Higher education as class commitment - by Richard Ngo

Bridging game theory and common sense

In a previous post, I argued that Bryan Caplan’s signaling theory isn’t a good explanation for why college graduates get higher-paying jobs. Instead, I claimed, understanding the role of higher education in the modern West requires sociological explanations. In this post I argue more specifically that getting an undergraduate degree serves as an initiation into a class of cultural elites, variously called the bourgeois bohemian (bobo) class, the professional-managerial class (PMC), the Blue Tribe, globalists, symbolic analysts, class X, or simply the ruling class. I think of each of these…

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