Category: Education
What should I ask Alison Gopnik?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Alison Gopnik (born June 16, 1955) is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles…
Gopnik has carried out extensive work in applying Bayesian networks to human learning and has published and presented numerous papers on the topic…Gopnik was one of the first psychologists to note that the mathematical models also resemble how children learn.
Gopnik is known for advocating the “theory theory” which postulates that the same mechanisms used by scientists to develop scientific theories are used by children to develop causal models of their environment.
Here is her home page. So what should I ask her?
H1-B visa fees and the academic job market
Assume the courts do not strike this down (perhaps they will?).
Will foreigners still be hired at the entry level with an extra 100k surcharge? I would think not,as university budgets are tight these days. I presume there is some way to turn them down legally, without courting discrimination lawsuits?
What if you ask them to accept a lower starting wage? A different deal in some other manner, such as no summer money or a higher teaching load? Is that legal? Will schools have the stomach to even try? I would guess not. Is there a way to amortize the 100k over five or six years? What if the new hire leaves the institution in year three of the deal?
In economics at least, a pretty high percentage of the graduate students at top institutions do not have green cards or citizenships.
So how exactly is this going to work? There are not so many jobs in Europe, not enough to absorb those students even if they wish to work there. Will many drop out right now? And if the flow of graduate students is not replenished, given that entry into the US job market is now tougher, how many graduate programs will close up?
Will Chinese universities suddenly hire a lot more quality talent?
Here is some related discussion on Twitter.
As they say, solve for the equilibrium…
From the comments
I am a high school teacher. As this study finds, banning phones hurts our best students. Unlike Tyler, I do have a problem with these policies. Studies like this dont even measure the ways that phones help our best students the most: they allow students to access real teachers, better teachers, sources of knowledge and learning that are beyond what they are stuck with in our public schools. There are many actions we could take that would boost grades. We could adopt singapore’s culture or the Japanese juku system. We could become as draconian as you like to boost grades for low-performing students. But to what end? Maybe there is one Peter Scholze who could boost his early learning by 5 pct, even 100 or more pct depending on what schhol he is in, with a phone. Is banning it from him worth boosting the algebra 1 scores of 20,000 future real estate salesman by 3 percent? Phones are new. Teachers have no idea how to use them. They are devices that contain the entire world’s knowledge and kids want to use them – and we are banning them? Any teacher who wants to ban phones is taking the easy way out.
That is from Frank. A broader but related point is that a school without smartphones probably cannot teach its students AI — one of the most useful things for a person to learn nowadays. As Frank indicates, you should be very suspicious that the smart phone banners take absolutely no interest in measuring their possible benefits. We economists call it cost-benefit analysis. If you wish to argue the costs are higher than the benefits, fine, that can be debated. If you are not trying to measure the benefits, I say you are not trying to do science or to approach the problem objectively.
And from a later post, again Frank:
Academic Human Capital in European Countries and Regions, 1200-1793
We present new annual time-series data on academic human capital across Europe from 1200 to 1793, constructed by aggregating individual-level measures at three geographic scales: cities, present-day countries (as of 2025), and historically informed macro-regions. Individual human capital is derived from a composite index of publication outcomes, based on data from the Repertorium Eruditorum Totius Europae (RETE) database. The macro-regional classifications are designed to re ect historically coherent entities, offering a more relevant perspective than modern national boundaries. This framework allows us to document key patterns, including the Little Divergence in academic human capital between Northern and Southern Europe, the effect of the Black Death and the Thirty Years’ War on academic human capital, the respective contributions of academies and universities, regional inequality within the Holy Roman Empire, and the distinctiveness of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Here is the full paper by Matthew Curtisa, David de la Croix, Filippo Manfredinib, and Mara Vitale. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
New print edition of Works in Progress
Amazing, here is the site: “The print edition contains everything you can get online, plus a lot more: print-exclusive columns, beautiful art and design, letters from our readers and editors, and visual explainers of technology.”
What should I ask Cass Sunstein?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him soon. Most of all (but not exclusively) about his three recent books Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom, Manipulation: What It Is, Why It Is Bad, What To Do About It, and Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do.
So what should I ask him? Here is my previous CWT with Cass.
What should I ask Jimmy Wales?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his uh…Wikipedia page. So what should I ask?
A new RCT on banning smartphones in the classroom
Widespread smartphone bans are being implemented in classrooms worldwide, yet their causal effects on student outcomes remain unclear. In a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 17,000 students, we find that mandatory in-class phone collection led to higher grades — particularly among lower-performing, first-year, and non-STEM students — with an average increase of 0.086 standard deviations. Importantly, students exposed to the ban were substantially more supportive of phone-use restrictions, perceiving greater benefits from these policies and displaying reduced preferences for unrestricted access. This enhanced student receptivity to restrictive digital policies may create a self-reinforcing cycle, where positive firsthand experiences strengthen support for continued implementation. Despite a mild rise in reported fear of missing out, there were no significant changes in overall student well-being, academic motivation, digital usage, or experiences of online harassment. Random classroom spot checks revealed fewer instances of student chatter and disruptive behaviors, along with reduced phone usage and increased engagement among teachers in phone-ban classrooms, suggesting a classroom environment more conducive to learning. Spot checks also revealed that students appear more distracted, possibly due to withdrawal from habitual phone checking, yet, students did not report being more distracted. These results suggest that in-class phone bans represent a low-cost, effective policy to modestly improve academic outcomes, especially for vulnerable student groups, while enhancing student receptivity to digital policy interventions.
That is from a recent paper by Alp Sungu, Pradeep Kumar Choudhury, and Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen. Note with grades there is “an average increase of 0.086 standard deviations.” I have no problem with these policies, but it mystifies me why anyone would put them in their top five hundred priorities, or is that five thousand? Here is my earlier post on Norwegian smart phone bans, with comparable results.
My Hope Axis podcast with Anna Gát
Here is the YouTube, here is transcript access, here is their episode summary:
The brilliant @tylercowen joins @TheAnnaGat for a lively, wide-ranging conversation exploring hope from the perspective of insiders and outsiders, the obsessed and the competitive, immigrants and hard workers. They talk about talent and luck, what makes America unique, whether the dream of Internet Utopia has ended, and how Gen-Z might rebel. Along the way: Jack Nicholson, John Stuart Mill, road trips through Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment of AI, and why courage shapes the future.
Excerpt:
Tyler Cowen: But the top players I’ve met, like Anand or Magnus Carlsen or Kasparov, they truly hate losing with every bone in their body. They do not approach it philosophically. They can become very miserable as a result. And that’s very far from my attitudes. It shaped my life in a significant way.
Anna Gát: I was so surprised. I was like, what? But actually, what? In Maggie Smith-high RP—what? This never occurred to me that losing can be approached philosophically.
Tyler Cowen: And I think always keeping my equanimity has been good for me, getting these compound returns over long periods of time. But if you’re doing a thing like chess or math or sports that really favors the young, you don’t have all those decades of compound returns. You’ve got to motivate yourself to the maximum extent right now. And then hating losing is super useful. But that’s just—those are not the things I’ve done. The people who hate losing should do things that are youth-weighted, and the people who have equanimity should do things that are maturity and age-weighted with compounding returns.
Excellent discussion, lots of fresh material. Here is the Hope Axis podcast more generally. Here is Anna’s Interintellect project, worthy of media attention. Most of all it is intellectual discourse, but it also seems to be the most successful “dating service” I am aware of.
The politics of depression in young adults
From a recent paper by Catherine Gimbrone, et.al.:
From 2005 to 2018, 19.8% of students identified as liberal and 18.1% identified as conservative, with little change over time. Depressive affect (DA) scores increased for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents (b for interaction = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.32), and scores were highest overall for female liberal adolescents with low parental education (Mean DA 2010: 2.02, SD 0.81/2018: 2.75, SD 0.92). Findings were consistent across multiple internalizing symptoms outcomes. Trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms diverged by political beliefs, sex, and parental education over time, with female liberal adolescents experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms, especially in the context of demographic risk factors including parental education.
Here is the link. This is further evidence for what is by now a well-known proposition.
The evolution of the economics job market
In the halcyon days of 2015-19, openings on the economics job market hovered at around 1900 per year. In 2020, Covid was a major shock, but the market bounced back quickly in 2021 and 2022. Since then, though, the market has clearly been in a funk. 2023, my job market year, saw a sudden dip in postings. 2024 was even worse, with openings falling 16% lower than the 2015-19 average.
At the time, the sudden fall in 2023 seemed mysterious—it was an otherwise healthy year for the broader labor market. In hindsight, it seems like the 2021-22 recovery masked some underlying weakness. The 2020 job market had 500 fewer openings than the 2014-19 average; 2021 and 2022 together produced only around 100 more jobs than the 2014-19 average. In other words, the recovery never made up for the pandemic; by this crude logic, around 400 economist jobs were “destroyed”.
…And of course, all of this decline occurred before the litany of disasters that have recently hit the Econ job market. In May, Jerome Powell announced that the Federal Reserve—perhaps the largest employer of economists in America—would cut its workforce by 10%. The federal government has frozen hiring, as has the World Bank. Hit by the dual threat of fines and looming cuts to federal funding, Harvard, MIT, the University of Washington, Notre Dame, Northwestern University, among others, have announced hiring freezes and budget cuts.
Here is more from Oliver Kim, who also offers a much broader discussion of the meaning of all this.
Moving on Up
James Heckman and Sadegh Eshaghnia have launched a broadside in the WSJ against the Chetty-Hendren paper The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects. It’s a little odd to see this in the WSJ but since the Chetty-Hendren paper has been widely reported in the media, I suppose this is fair game. Recall the basic upshot of Chetty-Hendren is that neighborhoods matter and in particular
…the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhood—as measured by the outcomes of children already living there—improve linearly in proportion to the amount of time they spend growing up in that area, at a rate of approximately 4% per year of exposure.
I am not going to referee this dispute but I did enjoy the audacity of one placebo test run by Eshaghnia. Eshaghnia runs the same statistical models as Chetty-Hendren but substitutes birth length (“the distance between a newborn’s head and heels”) instead of adult earnings and college attendance rates. Now, obviously, moving cannot affect birth length! Yet, Eshaghnia finds, in essence*, that children of parents who move to taller neighborhoods have taller children, in parallel with CH who find that children of parents who move to higher income neighborhoods have higher income children. Moreover, the covariance is stronger the earlier parents move. Since birth length is correlated with cognitive abilities and other later life outcomes this is highly suggestive that CH are not finding (pure) causal effects.
* I have simplified slightly for intuition. Technically, Eshaghnia shows that children’s birth‑length ranks align with the destination–origin permanent‑resident birth‑length difference, and that alignment is ≈0.044 stronger for each year earlier the move.
Addendum: Chetty et al. do not find similar results in California (see in particular Figure 2).
It would take more than one paper to establish these claims
Nonetheless these are interesting results, worthy of further examination:
The measurement of intelligence should identify and measure an individual’s subjective confidence that a response to a test question is correct. Existing measures do not do that, nor do they use extrinsic financial incentive for truthful responses. We rectify both issues, and show that each matters for the measurement of intelligence, particularly for women. Our results on gender and confidence in the face of risk have wider applications in terms of the measurement of “competitiveness” and financial literacy. Contrary to received literature, women are more intelligent than men, compete when they should in risky settings, and are more literate.
That is from the September JPE, by Glenn W. Harrison, Don Ross, and J. Todd Swarthout. Here are ungated versions of the paper. Here is Bryan Caplan on the limitations of any single paper.
What determines business school faculty pay?
We examine the determinants of business school faculty pay, using detailed data on compensation, research, teaching, and administrative service. We estimate that a top-tier journal publication is worth $116,000, with significant variation across disciplines. Second-tier publications are worth one-third as much, and other publications have no impact. Further analysis of salaries and cross-discipline publication records suggests that researchers are compensated based on the journals they publish in rather than the departments they belong to. Conference presentations and teaching evaluations have significant but smaller effects than top-tier publications. Faculty administrators earn a premium, with department chairs receiving 11-35% and deans 58-94%. Post-Covid-19, real faculty pay has fallen more than in comparable fields and the sensitivity of pay to research performance has weakened.
That is from a new paper by Michelle Lowry, Daniel Bradley, April M. Knill, and Jared Williams. Via Arpit Gupta.
*How to be a Public Ambassador for Science*
The subtitle is The Scientist as Public Intellectual, and the author is my very good friend Jim Olds, who works at George Mason University. A very timely topic, here is one excerpt:
I was only about eight weeks into my new job. I’d been sworn in and found myself very much thrown into the pool’s deep end. First, the job was much more than serving as the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) lead for President Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project. Second, the learning curve was very steep. There were meetings full of acronyms that meant nothing to me. And these were my meetings — with my direct reports. I had learned the hard way that the Eisenhower Conference Center in the White House complex was made of steel and acted like a Faraday cage: cell phones didn’t work there. Tuesdays started with breakfast at 7:30 a.m. and went straight through for 12 hours with meeting after meeting.
Recommended, most of all informative about the NSF and also neuroscience.
asdf wrote: