Results for “roland fryer”
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Roland Fryer on DEI

One of the most important developments in the study of racial inequality has been the quantification of the importance of pre-market skills in explaining differences in labor market outcomes between Black and white workers. In 2010, using nationally representative data on thousands of individuals in their 40s, I estimated that Black men earn 39.4% less than white men and Black women earn 13.1% less than white women. Yet, accounting for one variable–educational achievement in their teenage years––reduced that difference to 10.9% (a 72% reduction) for men and revealed that Black women earn 12.7 percent more than white women, on average. Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, and William Johnson were among the first to make this point in 1996: “While our results do provide some evidence for current labor market discrimination, skills gaps play such a large role that we believe future research should focus on the obstacles Black children face in acquiring productive skill.”

…the key step that is missing in every DEI initiative I have seen in the past 25 years: a rigorous, data-driven assessment of root causes that drives the search for effective solutions. In other aspects of life, we would not fathom prescribing a treatment without knowing the underlying cause.

…Solutions that yield measurable results can be substantiated into company policy, while those that don’t should be discarded. In the case of the hospital network, once a small change was made to the structure of their scheduling, gender differences were reduced. Despite countless hours spent in training and seminars, their results were unchanged for years. The solution was hidden in plain data.

Roland Fryer on using data not feelings to address diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lunch with the FT, Roland Fryer

Here is one bit:

Do they take a data-driven approach to parenting, I wonder? Fryer confesses to owning a Dropbox folder called “the science of kids”, with data to cite in arguments over sleep training. They also plotted their daughter’s weight on a spreadsheet for a couple of weeks. “But then it was too tiring. There’s nothing like your own child to make you want to throw data out of the window,” he jokes.

He admits he has slowed down from his most workaholic phase but I suspect we’re talking fine margins.

Interesting throughout, I fear it is gated for you, very sad do subscribe.  I link to it anyway as a show of expressive support for both Fryer and the FT and also John McDermott.

Roland Fryer’s Outstanding Seminar

Roland Fryer gave an outstanding seminar last week on Education, Inequality, & Incentives as part of GMU’s Buchanan Speaker Series. Fryer was passionate, funny, and informed as he recounted his journey pounding away at Stata in the late 1990s in an effort to show that Neal and Johnson were wrong and that racism just had to account for differences in wages and other outcomes between blacks and whites; to coming to accept that a large portion of the difference is determined by differences in human capital; to his shocking discovery that the Harlem Children’s Zone was dramatically increasing human capital among minorities; and finally to abandoning the academic game of estimating the different effects of beef and chicken soup (but in really cool and precise ways!) to instead throw himself into the messy work of taking the lessons from the best charter schools and applying and scaling those lessons to public schools across the nation.

I had long been aware of Fryer’s academic work but I had not realized how much he and his team at the Harvard EdLabs have actually done on the ground to remake dozens of schools in Houston, Denver and elsewhere–in the process showing that the best practices of the best charter schools can be scaled to the entire nation. Remarkable.

He starts off at 3:10 slightly hesitant but he really builds.

https://youtu.be/TTUMxqNu6KY?list=PLS8aEHTqDvpL84pWlE1RJ-SgDx3JDswqI

Roland Fryer wins the John Bates Clark medal

The announcement is here., with lots of detail.  Here is the first paragraph:

Roland Fryer is an influential applied microeconomist whose work spans labor economics, the economics of education, and social problems and social interactions.  His innovative and creative research contributions have deepened our understanding of the sources, magnitude, and persistence of U.S. racial inequality.  He has made substantial progress in evaluating the policies that work and do not work to improve the educational outcomes and economic opportunities of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  His theoretical and empirical work on the “acting white” hypothesis of peer effects provides new insights into the difficulties of increasing the educational investments of minorities and the socially excluded.  Fryer is the leading economist working on the economics of race and education, and he has produced the most important work in recent years on combating the racial divide, one of America’s most profound and long-lasting social problems.

Here are previous MR posts about Fryer, lots of interest there, a very good and deserving choice.  His home page is here.

Roland Fryer, Harvard economist, on race

I am headed out the door to the Salvador Dali exhibit in Philadelphia; supposedly it rehabilitates his often rather sloppy work.  In a rush, I offer you today’s New York Times article on Roland Fryer, the 27-year-old African-American Harvard economist who is studying race.  Stephen Dubner — Steve Levitt’s co-author on Freakonomics — wrote this excellent piece, which is worth printing out and reading in its entirety.  Here is an alternative link, if the first one doesn’t work.  Here is Alex’s earlier post on Fryer, which deals with the effectiveness of buying grades with cash.

The Sullivan Signal: Harvard’s Failure to Educate and the Abandonment of Principle

The current Harvard disaster was clearly signaled by earlier events, most notably the 2019 firing of Dean Ronald Sullivan. Sullivan is a noted criminal defense attorney; he was the director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and he is the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, he advised President Obama on criminal justice issues, he represented the family of Michael Brown. He and his wife were the first black Faculty Deans in the history of the college.

Controversy erupted, however, when Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team. Student protests ensued. The students argued that they couldn’t “feel safe” if a legal representative of a person accused of abusing women was also serving in a role of student support and mentorship. This is, of course, ridiculous. Defending an individual accused of murder does not imply that a criminal defense attorney condones the act of murder.

Harvard should have educated their students. Harvard should have emphasized the crucial role of criminal defense in American law and history. They should have noted that a cornerstone of the rule of law is the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, irrespective of public opinion.

Harvard should have pointed proudly to John Adams, a Harvard alum, who defied popular opinion to defend hated British soldiers charged with murdering Americans at the Boston Massacre. (If you wish to take measure of the quality of our times it’s worth noting that Adams won the case and later became president—roughly equivalent to an attorney for accused al-Qaeda terrorists becoming President today.)

Instead of educating its students, Harvard catered to ignorance, bias and hysteria by removing both Sullivan and his wife from their deanships. Harvard in effect endorsed the idea, as Robby Soave put it, that “serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus.” Thus Harvard tarred Sullivan and his wife, undermined the rule of law and elevated the rule of the mob. Claudine Gay, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, contributed to the ignorance, bias and hysteria. (It’s also notable, that Sullivan also criticized Harvard’s handling of the investigation of Roland Fryer as being “deeply flawed and deeply unfair.” This may have been Sullivan’s real sin, as the investigation of Fryer was under Dean Claudine Gay.)

Thus, we see in the Sullivan episode disregard for free speech, unprincipled governance in which different rules are applied to different actors in similar situations, and a bending to the will of the mob, all issues which have repeated themselves under the Gay regime. Sad to say, however, that these flaws were not so much ignored at the time as lauded.

Harvard followed the mob and when the mob turned and the season changed it had left itself no defense.

Addendum: See also Tyler, My thoughts on the Harvard mess.

Sunday assorted links

1. My podcast with Scott Galloway.

2. Redux for a survey request on which are your most underappreciated works.

3. Can dolphin immigration succeed?

4. AGM reviews Balaji’s new book.

5. The new Roland Fryer VC firm.

6. Wrongheaded but interesting thread on AI regulation and policy risk.

7. Pilot testimony.  Cites the data too.  Virginia Beach area!

8. Ezra Klein thoughts on television and tech (NYT).

Policing the Police

Here is the new paper by Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer, full title being “Policing the Police: The Impact of “Pattern-or-Practice” Investigations on Crime”:

This paper provides the first empirical examination of the impact of federal and state “Pattern-or-Practice” investigations on crime and policing. For investigations that were not preceded by “viral” incidents of deadly force, investigations, on average, led to a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime. In stark contrast, all investigations that were preceded by “viral” incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these investigations increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%. Other theories we test such as changes in community trust or the aggressiveness of consent decrees associated with investigations — all contradict the data in important ways.

Via Ilya.

Monday assorted links

1. Death threats against German virologists.  And “His perception of fishes’ features was so refined, she added, that he could distinguish individual faces, the way humans recognize one another.”  (NYT)

2. Does altitude matter for Covid-19?

3. Police violence thread, excellent, scholarly.

4. Thread on police unions.  Very good.

5. Model this, Samantha Shader edition.  And Scholar’s Stage on rioting.  And the lawyers are now throwing Molotov cocktails at the police (NYT)

6. Toward a further economics of gossip.

7. Data on school reopenings and how they have gone.

8. Roland Fryer on policing the police.