> "Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?"
Impossible to predict accurately, since so much of opportunity is luck. Maybe they would have made better connections in school. Maybe they would not have. Maybe they would have made the exact same connections.
It's possible to make a statistical argument that since they got such ridiculously unlikely opportunities, any deviation from the path they took would have been bad for them. But then you're no longer arguing about the value of education, you're just making observations about a pair of lucky people. And that's not compelling at all, when you don't address the entire outcome distribution for people making the exact same choices.
Impossible to predict accurately, since so much of opportunity is luck. Maybe they would have made better connections in school. Maybe they would not have. Maybe they would have made the exact same connections.
It's possible to make a statistical argument that since they got such ridiculously unlikely opportunities, any deviation from the path they took would have been bad for them. But then you're no longer arguing about the value of education, you're just making observations about a pair of lucky people. And that's not compelling at all, when you don't address the entire outcome distribution for people making the exact same choices.