Tyler Cowen

The very bottom of the distribution, well, youth crime has been falling since the 90s.

So the very bottom of the distribution also is getting better.

I think there's some thick middle above the very bottom and extending like a bit above the median that's clearly getting worse.

And because they're getting worse, there's a lot of anecdotal examples of them getting worse.

Like students wanting more time to take the test or having flimsy excuses or mental health problems with the young or whatever.

There's a lot more of that because of that thick band of people getting worse.

And that's a great concern.

But I see the very bottom and a big chunk of the top of the distribution as just much better.

And I think it's pretty proven by numbers that that's the case.

So I would say this increasing variance with the weird mix of where the gains and declines are showing up.

And I've said this to Patrick and I'm gonna say it to him again and I hope I can convince him.

The median goes down.

A lot of tests, they've pushed more people into taking the test, PISA scores in particular.

So I suspect those scores adjusted for that are roughly constant, which is still not great, I agree.

And I think there's some decline, some of it is pandemic and we're recovering a bit slowly, getting back to human bottlenecks.

But I think a lot of the talk of declining test scores is somewhat overblown.

At most, there's a very modest decline, I would say.

There's plenty of data on the earnings of Stanford kids.

If there were a betting market in what's the future trend, I'm long.

How long I should be, I really don't know.