Category: Education
How do Maryland and Virginia differ?
From Jared Sylvester, a loyal TCEDG reader:
I was reading through your dining guide, looking for a place to go with my father this weekend. In your write up of Crisfields [http://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/?p=561] you said "The accompanying visit to Silver Spring is an object lesson in how Maryland and Virginia differ." I was wondering if you would mind blogging on that topic.
Let's restrict (most of) this to the adjacent parts of each state. The food says a lot: Maryland has kosher food and Caribbean food. Virginia has better Bolivian, Vietnamese, Korean, Afghan, Ethiopian, and Persian food. (Here is a new piece on minorities in Virginia.) Both have excellent Sichuan food. Both have very good El Salvadoran and Thai food. Neither has real barbecue. Maryland used to have better Indian food, now Virginia has much better Indian food, including dosas. Apart from Bethesda, Maryland has virtually no "fine dining." Maryland has many more Russians, albeit without a decent restaurant.
Virginia has Tysons Corner, Tysons Mall I and II, The Palm, and a Ritz-Carlton, or in other words a lot of tacky, revenue-generating corporate assets. Virginia has better and more consistent school systems. Virginia has better Beltway on- and off-ramps.
Bethesda is better integrated into DC than is any part of Virginia, with Arlington playing catch-up. Virginia has the airports, the Pentagon, a better business climate, and lower taxes.
The Pentagon and the military are central to my theory of why Virginia is such a well-run state. Virginia has a major cash cow, to provide employment and taxable incomes, yet unlike Alaska's oil revenue, it is not one that the state government can get its hands on beyond general sources of tax revenue. The Pentagon, as a natural asset, does not foster corruption or complacency in the Virginia state government. It is politically untouchable. It makes Virginia a conservative yet interventionist and technocratic state. Maryland has more inherited blight.
Virginia has more ugly colonial houses, and more arches and pillars, Maryland has more tacky old American box houses. I dislike ugly colonial.
Virginia feels more like an assortment of minorities working within an essentially Protestant framework. Maryland was originally founded as a Catholic colony.
Looking to the state as a whole, Virginia doesn't have a proper city; Norfolk and Virginia Beach are agglomerations based around what are traditionally non-urban rationales. I bet people in California, or for that matter Shenzhen, don't even know they are cities at all. The third largest city, Chesapeake, no one has heard of, or cares about, if not for the nearby Bay. Other parts of Maryland, such as you find along the Susquehanna, were long integrated into more northerly and westerly trade routes. Virginia's major waterways lead to the sea.
I've long lived in Virginia, and never wanted to live in Maryland, even if I could equalize the commute.
Observations about Chinese (Chinese-American?) mothers
I agree with many of Bryan Caplan's views on parenting, and Yana can attest that I have never attempted a "dragon mother" style. Yet I think that Bryan is overreaching a bit in rejecting virtually all of Amy Chua's claims. The simpler view — which most Americans intuitively grasp — is that some Asian parenting styles do make kids more productive, and better at school, although it is less clear they make the kids happier. It remains the case that most people overrate how much parenting matters in a broader variety of contexts, and in that regard Bryan's work is hardly refuted. Still, I see real evidence for a parenting effect from many (not all) Asian-American and Asian families.
1. James Flynn argues, using evidence from tests, that Chinese families boosted their children's IQs by intensive parental techniques. Based on some very specific research, he claims the parenting was causal and the IQ boost followed. I hardly consider this the final word, but it's more to the point that the adoption studies and the like, which don't try to measure this effect directly and don't have measures of strict Asian parenting.
2. It is obvious that some Asian parenting techniques make the children much more likely to succeed as classical musicians. It's a big marginal effect upon whatever genetic influence there might be (and in this case the genetic influence might well be zero or very small; Chinese hardly seem genetically superior in music.) The only question is how much longer this list can become. What else can the parents make their kids better at, even relative to IQ? Future engineering success? If violin is a slam dunk, I don't see why engineering is a big stretch.
3. I suspect that Bryan and his wife do, correctly, apply the notion of "high expectations" to their children and to the benefit of those kids.
4. Bryan, like Judith Harris, argues that the influence of parents is typically mediated through peers and peer effects. But we should not confuse the partial and general equilibrium mechanisms here. For any single parent, the peers may well carry the chain of influence to their child and a lot of the parenting style applied to that individual kid will appear irrelevant. But for the culture as a whole, the peers can serve this function only because of the general influence of culture and parenting on all of the peers as a whole. In other words, peer quality is endogenous and a single family is free-riding upon the parenting efforts of others. That's a better model than just looking at the partial equilibrium coefficient on the parent effect and concluding that parenting doesn't matter. This is a mistake commonly made by Harris fans.
5. As an aside, I wonder how much there is a common Chinese parenting or mothering style. Chua, of course, is from the Philippines. It is estimated that about 20 percent of the children are China are "abandoned" by their parents — mothers too – typically as the parents move to the cities to take better jobs. When Chua writes, to what extent is she referring to Chinese immigrant parenting styles, uniquely suited to new situations, and derived from Chinese culture but distinct nonetheless.
6. There is a significant literature on Chinese immigrant parenting styles, based on lots of empirical evidence, but I don't see anyone giving it much of a close look. Here is a simple and well-known piece, not about Asians per se, arguing that "authoritative parenting" leads to superior performance in school. There is also evidence that the effects accumulate rather than disappear over time. There is a lot of research here, often quite disaggregated in its questions, and it goes well beyond the twin studies and it does not by any means always yield the same answers.
7. I expect great things from Scott Sumner's children.
Iceland fact of the day
The total literature of Iceland is under 50,000 books, which is easily scannable in 2 years by 12 people using the scribe scanners of the Internet Archive.
Indeed they might put it all on-line. Hat tip goes to Annie Lowrey.
Dialogue with David Leonhardt
It's about how to spur innovation, read it here. Here is one excerpt:
I would also like to see more of our elite institutions of higher education take the explicitly meritocratic and indeed arguably anti-egalitarian approaches of Caltech and also University of Chicago. Those two institutions are big successes – M.I.T. too – yet they are not always so easy to copy. We should be trying harder. In terms of respect for intelligence, achievement, and science, we should be more like Singapore.
The question did not come up, but I also favor reduced liability standards for major new innovations. Take the various plans for robot-driven cars. They will kill some people, as do human-driven cars. We run the risk of having the status quo so locked into place, so grandfathered, and so implicitly favored by the realities of regulation and lawsuits, that such an idea might never get off the ground. That in turn affects the incentives of innovators ex ante.
The evolution of regionalisms on Twitter
Postings on Twitter reflect some well-known regionalisms, such as Southerners' "y'all," and Pittsburghers' "yinz," and the usual regional divides in references to soda, pop and Coke. But Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU's Machine Learning Department, said the automated method he and his colleagues have developed for analyzing Twitter word use shows that regional dialects appear to be evolving within social media.
In northern California, something that's cool is "koo" in tweets, while in southern California, it's "coo." In many cities, something is "sumthin," but tweets in New York City favor "suttin." While many of us might complain in tweets of being "very" tired, people in northern California tend to be "hella" tired, New Yorkers "deadass" tired and Angelenos are simply tired "af."
The "af" is an acronym that, like many others on Twitter, stands for a vulgarity. LOL is a commonly used acronym for "laughing out loud," but Twitterers in Washington, D.C., seem to have an affinity for the cruder LLS.
That is from Science Daily, hat tip goes to LanguageHat and the original paper (pdf) is here.
Stan Kenton and Leslie Kenton
I never knew my paternal grandfather, but I was told he loved the music of Bartok, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and above all, Stan Kenton. My grandfather was a professional jazz drummer in the era of big band, supposedly with more talent than workplace discipline. Maybe because it's a way of keeping a connection with Grandpa Tom, but I've been listening to the music of Stan Kenton for about thirty-five years. In any case the best Kenton cuts (download here) still strike me as underrated. Despite the clunky and sometimes elephantine side of Kenton's style, his work draws upon, and anticipates, developments in compositional jazz, European modernism, Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound," and early Latin rhythms, all topped off with an energetic American brashness. I eagerly lapped up last year's new Kenton biography. But now — what am I to do? I've just read Leslie Kenton's Love Affair: A Memoir of a Forbidden Father-Daughter Union, which among other things is a very good treatment of how little consent lies behind father-daughter incest (review here, and it was from ages 11 to 13).
None of Kenton's previous biographers seems to have suspected this horror and overall he had the reputation of a straight-laced man. I had long thought of him as a somewhat dour disciplinarian, firmly wrapped up in middle American values.
The lesson is how little we know of an individual life. And what do we still not know? When we judge others, or decide not to, that is worth keeping in mind.
How to make better decisions?
I never thought of this method:
What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst–psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women. If this man were able to suppress his sexual desire in this situation, would his hunger also subside? This is the sort of question Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, sought to answer in the laboratory.
Tuk came up with the idea for the study while attending a long lecture. In an effort to stay alert, she drank several cups of coffee. By the end of the talk, she says, “All the coffee had reached my bladder. And that raised the question: What happens when people experience higher levels of bladder control?” With her colleagues, Debra Trampe of the University of Groningen and Luk Warlop of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tuk designed experiments to test whether self-control over one bodily desire can generalize to other domains as well.
In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes–the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder–the researchers assessed participants’ self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.
The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.
“You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder,” Tuk says. So maybe you should drink a bottle of water before making a decision about your stock portfolio, for example. Or perhaps stores that count on impulse buys should keep a bathroom available to customers, since they might be more willing to go for the television with a bigger screen when they have an empty bladder.
The pointer is from Michelle Dawson, although I do not take her to be necessarily endorsing (or rejecting) the results. There is related work here and here (pdf).
I wrote this post with an empty bladder.
*Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms*
The author is Ralph Keyes and you can buy it here. Here are three excerpts:
Yesterday's polite euphemism is tomorrow's prissy evasion. "Cherry" was once considered more respectable than "hymen." Now, just the opposite is true. The former is thought to be vulgar, the latter decent.
And:
When the unfortunately named rapeseed oil had trouble competing with products that had nicer names, a Canadian strain low in saturated fat was dubbed Canola (i.e., "Canadian oil") in 1978 and has done rather well since.
And:
It used to be said that "Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow."
Most of all, this book was…interesting.
*Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids*
The author is Bryan Caplan and the subtitle is Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Both were true for me and I predict at least one will be true for you. It is now available for pre-order on Amazon. And here is Bryan, new to Twitter.
We are now on Facebook
That is correct, the Cowen-Tabarrok text, Modern Principles. It is a steady stream of resources for using the text, and learning and teaching economics more generally, updated on a very regular basis, organized using the wonders of Facebook.
Don't forget to click the "Like" button.
http://www.facebook.com/ModernPrinciples
Thank you Mark Zuckerberg! I rooted for you in the movie too.
Has school segregation gone down since MLK?
I received this very useful email from Ken Hirsch:
I looked into the basis for the statement I read on Marginal Revolution that "American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed". The source that was given did not actually have statistics going back to the 1960s, but the author of the report, Gary Orfield, pointed me to an earlier report, "Brown at 50: King's Dream or Plessy's Nightmare" (http://tinyurl.com/BrownAt50), which did contain a time series for one measurement, "Percent of Black Students at Majority White Schools". There's a graph of this statistic for Southern black children on the cover of the report which I am attaching to this email.
This statistic is quite problematic. Most starkly, in "majority minority" states, such as Texas and California, this statistic measures the *opposite* of integration. The more evenly distributed that ethnic groups are in schools, the lower the the number. If all schools in California had exactly the same ethnic make-up, there would be no majority white schools, so 0% of black students would be in them! Indeed, in Table 11 from this report (p. 27), California is given as the most segregated state by this measure.
The other two measures that Dr. Orfield uses have similar problems. Most of the change in all three are probably caused by the increase in the percent of Hispanics and the decrease in the percent of non-Hispanic whites, not by segregation. By most mathematically sensible measures, segregation has decreased and integration has increased over the last 20 years. See "Measuring School Segregation" by David M. Frankel and Oscar Volij for details: http://www.econ.iastate.edu/research/working-papers/p11808
The original post was here.
Crowd-sourced economics department rankings
Greg Mankiw will be happy, so far here is the list. I have heard of comparable lists for political science and philosophy and perhaps other fields. In my view the top ten is exactly right, I haven't scrolled through the rest yet.
The wisdom of Katja Grace
She puts together some very good points and aphorisms. It starts with this:
Do what your heart tells you ‘means ‘stop making up excuses and do what my heart tells you’. ‘Clearly’ means ‘so unclearly I don’t want to explain it’. ‘We’ means different things to those with different political leanings, which helps them disagree.
Aphorisms tend to be cynical because only knowledge you don’t want to believe is short and easily verifiable enough to be an aphorism. People are more inclined to praise long, poorly written writing than short well written ones because it is easier for the former to cheat quality heuristics. Thinking is more fun than reading because it is more like ‘chasing’ than ‘searching‘. It’s interesting that reading isn’t better suited to chasing.
There is much more, read the whole thing.
U.S. fact of the day
American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white.
Overall, a third of all black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent black and Latino.
That's via Ezra Klein, Dana Goldstein post here, source here. In the meantime, and quite on point, here is one of Chris Christie's biggest mistakes.
Addendum: Here is from Matt Yglesias, another contender for U.S. fact of the day:
If the country as a whole had the same average population density as New Hampshire (!) it would contain about 522 million people…
How to become sophisticated?
J., a nascent MR reader, requests:
Which journals, magazines and blogs should a 15yo read in order to be considered a widely sophisticated and educated person 20 years later (not necessarily to show off or to impress others but for one's own good feeling)?
I do not have a concrete answer. When I was 12-13, I was very interested in chess and not so interested in culturally sophisticated outputs, unless you count the Beatles and jazz guitar and baseball. I am glad that I spent most of my time then reading in those areas because I cared about them deeply at the time. Those investments will then help us learn other areas, so it is learning about how to learn. At age 21 it was all about German Romanticism for me, and at 22 analytic philosophy. Find grooves, and push on them until your ardor abates. Until the very end, there is always time to learn more areas, and always a very large number of areas one does not know at all.
It has become a cliche, but Samuel Johnson was close to the truth when he wrote:
"A man should read as his fancy takes him, for what he reads as a chore will do him little good."
I don't recommend that attitude for mastering technical subjects, but for general sophistication it is right on. The most sophisticated person is someone who really loves an area and has pursued it, and that's also the best magnet for attracting interested and interesting others. On related topics, here is Modeled Behavior and here is Robin Hanson.