Which areas are taught best?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Joanne asks a good question:

Everything else being equal, are there subjects that lend itself to
better teaching by professors? I've always chosen classes mostly on
professor teaching quality as measured by anonymous student surveys,
but was wondering if there are certain classes of subjects where one
could find better or worse teachers?

This may sound odd, coming from someone with a Ph.d, but I don't feel I have much experience being a student.  A lot of the time I didn't pay attention.

A foreign language is especially hard to teach well.  What can you do with verb conjugation?  Microeconomics can be taught well.  Literature.  Classes that can be taught well make for easy narrative and vivid anecdote.  The instructor can be enthusiastic without it seeming forced (not the case for introductory accounting).  The students can be presented with relatively high-level material even in lower-level courses; poetry and literature illustrate that principle.  Finally, the class must have actual substance, which rules out any number of offerings, best left unlisted.  It's harder to teach macro well because it's less likely the instructor actually believes the material.

The best teachers I ever had were Hilary Putnam for Philosophy of Language and Charles Pine for calculus, plus H. Bruce Franklin for literature.  Franklin was (still is?) a Stalinist and he edited The Essential Stalin.  Barbara Jean Glotzer taught a very good Algebra II.

Russia markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen

AndrewG points us to the following:

A Russian armoured-car builder is boasting that its latest vehicle has seats covered with “whale-penis leather”.

That is not all:

The bulletproof windows are gold-plated, the exhaust is made of
tungsten, the gauges are encrusted with diamonds and rubies and the
exterior has a Kevlar coating.

The car also comes
with three bottles of the world’s most expensive Vodka, RussoBaltique,
although the website does warn prospective buyers not to drink and
drive.

It is supposed to be the world's most expensive…whatever it deserves to be called.  Here is more information.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Lots of opinions about lots of people, including assessments of their relative status.

2. How will Twitter make money? (a request), and more here.

3. Garett Jones: "How much have
cell phones pushed down the cash wages of tedious jobs? Labor supply
increase: parking attendant, janitor, better jobs now."

4. Kerry Howley on freedom.

5. Rules for writing non-fiction.

6. Pay as you wish, for the Goo Game: the results.

*Too Big To Fail*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That's the new book by Andrew Ross Sorkin and the subtitle is The Inside Story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves.  Last night I read through to p.132.  So far it seems to be the single best narrative of the crash and its aftermath.  I haven't seen anything theoretical or on root causes, etc.  I chuckled at reading this sentence, which starts with Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers picking up the phone:

"I know this call may be a little unusual," [Treasury Secretary] Paulson began.  "You and I have been trying to kill each other for years."

I'll let you know if my judgment changes, but so far this falls into the "recommended" category, noting again that it is narrative not theory.

Addendum: Here is Yves Smith on the book, very good post.  See also Felix Salmon.

Successful government bureaucracies

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jason asks:

What are some examples of successful government bureaucracies?

Wars aside, here is a short and very incomplete list: the NIH, the Manhattan Project, U.C. Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Fairfax County, the World Trade Organization, the urban planners of postwar Germany, some of the Victorian public works and public health commissions, most of what goes on in Singapore, anywhere that J.S. Bach worked.

The European Union has been very good for eastern Europe.  I'll leave aside the health care issue because we've debated that plenty already.  The real question is what all these examples have in common.

The day everything changed?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Even since I wrote Create Your Own Economy, which was not so long ago, I've come around closer to Alex's position on on-line instruction.  Today I read:

After several years of experimenting
with “hybrid” Spanish courses that mix online and classroom
instruction, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has
decided to begin conducting its introductory Spanish course exclusively
on the Web.

Spanish 101, which had featured online lessons
combined with one classroom session per week, will drop its
face-to-face component in an effort to save on teaching costs and
campus space in light of rising demand for Spanish instruction and a
shrinking departmental budget.

Adios a mis amigos!

Addendum: Elsewhere on the "everything changed" front, no one wants to buy The Boston Globe and Barnes and Noble's new e-Reader — Nook — will allow e-readers to "lend" copies to their friends, albeit in sequential fashion.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Blog on Chinese financial markets.

2. Webcast site for my NIH talk, coming on Wednesday noon, on lotteries and randomized control trials in medical research.

3. Very good comments on geo-engineering, with some excellent sentences, and more here.

4. Why the Euro is not the next global currency.

5. Evidence on pedigree effects in academia.

6. Cory Doctorow's publishing experiment.

Under- and over-explored areas in economics

by  Tyler Cowen in

Hamilton, a loyal MR reader, requests:

Of those questions in economics whose answers interest you, which
question do you think is most under-explored, given its importance? And
why do you think that is?

Or, going the other way, to what question or questions has economics
been over-applied? Where have economists put too much effort?

Under-explored; Empirical studies of signaling behavior, peer effects, the kind of "questionnaire macro" pioneered by Alan Blinder on price stickiness.  Economic anthropology.  Neuroeconomics other than brain scans.  The economics of the emotions, an area started by Robert Frank.  Status and fame motivations.  Economic history.  The economics of the non-profit sector.  The economics of science.  How IQ and other cognitive measures interact with economic decision-making and economic rationality.  Behavioral economics of politics and public choice.  Anything Alex does.

Over-explored: VAR, most structural macro, "another open economy model," auction theory, auctions in experimental economics.  There's more, but today I'm not so interested in complaining.

That's my list, what's yours?

My favorite guitarists

by  Tyler Cowen in

"Ar" wants to know who they are.  When I was young I studied guitar for seven years (multiple styles), so it's an area I've long had an interest in.  I was never very good but I learned a lot about it.  Here goes:

Classical: Segovia, Eduardo Fernandez.  I enjoy the transcriptions of Yamashita and Larry Coryell's covers of Stravinsky, though he isn't usually considered a classical guitarist.

Jazz: Django Reinhardt, Joe Pass's Virtuoso album, Wes Montgomery live (no strings), and George van Eps.  Charlie Christian deserves a mention.  Today, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and the guy who plays for Trio Saudade.  There are plenty of others, including Jim Hall and John McLaughlin.

John Fahey-Leo Kottke: They deserve their own category and indeed they dominate it.  For Kottke try 6 and 12-String Guitar Music, and then his 1981 Guitar Music.  For Fahey try the 1959-1977 Greatest Hits collection.  This is some of my favorite music.

Electric blues: Muddy Waters, Robert Cray (live), Johnny Winter (live only).  Amadou of Amadou and Miriam.  The player from Orchestra Baobab.  Does Lonnie Mack count here?

Acoustic blues: Reverand Gary Davis, Son House and many others.  Jorma Kaukonen also.  Bob Dylan is much underrated in this area.  Can Richard Thompson go here?  d'Gary, from Madagascar, is one of the greatest and most original guitarists that few people have heard of.  Bola Sete too, from Brazil.

Bluegrass: Clarence White and also Doc Watson.

Rock: Jimmy Page, Brian May, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, of course Jimi Hendrix as #1.  van Halen and his ilk never much impressed me.

Les Paul deserves mention but he straddles a few of these categories, as does Chet Atkins.  Hawaiian guitar deserves its own post.  Dick Dale.  The Carnatic slide guitar players, including Bhattacharya.  Roger McGuinn.  The Zairean tradition, including Franco.  Neil Young has his moments, as does Thurston Moore.

Eric Clapton was impressive for a while but overall I wish to be contrarian and leave him off.  Who am I forgetting?  Duane Allman?

In general guitar is an instrument which works relatively well on YouTube.  Most of the names above can be found there.

Pedigree bias in economics

by  Tyler Cowen in

Coastal Elite, a loyal MR requester, requests:

Why is there more "pedigree bias" for hiring of Economics faculty than
in other disciplines? For example, at any top 30 school, 95% of the
faculty will have their PhD from a top 10 school. In other fields, this
will not be the case. Some other disciplines have a much stronger
tendency to co-author than Economics, which should decrease the signal
to noise ratio on a CV. This should imply that pedigree bias should be
even stronger in disciplines with more co-authoring, but anecdotally
this does not seem to be true.

And very often it is the top six rather than the top ten.  I don't myself see the factor of co-authoring as the path to an answer here.  The default answer is to invoke a relatively high importance for IQ, in economics, combined with the relative absence of prodigies, compared to say math.  When prodigies and autodidacts are possible, top performers can come from anywhere.  But smarts and training and networking are all required.  The combination of those barriers give a big advantage, justified or not, to the very top schools.  It is usually believed that a candidate from a lesser school is lacking in at least one of these yet all are required for a big career success.  So maybe a "multiplicative model" of achievement in economics plays a big role in pedigree bias.

On top of that, economics is a relatively unified field with relatively homogeneous metrics of quality.  A school ranked #23 can "play it safe" by hiring a lesser MIT grad, rather than the best student coming out of Emory, and more or less know what they are getting and agree on that.  This tendency in the market is probably inefficient, relative to a first-best with a higher degree of intellectual innovation and less concentration of rewards across the top graduate programs.

Also, the top programs are good at doing admissions — surprisingly good in my view — and pre-selecting the kind of talent the rest of the profession is looking for.

Which other fields have a comparable "pedigree bias"?