Category: Education
How will Canada be a part of the knowledge economy?
Me:
Some economic sectors are distributed everywhere, like every city has its dentist[s], and other sectors are quite clustered. Banking is pretty clustered — New York, London, Hong Kong. Tech has been evolving in a pretty clustered way; I don’t mean simple software support, which is more like dentistry, but big, grand projects — the next Google, the next Facebook, Uber. We see those come out of quite a small number of places, so Skype coming from Estonia is quite the exception. Even then, it was improved by people in the clusters.
I think any location, not just Canada, has to ask itself, ‘are we going to be one of those clusters or not’? And the correct answer may be ‘no’. It may also be the sector evolves so it’s less clustered and more like dentistry, and then everywhere including Canada would partake. But maybe the future is Canada will have a knowledge sector doing small-scale things like software design for local projects but not anything like its own Silicon Valley. I guess at this point that seems likely — that Canada will not be a huge innovative part of the knowledge economy.
That is from my interview with the excellent Eva Salinas, mostly about other topics, such as what a great egalitarian age we live in and also where the World Bank and IMF stand, among other issues. A few of the comments make more sense if you know that the interviewer is Chilean and we were discussing Chile before the formal interview started.
Can cheap wine taste great?
And not just if you are drunk:
When consumers taste cheap wine and rate it highly because they believe it is expensive, is it because prejudice has blinded them to the actual taste, or has prejudice actually changed their brain function, causing them to experience the cheap wine in the same physical way as the expensive wine? Research in the Journal of Marketing Research has shown that preconceived beliefs may create a placebo effect so strong that the actual chemistry of the brain changes.
Related experiments were run with milkshakes, by Hilke Plassmann and Bernd Weber. There is more here, of considerable interest, hat tip goes to Samir Varma. Do any of you know of an ungated copy?
This new article asks how much placebos are affected by your DNA.
Rating colleges and universities by value-added
A new Brookings study by Rothwell and Kulkarni attempts to do just that. The list of ratings for two-year institutions puts NHTI’s-Concord Community College at the top, followed by a large number of institutions you mostly haven’t heard of. For four-year institutions the list starts with:
1. Caltech
2. Colgate
3. MIT
4. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology,
with other surprises to follow. The Colorado School of Mines does better than Princeton, for instance. Here is the report itself, here is a story on the report. I am finding the web site for the rankings is still a little glitchy, let’s hope they fix that soon, or maybe it is just the current volume of traffic.
*How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs*
That is the subtitle, the title proper is Pedigree, by Lauren A. Rivera. This is a very good book on the microdynamics of inequality and the important role played by social networks, how you present yourself, and…pedigree. Not all of it is a revelation, because by now many of these mechanisms are well-known. Still, it is unfailingly intelligent, well-written, and it documents these matters better than any other book I know. Here is one excerpt:
…individual sponsors did not need to be high up in the organization. HR professionals and school teams typically trusted the recommendations of even the most junior firm employees. Insider-outsider status was more salient than vertical position within a firm. First-year analysts or associates could successfully push through an individual they knew from class, athletics, extracurricular activities, their hometowns, or word-of-mouth to the interview phase, provided that they could successfully get the application on the “right desk,” in person or via email…In addition, the tie to an individual sponsor did not have to be strong.
More generally, it is often better to have a contact “within” an institution rather than at the very top. Recommended, for all those who have an interest in such topics.
Via Chug, here is what happens when you plate junk food as if it were high-end food, a good link.
Does the internet make you overconfident? (this post may offend some bloggers)
Dan Klein (from Abigail D.) directs my attention to an interesting paper by Fisher, Goddu, and Keil (pdf):
As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge “in the head,” even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images.
Having done some further search on this topic, using Google, I can assure you that I now have a much better grasp on whether this hypothesis is true or not…
Why I like trigger warnings
At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.
Read his whole discussion, but he more or less disapproves. I’ve long wanted to disagree with Chait “from the left,” and it seems this is my chance, I had better grab it while I can.
While teaching Law and Literature this year, I attached very gentle, low key “trigger warnings” to a number of items on the syllabus, namely those dealing with extreme violence, rape, and some other very unpleasant situations. I am glad I did this. I told students that if they preferred to do a substitute assignment, I could arrange that. Is that so unreasonable? There were no takers, but I don’t see it did anyone harm or limited free speech in the classroom (or outside of it) to make this offer. If anything, it may have eased speech a slight amount by noting it is OK to feel uncomfortable with some topics, or at least serving up that possibility into the realm of common knowledge. That struck me as better and wiser than simply pretending we were studying the successful operation of the Coase theorem the whole time.
I don’t doubt that trigger warnings may be misused in some situations by some professors, but overall they seem to me like another small step to a better world. I do agree we need to liberate trigger warnings from the strictures of the PC movement, no argument there.
Addendum: I am pleased to see that GMU was moved into the highest category for university free speech, according to FIRE.
What’s the Hardest Part of Being a PhD Student?
I was asked this this question on Quora. Here’s my answer:
Writing an original dissertation.
Anyone who makes it into graduate school has had at least 16 years of learning and, as a result, most graduate students are good learners. A dissertation, however, requires the creation or discovery of new knowledge. On the day you finish your dissertation you have to know something that no one else in the world knows. That is a tall order.
After their course work ends, many students find themselves at a loss. They have done a lot of learning and not much creating or discovering–skills that not only are different than learning but that may even be at cross purposes. A learner has to trust that what he or she is being taught is true and valuable. A learner with too much skepticism won’t pass the final. But a dissertation writer without enough skepticism will never advance beyond previous knowledge and never discover that something previously learned was false.
It’s an odd necessity that the more you know the more skeptical you must become to know more. Not every student navigates this evolution in attitude.
FYI, Quora seems to be growing very rapidly. I first noticed this when my followers on Quora started growing faster than and soon exceeded my followers on Twitter, a fact I found surprising. According to Alexa, Quora has leaped in the popularity rankings 42 places in just the last 3 months. It will be interesting to see how they handle the growth especially keeping the quality of the questions high.
“A good start…”
Mike Irvine is set to make a splash in the dry world of academe. The University of Victoria student is getting ready to defend his masters thesis in education from below the surface of the Salish Sea off the coast of British Columbia.
And lest you think he’s not taking his thesis defense seriously, he’ll be wearing a pinstripe suit over his wet suit.
…Irvine’s thesis, “Underwater web cameras as a tool to engage students in the exploration and discovery of ocean literacy,” will be streamed live on YouTube as well.
His thesis defense will take about 15 minutes and, following his presentation, he’ll face two rounds of questions from his advisors. He expects to be underwater for about an hour.
The link is here, with illustrative videos, via Jodi Ettenberg.
NBER Annual conference on macroeconomics
Today I am at the NBER annual macroeconomics conference as an observer. The program and papers are here, and they look very interesting. You may be hearing more about this later; I am allowed to blog the presentations but not attribute specific comments to individuals. The Bernanke talk I cannot cover at all.
Where do pickpockets strike?
Kevin Beirne reports from an FT chat with James Freedman and tells us:
I ask if there are certain hotspots where pickpockets strike. Tourist spots, Freedman tells me, especially places such as Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, where people’s attention is directed upwards and away from their belongings. He says that many pickpockets also operate near signs warning us to beware of pickpockets. The irony is that when people read the signs, they check their pockets or bag, thus alerting the lurking pickpocket to where their valuables are.
File under “Law of Unintended Consequences.” And if you can get through the gate, the piece is interesting more generally.
Compensating Differentials
The latest section of our Principles of Economics course at MRU is up today and it covers price discrimination and labor markets.
In this video, The Tradeoff Between Fun and Wages, we introduce the idea of compensating differentials in wages, an idea that goes back to Adam Smith.
Sharp readers will notice a homage near the beginning in what might otherwise appear to be an odd scene setting.
The Jeff Sachs chat
A live stream version is posted here, slide to 6:00 to start, YouTube and podcast and transcript versions are on their way. I thought Jeff did just a tremendous job. We covered the resource curse, why Russia failed and Poland succeeded, charter cities, his China optimism, how his recent book on JFK reflects the essence of his thought, why Paul Rosenstein-Rodan abandoned Austrian economics for “big push” ideas, whether Africa will be able to overcome the middle income trap, where he disagrees with Paul Krugman, his favorite novel (Doctor Zhivago, he tells us why too), premature deindustrialization, and how we should reform graduate economics education, among other topics.
Measurement education sentences to ponder
And at Utah Valley University in Orem, the school developed its own early warning system, called Stoplight, which uses academic and demographic details about students to predict their likelihood of passing specific courses; as part of the program, professors receive class lists that color-code each student as green, yellow or red.
The article, on anti-cheating software, is of interest more generally, via Michelle Dawson.
The Demand for R&D is Increasing
In my TED talk I said that if India and China were as rich as the United States is today then the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now. Larger markets, both in size and wealth, increase the incentive to invest in R&D. Larger markets save lives. As India and China become richer, they are investing more in R&D and investing more in educating the scientists and engineers who produce new ideas, new ideas that benefit everyone.
The WSJ reports on this trend:
Chipscreen’s drug, called chidamide, or Epidaza, was developed from start to finish in China. The medicine is the first of its kind approved for sale in China, and just the fourth in a new class globally. Dr. Lu estimates the research cost of chidamide was about $70 million, or about one-tenth what it would have cost to develop in the U.S.
…China’s spending on pharmaceuticals is expected to top $107 billion in 2015, up from $26 billion in 2007, according to Deloitte China. It will become the world’s second-largest drug market, after the U.S., by 2020, according to an analysis published last year in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice.
China has on-the-ground infrastructure labs, a critical mass of leading scientists and interested investors, according to Franck Le Deu, head of consultancy McKinsey & Co.’s pharmaceuticals and medical-products practice in China. “There’re all the elements for the recipe for potential in China,” he said.
We have much to gain from increased wealth in the developing world.
My conversation with Peter Thiel
The YouTube version is here, the podcast version is here.
I was very happy with how it turned out, as I deliberately set out not to copy the content of any of Peter’s other dialogues. You can learn how he thinks we will leave the “great stagnation,” whether the AI hype is justified, how he would boil his thought down to the smallest number of dimensions, whether NYC is over- or underrated, why globalization is likely to decline and what that means for different regions, the parts of the Bible which have influenced him most, “the Straussian Jesus,” to what age he thinks he will live, why Japan is special, how his German background matters, his favorite opening chess move, how and why company names matter, and even his favorite TV show, which he calls “schlocky.”
And much, much more, with commentary and questions from me throughout. A transcript is being prepared as well.