Category: Education

The growing importance of social skills in the labor market

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is a new NBER paper from David J. Deming:

The slow growth of high-paying jobs in the U.S. since 2000 and rapid advances in computer technology have sparked fears that human labor will eventually be rendered obsolete. Yet while computers perform cognitive tasks of rapidly increasing complexity, simple human interaction has proven difficult to automate. In this paper, I show that the labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Since 1980, jobs with high social skill requirements have experienced greater relative growth throughout the wage distribution. Moreover, employment and wage growth has been strongest in jobs that require high levels of both cognitive skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and trade more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I test and confirm using data from the NLSY79. The female advantage in social skills may have played some role in the narrowing of gender gaps in labor market outcomes since 1980.

There is an ungated copy here.

Starting over from Katrina

by  Tyler Cowen in

One of the tragedies of Katrina was that so many of New Orleans’ residents were forced to move. But the severity of that tragedy is a function of where they were forced to move to. Was it somewhere on the Salt Lake City end of the continuum? Or was it a place like Fayetteville? The best answer we have is from the work of the sociologist Corina Graif, who tracked down the new addresses of seven hundred women displaced by Katrina—most of them lower-income and black. By virtually every measure, their new neighborhoods were better than the ones they had left behind in New Orleans. Median family income was forty-four hundred dollars higher. Ethnic diversity was greater. More people had jobs. Their exposure to “concentrated disadvantage”—an index that factors in several measures of poverty—fell by half a standard deviation.

That is from Malcolm Gladwell, interesting throughout.

Are tenure track professors better teachers?

by  Tyler Cowen in

At least at Northwestern University, the answer seems to be no.  Figlio, Schapiro, and Soter report:

This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus contingent faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern and employ an identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which contingent faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from contingent faculty in their first-term courses. This result is driven by the fact that the bottom quarter of tenure track/tenured faculty (as indicted by our measure of teaching effectiveness) has lower “value added” than their contingent counterparts. Differences between contingent and tenure track/tenured faculty are present across a wide variety of subject areas and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s averages and less-qualified students.

Emphasis is added by me.  I wonder how much of the problem is that the bottom quarter of the tenure track instructors are more likely not to have English as a first language?

The pointer is from Ben Southwood.

Are reading texts becoming harder or simpler?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Robert J. Stevens, et.al. have done a pretty serious study of this question, based on computer analysis of texts, and here is their key conclusion:

From about 1930 through 1960 or 1970, the cognitive demands of reading curricula changed little…

In the period of 1970 through 2000 we observed a fairly consistent increase in the difficulty of reading text and comprehension tasks, particularly at third grade.

For sixth graders, however, reading texts were somewhat more complex in the 1910-1930 period.

I also found this comparison interesting:

In the 1920s, 45% of all questions asked were explicit detail questions, whereas by 1990 and 2000 curricula, that had diminished to only 8% of the questions asked.

Alas I can no longer remember who deserves thanks for this pointer.  Here is an earlier Alex post about whether TV shows are becoming more complicated.

Observers expect forecasters to show high confidence

by  Tyler Cowen in

Observers seem to focus on the target event and not its complement.  Bagchi and Ince have a new paper on this question:

Consumers routinely rely on forecasters to make predictions about uncertain events (e.g., sporting contests, stock fluctuations). The authors demonstrate that when forecasts are higher versus lower (e.g., a 70% vs. 30% chance of team A winning a game) consumers infer that the forecaster is more confident in her prediction, has conducted more in-depth analyses, and is more trustworthy. The prediction is also judged as more accurate. This occurs because forecasts are evaluated based on how well they predict the target event occurring (team A winning). Higher forecasts indicate greater likelihood of the target event occurring, and signal a confident analyst, while lower forecasts indicate lower likelihood and lower confidence in the target event occurring. But because, with lower forecasts, consumers still focus on the target event (and not its complement), lower confidence in the target event occurring is erroneously interpreted as the forecaster being less confident in her overall prediction (instead of more confident in the complementary event occurring—team A losing). The authors identify boundary conditions, generalize to other prediction formats, and demonstrate consequences.

Of course this also has relevance for the evolutionary processes governing pundits.

Here is a related press release (pdf).  For the pointer I thank Charles Klingman.

The twenty greatest English-language novels

by  Tyler Cowen in

A few of you wrote in and asked me to match this Guardian list of the top one hundred English-language novels of all time.  (It is notable how many second-rate English novels made that list, and how few second-rate American ones did…)  Well, one hundred is too many but here is twenty, in no particular order:

James Joyce, Ulysses

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Wuthering Heights

William Faulkner, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury

Huck Finn

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway

Nabokov, Pale Fire

Henry James, The Golden Bowl

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Sterne, Huxley, Lawrence, Beckett, and Wharton are all knocking on the door and probably would have rounded out a top twenty-five.  Scott and Trollope too, more Hardy.  I consider the omission of Austen to be my flaw, not hers, but I just don’t love them.

You’ll note I made no attempt to be “balanced.”  I gladly would have awarded all twenty spots to the same author, had such a choice been justified.  There is also no attempt at racial, ethnic, gender, or geographic balance, none whatsoever.  I simply picked what I think are the best books.

And if you think there are some obvious omissions, they probably are intentional.  There are plenty of fine books, but no I don’t put 1984 in the top twenty, and while America has many very good novels from the latter part of the twentieth century, only a few (V?)  would receive my serious consideration for a top thirty list or even top forty list.  Not many are better than Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, or for that matter John Galsworthy.

Effective Altruism: where charity and rationality meet

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of my current column at The Upshot.  I very much enjoyed my read of William MacCaskill’s Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.  The point of course is to apply science, reason, and data analysis to our philanthropic giving.

I am more positive than negative on this movement and also the book, as you can see from the column.  Still, I think my more skeptical remarks are the most interesting part to excerpt:

Neither Professor MacAskill nor the effective-altruism movement has answered all the tough questions. Often the biggest gains come from innovation, yet how can a donor spur such advances? If you had a pile of money and the intent to make the world a better place in 1990, could you have usefully expected or encouraged the spread of cellphones to Africa? Probably not, yet this technology has improved the lives of many millions, and at a profit, so for the most part its introduction didn’t draw money from charities. Economists know frustratingly little about the drivers of innovation.

And as Prof. Angus Deaton of Princeton University has pointed out, many of the problems of poverty boil down to bad politics, and we don’t know how to use philanthropy to fix that. If corruption drains away donated funds, for example, charity could even be counterproductive by propping up bad governments.

Sometimes we simply can’t know in advance how important a donation will turn out to be. For example, the financier John A. Paulson’s recently announced $400 million gift to Harvard may be questioned on the grounds that Harvard already has more money than any university in the world, and surely is not in dire need of more. But do we really know that providing extra support for engineering and applied sciences at Harvard — the purpose of the donation — will not turn into globally worthwhile projects? Innovations from Harvard may end up helping developing economies substantially. And even if most of Mr. Paulson’s donation isn’t spent soon, the money is being invested in ways that could create jobs and bolster productivity.

In addition, donor motivation may place limits on the applicability of the effective-altruism precepts. Given that a lot of donors are driven by emotion, pushing them to be more reasonable might backfire. Excessively cerebral donors might respond with so much self-restraint that they end up giving less to charity. If they are no longer driven by emotion, they may earn and save less in the first place.

On Paulson, here is Ashok Rao’s recent post on compounding returns.

There are an estimated 250 paternoster lifts (Personenumlaufaufzüge) still in use in Germany

by  Tyler Cowen in

The culture and polity that is Germany:

Officials in Stuttgart were among the loudest protesters against the labour minister Andrea Nahles’ new workplace safety regulations, which stated that the lifts could only be used by employees trained in paternoster riding.

“It took the heart out of this place when our paternoster was brought to a halt, and it slowed down our work considerably,” said Wolfgang Wölfle, Stuttgart’s deputy mayor, who vociferously fought the ban and called for the reinstatement of the town hall’s lift, which has been running since 1956.

“They suit the German character very well. I’m too impatient to wait for a conventional lift and the best thing about a paternoster is that you can hop on and off it as you please. You can also communicate with people between floors when they’re riding on one. I see colleagues flirt in them all the time,” he added, celebrating its reopening at a recent town hall party to which hundreds of members of the public were invited.

…In officialese the lifts are referred to as Personenumlaufaufzüge – people circulation lifts – while a popular bureaucrats’ nickname for them is Beamtenbagger or “civil servant excavator”. The name paternoster – Latin for “our father” – is a reference to one of the prayers said by Catholics using rosary beads, which are meditatively passed through the hand, just as the cabins are in perpetual motion around the shaft.

There is more here, with excellent videos of paternoster riding, all via Michelle Dawson.  By the way, it has been against the law to build new paternosters since 1974.

Sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

We did not observe any individual protein-altering variants that are reproducibly associated with extremely high intelligence and within the entire distribution of intelligence.

That is from “a whole bunch of guys” writing in Molecular Psychiatry, via Michelle Dawson.  In other words, the prospect of straightforward genetic engineering for smarter babies probably won’t be a reality anytime soon.  Technology remains pretty far behind the matchmaker.

Can economists justify pre-market exclusion for pharmaceuticals?

by  Tyler Cowen in

One recurring problem in economics, and the other social sciences all the more, is that researchers will accept a lot of conventional wisdom on a topic if it suits their preexisting biases, especially if it is not an area which they have researched themselves.  Yet this entire question is — surprise, surprise — largely unstudied.  Social scientists love to talk about themselves, but critical self-scrutiny backed by data is less popular.

Jason Briggeman just wrote a GMU dissertation to investigate these and similar questions, here is his abstract:

In the United States and most other wealthy nations, all drugs are banned unless individually permitted. This policy, called pre-market approval, is controversial among economists; the preponderance of the economics literature that offers a judgment on pre-market approval is critical of the policy, but surveys of U.S. economists show that many, perhaps a majority, support pre-market approval. Here I analyze the results of a recent survey that asked economists who support pre-market approval to justify, with reference to the economic concept of market failure, their support of the policy. I find that, while almost all the economists surveyed could point to a market failure or failures that may plausibly exist and affect the market for pharmaceuticals, none were able to make a well reasoned connection between those market failures and the particular remedy of pre-market approval. None of the economists surveyed cited in support of their position any literature specific to pre-market approval. I supplement the survey findings with a review of relevant reading material assigned in health economics courses at top universities, searching that material for discussions of what may justify pre-market approval. I find a strong argument that the prospect of overt disasters being caused by avoidable mistakes can justify some intervention in pharmaceuticals; however, I find little to justify the other interventions that are part of pre-market approval. I suggest that future inquiry into possibilities for liberalizing reform concentrate on understanding matters such as the informational effects of product bans, the distinction between safety and efficacy, the nature of demand for drugs about which little is known, and the political economy of drug substitutes.

The upshot is that economists hold a lot of views whose justifications they cannot articulate very well.  I think you would find the same when it comes to the Ex-Im Bank (are you sure it fits the model of strategic trade theory?), the mortgage agencies (what was that externalities argument for home ownership again?) or all sorts of random regulations.  The relatively interventionist economists will pull some justification out of a hat, and the relatively pro-market economists will be pretty skeptical.

For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.

Stanford is the top producer of Nobel Laureates in this century

by  Tyler Cowen in

And that is by a clear margin.  Columbia is number two.  Harvard is number eleven.  UCSB > MIT.  None for Oxford.

The list is here, excluding literature and peace prizes.

As for countries, the United States is a very clear number one and the UK is number two.  Other than Japan, Asia barely has any at all.

The pointer is from Michelle Dawson.  Here is my previous post on Stanford.

People who deserve to be raised in status

by  Tyler Cowen in

Let’s stick with the living, here are a few who come to mind:

Adam Minter

Charles C. Mann

Laura Miller (formerly of Salon.com, now of Slate)

Ted and Dana Gioia

Christopher Balding

Fuchsia Dunlop

Stephen King

Arnold Kling

Kendrick Lamar

Viktor Zhadanov

Chow Yun Fat

To be clear, I am not suggesting these people are deficient or lacking in status, rather that it should be higher yet.  Or maybe it is the list of people who should decline in status which interests you more…