Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at all, according to a new Fidelity Investments study of higher education faculty. While 69 percent of those surveyed cited financial concerns, an even higher percentage of professors said love of their careers factored into their decision.
I suspect nothing in this book can be trusted. Still, it is one of the more stimulating reads of the year, though I have to be careful not to draw serious inferences from it. Does its possible fictionality make it easier to create so many interesting passages?:
I can seem amazingly prescient and insightful, to the point that people proclaim that no one else has ever understood them as well as I do. But the truth is far more complex and hinges on the meaning of understanding. In a way, I don’t understand them at all. I can only make predictions based on the past behavior they’ve exhibited to me, the same way computers determine whether you’re a bad credit risk based on millions of data points. I am the ultimate empiricist, and not by choice.
The author argues that sociopaths are often very smart, have a lot of natural cognitive advantages in manipulating data, and are frequently sought out as friends for their ability to appeal to others. It is claimed that, ceteris paribus, we will stick with the sociopath buddies, as we are quite ready to use sociopaths to suit our own ends, justly or not. It is claimed that for all of their flaws, many but not all sociopaths are capable of understanding what is in essence the contractarian case for being moral — rational self-interest — and sticking with it. Citing some research in the area (pdf), the author speculates that sociopaths may have an “attention bottleneck,” so they do not receive the cognitive emotional and moral feedback which others do, unless they decide very consciously to focus on a potential emotion. For sociopaths, top down processing of emotions is not automatic.
We even learn that (supposedly) sociopaths are often infovores. It seems many but not all sociopaths are relatively conscientious, and the author of this book (supposedly) teaches Sunday school and tithes ten percent to the church. It just so happens sociopaths sometimes think about killing or destroying other people, without feeling much in the way of remorse.
I can also recommend this book as an absorbing memoir of a law professor and also of a Mormon outlier. It is written at a high level of intelligence, and it details how to get good legal teaching evaluations, how to please colleagues, how to evade Mormon proscriptions on sex before marriage, and it offers an interesting hypothesis as to why sociopaths tend to be more sexually flexible than the average person (hint: think more systematically about what abnormal or weakened top-down processing of emotions might mean in other spheres of life).
The author argues that sociopaths can do what two generations of econometricians have only barely managed, namely to defeat the efficient markets hypothesis and earn systematically super-normal returns. What does it say about me that I find this the least plausible claim in the entire book?
Here is a useful New York Times review. Here is the author’s blog, which is about being a sociopath, or about pretending to be a sociopath, or perhaps both. Here is the book on Amazon and note how many readers hated it. I say they just don’t like sociopaths.
One hypothesis is that this book is a stunt, designed as an experiment in one’s ability to erase or conceal an on-line identity, although I would think a major publisher (Crown) is not up for such tricks these days. An alternative is that a sociopath — not the one portrayed in the book — is trying to frame an innocent person as the author of the book (some trackable identity clues are left), noting that the book itself discusses at length plans to destroy others for various (non-justified) reasons. Or is it a Straussian critique of the Mormon Church for (supposedly) encouraging sociopathic-related character traits in its non-sociopath members? Or all of the above?
You will note that the book’s opening diagnosis comes from an actual clinical psychologist in the area, and the Crown legal department would have no interest in misrepresenting him in this manner. So the default hypothesis has to be that this book represents some version of the truth, at least as seen through the author’s eyes.
Some version of the author, wearing a blonde wig it seems, appeared on the Dr. Phil show, to the scorn of Phil I might add.
I cannot evaluate the scientific claims in this book, and would I trust the literature on sociopaths anyway, given that the author claims it is subject to the severe selection bias of having more access to the sociopathic losers and criminals? (I buy this argument, by the way.) It did occur to me however, that for the rehabilitation of sociopaths, whether through books or other means, perhaps they should consider…a rebranding exercise? But wait, “Sorry, I could not find synonyms for ‘sociopath’.”
If nothing else, this book will wake you up as to how little you (probably) know about sociopaths.
Yana flew yesterday from Newark airport and will be arriving in Mumbai shortly, heading in a few days to live in Bangalore. She will be working with Forus Health to decrease preventable blindness among India’s poor, in part by aiding with their distribution of an affordable screening device.
Her indiegogo project is here, which also describes her trip and mission. I hope to visit later in the year. And I expect her to come back knowing three or four more languages.
“Early intervention” to benefit children is one of those sacred cows which I consider unproven and which also is cited in far too malleable a fashion. Here is a new paper by Alan Rushton, Margaret Grant, Julia Feast, and John Simmonds, probably gated for many of you, but worth a read if you can.
The abstract is too wordy, but the study is a follow-up on one hundred Chinese girls who first lived in Chinese orphanages, were later adopted into the UK, and who now are 40 to 50 years old. The orphanage involved deprivation and even some malnutrition (55% of sample). There was basic medical care and supervision, although no general one-to-one caregiver relationship.
Of the initial hundred children, 98 were still alive and 72 of those responded to the survey, which also involved extensive follow-up interviews.
Most entered the orphanage very early, in the first year of life, with a mean of three months old. Age at exit varied between eight months and 83 months, with a mean of 23 months, and with a mean of 20 months spent in the care of the orphanage.
Compared to a general sample of adopted British women, and also UK non-adopted women, the adopted Chinese women did not appear to be at greater risk of mental illness, nor did they appear to have elevated health risks. There were no statistically significant differences when it came to “life control” or “life satisfaction.”
This single study is hardly dispositive, but it should raise some skeptical eyebrows. Recovering from a bad start, in this data set, appears eminently possible, provided of course that the environment improves.
Addendum: Here are some observations on Gerard Debreu’s early life (jstor).
For the pointer I thank a loyal MR reader.
When an athlete chooses to transfer, three sets of rules can be involved: those of the NCAA.; those of the conference in which the university competes; and those that accompany the national letter of intent, a contract that athletes sign while still in high school to announce their intention to attend a university.
“It’s entirely slanted to the coach’s side,” said Don Jackson, a lawyer who runs the Sports Group in Montgomery, Ala., and who has represented dozens of athletes attempting to transfer to a university of their choice. “Once the student-athlete signs that national letter of intent, it’s essentially a contract of adhesion. They have limited rights.”
Universities have long sought to block student-athletes from transferring to a rival program. Alabama’s football team, for example, would not be expected to let a star player go to Auburn. But the impulse to limit the student-athlete’s options has been heightened to the point that coaches are now blacklisting dozens of universities.
From the NYT, here is more, none of it pretty, but of course lower-tier universities will claim they are making big investments in improving the quality of diamonds in the rough. The funny thing is — if I may sound Caplanian for a moment — no one at these schools seems to demand similar restrictions on transfers of the students.
I am pleased to announce that a conference and memorial program will be held to celebrate the work of Jim Buchanan. The conference will be on Saturday Sept. 28 and the memorial program to which all of Jim’s students, colleagues and friends are invited will be on Sunday Sept. 29. More information and rsvp here.
I hear this topic discussed quite often, yet rarely does this 2006 paper by Darius Lakdawalla, “The Economics of Teacher Quality,” come up in the popular conversation. Here is the abstract:
Concern is often voiced about the quality of American schoolteachers. This paper suggests that, while the relative quality of teachers is declining, this decline may be the result of technological changes that have raised the price of skilled workers outside teaching without affecting the productivity of skilled teachers. Growth in the price of skilled workers can cause schools to lower the relative quality of teachers and raise teacher quantity instead. Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth demonstrates that wage and schooling are good measures of teacher quality. Analysis of U.S. census microdata then reveals that the relative schooling and experience-adjusted relative wages of U.S. schoolteachers have fallen significantly from 1940 to 1990. Moreover, class sizes have also fallen substantially. The declines in class size and in relative quality seem correlated over time and space with growth in the relative price of skilled workers.
The jstor link is here, this version is (I think) ungated for you. Here is an ungated, earlier version with some related results. Here is a good sentence from the middle of the paper:
Both schooling and experience-adjusted wages entered a period of relative decline for teachers beginning with the cohorts entering the labor force during the 1950s.
On pp.318-318 Lakdawalla discusses the importance of superior labor market opportunities for women for the argument. Here is Lakdalla’s earlier argument that Medicare benefits the poor to a disproportionate degree.
I was reminded of the education paper by a tweet from Austan Goolsbee.
Dylan Matthews reports:
Jason Trigg went into finance because he is after money — as much as he can earn.
The 25-year-old certainly had other career options. An MIT computer science graduate, he could be writing software for the next tech giant. Or he might have gone into academia in computing or applied math or even biology. He could literally be working to cure cancer.
Instead, he goes to work each morning for a high-frequency trading firm. It’s a hedge fund on steroids. He writes software that turns a lot of money into even more money. For his labors, he reaps an uptown salary — and over time his earning potential is unbounded. It’s all part of the plan.
Why this compulsion? It’s not for fast cars or fancy houses. Trigg makes money just to give it away. His logic is simple: The more he makes, the more good he can do.
He’s figured out just how to take measure of his contribution. His outlet of choice is the Against Malaria Foundation, considered one of the world’s most effective charities. It estimates that a $2,500 donation can save one life. A quantitative analyst at Trigg’s hedge fund can earn well more than $100,000 a year. By giving away half of a high finance salary, Trigg says, he can save many more lives than he could on an academic’s salary.
…In many ways, his life still resembles that of a graduate student. He lives with three roommates. He walks to work. And he doesn’t feel in any way deprived. “I wouldn’t know how to spend a large amount of money,” he says.
The full story is here. Here is commentary from Salam and Sanchez. And I have just received the new book by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, an analytical treatment written by two economists.
From EJMR:
I have a new paper that I consider my best work. For a variety of reasons, the marginal return professionally for this paper is very small for me. But I think it has an excellent shot a top
journal, I would estimate 1/3 at the AER (I have published there before). So I am offering it for sale. Here are the details:1. This paper is not yet posted on my website. It has not been circulated and I have not yet presented it.
2. The paper is applied micro although I will sell it to anyone.
3. Email bids to econpubforsale@hotmail.com. Use a fake account and make sure to send no revealing information.
4. Your bid is for an AER or QJE. If it ends in Restud, you pay 65%. If it ends in the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, or EJ, you pay 35%. Other journals are negotiable. You can choose the submission path as long as it starts with one of the top journals.
5. I will contact the winning bid (or highest real bid) to arrange an in person meeting in Philly at the meetings. We will never leave a paper trail.
6. Half of payment is due with a revise and resubmit. I will also make the needed changes. The final half is due with final acceptance.
7. Spare me any discussion of the ethics here. I am dead serious and I will not be commenting further on this thread.
The whole thing could be a troll or an experiment but let’s assume it’s real. An AER could easily be worth 50k, especially for someone early in their career but that’s for one you wrote yourself. An AER written by someone else has a significantly lower expected value since, if revealed, it may end your career. Moreover, suppose the buyer, as unlikely as it seems, takes advantage of the big push and makes it big on their own. Is the buyer not then vulnerable to blackmail from the seller who already has signaled their ethics? I can see this appealing, however, to the scion of some dictator who could afford to pay well over 50k and also afford to make the seller pay if the secret is revealed. Caveat emptor and also caveat venditor. True, there are not many econ PhDs among the dictator set but there are a few and sadly this kind of thing does have precedents.
P.S. I did like the discounting by journal, a nice, accurate touch.
I continue to read from Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis Theory and Technique. Here is another bit of interest:
…Lacanian analysis seeks to keep the analysand off guard and off-balance, so that any manifestation of the unconscious can have its full impact.
When fixed-length sessions are the norm, the analysand becomes accustomed to having a set amount of time to talk, and considers how to fill up that time, how best to make use of it. Analysands are very often aware, for example, that the dream they had the night before about their analyst is what is most important to their analysis, yet they try to fit in plenty of other things they want to talk about before they get to the dream (if they get to the dream). They thus attempt to minimize the importance of the dream in their own eyes, minimize the time that can be devoted to associating to it, or maximize the amount of time the analyst gives them. Analysands’ use of the time allotted to them in the session is part and parcel of their larger neurotic strategy (involving avoidance, neutralization of other people, and so on), and setting session length in advance merely encourages their neurosis.
The variable-length session throws analysands off guard, to some extent, and can be used in such a way as to encourage the analysand to get right to the good stuff.
I know some of you are making fun of me, but this is not the least interesting book I have read this week (though I would not want to base very much on it).
Another 15 percent will be working in finance, nearly doubling the 9 percent who entered the sector last year but still paling in comparison to 2007, when before the financial crisis, 47 percent of graduating seniors went into finance.
The article is here, interesting throughout on other points too. I say they are lying about the sex and drugs, and maybe a few other things too, hat tip goes to @MattYglesias.
It’s a well-known fact — well-known around GMU that is — that GMU graduates earn higher average salaries than do UVA grads (direct link here), that is for four year undergrads in their first year of employment.
It’s not just that UVa is in decline, or that some of them end up richer later in life. Or others may use their wealthier parents to live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and avoid direct employment. A major reason for the wage discrepancy is simply that a disproportionate chunk of GMU students are likely to get jobs in the relatively high-paying Washington, D.C. area.
OK, so how does this relate to the broader ongoing debate over the signaling theory of education and wages?
It is widely accepted that UVa is a more exclusive school than GMU by the usual standards. Yet here we see labor markets “seeing through” those credentials, and paying more to the GMU graduates. In other words, labor markets are seeing that GMU students are, on average, “less exclusive by origin but will have a higher marginal product very quickly.”
The signaling model, in its simplest, most stripped down form, assumes that employers cannot judge the marginal products of individual new hires but instead pay them according to their credentials. Yet here we have a case where employers seem quite willing to make a judgment about marginal product and indeed that is a judgment which contradicts data on exclusivity of academic origins. Once you postulate that employers are willing to make estimates of individual marginal products which differ from the rankings that might be given by “raw ability,” the signaling model is less applicable. I don’t want to claim that the wages converge exactly on marginal products, but the credentials clearly are just one factor of many. Employer judgments of expected marginal products are not dominated by credentials, and you can imagine that after having a worker for a year or two the credentials are even less important as a means of judging prospective marginal product.
Another way to put this point is that the speed of employer learning is in fact fairly rapid, and some of it happens before the job even starts.
The virtual therapist sits in a big armchair, shuffling slightly and blinking naturally, apparently waiting for me to get comfortable in front of the screen.
“Hi, I’m Ellie,” she says. “Thanks for coming in today.”
She laughs when I say I find her a little bit creepy, and then goes straight into questions about where I’m from and where I studied.
“I’m not a therapist, but I’m here to learn about people and would love to learn about you,” she asks. “Is that OK?”
Ellie’s voice is soft and calming, and as her questions grow more and more personal I quickly slip into answering as if there were a real person in the room rather than a computer-generated image.
…With every answer I’m being watched and studied in minute detail by a simple gaming sensor and a webcam.
How I smile, which direction I look, the tone of my voice, and my body language are all being precisely recorded and analysed by the computer system, which then tells Ellie how best to interact with me.
Right now there are two assistants guiding the avatar, in essence standing behind a screen, but that will not always be the case:
Real people come in to answer Ellie’s questions every day as part of the research, and the computer is gradually learning how to react in every situation.
It is being taught how to be human, and to respond as a doctor would to the patients’ cues.
Soon Ellie will be able to go it alone.
The full article is here, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
The NYTimes has an excellent piece on Greece’s broken property system:
In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.
As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress. It scares off foreign investors; makes it hard for the state to privatize its assets, as it has promised to do in exchange for bailout money; and makes it virtually impossible to collect property taxes.
… less than 7 percent of the country has been properly mapped, officials say. Experts say that even the Balkan states, recovering from years of Communism and civil war, are far ahead of Greece when it comes to land registries attached to zoning maps — an approach developed by the Romans and in wide use in much of the developed world since the 1800s.
Here from our course on development economics at MRUniversity is our video which covers the theory and empirical research on titling from Peru to Palau:
