Category: Education
India, India, India!
Today at MRUniversity we release the first of our country sections, India. In nearly 50 videos we cover key aspects of India’s history, economics, politics and culture from the viewpoint of development economics. Among the topics are India’s Early Growth History, Gandhi and the Salt March, the Green Revolution, Food Crises and the Media, the Rise of Private Education in India, and the Economics of Bollywood.
Tyler and I will both be in Delhi on Thursday December the 20th to talk to students of MRUniversity and others about economics, development and the future of online education. Information on times and places to follow.
By the way, for those of you taking the Development Economics course the India material is bonus to be sampled at will – this won’t be on the exam!
MRU also introduces new features this week including user contributions of links, videos and other materials directly from the video pages, ordering of questions by votes or recency and easier ways to see and access related materials and user contributions.
How much do charter schools really matter?
I’ve seen so many people discuss this topic, but Yusuke Jinnai seems to be making progress on the question. Here is part of his abstract:
In this paper, I propose a new empirical approach to identify the impact of charter schools on local traditional schools. Specifically, I define direct impact as the effect of introducing charter schools on traditional-school students in grades that overlap with charter schools’ grades, while indirect impact is defined as the effect on students in non-overlapping grades. Unlike prior research work, which estimates the effects of charter school entry at the school level, I examine the impact at the grade level by exploiting the variation in gaps between grades offered by charter schools and grades at nearby traditional schools.
Using student-level panel data from North Carolina, this paper shows that the introduction of charter schools does not induce any significant indirect impact but generates a positive and significant direct impact on student achievement. Distinguishing between the two distinct impacts and taking into consideration both traditional-school and charter-school students, my study finds overall positive effects of introducing charter schools on student achievement. I also demonstrate that such overall effects would have been underestimated by 85% in the literature, since previous work identifies the impact of charter school entry at a moment when the direct and indirect impacts are likely to be mixed.
Finally, I argue that the direct impact consists of student sorting effects and competitive effects and, by controlling for unobserved peer characteristics, demonstrate one-quarter of the positive direct impact is driven by the former while three-quarters result from the latter.
The paper is here, and Yusuke is on the job market from Rochester this year. His entire portfolio of papers on education appears to be quite interesting.
Here is a related post on school choice in Sweden, from Modeled Behavior.
Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental Study
That is a new paper by Dan M. Kahan, at Yale Law School, and it has to do with what I call “mood affiliation”:
Social psychologists have identified various plausible sources of ideological polarization over climate change, gun violence, national security, and like societal risks. This paper reports a study of three of them: the predominance of heuristic-driven information processing by members of the public; ideologically motivated cognition; and personality-trait correlates of political conservativism. The results of the study suggest reason to doubt two common surmises about how these dynamics interact. First, the study presents both observational and experimental data inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with closed-mindedness: conservatives did no better or worse than liberals on an objective measure of cognitive reflection; and more importantly, both demonstrated the same unconscious tendency to fit assessments of empirical evidence to their ideological predispositions. Second, the study suggests that this form of bias is not a consequence of overreliance on heuristic or intuitive forms of reasoning; on the contrary, subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition. These findings corroborated the hypotheses of a third theory, which identifies motivated cognition as a form of information processing that rationally promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signify their loyalty to important affinity groups. The paper discusses the normative significance of these findings, including the need to develop science communication strategies that shield policy-relevant facts from the influences that turn them into divisive symbols of identity.
To put that in Cowenspeak, both sides are guilty, the smart are guiltiest of them all, and the desire for group loyalty is partially at fault. Is it possible you have seen these propensities in the economics blogosphere?
Here is a related blog post by Kahan, here is another on how independents do somewhat better than you might think, here is Kahan’s blog.
I would stress the distinction between epistemic process and being more right about the issues at a given point in time. Even if various groups of individuals are epistemically similar in terms of how they process information, at some point in time some groups still will be more right than others, just as some sports fans, every now and then, are indeed backing the winning teams. It’s less a sign of virtue than you might think.
For the pointer I thank Jonas Kathage.
Sentences to ponder
Fewer children in the United States grow up with both biological parents than in any other affluent country for which data are available.
Here is another bit:
Genuine progress probably hinges on poor or less-educated women delaying childbirth. Eventually, this will happen; the teen birthrate has already been dropping for nearly two decades, albeit slowly. For its part, Washington (or any other government) has only limited tools to speed it up.
That is from Lane Kenworthy, from his article on why opportunity has slowed down in the United States, hat tip Brad DeLong.
“The Myth of American Meritocracy: How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?”
There is a new and stimulating piece by Ron Unz, in The American Conservative. The article covers plenty of ground, but I took away two main points. The first is that there is massive and quite unjustified bias against Asian and Asian-American students in the U.S. admissions process. Yes, I already thought that but it turns out it is much worse than I had thought. Yet many people support this aspect of our current admissions systems, either directly or indirectly.
The second point is the claim that Jewish academic achievement in America is collapsing at the top end, in relative terms at least.
For reasons which are possibly irrational on my end, but perhaps not totally irrational, I am not entirely comfortable with the religious and ethnic and racial “counting” methods applied in this piece (blame me for mood affiliation if you wish). Still, it is an interesting read and after some internal debate I thought I would pass it along, albeit with caveats.
In any case, the link to the article is here.
Marginal Revolution University videos on foreign aid
These new videos are up, click on “Foreign Aid” to access them, under “Course in Progress” on the right hand side of the page. For a sample, here is Alex’s video on whether foreign aid increases growth. Here is my video on the Millennium Villages Project.
Arnold Kling is blogging again
The blog is here, the subtitle is “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree.” Arnold is a favorite of mine, along a variety of dimensions I might add.
The dangers of “early intervention”
An Australian psychologist says smartphone apps allowing parents to send their naughty children phone calls from Santa “are not useful” and “could be abused.”
Dr. John Irvine said the smartphone apps — including the free “Fake Call From Santa” app and the $1.99 “Parents Calling Santa” app — are “not productive” methods of behavior correction, The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, reported Wednesday.
“These kinds of apps have made the Santa threat much more real and immediate and they could be abused by some parents in the lead-up to Christmas Day,” he said. “What is the point in threatening something that you are not going to carry out? Is mum really going to cancel presents on Christmas Day?
“Empty threats are not useful as kids soon realize that there are no consequences,” he said.The “Fake Call from Santa” app includes an incoming call with audio, but the “Parents Calling Santa” app allows parents to choose from three recorded messages — a “well done call,” a “could do better” call, or a “must improve or you will get a lump of coal for Christmas” call.
The link is here.
The new Emily Oster book
Expecting Better: How to Fight the Pregnancy Establishment with Facts.
Due out next August!
More on Online Education
At Cato Unbound I respond to some of the critics of my article Why Online Education Works. Here is one bit:
We do need more studies of offline, online, and blended education models, but the evidence that we do have is supportive of the online model. In 2009, The Department of Education conducted a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies and found:
- Students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.
- Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.
- Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed than in those studies where online learners worked independently.
- The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types. Online learning appeared to be an effective option for both undergraduates (mean effect of +0.30, p < .001) and for graduate students and professionals (+0.10, p < .05) in a wide range of academic and professional studies.
Does corruption harm economic growth?
Chris Blattman says maybe not. Excerpt:
The reasons that corruption should hurt growth are so persuasive that economists have been pretty surprised not to find much evidence. One team reviewed 41 different cross-country studies of corruption and development. Two-thirds of the studies don’t even find a negative correlation. Cross-country studies have mostly bad data and empirics, so we should not rest here. But Jacob Svensson has a nice overview of the broader evidence and draws the same conclusion: there’s not much to show that corruption reduces growth on net.
I worry more about corruption than those remarks would indicate, though I agree with Chris that the issue isn’t nearly as important as stopping a civil war.
First, I see a strong correlation between high levels of per capita income and low corruption. (I don’t worry about the lack of correlation with growth rates because, for one thing, poor countries, even many corrupt ones, may grow more rapidly for reasons related to the Solow model.) The causality here is hard to sort out, but there is plenty of micro evidence that corruption harms prosperity; it’s not just an aesthetic taste of wealthy people to limit corruption, the way they might buy nice interior drapes.
Furthermore, the correct corruption/poverty model may have multiple equilibria, depending on expectations. In that setting, making your country “look clean” may improve outcomes by shifting the economy up to better equilibria, even if lower corruption isn’t a direct cause of greater prosperity. There is worse advice than “Act like a rich country, and in the meantime you may become one,” at least provided you do not take this as liberty to spend above your means or to slack off with the work hours.
Second, even high levels of wealth will in some regards bring more corruption, especially as a country moves out of “fourth world” status or other forms of extreme poverty. Corruption very often rises with complexity and so along some margins it is correlated with wealth levels too. Similarly, we find that economic growth tends to bring more sexual harassment in the workplace, if only because more women are working outside the home. Yet it is still correct to think of the harassment as a very real negative, as is corruption.
In any case, this week’s new videos are up at MRU and they cover the topic of corruption, go over and take a look. Here is one video on the causal question about corruption and growth. Here is our video on the causes and predictors of corruption, historically speaking. Here is our video on how corruption can trap economies.
New intermediate microeconomics textbook by Goolsbee, Levitt, and Syverson
It is by Austan Goolsbee, Steve Levitt, and Chad Syverson. I have only browsed it, but it looks very good. There is information about the book here (note that we share a publisher; they do great books!).
Economists are everywhere China fact of the day
North Korean-trained economist Zhang Dejiang is expected to head the largely rubber-stamp parliament, while Shanghai party boss Yu Zhengsheng is likely to head parliament’s advisory body, according to the order in which their names were announced.
Tianjin party chief Zhang Gaoli and Liu Yunshan, a conservative who has kept domestic media on a tight leash, make up the rest of the group.
And who said education doesn’t matter?
The story is here, via Emily Kaiser.
The wisdom of Alex Tabarrok
Alex did not reproduce this passage from his essay on on-line education, so I will did (and Reihan Salaam did):
Productivity in education has lagged productivity in other sectors of the economy because teaching is so labor intensive. Where exactly in the typical classroom is there room for investment, let alone productivity improvement? More chalk? Prior to online education, the bottleneck though which productivity improvements had to pass was the teacher, and we know that improving teacher productivity is very difficult, which is why teaching methods haven’t changed in millennia. Online education vastly increases the potential for productivity increases because it greatly increases the size of the potential market. Bigger markets increase the incentive to research and develop new products (coincidentally the very topic of my TED talk.) A tool used to improve online education–an interface, an algorithm, a new teaching method–can be applied very widely, potentially world-wide, thus greatly increasing the incentive to invest in the education sector, perhaps the most important sector of the 21st century economy.
Here are some budges forward on the accreditation of MOOCs.
Addendum: Here are interesting comments from Joshua Gans.
Why Online Education Works
My essay at Cato Unbound, Why Online Education Works, goes beyond much of the recent discussion to give specific examples of how online teaching increases the productivity and quality of education. Here is one bit:
Dale Carnegie’s advice to “tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said” makes sense for a live audience. If 20% of your students aren’t following the lecture, it’s natural to repeat some of the material so that you keep the whole audience involved and following your flow. But if you repeat whenever 20% of the audience doesn’t understand something, that means that 80% of the audience hear something twice that they only needed to hear once. Highly inefficient.
Carnegie’s advice is dead wrong for an online audience. Different medium, different messaging. In an online lecture it pays to be concise. Online, the student is in control and can choose when and what to repeat. The result is a big time-savings as students proceed as fast as their capabilities can take them, repeating only what they need to further their individual understanding.
More at the link including a discussion of how most of my teaching career happened in 15 minutes.
Responses from Siva Vaidhyanatha (Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia), Alan Ryan (former Warden of New College, Oxford) and Kevin Carey (Director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation) follow later this week.