) assumes education has intrinsic value, so do I.
UNDP in 1996 Human Development Report page 50 asks the question “Why is income part of the human development index?” For them it is obvious that “Longevity and education are clearly valuable aspects of a good life” they then go on to explain why income should be included in the index.
In this thread I asked the question earlier
“The most respected and widely used index for measuring human well being is the human development index, it includes education as an outcome, valuable for its own sake, the EA community has to explain why it deems education not useful while the UNDP thinks that it is important.”
GiveWell is surely right here that the benefits are mostly instrumental.
And that is the crux of the disagreement. I (and UNDP) believe Education like health has intrinsic value, whereas Give Well and the EA community does not.
Unless you think spending time in school is very useful even if it has no other benefits to kids
Let me unpack this. The time spent in school has benefits for kids even if the benefits do not show up in terms of health, wealth. Why? It changes outlook towards life, makes married life less unequal for women, increases self-respect, self-confidence, allows for better participation in society.
“There are aspects of human flourishing that education enhances that are neglected by the human capital approach. This is the aspect of
education enabling human being to live freely and fully. The development of human capacity to think and reason. This facilitates the
ability of individuals who are educated to exercise critical reasoning about their lives and about the society in which they live. ”
From an evolutionary standpoint , our large plastic brains and long childhood is designed to absorb knowledge via cultural transmission. Kids who go to school are soaked in the enormous changes in knowledge of the industrial era, and absorb the values of industrial era(modern values). Kids who don’t go to school are stuck with much less knowledge, are stuck with values of agricultural era (patriarchal values)
They also didn’t buy people food, but presumably they don’t think eating is a useless activity and people can safely starve themselves.
I actually agree with GiveWell on this, food has no intrinsic value only instrumental value. However education is very different, it has intrinsic value.
GiveWell just didn’t think the very best giving opportunities they could support were in education — that doesn’t mean they think it has no value.
No. Give Well assumed that education by itself had no value. Then they looked for the effects of education on health and earnings and find
” very little evidence of effects of education on health outcomes”
“evidence that education increases earnings is currently thin”
The report by GiveWell is poorly done, which itself is a sign of the importance given to education.
GiveWell isn’t all of EA. Some EAs probably have a very positive view of the value of education. There’s a wide range of views on most issues.
I appreciate and understand the difference. However GW is the most respected organization with great influence among EA’s interested in the space of Global Human Well Being. Anybody reading about EA (from the outside) easily sees that Global Health And Development is a cause priority.
So while some EA’s might have different views or even a wide range of views. The EA community as a whole gives very little (zero) importance to education.
“changes outlook towards life, makes married life less unequal for women, increases self-respect, self-confidence, allows for better participation in society”
I agree these are all benefits, but I class them as instrumental benefits, and imagine most others here do as well.
They are benefits inasmuch as they go on to improve people’s well-being.
“the human development index, it includes education as an outcome, valuable for its own sake”
The HDI also includes GDP which presumably nobody thinks is valuable for its own sake (i.e. widgets are only useful inasmuch as they make people better off when they’re used not valuable merely for existing). In my opinion education is good to have in the HDI as a proxy for all of the many instrumental benefits it provides people.
Most people here place great weight on a welfarist theory of value: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/well-being/ . If you disagree with welfarism then it would pay to set education aside for a minute and go back and discuss more fundamental issues in moral philosophy.
The last time I had this discussion about intrinsic values, I was sent to read another SEP article, this is what it said
“One of the most comprehensive lists of intrinsic goods that anyone has suggested is that given by William Frankena ….consciousness,.… truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom;”
Education brings about changes in consciousness, truth, knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom.
Or simply education is knowledge, understanding, wisdom, truth etc.. Education has intrinsic value.
The HDI also includes GDP which presumably nobody thinks is valuable for its own sake
Quoting myself from earlier in the thread
“Frankly EA is far from understanding root causes of human development, if I had to drop one index from HDI I would have dropped money not education.”
I agree these are all benefits, but I class them as instrumental benefits, and imagine most others here do as well.
no matter how you class them, EA headlining money and health as a cause priority while dropping education. + spending no money on education is straight out saying a lot about the priorities of EA.
EA gives zero value to education, and that is fundamentally wrong.
I agree that EA is not working in every area, and that is cool. How about
“EA gives very little value to education, and that is fundamentally wrong.”
On what basis has EA dropped Education from the headline? Why do they think UNDP is wrong? Why is HDI wrong?
it doesn’t mean that EAs think that education isn’t important. In fact EA is very disproportionately composed of highly educated people—presumably at least some of these people value education highly
Which is why this whole conversation is strange to me, people clearly see the value of education for themselves but not for others!
Malala in her nobel prize lecture put it beautifully
“It is not time to tell the world leaders to realize how important education is — they already know it — their own children are in good schools. Now it is time to call them to take action for the rest of the
world’s children.
We ask the world leaders to unite and make education their top priority.”
Yay.. another set of my comments gets downvoted without any response.
I think what would really resolve your debate would be associating a quality of life measure to education outcomes as well as to time spent in school. See Whitehead and Ali on assigning health-related quality of life (HRQoL) value to different health outcomes.
Even so comparing health to money itself is a moral decision and depends on ones intuitions and preferences without clear answers. e.g. Give Well values doubling of income for one year = .6 years of life
I value the same doubling of income at less than .1 years
Who is right?
EA community values education (by itself) at zero, so does Give Well. I value 1 year of education = 1 year of life
Putting the two together I value
1 year of education = 6 years of income
Perhaps, Western education empowers some (e.g. females) through the socio-economic prospects that education gives them. Thus, the traditionally disenfranchised individuals gain power over those they have been traditionally subject to (e.g. males). Yet, these educated females are still subject to a discriminatory norm—that which is based on their financial situation and is imposed by the West.
Thus, these females may ‘trade’ their submission to males to their submission to ‘the rich.’ Therefore, although education may seem to empower otherwise industrially unskilled individuals, it may reduce the power which these individuals draw from adhering to traditional norms. So, the “modern values” which the “industrial era” education instills in children may not have an intrinsic worth—it always depends on the normative structure of achievement through which you look at the issue.
This may be why GW highly values measurable health outcomes. Empowerment is hard to measure and relative. Yet, GiveDirectly supported research that measured beneficiaries’ psychological improvements—measured the level of cortisol in GD’s program’s participants’ saliva.
Do you think GW should assign more value to improvements in psychological wellbeing, which stem, for example, from self-perceptions of one’s improved critical thinking abilities and empowerment?
Education benefits are for boys too, not just girls. Girls dont gain power over boys, after all USA is still male dominated. Educated girls gain a little more power, so that cannot be dominated to the extent that they were in agricultural societies.
From my understanding the “support” that women get in traditional societies is very stifling. Ghoonghat, Burka, citing woman for wearing bikini in France, honor killings, ban on dating, obsession with virginity, early marriage, lots of kids, abortion of girl child, the problems are endless. They are not solved in the industrial era, but life for women is much better.
--
Sure psychological well-being can be considered, but data is hard to come by. I simply assume that every year of education is worth a year of life. That itself make Educate Girls as effective as GW charities.
Well, is it then that affluent females gain emancipation through using the products of low-paid low-skilled laborers, males and females, in developing countries?
Or, do well-to-do females use impoverished females’ work more than that of poor males, since the rich women outsource ‘traditionally their’ work, such as household care, to foreign domestic workers?
_
I simply assume that every year of education is worth a year of life.
It would be interesting to quantify the quality of life associated with unit educational gains, for example by surveys similar to those described by Whitehead and Ali, which concern quality of life related to (mostly physical) health.
My writing and concern is not for affluent women, my concern is for the poor girls (and boys) who are not getting 6 years of education. Even if they get 12 years of education, they will not have enough earnings to hire anyone to work in their homes.
Educated women are better off in life (even without more money), because their married life is more equal, they have less number of kids, their husband’s family bosses them less, they can teach their kids, get small stuff done like deal with bank, interactions with society are better, they command respect etc.. The non woman specific things are positives for mens life too.
--
I am happy to read and think about how to value education. I want the EA community to acknowledge that education has intrinsic value according to UN, and respond with why they don’t think it has intrinsic value.
Likewise Malala is a much better voice of the values of people in agricultural societies than any EA organization i saw.
It is not that Malala or the UN are always right, they make mistakes too. A good starting point is to assume that they are correct, when we think they are wrong, we should act with great care and deliberation. Prove that they are wrong, dismiss the parts in which they are mistaken, act and follow the rest.
Maybe, more than education by itself, you then value empowerment, equality, dignity, respect, lack of abuse, one’s ability to have a perspective which is valued, one’s ability to be considered as opposed to used, one’s ability to live for oneself as opposed to be forced to live for others, and an environment which is cooperative as opposed to abusive alongside the lines of characteristics assigned to an individual by society (at birth). Education is just means for achieving these goals.
In addition to all the benefits mentioned above I want to highlight ability to think for oneself, is much greater with educated people, ability to interact with society is much greater.
We could also say that we value health, because we can get up everyday, we can exist, we can drive, play a game, sing, dance, shower, walk, run, eat, see etc.. etc.. At some point such expansion becomes merely an enumeration of all the things that can be done if one is healthy, all those things are useful. Does such enumeration add any analytical value? I think not.
We simplify and say that health has intrinsic value. Likewise I believe education has intrinsic value.
When ones brain changes and gains capabilities, then it becomes intrinsic to that person and cannot be broken down into constituent pieces, merely for its effects.
My main thrust and criticism is not about what I think is valuable.
UNDP, Amartya Sen, Malala all agree that education has intrinsic value, they say education is an end in itself.
Why does EA think otherwise? On what basis are they dismissing the voice of people in the agricultural era?
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) assumes education has intrinsic value, so do I.
UNDP in 1996 Human Development Report page 50 asks the question “Why is income part of the human development index?” For them it is obvious that “Longevity and education are clearly valuable aspects of a good life” they then go on to explain why income should be included in the index.
In this thread I asked the question earlier
“The most respected and widely used index for measuring human well being is the human development index, it includes education as an outcome, valuable for its own sake, the EA community has to explain why it deems education not useful while the UNDP thinks that it is important.”
and also as a post Global basic education as a missing cause priority
And that is the crux of the disagreement. I (and UNDP) believe Education like health has intrinsic value, whereas Give Well and the EA community does not.
Let me unpack this. The time spent in school has benefits for kids even if the benefits do not show up in terms of health, wealth. Why? It changes outlook towards life, makes married life less unequal for women, increases self-respect, self-confidence, allows for better participation in society.
Rethinking the Value of Education: Amartya Sen and the Capability Approach Dr. Sunday Olaoluwa Dada http://internationaljournalcorner.com/index.php/theijhss/article/view/126772/87663
“There are aspects of human flourishing that education enhances that are neglected by the human capital approach. This is the aspect of education enabling human being to live freely and fully. The development of human capacity to think and reason. This facilitates the ability of individuals who are educated to exercise critical reasoning about their lives and about the society in which they live. ”
From an evolutionary standpoint , our large plastic brains and long childhood is designed to absorb knowledge via cultural transmission. Kids who go to school are soaked in the enormous changes in knowledge of the industrial era, and absorb the values of industrial era(modern values). Kids who don’t go to school are stuck with much less knowledge, are stuck with values of agricultural era (patriarchal values)
I actually agree with GiveWell on this, food has no intrinsic value only instrumental value. However education is very different, it has intrinsic value.
No. Give Well assumed that education by itself had no value. Then they looked for the effects of education on health and earnings and find ” very little evidence of effects of education on health outcomes” “evidence that education increases earnings is currently thin”
The report by GiveWell is poorly done, which itself is a sign of the importance given to education.
I appreciate and understand the difference. However GW is the most respected organization with great influence among EA’s interested in the space of Global Human Well Being. Anybody reading about EA (from the outside) easily sees that Global Health And Development is a cause priority.
So while some EA’s might have different views or even a wide range of views. The EA community as a whole gives very little (zero) importance to education.
“changes outlook towards life, makes married life less unequal for women, increases self-respect, self-confidence, allows for better participation in society”
I agree these are all benefits, but I class them as instrumental benefits, and imagine most others here do as well.
They are benefits inasmuch as they go on to improve people’s well-being.
“the human development index, it includes education as an outcome, valuable for its own sake”
The HDI also includes GDP which presumably nobody thinks is valuable for its own sake (i.e. widgets are only useful inasmuch as they make people better off when they’re used not valuable merely for existing). In my opinion education is good to have in the HDI as a proxy for all of the many instrumental benefits it provides people.
Most people here place great weight on a welfarist theory of value: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/well-being/ . If you disagree with welfarism then it would pay to set education aside for a minute and go back and discuss more fundamental issues in moral philosophy.
I will read the philosophy link, but I am not a fan of reading philosophy. Amartya Sen says that education has intrinsic value, he is a professor of philosophy (if you care for that sort of thing). In this thread I had a quote from Sen/UNDP where they say that education is a goal in itself like health. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mC8NMNnaTKzYsL8jk/effective-altruism-and-international-trade#kDjYFcFhsDZNrDWvW
The last time I had this discussion about intrinsic values, I was sent to read another SEP article, this is what it said
“One of the most comprehensive lists of intrinsic goods that anyone has suggested is that given by William Frankena ….consciousness,.… truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom;”
Education brings about changes in consciousness, truth, knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom.
Or simply education is knowledge, understanding, wisdom, truth etc.. Education has intrinsic value.
Quoting myself from earlier in the thread “Frankly EA is far from understanding root causes of human development, if I had to drop one index from HDI I would have dropped money not education.”
Also see how Ashweetha thinks about education https://www.ted.com/talks/ashweetha_shetty_how_education_helped_me_rewrite_my_life
no matter how you class them, EA headlining money and health as a cause priority while dropping education. + spending no money on education is straight out saying a lot about the priorities of EA.
EA gives zero value to education, and that is fundamentally wrong.
.
Thanks anonymous_ea
I agree that EA is not working in every area, and that is cool. How about
“EA gives very little value to education, and that is fundamentally wrong.”
On what basis has EA dropped Education from the headline? Why do they think UNDP is wrong? Why is HDI wrong?
Which is why this whole conversation is strange to me, people clearly see the value of education for themselves but not for others!
Malala in her nobel prize lecture put it beautifully “It is not time to tell the world leaders to realize how important education is — they already know it — their own children are in good schools. Now it is time to call them to take action for the rest of the world’s children.
We ask the world leaders to unite and make education their top priority.”
Yay.. another set of my comments gets downvoted without any response.
I think what would really resolve your debate would be associating a quality of life measure to education outcomes as well as to time spent in school. See Whitehead and Ali on assigning health-related quality of life (HRQoL) value to different health outcomes.
:) brb243
I would be happy for more research
Usually people use LAYS but that has its problems.
Does Education Need a QALY and Is LAYS It?
Even so comparing health to money itself is a moral decision and depends on ones intuitions and preferences without clear answers. e.g. Give Well values doubling of income for one year = .6 years of life I value the same doubling of income at less than .1 years
Who is right?
EA community values education (by itself) at zero, so does Give Well. I value 1 year of education = 1 year of life
Putting the two together I value 1 year of education = 6 years of income
Who is right?
Thanks for the article!!
I think that everyone will be right if LAYS (the unit of quality education provided) is linked to QALYs (the unit of quality life years provided).
Please submit a request to the World Bank (which developed LAYS) and the UK Medical Research Council (which aims to improve the QALY measure).
Perhaps, Western education empowers some (e.g. females) through the socio-economic prospects that education gives them. Thus, the traditionally disenfranchised individuals gain power over those they have been traditionally subject to (e.g. males). Yet, these educated females are still subject to a discriminatory norm—that which is based on their financial situation and is imposed by the West.
Thus, these females may ‘trade’ their submission to males to their submission to ‘the rich.’ Therefore, although education may seem to empower otherwise industrially unskilled individuals, it may reduce the power which these individuals draw from adhering to traditional norms. So, the “modern values” which the “industrial era” education instills in children may not have an intrinsic worth—it always depends on the normative structure of achievement through which you look at the issue.
This may be why GW highly values measurable health outcomes. Empowerment is hard to measure and relative. Yet, GiveDirectly supported research that measured beneficiaries’ psychological improvements—measured the level of cortisol in GD’s program’s participants’ saliva.
Do you think GW should assign more value to improvements in psychological wellbeing, which stem, for example, from self-perceptions of one’s improved critical thinking abilities and empowerment?
Education benefits are for boys too, not just girls. Girls dont gain power over boys, after all USA is still male dominated. Educated girls gain a little more power, so that cannot be dominated to the extent that they were in agricultural societies.
From my understanding the “support” that women get in traditional societies is very stifling. Ghoonghat, Burka, citing woman for wearing bikini in France, honor killings, ban on dating, obsession with virginity, early marriage, lots of kids, abortion of girl child, the problems are endless. They are not solved in the industrial era, but life for women is much better.
--
Sure psychological well-being can be considered, but data is hard to come by. I simply assume that every year of education is worth a year of life. That itself make Educate Girls as effective as GW charities.
Well, is it then that affluent females gain emancipation through using the products of low-paid low-skilled laborers, males and females, in developing countries?
Or, do well-to-do females use impoverished females’ work more than that of poor males, since the rich women outsource ‘traditionally their’ work, such as household care, to foreign domestic workers?
_
It would be interesting to quantify the quality of life associated with unit educational gains, for example by surveys similar to those described by Whitehead and Ali, which concern quality of life related to (mostly physical) health.
My writing and concern is not for affluent women, my concern is for the poor girls (and boys) who are not getting 6 years of education. Even if they get 12 years of education, they will not have enough earnings to hire anyone to work in their homes.
Educated women are better off in life (even without more money), because their married life is more equal, they have less number of kids, their husband’s family bosses them less, they can teach their kids, get small stuff done like deal with bank, interactions with society are better, they command respect etc.. The non woman specific things are positives for mens life too.
--
I am happy to read and think about how to value education. I want the EA community to acknowledge that education has intrinsic value according to UN, and respond with why they don’t think it has intrinsic value.
UN reflects the voice of people around the world than EA community, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S2Sonawxz2cY4YdXK/ea-survey-2018-series-community-demographics-and
Likewise Malala is a much better voice of the values of people in agricultural societies than any EA organization i saw.
It is not that Malala or the UN are always right, they make mistakes too. A good starting point is to assume that they are correct, when we think they are wrong, we should act with great care and deliberation. Prove that they are wrong, dismiss the parts in which they are mistaken, act and follow the rest.
Sadly that is missing in EA.
Maybe, more than education by itself, you then value empowerment, equality, dignity, respect, lack of abuse, one’s ability to have a perspective which is valued, one’s ability to be considered as opposed to used, one’s ability to live for oneself as opposed to be forced to live for others, and an environment which is cooperative as opposed to abusive alongside the lines of characteristics assigned to an individual by society (at birth). Education is just means for achieving these goals.
In addition to all the benefits mentioned above I want to highlight ability to think for oneself, is much greater with educated people, ability to interact with society is much greater.
We could also say that we value health, because we can get up everyday, we can exist, we can drive, play a game, sing, dance, shower, walk, run, eat, see etc.. etc.. At some point such expansion becomes merely an enumeration of all the things that can be done if one is healthy, all those things are useful. Does such enumeration add any analytical value? I think not.
We simplify and say that health has intrinsic value. Likewise I believe education has intrinsic value.
When ones brain changes and gains capabilities, then it becomes intrinsic to that person and cannot be broken down into constituent pieces, merely for its effects.
My main thrust and criticism is not about what I think is valuable. UNDP, Amartya Sen, Malala all agree that education has intrinsic value, they say education is an end in itself.
Why does EA think otherwise? On what basis are they dismissing the voice of people in the agricultural era?