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Thank you. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here with today's guest, Brian Kaplan.

Brian is a professor of economics, George Mason University, and the author of several books,

including most recently, The Case Against Education, Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and

Money. That's the case we're going to be talking about today on the show. Brian, welcome

back to rationally speaking.

So much fun to return.

So your case against education lays out a model of what education is doing, what the value of the education system is to people and to society that is different from the norm.

Could you lay out that case in brief?

Sure. So the big thing that I'm doing differently from almost everybody else is I'm taking the idea of signaling very seriously just to back up. So there's a standard story that almost

everyone tells about why education pays in the labor market and it just says you go to school,

they pour some skills into you you're better at your

job and so you get paid more what's the problem and I'm happy to say well sure that's part of the

story but I say there's also a much bigger part of the story that rarely gets discussed and that is

...