Category: Education
The Impacts of Same and Opposite Gender Alumni Speakers on Interest in Economics
What is the impact of male and female alumni speaker interventions in introductory microeconomics courses on student interest in economics? Using student-level transcript data, we estimate the effect of speakers on future course-taking in models which use untreated lectures as control groups, including professor and semester fixed effects and student-level covariates. Alumni speakers increase intermediate economics course take-up by 2.1 percentage points (11%). Students are more responsive to same-gender speakers, with male speakers increasing men’s course take-up by 36% and female speakers increasing women’s course take-up by 40%, implying that the effect of alumni speakers is strongly gendered.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Arpita Patnaik, Gwyn C. Pauley, Joanna Venator, and Matthew J. Wiswall.
ChatGPT vs. the experts (Department of Uh-Oh)
ChatGPT’s answers are generally considered to be more helpful than humans’ in more than half of questions, especially for finance and psychology areas.
Most of all, ChatGPT does better in terms of concreteness. Note also that ChatGPT uses more nouns and deploys a more neutral tone than do the human experts. ChatGPT fares worst in the medical domain, but its biggest problem (from the point of view of the human evaluators) is giving too much information and not enough simple instructions. Hmm… In any case, here is the link.
I wonder how well the upgrades are going to do.
Give Cash, Proverb Contest
Give Directly is looking for a proverb to promote the idea of giving directly:
The most common critique of giving cash without conditions is a fear of dependency, which comes in the form of: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”
We’ve tried to disabuse folks of this paternalistic idea by showing that often people in poverty know how to fish but cannot afford the boat. Or they don’t want to fish; they want to sell cassava. Also, we’re not giving fish; we’re giving money, and years after getting it, people are better able to feed themselves. Oh, and even if you do teach them skills, it’s less effective than giving cash. Phew!
Yet, despite our efforts, the myth remains.
The one thing we haven’t tried: fighting proverb with (better) proverb. That’s where you come in. We’re crowdsourcing ideas that capture the dignity and logic of giving directly.
Submit your direct giving proverb.
The best suggestions are not a slogan, but a saying — simple, concrete, evocative (e.g.). Submit your ideas by next Friday, March 3, and then we’ll post the top 3 ideas on Twitter for people to vote on the winner.
MRU One Million Users!
Marginal Revolution University hit a milestone last week: the one millionth use of our interactive econ practice tools!
Interactive tools help students learn economics and help teachers deliver great econ education. To celebrate, the MRU team has just released a 6-day high school unit plan on inflation complete with lecture slides, videos, and interactive practice and we’re offering high school teachers a chance to win billions of dollars to check it out. (Ok, Zimbabwean billions but still pretty cool!)
More generally, check out our free economics courses and teaching resources at MRU and our superb principles of economics textbook, Modern Principles of Economics. Next stop: Ten million!
Why not get out? Really
Bolotnyy: We found that these moderate to severe symptoms of depression and anxiety were about two to three times more prevalent among PhD students in these eight top-ranked economics PhD programs than in the general population. Suicidality was also about two times what you’d see in the general population.
And:
Economic students are about half as likely as other Harvard PhD students to be in treatment if they have some of these serious symptoms. That’s something that we’ve talked a lot about and tried to understand.
Here is more, brought to you by the AEA. I am very happy to see this work being done, kudos to Valentin Bolotnyy. And I am all for more social connections, better campus mental health counseling, and involved advisors, all of which are listed as potential partial remedies. Yet if I were the AEA, I would be wondering about pushing yet another recommendation — discouraging some people, at the margin of course, from even starting graduate school in economics? And other fields too.
Somehow that option does not receive much consideration. (When I advise people. in part due to this and other data, I am much less likely to recommend graduate school than in earlier times.) Should not part of the mission of the AEA be to think like an economist? What about “exit”? Or is that only for other sectors?
My Conversation with Brad DeLong
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the summary:
Tyler and Brad discuss what can really be gleaned from the fragmentary economics statistics of the late 19th century, the remarkable changes that occurred from 1870–1920, the astonishing flourishing of German universities in the 19th century, why investment banking allowed America and Germany to pull ahead of Britain economically, what enabled the Royal Society to become a force for progress, what Keynes got wrong, what Hayek got right, whether the middle-income trap persists, his favorite movie and novel, blogging vs. Substack, the Slouching Towards Utopia director’s cut, and much more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What do you take to be the best understanding of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, if indeed you view it as a 17th-century revolution?
DELONG: I always think Joel Mokyr is absolutely magnificent on this. I think he understates the role that having printing by movable type played in creating the community of scientific practice and knowledge seeking.
There’s one thing that happens that is extremely unusual. Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough. Which means that, principally, politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way, and then finding a way to run a force-and-fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society so that they at least can have enough. When Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft, it was not metaphor. It was really fact.
What does this elite consist of? Well, it’s a bunch of thugs with spears, the people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they’re their bosses, and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. Which means, most of the time, when you have a powerfully-moving-forward set of people thinking about ideas, whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.
This is a point I’ve stolen from Ernest Gellner, and I think it is very true. Yet, somehow, the Royal Society decides, no. The Royal Society decides nothing except through experiment — what we are going to demand that nature tell us, or tell one of us, or at least someone writes us a letter saying they’ve done the experiment about what is true. That is a miraculous and completely unexpected transformation, and one to which I think we owe a huge amount.
Many interesting points are discussed.
Why are adolescents so unhappy?
Here is a new tack, or rather a very old one:
Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the otherwise positive relationship found between GDP per capita and adult life satisfaction for the same countries. Results are robust to various model specifications and both macro and micro approaches. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this apparent paradox can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries. Effects are found to be more pronounced for girls than for boys.
That is from a new paper by Robert Rudolf and Dirk Bethmann. Is it the learning per se, or is the learning a proxy for a very particular kind of peer interaction? Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
No Respect for Diversity of Opinion or Choice
David Zweig notes an important correlation:
The colleges with the most stifling atmospheres for speech also have the most aggressive Covid vaccine policies. The colleges that most welcome and protect a free exchange of ideas, in turn, have the least intrusive vaccine requirements.
Number 1 ranked [on Fire’s Free Speech Index, AT] Chicago has no vaccine mandate at all. The university merely “strongly recommends” Covid vaccination. Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 on the list – Kansas State, Purdue, Mississippi State, and Oklahoma State – do not require any Covid vaccination either. They do each highly encourage vaccination, though.
At the bottom, Columbia not only requires the primary series for its students, but also requires the most recent bivalent booster. Ditto for second-to-last place Penn. For the many students who received an initial booster early on, this means a requirement of four doses. Rounding out the worst five colleges for free speech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgetown, and Skidmore also mandate all students be boosted. Though compared to Columbia and Penn they are relatively lax, only requiring “a booster,” meaning the third shot could have been from a long while ago, and not necessarily the bivalent.
Why are the colleges with the worst limits on free speech also the worst for limiting bodily autonomy?
Columbia and its ilk had a history of liberalism which, as is well-known now, has recently morphed into a more stifling form of modern progressivism that doesn’t tolerate dissent. The political tribalism that demands in-group thinking also demands in-group behavior — during, and now exiting the pandemic, the more extreme that one reacted toward Covid, the more one demonstrated their membership in the left wing. (Being double masked and triple vaxxed was for a long time a progressive identity marker.) Quite simply, an extreme vaccination policy, out of step with much of the world yet perfectly accepted in progressive America, announces one’s institution as an unimpeachable member of the tribe.
That there is an association between respect toward free speech and respect toward bodily autonomy — or a lack thereof for each — at academic institutions shouldn’t surprise anyone. Both reflect attitudes either in agreement with or against a libertarian ideal of individual freedom. But the degree of correlation is still disheartening.
…It is an embarrassment that policies at many of our most elite institutions of higher education are the most divorced from scientific evidence, and are now, finally, even alienating mainstream liberals. FIRE’s free speech rankings, alas, help explain how we got to this place.
We live in a diverse society and that requires respect. Unfortunately, at some of our nation’s top universities there is no respect for diversity of opinion or choice.
Emergent Ventures winners, 24th cohort
Shakked Noy, MIT economics, to do RCTs on GPTs as teaching and learning tools.
Gabriel Birnbaum, Bay Area, from Fortaleza, Brazil, to investigate lithography as a key technology used in the manufacturing of microchips.
Moritz Wallawitsch, Berkeley. RemNote is his company, educational technology, and to develop a complementary podcast and for general career development.
Katherine Silk, Boston/Cambridge, general career support and to support advice for early-stage startups.
Benjamin Schneider, Brooklyn. To write a book on the new urbanism.
Joseph Walker, Sydney, Australia, to run and expand the Jolly Swagman podcast.
Avital Balwit, Bay area, travel grant and general career development.
Benjamin Chang, Cambridge, MA. General career support, “I will develop novel RNA riboswitches for gene therapy control in human cells using machine learning.”
Daniel Kang, Berkeley/Champagne-Urbana, biometrics and crypto.
Aamna Zulfifiqar, Karachi, Pakistan, to attend UK higher education to study economics.
Jeremy Stern, Glendale, CA, Tablet magazine. To write a book.
James Meech, PhD student, Cambridge, UK, to work on a random number generator for better computer architectures.
Arthur Allshire, University of Toronto, background also in Ireland and Australia, robotics and support to attend conferences.
Jason Hausenloy, 17, Singapore, travel and general career development, issues surrounding artificial intelligence.
Sofia Sanchez, Metepec, Mexico, biology and agricultural productivity, to spend a summer at a Stanford lab.
Ukraine tranche:
Andrey Liscovich, eastern Ukraine, formerly of Harvard, to provide equipment for public transportation, communication and emergency power generation to civilian authorities of frontline-adjacent areas in Ukraine which have lost vital infrastructure.
Chris Nicholson, Bay area, working as a broker to maintain internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Andrii Nikolaiev, Arsenii Nikolaiev, Zarina Kodyrova, Kvanta, to advance Ukrainian mathematics, help and train math Olympiad winners.
As usual, India and Africa/Caribbean tranches will be reported separately.
Has the Great Awokening in scholarship peaked?
Here is much more from Musa al-Gharbi. Via John Cunningham.
The Capacity for Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models
We test the hypothesis that language models trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have the capability to “morally self-correct” — to avoid producing harmful outputs — if instructed to do so. We find strong evidence in support of this hypothesis across three different experiments, each of which reveal different facets of moral self-correction. We find that the capability for moral self-correction emerges at 22B model parameters, and typically improves with increasing model size and RLHF training. We believe that at this level of scale, language models obtain two capabilities that they can use for moral self-correction: (1) they can follow instructions and (2) they can learn complex normative concepts of harm like stereotyping, bias, and discrimination. As such, they can follow instructions to avoid certain kinds of morally harmful outputs. We believe our results are cause for cautious optimism regarding the ability to train language models to abide by ethical principles.
By Deep Ganguli, et.al., many authors, here is the link. Via Aran.
If you worry about AGI risk, isn’t the potential for upside here far greater, under the assumption (which I would not accept) that AI can become super-powerful? Such an AI could create many more worlds and populate them with many more people, and so on. Is the chance of the evil demi-urge really so high?
Should we pay mothers to stay home?
These are Finnish results, and their generality can be questioned, but it is not the first time such results have appeared:
We study the impacts of a policy designed to reward mothers who stay at home rather than join the labor force when their children are under age three. We use regional and over time variation to show that the Finnish Home Care Allowance (HCA) decreases maternal employment in both the short and long term. The effects are large enough for the existence of home care benefit system to explain the higher short-term child penalty in Finland than comparable nations. Home care benefits also negatively affect the early childhood cognitive test results of children, decrease the likelihood of choosing academic high school, and increase youth crimes. We confirm that the mechanism of action is changing work/home care arrangements by studying a day care fee reform that had the opposite effect of raising incentives to work – with corresponding opposite effects on mothers and children compared to HCA. Our findings suggest that shifting child care from the home to the market increases labor force participation and improves child outcomes.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Jonathan Gruber, Thomas Kosonen, and Kristina Huttunen. Note that the results may irritate both some social conservatives and some proponents of extremely generous maternal leave arrangements.
Language Models and Cognitive Automation for Economic Research
From a new and very good NBER paper by Anton Korinek:
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have the potential to revolutionize research in economics and other disciplines. I describe 25 use cases along six domains in which LLMs are starting to become useful as both research assistants and tutors: ideation, writing, background research, data analysis, coding, and mathematical derivations. I provide general instructions and demonstrate specific examples for how to take advantage of each of these, classifying the LLM capabilities from experimental to highly useful. I hypothesize that ongoing advances will improve the performance of LLMs across all of these domains, and that economic researchers who take advantage of LLMs to automate micro tasks will become significantly more productive. Finally, I speculate on the longer-term implications of cognitive automation via LLMs for economic research.
Recommended.
Cheating Teachers
Chalkbeat: New York City schools will once again grade their own students’ Regents exams, a policy that officials scrapped a decade ago amid concerns that educators were systematically nudging scores over the passing cutoff.
New York’s Regency exam is a statewide system of standardized, exit exams for secondary school students. Traditionally, the exam was graded by teachers from the same school as the student, i.e. the student’s teachers. The exam had two cutoffs, 55 for a “local diploma” and 65 for the higher-level “Regent’s diploma.” The distribution of grades during the home-school grading period shows clear spikes in the number of students just passing the 55 and 65 point cutoffs (and consequent dips in the number of students just failing). From an excellent paper by Dee, Dobbie, Jakob and Rockoff.
Is this altruism on the part of the teachers? Maybe. But the teachers are also graded on the number of their students who pass the exam.
The home-school grading system was dropped around 2011 due to bad publicity about the rampant cheating. It’s quite amazing that not a single good reason has been given for returning to the home-school grading system but the teacher’s union has been pressuring to return to the easier to manipulate system.
Hat tip: Thomas Dee.
Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell
Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph….I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct….
One might be tempted to dismiss this as another old, white male complaining about the kids but the speaker is Vincent Lloyd, highly-regarded director of Africana Studies at Villanova and the author of Black Dignity, “a radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought…an effort to describe the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement.”
I have no doubt that I would disagree with much of what he has to say but Lloyd has a calling, he believes in his students, in the virtue of teaching and in the power of the humanities to make us better:
…a seminar requires patience. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions. All of this is grounded in a text: Specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, holding seminar participants accountable to something concrete. The instructor gently—ideally, almost invisibly—guides discussion toward what matters.
The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.
A seminar takes time. The first day, you will be frustrated. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Even on the last day, you will be frustrated, though ideally now in a different way. Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes.
It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.
You can feel Lloyd’s pain when his students reject this gift.
Read the whole thing.