Category: Education
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.
Not all of higher education is in financial trouble
In the almost six years since Falwell’s death, Liberty University has doubled its student head count — twice.
Total enrollment now exceeds 74,000, with nearly 62,000 working toward degrees online in fields such as psychology, business, education, criminal justice and, of course, religion. That makes Liberty the largest university in Virginia — with more than double the number of students at No. 2 George Mason — and the largest private, nonprofit university in the country. With a slogan of “training champions for Christ,” Liberty also is the nation’s largest university with a religious affiliation.
Liberty figured out how to recruit masses of students via the Internet years before elite universities began ballyhooed experiments with free online courses.
…Liberty’s expansion has yielded a river of money. The university ended 2012 with more than $1 billion in net assets for the first time, counting cash, property, investments and other holdings. That is 10 times what the school had in 2006, putting Liberty in the same financial league as universities such as Pepperdine, Georgetown and Tulane.
Flush with cash, Liberty is building a huge, $50 million library, replacing old dormitories and angling to place its Flames football team in a conference eligible for NCAA bowl games.
That is by Nick Anderson, here is more.
Online Education and Jazz
A common responses to my article, Why Online Education Works, is that there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. The time I saw Otis Clay in a small Toronto bar, my first Springsteen concert, the Teenage Head riot at Ontario Place these are some of my favorite and most memorable cultural experiences and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.
Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.
Edmundson also says this about online courses:
You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will.
Edmundson reminds me of composer John Philip Sousa who in 1906 wrote The Menace of Mechanical Music, an attack on the phonograph that sounds very similar to the attack on online education today.
It is the living, breathing example alone that is valuable to the student and can set into motion his creative and performing abilities. The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art.
Sousa could not imagine it, but needless to say recorded music has inspired many inventive geniuses. Edmundson’s failure of imagination is even worse than Sousa’s, online courses are already creating intellectual joy (scroll down).
(Sousa was right about a few things. Recorded music has reduced the number of musical amateurs and the playing of music in the home. Far fewer pianos are sold today, for example, than in 1906 when Sousa wrote and that is true even before adjusting for today’s much larger population. Online education will similarly change teaching and I don’t claim that every change will be beneficial even if the net is good.)
Sousa and Edmundson also underestimate how much recording can add to the pursuit of artistic excellence. Many musical works, for example, cannot be well understood or fully appreciated with just a few listens. Recording allows for repeated listening and study. Indeed, one might say that only with recording, can one truly hear.
Recording also let musicians truly hear and thus compare, contrast and improve. Most teachers will also benefit from hearing and seeing themselves teach. With recording, teaching will become more like writing and less like improv. How many people write perfect first drafts? Good writing is editing, editing, editing. Live teaching suffers from too much improv and not enough editing. Sometimes I improv in class–also called winging it–but like most people I am usually better when I am better prepared. (Tyler, in contrast, is the Charlie Parker of live teaching.)
Sousa and the modern critics of online education also miss how new technologies bring new possibilities. For Sousa then, as for Edmundson today, the new technologies are simply about recording the live experience. But recorded music brought the creation of new kinds of music. Indeed, a lot of today’s music can’t be played live.
In his excellent 1966 disquisition, The Prospects for Recording (highly recommended, fyi), pianist Glenn Gould said that using the technology of the studio “one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination.” The same will be true for online education.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments.
Sentences to ponder
A query about MRU
Christina asks on Twitter:
@tylercowen neat!#loyalreaderrequest: a post about how you all think about which courses to add?
The first prerequisite is that the teacher be interested in the material and familiar with current debates. A second issue is that it be readily teachable on-line, though I don’t think it is yet clear which segments of economics fit this bill. My suspicion is that extreme narrative material (economic history, history of economic thought) or purely technical material (“what are the mechanics of covered interest parity?”) will do best here, but that is unproven to say the least. (If that is right, why quality of coverage should be non-monotonic in degree of narrative is an interesting question.) Third, we would like to cover most courses and most fundamentals of economics, in due time, so in part these are issues of sequencing rather than either/or issues of coverage or not.
We will have many more videos coming up today, and in addition to the four new classes we are working on some forthcoming classes too. When using the new MRU page, you can go through the menus. Alternatively, I use visual fields differently than do most people, so I find it easiest to scroll down the page to the “All Videos” section and simply view the entire menu of choice. Up to you.