Category: Education
Do Lacanians understand the third derivative?
I continue to read from Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis Theory and Technique. Here is another bit of interest:
…Lacanian analysis seeks to keep the analysand off guard and off-balance, so that any manifestation of the unconscious can have its full impact.
When fixed-length sessions are the norm, the analysand becomes accustomed to having a set amount of time to talk, and considers how to fill up that time, how best to make use of it. Analysands are very often aware, for example, that the dream they had the night before about their analyst is what is most important to their analysis, yet they try to fit in plenty of other things they want to talk about before they get to the dream (if they get to the dream). They thus attempt to minimize the importance of the dream in their own eyes, minimize the time that can be devoted to associating to it, or maximize the amount of time the analyst gives them. Analysands’ use of the time allotted to them in the session is part and parcel of their larger neurotic strategy (involving avoidance, neutralization of other people, and so on), and setting session length in advance merely encourages their neurosis.
The variable-length session throws analysands off guard, to some extent, and can be used in such a way as to encourage the analysand to get right to the good stuff.
I know some of you are making fun of me, but this is not the least interesting book I have read this week (though I would not want to base very much on it).
The job choices of Harvard graduates
Another 15 percent will be working in finance, nearly doubling the 9 percent who entered the sector last year but still paling in comparison to 2007, when before the financial crisis, 47 percent of graduating seniors went into finance.
The article is here, interesting throughout on other points too. I say they are lying about the sex and drugs, and maybe a few other things too, hat tip goes to @MattYglesias.
The GMU/UVa wage disparity and the signalling model of education
It’s a well-known fact — well-known around GMU that is — that GMU graduates earn higher average salaries than do UVA grads (direct link here), that is for four year undergrads in their first year of employment.
It’s not just that UVa is in decline, or that some of them end up richer later in life. Or others may use their wealthier parents to live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and avoid direct employment. A major reason for the wage discrepancy is simply that a disproportionate chunk of GMU students are likely to get jobs in the relatively high-paying Washington, D.C. area.
OK, so how does this relate to the broader ongoing debate over the signaling theory of education and wages?
It is widely accepted that UVa is a more exclusive school than GMU by the usual standards. Yet here we see labor markets “seeing through” those credentials, and paying more to the GMU graduates. In other words, labor markets are seeing that GMU students are, on average, “less exclusive by origin but will have a higher marginal product very quickly.”
The signaling model, in its simplest, most stripped down form, assumes that employers cannot judge the marginal products of individual new hires but instead pay them according to their credentials. Yet here we have a case where employers seem quite willing to make a judgment about marginal product and indeed that is a judgment which contradicts data on exclusivity of academic origins. Once you postulate that employers are willing to make estimates of individual marginal products which differ from the rankings that might be given by “raw ability,” the signaling model is less applicable. I don’t want to claim that the wages converge exactly on marginal products, but the credentials clearly are just one factor of many. Employer judgments of expected marginal products are not dominated by credentials, and you can imagine that after having a worker for a year or two the credentials are even less important as a means of judging prospective marginal product.
Another way to put this point is that the speed of employer learning is in fact fairly rapid, and some of it happens before the job even starts.
The virtual therapist
The virtual therapist sits in a big armchair, shuffling slightly and blinking naturally, apparently waiting for me to get comfortable in front of the screen.
“Hi, I’m Ellie,” she says. “Thanks for coming in today.”
She laughs when I say I find her a little bit creepy, and then goes straight into questions about where I’m from and where I studied.
“I’m not a therapist, but I’m here to learn about people and would love to learn about you,” she asks. “Is that OK?”
Ellie’s voice is soft and calming, and as her questions grow more and more personal I quickly slip into answering as if there were a real person in the room rather than a computer-generated image.
…With every answer I’m being watched and studied in minute detail by a simple gaming sensor and a webcam.
How I smile, which direction I look, the tone of my voice, and my body language are all being precisely recorded and analysed by the computer system, which then tells Ellie how best to interact with me.
Right now there are two assistants guiding the avatar, in essence standing behind a screen, but that will not always be the case:
Real people come in to answer Ellie’s questions every day as part of the research, and the computer is gradually learning how to react in every situation.
It is being taught how to be human, and to respond as a doctor would to the patients’ cues.
Soon Ellie will be able to go it alone.
The full article is here, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Titling of Property
The NYTimes has an excellent piece on Greece’s broken property system:
In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.
As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress. It scares off foreign investors; makes it hard for the state to privatize its assets, as it has promised to do in exchange for bailout money; and makes it virtually impossible to collect property taxes.
… less than 7 percent of the country has been properly mapped, officials say. Experts say that even the Balkan states, recovering from years of Communism and civil war, are far ahead of Greece when it comes to land registries attached to zoning maps — an approach developed by the Romans and in wide use in much of the developed world since the 1800s.
Here from our course on development economics at MRUniversity is our video which covers the theory and empirical research on titling from Peru to Palau:
http://youtu.be/1CFqK_lHngs
Some of the longer-run economic news is turning around
Here is my latest New York Times column. I would stress that the observed good news is not much showing up in real wages, but at least the outlines of a potential positive narrative are falling into place. For instance:
The nation’s high school graduation rate has risen — to 78 percent in 2010, the Education Department says in its most recent estimate. That’s obviously still not where it should be, but it’s the highest figure since 1974. (For a long time, the rate was under 70 percent. After decades of stagnation, the graduation rate started to turn up in 2000, and the growth has been robust for more than a decade.)
On average, these additional high school graduates — not to mention college degree recipients — will find better jobs and enjoy better health, long-lasting benefits that will be reaped for many decades.
And this:
The growth rate in health care costs has been slowing for the last four years. In some years, in fact, it’s been no higher than the growth rate of the economy as a whole. And much of the change appears driven by efficiencies, rather than by the recent recession. This is documented in a paper by David M. Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard, and Nikhil R. Sahni, a fellow at Harvard Business School; it appeared in the May 2013 issue of Health Affairs.
This cost deceleration isn’t guaranteed to stick, but the danger that sharply rising health care costs, compounding over time, will crash the entire economy is now somewhat reduced.
That’s hardly the Jetsons, but still education and health care have been major productivity drags on the economy in the past (not in terms of the measured number, but in terms of actual performance). Coming from another direction, we even find that California suddenly has a budget surplus. One other reason for optimism is this:
While the populations of countries like the United States are aging, the number of innovative young people worldwide has never been higher. Countries like China, India, Brazil and Russia, despite recent slowdowns in growth, still are making progress in improving their educational systems and scientific networks. That increases their ability to supply technological innovations — or scientists and entrepreneurs — to the United States. These gains can be reaped in coming decades.
For the cold water, do note that none of these other countries are currently major innovators in a way which benefits the United States. Still, perhaps the dependency ratio should be defined in terms of potential ideal creators, rather than bodies and ages per se, and then it is more favorable looking forward. Finally:
Note, too, that none of these trends can be reduced to breathless or utopian claims about the future of information technology, even though each is intertwined with tech progress in subtle ways. Further breakthroughs in technology, perhaps in the field of quantum computing, could add substantially to these positive trends.
The forthcoming clustering of human capital
A radical change is taking place in the German job market: Today’s immigrants to Germany are better trained and have a higher level of education than native Germans, according to a study carried out by labor market researcher Herbert Brücker on behalf of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a private think tank based in Gütersloh. Today, 43 percent of newly arriving immigrants between the ages of 15 and 65 have graduated from a university, a technical school or a graduate program, compared to only 26 percent of Germans without an immigration background.
The German public still largely believes that immigrants come primarily from low-skilled segments of the population, according to research done by the Nuremberg-based Institute for Employment Research (IAB).
Here is a bit more.
Questions that are rarely asked
In my email, from Eric Crampton:
Imagine the following deal, which is entirely not on any PPF so it’s not really a deal anyway. But imagine it. Genie offers a button. Push the button, and it burns the last n years of every journal in economics, along with all knowledge that those results ever existed, though they can be rediscovered. At the same time, every potential voter is brought up to a thorough Econ 101 level of understanding of Economics. At what value of n is the deal no longer worthwhile? A decade? Two?
Here is a related blog post by Eric. And here is Eric in praise of New Zealand health care institutions.
What did I learn from (another) re-read of Adam Smith?
Here is my MRU video on precisely that topic.
By the way, Brandon Dupont has done for us this excellent video on John Law.
When will most universities teach in English?
Higher Education Minister Genevieve Fioraso this past week introduced a bill that would allow French universities to teach more courses in English, even when English is not the subject. The goal, she explained, is to attract more students from such countries as Brazil, China and India, where English is widely taught, but French is reserved largely for literature lovers.
“Ten years ago, we were third in welcoming foreign students, but today we are fifth,” she said in a Q&A in the magazine Nouvel Observateur. “Why have we lost so much attraction? Because Germany has put in place an English program that has passed us by. We must make up the gap.”
The reaction?
Yet it has sparked cultural and nationalist outrage — not only from Paris intellectuals but also from several dozen members of Parliament, opposition as well as Socialist, who insist that learning French should be part of any foreign student’s experience in France.
From Jacques Attali:
“Not only would such a reform be contrary to the Constitution (which provides in its Article 2 ‘the language of the Republic is French’), but you cannot image an idea that is stupider, more counterproductive, more dangerous and more contrary to the interest of France,” he intoned in a blog.
There is more here. On one hand, on-line education makes fluency in English more important for plugging into dominant networks. On the other hand, technologies of easier subtitling and dubbing may keep other languages in contention. Still, I predict the former effect will win out, just as the internet has boosted English more generally, with or without Google Translate. The internet has indeed done a good deal to preserve, record, and ultimately transmit true minority languages, Nahuatl being one example of many, but it has not elevated them into general media of instruction.
The Adam Smith segment of the Great Economists course is underway
You will find it here, at MRUniversity.com. We have recorded videos covering, annotating, and explaining every single chapter of Smith’s masterwork Wealth of Nations, along with some coverage of surrounding historical material. Having to explain a book “along the way” is a very interesting way to read, and I was surprised how much Wealth of Nations rose in my eyes as a result of this project. I would like to do Keynes and Hayek and perhaps Marx in this manner as well.
Sentences to ponder
For jazz players, there is a negative relationship between earnings and having a BFA or a MFA.
The quotation is from here (pdf), the original source is Thomas M. Smith, pdf of the underlying paper here. There are other interesting results in this paper as well. Do note that if you don’t end up as a jazz player the degree still correlates with higher earnings.
How to make the rate of return on higher education negative
They’re signing up as we speak for a two-year degree course in heavy metal music (believed to be the first of its kind), which begins in September in a college in Nottingham.
…The degree organisers are loftily talking up the course by using terms such as “culture” and “context”. They point out that you can study music at Oxford, Cambridge or any other university, but that this “genre” degree is unique.
“Heavy metal is an extremely technical genre of music and its study is a rising academic theme,” they say. Metal is “seriously studied in conservatoires in Helsinki”, has classical music roots, and leading axe-men such as Joe Satriani incorporate the works of Paganini in their oeuvre.
Wow, Paganini. Get this:
“It’s a degree, so it will be academically rigorous,” said Mr Maloy [the sequence designer].
And why Nottingham?:
Not only was Earache Records, a heavy metal-focused record label, founded in the city, but additionally, the region’s Download Festival appeals to over 75,000 rock and metal fans on an annual basis.
The course fees are £5,750 a year. Here is a bit more information.
The Man of System
One sometimes hears arguments for busing or against private schools that say we need to prevent the best kids from leaving in order to benefit their less advantaged peers. I find such arguments distasteful. People should not be treated as means. I must confess, therefore, that I took some pleasure at the findings of a recent paper by Carrell, Sacerdote, and West:
We take cohorts of entering freshmen at the United States Air Force Academy and assign half
to peer groups designed to maximize the academic performance of the lowest ability students.
Our assignment algorithm uses nonlinear peer eff ects estimates from the historical pre-treatment
data, in which students were randomly assigned to peer groups. We find a negative and signi ficant treatment eff ect for the students we intended to help. We provide evidence that within our
“optimally” designed peer groups, students avoided the peers with whom we intended them to
interact and instead formed more homogeneous sub-groups. These results illustrate how policies
that manipulate peer groups for a desired social outcome can be confounded by changes in the
endogenous patterns of social interactions within the group.
I was reminded of Adam Smith’s discussion of exactly this issue in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
Do note that this discussion is not a critique of the paper which is very well done.
Further results on hypergamy
This paper, by Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica, was pointed out by Matt Yglesias on Twitter, the abstract is this:
We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We establish that gender identity – in particular, an aversion to the wife earning more than the husband – impacts marriage formation, the wife’s labor force participation, the wife’s income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. Within couples, if the wife’s potential income (based on her demographics) is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband.
Their title is “Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households.” There is a non-gated copy here.