Freddie deBoer is a writer, academic, and former teacher whose research and experience challenge one of society’s most deeply held beliefs: that education is the great equaliser.
After teaching students at every level - from special education classrooms to college lecture halls - Freddie had a change of heart. He came to believe that intelligence is largely inherited, that academic ability is far more stable than we like to admit, and that expecting every child to succeed in the same system can actually be cruel.
We explore the moment that led Freddie to question the promise of education, why well-funded interventions and elite schools rarely change outcomes, and what a more humane and realistic approach to schooling could look like.
📘 Check out The Cult of Smart — Freddie’s book on meritocracy, inequality, and the myth of potential
📰 Read his essays on education, politics, and culture at freddiedeboer.substack.com
Thom and Aidan left boring, stable careers in law and tech to found FarmKind, a donation platform that helps people be a part of the solution to factory farming — regardless of their diet. While the podcast isn’t about animal welfare, it’s inspired by their daily experience grappling with a fundamental question: Why do people so rarely change their minds, even when confronted with compelling evidence? This curiosity drives their exploration of intellectual humility and the complex factors that enable (or prevent) meaningful belief change.
Thoughts? Feedback? Guest recommendations?
Email us at hello@changedmymindpod.com
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Kids grades and test scores are a reflection of a inherent
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intrinsic academic ability, right?
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We have done all kinds of interventions to try to change
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these things that end up having no effect.
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So, for example, you just take a bunch of kids and you randomly
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assign them to schools that are of different perceived quality.
00:00:20
There is no observable difference in those groups.
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Not everybody is equally good at everything.
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And the way that the last 50 or 60 years of American education
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has reduced children's value to just their ability to do well in
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school is a really cruel and pernicious thing.
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And it creates A terribly ugly vision of what human life is
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foreign about. I'm Tom and I'm Aiden, and
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you're listening to Change My Mind.
00:00:45
We're interesting people show their biggest changes of heart
00:00:47
and takes along their journey from first outs to completely
00:00:50
new perspectives. In the comedy show Breeders, 2
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helicopter parents threatened by another couple buying a house
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right next door to the best school in the area.
00:01:09
Carry out a plot to. Blow up the marriage of their
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children's educational rival. This is satire, but only just.
00:01:17
In 2023, Rick Singer was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in
00:01:21
prison for helping over 50 parents bribe their kids into
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top US colleges, including a couple accused of paying half
00:01:28
$1 to get their daughters into a college as Fig
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rowing team recruits. Meanwhile, politicians promise
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that better education will solve inequality, and we tell
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struggling students that with enough effort, they can achieve
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anything. And at the heart of it all lies
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a simple, powerful belief that if you work hard enough, a great
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education can be your ticket to the good life.
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But what if this entire framework is not just wrong, but
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actively harmful? Today we're joined by Freddie
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Debert, whose book The Cult of Smart challenges some of the
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assumptions that fuel our political debates around
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education. The education can act as a tool
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to reduce inequality, and that any student can learn anything
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with the right effort and teachers.
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He's both an insider and an outsider, having worked as a
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teacher himself of everyone from special education students to
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college freshmen, but also having studied education itself,
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writing APHD on educational measurement and standardized
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testing. In The Cult of Smart, he argues
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that academic ability is largely inherited, the education can't
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meaningfully reduce inequality, and that our meritocratic
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society is no more just and the aristocracies it replaced.
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All right. Hi, Freddy.
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Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for joining
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us. Yeah, thank you for having me.
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Right, So really excited about this conversation.
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I massively enjoyed reading the Colt Smart.
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It was a really fascinating book on a topic like we all have a
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take on education because we've all obviously we've all been to
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school. But I found it really
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interesting and for me, just like, broke down a lot of my
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assumptions about like how school works and how it's useful
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and things like this. But before we kind of get into
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that, I wanted to start with one of the really important key
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stories in the book. And you describe this as a
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moment that fundamentally changed how you think about
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education. So could you tell us the story
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about your students struggling with long division?
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Yeah, I was working for my local public school district.
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I worked there for like a year and a half and in various roles
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and my love. This role was being a program
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for kids with severe emotional disturbance.
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You can probably expect from that that there was a lot of
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like kids who are very deep problems.
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This kid was like one of the success stories of the program.
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He really improved charges, behavior around the club, but he
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still had a really deep academic struggles.
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And I was working with him on long division in particular and
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just sort of observing the fact that there probably was no magic
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bullet way to make him good at it.
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Actually. That everything that he picked
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up, that he got a little bit better and was grudgingly
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earned, that any progress was transient, that he could lose it
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at anytime, and that fundamentally there are concepts
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that he was just not understanding and I knew.
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So one of my best friends happened to work at the same
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school and occasionally I would get to go and work with her 5th
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graders, so the same grade as these kids and just kin in a
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normal sort of non special Ed classroom.
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And they were doing fractions and they were, you know, I mean,
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you're doing the rudiments of algebra in there, you know.
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And so this was these were the the people who, you know, 7 or 8
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years down the line would be his competition to get into college
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and 10 or 12 years down the line would be his competition in the
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labor market. And fundamentally, right, what
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the entire political apparatus was saying to me, I mean, this
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was a completely bipartisan belief among Democrats,
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Republicans, was that the way you saved that kid was making
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him as good at math as those other kids, right.
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Yeah. That the way that you that you
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rescued this kids life because as you can probably imagine, the
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kids note in that program came from almost universally broken
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homes that bring a very difficult circumstance.
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The way you save a kid like that is by making him good at math.
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And it occurred to me that I probably could not make him good
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at math, that there was probably if I was taking things seriously
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and that there would be nobody who could make him, you know,
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competitive with the best of his peers, which she would have to
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be if he was going to go to Stanford someday and from
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Stanford go on to work at Google someday, etcetera.
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And this was just a false and then I, you know, that holding
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on to the idea that anything was possible with this kid
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ultimately was the opposite of compassionate towards him,
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right? That in fact, the idea that if I
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just wanted enough, if I was a good enough paraprofessional, if
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the teacher in the classroom was a good enough teacher, if
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everybody wanted it enough, that we could just do this, that that
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actually wasn't surf, producing a great deal of delusion, that
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ultimately wasn't surfing him. And that stickiness, his
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inability to catch up, was genuinely kind of flight
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faltering for me. I imagine that over the years
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you would have been in a lot of similar experiences with with
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other kids. What do you think it was that
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made that made it click for you this time?
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Or was that kind of a gradual dawning of this realization?
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Yeah. I mean, I've taught every level.
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I've literally taught from kindergarten, grad school.
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But my bulk of my experiences with college students,
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undergraduate students. For one thing, undergraduate
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students are self selecting to population, right?
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There's a screening mechanism through which they get into the
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college, but also with this kid, this was, you know, I was
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working as a tutor for him. So, you know, because of the way
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that special education funding works in the United States,
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their ability to have me in class as a full time
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paraprofessional. So there's another full time
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adult for a class of only eight students, right?
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All this was only made possible because of the affordances of
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the funding structure of special education in the United States,
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which is a whole big conversation that enabled me to
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work with him one-on-one, which would that never been possible
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in most other contexts. And so working with this kid,
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but also understanding his wife context, right?
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Like one of the things about a program like this is that
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there's a really deeply unusual integration of the kids that
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will homo life into school because there has to be.
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I met his father many times, knew about his personal life and
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personal struggles. And so I was just getting a
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picture of the whole individual. Also, he was my buddy.
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He's just this, he's just great kid.
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I liked a lot. And that sort of opened him up
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more as a total human being to me.
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And as a total human being, I was forced to ask myself, going
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through my life, has it been the case that I have observed many
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human beings around me going from near the bottom of the
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academic total pole where he was to near the top?
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And the reality is that I hadn't.
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In fact, I think that that was probably unheard of in my
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experience. And that's what spurred research
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that demonstrated to me in fact, that doesn't happen that a
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remarkable degree, our academic relative academic standing is
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sticky. It's persistent.
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By which I mean if you take where all the kids are in fifth
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grade or even kindergarten, if you take all where all the kids
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are in their academic position quite early in life, really
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early in life, that relative position is almost always
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maintained throughout academic life.
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Of course there are some exceptions, right?
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Some extreme things can happen. Kids can have family tragedies
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that result in Derek's in their greatest falling apart or some
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kids can get adopted into a household that helps them a lot.
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Although even, and that appears to have limited effect, there
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aren't like rare exceptions where this happens, but to a
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remarkable degree from 10 feet.
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The system is static, right? To the point where I pull out
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all these stats all the time that make people unhappy, right?
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For example, So third grade reading group, right?
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So in the United States, it's very common for kids to be put
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into reading groups in 3rd grade because kids read at different
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rates. This is a form of soft tracking.
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They, they don't say high, medium and low.
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They say like gold, silver and bronze.
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Or they'll just give them like whatever animal names or
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whatever. But it's high, medium and low,
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right? That information alone, if
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they're in high, medium or low, you can make remarkably accurate
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predictions about whether they're ever go to college,
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right? And 3rd graders are 8, you know,
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So like we know with remarkable predictive accuracy from a very
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coarse information, right? Who's going to go to college and
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who's not, right? And that is a bit of information
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that is staring us in the face in the research record.
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But because it is, people find it so profoundly antithetical to
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what they think about human flourishing and freedom.
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Nobody pays attention to it. And the whole point of the Cult
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is Smart was to pay attention to.
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Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, spend the
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majority of our conversation kind of talking about that and
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then indications of that. And but before we do, I, I
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wanted to just sort of spend a little bit of time on your kind
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of what got you there, Because obviously you decided to become
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an educator. And I imagine therefore, before
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you kind of came to this kind of way of thinking about education,
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did you start to start with that kind of belief that that mantra
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that education can kind of really be that great level of
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the people or transform the lives of children?
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I mean, that would sort of imply the question would imply that I
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had any kind of organised thinking about education at all,
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right? So it was interesting, like I
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worked in, you know, various kinds of education.
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If you define a broadly for a long time, I mean, even my, my
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early 20s, I started working as an instructor for the Red Cross
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and I taught lifeguarding, I taught CPRI, taught oxygen
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administration, you know, the firefighters or whatever, my
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first aid skills, things like that's like, but in the world of
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education broadly. But I got that gig because I was
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like, I just needed a job. I was in my late, I was getting
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into my late 20s and I was broken, directionless and didn't
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really know what else to do with myself.
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And so my brother told me that they were always hiring at this
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local school school district. So I just know what I got a job
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there, never attending it. For it to be a launcher.
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Yeah, it wasn't ultimately, I can't say that I had any kind of
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organized through ideology about education, but the American
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ethos is and everyone can do everything right.
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Like it's very, very deeply built into these things.
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I didn't. I was never like an Eddie reform
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guy. In fact, I was very friendly
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not. But there is like the assumption
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that the way that you, Sarah, save kids like this, the way
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that you help kids through at the bottom of the totem pole is
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by by educating them better and more was an assumption that was
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so deeply based into American political life that people
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didn't see it as an assumption. I just thought that it was just
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true, right. So I didn't have like a big
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conversion narrative in that sense, but I definitely had
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especially then when I went on stood to grad school, I started
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teaching college students a lot and also I began all my
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research. So I began doing tons of
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research for grad school. I was doing a lot of education
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research, reading a lot of education research, and that's
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when I sort of came around to the fact that something just
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wasn't adding up. Yes.
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So it's starting to question the received wisdom or the
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assumptions that are underlying kind of the way that education
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is is set up. You write in your book about
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this kind of educational mantra, you know that there are no
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hopeless students. And the corollary to that, which
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is that there are therefore some bad teachers as well, which I
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think is an important part of what you're saying.
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Just one final story that I think was really interesting.
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Could you tell us about the first year engineering student
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who you saw kind of breaking down with the stress of their
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cause and what this tells us about the the gap really between
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the educational rhetoric and the reality?
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Sure. So.
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I got my PhD at Purdue University, which is a well
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regarded, generally well regarded public university in
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Indiana and Nemstead, but it is specially well regarded in
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engineering. It is particularly well regarded
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in aerospace and astronautic engineering, so it is referred
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to as Astronaut University. There's more astronauts have
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graduated from Purdue than anyone else.
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And Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon as a Purdue graduate.
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That's a pretty cool claim to fame, you know?
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Yeah, for years after his retirement and before his death,
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he would turn up at, pursue football games and wave the flag
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or whatever. Amelia Earhart was an instructor
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there, etcetera, etcetera. You know, first year engineering
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at Purdue, like it is at many schools, is notorious, is
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notoriously difficult, it's notoriously hard and notoriously
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a condom. Students don't make it.
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In fact, only a third of the kids who start first year
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engineering and up as engineering majors.
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One of the reasons for that or what part of the part of what's
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baked into the system, It was called the weed out class.
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And the idea of a weed out class.
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This is not just an engineering thing.
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So like in Med school or for pre Med programs or in a lot of sort
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of things like organic chemistry is a notorious weed out class.
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These are courses that are hard in parts to get people to drop
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the major, right? So first year engineering at
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Purdue has these weed out classes which are designed to be
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so punishingly difficult that they will convince some students
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to go to a different major. Right now.
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This offends people a lot. And a lot of people find this
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just like, Oh my God, it's educate the malpractice.
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But in fact, right, it's a very humane logic behind which is one
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of the most devastating things that can happen to you as an
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American College student, because college is so immensely
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expensive because it takes a long time is if you get into
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your upper class years and then discover that you don't have
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what it takes to to graduate, right.
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In order to prevent that from happening, they try to front
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load difficulty in a way that gets the marginal cases out
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right. In other words, the idea is that
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if we have a we out classes in first year engineering, that's
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going to get kids out of the program who otherwise might make
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it to their junior year and discover, oh shit, I can't pass
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my classes. Right.
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And a student who changes majors as a freshman is in much better
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shape than the student changing majors and institute.
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That's like the context in which the student of mine was showed
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up to class crying and I was talking to sort of some of her
00:13:55
peers and they were just saying like, look, so just what this
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is, right? And as with any of this sort of
00:14:00
thing, right? And it's like that was part of
00:14:02
why the engineering degree was so prized within the school
00:14:05
because it meant that you would pass through the courtly, right?
00:14:08
Like I said, I've mentioned this before online and people freak
00:14:11
because they think that it's abusive.
00:14:12
But to me, right, the concept of a weed out class is just a very
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kind of pragmatic acknowledgement that not
00:14:21
everybody is equally good at everything, right?
00:14:23
I've been debating this book for five years now.
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I've never really felt comfortable that I have the
00:14:28
exact right way to sort of approach people, sort of
00:14:30
convincing people about it. But this idea is, you know, are
00:14:33
some people smarter than others is an interesting kind of thing
00:14:36
because depending on context, I can get the same people to say,
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of course, everyone knows that people are smarter than others
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or everybody knows that people are better at algebra than
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others. But if you change the context
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and you sort of change the way that you're saying it, people
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say, how dare you? That's awful.
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That's racist often. So if I say, you know, different
00:14:53
individual students have like a genetic endowment that sort of
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helps determine their mental acuity and that mental acuity
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helps determine how good they are at school.
00:15:01
And so we can say that, you know, your ability at school is
00:15:04
heavily influenced by your genes.
00:15:06
There's tons of people who will immediately declare that to be
00:15:09
eugenics, who will immediately say that that must be an
00:15:12
expression of student scientific racism, who it just insists that
00:15:15
that's beyond the pale bigotry. But if you say to those same
00:15:18
people hate it, you know, are some kids smarter than the
00:15:20
others? Do some kids sort of having a
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natural attitude? You know, thus it will sure,
00:15:23
some kids are better at something, right?
00:15:25
And, and I think that that kind of thing where you can find
00:15:28
these sort of these sort of moments where the exception of
00:15:32
how offensive a question is changes so much on what are
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really not that important sort of ways of framing it.
00:15:39
That to me sort of reveals where society is sort of built a Moat
00:15:42
around an issue. We just want to talk about it.
00:15:45
I think part of why you get these different responses in
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different contexts is that depending how you ask the
00:15:49
question, people think that you or other people, third parties
00:15:53
listening will conflate intelligence with moral worth or
00:15:57
being deserving of a good life, which is of course it's not what
00:16:01
but not what you're saying. And people have this reaction
00:16:03
when it comes to kind of anything heritable.
00:16:06
But in other contexts, they're perfectly willing to admit that
00:16:09
basically everything varies due to due to genetics.
00:16:11
So yeah, I think this is really important, disease apart, that
00:16:14
the fact that it is the case that genes make some people more
00:16:17
likely to perform better than others does not mean that
00:16:20
they're they're deserving of more or others are deserving of
00:16:23
less. Well, I mean, I frequently
00:16:25
accused of that, which is funny because that's the entire
00:16:27
premise of the book, right? Like the way that I sold the
00:16:30
book to the publisher, the core point of the book, right?
00:16:33
The titular cult of smart is the erroneous assumption that
00:16:37
academic intelligence is the only true human value, right?
00:16:41
And so I get myself in these really weird conversations where
00:16:44
I wrote this book arguing that there are many of other things
00:16:46
that human beings bring to the table that are not properly
00:16:49
being valued in our society other than academics.
00:16:52
But in the course of. And so I am frank about the fact
00:16:55
that some people are better at school than others, which then
00:16:58
leads them to it to assume that I'm saying that some people are
00:17:01
better than others. But the whole point, the whole
00:17:03
book is about the idea the cult of smart.
00:17:05
That's not like I'm not praising the cult of smart by calling it
00:17:08
the cult of smart, right? Like the whole idea is that is
00:17:11
that that is a erroneous set of assumptions, A reductive set of
00:17:15
assumptions. And so again, like Google by
00:17:18
this book depends so much on how what word or I go about laying
00:17:21
out its arguments, right. But it is just, to me, it is in
00:17:24
fact quite easy and obvious to sort of see the symmetry, which
00:17:28
is we have to acknowledge that not everybody is equally good in
00:17:31
all intellectual tasks. And it's in fact, it becomes
00:17:34
quite cruel to expect them to be.
00:17:36
But we also have to understand that there's all the different
00:17:38
kinds of ways to be a worthwhile human being.
00:17:41
And we should value those and we should help make sure everybody
00:17:43
has what they need to survive. Or you can express it the
00:17:46
opposite way, which is everybody has their own values and their
00:17:48
things that they're good at. And everyone should have the
00:17:50
right to know what they're, what they, what they can and can't
00:17:52
do, and to sort of be able to earn a living with what they
00:17:55
actually have. And then we can see that it
00:17:57
doesn't matter that not everyone is equally good at different
00:18:01
things in school. But like we do have to be
00:18:02
realistic. I mean, I get into so many of
00:18:04
these arguments that I say, OK, like some people just deny,
00:18:06
flatly deny the idea of like any intelligence or, or just some
00:18:10
that some people are smarter than others.
00:18:12
And I say, is it the case? And if I put everybody in a room
00:18:15
together and I give them the out and out for a test, are they all
00:18:18
going to do the same, get the same answers?
00:18:20
I say no, right? And I could say, and look, I
00:18:22
could show you that it's a persistent sort of attribute of
00:18:25
individuals that some people are better at math.
00:18:27
They don't just take one test. And the next time when they take
00:18:29
the it's a completely different outcome, right?
00:18:31
We have these consistent attributes of how good we are at
00:18:33
certain academic tasks. So different people, some
00:18:35
actively, right, good at different things, right?
00:18:38
And a lot of people will then say, well, yes, it's true.
00:18:40
You know, eventually you get to a point where you are as good as
00:18:44
you are at these different academic skills, but everyone
00:18:47
has the same potential, right? And that's one of the biggest
00:18:50
things is the really dogged attachment to the concept of
00:18:54
potential saves us from having to have this uncomfortable
00:18:56
conclusion. The problem is that it's not
00:18:59
true, right? I can and have brought a ton of
00:19:03
empirical evidence saying that in fact it's not the case that
00:19:05
everyone is equally good at everything.
00:19:07
But the other problem is that, as I constantly tell these
00:19:09
people, it's a very cruel thing to insist that everyone has the
00:19:12
same potential, right? Because once you do that, then
00:19:16
you're kicking out the legs from under the the argument that the
00:19:19
outcome is unfair if they end up poor, right?
00:19:21
In other words, a world where everyone has the exact same
00:19:24
intellectual ability in a market in which intellectual ability is
00:19:28
rewarded. If that's true, then you don't
00:19:30
have to feel bad about the person who ends up poor because
00:19:32
he can't do math, right? If that's true, you don't have
00:19:34
to feel bad about the about spiraling inequality, right?
00:19:38
Hey, everybody had the same chance, right?
00:19:39
We all have the same potential, right?
00:19:41
So if that's the case, then it bleeds in a really perverse sort
00:19:45
of social Darwinist perspective, you know?
00:19:47
Yeah, yeah, for sure. But I think this this point
00:19:50
about whether people have the same potential or or not is it
00:19:54
is one of the things that consistently people sort of push
00:19:56
back against you on for example, they say maybe, oh, you know,
00:20:01
it's just this particular educational environment is
00:20:03
better for some people or not others or something like this.
00:20:06
So could you very briefly just sketch out to us what the
00:20:09
evidence is for this point that you're making that that
00:20:12
essentially that I. Educational ability is heritable
00:20:15
and we don't all start as blank slates with the same the same
00:20:18
opportunity there. Let's look at a couple of
00:20:20
different kinds of evidence to the report.
00:20:22
So the first thing, the thing that I'm sort of most interested
00:20:25
in convincing people of, I mean, I, I kind of look at this as
00:20:27
sort of a nested series of statements.
00:20:29
One I'm certain of, one I am pretty strongly convinced of,
00:20:34
and one that I'm less convinced of.
00:20:36
It still seems like it's the thing that makes the most sense,
00:20:37
so that the top level is people sort themselves into ability
00:20:40
bands academically very early in life, and they stay in them with
00:20:44
remarkable fidelity. The first big piece of evidence
00:20:47
is you can just take school records from a school district
00:20:50
and you just do a rank order coefficient correlation where
00:20:53
you're just looking at where they are, like who's the top
00:20:56
student? Who's the bottom student in GPA,
00:20:58
your test scores or whatever? And you look at them when they
00:21:00
come in at 5 years old. So we can gather data from kids
00:21:03
after kindergarten, 5 year olds, that arrangement of data, who's
00:21:06
at the top and who's at the bottom with remarkable fidelity.
00:21:09
And we've seen this over and over again in thousands of
00:21:12
contexts in all different kinds of countries and school systems
00:21:16
or whatever. That rank order will be about
00:21:19
the same when they graduate high school at 18.
00:21:21
In other words, those intervening 13 years don't
00:21:24
really do much to shuffle the order at all.
00:21:27
Poor kids stay, poor kids in charters stay in charters, while
00:21:30
kids in public stay in public, whatever.
00:21:32
Now, people will say, well, you know, this is just an expression
00:21:36
of parenting or it's an expression of environment.
00:21:38
The problem is, is that like, we have an enormous amount of data
00:21:41
demonstrating that all kinds of environmental changes just don't
00:21:45
make that much of a difference. One of the things that we can
00:21:47
say with confidence is moving a kid from one school district to
00:21:50
another has very little impact on their relative placement.
00:21:54
They might move from a better district to a worse one and
00:21:57
their relative position will rise, but their position
00:22:00
relative to everybody doesn't really change that much.
00:22:03
We can move kids from public to charter to private.
00:22:06
That research has been done a lot.
00:22:08
The median private school student does not do any better
00:22:10
than the median public school student once you adjust for the
00:22:13
fact that private school hints come from different backgrounds,
00:22:16
etcetera. In fact, if you actually sort of
00:22:19
look at the progress of kids throughout their lives, it was
00:22:22
often very difficult to tell in the educational data by itself
00:22:25
when major life events has happened.
00:22:27
In other words, if all you gave me was grades and, and report
00:22:30
cards and, and, and test scores and you said, OK, here's the
00:22:34
sort of 13 years in K through 12 that this kid had you pick out
00:22:38
the year when they moved from New York to California, I almost
00:22:41
certainly couldn't do it right. Why?
00:22:43
Because that kids grades and test scores are a reflection of
00:22:47
a internal interior inherent intrinsic academic ability,
00:22:52
right? We have done all kinds of
00:22:54
interventions to try to change these things that end up having
00:22:58
no effect. So for example, I mean, the most
00:23:00
important probably evidence of this kind of there is, is we
00:23:03
have at least a dozen studies where we have actual genuine
00:23:06
random placement of students into schools, right?
00:23:09
It's hard to do, but occasionally there are
00:23:11
opportunities to do this. And what we find in these cases,
00:23:14
and I have a post called education doesn't work 2 point O
00:23:17
anybody can Google if they want, I guess.
00:23:19
I think dozen studies were genuine random placement makes
00:23:21
absolutely no difference for our students outcomes.
00:23:23
In other words, you just take a bunch of kids and you randomly
00:23:26
assign them to schools that are of different perceived quality
00:23:29
and there is no observable difference in those groups,
00:23:33
right? In other words, the random
00:23:35
placement between different schools doesn't matter, right?
00:23:37
Which would make perfect sense, right?
00:23:39
So that's I said my for my first thing is that the belief that
00:23:42
students maintain their relative position over school.
00:23:45
My second belief, which I don't know for sure as much, but which
00:23:48
certainly strongly implied is that there is in fact such a
00:23:51
thing as an intrinsic or inherent academic potential,
00:23:53
right? Then for we have something
00:23:56
within us that makes us better or worse at school and that that
00:23:58
tends to be persistent. I mean, there's tons and tons of
00:24:01
ways that we can look at this. So in the United States, there
00:24:03
are there are magnet schools and within these schools to this
00:24:07
category is something called an exam school.
00:24:09
So in the New York City public school system, in Boston, in
00:24:12
many different school systems. So there are the schools that
00:24:15
are supposed to be for the elite of the elite, which are exam
00:24:18
schools where rather than attending your high school that
00:24:22
you would have been assigned to otherwise within the system, you
00:24:24
take an exam. And if you are above a certain
00:24:27
cut score, then you get into these, this elite school.
00:24:30
Now there's been tons of controversy about this because
00:24:32
they've been producing racially disproportionate outcomes and
00:24:35
people are saying the tests are racing, etc.
00:24:37
But they provide us with a very good sort of basis of research,
00:24:41
which is we've got the test score, right?
00:24:43
And some kids score clearly well below or not getting in.
00:24:46
Some kids score so high, we know they're getting in.
00:24:48
But what if you look at the kids who just get in or don't get in,
00:24:50
In other words, Yeah, sometimes they call it a last in, last out
00:24:53
model. So you take years of data and
00:24:55
you just look at, OK, I'm going to look at the kids who just got
00:24:58
in, like the last 5% of students who got in and then the last 5%
00:25:03
of students who didn't get in, right?
00:25:04
These are students who are very tightly grouped by ability,
00:25:07
right? But some of them are going to
00:25:09
the exam school that everybody thinks is a great school and
00:25:12
some of them are going to their regular high school, right?
00:25:14
And because they're a little bit different in the test, we just
00:25:16
make, we do some very minor statistical adjustments to, to
00:25:19
keep the comparison fair. But what the finding of in all
00:25:22
of this research is always the same, which is that there it
00:25:24
makes absolutely no difference going to these exam schools,
00:25:27
right? These schools that are so
00:25:28
celebrated that they're so fought over that you have
00:25:31
parents who spend their kids entire childhood trying to prep
00:25:34
them and get into an exam school.
00:25:35
So they think that it matters so much in terms of the colleges
00:25:37
that they go to, into their their high school GPA, into
00:25:40
their college GPA, SAT scores, in terms of their employment
00:25:44
rates and their income after college.
00:25:47
No difference. You cannot tell these groups of
00:25:49
students apart. The thing that I find hard to
00:25:52
square about all of this is that the evidence you just point to
00:25:55
is all very compelling. At the same time, if a kid
00:25:58
didn't go to school at all, I wouldn't expect if they learn to
00:26:00
read or can do all sorts of things.
00:26:02
So like really, education can do something.
00:26:05
And if this is the case, it just seems kind of strange that
00:26:08
there's nothing about the way we do it that should have
00:26:11
meaningful educational attainment.
00:26:13
How do I square that? Sure.
00:26:14
So absolutely we can artificially keep a kid from
00:26:17
learning anything by actually keeping him entirely out of
00:26:19
school, right? But that kid who's like blocked
00:26:22
in a closet or whatever, you know, whatever tragic
00:26:24
occurrence, he's not going to school.
00:26:26
Underneath what's something that we have nothing to access is an
00:26:29
academic potential, right? So let's say that we have some
00:26:32
sort of time machine or alternative dimension machine.
00:26:34
We have the version of this kids life where he goes to school and
00:26:37
the version of the life where he doesn't go to school.
00:26:39
Where he goes to school, obviously he's learning more
00:26:41
than he would if he doesn't. AVS never goes to school and
00:26:44
there are life benefits that accrue to that.
00:26:46
But let's say that now halfway through education, we zapped the
00:26:50
kid who is not getting any school into the reality where
00:26:53
he's getting to school, right? Very quickly.
00:26:56
We the best evidence suggests to us that he would gravitate right
00:26:59
to that same level of relative ability, right?
00:27:02
In other words, there's a distinction between an absolute
00:27:04
learning and relative learning, right?
00:27:06
My kid who couldn't do law division was struggling in terms
00:27:09
of relative learning, right? He couldn't learn the material.
00:27:12
And there's many kids who can't learn things that they need to
00:27:14
learn. So one of the things is
00:27:16
constantly debated in America is do students need abstract math?
00:27:19
And the reason it's constantly debated is because they suck at
00:27:22
it. And to give you a sense of how
00:27:23
much they suck at it is there was one year where 2/3 of all
00:27:26
the students in the Arizona State public school system
00:27:29
failed their algebra requirement, 2/3 right now, I
00:27:32
would say that's obviously a misaligned standard, but it also
00:27:34
means that sometimes kids just can't learn something, certain
00:27:37
things, and they struggle with that.
00:27:38
But my concern for that kid wasn't really can he do long
00:27:41
division? Because speaking as an adult now
00:27:44
as a 44 year old man and never do long decision right, that
00:27:47
skill doesn't matter. What mattered to me was that his
00:27:50
struggle to do long division right, as I said, is matched up
00:27:53
against kids who who were his age, who were doing algebra and
00:27:56
who being fractions, who very much could do long division.
00:27:59
In other words, his peers were leaving him the dust, right?
00:28:03
So the student who was completely artificially
00:28:05
restricted from getting any schooling, which will
00:28:07
thanksfully is rare, right? It's definitely screwed, right?
00:28:10
But if we put them into the world where they do get
00:28:12
educated, that doesn't eliminate the fact that they have a level
00:28:15
of academic potential that they will gravitate towards.
00:28:18
You know, a lot of European countries have issues with
00:28:20
persistent youth unemployment, right?
00:28:23
So France, we had that problem in the 1970s.
00:28:26
They had a ton of specifically young men who could not get
00:28:28
jobs. French used to have mandatory
00:28:30
conscription right? So like Israel or South Korea,
00:28:33
all the men have to serve military right?
00:28:36
However, as is common in these systems, if you were college
00:28:39
bound, you could avoid the draft if he's a young Frenchman,
00:28:42
right? So you had these young freshmen
00:28:45
who go to college and avoid the draft and in doing go to college
00:28:49
and they have much better academic but also like financial
00:28:54
outcomes. And then guys who get drafted,
00:28:56
right? Which you know, if you were a
00:28:58
policy maker, you say, aha, look, these kids are getting
00:29:00
screened out of college and that's why they're not doing
00:29:02
well, right? So we'll get rid of the screen.
00:29:04
So they eliminate conscription. And they did that with based on
00:29:08
a specific birthday. If you were born of the state,
00:29:10
you had to be conscripted. If you were born after the
00:29:12
state, you didn't have to be very nice.
00:29:14
Natural experiment for us, right?
00:29:16
So that happens. They keep really rigorous track
00:29:19
of what happens between these groups, right?
00:29:21
So now all of these French young men who used to be going into
00:29:25
the military are now free to go to college, OK.
00:29:27
And what they thought is that it made no difference.
00:29:29
So, right, removing the screen of the draft that was keeping
00:29:32
all of these kids from going to college, not only did it have
00:29:35
literally 0 impact on their incomes or their employment
00:29:38
rate, right? It had very small impact on the
00:29:42
number of French men who are graduating from college.
00:29:45
Because most of the men who now didn't have to draft, that
00:29:49
didn't mean they wanted to go to college and most of themselves
00:29:51
selected out. And most of the ones who now did
00:29:54
go to college were the marginal cases who didn't have the
00:29:57
prerequisite ability and ended up dropping out, right?
00:30:00
In other words, you can identify the screen, but the real screen
00:30:04
was some French men were better at school than others, right?
00:30:07
And that massive policy intervention just could not
00:30:10
overcome the fact that some people are smarter than others,
00:30:13
right? Some people are better at
00:30:15
school. Then the third leg, which is the
00:30:17
least sort of justifiable, although I strongly believe that
00:30:19
it's true, is that this is largely genetic origin, right?
00:30:22
That that the inherent orange means, I think is the product of
00:30:25
our genes. And it's not particularly hard
00:30:27
to sort of imagine how this would work, right?
00:30:30
You we have a genetic endowment from our parents, our cognitive
00:30:34
system. Our brains are a nervous system,
00:30:36
are built by our genomes like we people have babies and those
00:30:41
babies are built with DNA, right?
00:30:42
And there is some connection between the architecture of the
00:30:45
building of that person from that genome and how smart they
00:30:49
are when they come out. As you know, this is one of the
00:30:51
most controversial topics in the history of cognitive science and
00:30:55
I mean behavioral genetics. There are many people in the
00:30:57
Academy who derive behavioral genetics as just inherently
00:31:00
raises the stories inherently bigoted.
00:31:01
Or you know, the behavioral geneticists, for their part,
00:31:04
have an immense amount of data showing that the more
00:31:07
genetically similar to people are this, the more similar they
00:31:10
are in terms of their cognitive outcomes.
00:31:11
Right. The thing is, is I think this is
00:31:13
one of my biggest We read about the book and this is really kind
00:31:15
of, I mean, I don't want to say it's their fault, but like the
00:31:17
publishing company really wanted to emphasize the genetics angle
00:31:21
because it was controversial and controversy to create publicity
00:31:23
and it's just not that important to me, right?
00:31:26
In other words, much, much less interested in proving to people
00:31:29
or arguing to people that intelligence is has a genetic
00:31:33
basis than I am in arguing. Like, hey, look, at some point
00:31:38
we should probably acknowledge that really early on.
00:31:41
We know which kids are the smart ones and which aren't.
00:31:43
We know which kids are the good students and which aren't.
00:31:45
And while we'll never, we should never give up on a possibility
00:31:48
of students getting better. They sometimes do, right?
00:31:50
Maybe we should start taking that seriously and stop
00:31:53
pretending like it's a thing that happens all the time.
00:31:55
That like we're taking, you know, bottom quartile kids and
00:31:59
making them as smart as top quartile kids because they never
00:32:02
happen, right? Look like, look at like the most
00:32:04
extreme intervention I can think of as adoption, right?
00:32:07
Like adoption from the sort of the poorest home to the richest
00:32:10
home with the understanding that poor and rich is not just about
00:32:13
income, it's also about stability, right?
00:32:15
Like it's a proxy for a lot of things.
00:32:16
Is there an influence on adoption moving from a very
00:32:19
poor, very poor home to a very ritual?
00:32:21
There is, it's less than 1/2 of 1 standard deviation of IQ, 66
00:32:27
points on enforge to move from the poorest home to the richest
00:32:29
home. That's not nothing.
00:32:31
And of course, I would never see there's no environmental
00:32:33
influence in this. Of course there is some
00:32:34
environmental influence, but that's the most extreme
00:32:36
intervention I can possibly think of.
00:32:38
It has what is a quite modest outcome.
00:32:41
And of course, we can't and shouldn't be adopting out kids
00:32:45
to traumatically different homes to try to save them.
00:32:47
Yeah, I just want to very quickly So what we've just
00:32:50
because I do think. What, You've just.
00:32:52
Laid out for us really well there with reference to lots of
00:32:55
different examples. He's just like so sort of
00:32:58
paradigm chattering for the way that we tend to think about
00:33:00
education and educational outcomes.
00:33:02
Like So what you've said is like essentially very extremely early
00:33:06
on, we are fixed in our relative educational gaps, but also that
00:33:11
moving from different school systems in a country at
00:33:14
different schools in the country, that effect we can't
00:33:17
really see. And I think that that point you
00:33:19
just made right at the end there, that to me is almost the
00:33:21
most surprising. Like if I was going to think,
00:33:23
OK, it's it's fixed, but that's probably due to, you know, the
00:33:27
home environment, which is obviously so economic.
00:33:29
But even even taking people from the poorest homes to the richest
00:33:33
homes has an effect, but as you say, a very marginal effect.
00:33:36
I think this is just such a different way of thinking about
00:33:40
about this, this kind of this educational attainment.
00:33:43
Yeah. Well, I have one last bit of
00:33:44
push back. To be clear, I like, I find the
00:33:46
evidence very compelling. But I suppose I was learning a
00:33:49
little bit about the the history of of education, particularly in
00:33:52
the US recently. And it occurs to me that we only
00:33:54
really started to get remotely scientific about it in the past
00:33:59
couple of decades. And is it possible that we just
00:34:02
haven't found the thing that works yet?
00:34:04
We, we just haven't tried enough.
00:34:05
And in particular, I was, I was reading A blog, which I know you
00:34:09
read as well. I saw you in the comments, the
00:34:11
Alpha School Network in the US. That's for those who haven't
00:34:13
heard about it. It basically uses text to kind
00:34:15
of personalized learning. So it goes at the right speed
00:34:17
relative to the student's ability.
00:34:18
There's built in instantaneous feedback loops and the, all the
00:34:21
feedback loops are just good in general when it comes to
00:34:23
improving things and devocation for incentives.
00:34:26
And these things on their face just seem like kind of no
00:34:29
brains. I'm not saying these are the
00:34:31
solution, but I guess what I'm gesturing out is, is it too soon
00:34:35
to declare that there are solutions?
00:34:37
Yes. So I think that it is too soon
00:34:38
to declare there are solutions. I would be extremely skeptical
00:34:41
given that the United States has invested in absolutely immense
00:34:45
amount of blood and treasure into this project for at least
00:34:48
the last 75 years and has almost nothing to show for it like the
00:34:52
amount of money that we have dedicated to education.
00:34:55
If you look at a graph of the portion of GDP that is being
00:34:58
dedicated to education in this country over time, it is
00:35:01
stunning just how I'm sort of much more we're dedicating now.
00:35:04
You could say, well, maybe we just have to find the thing and
00:35:06
maybe that's true. I will say a few things.
00:35:07
The first thing is like deciding whether it's worth the pain in
00:35:10
the ass or not to write a post about the Alpha School.
00:35:12
The Office School was one of many of these organizations that
00:35:15
really goes hard on what's called Blooms to Sigma problem,
00:35:18
which is this guy, this Bloom sociologist.
00:35:20
You had the amazing discovery that, you know, intensive small
00:35:23
group tutoring can move students to standard deviations in the
00:35:27
performance spectrum, which we said if we can only figure out a
00:35:30
way to make an economical to do that, then we would solve these
00:35:33
problems, right? And the Alpha School people
00:35:35
quote this all the time. The problem is, is that like I
00:35:38
said before, education research is really hard to do and a lot
00:35:40
of is extremely low quality. And I mean, just the history of
00:35:44
educational research is the history of like thinking that we
00:35:46
found something and then gradually we get better at doing
00:35:48
studies, you realize, and that we haven't.
00:35:50
So with the balloon thing in particular, it's amazes me that
00:35:52
people constantly cite this thing as sacrosanct.
00:35:55
His his data sets in a fourth that research was came from 2
00:35:59
dissertations that are both small and one was about fourth
00:36:03
and 5th graders learning probability and one was about an
00:36:05
E grade cartography class. That is the that is the data
00:36:08
quality of that underlies the entire perception of Bloom's to
00:36:11
Sigma miracle. OK, so like something that just
00:36:14
doesn't that doesn't walk the dog for me, You're going to have
00:36:17
to come up with a really compelling sort of argument for
00:36:19
how these things are going to change and look like again,
00:36:23
like, yeah, it it matters. The things that appear to really
00:36:25
matter or to really work don't over time, right.
00:36:28
So the the classic example is pre-K right.
00:36:31
So, so this is so it for those not in the United States context
00:36:34
that, you know, we, we fund education from age 5 to age 18,
00:36:38
kindergarten through 12. But we don't have, except in a
00:36:41
small handful of cities, universal access to pre-K.
00:36:44
But pre-K is like a pre kindergarten.
00:36:46
And the difference between daycare and pre-K is that pre-K
00:36:48
has an academic focus as well as being daycare for for years or
00:36:52
decades. Liberals have insisted the pre-K
00:36:54
is the solution, and they point to old studies that came out in
00:36:56
the 1960s. As time is going on and we've
00:36:59
learned more and more about statistical controls and we've
00:37:02
learned more and more about data quality and we've learned more
00:37:04
and more about how to do these studies effectively.
00:37:06
The pre-K studies have gotten more and more and more
00:37:08
discouraging to the point now where it's even hard for a lot
00:37:11
of sort of the most diehard liberal walks to sort of hold on
00:37:13
to the illusion that this stuff is going to be the solution.
00:37:16
I mean, there's what's called a fade out effect, which again is
00:37:18
like, except which you expect if there we have a genetic
00:37:21
endowment that influences this stuff.
00:37:22
But there's tons of things that appear to have some measurable
00:37:25
difference early in life, but that when you remeasure down the
00:37:29
road, the students have all reverted to their previous
00:37:32
places, right. So it's sometimes referred to as
00:37:34
the Wilson effect, which is cognitive ability appears to
00:37:37
become more heritable as you go later in life.
00:37:40
Well, why would that be true? Well, if you think about it, if
00:37:42
you have a very young child, that young child controls very
00:37:45
little of their environment and their behavior and their time
00:37:48
and how they spent it, right? You can pretty much force A4
00:37:50
year old to do what you want to do.
00:37:52
You can stick a book in front of them, you can make them do their
00:37:54
homework, you can be someone who is very actively invested in
00:37:57
them. Overtime it is inevitable and
00:38:00
necessary for people as they age to gain more and more
00:38:03
independence. And what we find is that as
00:38:05
people gain more and more independence, they have a
00:38:07
tendency to gravitate to their underlying level of talent,
00:38:11
meaning people who might get a boost from something like pre-K,
00:38:15
who lose that boost within a few years because they are no longer
00:38:18
in the environment where they are being forced to do those
00:38:20
things, right? And this is an important
00:38:22
statement. The fact that like that, like
00:38:24
interest in will is bound up in cognitive ability, right?
00:38:27
You have to care enough to do these things.
00:38:29
Here's what I would say. No, I'm not closing my door to
00:38:31
the opportunity to idea they would.
00:38:32
Something could happen. Here's the analogy I would make,
00:38:34
right? You have an algorithm, then you
00:38:36
have a data set, and the algorithm can parse the data
00:38:38
set, right? I can build different algorithms
00:38:41
of different levels of power and sophistication.
00:38:43
And some algorithms are going to do with the job faster or
00:38:46
slower. Based on that, we can change the
00:38:48
data set. We can prune the data set and
00:38:50
clean the data and set it up the best way that we possibly can to
00:38:54
make it the most digestible for everyone, right?
00:38:56
But at some point, you get to a level where you can't clean the
00:39:00
data anymore and you just have to have a more powerful
00:39:02
algorithm, right? And so if our brains are like
00:39:04
these algorithms, it just is in the research record the case
00:39:07
that over time, power of natural ability reveals itself over and
00:39:11
over again. And I think this is a really,
00:39:13
really key thing to point out too, which is the part, a
00:39:15
fundamental part of the problem is the smart kids keep learning
00:39:18
too. So like in the United States,
00:39:20
we're obsessed with the racial achievement gap.
00:39:22
I find it kind of a distraction in some ways.
00:39:24
It's important to say that black American kid today in 2025 is a
00:39:29
much stronger student. You just just take the median
00:39:32
black third grader or 8th grader or whatever you want.
00:39:34
That student today in 2025 is a much better student than the
00:39:38
median black kid of the same age in 2000.
00:39:41
So what One of the things that's happening all the time is we
00:39:43
actually are getting smarter all the time.
00:39:44
They mentioned these kids doing fractions or algebra when I was
00:39:47
in the same school district 20 years earlier than them.
00:39:50
We never did that stuff when I was in fifth grade.
00:39:52
As time goes on, skills move earlier and earlier in a kids
00:39:55
education. So people are getting smarter
00:39:58
and black kids are outperforming the black kids of 25 years ago.
00:40:01
The problem is the white kids got smarter too.
00:40:03
In other words, they were also getting smarter.
00:40:05
And so the gap doesn't close. It's a scatter plot.
00:40:07
It's a scatter plot of it is looking at a test of college
00:40:12
student ability that they take when they're freshman and when
00:40:15
they're seniors to show that their growth.
00:40:18
And it is regressed on that the those same students SAT scores.
00:40:23
In other words, you're just looking at, OK, here's how the
00:40:25
kids do at these different institutions.
00:40:27
Here's the average, here's a, you know, a Community College,
00:40:29
here's a mid tier state school, here's an Ivy school.
00:40:32
It's a hundreds of schools. Here's their freshman scores and
00:40:35
here's their senior scores. And because we're putting it on
00:40:38
a scatter plot with the SAT, we can see the relationship between
00:40:41
the SAT scores and those scores, right?
00:40:43
On one hand, this image is optimistic because all of these
00:40:47
institutions saw significant growth in their average student
00:40:51
scores, right? I think that it is a myth that
00:40:53
students don't learn in college. I think the best evidence is
00:40:55
that, in fact, there's robust learning happening in American
00:40:58
colleges and the gap between these two lines, here's the
00:41:01
freshman, here's the seniors, say that's growth, that's
00:41:03
learning. So what's the problem?
00:41:05
The problem is, is if you look all the way on the right, which
00:41:08
is the Harvards, right, the Hills, right, their bubble
00:41:10
started out, you know, way higher than where the other
00:41:13
people did and they learned too. So you shift the whole lineup.
00:41:17
People are learning, but relatively the people on the
00:41:21
left hand side are in no better situation than they were when
00:41:23
they started. And they are labor market
00:41:26
competition for the people all the way on the right.
00:41:29
Right. And I've said this many times, I
00:41:31
can absolutely 100% close the racial achievement camp.
00:41:35
You make it illegal for Asian and white kids to go to school
00:41:37
for two decades and we will have no academic achievement camp,
00:41:40
right? Unfortunately, it's not a
00:41:42
practical solution, nor is it a good solution, right?
00:41:45
And people really don't like this part is it kind of pulls,
00:41:48
it pulls apart to sort of like, but wait a minute, if you're
00:41:50
learning, isn't that all that matters?
00:41:51
But the reality is, it very much is not all that matters if what
00:41:54
we're caring about is the economic consequences of the
00:41:58
education system, right? Like moral justification for all
00:42:01
this shit, right? The story that Barack Obama used
00:42:04
to give soaring speeches about ones these poor black kids,
00:42:07
these poor Hispanic kids, these poor white kids in like the
00:42:11
Appalachian Mountains or Ozarks or whatever.
00:42:13
These kids don't have a chance now, but if we teach them well
00:42:16
enough, then they'll get to go to Google and Roxale.
00:42:19
They'll get to go to Stanford and become lawyers and doctors.
00:42:22
They'll get to go to DEL and become engineers.
00:42:24
Whatever. Right.
00:42:25
The problem with that, though, is that that is a relative
00:42:29
playing field, right? Harvard wants the best students,
00:42:32
and then Google wants to hire the best of those Harvard
00:42:35
students. And so you can't ignore the
00:42:37
relative performance of people as long as they are eventually
00:42:41
winding up in a competition against each other.
00:42:43
You know what I'm saying? Yeah.
00:42:45
This is really important. And I think even the the Obama
00:42:49
goal that you referenced seems to have guided because even if
00:42:51
you could close relative attainment, if everyone was as
00:42:54
smart as the smartest kids, Google was only going to hire as
00:42:56
many people as they're going to hire.
00:42:57
So we are going to end up with unequal economic outcomes.
00:43:00
And you can, yeah, you can therefore conclude, you know,
00:43:03
education doesn't solve inequality of attainment and so
00:43:06
it doesn't solve inequality of economic results.
00:43:10
But a push back one might have is that an economy where
00:43:13
everybody is more educated in aggregate is an economy with
00:43:17
more wealth to distribute. And so even though we still have
00:43:20
inequality, we're unequally splitting a larger pie.
00:43:23
And sure, that's not nearly as good as equally splitting a
00:43:26
larger pie, but it's better than unequally splitting a small pie.
00:43:29
What would you say to that? Yeah.
00:43:30
I mean, I would say that at first, like I, I it's not
00:43:33
entirely clear to me that the economy benefits that much from
00:43:35
the 20th percentile person being marginally smarter, right.
00:43:40
So in other words, I mean, I think that I have to point out
00:43:42
to give all the time is people talk about like, Oh my God,
00:43:44
American schools are so bad now. When can we get back to our
00:43:47
glory days? We've never had glory days.
00:43:49
OK, going back to the very beginnings of rigorous
00:43:51
international comparison between America and other school systems
00:43:55
in a developed world, we've always been terrible, right?
00:43:58
The first major one was in the 1960s, early 1960s.
00:44:01
I think we were second to last out of all of the major
00:44:04
developed nations that were included, right?
00:44:06
We've always sucked. And that's true even at the
00:44:08
height of our various powers. So like 1969, we put a man on
00:44:11
the moon, right? The appearance of our greatest
00:44:14
military dominance, economic dominance, scientific dominance.
00:44:17
Our numbers suck. Why?
00:44:18
Well, because the generic condition in American schooling
00:44:22
is that we actually don't really have bad median students.
00:44:25
Like our median student does pretty good, right?
00:44:27
Our highest performing students. And this is what nobody in the
00:44:30
media wants to talk about. We're the envy of the world,
00:44:33
right? Our kids win the top
00:44:34
international competitions all the time, and we have three
00:44:37
years. So the fucking United States
00:44:39
right now there's the other side, which is that all the kids
00:44:42
are Asian on these teams, but Asian American kids are American
00:44:45
kids. But the point is, copper forming
00:44:47
students, I will take the top performing 10% or 5% or 3% of
00:44:51
American students, I'll put them up against anyone in the world,
00:44:54
right? So that to me, it's like that
00:44:57
slightly confuses, I think, your narrative because presumably
00:44:59
you're not claiming that for some reason Americans are
00:45:04
genetically more intelligent than any girl with a given
00:45:07
country. So I, I, I absolutely would say
00:45:09
that. I would say that what, why,
00:45:12
without why are all the nation's students Asian Americans and not
00:45:16
Chinese students or Japanese students or Venus students?
00:45:19
Well, but that's that's my point, right?
00:45:21
So like like 1 explanation is that Americans are genetically
00:45:26
smarter, but that seems like quite unlikely given how much
00:45:29
the American genetic makeup is a product of various different
00:45:32
immigrations from different periods of time.
00:45:34
Another might be that your education system is particularly
00:45:37
good at nurturing its most talented people, and that seems
00:45:40
to me and maybe not, but that seemed contradict your thesis.
00:45:44
Again, it's not an argument about racial differences in
00:45:46
intelligence. It's about parenting.
00:45:48
Yeah, those Asian kids, the reason I say the fact that they
00:45:51
are Asian, right, is only to me relevant because I'm talking
00:45:53
about the immigration inflow. They are American, right,
00:45:56
because their parents wanted to become American.
00:45:59
Their parents had the wherewithal and ability to
00:46:01
become American, generally speaking, because they came
00:46:04
themselves from the cognitive elite.
00:46:06
I think this is really important.
00:46:07
The stereotype of American immigration is like someone who
00:46:10
comes and owns a Chinese restaurant and or some of you
00:46:13
know, poor people, you know, struggling to be free.
00:46:15
If you actually look at the data, immigrants will make it
00:46:18
into the United States or people who are coming from financially
00:46:20
advantage backgrounds and really disproportionately from highly
00:46:25
educated, sort of like cognitively advantage
00:46:27
backgrounds. Part of the reason our
00:46:29
immigration site is so ugly is because what conservatives, I
00:46:33
guess they are saying in out loud now.
00:46:36
I guess they'll say whatever they want to, but the, the part
00:46:38
that they wouldn't say out loud is they, they don't mind
00:46:40
immigration. They just don't want the stupid
00:46:42
brown people to come in. That's, that's that's why they
00:46:45
don't want people from, you know, the corporal South or
00:46:46
whatever. But we've always actually let in
00:46:49
immigrants who have advantages professionally, like the average
00:46:52
immigrant into the United States.
00:46:53
So if you look like Indian Americans, it's a mistake to
00:46:56
ever look at how smart Indian Americans are by looking at
00:46:59
their degrees or their SAT scores or whatever and
00:47:01
concluding that they're a genetic Indian advantage because
00:47:05
the Indians that come to the United States are a highly
00:47:08
screened small percentage of the smartest Indians, right?
00:47:12
So I would, I would actually argue that looking at the like
00:47:15
the very top of the distribution that they're actually are
00:47:17
genetic effects, I think just played out across the country.
00:47:20
I think that you're right. I will say, look, I, I certainly
00:47:23
think that there are environmental effects on, on
00:47:25
this stuff. I never actually got around to
00:47:27
saying the bad part about the American spectrum, right, which
00:47:29
is the top is really, really good, the median.
00:47:32
And so, so our numbers look bad because we have horrifically bad
00:47:35
numbers in what's actually a rather small number of
00:47:39
geographically distinct locations that dramatically drag
00:47:42
down the averages. These do tend to be from black
00:47:47
or Hispanic areas, but the degree of that influence is
00:47:50
actually overstated. The United States has a really
00:47:52
big problem with horrible academic outcomes from white
00:47:55
people in rural poverty. So like the Ozark Mountains,
00:47:58
right? Or white communities in the
00:48:00
Mississippi River Delta, right. And so you say, OK, well,
00:48:03
Freddy, like you're sort of a skeptic about environmental
00:48:05
influence. But here we're getting to the
00:48:08
point where the environmental influence is like that kid we
00:48:11
talked about before who's completely stopped from coming
00:48:14
to school at all. I mean, you, you have to
00:48:15
understand that some of these numbers like, you know, you look
00:48:19
at school districts where the median student is missing 45% of
00:48:23
the school days because they don't show up.
00:48:25
You're looking at places where kids drop out and stop out,
00:48:28
where, you know, you, any given teacher can't assume that more
00:48:32
than 2/3 of her students who start the school year are going
00:48:34
to end the school year in her class.
00:48:35
When you're getting to a certain level of poverty, neglect to
00:48:38
drug use, crime, where the in fact is so intense that it
00:48:42
becomes like the student who just literally could never goes
00:48:44
to school. The influence is so pernicious
00:48:46
and so major that you never don't even have an opportunity
00:48:49
to sort of unveil what kind of potential they might
00:48:51
particularly have. I think though, so, you know, I
00:48:54
was trying to make a claim that even if education can't solve
00:48:57
inequality of attainment, maybe it can increase aggregate
00:48:59
attainment. And this is good for everyone to
00:49:02
some degree, even though I'm equally and I I take a push
00:49:04
back. But then you can also look at,
00:49:06
you know, the Flint effect, which shows that over time Iqs
00:49:09
are increasing. And yeah, maybe you can chalk
00:49:10
that up to there's less lead in the environment and stuff like
00:49:13
that. Nonetheless, aggregate
00:49:15
educational attainment is increasing.
00:49:17
This is economically good. Do we do we agree about that?
00:49:20
Yes, but but I let's get specific, right?
00:49:22
Like what do we want to do with that information?
00:49:24
What this what this debate is really ultimately about is like,
00:49:27
right, should we dismantle a marriage of education?
00:49:30
Should we should we crush the teachers unions?
00:49:31
Right. Should we make it an all voucher
00:49:34
system or should we just have all private shout or whatever?
00:49:37
And once we get to that level right there, the relative
00:49:40
performance really matters because, you know, the median
00:49:42
charter school student does not do any better than the median
00:49:45
school student. Once you look at demographic
00:49:47
differences, the median private school student doesn't do any
00:49:50
better than the median public school student.
00:49:52
As this gets back to that school was the alpha school.
00:49:54
The relentless effort in American education discourse is
00:49:59
to look at small, non representative situations where
00:50:02
students appear to be excelling and saying OK, we just got to
00:50:06
scale that up. And I would argue that there's
00:50:07
been nothing that's been more clearly proven in the last 50
00:50:11
years of American education is that they just never scale them,
00:50:13
right? They never scale.
00:50:15
So, for example, selection and attrition.
00:50:17
It's long been the case that charter schools have an endemic
00:50:20
problem of cooking the books to let in students who have better
00:50:24
ability. Unfortunately, in many locales
00:50:27
in the United States system, charter schools run the
00:50:30
lotteries that say which students they're going to get to
00:50:32
educate, but they have every intrinsic reason to cook the
00:50:36
books. So, for example, the ACLU did
00:50:38
this big investigation in California, just in California,
00:50:42
they found more than 250 schools committing an admissions fraud.
00:50:45
Charter schools committed admissions fraud.
00:50:47
Why? Because they want to teach the
00:50:48
easy to educate kids. They want the kids who are going
00:50:50
to be good kids, which makes their numbers look good, which
00:50:53
means that they get to stay in business.
00:50:54
Nutrition is another big one. So Success Academy is a school
00:50:57
system in New York that was the bell of the ball for a long
00:51:00
time. Everybody said this is it, this
00:51:01
is the one. They had a number of scandals.
00:51:04
They had a got to go list, which was students that they were
00:51:07
actively seeking to find reasons to expel, which has obvious
00:51:10
advantages if you're trying to cook the numbers.
00:51:13
But also they have a, they have a no backfill policy so that
00:51:15
when kids drop out of Success Charter Academy, they do not
00:51:20
backfill those seats in right, Meaning they don't replace those
00:51:24
students with a new entrants as schools in many systems are
00:51:27
required to do by law, which means that over time you end up
00:51:30
with a smaller and smaller student body.
00:51:32
I think the initial class of Success Academy, I think they
00:51:35
started out with something like 75 students and the only
00:51:38
graduated something like 14 of those.
00:51:40
Well, it's obviously much easier, right, to end up with
00:51:43
really impressive improvement in your average numbers when you
00:51:47
were gradually trending out, right?
00:51:49
All of the poorest performers. Because one thing that we know
00:51:51
generically is true in American education is the students who
00:51:55
were most likely to drop out are overwhelmingly likely to be from
00:51:58
lower in the performance, right? And so of course, I want
00:52:01
students to be better at this stuff, right?
00:52:03
Of course I want everyone to be smarter.
00:52:05
And I think it's great that the fun effect is happening.
00:52:07
The fact that it's happening for everyone means that it's not
00:52:10
going to solve our particular social problem.
00:52:12
The issue is like, it's hard to know where to take that right
00:52:15
when the debate is about parsing contentious claims about what's
00:52:20
going to make everyone smarter. And that's why the point of the
00:52:23
book is rather than trying to fit a bunch of square pegs into
00:52:26
round holes, rather than trying to make everybody the same smart
00:52:29
in the same way, let's see if we can't find ways to make schools
00:52:33
or humane, right, to make them more comfortable.
00:52:35
Let's broaden the path to success.
00:52:37
So again, like I said, you have these sky high failure rates in
00:52:41
like algebra requirements in these states.
00:52:43
Who is that serving? Right?
00:52:44
The the smart kids, the kids who kick ass at algebra, they're
00:52:48
going to do it anyway. The smart kids are going to go
00:52:50
and take the algebra class. If you say you don't have to
00:52:52
have an algebra requirement, the smart kids are still going to
00:52:54
take it 'cause they want to be competitive with everybody else,
00:52:56
right? But if you open that pathway up
00:52:58
and you say, okay, you still have to do something math wise,
00:53:01
but let's do a practical math class that introduced statistics
00:53:03
and quantitative reasoning instead of a lot of abstract
00:53:06
math. Kids are going to graduate at a
00:53:08
higher rates because they're not going to be stopped up and
00:53:10
they're going to spare a lot of time and heartache.
00:53:11
That doesn't need to happen. The problem is, is that a lot of
00:53:14
people within the debate insist that if you open up standards,
00:53:19
then you are leaving kids behind, right?
00:53:21
That you are. You were saying that some kids
00:53:22
can't succeed. But to me it just seems like a
00:53:25
like a no brainer. And as I always tell people like
00:53:28
it ends up happening anyway, that we have fundamentally
00:53:31
different tracks within our schools.
00:53:32
It's just we find ways to hide them.
00:53:35
Germany has a three track system.
00:53:37
You get tracked in middle school.
00:53:39
It's not a for the rest of your life, you have to be this thing.
00:53:41
But there is like a couple of vocational paths and a college
00:53:44
path and the non college paths, and this is really important,
00:53:49
are not stigmatized. There isn't, there's no stigma
00:53:52
in Germany about not being on the college path because working
00:53:55
in industry is seen as being a, a noble thing to do.
00:53:59
And they have a path to a solid middle class life, right.
00:54:02
And this that system is very popular there in new works.
00:54:05
OK. So I think that is the last sort
00:54:07
of piece that I touched on in this interview is because we I
00:54:09
think we've explored the problem really well.
00:54:12
But I've heard some of your education policies, you've got
00:54:14
some really radical ideas, for example, letting people leave
00:54:16
school at the age of 12 and things like this.
00:54:18
So could you so paint as a picture of what you think better
00:54:21
education policies that we could pursue now in the kind of
00:54:25
political environment we are in might be?
00:54:28
Yeah, so I I think that the letting kids drop out at 12
00:54:31
thing, which is proven to be the most sort of radical thing for
00:54:34
people. I think that's just like a
00:54:35
matter of practicing basic honesty, which is that's already
00:54:38
happening in every way that matters.
00:54:40
Meaning kids are already dropping out at that age, right?
00:54:44
They're just not formally doing it.
00:54:46
So we you, you have the situation in your in America
00:54:48
school where you have, like I was talking about before, tons
00:54:51
of American school districts where truancy is absolutely
00:54:53
endemic, where tons of kids are missing large portions of every
00:54:57
year. You also have students who have
00:54:59
effectively dropped out but stayed in the building.
00:55:02
So it's, it's very common in these cases where you have kids
00:55:05
who are so apathetic about the work and are such behavioral
00:55:07
problems that they are still housed within the school, but
00:55:11
they're not doing any actual work.
00:55:12
It's a perfectly common thing in the United States for like these
00:55:15
schools to have like, you know, we're essentially holding pens
00:55:18
for these kids where the teachers don't want them
00:55:20
disrupting this class anymore. They don't want to be in class.
00:55:22
They don't do any work. So they show up and they go to
00:55:24
the holy pen. They stay there all day, right?
00:55:26
To allow that kid to formally drop out at 12 rather than to
00:55:30
just do that, to just sort of informally do it, saves
00:55:33
resources and is more honest. So all of this stuff is
00:55:37
happening in the shadow of a major change to the American
00:55:41
economy, right? The emphasis on college for all
00:55:45
only becomes really loud about 50 or 60 years ago.
00:55:49
It is not a coincidence that that is the same time when the
00:55:52
neoliberal revolution is happening, when Ronald Reagan
00:55:54
and Margaret Thatcher and and and Jimmy Carter are beginning
00:55:57
to sort of create the modern neoliberal American economy.
00:56:01
That economy devastates the American industrial base.
00:56:04
Manufacturing shuts down and goes abroad and it destroys a
00:56:08
way of life that was available to Americans, which was a, you
00:56:11
know, the ability to have a middle class income without a, a
00:56:15
college degree. And so once you can't do that,
00:56:18
once the the factory at the edge of town is gone, an enormous
00:56:21
amount of pressure goes on. American colleges, they're
00:56:24
fundamentally being tasked with doing things that they can't do.
00:56:27
And students are like, I'm not, I'm not an academic guy, but I
00:56:30
got to do this. I have no, I have no life and no
00:56:32
future. And so they get forced to a
00:56:33
pipeline that they don't belong in.
00:56:35
So the first thing is that there has to be a new deal in the
00:56:38
American economy first for any of this to make sense, right?
00:56:41
But strictly on school side, it makes absolutely no sense to be
00:56:45
continuing to get make standards and requirements more and more
00:56:49
Byzantine and specific right, Which is what we've done with
00:56:52
the the Common Core. The students are always telling
00:56:55
us that they cannot pass the requirements, like the the
00:56:57
students are telling us something about themselves and
00:56:59
their ability. Not everybody is made for this
00:57:02
shit. We can make school better for
00:57:03
them by having a a wider variety of paths through the the
00:57:07
curriculum, eliminating onerous requirements.
00:57:10
A kid who absolutely cannot pass algebra one was never going to
00:57:13
be a doctor anyway, right? A kid who cannot, absolutely
00:57:16
cannot pass chemistry one was never going to be a programmer
00:57:20
anyway, right? Like it's, we're, we're not
00:57:22
giving up on these kids by eliminating these these
00:57:25
requirements because those kids self select themselves out
00:57:28
anyway. They don't want to do that shit,
00:57:29
right. So more pass through the through
00:57:31
the curriculum and a more of a focus on hey, look, once we
00:57:34
don't have all this immense pressure on school to be the one
00:57:37
noble path to getting a like a stable life, a middle class
00:57:41
life, school can be school again, right?
00:57:43
And you can, we can concentrate on your enrichment and
00:57:45
curiosity. And then hopefully you have a
00:57:48
human sort of emotional sort of evolution to where you say, hey,
00:57:52
you know, what's really important?
00:57:53
That has nothing to do with school being honest, right?
00:57:57
Or being compassionate or being trustworthy or being a good
00:58:01
friend, right? Or the way that the sort of the
00:58:04
last 50 or 60 years of American education has reduced children's
00:58:09
value to just their ability to do well in school is a really
00:58:12
cruel and pernicious thing. And it, it creates a, to me, a,
00:58:16
a terribly ugly vision of what human life is for and about,
00:58:20
right. And I think that we need to
00:58:22
reinvigorate the idea that, you know what, that your favorite
00:58:25
person may be someone who went to Harvard, but probably not,
00:58:28
right? And there's a reason that
00:58:29
they're your favorite person that has nothing to do with
00:58:31
their SAT score. Yeah, yeah, this is really
00:58:34
interesting. I like the idea of rethinking
00:58:37
human value and and what prestige means in our society,
00:58:40
but also the point we're making about rethinking what the
00:58:42
purpose of school might be. And, you know, I mentioned thing
00:58:46
reading a bit about the history of education in the US and a
00:58:49
thing that I learned, if my sources are to be trusted, is
00:58:51
that when the common school movement began, the purpose
00:58:54
wasn't maximizing education, it was about instilling democratic
00:58:58
values. Yeah, this just, like was quite
00:59:01
surprising to me and pointed to me that, like, you know, the
00:59:04
options are really wide open in terms of what we might want to
00:59:07
make school about as here. What do you think about schools
00:59:11
prioritizing civic engagement or social cohesion or basic life
00:59:14
skills instead of being about academic sorting?
00:59:16
Could this like is this a worthy and attainable goal for this
00:59:19
institution? Yeah, so I mean, I would say
00:59:21
like in responsibility, you just the the point that you just made
00:59:25
about the purpose of schooling. John Dewey is in some ways a
00:59:27
hero and in some ways a villain of American education.
00:59:30
He was the individual who was most responsible for universal
00:59:34
free public education existing. And for that he'll always be a
00:59:37
hero. But one of the ways that he went
00:59:40
about doing it was it by pressing the sort of blank slate
00:59:43
mindset that everyone is equally smart or as equal to smart
00:59:46
potential. And the reason he did it is
00:59:48
because when they were in that period that you mentioned of
00:59:50
trying to make school universal and free, a ton of people said
00:59:54
why should we pay tax dollars to educate dumb kids, right?
00:59:57
Like what's what's the point of educating dumb kids that should
00:59:59
go work at farms right? And so he sort of advanced that
01:00:01
sort of thing and that you know, we do that all the time in
01:00:04
politics, right? It's an argument of convenience,
01:00:06
But you know, it it has had it has led to this scenario where
01:00:09
which I think has always perverse incentives.
01:00:12
Any education should at its core be teaching values, right?
01:00:15
Of course, in this country, we're going to have very bit be
01:00:18
fights about what those values are.
01:00:20
It's important to say like, look, look at, look at college,
01:00:22
right? Whatever else is true of
01:00:25
position now politically and true culturally, American
01:00:28
colleges have always been the envy of the world, right?
01:00:31
People from other colleges have fought to get into the American
01:00:33
University system for 100 years. And and yet it's really
01:00:37
important to say that until quite recently, the idea that
01:00:40
college was to make you smarter or more educated in the
01:00:43
traditional sense just wasn't a thing, right?
01:00:45
So I'm, I'm, I'm here in New Haven County.
01:00:47
Yale University is a couple miles that way.
01:00:50
If you had gone to Yale the 1800 and said, hey, like, isn't the
01:00:54
most important thing for your students teaching them to do
01:00:56
math or teaching in history, It's, you know, what are you
01:00:59
talking about? The whole point was to just to
01:01:00
groom leaders, right? Because Yale was a bunch of land
01:01:04
owning white men who came from the American aristocracy, which
01:01:07
is not a formal affair aristocracy, but it's still very
01:01:10
much real. And the point was like, we need
01:01:12
to train these young men to be leaders.
01:01:14
We need to train them to be the next generation of American
01:01:16
leaders. The idea that it had a
01:01:17
fundamentally like academic in the traditional sense, sort of
01:01:20
like purpose. It's a very new sort of a thing,
01:01:23
right? It's only after we get towards,
01:01:26
you know, World War Two time and the Cold War, when all of a
01:01:29
sudden there's perceived to be this massive lead to 1st sort of
01:01:32
scientific and technical understanding to win these wars
01:01:36
that we really shift strong into what we now think of it as sort
01:01:39
of epidemic mindset. But you can also look at it a
01:01:41
different way. Go to Yale in 1930.
01:01:43
Like we now, we as colleges will tell you they have a social
01:01:46
justice purpose. If you went to Yale in 1930 and
01:01:48
said and use the purpose of Yale to spread social justice, they'd
01:01:51
look at you licking out a hole in your head.
01:01:53
They said, what are you talking about?
01:01:53
And the point being, over time, we have these broad changes in
01:01:57
what we expect and want school to do, and we should do that
01:02:00
again. The trouble is, right, we don't
01:02:03
notice when it's changed. Part of the reason American
01:02:05
colleges are under such incredible strain is because
01:02:08
American colleges being treated as the guarantor of America's
01:02:12
economic future. That if you that, that, that the
01:02:14
purpose of college is to make the entire country able to have
01:02:18
a mortgage, right? And it's currently failing at
01:02:21
that task. It was never intended for that
01:02:23
task. I do see that there are
01:02:25
alternatives, but fundamentally, you still have to figure out how
01:02:29
you're going to get people housing and and healthcare.
01:02:33
And we as a country don't really have a plan for that, right?
01:02:37
Fair enough. That I think is a great place
01:02:39
for us to kind of bring this to a close.
01:02:42
You have one final question we always ask, which is what's
01:02:45
something that you would like to see more people changing their
01:02:49
minds about? I think that I would like to see
01:02:52
more people changing their mind about the human capacity for
01:02:57
resilience as a goal rather than the human capacity for
01:03:01
sensitivity. Meaning that the the liberal
01:03:04
ethos, at least the last several decades, has definitely been
01:03:07
that we have to constantly increase sensitivity so that
01:03:10
we're nicer to each other and we don't hurt each other.
01:03:12
And I think that the record will show that we're just not good
01:03:15
enough at that, at being that sensitive.
01:03:17
And so I think that we should reinvigorate the other side,
01:03:19
which is the resilience to be able to find that our
01:03:22
sensitivities have the harm to keep going.
01:03:25
Fantastic, Freddie. Thank you very much for your
01:03:27
time. It's been a fantastic
01:03:28
conversation. We've little a huge amount.
01:03:30
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
01:03:36
Wow. Well, that sure ended up having
01:03:38
a lot more odd stuff about race than I expected.
01:03:40
Yeah. I mean, I think it's an
01:03:42
interesting point that Freddie made about how the reason you
01:03:47
see on average better academic performance amongst Asian
01:03:50
Americans then the aggregate in the US is the selection effects,
01:03:54
student immigration. And it reminds me of an argument
01:03:56
that I've heard Coleman Hughes make about how African migrants
01:04:01
to the US have significantly better educational and economic
01:04:05
attainment than African Americans, and he chops us up to
01:04:08
cultural differences between these groups.
01:04:10
But I think Freddy's argument is a really good counterpoint to
01:04:12
say, no, actually it's selection effects relating to immigration.
01:04:16
But a really important point we need to underline here, which is
01:04:20
one that Freddie would agree with, it's, it's what's
01:04:22
reflected in his book is that even though educational
01:04:24
attainment is to some degree heritable, it relates to our
01:04:27
genes. It does not follow from this
01:04:29
that there are average differences in educational
01:04:32
capability between races, as I understand it.
01:04:35
Although I haven't dug into the evidence in great detail, the
01:04:37
evidence doesn't substantiate the existence of such
01:04:40
differences. Yeah, I agree.
01:04:41
I mean, I think often when we talk about genetics and
01:04:44
heritability, especially in these kind of extremely
01:04:47
sensitive topics, how people can jump to assuming that the races
01:04:52
in some way back, back to here. And again, you know, even
01:04:57
putting that aside for striving to point out that even if your
01:05:01
intellectual capabilities inherited, this says nothing
01:05:04
about your worth as a human being in any event.
01:05:07
Whether or not you're deserving of prosperous and fighting life.
01:05:10
Yes, exactly. And I think that actually, if he
01:05:13
is right and in fact your intellectual ability is in some
01:05:17
way perishable and and fixed, then it is exactly realizing
01:05:21
this that allows us to disaggregate your intelligence
01:05:24
from your ability to have a flourishing life.
01:05:27
Because it allows us to give up this idea that education can be
01:05:31
a tool for fixing inequality or improving social mobility and
01:05:35
say, OK, we need an alternative here.
01:05:38
Whether that is, for example, redistribution or some other
01:05:43
policies that maybe are a little bit less politically palatable,
01:05:46
but are in fact real solutions to problems like inequality in a
01:05:49
way that, if Freddie is right, looks like education can't be.
01:05:52
Yeah, you made the point before. You know, perhaps somewhat
01:05:55
cynically, that may be a reason that politicians push this
01:05:58
education is the solution to inequality message is that it
01:06:01
means that we don't have to talk about redistribution quite so
01:06:04
much. But yeah, I'd personally be in
01:06:06
favour of just batting the bullet, accepting that ending
01:06:09
inequality is not what education is for, but it is nonetheless
01:06:12
valuable for increasing total wealth in society and we should
01:06:15
solve inequality through redistribution.
01:06:17
But hey, This is why I'm not a politician.
01:06:19
Exactly. Thank you for listening to
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