Meritocracy, Exams, and the Knowledge That Matters (with Daisy Christodoulou)

What does a failed 19th-century Chinese civil exam and one of the deadliest wars in history have to do with how we hire, educate, and test people today? In this EconTalk conversation, Russ Roberts and education expert Daisy Christodoulou trace a surprising thread from the Taiping Rebellion through Britain's Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, Samuel Pepys's naval exams, and Macaulay's belief that a hard exam on anything--even alchemy or the Cherokee language--reveals the best minds. Christodoulou dismantles that idea with evidence that skills are stubbornly domain-specific: chess masters, surgeons, even Steven Spielberg couldn't simply transfer their brilliance elsewhere. Along the way they wrestle with meritocracy, why bureaucracies fail without feedback, and whether great teachers must resist irony. A rich, wide-ranging discussion that will change how you think about testing and expertise.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is July 21, 2026, and my guest is Daisy Christodoulou. Daisy is the Director

• 0:43Speaker 00

  of Education at No More Marking, a provider of valuation software for schools. She was last here in March of 2025, talking about education and feedback. Daisy, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Great to be here, Russ.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Now, our topic for today is the intersection between meritocracy, education, governance. But we're going to go back in time and look at some crazy historical moments in civil service history. And we're going to start with a failed Chinese civil servant exam taker, Hongxiao Chen. Why is he interesting?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  So Hongxiao Chen is really interesting because he's probably the instigator of the worst civil war, maybe the worst war in history. It's not very well-known in the West. And in fact, one of the leading American historians of this war, this civil war, has said that he didn't even read about it, that he was an undergraduate. So it's remarkably not very well-known in the world, given how significant it is and how major a factor it is in Chinese history. And Hongxiao Chen, he's basically a failed civil service candidate. So, and this all takes place in the mid-19th century in China. And at that time, China has these

• 2:04Speaker 01

  very rigorous exams to become a civil servant. So if you want to become a civil servant in 19th century China, you sit these very, very tough exams. They have multiple stages. So you will sit some that are just kind of close to your village. You will sit some, you'll go to the provincial level. And by the mid-19th century, these exams have been around for centuries. And China's population has been increasing over that time. But the number of openings, number of job openings available for the exam takers, hasn't gone up. So it's very intense competition. And you have all of these incredibly bright, young Chinese men, studying really hard to try and pass these exams. And they're tough exams,

• 2:48Speaker 01

  and you have to go away for the provincial ones, and they're three days, and you're sitting in cells, working away at these exams. And if you fail them, you can take them again. And they don't happen every year, they happen every couple of years. And what you have is, you might see some parallels with today. You have students who are maybe the brightest student in their village, maybe even the brightest student in their province, but they get to the stage where they're competing against all the brightest students from all over China, and very many jobs to have. So you can be very bright and have spent years studying, and still fail and not get the job. And you have people who take them, carry on taking them into their 40s, 50s, 60s, kind of keep going back and taking them. And

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Hongxiao Chen takes them quite a few times these exams, and he fails them. The fourth time he fails them, he's absolutely devastated. And he has what we maybe might call now a kind of mental breakdown. And he goes back home to his village, and he's seeing visions. And in the time, previous times when he's taken these exams, he's also come into contact with some Christian missionaries, and he's picked up a few of their tracts. And so, after this final failure, he's got these tracts on his mind, and he sees these visions that tell him he's the younger brother of Christ. And he's inspired to kind of start some kind of millenarian kind of revolution. And his first few followers are people like him, his

• 4:18Speaker 01

  cousin, some friends, people who have also taken these exams and not succeeded. And he basically moves across the countryside, kind of picking up an army. And the army grows and grows. And as I say, he becomes the leader of what is known now as the Taiping Rebellion, which, as I say, is one of the worst civil wars in history, maybe around 30 million people die. Eventually, it's put down, and he's killed, but not before enormous kind of death, destruction, suffering. And I think approximate cause of this terrible war is

• 5:00Speaker 01

  the frustrations, the pent-up frustrations of these young men who are trying to take these exams and failing and not getting the jobs that they hope. But I also think you can look in a way at what's the ultimate cause of this revolution. Because the exams that Hongxu Rikhan is taking, the exams he's taking, they are full of kind of the ancient Chinese classics. And by the time he comes to take them, they're quite stereotyped, and they're quite rigid. And you have to, there's a particular format called the eight-legged essay, where you have to write an essay that is set out in a really precise and specific way. There's nothing on them about the kind of modern, Western knowledge of scientific

• 5:43Speaker 01

  and maths that's transforming the rest of the world. So you can make another argument that certainly the students who fail these exams, it's not great for them. But for the students who pass them and become the bureaucrats who are running China, they're really lacking in the kind of knowledge that is transforming the rest of the world. So you can make a case that these exams play a very important proximate and ultimate role in one of the worst civil wars in history.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  So we could spend an hour on the 19th century Chinese civil service and how it was, the entry to it was controlled. But we are not going to. We're going to divide it between the Chinese civil service in the 19th century and the British civil service in the 19th. No, we're actually, we are going to touch on the latter, but we'll move on to other things. But it's a fascinating story. It raises a question, which I don't think you talked about in a preliminary essay you shared with me, which is, why were people so eager to be a civil servant in China in 1850, say? And it raises a general question,

• 6:55Speaker 00

  which we're going to spend some time on, which is, the prestige and pay and honor that's associated with the civil service differs wildly by culture and country. And the significance of the civil service, the bureaucracy, I think, varies quite a bit. So let's start with China. Why were people so eager to have these jobs?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  So look, I don't want to overclaim and pretend to be an expert in China. My entry into this has been through exams. My specialism is assessment and exams. But I think, obviously, when you just see the sheer numbers of young boys, and it is boys, who are studying for these exams, you can read some of the literature that the failed candidates leave behind. For whatever reason, it is hugely prestigious. I think it's partly there aren't many other, there aren't many other jobs or outlets for if you are, kind of, you have academic tendencies, and you enjoy reading and you enjoy studying. So there's not much else that necessarily

• 8:05Speaker 01

  you can do that will give you a living. And in fact, when these candidates fail, a lot of the time, the only option for them is to go back to their vision, become a teacher, and to try and teach the next students who are coming through, and see if they can get them to succeed. So there aren't necessarily many other things you can do. And I think, yeah, you know, the prestige and the power, the civil service in any society is powerful. They do have powers. And for young men from lower, you know, lower social backgrounds, again, in any society, you would say it's one of the few ways of advancement and the few ways to develop yourself.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  You said something kind of shocking to me a minute ago. You said something about how the bureaucracy runs the country. Now, the bureaucracy often thinks they run the country. And people are often under the illusion that even a dictator runs the country, when a dictator can't run the country either. But certainly in a, in modern democratic states, the bureaucracy doesn't run the country, although they may run parts of it more, in a more serious way than the legislature runs the country, or the so-called president, or whoever's the leader, the prime minister. But I want to go back a sec and just talk

• 9:27Speaker 00

  about your specialty, which is exams. Because on the surface, if you think it's important that the bureaucrats who are, quote, "running the country," are skilled and capable, an exam has an appeal. Because otherwise, it's who you know, and so on. And what's remarkable about the Chinese exam, and will prove remarkable about the British case when we turn to it, is that the content of these exams is not what you

• 10:00Speaker 00

  You or I would design to make sure that the best ended up on top. So talk about what happened in England around this time and the reforms that were made and how peculiar they were and strange.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So by really a kind of historical coincidence, a historical irony, as this terrible civil war is breaking out in China, and almost literally as a news of it is making its way back to Britain, Britain is engaged in a big national debate about how it should recruit and select its own civil servants. And obviously, Britain at this time has an empire. So in particular, it has India. Now, India at this point, you know, is in flux as well, but essentially, Britain is either directly or indirectly ruling, you know, vast ways of the Indian subcontinent. And also, you have a lot of changes going on at home and you have a lot of growth in

• 11:00Speaker 01

  the home civil service, as you might call it. So there's an increasing debate about what's the best way to pick all of these administrators and to recruit them. And as you say, one problem you get when it comes to recruiting bureaucrats and recruiting administrators who are going to run the show, whether you think they're really running the show or not, I think that it's fair to say they have at least some opportunities for kind of power and influence, even if they're not necessarily always running things in the way they might think. The risk is that you get people just appointing on for patronage, basis of nepotism, people giving jobs to their mate's nephew. So that's a risk. And if you want people who are competent to do the job, as you say, one thing you can

• 11:43Speaker 01

  do is say, well, have an exam. But it really matters what is on the exam. And on the Chinese, the Chinese civil service exam at that time, as I say, is really a lot of ancient classical Chinese knowledge and languages and this eight-legged essay. And Britain are kicking around ideas and saying, well, what goes on, if we're going to have an exam, what should go on the exam? And there've been a few kind of experiments prior to this time, and there are a few places where exams are starting to be used. But there is this major point in 1854 where a major report is written that proposes there should be one central exam for applicants to the civil service, the British civil service,

• 12:28Speaker 01

  and that this exam basically should consist of a lot of knowledge of the classical languages of Greek and Latin. And these are very prestigious at the time in Britain. They're taught in a lot of the public schools, the great public schools. They're taught at the famous ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge. And you have two administrators of the time, a guy called Stafford Northkot, another man called Charles Trevallion, who write a report that essentially proposes that these curriculums with the heavy emphasis on ancient Greek and Latin should become the basis for the exam that selects for civil servants.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  And it gets, the report basically gets implemented?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So the report is commissioned by William Gladstone, who's obviously quite a famous, famous prime minister eventually. So it's commissioned by Gladstone, it's written in 1854. It is just a report, so it isn't immediately an act of parliament, but gradually, over the next decade or so, most of its recommendations do become law and are implemented. And to the extent today that it is now regarded, even in Britain today, as the founding document of the British civil service. So very senior official currently in the British civil service, actually, I think

• 14:01Speaker 01

  he lost his job a couple of months ago, but a very senior figure, Ollie Robbins, has said very recently, "Northkot Trevallion, the Northkot Trevallion Report, as it's known, is the founding document of the modern civil service." So it's been hugely influential.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And it does come in for its fair share of discussion, and it's become something that's been discussed a little bit more lately, as I think people wonder about modern Britain and modern Britain's civil service and whether modern Britain's civil service is as effective as it should be, and if some of the problems of that do go back all the way to this Northkot Trevallion report.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  So I want to set this next part up a little bit with some background and some things to think about for listeners and for you and me, Daisy, because, I mean, it's, you could take this conversation so far to be about some obscure exam in 19th century England, and who cares about Northkot Trevallion? But what's, here's what's important, and I want to bring in a couple other things. America is pretty disdainful of its bureaucratic system. Americans do not look at, quote bureaucrats, the polite term is administrators, the more

• 15:19Speaker 00

  negative term is bureaucrats, in, say, Health and Human Services or various Department of Education. They don't have a lot of prestige, and a lot of people would say they don't do a very good job. At the other end, for both the UK and the United States, you have the military. And the standards and excellence is totally different. One might suppose that's because one's a matter of life and death and one isn't. So indulging in hiring students who are good at Latin and Greek, you could say, well, who cares if the Treasury Department has a lot of those, it's not so important.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  But when it comes to military affairs, you kind of want them to be able to know what they're doing. So you'd want a different test for the Royal Navy or the US Air Force or the Marines or the US Army. Now, before we get to, I just want to put that on the table in terms of the importance of this, but I want to also talk about this reform, because as you point out, and this is extremely interesting to me, basically, they took this prestigious gate of getting into the civil service, and the gatekeeper became, are you really good at what we teach at the two most prestigious universities in the land?

• 16:46Speaker 00

  And it's hard not to view this as a public choice story, meaning the field in economics that assumes policy decisions are made often driven by self-interest and not the national good or the public good. So basically, they basically circled the wagons, Northkot Trevallion, forget what they said about it. What they actually did in that report was encourage the British civil service to keep hiring people like themselves, people who've gone to Oxford and Cambridge, who are really good at Latin and Greek. And as you point out in your essay, which is hilarious, people at the time said, you know, it really doesn't matter what they study or what the criteria are or what the subject matter of the test is, it just has to be hard.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  And that we will get the people who are good at hard things, and they'll be skilled, they'll be the most skilled people because they could do the hardest things, even if it's nonsense. Thomas Macaulay, the greatest historian, says, yeah, you know, if they studied astrology or alchemy or the Ptolemaic system of astronomy of the solar system instead of Newton, they're hard to master, and that's what counts. So I'm throwing a lot on the table here, take a crack at reacting to that.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. So I basically agree with what you said, your view of Northkot Trevallion. But what I will point out to you, so to what you've said, this is a public choice theory, this is basically a way of getting people, kind of almost like a self-perpetuating oligarchy, of getting people who look like you and sound like you and are like you into positions of power and influence and keeping that ticking over. So I would agree with you on that. And as you say, I've got this essay where I kind of make that argument. However, what I will say is, that is not the dominant historical opinion of Northkot Trevallion. So as I say, it does have a little bit of fame here in the UK, it's something people kind of think about and talk about.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  The dominant, I would say, take on Northkot Trevallion is that it's meritocratic and it's a good thing.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  And I would say it's only in the last decade or so that there's been a little bit more revisionist scholarship on that. And the book that I draw on to make, that I think makes a revisionist argument really well, is a book by a guy called Michael Coolican called No Trades Men and No Women. And it's a history of the British civil service, and he takes this quite revisionist stance where he says, everyone thinks Northkot Trevallion is about meritocracy because it introduces exams. He said, but it isn't about meritocracy. He has a line where he says, okay, it probably did reduce the opportunities for patronage of the really explicit corrupt type where you, you know, you pay someone to give your,

• 19:31Speaker 01

  your underperforming nephew a job. So it probably does reduce that. But it is, he says, it eliminated patronage, but it also eliminated professionalism. Because actually prior to Northkot Rebellion, the system is starting to evolve in a lot of important ways to be using exams already, but to be using exams that are relevant to the job you'll be doing. So I would say when I was growing up, the dominant take on Northkot Rebellion was, oh, before Northkot Rebellion, everything was super corrupt. People paid for jobs. Northkot Rebellion came in and professionalized everything. What I think this guy Michael Cooligan is arguing and what I would agree with and what I think you were saying too is actually what was happening is before Northkot Rebellion, there definitely was

• 20:16Speaker 01

  some corruption, but there were also a lot of moves to modernization and professionalism. There were civil service departments that were using exams that were useful for the specific job that the candidate would be doing. And actually, Northkot Rebellion came in and said, we're going to replace all that with one central exam that's going to be, that's going to be based on topics that really have no relevance to the job in hand. So it is a revisionist take. It is a controversial one. And there are people who I think have grown up with that standard take on Northkot Rebellion who don't like that revisionism. So it is controversial. But I think this book by Michael Cooligan does a fantastic job of drawing out a lot of the debates. And in particular, he draws out a lot of

• 20:56Speaker 01

  the importance of a guy who's the master of Balliol College at this time, a very important figure behind the scenes. He's called Benjamin Jowett. And he is incredibly keen to be getting his classics graduates from Balliol College into positions of influence all over the British establishment. And he's very successful. And he is a kind of a major figure in the background of Northkot Rebellion and subsequent developments. So I would agree with you with your, how you put it there. But as I say, I would say this is relatively controversial take in Britain.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  So talk about the, the military. And I, again, I think we can think about bureaucrats who run, you know, say, a welfare program or transfer program that distributes money in certain ways. And there could be, it could be run better or worse, obviously. But a lot of times, what's at stake in these conversations, and you and I recently had a chance to talk about this a little bit in England, is basic fundamental infrastructure. And so, for example,

• 21:58Speaker 00

  when I was in, in England recently, a couple of trains I was scheduled to take were just cancelled out of the blue with no real, like a half an hour before I get on, just a cancelled signal issues. I don't know. I don't know if that's a fair criticism that means it wasn't, the system's not run so well. You evoked pride for the Elizabeth line, which I took without, without any problems while I was in, in London. And I do like it a lot. And again, we might think about the military where, oh, well, that plane didn't work or this aircraft carrier sunk would be unacceptable. No one would, would take it for a minute. And the people who, who failed there would, would be fired. That seems to never happen

• 22:40Speaker 00

  with transportation, infrastructure of that kind. There's seen to be very little consequences, which makes you wonder whether the people who are in the jobs or have the skills necessary to do it. So talk a little bit about your, your take on, on the military and transportation. And then, and you can, and you can bring in Samuel Pepys. Because if we're going to delve into the, into strange moments in British history, we can mention him. Although we will not discuss his X-rated diary, but those who are interested can pick it up on their, on their Kindle.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  So Russ, I think at the heart of this is a classic Econ Talk theme, which we chatted about when I was on an episode before, of feedback loops and price mechanisms. So the major problem I think you have with bureaucracies is often there isn't a price mechanism. You don't have those feedback loops. And actually, when it comes to the military, I know what you're saying, that obviously the military, you know, in lots of ways, there's more competence there. But I think you've also got to be aware throughout history and in every single country you can think of, there's a history of military mess ups too.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Oh, sure.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Like military bureaucrats don't always kind of get it right. And I think what you have in bureaucracies is you, you don't have a price mechanism. Often, there's a reason for that. So, again, I don't want to get too off topic going into this, but you know, obviously, there are some times, obviously, with the military, you understand why the state has to have control of that. And you don't necessarily want to be outsourcing everything to countries that are your, your enemy, whatever. So in a lot of bureaucracy, you don't have that price signal. You don't have the feedback loops and it can go awry. And I would say, actually, it's a theme of British military history that often, after a long period of peace, the first year of wars go really badly, and a lot of things

• 24:28Speaker 01

  go wrong. And then you have a different feedback loop which asserts itself, which is lots of people dying on the battlefield. And that is almost a replacement for the price mechanism. And in a lot of ways, it is a more brutal master than the price mechanism.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  So the first year of World War One, not just Britain, but everything, participant country, just have all kinds of crises where the peacetime military bureaucracy was not, and the civilian bureaucracy was not up to the task of a total war.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  And so in Britain, we have a famous thing. We have a munitions crisis. There just aren't enough shells. And this is something that you have to get a mix. I say civilian bureaucrats, military bureaucrats, you have a change in the top of government to, to handle this issue. So I, I think you have issues across the board, all kinds of bureaucracies, that when there isn't a feedback mechanism, things can go wrong. And then you have feedback mechanisms assert themselves and people have to scramble to keep up and fix things. And so if we bring this back to the kind of issue of then how do you select, recruit, and not just actually even select and recruit, but like, what do you do once you've recruited your bureaucrats? How do you check they're kind of doing the right thing? And are keeping

• 25:43Speaker 01

  the military ready for the eventual war or keeping whatever system they have got running?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Obviously, you have to be thinking about, actually, exams do form a major part of this. And again, it might seem like exams are a really modern technology, but they're not. So as I say, in China, they go back centuries. And the reason why exams matter is because if you do want a way of selecting for competent people who are going to be able to run these organizations well, an exam is not a bad option. And again, we tend to think of exams in the, in the UK, people talk about Northkot Rebellion, 1854 as being a landmark. And people also talk about how exams for the army don't come in until the late 19th century. So there's a set of reforms in the late 19th century after Northkot Rebellion

• 26:32Speaker 01

  called the Woolsey Reforms, which bring in more meritocratic examinations. And I don't know, I feel like for those of you who are keen on Gilbert and Sullivan, I think Gilbert and Sullivan are quite popular in the US.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  I'm a big fan.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  There's that song, He Is The Very Model Of A Modern Major General.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  That lists all the things the modern major general has to know. And that's a satire. So it's late 19th century Gilbert and Sullivan. That's a satire on the Woolsey Reforms. So everyone, they're, again, quite famous. And people will look at those and go, oh, so you know, the army bring in kind of exams in the late 19th century. And the Napoleonic era, so the era before that, officers would buy commissions. So if you wanted to be rise in the army, you actually had to be quite wealthy and you purchased commissions. And that persisted in the army until the late 19th century. So people often say, oh, look, you know, the military has this very kind of un-meritocratic and patronage-based system right up to the 19th century. But that is not the whole story. The army, for sure, has quite a patronage-based system up to the late 19th century. But Britain,

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Britain, the major, the major sort of service in Britain is not the army. The major branch of the military in, in Britain at this time, it's the navy. It's the Royal Navy. France is the great land power. Britain, England is the great sea power. And actually, for that really important service, which lays the foundation of so much of British power, they had exams for much, much longer. And the guy who introduced exams into the navy way back in 1677, so almost, I think, over 200 years before they introduced them in the army. And the man who introduces them is a bureaucrat. And he's the famous, he's

• 28:13Speaker 01

  more famous now for his diaries, Samuel Pepys. So Samuel Pepys is very famous now, not just for slightly, slightly naughty diaries, but also diaries that he wrote at the time of some great upheaval in London. So he gives, gives us these really vivid firsthand accounts of the Great Fire of London. And I grew up a 10-minute walk from where Peeps lived and worked. And I actually have an office next door to where his offices were. So I'm very interested in Peeps. He's a completely fascinating figure. And as I say, he is better known now for these really compelling and vivid firsthand accounts of the Great Fire of London and for, as I say, some, some quite X-rated bits in his diaries. But as

• 28:57Speaker 01

  a figure at that time, he is incredibly important. And in 1677, after a series of quite bad naval defeats to the Dutch, Peeps introduces oral exams for Royal Navy lieutenants. Because he is concerned about the fact that lieutenants are often well-bred gentlemen with good connections, but they don't really know much about running a ship. And actually, running a ship is really quite hard. And at that time, there's, at that point, there's a lot of naval innovation going on. And it's not something you can really just bluff your way through. So he introduces their oral examinations. And it's a panel of three senior officers who will question the candidate very closely on the practicalities of running

• 29:41Speaker 01

  a ship. And then what you also get come in, you know, later, over the, the next few decades, century, whatever, is you also get quite a lot of written examinations come in. So if you look at some of the most famous characters, not actually just in British naval history, but arguably in all British history, people like Horatio Nelson, James Cook, people like Flinders, Vancouver, Blythe, people who go around the world and chart maps of so many parts of the world. A lot of them have taken exams that were either the ones that really Peeps kind of designed, or the ones that built on, on that, on that, on that foundation. So that kind of exam, that really practical examination cartography in trigonometry, which

• 30:25Speaker 01

  you do need to be able to, you know, navigate, in charting and map making, those really practical examinations are there from really quite an early stage in Britain and play a really central part in the development of one of its most powerful and competent institutions, the Royal Navy.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Let's talk about, let's go back to the general idea of, of an exam and what, you know, in the case of the Royal Navy, navigation, certain basic math skills, of course, a lot of it's going to be how to deal with people, which is very hard to take, to have a test for. You can get recommendations from people who've seen you in action doing similar processes. But, you know, one of the big questions, I think, in education today is entry exams into college. A lot of American colleges dropped the SAT exam as a gatekeeper, feeling it was either unfair, racist, or ineffective. A lot of people disagreed with that. A lot

• 31:30Speaker 00

  of schools have brought that back. But I want, I want you to talk about this general question of, of transferable skills. And we, I made fun of Macaulay earlier, but I wanted, I want to defend him for a minute and get your reaction. So Macaulay argues that it doesn't matter what you put on the civil service exam, it just has to be hard. And of course, this is, now we would call this a signaling technique. We're going to force people to jump through a bunch of hoops. And it almost doesn't matter, says Macaulay, what the hoops are, because what we really want are people good at jumping. And since it's prestigious, it's going to attract the smart people. And the smartest ones will

• 32:12Speaker 00

  figure it out. The content's not so important. What's important is making sure the cream rises to the top. The best people do the jumping and, and that's, and that's the case. Now, you make the point, undeniable, that, well, wouldn't you want them to learn something that was true? But I, I want to, and you can, you can elaborate on that, but I want to defend Macaulay for a minute, suggesting that, oh, I don't, I'm not totally comfortable with it, but I'll try, that if you give a really hard exam about something that's really obscure, Sanskrit grammar or Thucydides, which North cut himself, said was part of the reason he was successful, he'd read Thucydides in Greek, and that helped him build up his brain and he got smarter. Turns out Thucydides, by the way, a lot of what Thucydides wrote

• 32:55Speaker 00

  probably didn't happen. He exaggerated, wasn't exactly accurate 100%. So that makes the argument through, through this difficult parsing of this hard text in a difficult language, you find out who the smartest people are. And that's all you really need. What's wrong with that argument?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  So, we can view this as a debate through British history between peeps and Macaulay. That peeps said, we need an exam and the exam needs to be in stuff that's useful. And Macaulay said, we need an exam, but it doesn't matter what the exam's on. We just want to find the super smart people and then they can turn their hand to anything. And I actually just really want to actually read out what Macaulay says, because people might think we're creating a straw man here.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  When we're saying this. And actually, I just want to point out that Macaulay made, he, he himself made something that sounds like a really extreme straw man argument. He made that argument. And every time I read it, I am just astonished. I cannot believe, like, Macaulay is a big deal and he's a big guy and he's a

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Great historian.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he's an MP, he's giving this speech that I'm about to quote from in Parliament. After he gives this speech, another MP jumps up and says, this speech has never been exceeded within these walls for the development of statesmanlike policy and practical good sense. And actually, the nice thing about this is people are a bit down on our politicians now. I read this speech and the responses it gets, and I think, oh, people must have been crazy, because this speech has no good sense to my mind. This speech is mad.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Before you read it, I want to let listeners know, I think I know what you're going to read, which is, there's a term in here called a wrangler.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  And a wrangler is a person who's good at wrangling, meaning not animals, which is the American use of the term, but debating back and forth, uh, uh, some topic. And there's also a term in here, the wooden spoon. And the wooden spoon, according to Claude, I looked it up, and you can verify it, is an award giving to the worst person who passes. So, you know, the joke is, what do you call the, the person who finishes last in their medical school class? And the answer is doctor. And, and, but it turned out in England, it was called the wooden, you, you got the wooden spoon. It means the, just got across the line.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  And we still use wooden spoon in sports now, for people finishing bottom of something. So it's your term in English.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, idiom. Okay. So here we go. This is Macaulay. This is Macaulay's take on, on exams. This is 1833. Whatever be the languages, whatever be the sciences, which it is, in any age or country, the fashion to teach. The persons who become the greatest proficient in those languages and those sciences will generally be the flower of the youth, the most acute, the most industrious, the most ambitious of honorable distinctions. If the Ptolemaic system were taught at Cambridge instead of the Newtonian, the senior wrangler would nevertheless be in general a superior man to the wooden spoon. If, instead of learning Greek, we learned the Cherokee, the man who understood the Cherokee best, who made the most correct and melodious Cherokee verses, who comprehended most accurately the

• 36:08Speaker 01

  effect of the Cherokee particles, would generally be a superior man to him who was destitute of these accomplishments. If astrology were taught at our universities, the young man who cast nativities best would generally turn out a superior man. If alchemy were taught, the young man who showed most activity in the pursuit of the philosopher's stone would generally turn out a superior man. Okay, that's Macaulay done. Now we're back to me. This is just Macaulay getting carried away with his own eloquence. He is literally saying, I would rather people study things that are completely wrong, that we know to be completely wrong, like the philosopher's stone. And that's fine, because if they study those and they do well at it, and they cast nativities the best, then, you know, they'll

• 36:53Speaker 01

  be the smartest guys. They'll be the hardest working, most industrious. And so that's fine. We've, we've, you know, we, those are the people we want. What he seems to be completely missing here is that the stuff you study really matters. And that's why I think, go back to where we opened, when we're talking about China in the 19th century. If you take the most industrious and hardest working and most ambitious youths of your country, and in their most productive years of their life, teach them things that are wrong, or just not that useful, what is going to happen is there will be other countries who take the same tranche of their students and teach them things that are true and useful. And

• 37:37Speaker 01

  then where are you going to be? Which country do you think is going to come out best? So I really just find it astonishing from Macaulay. I think it's just unbelievably misguided.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  So I'm going to

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  I want to defend him.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  And, and I, I can't resist the urge.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Um, well, I am going to resist that urge. I'll tell you later off air, but, but I'm going to defend Macaulay.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  And because behind Macaulay's view, so you're making one point, which is that if you want to incentivize people to master something, you should incentivize them to master something valuable, especially if it might take years, because they could then take that true knowledge, rather than just having jumped through the hoops and signaled that they're the smartest, they'd actually would have added, besides their raw intelligence, they would have added content that would make them more effective in their job. So I agree with you 100%. The real question for me, and this is a modern education question, which I know you have views on, isn't the real question, as you describe it, I think in your essay, turning the brain into this razor sharp tool? And it doesn't matter whether

• 38:43Speaker 00

  you study, I'll, to take a, a famous example in Jewish life, the Talmud, which is notoriously difficult. So you study the Talmud and your brain gets more skilled. Okay, you may not agree with what's in the Talmud, you may think it's nonsense, it's just a myth or superstition, but the act of mastering it makes you, many people would say in Jewish life, it'll make you a better lawyer, because you've studied all these debates back and forth and these cases. And although the cases may not be relevant, because they're talking about something that doesn't exist anymore in the, in Jewish life, all that really matters is that you've honed your reasoning ability. And that's what education is about. It's about turning

• 39:22Speaker 00

  your brain into a power, powerful tool that you could then, or a searchlight, you could go across the landscape and turn it on to any topic and illuminate it, because you've got this great brain. What's wrong with that argument?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what we are kicking around now, this argument we're having, people obviously were having the argument in the 19th century. So Macaulay did not have it all his own way in the 19th century. People were saying things like I'm saying at the time. And by the time you get to the late 19th, early 20th century, the people arguing back against the kind of, just study hard stuff and it will make your brain sharp. There are people who are arguing back against this. And one of the things that, and so then they developed basically some empirical evidence on this question, which we can take a look at now. And actually, one of the most important aspects of this debate is that in the late 19th, early 20th

• 40:22Speaker 01

  century, medicine is really developing as a science. And a lot of people are starting, you know, medicine is becoming more of a career and more of a career pathway. And yet, a lot of top medical schools in the US and the UK, and this is very much at this point a very, a big US debate too, a lot of people who want to become doctors are saying, well, actually, like, why do I have to qualify in Greek to get into medical school? Or why do I have to qualify in Greek to become a doctor? And actually, is this not a bit of a waste of my time, given that medical knowledge is expanding at such a rate, that maybe my time would be better off spent doing that instead? And so I think one of the best statements

• 41:04Speaker 01

  of, of, of the anti-Macaulay argument comes from an American medical educator who was extraordinarily influential in early 20th century America. His name's Abraham Flexner. And he writes a fantastic article in The Atlantic magazine in 1917. And he takes on a lot of these arguments through You know, with, from the point of view of, of medical training. And one of the things he says, which, you know, I think really counters that McCauley argument, is he has this great line where he says, he, he says, "I can compare the champions of mental discipline." So that's the McCauley type people who think that it doesn't matter what you study, just matters that you build discipline.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  He says, "I compare the champions of mental discipline to Egyptian priests who planted rows of dead sticks, which for disciplinary purposes, they watered regularly. Had they planted corn, they would have got the same discipline and something more, the corn, for example." So what he's saying is, you've got all these aspiring medics in early 20th century America, and you're saying to lots of them, "You need to be studying Greek and Latin before you can look at a medical textbook." And he's saying, "Medicine is hard enough. Medicine is tough enough in itself. Instead of getting our kids to study Greek and Latin, because that is hard stuff that trains their mind, we could just get them to study the hard stuff of medic, medicine that is useful."

• 42:28Speaker 01

  So he is a really important figure, and actually, I would say, in practical terms, kind of carries the day in terms of being very influential in the establishment of medical schools in America. And the other crucial figure who lays down a lot of empirical evidence on this point is another American, E.L. Thorndike, who's a pioneer of experimental psychology. And again, Thorndike is listening to these arguments and sort of thinking, "Well, can we bring any data to bear? Like, can we do some research?" And he lays the foundation for a lot of later experimental psychology. And he does these very pioneering studies on whether skills do transfer across domains. So essentially, the McCauley argument, if you like, is it doesn't matter what you study, you just need to hone your brain to a razor point sharpness.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  And in McCauley's idea, the hardest thing you can study is ancient Greek. So if you can translate the Melian dialogue, you can kind of basically do anything. Like, it's not just ancient Greek, the hardest bit of ancient Greek is Thucydides. So people are like, "Once you can translate Thucydides, you can do anything."

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And what, what Thorndike is saying is, "Well, let's test this." He comes up with a couple of ways of testing it. So one of the things is, he looks at the kind of students who are doing the classical languages at school, and he says, "Well, do they do better on all their other subjects?" So that's just a kind of more of a statistical survey. And he basically finds, once you control for prior attainment, they don't. The second type of experiments he do, which again have been very influential, is he trains people up in doing one skill really well, and then he gives them another task to do that's similar but different, and he sees, "Well, does it transfer across?" So, you know, a simple example, but he gives, he gives sort of the experimental subjects

• 44:15Speaker 01

  practice in estimating the, the shapes of rectangles. And they get a lot of practice at that, and they get better at that. And then he says, "Does that make you better at estimating the shapes of triangles?"

• 44:26Speaker 00

  You mean the area?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yes, I think the area, estimating the area.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  So he gives, he gives experimental subjects practice estimating the area of rectangles. And they get better at that, and they have the practice, and they improve. And then he says, "Will that transfer over to improvements in estimating the area of triangles?" And he finds, "No, it doesn't." And even on that very simple, quite close allied skill, it doesn't. And again, I think if we go back to Flexner, are we really saying that if you can translate the Melian dialogue, that is going to make you a really fantastic surgeon? Like, really? So, where your Talmud point, where you say, "Oh, doing the Talmud makes you a better lawyer," this is where you get some interesting things about transfer, which in the modern literature would be called far transfer and near transfer.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  So near transfer would be when you're transferring, and Thorndike comes up with the term, he talks about where there are identical elements. So where there are identical elements in the skill you've studied and the thing you are transferring to, then you can have some transfer take place. But when there is not really that much in common, and that's in the modern literature, you would say far transfer, it just kind of breaks down. So I can see that obviously, the Talmud and indeed ancient Greek, there are obviously some near transfer things that you're going to take from that that would be useful in everyday life. But are you going to be able to far transfer to lots of other things? I don't think so.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  So if it's really important to you to have trained doctors and trained medics and people who understand medical science, and you want to train and design a training program for them, or in Peep's example, if it's really important for you to have trained navigators on board a ship, then you should be coming up with a training program that is quite closely allied to the final skill that it is you want to see. And you should be trying to make sure there are ways that, you know, you are, that there is that identical elements, and that where there is transfer needed, it's a near transfer, and you can test for that, and you can see that it's happening.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  So let me, you know, deep down, I agree with a lot of that, but I, I want to push back on it a little bit, which is, um, I've been fortunate to meet some very high IQ people in my life, and some of them are only good at one thing, but a lot of them are good at a lot of things. Now, I think the relevant point would be, well, they're not just good at those things, they know a lot about them. And those are two very different things. They have a, a base knowledge of context and raw fact and information that's crucial for allowing that well-honed, razor-sharp brain to do something.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  And I think, when we think about, you know, let's move away from civil service and Royal Navy, when we think about what is the purpose of, of education, whether, let's start with, you know, K through 12 or college, you know, I like to believe that what I do here at Shalom College is, quote, "Help my students learn how to think." Now, you could make fun of that and say, "Well, but that's an amorphous skill that doesn't transfer to lots of things." And yet I think when our students deal with, say, the Iliad or the Odyssey or Plato or Aristotle, they don't read them in the original languages, they usually read them in translation, but they've learned some, actually, some of the Greek.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  I think they get good at understanding things, and they get good at reading, and they get good at raising questions, interpreting text, and those are useful skills, and they do transfer to other things. Maybe they're limited, but, but I'm curious, given your Thorndikeian pessimism about transferability, if that's the case, should there be anything other than trade schools that teach people expertise in narrow areas where expertise is crucial?

• 48:36Speaker 01

  No, so look, so I definitely don't want to say that. I'm definitely not making the argument.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  I know, you don't, Dave, I was just pushing into a corner there.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  You're right, you're right. And I would agree, I think, with a lot of what you're doing at Shalom College. I think the point I would make is that if you are setting out with a goal to get students to think well, I think that's a legitimate goal, but you have to acknowledge that being able to think well depends on main knowledge. It depends on specific knowledge of a particular domain. So for example, literature, I do think literature is a completely legitimate topic of study. And what I would say is, if you are studying ancient literature, either in translation or in the original language, if you read a lot of literary texts, you will come to one that you have never read before that's unseen, and you can have a really good understand,

• 49:27Speaker 01

  go at understanding it, even if you haven't seen it before, because you've got the kind of near transfer from all of the other knowledge of literary texts. And I think that kind of thing is important. So what I would say is, is that whatever it is we are trying to teach, whether it is literature, whether it is navigation, whether it is good administration, whether it is how to build munitions shells, like whatever the thing is we want people to have skills in, what we have to understand is...

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Those skills are domain specific. And I think what has been neglected in a lot of modern education is the domain specificity of skills. And in modern education, so if we complete the kind of historical tour of where this is going, in the late 19th, early 20th century, the argument for knowledge doesn't matter and it's just the kind of create a razor sharp brain. That school of thought is known as the faculty psychology or mental discipline. And it's known as that in both the US and the UK and it's influential. And then you have people, as I say, like Thorne Dyke and Flexner come along and say, hang on a minute. And I think what you've had since then, in the sort of post-war era and coming up to

• 50:46Speaker 01

  today, is a lot more research on what experts, what kind of training they do and what kind of skills they have. And again, you've had a lot more research on how even moving slightly outside your domain can really challenge you and your skills can break down. And some of the most famous research was done with chess players by Herbert Simon, who is again another American, a Nobel laureate in economics. He did some really famous research on chess players where he showed that if you show them a chessboard with a bunch of pieces for five seconds, take it away. If those pieces are drawn from an actual game, like a genuine game scenario, their memory is insanely good, right?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  They look at it a couple of seconds, bang, they've got it, they can reproduce it almost perfectly.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Chess players, serious chess players.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good chess players, chess grandmasters. If you give them a chessboard with 25 pieces, you give them a couple of seconds to look at it, ask them to reproduce it, they're insanely good. But if you give them the exact same task with one small difference, so the pieces are not taken from a chess game, they're just put at random on the board, they cannot do it. So again, this is disproving that general mental tool idea of of mental skill. Because if, why is it they can be so good at 25 pieces from an actual chess game, but terrible at 25 pieces placed at random? They don't have like a generally good memory skill.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  What they have stored in long-term memory is a schema of thousands of chess games that they've seen, where they know the kind of typical patterns that you would get. And that's what makes it so easy for them to remember and to perform these apparently superhuman feats of memory. And again, that's a really seminal study. Simon and Chase, skill in chess, been replicated with all kinds of other experts. And the thing I always say is, you know, people talk about critical thinking as being this all-purpose, transferable skill. I mean, the thing I always like to joke about is, you can think of a physics professor who's really good at critical thinking within the context of solving a physics problem

• 52:58Speaker 01

  and really poor at critical thinking in the context of solving a problem in his marriage. We all know that person, right? So the idea that these skills, you know, you can have this very generic skill like problem solving or critical thinking, it's just not there. One other paper I put in, that a lot of Americans have been putting in here, there's a lot of really good American researchers here. One of my favorite ones on creativity has a little American sporting reference for you in the title. It's by a leading researcher in creativity, James Kaufman, and it's called Could Steven Spielberg Have Managed the Yankees?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Good question.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  And it concludes, it's a very good question, and he concludes, no. Because he concludes that again, Steven Spielberg's creativity is built up within a specific domain of filmmaking. And when you jump to a very different domain that would require far transfer, like to managing the Yankees, sure, you need creativity to manage the Yankees, but it's a just really different knowledge, the creativity is within a completely different domain. So, and the other, one last name check is, the guy who I think has done so much work on this is completely brilliant, is Professor Daniel Willingham at University of Virginia.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  He's been on the program, talking about some of these issues, we'll link to that episode.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely brilliant, enormously influential for a lot of people here in the UK. And he just has brilliant, brilliant, very teacher-friendly articles about how all of this research should manifest itself in terms of how you design a curriculum and assessment. So I would say the empirical argument, you know, we're arguing back with McCauley, you know, arguing with him in the grave, the empirical argument since McCauley is just completely, I would say, a slam dunk against his argument. Skills are domain specific, it matters what you teach.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  I'm glad you got slam dunk in there for the Americans.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  The, I think a simpler test, I haven't read the Kaufman article, but it's famously the case that successful coaches in college basketball do not become successful pro coaches and vice versa. Successful pro coaches often struggle in college, although some, you know, there are obviously exceptions in, and there are in other sports as well besides basketball. Like, how far is that? That seems pretty close. And yet, they, there are some specific skills in there they they just don't have or have never honed, and the general skill actually is not so helpful. I want to close with a different, what some might think of as different, but I actually think of as quite related.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  And I heard you talk about a little bit recently, we were in England at this conference together and it fascinates me. Let me set it up this way. One could argue, I don't believe this, but one, many people think this is the case, that the goal of education is to encourage skepticism. And you could argue that a lot of econ talk is about skepticism, you know, someone says, studies show about chess players, but you know, hey, there's publication bias and replicability problems and maybe that Herbert Simon thing is true, and so I'm going to be skeptical about it until I get to look closely and see if it was well done.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  And so, you know, that honing of the brain to be skeptical, one might argue is a very important part of education. Don't just believe everything you hear. And you could argue that there's not many things more important in education than being skeptical of what, being skeptical of what you're told. And to make sure that the things that you're told or that you come to believe have real foundations and evidence behind them and so on. And I struggle with the fact, so I have a part of me that's very much in that direction and that domain, and yet at the same time, pushed too far, that kind of skepticism can lead to what, to what you would call cynicism. Nothing is true.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Everything's relative, there are no ultimate values, there's no ultimate truth, you can never know, and therefore you should just be cynical about everything, not just skeptical. And in my experience, that leads to nihilism, which is not a healthy thing in my view. But I heard you say at this conference we were at, that very few great teachers, and it's just a casual empirical observation on your part, are cynics. Is that, did I understand you correctly and then react to what I said?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what I said was that every great head teacher I've met, and I work in education, but quite a lot of head teachers, I would say, again, completely anecdotes.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Is this a, would you say head teachers? Do you mean principals in American parlance?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yes, principals, yeah, sorry, principals. So I would say every great principal I've met, and again, it's totally anecdotal, no data behind this, maybe I'm doing a McCauley and going ahead of myself and getting convinced by my own eloquence, but I would say every great head teacher I've met doesn't really have a sense of irony. They can have a sense of humor, they'd be funny and be witty, but they don't have that sense of irony. And what I mean by irony is that sense of undercutting, of that sense of seeing something, yeah, maybe it is related to skepticism, but kind of seeing the.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  It's cynicism, I think.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  It's related to skepticism and cynicism. So I think irony goes too far and it's, it becomes cynicism. And I think the reason for this is a head teacher is setting rules and they, they can't be undercutting the rules, they have to believe in the rules. And I, I think I said to you too, when I started out as a teacher, I did an English literature degree, so I need to put my cards on the table, I've spent this whole podcast talking to you about how the study of ancient literature is a terrible idea and it's basically been my entire academic field of study. So yeah, make of that what you will. But a big part of the study of English literature is, irony is a huge part of it. And a lot of the English authors I would say we most admire are ones who are masters

• 58:56Speaker 01

  of irony, I mean, Jane Austen leaps to mind, but there are plenty of others. And I remember, you know, I came out of education, I came straight out of my degree and was, you know, graduated in the summer and by the autumn was teaching. And it's really hard to sustain a sense of irony in a classroom with teenagers, because you, you have to kind of enforce these rules and believe in them. And if you don't, and if you're the one who's constantly undercutting, it just gets really difficult. And so I think you can probably, as a teacher, just about sustain it, but I think it gets harder if, as I say, you're a principal and you're at the top of the tree and you are responsible for upholding, upholding these rules. And so I think there is a kind of an issue that a lot of the qualities, and in lots

• 59:39Speaker 01

  of ways, I do admire these great masters of irony like Jane Austen, but there are a lot of ways in which it's kind of hard to really construct a coherent worldview on that, because as you say, one of the. One of the great issues with skepticism is it undercuts itself. And I think the great tension here is that skepticism and rationality have historically given us enormous benefits. So, modern science is incredible and is to a large part built on not trusting and verifying.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Prove it.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  But on the other hand, if you just literally believe in nothing and you are trying to prove everything, you will just end up in a reductio ad absurdum. And you will end up really in something, and this again, we're talking about Peeps, but you can go right back to the 17th century here. You will end up in a kind of antinomian state of mind, where you just trust nobody and nothing. And I think this goes to the heart of the Royal Society. The Royal Society's motto, and Peeps was involved, I think, in setting up the Royal Society. The Royal Society's motto is nullius in verba, take no one's word for it.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  And on the one hand, yeah, fantastic, that's amazing. And the way the Royal Society did that did result in some of the most amazing advances that we all, you know, the entire world have benefited from. On the other hand, actually, it just doesn't work. You can't, you know, to absolutely definitively prove even one of the most basic facts that you take for granted in your life could take a lifetime. So ultimately, we are all taking something on someone else's word. You can't not. But this is the tension. You know, you go too far one way and you're credulous and you just become gullible and you fall for scams and cons. But you go too far the other way and you just undercut yourself and, as I say, become antinomium and the ground beneath you falls away. So there has to be some kind of place that you can find where you do find some secure ground to put your foot on.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  But when you find that, I think you do really kind of have to defend it a bit. It's a tricky one.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I first read it in David Epstein's book, where he talks about NASA, which by the way, is another government agency that very much prioritized skill, particular skills of astrophysics and mathematics wisely to keep people alive, but fails from time to time, as we know. And David writes, I think it's where I saw it, on the wall, it says, "In God we trust, everyone else bring data." And it's a beautiful idea. And in a certain sense, you want to live your life that way, requiring, you know, take no one's word, prove it. Where's the data? Where's the evidence?

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  And yet, there's a dance as a human being where not just the practicality part, that you can't prove everything and you have to accept some things on faith, but I think there's something more important, which is some things aren't amenable to proof. Some of those are in marriage, you were talking about earlier, how you deal with people, whether it's your spouse or friend or a colleague at work. And this is related for me, I don't know if it makes sense, but I think about my youth. I was brought up on certain types of humor, and they were all ironic.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  I was, I think, 12 years old in the heyday of Marvel Comics, when Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four and others were coming out of the pen and mind of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and others. And they like, they were always ironic. Their sense of humor was always about, they were always wisecracking. They were always putting things down and being hip. And I think that's a huge part of American culture. I was part of that as a kid. The humor, I was a big fan of the Fire Sign Theater, which was this set of crazy recordings

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  when I was in high school of super ironic stuff. And I think, I don't know if it's healthy. I mean, I love my sense of humor, I'm totally happy with it. And I passed, I hope, some of it on to my children through, but part of what they watched was the Andy Griffith Show, which I'll just mention is incredibly funny, but also incredibly charming, and there's zero irony in it. It's good-hearted in its nature, it's virtuous in its nature. There's no attempt to show that you're cooler than the people who keep the rules. But all that other stuff's about breaking the rules. And it's a fascinating issue.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  I think you said it well about, you know, you need a place to stand, and if you were only going to stand on places where you know it's safe, you're in trouble. So I don't know what else to say about you. Can you take us home if you want to add anything?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I agree with that. And I think the other thing we were chatting about when we spoke in person was, to what extent, maybe, I get your point, there's an ironic strain in American culture. You know, America is large, it contains multitudes, but it does feel like maybe there's a strain of earnestness in American culture that often maybe British people maybe sometimes like to mock.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  And I've probably been guilty of that. But then you look at it and you think that earnestness does have its strengths. And as you say, there is a point at which the irony can shade into cynicism, and the cynicism can be something that can really stop you getting things done, if you just are always seeing the bad side of things. So there has to be some kind of value to earnestness as a way of, you know, if you want to achieve things and you want to build things, you can't always be knocking things down. You have to want to try to build. And I wonder if some element of earnestness is necessary for being a builder and not a destroyer.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Daisy Kristodoulou. Daisy, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Fantastic. Thank you, Russ.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.