-Well, effective altruists may like proven causation. Otherwise they cannot be sure that education leads to growth. What if growth leads to education?
If growth leads to education, then why is South Africa behind Jamaica and India, how about Bangladesh > Pakistan? Sri Lanka > Brazil? The country studies and understanding the history of various countries and cross comparisons across time and space help understanding root causes.
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.
Its very strange EA says education has no value, but they want evidence, thinking, papers, books. If education is so critical to the functioning of EA then why does EA assume that it is not important for the well being of illiterate societies?
What if something else (maybe international investment??) leads to both growth and education?
Both money and education are big items, we can be reasonably sure that we did not miss out small things that have outsize effect. Let’s take deworming, it has enormous positive effects (assuming deworming increases schooling by 10+ years/100 $USD). This is great on the marginal side for individual EA’s. If one takes the systemic view then the cost of schools, cost of enrolling kids, retention, attendance costs all matter. Put all these things together and schooling costs should be 5% of GDP, there maybe marginal improvements maybe 4% is enough, but we can be sure .4% will not be enough.
-Are you criticizing that India aims to educate few elites (e.g. in engineering and IT) leaving others behind? Should India sacrifice some of its growth to more inclusive education?
There is no tradeoff between growth and inclusive education.
“Scenario 4 finally presents another possible direction of improvement from the baseline (which somewhat resembles the case of India), in which half of the population remains without education although 5% have tertiary education, 15% secondary, and 30% primary. This case of elitist education in a
context with half of the population being without any schooling does clearly better than the baseline and even better than the universal primary education (combined with 10% secondary and no tertiary), but falls far short of the economic growth implied by universal primary combined with 50% secondary and no tertiary education”
India fell short on growth because they did not educate their population, China did a better job and hence its economy is better. Amartya Sen says the same.
If India’s education was inclusive and not elitist, India would be better off in education terms, health, and finally in money. See China, or Kerala.
-Well, if there is political will, countries may choose to invest into issues other than education, if they believe that will help that country’s competitiveness. Perhaps, if the SDG goal of inclusive education is highlighted, then India would invest more into meeting that objective?
I am not a fan of speculating about how I can influence politics, Amartya Sen has been a voice of reason, his book Hunger and Public Action is still timely for EA even today. Sen has voiced his opinions and governments know where he stands.
The political will of China, Cuba, Kerala comes from their ideology all three places being communist (in the past, and to varying degrees). Communists have historically given great importance to education, health and equality. It shows in their results. They cared for industrialization too but health, education, and equality were their primary values.
Of course there are others who gave similar importance to health, education Singapore, South Korea come to mind.
The common thread is the priority or importance given to education and health. Money is not the most important factor in improving health and education in poor countries.
Sen says
“Finally, it is important to note that despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of (p.215) 1958–61.37 India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.”
Out of the half a billion dollars that was given to “global health and development” via GW or influenced by it. Exactly zero dollars went to education. Deworming according to Esther Duflo increases time in school, but GW analysis found that it did not increase time in school (or was insignificant) so we can discount it as going toward education.
Give Well did only 2 reports on education, one in 2009, and another in 2018. They came up empty.
The overall importance given to education is zero.
“We do not place much intrinsic value on increasing time in school or test scores”
But you cut off the quote in a very misleading way indeed:
We do not place much intrinsic value on increasing time in school or test scores, although we think that such improvements may have instrumental value.
Unless you think spending time in school is very useful even if it has no other benefits to kids (i.e. they don’t learn anything they use later in life), GiveWell is surely right here that the benefits are mostly instrumental.
It is wrong to quote others in a way that misrepresents their view like this.
You also say:
“Exactly zero dollars went to education … The overall importance given to education is zero.”
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. They also didn’t buy people food, but presumably they don’t think eating is a useless activity and people can safely starve themselves.
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.
From Education for All: is the world on track? EFA global monitoring report, 2002 by UNESCO
As Sen puts it,
“it is often asked whether certain political or social freedoms, such as the liberty of political participation and dissent, or opportunities to receive basic education, are or are not ‘conducive to development’. In the light of the more foundational view of development as freedom, this way of posing the question tends to miss the important understanding that these substantive freedoms (that is, the liberty of political participation or the opportunity to receive basic education or health care) are among the constituent components of development. Their relevance for development does not have to be freshly established through their indirect contribution
to the growth of GNP or to the promotion of industrialization.”
Hence, education counts as a ‘valuable being or doing’, as an ‘end’ of development.
It seems that the fundamental disagreement between you and some others is that you associate intrinsic value to time spent in school, while others believe that being in school is worthy only if it brings students positive health and income outcomes.
For example, you may believe that if a third grade student who fell behind in their first grade due to post-colonial education and is not learning anything anymore should be kept in school, e.g. where teachers beat children and fail the exams of grades below those which they teach, for another eight years, because school is good on its own.
Others may believe that a third-grade student who fell behind in their first grade does not need to attend the school where the only thing they learn is that they cannot do what is required from them, teachers cannot help them, and they receive beating for this situation. Instead, the finances which would be otherwise spent on keeping this student in school should be spent on, e.g. deworming, because this will enable the student to be healthy, energetic, and free, helping their family business.
you associate intrinsic value to time spent in school
not just me UNDP, Amartya Sen, Malala Yousafzai assume that time spent in school has intrinsic value.
I along with them want better schools, better teaching etc.. but the quality of the schooling system should detract from the fact that schooling has value.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/does-education-need-qaly-and-lays-it
“The non-pecuniary returns to education—child health, delayed pregnancy and marriage, democratic participation and so on—are substantial in education systems that otherwise perform dismally on test scores (e.g. the positive impacts of secondary schooling in Ghana despite low gain in learning shown in Duflo, Dupas & Kremer 2017).
Looking across countries (Figure 2), there is precisely zero relationship between school quality (measured by the World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes) and the labour market rate of return on investment in schooling.”
So what seems like bad schooling in terms of test scores, still has instrumental and intrinsic value.
where teachers beat children and fail the exams of grades below those which they teach, for another eight years, because school is good on its own.
I am not in favor of punishment, yes schools in agricultural societies do beat children. Worse still in the classroom sometimes they face discrimination, made to sit apart from other kids based on caste etc.. Race in USA and South Africa played that same role.
Even so education is better, because tomorrow they grow up, teach in their own communities, or put pressure on governments for change. e.g. the civil rights movement in the US, which BTW had a lot of moral help from newly independent countries, and was a factor in Brown vs Board
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education#Background
Most countries independence leaders went to college in Western countries, we can be sure that they faced racism from society and from the colleges they went to. The education was useful nevertheless.
the finances which would be otherwise spent on keeping this student in school should be spent on e.g. deworming
deworming is so cheap because kids are in school. if they are not in school, you cant deworm them because the medicine is given in school.
I have to say, I have been doing this for over a decade, and I have never met a girl who said to me, you know, “I want to stay at home,” “I want to graze the cattle,” “I want to look after the siblings,” “I want to be a child bride.” Every single girl I meet wants to go to school. And that’s what we really want to do.
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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
It is wrong to quote others in a way that misrepresents their view like this.
This has bothered me quite a lot. I have been clear and consistent that I think that education has intrinsic value and have focused on that aspect. This can be seen from comments and posts on the forum.
I had no intent to mislead, I don’t see what I wrote as misleading or misrepresenting. I quoted accurately and linked to the source.
If anything it is the EA community that is misleading folks. “Development” is widely understood to include education when used in the context of “developing” countries or the global poor. Saying “Global Development” and not including education is extremely misleading it took me 2 years of immersion in EA to finally understand that EA folks don’t include education when talking about “Global Development”
There is no tradeoff between growth and inclusive education.
This would be great, if this holds true. Intuitively, this makes sense: investments in human capital improve a nation’s productivity—the only thing is that returns on education are not immediate (and the “discount rate” in poor areas may be high—people may not like sacrificing present benefit for a ‘distant’ future gain). The delayed benefits may be an issue for poor and indebted countries.
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“Its very strange EA says education has no value”
‘EA’ does not say this, and I don’t know anyone involved in EA who holds such a strong view.
Yes, perhaps EA can look into the long-term gains of inclusive education? There is an RCT on the effectiveness of after-school tutoring in improving students’ learning outcomes. However, I am not sure about statistically robust research that examines the conditions under which education leads to health, income, and wellbeing improvements.
the only thing is that returns on education are not immediate (and the “discount rate” in poor areas may be high—people may not like sacrificing present benefit for a ‘distant’ future gain).
We humans are social animals, and pass knowledge from one generation to another via culture, uneducated parents expect that the lives of their will be similar to their own. Schools are outside their social expectations for what is good or useful for their kids. ‘Sacrificing ’ current benefits for future benefits is not the main issue, those calculations and thoughts don’t occur to illiterate parents. They expect their kids to have similar lives as them, a winning formula that worked for 10,000+ years.
However, I am not sure about statistically robust research that examines the conditions under which education leads to health, income, and wellbeing improvements.
you should read research from Wolfgang Lutz, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, Warren Sanderson. It is statistically robust.
I will also note that anthropology , sociology, demography are valid disciplines to reason about human societies, social policy. Math and statistics are not the only tools.
As far as RCT’s goes, RCT is good for finding short-term effects, and not very useful at finding effects that are long term in nature and those that have positive externalities like education.
Jean Dreze co-author with Sen in Hunger and Public Action and many other books has this to say about RCTs
Schools are outside their social expectations for what is good or useful for their kids. ‘Sacrificing ’ current benefits for future benefits is not the main issue, those calculations and thoughts don’t occur to illiterate parents. They expect their kids to have similar lives as them, a winning formula that worked for 10,000+ years.
I understand that one may think as such – closeminded thinking which does not question tradition and blindly follows authoritarian structure.
However, with the arguable dominance of the Western authoritarian structure which assigns power to socio-economic status as defined by the norms of industrial economies, even illiterate parents may wish their children to succeed within these new, Western structures, if the parents believe for such possibility.
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Thank you, I am skimming this article by Lutz, Cuaresma, and Sanderson. Controlling for “human capital dynamics” in their regression, the authors find that “improvements in educational attainment are the key to explaining productivity and income growth.
But perhaps the authors solely argue (also here) that favorable educational dividend (a high ratio of educated to uneducated workers), rather than favorable demographic dividend (high ratio of productive-age to unproductive-age labor force) leads to national growth.
The claim on the benefits of education seems intuitive: the more educated workforce a nation has, the higher up within global value chains it is.
Yet, will you be able to provide any other statistical evidence that quantifies the returns on investments in education (in terms of income and health changes), particularly in the geographical areas where Educate Girls operates?
even illiterate parents may wish their children to succeed within these new, Western structures, if the parents believe for such possibility
Sure they do, especially with exposure these days via media. However there is a differential in how much boys are sent to school vs girls. Age is also a factor: puberty is a big wall for the girl child in terms of going to school. Most parents send kids to school if one is accessible. Where schools are absent no one went to school. With MDG and SDG more focus has come on schools, they are now more accessible. Hence the increase in enrollment.
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The research from Lutz et all is highly recommended. Amartya Sen, Jean Dreze, Hans Rosling are also at the top of my list.
Yes there is no Demographic dividend, it is an education dividend.
Yet, will you be able to provide any other statistical evidence that quantifies the returns on investments in education (in terms of income and health changes),
Such data is hard to come by, even basic data like registrations of births, deaths is incomplete. If we look at the data from states of India we find that the relationship between education and health/income stands.
I would suggest moving away from requiring statistical evidence in every geographical area. Lets take medicine, first there is the research, then the RCT, then it comes to market. While the manufacturer should continue to monitor the effects of drug after the drug is in market, we dont expect them to run RCT in every country.
Like medicines the evidence for the benefits of education are robust and go a long way. We should be able to take that evidence as fact, and move on to finding out the best way to spread education to everybody. RCT can be used as a tool for this goal.
This is similar to how Duflo and others assume immunization is good, now they are working on getting everyone immunized and figuring out best way to do so via RCT.
As far as returns go, there is data on child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, income by level of education. All of this data is approximate.
My calculations suggest that Educate Girls is 3-6 times more effective than most GW recommended charities and 30 times that of Give Directly. I dont take the estimates literally, I think they are good ballpark numbers.
OK, I read that there should be more RCT research on cost-effective methods of achieving favorable welfare outcomes through mass education, especially of disadvantaged students.
If growth leads to education, then why is South Africa behind Jamaica and India, how about Bangladesh > Pakistan? Sri Lanka > Brazil? The country studies and understanding the history of various countries and cross comparisons across time and space help understanding root causes.
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.
Its very strange EA says education has no value, but they want evidence, thinking, papers, books. If education is so critical to the functioning of EA then why does EA assume that it is not important for the well being of illiterate societies?
Both money and education are big items, we can be reasonably sure that we did not miss out small things that have outsize effect. Let’s take deworming, it has enormous positive effects (assuming deworming increases schooling by 10+ years/100 $USD). This is great on the marginal side for individual EA’s. If one takes the systemic view then the cost of schools, cost of enrolling kids, retention, attendance costs all matter. Put all these things together and schooling costs should be 5% of GDP, there maybe marginal improvements maybe 4% is enough, but we can be sure .4% will not be enough.
There is no tradeoff between growth and inclusive education.
I gave link earlier “The Demography of Educational Attainment and Economic Growth”
“Scenario 4 finally presents another possible direction of improvement from the baseline (which somewhat resembles the case of India), in which half of the population remains without education although 5% have tertiary education, 15% secondary, and 30% primary. This case of elitist education in a context with half of the population being without any schooling does clearly better than the baseline and even better than the universal primary education (combined with 10% secondary and no tertiary), but falls far short of the economic growth implied by universal primary combined with 50% secondary and no tertiary education”
India fell short on growth because they did not educate their population, China did a better job and hence its economy is better. Amartya Sen says the same.
If India’s education was inclusive and not elitist, India would be better off in education terms, health, and finally in money. See China, or Kerala.
I am not a fan of speculating about how I can influence politics, Amartya Sen has been a voice of reason, his book Hunger and Public Action is still timely for EA even today. Sen has voiced his opinions and governments know where he stands.
The political will of China, Cuba, Kerala comes from their ideology all three places being communist (in the past, and to varying degrees). Communists have historically given great importance to education, health and equality. It shows in their results. They cared for industrialization too but health, education, and equality were their primary values.
Of course there are others who gave similar importance to health, education Singapore, South Korea come to mind.
The common thread is the priority or importance given to education and health. Money is not the most important factor in improving health and education in poor countries.
Sen says
“Finally, it is important to note that despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of (p.215) 1958–61.37 India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.”
https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198283652.001.0001/acprof-9780198283652-chapter-11
“If growth leads to education, then why is South Africa behind Jamaica and India, how about Bangladesh > Pakistan? Sri Lanka > Brazil”
Because it’s not the only factor?
“Its very strange EA says education has no value”
‘EA’ does not say this, and I don’t know anyone involved in EA who holds such a strong view.
So what other factors are there? Is EA valuing money too much?
“We do not place much intrinsic value on increasing time in school or test scores” https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/education
Out of the half a billion dollars that was given to “global health and development” via GW or influenced by it. Exactly zero dollars went to education. Deworming according to Esther Duflo increases time in school, but GW analysis found that it did not increase time in school (or was insignificant) so we can discount it as going toward education.
Give Well did only 2 reports on education, one in 2009, and another in 2018. They came up empty.
The overall importance given to education is zero.
See my question Global basic education as a missing cause priority
You quote GiveWell as saying:
But you cut off the quote in a very misleading way indeed:
Unless you think spending time in school is very useful even if it has no other benefits to kids (i.e. they don’t learn anything they use later in life), GiveWell is surely right here that the benefits are mostly instrumental.
It is wrong to quote others in a way that misrepresents their view like this.
You also say:
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. They also didn’t buy people food, but presumably they don’t think eating is a useless activity and people can safely starve themselves.
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.
From Education for All: is the world on track? EFA global monitoring report, 2002 by UNESCO
As Sen puts it, “it is often asked whether certain political or social freedoms, such as the liberty of political participation and dissent, or opportunities to receive basic education, are or are not ‘conducive to development’. In the light of the more foundational view of development as freedom, this way of posing the question tends to miss the important understanding that these substantive freedoms (that is, the liberty of political participation or the opportunity to receive basic education or health care) are among the constituent components of development. Their relevance for development does not have to be freshly established through their indirect contribution to the growth of GNP or to the promotion of industrialization.”
Hence, education counts as a ‘valuable being or doing’, as an ‘end’ of development.
It seems that the fundamental disagreement between you and some others is that you associate intrinsic value to time spent in school, while others believe that being in school is worthy only if it brings students positive health and income outcomes.
For example, you may believe that if a third grade student who fell behind in their first grade due to post-colonial education and is not learning anything anymore should be kept in school, e.g. where teachers beat children and fail the exams of grades below those which they teach, for another eight years, because school is good on its own.
Others may believe that a third-grade student who fell behind in their first grade does not need to attend the school where the only thing they learn is that they cannot do what is required from them, teachers cannot help them, and they receive beating for this situation. Instead, the finances which would be otherwise spent on keeping this student in school should be spent on, e.g. deworming, because this will enable the student to be healthy, energetic, and free, helping their family business.
you captured the disagreement well
not just me UNDP, Amartya Sen, Malala Yousafzai assume that time spent in school has intrinsic value. I along with them want better schools, better teaching etc.. but the quality of the schooling system should detract from the fact that schooling has value.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/does-education-need-qaly-and-lays-it “The non-pecuniary returns to education—child health, delayed pregnancy and marriage, democratic participation and so on—are substantial in education systems that otherwise perform dismally on test scores (e.g. the positive impacts of secondary schooling in Ghana despite low gain in learning shown in Duflo, Dupas & Kremer 2017).
Looking across countries (Figure 2), there is precisely zero relationship between school quality (measured by the World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes) and the labour market rate of return on investment in schooling.”
So what seems like bad schooling in terms of test scores, still has instrumental and intrinsic value.
I am not in favor of punishment, yes schools in agricultural societies do beat children. Worse still in the classroom sometimes they face discrimination, made to sit apart from other kids based on caste etc.. Race in USA and South Africa played that same role.
Even so education is better, because tomorrow they grow up, teach in their own communities, or put pressure on governments for change. e.g. the civil rights movement in the US, which BTW had a lot of moral help from newly independent countries, and was a factor in Brown vs Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education#Background
Most countries independence leaders went to college in Western countries, we can be sure that they faced racism from society and from the colleges they went to. The education was useful nevertheless.
deworming is so cheap because kids are in school. if they are not in school, you cant deworm them because the medicine is given in school.
Also J-PAL headlines deworming with “Deworming to increase school attendance” https://www.povertyactionlab.org/case-study/deworming-schools-improves-attendance-and-benefits-communities-over-long-term
Implicitly they assume education has intrinsic value.
no question the health benefits of deworming are important
“free” is a fantasy, most kids want to go to school, despite the poor learning environment.
the “family business” is tending to cows, farming, household chores etc., it should be considered similar to child labor.
Safeena Husain says
I have to say, I have been doing this for over a decade, and I have never met a girl who said to me, you know, “I want to stay at home,” “I want to graze the cattle,” “I want to look after the siblings,” “I want to be a child bride.” Every single girl I meet wants to go to school. And that’s what we really want to do.
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
This has bothered me quite a lot. I have been clear and consistent that I think that education has intrinsic value and have focused on that aspect. This can be seen from comments and posts on the forum.
I had no intent to mislead, I don’t see what I wrote as misleading or misrepresenting. I quoted accurately and linked to the source.
If anything it is the EA community that is misleading folks. “Development” is widely understood to include education when used in the context of “developing” countries or the global poor. Saying “Global Development” and not including education is extremely misleading it took me 2 years of immersion in EA to finally understand that EA folks don’t include education when talking about “Global Development”
Maybe you should do a podcast on this.
The following URL needs to be fixed to say “Global Health and Income” or “Global Health and Poverty”, right now it’s misleading. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cause-profile-global-health-and-development/
This would be great, if this holds true. Intuitively, this makes sense: investments in human capital improve a nation’s productivity—the only thing is that returns on education are not immediate (and the “discount rate” in poor areas may be high—people may not like sacrificing present benefit for a ‘distant’ future gain). The delayed benefits may be an issue for poor and indebted countries.
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Yes, perhaps EA can look into the long-term gains of inclusive education? There is an RCT on the effectiveness of after-school tutoring in improving students’ learning outcomes. However, I am not sure about statistically robust research that examines the conditions under which education leads to health, income, and wellbeing improvements.
We humans are social animals, and pass knowledge from one generation to another via culture, uneducated parents expect that the lives of their will be similar to their own. Schools are outside their social expectations for what is good or useful for their kids. ‘Sacrificing ’ current benefits for future benefits is not the main issue, those calculations and thoughts don’t occur to illiterate parents. They expect their kids to have similar lives as them, a winning formula that worked for 10,000+ years.
you should read research from Wolfgang Lutz, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, Warren Sanderson. It is statistically robust. I will also note that anthropology , sociology, demography are valid disciplines to reason about human societies, social policy. Math and statistics are not the only tools.
As far as RCT’s goes, RCT is good for finding short-term effects, and not very useful at finding effects that are long term in nature and those that have positive externalities like education.
Jean Dreze co-author with Sen in Hunger and Public Action and many other books has this to say about RCTs
https://thewire.in/economy/some-questions-around-the-use-of-evidence-based-policy
I understand that one may think as such – closeminded thinking which does not question tradition and blindly follows authoritarian structure.
However, with the arguable dominance of the Western authoritarian structure which assigns power to socio-economic status as defined by the norms of industrial economies, even illiterate parents may wish their children to succeed within these new, Western structures, if the parents believe for such possibility.
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Thank you, I am skimming this article by Lutz, Cuaresma, and Sanderson. Controlling for “human capital dynamics” in their regression, the authors find that “improvements in educational attainment are the key to explaining productivity and income growth.
But perhaps the authors solely argue (also here) that favorable educational dividend (a high ratio of educated to uneducated workers), rather than favorable demographic dividend (high ratio of productive-age to unproductive-age labor force) leads to national growth.
The claim on the benefits of education seems intuitive: the more educated workforce a nation has, the higher up within global value chains it is.
Yet, will you be able to provide any other statistical evidence that quantifies the returns on investments in education (in terms of income and health changes), particularly in the geographical areas where Educate Girls operates?
Sure they do, especially with exposure these days via media. However there is a differential in how much boys are sent to school vs girls. Age is also a factor: puberty is a big wall for the girl child in terms of going to school. Most parents send kids to school if one is accessible. Where schools are absent no one went to school. With MDG and SDG more focus has come on schools, they are now more accessible. Hence the increase in enrollment.
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The research from Lutz et all is highly recommended. Amartya Sen, Jean Dreze, Hans Rosling are also at the top of my list.
Yes there is no Demographic dividend, it is an education dividend.
This entry in Our World in Data is very good https://ourworldindata.org/global-rise-of-education
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Such data is hard to come by, even basic data like registrations of births, deaths is incomplete. If we look at the data from states of India we find that the relationship between education and health/income stands.
I would suggest moving away from requiring statistical evidence in every geographical area. Lets take medicine, first there is the research, then the RCT, then it comes to market. While the manufacturer should continue to monitor the effects of drug after the drug is in market, we dont expect them to run RCT in every country.
Like medicines the evidence for the benefits of education are robust and go a long way. We should be able to take that evidence as fact, and move on to finding out the best way to spread education to everybody. RCT can be used as a tool for this goal.
This is similar to how Duflo and others assume immunization is good, now they are working on getting everyone immunized and figuring out best way to do so via RCT.
As far as returns go, there is data on child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, income by level of education. All of this data is approximate.
My calculations suggest that Educate Girls is 3-6 times more effective than most GW recommended charities and 30 times that of Give Directly. I dont take the estimates literally, I think they are good ballpark numbers.
OK, I read that there should be more RCT research on cost-effective methods of achieving favorable welfare outcomes through mass education, especially of disadvantaged students.