His blog entry does indeed use the word "menial"; don't know how I missed that. It doesn't, in any case, affect the substance of my post.
This guy is basically suggesting that education is "welfare", that welfare is inherently bad, and that people should be less educated in order to perform unskilled labor.
Re-read Caplan's words; that's not what he states at all. Indeed, nowhere does he say that even a single person is "too educated" per se. Rather, he suggests that some people are "too educated" to be performing unskilled labor.
My point is a modest one: Caplan's blog entry does not make the cartoonish argument Gully has attributed to him. I don't know, and don't claim to know, what the problem in Sweden is—if indeed there is a problem.
He claims that it's a waste when educated people do unskilled labor... but there isn't a large enough pool of uneducated workers in Sweden to cover all of the unskilled jobs..
So to address this inefficiency you can either stop educating certain people or you can try and somehow get rid of the low-skill jobs.. or invite unskilled workers in.. but that can inefficient in itself.
You don't seem to think things through, Philip. No, he did not explicitly say he wanted to dumb down the population to save money and make it more efficient, but he pretty much implied it.
And that was a slick excuse to get out of addressing my question to you.
If you're going to defend the economist that wrote the article, then I expect you to defend his argument as well rather than skirting around the issue and trying to find a few exaggerations to focus on in Gully's post.
If you don't want to defend the argument or don't care about it, then don't pick apart Gully's post. The thread is about the economist and his ideas.. not about critiquing Gully's post.
