Category: Education
Edward Luce has lunch with Michael Sandel
I ask Sandel whether he does anything in his own life to make the world less money-minded. He begins a couple of answers but peters out. I suggest that he makes all his lectures free online. “Yes, that’s one thing,” he agrees. After our lunch I see that Sandel is listed on Royce Carlton, a speaker’s agency, as one of its big names (without apparent irony, a posting by the agency last year said Sandel was available to lecture “at a reduced fee in conjunction with his new book, What Money Can’t Buy”).
The rest of the meal is presented here, possibly behind an FT gate; Sandel opted for Legal Seafood and Luce ordered fish and chips.
Does anyone give money to charity efficiently?
Scott Alexander meets up with Robin Hanson and reports from the front:
Then Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias got up and just started Robin Hansonning at everybody.
…One of his claims that generated the most controversy was that instead of donating money to charity, you should invest the money at compound interest, then donate it to charity later after your investment has paid off – preferably just before you die, since donating money after death is legally complicated. His argument, nice and simple, was that the real rate of return on investment has been higher than the growth rate for 3000 years and this pattern shows no signs of changing. If you donate the money today, your donation grows with the growth rate, but if you invest it, it grows with the interest rate. He gave his classic example of Benjamin Franklin, who put his relatively meager earnings into a trust fund to be paid out two hundred years later; when they did, the money had grown to $7 million. He said that the reason people didn’t do this was that they wanted the social benefits of having given money away, which are unavailable if you wait until just before you die to do so.
…Then he started talking about how you should only ever donate to one charity – the most effective. I’d heard this one before and even written essays speaking in favor of it, but it’s always been very hard for me and I’ve always chickened out. What Robin added was, once again, a psychological argument – that the reason this is so hard is that if charity is showing that you care, you want to show that you care about a lot of different things. Only donating to one charity robs you of opportunities to feel good when the many targets of your largesse come up and burdens you with scope insensitivity (my guess is that most people would feel more positive affect about someone who saved a thousand dogs and one cat than someone who saved two thousand dogs. The first person saved two things, the second person only saved one.) In retrospect this is absolutely true and my gibbering recoil at this problem isn’t just Yet Another Cognitive Bias but just good old self-interest.
The post is interesting throughout, and the hat tip goes to Geoffrey Miller, @MatingMind.
The hybrid educational model works
This is from the new William G. Bowen book, Higher Education in the Digital Age:
…we found no statistically significant differences in standard measures of learning outcomes (pass or completion rates, scores on common final exam questions, and results of a national test of statistical literacy) between students in the traditional classes and students in the hybrid-online format classes…This finding, in and of itself, is not different from the results of many other studies. But it is important to emphasize that the relevant effect coefficients in this study have very small standard errors…what we have here are “quite precisely estimated zeros.” That is, if there had in fact been pronounced differences in outcomes between traditional-format and hybrid-format groups, it is highly likely that we would have found them.
Note also that this finding holds across various subgroups of the basic student population, including students from families with incomes below 50k a year, first-generation college students, non-white students, and students with GPAs below 3.0.
The core report is here.
What’s the best sentence ever formed?
That was the topic of a recent Quora forum (by the way may I officially announce that Quora seems to have succeeded? Would it be so bad to spend less time with your Google Reader and more time browsing Quora?), and here was the top pick:
“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.”
(Dmitri Borgmann, Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities. Scribner, 1965)
This is a ‘rhopalic’ sentence: A sentence or a line of poetry in which each word contains one letter or one syllable more than the previous word.
File under “Very good sentences’! If I understand the Quora system correctly, that was from Ramnath Ragunathan.
Nishit Jain has the runner-up:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
No, really. There’s a whole Wikipedia page on it – Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
The sentence’s intended meaning becomes clearer when it’s understood that it uses the city of Buffalo, New York and the somewhat-uncommon verb “to buffalo” (meaning “to bully or intimidate”), and when the punctuation and grammar is expanded so that the sentence reads as follows: “Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” The meaning becomes even clearer when synonyms are used: “Buffalo-origin bison that other Buffalo bison intimidate, themselves bully Buffalo bison.”
The entire thread is worth reading, and in your spare time you can ponder why most of the best answers come from individuals with names from the subcontinent. Here is the contribution of Veekas Shrivastava, listed as an elementary school chess player (retired):
A little grammar puzzle:
“that that is is that that is not is not that is it is it not”
Correctly punctuated: “That that is, is. That that is not, is not. That is it, is it not?”
Here is from Sugavanesh Balasubramanian:
“However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.”
So there.
The Flynn effect vs. population aging
Here is some good news for you all on Easter Sunday, good news until 2042 that is:
Although lifespan changes in cognitive performance and Flynn effects have both been well documented, there has been little scientific focus to date on the net effect of these forces on cognition at the population level. Two major questions moving beyond this finding guided this study: (1) Does the Flynn effect indeed continue in the 2000s for older adults in a UK dataset (considering immediate recall, delayed recall, and verbal fluency)? (2) What are the net effects of population aging and cohort replacement on average cognitive level in the population for the abilities under consideration?
First, in line with the Flynn effect, we demonstrated continued cognitive improvements among successive cohorts of older adults. Second, projections based on different scenarios for cognitive cohort changes as well as demographic trends show that if the Flynn effect observed in recent years continues, it would offset the corresponding age-related cognitive decline for the cognitive abilities studied. In fact, if observed cohort effects should continue, our projections show improvements in cognitive functioning on a population level until 2042—in spite of population aging.
That is from Vegard Skirbekk, Marcin Stonawski, Eric Bonsang, and Ursula M. Staudinger, and one gated link is here. Do any of you know of an ungated copy?
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
The word that is Swedish
1. Bloggbävning, n.
Definition: Literally translating to “blogquake,” the word describes the process by which a topic explodes in the blogosphere and is then picked by by more mainstream media outlets.
Used in an English sentence: “Man, that ‘ogooglebar’ thing really caused a bloggbävning today.”
Somehow I don’t think this post itself is going to Bloggbävning. Here are fourteen other Swedish words you should know, interesting throughout.
The new Candlemakers’ Petition (sentences of interest)
The MOOC champions, Mr. Cusumano said, are well-intentioned people who “think it’s a social good to distribute education for free.”
But Mr. Cusumano questions that assumption. “Free is actually very elitist,” he said. The long-term future of university education along the MOOC path, he said, could be a “few large, well-off survivors” and a wasteland of casualties.
There is more here.
Mexico’s economy: current prospects and history
That is a new MRUniversity course, taught by University of Oklahoma Professor Robin Grier (with a small number of guest videos from me, too). It is absolutely excellent and I recommend it highly. The course outline is this:
1 An Overview of the Mexican Economy
2 Colonial Legacies: Obstacles to Growth after Independence3 Development Strategies4 Social Issues5 Land & Agriculture6 The Debt Crisis of the 1980s7 The State Retreats: Reform in the 1980s & 1990s8 The Peso Crisis9 NAFTA & the Mexican Economy
The early videos are now on-line and new videos will be appearing regularly. You can view them on your own or register sign up for email updates at the link. You can check out our other courses at the home page of MRUniversity.com.
From David Sinky on subsidies for science, by email
Since it seems that the supply of talented researchers in any specific area is likely fairly inelastic in the short term, to what extent do you see cash funding (as opposed to supply of talent) as a major constraint to specific scientific research in either the short and medium terms?
>Even if we believe that this funding will lead to a proportional increase in clean-tech research, I suspect that returns may be quite low since the impacts of this funding would seem to be:
1. Pulling smart people from their private sector efforts into publicly funded research
2. Funding marginal projects by lower quality researchers where returns are likely to be significantly lower than average returns to research funding (which may be quite low already)
3. Increasing the funds available to established, high-status labs and researchers. If a large percentage of a lab’s output is due to the abnormally high human capital of its lead researchers, the binding constraint is their time and mental resources rather than cash so the returns on additional cash would not be very high.
4. Allowing institutions that were already going to fund this sort of research to direct additional funds to other priorities such as undergraduate academics (stem or otherwise), student amenities or other unrelated research initiatives.
I suspect much of this logic also applies to donations to “cancer research charities” which I believe may be one of the single least efficient use of charitable dollars.
In general, I am disappointed that neither the right nor the left seems interested in trying to estimate the return to marginal government spending on research (either in aggregate or for specific programs).
The points above lead me to suspect it is quite low in aggregate but I’m open to being convinced otherwise if you think there is good evidence to do so.
Shout it from the Rooftops! Performance Pay for Teachers in India
Several years ago I reported on a very large, randomized experiment (JSTOR) on teacher performance pay in India that showed that even modest incentives could significantly raise student achievement and do so not only in the incentivized subjects but also in other non-incentivized subjects, suggesting positive spillovers. The earlier paper looked at the first two years of the program. One of the authors, Karthik Muralidharan, now has a follow-up paper, showing what happens over 5 years. The results are impressive and important:
Students who had completed their entire five years of primary
school education under the program scored 0.54 and 0.35 standard deviations (SD) higher than
those in control schools in math and language tests respectively. These are large effects
corresponding to approximately 20 and 14 percentile point improvements at the median of a
normal distribution, and are larger than the effects found in most other education interventions in
developing countries (see Dhaliwal et al. 2011).Second, the results suggest that these test score gains represent genuine additions to human
capital as opposed to reflecting only ‘teaching to the test’. Students in individual teacher
incentive schools score significantly better on both non-repeat as well as repeat questions; on
both multiple-choice and free-response questions; and on questions designed to test conceptual
understanding as well as questions that could be answered through rote learning. Most
importantly, these students also perform significantly better on subjects for which there were no
incentives – scoring 0.52 SD and 0.30 SD higher than students in control schools on tests in
science and social studies (though the bonuses were paid only for gains in math and language). There was also no differential attrition of students across treatment and control groups and no
evidence to suggest any adverse consequences of the programs.…Finally, our estimates suggest that the individual teacher bonus program was
15-20 times more cost effective at raising test scores than the default ‘education quality
improvement’ policy of the Government of India, which is reducing class size from 40 to 30
students per teacher (Govt. of India, 2009).
In another important paper, written for the Government of India, Muralidharan summarizes the best research on public schools in developing countries. His conclusion is that there are demonstrably effective and feasible policies that could improve the public schools thereby increasing literacy and numeracy rates and raising the incomes of millions of people.
The generation entering Indian schools today is the largest that has ever, or for the foreseeable future, will ever enter Indian schools so the opportunity to raise educational quality for essentially the entire Indian workforce over the next several generations is truly immense.
Puzzles in search of answers: why are men losing ground?
“I think the greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labor market screaming out ‘You need more education’ and have been able to respond to that, and men have not,” said Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economics professor who was not involved in Professor Autor’s work. “And it’s very, very scary for economists because people should be responding to price signals. And men are not. It’s a fact in need of an explanation.”
Most economists agree that men have suffered disproportionately from economic changes like the decline of manufacturing. But careful analyses have found that such changes explain only a small part of the shrinking wage gap.
That is from a very excellent article by Binyamin Applebaum, on why men are (along some but not all margins) losing economic ground, especially below the ranks of the top earners. I liked this sentence at the end:
Instead of making marriage more attractive, he [Christopher Jencks] said, it might be better for society to help make men more attractive.
As I once asked Bryan Caplan, “How many marriageable men do you think there are? And what are the other women supposed to do?”
Why a coach should be ambiguous
Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight? Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.
If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.
An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.
Ask Emily
Emily Oster, that is. She has a new “advice column” in the WSJ. You can email her questions at [email protected]. Here is previous (and extensive) MR coverage of Emily Oster.
Australian Travel Notes from a Policy Wonk
Here are some notes on Australia, mostly from and for policy wonks.
Australia has a private pension system. In the 1990s a Labor government, with the support of the trade unions, created a system of private pension accounts to supplement the basic, means-tested state pensions that Australia has had since 1909. Employers are required to pay 9% of an employee’s wages (scheduled to increase to 12%) into the private accounts. The funds can be withdrawn at retirement (age 60 for new workers), at age 65, or in exceptional cases with disability. Workers can invest their funds with very few restrictions–workers, for example, can choose among a variety of mutual funds (such as Vanguard etc.) or invest with non-profit funds run by trade union associations or they can even self-manage. The accounts, now totaling more than 1.4 trillion, have increased savings and made Australia a shareholder society. Some issues remain including fees which are probably too high (better default rules could help) and a lack of annuitization (annuitization of some portion of the lump sum payment should be required to avoid moral hazard)–see here for one critique–but overall the system appears very favorable relative to the American system.
Australia farmers pay for water at market prices. Water rights are traded and government water suppliers have either been privatized or put on a more stand-alone basis so that subsidies are minimized or at least made transparent.
Australia has one of the largest private school sectors in the developed world with some 40% of students in privately-run schools.
Australia has a balanced-budget principle (balanced over the business cycle) which has been effective although perhaps more important has been a widely held aversion to deficits combined with an understanding of sustainability and intergenerational fairness (factors which also played a role in the decision to create private, pre-funded pensions).
Prostitution is legal in much of Australia and some of Sydney’s brothels have made significant capital investments.
The Australian civil service is of very high quality. I spoke at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Treasury and the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education (whew) and in all cases I found the civil servants to be highly informed and sophisticated. I was not the first to bring up the term rent seeking or to laugh at the latest political shenanigans which everyone acknowledged had been done for votes and not for sound reasons of public policy. All consistent with Yes, Minister but it gave me a different perspective.
More than a quarter of the Australian population is foreign born but there is very little cultural or economic tension about immigrants within Australia (with minor exceptions over refugees (“jumping the queue”) and occasional minor flare-ups over job visas). From cab drivers to MPs the word on immigration was, “Not an issue, mate.”
I had some of the best Thai food I have ever had anywhere. Spice I Am was excellent (thanks!) and Home on Sussex was outstanding.
The Manly ferry is a great way to see Sydney’s magnificent coastline.
The world owes Sydney barristas (New Zealand also) an enormous debt for the flat white, perhaps the best form of coffee yet perfected. The flat white has made its way to London but is only now becoming available in a few high end coffee shops in New York. I eagerly await for this trend to extend to Fairfax as I am already jonesing for another.
Australia has great natural beauty. The British should have left the convicts behind and moved everyone else.
Addendum: And here is Lars Christensen on Australian monetary policy, also very good, and Reihan Salam with more on education.
Good sentences about John Stuart Mill
He was so bewildered by his lack of books that he even began sleeping late, once not getting up till nine o’clock. One of the daughters [in Toulouse] pitying his plight gave him Legendre’s Geometry. He dissected it eagerly, although its muddled thinking on Ratio took away a good deal of its merits as an elementary work. The confusion in the house grew worse; a dog went mad and terrorized the servants. To John’s orderly mind the Benthams seemed to live in a state of constant uproar. They were always interrupting him for other things. He was never left to himself. They took him to see peasant dances…
That is from Michael St.John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill.