Category: Education
In defense of Los Angeles as a superb walking city
I am shocked that so many people in the comments, and on Twitter, scoffed at this notion which I put forward the other day.
First, in Los Angeles the weather is almost always very good for walking. That is a big plus, to say the least. It is not just that the average quality of experience is high, but you can make advance plans to be walking and arrange your life accordingly.
To be concrete, here are a few of the many splendid walks in the greater Los Angeles area: Almost anywhere in mid-Wilshire, downtown Santa Monica, Melrose, central Westwood, Beverly Hills, a blossoming Downtown (just don’t jaywalk), Pasadena and Glendale, most residential parts of Hollywood, almost any beach locale (and there are many), and even (limited) parts of Sunset. How many cities have great walks where you can be on the beach and/or see the mountains? Or where you can stop for first-rate ethnic food almost anywhere?
I will grant that Santa Monica Boulevard is not ideal for walking on many of its parts, nor is all of Culver City. Is Manhattan’s Park Ave. always so fascinating?
My personal favorite walk is to start somewhere such as Olympic and walk up Vermont, exploring side streets along the way and stopping for Asian food or pupusas. My two favorites car drives are Sunset and then Griffith Park all the way down to the bottom of Western, or vice versa, stopping for Belizean food along the way.
Here is my earlier post on which are good walking cities, London wins the overall #1.
The economic value of a law degree
Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre have a new paper on this topic:
Legal academics and journalists have marshaled statistics purporting to show that enrolling in law school is irrational. We investigate the economic value of a law degree and find the opposite: given current tuition levels, the median and even 25th percentile annual earnings premiums justify enrollment. For most law school graduates, the present value of a law degree typically exceeds its cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars. We improve upon previous studies by tracking lifetime earnings of a large sample of law degree holders. Previous studies focused on starting salaries, generic professional degree holders, or the subset of law degree holders who practice law. We also include unemployment and disability risk rather than assume continuous full time employment. After controlling for observable ability sorting, we find that a law degree is associated with a 73 percent median increase in monthly earnings and 60 percent increase in median hourly wages. The mean annual earnings premium of a law degree is approximately $57,200 in 2013 dollars. The law degree earnings premium is cyclical and recent years are within historical norms. We estimate the mean pre-tax lifetime value of a law degree as approximately $1,000,000.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Andres Marroquin.
How much does America benefit from the growth of emerging nations?
Charles Kenny writes:
And growth in the developing world, even if it means that some populous economies may eventually grow larger than the United States, also means that there are more places for Americans to travel in security and comfort, and more places to learn, work or while away our retirement years. Americans can get health care at Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok — accredited by the Joint Commission International, which certifies health-care organizations worldwide — for a fraction of the cost they can in Bethesda. Or their kids can attend college at the University of Cape Town, rated higher than Georgetown University in international rankings but one-fifth as expensive. Or perhaps they can get jobs at one of the new breed of world-class multinational firms based in the developing world, such as Tata or Huawei.
I sometimes think of this issue in terms of the gravity equation and the inward-looking propensities of large countries. Relative say to Swedes, Americans are relatively unwilling to travel abroad, educate themselves abroad, or work abroad. Some of this may be misguided arrogance, and some of it is a rational response from those living in a large, prosperous country and (often) knowing only the global language, namely English. In other words, Americans benefit less (per capita) from the new opportunities abroad than do Swedes. We do benefit to the extent foreign countries generate innovations which make their way to the United States, but so far not so many of those have come from emerging economies. I expect that to change, although when is a very important and underexplored question.
I believe that for many educated but not super-elite Americans the best opportunities already are abroad, but most of that group is reluctant to exploit them, if only for reasons related to personal lifestyles and family connections and a general unfamiliarity with living abroad. We can expect to see more anecdotally-based feature stories on this theme, however. And there is some longer-run elasticity where the underlying American social norms change.
In the meantime, homebody Americans pay more for gasoline, due to the demands from emerging economies, and pay less at Walmart, and otherwise wonder what the fuss is about.
For more on related points, read Charles’s new and excellent book The Upside of Down, not to be confused with Megan McArdle’s new and excellent The New Up Side of Down, a single space can make all the difference in the world.
Can public libraries offer high school degrees? (hi future)
The Los Angeles Public Library announced Thursday that it is teaming up with a private online learning company to debut the program for high school dropouts, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.
It’s the latest step in the transformation of public libraries in the digital age as they move to establish themselves beyond just being a repository of books to a full educational institution, said the library’s director, John Szabo.
Since taking over the helm in 2012, Szabo has pledged to reconnect the library system to the community and has introduced a number of new initiatives to that end, including offering 850 online courses for continuing education and running a program that helps immigrants complete the requirements for U.S. citizenship.
The library hopes to grant high school diplomas to 150 adults in the first year at a cost to the library of $150,000, Szabo said. Many public libraries offer programs to prepare students and in some cases administer the General Educational Development test, which for decades was the brand name for the high school equivalency exam.
But Szabo believes this is the first time a public library will be offering an accredited high school diploma to adult students, who will take courses online but will meet at the library for assistance and to interact with fellow adult learners.
The article is here, and for the pointer I thank Robert Tagorda.
Should women brag more?
Here is the latest:
Women’s Bragging Rights: Overcoming Modesty Norms to Facilitate Women’s Self-Promotion
Jessi Smith & Meghan Huntoon
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcomingAbstract:
Within American gender norms is the expectation that women should be modest. We argue that violating this “modesty norm” by boasting about one’s accomplishments causes women to experience uncomfortable situational arousal that leads to lower motivation for and performance on a self-promotion task. We hypothesized that such negative effects could be offset when an external source for their situational arousal was made available. To test hypotheses, 78 women students from a U.S. Northwestern university wrote a scholarship application essay to promote the merits of either the self (modesty norm violated) or another person as a letter of reference (modesty norm not violated). Half were randomly assigned to hear information about a (fake) subliminal noise generator in the room that might cause “discomfort” (misattribution available) and half were told nothing about the generator (normal condition: misattribution not available). Participants rated the task and 44 new naive participants judged how much scholarship money to award each essay. Results confirmed predictions: under normal conditions, violating the modesty norm led to decreased motivation and performance. However, those who violated the modesty norm with a misattribution source reported increased interest, adopted fewer performance-avoidance goals, perceived their own work to be of higher quality, and produced higher quality work. Results suggest that when a situation helps women to escape the discomfort of defying the modesty norm, self-promotion motivation and performance improve. Further implications for enhancing women’s academic and workplace experiences are discussed.
That is via Kevin Lewis.
Introductory Korean drama
To an economist like me, this fondness for hospitals is surprising, because hospitals are expensive in Korea and much of the bill is not covered by Korea’s National Health Insurance system. Price-elasticity of demand does not seem to work in Korean drama.
That is from Princeton economist Uwe E. Reinhardt, from a document from his “class” on Korean Drama (pdf). He introduces the “class” with this explanation:
After the near-collapse of the world’s financial system has shown that we economists really do not know how the world works, I am much too embarrassed to teach economics anymore, which I have done for many years. I will teach Modern Korean Drama instead.
Although I have never been to Korea, I have watched Korean drama on a daily basis for over six years now. Therefore I can justly consider myself an expert in that subject.
By the way, I have been watching Boys Over Flowers lately, a Korean drama (it’s also on Hulu). Think of it as a mix of Heathers, Mean Girls, and Clueless, but set in a posh Korean high school, with lots of “Average is Over” value. There is definitely income-elasticity of demand in Korean drama, even if there is not much price-elasticity. There is also plenty on matching models, moral hazard, status competition, and repeated games, and not always with cooperative solutions.
For the pointer I thank Oriol Andres.
Law and Literature syllabus 2014
The first class is today! Here is my reading list:
The New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition
Glaspell’s Trifles, available on-line.
Billy Budd and Other Tales, by Hermann Melville.
The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott.
Conrad Black, A Matter of Principle.
Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, volume 1.
I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov.
Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville, excerpts, chapters 89 and 90, available on-line.
Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.
Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman.
The Pledge, Friedrich Durrenmatt.
Haruki Murakami, Underground.
Honore de Balzac, Colonel Chabert.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49.
M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath.
Alan Moore, V for Vendetta.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl.
Some additions to this list will be made as we proceed. We also will view a few movies on legal themes, I will be back in touch on these.
I am likely to use A Separation and Memories of Murder as two of the movies, along with a new release depending on schedule.
Humane Studies Fellowships and Mercatus Center fellowships
For Humane Studies fellowships, the deadline is January 31st, 2014. “The Humane Studies Fellowship can provide grants for up to $15,000.00 in addition to opening the door to participation in a number of the Institute for Humane Studies’ programs. The code “HSFFeeWaiver” can be used to waive the application fee up until the final deadline.”
More information about the fellowship and where to apply can be found here:http://www.theihs.org/humane-studies-fellowships. Any questions can be addressed to [email protected].
And:
The Mercatus PhD Fellowship is a three-year, competitive, full-time fellowship program for students who are pursuing a doctoral degree in economics at George Mason University. It includes full tuition support, a stipend, and experience as a research assistant. It is a total award of up to $120,000 over three years. The application deadline is February 1, 2014.
The MA Fellowship is a two-year, competitive, full-time fellowship program for students pursuing a master’s degree in economics at George Mason University, public policy emphasis, application deadline is March 1, 2014.
The Adam Smith Fellowship is a one-year, competitive fellowship for graduate students attending PhD programs at any university, in a variety of fields, including economics, philosophy, political science, and sociology. Smith Fellows receive a stipend and attend workshops and seminars on the Austrian, Virginia, and Bloomington schools of political economy. It is a total award of up to $10,000 for the year. The application deadline is March 15, 2014.
Should economists aspire to be academics or to work in government?
From Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd:
The study was based on data from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, and also on surveys of economics Ph.D.s who entered or left programs in certain years. The work was conducted by Wendy Stock, professor of economics at Montana State University, and John Siegfried, professor of economics at Vanderbilt University.
Comparing four cohorts of economics Ph.D.s by year graduated (from 1997 through 2011), the study found that while a majority still enter academe, that share is going down. And while salaries for those in business and industry exceeded those in academe throughout the period studied, the time span saw salaries in government grow such that they too now exceed those in academe.
In 1997 63.7% of new economics Ph.d.s went into academia, as of 2011 it is 56.3%. The government to academia salary over that same time went from 0.87 to 1.17, see the chart at the initial link. For instance:
…for those who earned Ph.D.s in 1997, the average annual salary increase was 8.2 percent. But for academics that was 5.7 percent, while for non-academics it was 15.0 percent.
You can earn more if you were hired later:
“Indeed, the median salaries of graduates of full-time permanent 9-10 month academic economists hired in 2002-3 actually exceeded the median 2003 salaries of their counterparts initially hired in 1997-98,” the paper says.
There is a marriage penalty for women but not for men, and the paper reports this:
The surveys of new Ph.D.s also asked them about the doctoral education they received. Among the findings:
- Most said that the overall emphasis in their programs was “about right.”
- Most also reported too little emphasis on “applying economic theory to real-world problems,” “understanding economic institutions and history” and “the history of economic ideas.”
- Mathematics was viewed by most as more important in graduate school than in their careers.
- Skills in application, instruction and communication were more important in their careers than in graduate school.
Here are related thoughts from Megan McArdle and from Bryan Caplan. Can any of you find a link to the actual paper on-line (try this: http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=305#sthash.Avt8kMpt.dpuf)?
How the job of policeman is changing
Here is one bit from an interesting article:
Minnesota has long led the nation in peace officer standards; it’s the only state to require a two-year degree and licensing. Now, a four-year degree is becoming a more common standard for entry into departments including Columbia Heights, Edina and Burnsville. Many other departments require a four-year degree for promotion.
It’s not a rapid-fire change, but rather an evolution sped up by high unemployment that deepened the candidate pool and gave chiefs more choices. Officer pay and benefits can attract four-year candidates. Edina pays top-level officers $80,000; Columbia Heights pays nearly $75,000.
Nowadays, officers are expected to juggle a variety of tasks and that takes more education, chiefs said. Officers communicate with the public, solve problems, navigate different cultures, use computers, radios and other technology while on the move, and make split-second decisions about use of force with a variety of high-tech tools on their belt. And many of those decisions are recorded by squad car dashboard cameras, officer body cameras and even bystanders with smartphones.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Kirk Jeffrey.
On-line education at the AEA meetings in Philadelphia
I can recommend to you all the session Economics Education in the Digital Age, scheduled for Saturday, January 4, at 10:15 a.m.
Nancy Rose is chairing the proceedings and presented papers will be by Caroline Hoxby, Banerjee and Duflo, and Acemoglu, Laibson, and List, as well as by Alex and myself. They are all very interesting papers, as you would expect from these economists.
Why does Singapore have such a low birth rate?
In the comments, Collin asked:
How is it the most productive, functional country Singapore has one of the lowest birth rate in the world? Is this robot future in which only the better off have children? Why is it richer the world is the less people can afford children?
Right now the total fertility rate in Singapore is at about 1.2 and at times it has slipped down as far as 1.16. (Though it just went up to 1.29, perhaps because of “dragon babies,” noting that intertemporal substitution may snatch some of this back.) Why?
1. Singapore does education very well, and education lowers birth rates.
2. Singapore land and housing prices are especially high, which makes it very costly to have a family with three kids. Long working hours are expected too.
3. Singapore is a lot more fun than it used to be, and in this regard it has improved more than say France has. Children are a bit more fun, because modern life is safer, but “the fun of children” is subject to Baumol’s cost disease.
4. Women are doing very well in Singapore and arguably they are not so willing to marry down in terms of income and educational status. I was struck, when I gave a talk to the economists at the Civil Service College in Singapore this summer, that well over half the audience was female. Sadly for some, rates of female “singlehood” for women in their twenties are still rising (pdf, very useful). Controlling for education, however, female singlehood is not going up, which indicates the decline in fertility is related to the rise in education. And in that same piece you will find direct evidence for a “marriage squeeze” for well educated women and less educated men. That same squeeze doesn’t seem as strong in the other wealthy East Asian countries.
5. This 209 pp. cross-national comparative study (pdf, also very useful) suggests that Singapore’s generous childbearing subsidies do not work because women are still expected to shoulder so many responsibilities of child rearing. The traditional family model there is stronger than in say France. At the same time, France is a culture of leisure, long vacations, and limited work hours in a way which is quite far from practices in Singapore.
6. Modern fairytales do not work. Rap music also does not work (try this video, if you need help), nor do government-sponsored cruises and speed dating services.
7. It is suggested that population density lowers birth rates.
8. Child care and subsidized child care have been less common in Singapore than in France (see about p.119 of this pdf, the comparative study cited above), though Singapore has been changing in this regard.
Here is a typical Singaporean answer to the question:
What is stopping you from having more than 1-2 children?
“Very stressful, because when they misbehave, you have to scold them.”Why do you think some Singaporeans are not having children nowadays?
“It is very stressful for Singaporeans as the cost of living has gone up and they do not have time for their children. More women are now busy working too.”
If you are interested in the comparison, ethnic Chinese in Malaysia have a total fertility rate of about 1.8. Malays in Singapore have a TFR of about 1.6, whereas the ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indians in Singapore are just barely above 1.0. To me that suggests that both culturally-specific-to-Chinese-high-earner factors and cost-of-living-in-Singapore factors are playing a significant role. Malay population growth, in terms of Malay babies born in Malaysia, is robust. Perhaps Singaporean men need more confidence. In Shanghai, by the way, the rate is barely above 1.0.
If I had to put it all in a sentence, I might try this: in Singapore, work and educational norms have shifted far faster than have family norms, relative to other birth-subsidizing countries such as France.
Note, most of all, that the low birth rate in Singapore is not the fault of Lee Kuan Yew.
Are your eBooks reading you?
“What writer would pass up the opportunity to peer into the reader’s mind?” she asked.
Scribd is just beginning to analyze the data from its subscribers. Some general insights: The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all.
At Oyster, a top book is “What Women Want,” promoted as a work that “brings you inside a woman’s head so you can learn how to blow her mind.” Everyone who starts it finishes it. On the other hand, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s “The Cycles of American History” blows no minds: fewer than 1 percent of the readers who start it get to the end.
Oyster data shows that readers are 25 percent more likely to finish books that are broken up into shorter chapters. That is an inevitable consequence of people reading in short sessions during the day on an iPhone.
…He contrasted two romance novels. One had few Amazon reviews and little promotion, but Scribd’s data showed 6 out of 10 readers were finishing it — above average for the genre. Another romance had hundreds of reviews on Amazon, but only about 4 out of 10 readers bothered to finish it. They began closing the book, the data showed, when the writer plunged deeper into fantasy. Maybe this was not a good idea.
Some writers, of course, might not be receptive to hearing this.
“If you aren’t careful, you could narrow your creativity. You won’t take risks,” said Ms. Loftis, the young adult novelist. “But the bigger risk is not giving the reader what she wants. I’ll take all the data I can get.”
There is more here.
Where are the returns to skill highest?
Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.
That is from Eric A. Hanushek, Guido Schwerdt, Simon Wiederhold, and Ludger Woessmann, the NBER paper is here. There is an ungated OECD version here.
The Israel boycott is endorsed by the American Studies Association and Corey Robin
By a 2-1 margin, “An association of American professors with almost 5,000 members has voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities…” My earlier criticism of the boycott was here. A good Michael Kazin critique is here. Corey Robin defends the proposed boycott here. Robin’s argument is that change has to start somewhere, and we cannot boycott everything, so we might as well start with some boycotts that could work, even if that means singling out some targets unfairly.
I would start by applying a different standard. I would focus on the demands of the boycotters, and ask what is the chance that meeting those demands would work out well. The demands of the boycotters, in this case, include having Israel grant the “right of return” to Palestinians to the current state of Israel.
Now I understand the justice-based case for such a right, but what about the practicalities of such a change? The most striking feature of Robin’s boycott defense is that he doesn’t bother to argue this point.
In my untutored view, the chances that granting such rights would lead to outright civil war is at least p = 0.1, possibly much more, and the chances that such a change leads to a better outcome, in the Benthamite sense, are below p = 0.5. I readily grant these estimates may be wrong, but I don’t think they are absurdly wrong or implausible and in fact they represent a deliberate attempt on my part to eschew extreme predictions. An educated person or even a specialist might arrive at similar estimates or even more pessimistic ones. I would be curious to read Robin’s assessment.
By the way, you might think that the potential for bad outcomes is “the fault of the Israelis,” but that bears on the justice question, not on the Benthamite question. Don’t use “emotional allocation of the blame” to distract your attention from the positive questions at hand.
Why don’t we look at the world of science, where academic collaboration is actually um…useful?:
In science, however, the boycott movement has so far made comparatively few inroads.
“For us, it’s meaningless,” said Yair Rotstein, the executive director of the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), which was established in 1972 with an endowment funded by both countries. The boycott, he said, is something blown up in the media: for all practical purposes, “there really is no boycott.” Rotstein said that of about 7,000 requests to prospective external reviewers it sends each year, the foundation gets just one response on average from a scientist declining for political reasons.
Meanwhile, the BSF grants about $16 million in awards each year to American and Israeli scientists working on joint projects, having funded over the years, according to Rotstein, 42 Nobel Laureates. And since 2012, the BSF has partnered with the National Science Foundation to support collaborative research in biology, chemistry, computational neuroscience and computer science (The BSF gets an additional $3 million a year from the Israeli government to support these joint BSF-NSF projects.)
I still say this is not a boycott worth supporting. If we are going to do boycotts, and if we need to do boycotts, let’s do boycotts whose terms have a clearly positive Benthamite value with a minimum of extreme downside risk. There are plenty of those, and remember, we’ve been told that we need to be selective.
We’re back again to this whole thing being a lot of posturing. Note that the Palestinian government does not itself support boycotts of Israel. How about a small amount of solidarity with them?