Category: Education
Emails I receive (the consumer surplus of the internet)
…the origins of your name, off by a letter.
RL
> Put the following text into google: freemason Cowan Tyler What is the result?
Interesting. “Tyler” is the title of an officer in the Masonic hierarchy, while a “cowan” is a stonemason who is not a member of the Freemasons guild. This from “Freemasonry for Dummies”:
The Tyler’s job is to keep off all “cowans and eavesdroppers” (for more on the Tyler, see Chapter 5). The term cowan is unusual and its origin is probably from a very old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “dog.” Cowan came to be a Scottish word used as a putdown to describe stonemasons who did not join the Freemasons guild, while the English used it to describe Masons who built rough stone walls without mortar and did not know the true secrets of Freemasonry.
Questions that are rarely asked
It is estimated that less than $1B is spent in the U.S. each year on education research, with the federal government spending about $700M and universities, foundations and the private sector spending about $300M. That may sound like a lot, but it’s not. Consider that medicine and education should be two sides of the same coin. Both are services that developed democracies have decided all citizens are entitled to regardless of birth, station or resources. Medicine advances human health and happiness. Education advances economic productivity and happiness. Then consider that $140B is spent in the U.S. each year on medical research.
How to explain the 140:1 ratio?
Here is more.
Baumol’s new book on the cost disease
It is self-recommending, here are a few points of relevance:
1. There has been a clear cost disease in most kinds of education and many kinds of medicine, but I blame institutions and laws as much as the intrinsic nature of the product.
2. I do not see the arts as subject to the cost disease very much at all. As for the “live performing arts,” the disease seems to afflict the older and less innovative sectors, such as opera and the symphony. There is plenty of live music these days, it is offered in innovative ways, and much of it is free.
3. Even “the live performing arts” can be broken down into underlying characteristics, many of which show a great deal of recent innovation. For instance the supply of “musical immediacy” has been non-stagnant through YouTube, which often gives you a better glimpse of the performer than you get through nosebleed seats and giant screens. YouTube isn’t “live,” but there is no particular reason to break down the analysis at that level and certainly it is not a sacred category for consumers.
4. In many sectors of the arts, especially music, consumers demand constant turnover of product. Old music becomes “obsolete” — for whatever sociological reasons — and in this sense the sector is creating lots of new value every year. From an “objectivist” point of view they are still strumming guitars with the same speed, but from a subjectivist point of view — the relevant one for the economist – they are remarkably innovative all the time in the battle against obsolescence. A lot of the cost disease argument is actually an aesthetic objection that the art forms which have already peaked — such as Mozart — sometimes have a hard time holding their ground in terms of cost and innovation.
5. In general “cost disease” sectors do not remain constant over time. Agriculture has been unusually stagnant for the last twenty or so years, but it is hardly obvious that this trend will continue for the next century to come and it certainly was not the case for the period 1948-1990, quite the contrary.
6. The stagnancy of one sector may depend on the stagnancy of other sectors in non-transparent ways. “Live music” may seem like it doesn’t change much, but lifting the embargo on Cuba would boost the quantity and quality of my consumption of spectacular concert experiences, as would a non-stop flight to Haiti.
You can buy the book here.
Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.
The Evil of Pagination
I agree with Farhad Manjoo:
Splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop.
Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site’s highest priority—folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.
Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page. The practice has become so ubiquitous that it’s numbed many publications and readers into thinking that multipage design is how the Web has always been, and how it should be.
Neither is true: The Web’s earliest news sites didn’t paginate, and the practice grew up only over the past decade, in response to pressure from the ad industry. It doesn’t have to be this way—some of the Web’s most forward-thinking and successful publications, including BuzzFeedand the Verge, have eschewed pagination, and they’re better off for it.
*Mismatch*
The authors are Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and the subtitle is How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.
Here is the book’s website, and a summary:
… law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr. draw on extensive new research to prove that racial preferences put many students in educational settings where they have no hope of succeeding. Because they’re under-prepared, fewer than half of black affirmative action beneficiaries in American law schools pass their bar exams. Preferences for well-off minorities help shut out poorer students of all races. More troubling still, major universities, fearing a backlash, refuse to confront the clear evidence of affirmative action’s failure.
As you may know, the Supreme Court starts hearing oral arguments on affirmative action on October 9th. I have not much followed the empirical debate on affirmative action, but it seems to me this is likely the best recent book on the “anti” side. On the pro side, you can read The Shape of the River, by William Bowen and Derek Bok.
The New Republic covers MRU
I very much enjoyed this new article by Marc Tracy. (The site is now up! And if we haven’t processed your registration yet it is because we are swamped with numbers, our apologies, please bear with us.) Excerpt:
The videos, several of which were made available to me, are indeed more friendly than the stuff you typically find on Coursera, if not as viscerally captivating as, say, a TED talk. Manufactured with Microsoft PowerPoint and a $4 iPad app, they tend to last in the neighborhood of five to eight minutes—Cowen, who possesses a parody of an economist’s precision, noted on his blog, “The average video is five minutes, twenty-eight seconds long”—with segments frequently summarizing and highlighting the most interesting parts of academic papers (“Seasonal Food Prices and Policy Responses: A Narrative Account of Three Food Security Crises in Malawi”); these papers are duly credited and usually available online for free.
Narrated by Cowen or Tabarrok, the videos share the curiosity, eclectic interests, and tongue-in-cheek dryness of the blog. For example, Cowen riffs off a paper that showed that when cable television was introduced to several Indian villages, the fertility rate fell. He intones, in a studied deadpan reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s belabored enunciation: “We don’t know, however, whether this is because women or families have better information about birth control, or simply that they’re exposed to alternative visions of different lifestyles on TV, and maybe want to spend their time in ways other than just having more children.”
Maybe today you should go visit MRUniversity.com
The link is here, and we thank you for your interest. Read Alex’s opening statement for more information:
Welcome to MRU! At right you will find our first course, Development Economics. Click the + to see the videos in each section. New sections will be released at the beginning of every week and there will be bonus sections released during the middle of some weeks. Practice questions for each video provide some simple feedback.
Anyone can watch videos and take the practice questions but to truly participate by asking and answering questions, posting material, partcipating in chats and so forth you will need to register. Please do register as this will also help us to plan for future courses. There is no charge for registering.
In order to make our material as widely available as possible the videos default to low resolution, 380p, but if you have good bandwidth we recommend bumping them up to 480p which will increase video and audio resolution. You can do this on many platforms (not all) by clicking near the bottom right of the video and then clicking the settings button.
The course is designed for videos but every lecture also includes a downloadable MP3 in the section Related Materials.
The “How to Use” section (link in bar at top), includes ideas such as flipping the classroom and some basic directions for making your own videos.
In coming weeks, we will be releasing new features and announcing virtual and live chats!
Women economists see the world differently
The biggest disagreement: 76% of women say faculty opportunities in economics favor men. Male economists point the opposite way: 80% say women are favored or the process is neutral.
As for politics:
Female economists tend to favor a bigger role for government while male economists have greater faith in business and the marketplace. Is the U.S. economy excessively regulated? Sixty-five percent of female economists said ‘no’ — 24 percentage points higher than male economists.
The story is here. The article is “Are Disagreements Among Male and Female Economists Marginal at Best? A Survey of AEA Members and Their Views on Economics and Economic Policy,” Ann Mari May, Mary G. McGarvey and Robert Whaples, Contemporary Economic Policy (forthcoming), but I can’t seem to find a copy on-line.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
A cultural guide for Afghanis
After eleven years, we are trying a new approach:
“Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you,” the guide instructs.
“When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind,” it explains. “They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”
This is news to me, though I would like to see it confirmed:
Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.
Finally:
NATO’s coalition is described as a “work of art.”
For my house, I might rather have a Suzani.
The culture that is Germany
Men are in particularly high demand because many parents don’t want their children looked after exclusively by women. According to a study carried out on behalf of the Ministry of Family Affairs, more than a third of mothers and fathers prefer day care facilities that have male staff. The higher the parents’ educational and income levels, the more important they consider having male child care workers.
Here is much more.
From the Institute for New Economic Thinking
We would like to introduce our new blog on the website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) entitled ‘Reading Mas-Colell’, which will initially run in the fall of 2012, alongside our teaching of a course which uses the textbook on microeconomics by Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green. We hope to make a modest contribution to economic thinking by engaging in selective close reading and commentary on a very influential text, which in certain ways has become a ‘Bible’.
Our goal is to help through the blog to change the way in which economics teaching is approached at the Ph.D. level (many agree that it is limited and limiting). We hope to generate a lively conversation on how economics is taught and practiced today.
You can find the blog on the INET website at:
http://ineteconomics.org/blog/reading-mas-colell
We very much hope that you and your readers will participate in the conversation that we hope to generate.
Best wishes,
Sanjay G. Reddy and Raphaele Chappe
Economic education in Italy
Prof. Antonio Nicita emails to me:
Following a long period of cooperation in the field of Economics, the Universities of Florence, Pisa and Siena announce a new joint regional PhD program, with 10 three years scholarships, supported by Regione Toscana.
The Doctorate courses will provide students the knowledge, analytical skills and capabilities to conduct their research at the frontier of economics. Our programme gives emphasis to economic history and the history of economic thought, and recognizes the importance of exposing students to different theoretical perspectives.
First year courses will mainly be held at the University of Siena, where students are welcome to apply for accommodation facilities. In the following years students will rely on the academic environment and facilities in one of the three universities, according to their research interests.
For additional information please refer to the site: http://www.econ-pol.unisi.it/dottorato/, or to the official sites of the Tuscan Universities
MR is Going to Korea: Gangnam Style!
Tyler and I will both be in South Korea in early October for the Asian launch of Marginal Revolution University. Tyler will be speaking at the World Knowledge Forum (Oct. 9-11). The WKF is known as the Asian Davos. In addition to Tyler, the speakers include Paul Krugman, Daron Acemoglu, Malcolm Gladwell, Cass Sunstein, Dani Rodrik, a number of other well known economists and social scientists and a host of political and business leaders.
Coincidentally, Google invited me to speak in South Korea on Oct. 9. I will be speaking on Innovation at the Google Big Tent event in Gangnam! I will also be on several panels at the WKF on the 10th and 11th.
Neither Tyler nor I have been to Korea before so we are looking forward to the trip. Recommendations welcome in the comments.
We are committed to making MRU a global player in online education.
The bias against stale labor
Rational or not? Brian Leiter reports:
Philosopher Daniel Weiskopf (George State) calls my attention to a quite startling ad for a job in English at Colorado State University, which requires that applicants have earned the PhD since 2010! As the linked post notes, given the state of the humanities job market, everyone knows there are lots of very good candidates with PhDs from 2009, 2008 and, horrors, even 2007 who still haven’t found suitable appointments. This ad promises to consign them to the discard pile without even looking at them.
There is another example here. By the way, here is a Leiter post updating us on Grayling’s New College of the Humanities.
Does work or school boost your vocabulary more?
From the new James R. Flynn book:
It appears that the world of work, which follows university, has been the main force behind the adult vocabulary gains of the last half-century…Note that in 1953, low-IQ people enhanced their vocabularies over the ages of 17 to 22 far more than low-IQ people did in 2000. I suggest the hypothesis that they were more likely to be settled in apprenticeships or adult jobs in those days than today. Even the high-IQ people increased their vocabularies more between the ages of 17 to 22 in 1953 than in 2000. Apparently being placed in work was more potent than being in a tertiary institution.
Isn’t it also the case that we have been moving to a flatter, simpler English for a long time? Try reading some James Fenimore Cooper. Plus schools are less likely to make you memorize long, classic poems, which is another good way of building vocabulary.