Alex Tabarrok

Does Not Compute

by on April 23, 2012 at 7:20 am in Economics, Education | Permalink

Steven Salzberg from Forbes is right about this:

Wow, no one saw this coming.  The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million.  The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.

Let’s get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely?

Salzberg, however, is critical of Florida Governor Rick Scott for cutting university funding overall (Scott famously decried anthropology degrees in favor of STEM). Salzberg also finds it “unintentionally ironic” that in announcing a new polytechnic just two day ago Gov. Scott said:

“At a time when the number of graduates of Florida’s universities in the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields is not projected to meet workforce needs, the establishment of Florida Polytechnic University will help us move the needle in the right direction.”

Rather than ironic I see this as illustrating how university incentives are not always aligned with those of the Governor or with the social interest. As Governor, Scott can more easily direct new funds towards STEM than tell entrenched university bureaucracies how to reallocate funds among existing programs. In particular Scott wants to promote STEM and computer science graduates for the externalities they produce but universities don’t get paid for producing externalities they get paid based on student enrollment. Thus, this is not surprising:

…Meanwhile, the athletic budget for the current year is $99 million, an increase of more than $2 million from last year.  The increase alone would more than offset the savings supposedly gained by cutting computer science.

100 comments submit to reddit

Tabarrok on the Alyona Show (“Debtors’ Prisons”)

by on April 21, 2012 at 7:01 am in Economics, Law, Television | Permalink

I believe it was Brad DeLong who once said that people who can look into the camera and emote as if they are talking to a person will one day rule the world. It’s a very unnatural thing but ironically it makes you look much more natural on television (when you look at the person it looks as if you are not looking the viewer in the eye and worst of all is the shifty-eyed switch between looking at the camera and the person or their image which makes you look untrustworthy). I am getting the knack but still have other tics to work on.

Interview below, here is my original post.

18 comments submit to reddit

Outcome Unbiased Journals

by on April 19, 2012 at 11:39 am in Economics, Science | Permalink

Chris Said, a neuroscientist, prods the NIH to support outcome-unbiased journals:

The growing problems with scientific research are by now well known: Many results in the top journals are cherry picked, methodological weaknesses and other important caveats are often swept under the rug, and a large fraction of findings cannot be replicated. In some rare cases, there is even outright fraud. This waste of resources is unfair to the general public that pays for most of the research.

The Times article places the blame for this trend on the sharp competition for grant money and on the increasing pressure to publish in high impact journals. While both of these factors certainly play contributing roles…the cause is not simply that the competition is too steep. The cause is that the competition points scientists in the wrong direction.

…scientific journals favor surprising, interesting, and statistically significant experimental results. When journal editors give preferences to these types of results, it is obvious that more false positives will be published by simple selection effects, and it is obvious that unscrupulous scientists will manipulate their data to show these types of results. These manipulations include selection from multiple analyses, selection from multiple experiments (the “file drawer” problem), and the formulation of ‘a priori’ hypotheses after the results are known.

…the agencies should favor journals that devote special sections to replications, including failures to replicate. More directly, the agencies should devote more grant money to submissions that specifically propose replications….I would [also] like to see some preference given to fully “outcome-unbiased” journals that make decisions based on the quality of the experimental design and the importance of the scientific question, not the outcome of the experiment. This type of policy naturally eliminates the temptation to manipulate data towards desired outcomes.

68 comments submit to reddit

Debtor’s Prison for Failure to Pay for Your Own Trial

by on April 18, 2012 at 7:38 am in Economics, History, Law | Permalink

Debtor’s prisons are supposed to be illegal in the United States but today poor people who fail to pay even small criminal justice fees are routinely being imprisoned. The problem has gotten worse recently because strapped states have dramatically increased the number of criminal justice fees. In Pennsylvania, for example, the criminal court charges for police transport, sheriff costs, state court costs, postage, and “judgment.” Many of these charges are not for any direct costs imposed by the criminal but have been added as revenue enhancers. A $5 fee, for example, supports the County Probation Officers’ Firearms Training Fund, an $8 fee supports the Judicial Computer Project, a $250 fee goes to the DNA Detection Fund. Convicted criminals may face dozens of fees (not including fines and restitution) totaling a substantial burden for people of limited means. Fees do not end outside the courtroom. Jailed criminals can be charged for room and board and for telephone use, haircuts, drug tests, transportation, booking, and medical co-pays. In Arizona, visitors to a prison are now charged a $25 maintenance fee. In PA in order to get parole there is a mandatory charge of $60. While on parole, defendants may be further assessed counseling, testing and other fees. Interest builds unpaid fees larger and larger. In Washington state unpaid legal debt accrues at an interest rate of 12%. As a result, the median person convicted in WA sees their criminal justice debt grow larger over time.

Many states are now even charging the accused to apply for and use a public defender! As a result, some defendants are discouraged from exercising their rights to an attorney.

Most outrageously, in some states public defender, pre-trial jail and other court fees can be assessed on individuals even when they are not convicted of any crime. Failure to pay criminal justice fees can result in revocation of an individual’s drivers license, arrest and imprisonment. Individuals with revoked licenses who drive (say to work to earn money to pay their fees) and are apprehended can be further fined and imprisoned. Unpaid criminal justice debt also results in damaged credit reports and reduced housing and employment prospects. Furthermore, failure to pay fees can mean a violation of probation and parole terms which makes an individual ineligible for Federal programs such as food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Family funds and Social Security Income for the elderly and disabled.

It’s difficult to argue against criminal justice fees for those who can pay, but for those who cannot– and most criminal defendants are poor–such fees can be a personal and public policy disaster. Criminal justice debt drags people further away from reintegration with civil society. A person’s life can spiral out of their control when interest, late fees, revocation of a driver’s license and ineligibility for public assistance, mean that unpaid criminal justice debt snowballs. You can’t get blood from a stone but if you try, you can break the stone.

Optimal punishment is swift and sure but also has a defined endpoint. As with bankruptcy, punishment must end, leaving both hope and opportunity. We used to release criminals without a nickel or a nail but with an understanding that their debt to society had been paid. Today, we release criminals with a ball of debt and other restrictions that chains them to the criminal justice system and which can pull them back into prison long after their sentences have been served. Releasing people with little hope or opportunity for reintegration with civil society is good for neither the releasees nor society.

190 comments submit to reddit

The Internet in Estonia

by on April 17, 2012 at 6:45 am in Economics, Law, Web/Tech | Permalink

Free Wi-Fi is everywhere, and has been for a decade.

Viik says you could walk 100 miles – from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn to the university spires of Tartu – and never lose internet connection.

…Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.

Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line.

Estonia is also at the forefront of privacy issues. Everyone in Estonia has a national ID card, which might frighten some Americans–although we already have essentially the same thing, but everyone in Estonia also knows who else has accessed their records. Thus, compared to the United States, Estonia is in many ways a more transparent society. Estonia is also on the forefront of dealing with cyber-terrorism with their own national “electronic” guard.

More at The Guardian.

39 comments submit to reddit

Toward a 21st-Century FDA?

by on April 16, 2012 at 6:35 am in Economics, Law, Medicine | Permalink

In a WSJ op-ed, Andrew von Eschenbach, FDA commissioner from 2005 to 2009, is surprisingly candid about how the FDA is killing people.

When I was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2005 to 2009, I saw firsthand how regenerative medicine offered a cure for kidney and heart failure and other chronic conditions like diabetes. Researchers used stem cells to grow cells and tissues to replace failing organs, eliminating the need for expensive supportive treatments like dialysis and organ transplants.

But the beneficiaries were laboratory animals. Breakthroughs for humans were and still are a long way off. They have been stalled by regulatory uncertainty, because the FDA doesn’t have the scientific tools and resources to review complex innovations more expeditiously and pioneer regulatory pathways for state-of-the-art therapies that defy current agency conventions.

Ultimately, however, von Eschenbach blames not the FDA but Congress:

Congress has starved the agency of critical funding, limiting its scientists’ ability to keep up with peers in private industry and academia. The result is an agency in which science-based regulation often lags far behind scientific discovery.

Should we not, however, read the following ala Strauss?

The FDA isn’t obstructing progress because its employees are mean-spirited or foolish.

…For example, in August 2010, the FDA filed suit against a company called Regenerative Sciences. Three years earlier, the company had begun marketing a process it called Regenexx to repair damaged joints by injecting them with a patient’s own stem cells. The FDA alleged that the cells the firm used had been manipulated to the point that they should be regulated as drugs. A resulting court injunction halting use of the technique has cast a pall over the future of regenerative medicine.

A peculiar example of a patient-spirited and wise decision, no? And what are we to make of this?

FDA scientists I have encountered do care deeply about patients and want to say “yes” to safe and effective new therapies. Regulatory approval is the only bridge between miracles in the laboratory and lifesaving treatments. Yet until FDA reviewers can be scientifically confident of the benefits and risks of a new technology, their duty is to stop it—and stop it they will. (emphasis added).

von Eschenbach ends with what sounds like a threat or perhaps, as they say, it is a promise. Unless Congress funds the FDA at higher levels and lets it regulate itself:

…we had better get used to the agency saying no by calling “time out” or, worse, “game over” for American companies developing new, vital technologies like regenerative medicine.

Frankly, I do not want to “get used” to the FDA saying game over for American companies but nor do I trust Congress to solve this problem. Thus, von Eschenbach convinces me that if we do want new, vital technologies like regenerative medicine we need more fundamental reform.

37 comments submit to reddit

The Chicago School

by on April 12, 2012 at 7:39 am in Current Affairs, Economics, Education | Permalink

In Launching the Innovation Renaissance I wrote:

In the United States, “vocational” programs are often thought of as programs for at-risk students, but that’s because they are taught in high schools with little connection to real workplaces. European programs are typically rigorous because the training is paid for by employers who consider apprentices an important part of their current and future work force. Apprentices are therefore given high-skill technical training that combines theory with practice—and the students are paid!

In the United States there are some experimental programs moving in this direction. One of the most interesting is being pushed by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel:

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students will have the opportunity to attend five Early College STEM Schools (ECSS) that focus on technology skills and career readiness – as well as earn college credits– under a partnership agreement with five technology companies, CPS and City Colleges of Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced…

The five technology companies, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft Corporation, Motorola Solutions and Verizon Wireless, will help develop a unique curriculum at each new school to teach students the skills required in that marketplace, as well as provide mentors and internships.  Upon graduating from these tailored programs, the students will be prepared for careers in science and technology.

…All of the new schools will open in September 2012 with a class of ninth graders.  Each student will be able to graduate in four-years with a high school diploma with college credits, with a goal of graduating within six years with an Associate of Science (AS) degree in Computer Science or an Associate in Applied Science (AAS) in Information Technology. The college courses will be taught by professors from CCC.

Emanuel is also redesigning the City Colleges of Chicago along similar lines:

Rahm fired almost all the college presidents, hired replacements after a national search, and decreed that six of the seven city-run colleges would have a special concentration. Corporations pledging to hire graduates will have a big hand in designing and implementing curricula. “You’re not going for four years, and you’re not going for a Nobel Prize or a research breakthrough,” he says. “This is about dealing with the nursing shortage, the lab-tech shortage. Hotels and restaurants will take over the curriculum for culinary and hospitality training.” Already AAR, a company that has 600 job openings for welders and mechanics, is partnering with Olive-Harvey College; Northwestern Memorial Hospital is designing job training in health care for Malcolm X College.

It’s too early to judge these developments but Emanuel’s op-ed on this subject was surprisingly good. The key question, which I haven’t yet seen answered, is whether the the companies will have real skin in the game, which I see as critical to success.

Hat tip: Ben Casnocha.

11 comments submit to reddit

New Cities

by on April 9, 2012 at 7:38 am in Economics | Permalink

In 2009, the percentage of the planet’s population living in urban areas crossed the 50% threshold…this year the population of the world’s cities will grow by a further 65 million people, equal in size to the total population of France…

As recently as 1990 the United States had the highest number of one million plus inhabitant urban agglomerations globally with a total of 33….by the year 2020 China will lead the world with 121 followed by India with 58…

Remarkably, in 2009 China generated some 40.9% of GDP from just 16.6% of its population living in the 35 largest cities.

From an interesting Credit Suisse report, Opportunities in an urbanizing world (pdf).

I was surprised at how close the association is between state level GDP and the urbanization rate (Ryan Avent in The Gated City and Matt Yglesias in The Rent is Too Dammed High make similar points.)

Urban dwellers also have much lower levels of carbon dioxide production than rural dwellers [Addendum: this seems to be per unit of GDP]. Moreover, the half of the world’s population that lives in cities occupies only approximately 2.7% of the world’s land area.

Hat tip: Gulzar at Urbanomics.

61 comments submit to reddit

Markets in Everything: Prison Consultants

by on April 9, 2012 at 7:34 am in Economics, Law | Permalink

NYTimes: Mr. Levine is a prison consultant. The business — which entails advising people who are facing jail time on how to prepare for life on the inside, deal with medical issues, transfer to other prisons and even reduce their sentences…The consultants [also] teach prison etiquette.

For example? “Never walk across a wet floor,” Mr. Mulholland advised, saying you might mess up the work of the prisoner manning the mop. And then he might kill you.

Prison consultancy seems to be one of the few businesses where the owners aggressively advertise their criminal record:

Mr. Levine said he thought the competition would thin out over time because the competitors lack marketing smarts. Besides, he argued, he has the criminal CV to back up the marketing.

If they handed out diplomas for prison savvy, he said, “These guys have maybe an associate degree. I have like a Ph.D. or above.”

Indeed, “some prison consultants say that others are so lacking in expertise that their businesses are practically criminal enterprises.”

10 comments submit to reddit

Surprising Probability Estimate of the Day

by on April 3, 2012 at 7:32 am in Data Source, Medicine | Permalink

The UK’s Office of Work and Pensions estimates that a child born today has a 30% chance of reaching the age of 100. In contrast, a person 80 years old today has only a 7.7% chance of reaching the age of 100. Indeed, a person today, according to these estimates, has to be about 96.5 years of age to have the same probability of reaching the age of 100 as a newborn.

You can find the data at The Guardian.

Hat tip: John Lanchester’s article on Marx in the LRB.

40 comments submit to reddit

Newt for President!

by on April 2, 2012 at 2:24 pm in Science | Permalink

Sixty-five million years ago, a Manhattan-size meteorite traveling through space at about 11 kilometers per second punched through the sky before hitting the ground near what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The energy released by the impact poured into the atmosphere, heating Earth’s surface. Then the dust lofted by this impact blocked out the sun, bringing years of wintry conditions everywhere, wiping out many terrestrial species, including the nonfeathered dinosaurs. Birds and mammals thus owe their ascendancy to the intersection of two orbits: that of Earth and that of a devastating visitor from deep space.

We humans need not wait, like dinosaurs, for the next big rock to drop.

From a good piece in IEEE Spectrum analyzing the various methods available to deflect asteroids. Tyler and I have a special interest in this since we discuss asteroid deflection as a public good–a public good that as of yet neither private firms nor governments provide–in Modern Principles.

With better and more complete telescope coverage we are learning that there are a lot more near-misses than we previously thought. As the public becomes more aware of the dangers, I hope that we will see more action on this front.

Hat tip: The Browser.

33 comments submit to reddit

Billionaires for the War on Drugs

by on April 1, 2012 at 7:31 am in Current Affairs, Economics | Permalink

Hat tip: Carpe Diem. Do note the date.

12 comments submit to reddit

Felix Salmon on the Spot Market, Stripes Too!

by on March 31, 2012 at 9:49 am in Economics, The Arts | Permalink

5 comments submit to reddit

Is Creativity more like IQ or Expertise?

by on March 28, 2012 at 11:59 am in Education, Science, The Arts | Permalink

IQ, whatever its flaws, appears to be a general factor, that is, if you do well on one kind of IQ test you will tend to do well on another, quite different, kind of IQ test. IQ also correlates well with many and varied real world outcomes. But what about creativity? Is creativity general like IQ? Or is creativity more like expertise; a person can be an expert in one field, for example, but not in another.

In a short piece in The Creativity Post, cognitive Psychologist Rober Baer argues that creativity is domain-specific:

Efforts to assess creativity have been plagued by supposedly domain-general divergent-thinking tests like the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, although even Torrance knew they were measuring domain-specific skills. (He create two different versions of the test, one that used verbal tasks and another that used visual tasks. He found that scores on the two tests were unrelated —they had a correlation of just .06—so they could not be measuring a single skill or set of skills. They were—and still are—measuring two entirely different things.) Because these tests have been used in so many psychological studies of creativity, much of what we think we know about creativity may be based on invalid data. These tests have also been widely used in selection for gifted/talented programs — programs that have, in turn, often suffered because by assuming creativity was domain general, these programs often wasted students’ time with supposedly content-free divergent thinking exercises (like brainstorming unusual uses for bricks) that really only develop divergent-thinking skill in limited domains.

The metaphor we use for understanding creativity will impact how we train for creativity:

If one’s goal is to enhance creativity in many domains, then creativity-training exercises need to come from a wide variety of domains—just as we must provide a broad general education if we want students to acquire modest levels of expertise in many areas. But if one’s goal is to increase creativity in just one domain, such as one might want to do in a gifted program focusing on one domain (such as a program in dance, poetry, math, etc)., then it would be appropriate for all of the creativity-training exercises to come from the particular domain of special interest.

Baer’s view is controversial. My inclination is to think that creativity does have a significant general aspect because creativity seems so often to involve combining seemingly disparate ideas. My suspicion is that that there is a neurological basis for this in, to put it crudely, right-brain, left-brain communication channels. The fact that creativity can be stimulated by drugs and travel also suggests to me a general aspect. No one ever says, if you want to master calculus take a “trip” but this does work if you are blocked on some types of creative projects.

Nevertheless, Baer’s view is worth thinking about; he gives more detail to his argument in two academic papers here and here.

57 comments submit to reddit

The Golden Rule of Organ Donation

by on March 27, 2012 at 7:30 am in Economics, Medicine | Permalink

Here is Joseph Roth, president and CEO of New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network:

Caseworkers from our organization recently went to the hospital to visit the family of a woman who suffered a stroke. The woman was dead, but machines continued to keep her organs functioning. She was an ideal candidate to be an organ donor. Her husband, it turns out, was on the waiting list to receive a heart.

Our caseworkers asked the husband if he would allow his wife’s organs to be donated. The husband, to the shock of our caseworkers, said no. He simply refused. Here was a man willing to accept an organ to save his own life, but who refused to allow a family member to give the gift of life to another person.

…Cases like this are rare, thankfully, but are nonetheless troublesome.

Roth continues:

Our proposal — we call it the Golden Rule proposal — would permit health insurers in New Jersey to limit transplant coverage for people who decline to register as organ donors. It would be the first such law in the nation. No one would be denied an organ. But under the proposal, insurers could limit reimbursement for the hospital and medical costs associated with transplants of the kidney, pancreas, liver, heart, intestines and lungs.

I am not in favor of messing with the insurance system for this purpose but have argued for a more direct approach. Under what I call a “no-give, no-take” rule if you are not willing to sign your organ donor card you go to the bottom of the list should you one day need an organ. Israel recently introduced a version of no-give, no take which gives those who previously signed their organ donor cards points pushing them up the list should they need an organ transplant–as a result, tens of thousands of people rushed to sign their organ donor cards.

Hat tip to David Undis whose excellent group Lifesharers (I am an adviser) is implementing a private version of no-give, no take in the United States.

Here is my piece on Life Saving Incentives and here are previous MR posts on organ donation.

85 comments submit to reddit

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →