Category: Education

Why should we not recreate Neanderthals?

by  Tyler Cowen in

A few of you were puzzled over this question two days ago, or at least pretended to be.  So why not?  For a start, the cloning process probably would require a lot of trial and error, with plenty of victims of experimentation being created along the way.

Then ask yourself some basic questions about Neanderthals: could they be taught in our schools?  Who would rear the first generation?  Would human parents find this at all rewarding?  Do they have enough impulse control to move freely in human society?  How happy would they be with such a limited number of peers?  What public health issues would be involved and how would we learn about those issues in advance?  What would happen the first time a Neanderthal kills a human child?  Carries and transmits a contagious disease?  By the way, how much resistance would the Neanderthals have to modern diseases?

What kinds of “human rights” would we issue to them?  Would we end up treating them better than lab chimpanzees?  Would they be covered by ACA and have emergency room rights?

We don’t know the answers here, but I would expect to run up against a number of significant fails on these issues and others.

We do, however, know two things.  First, the one environment we know they could survive in (for a while) was a Europe teeming with wildlife.  That no longer exists.

Second, we’ve already run the “human/Neanderthal coexistence experiment” once, and it seems to have ended in the violent destruction of one of those groups.  It would be naive to expect anything much better the second time around.

Most likely the Neanderthals would end up in some version of concentration camps, with a lot of suffering and pain along the way, and I don’t see that as an outcome worth bringing about.

Addendum: If you’d like to read another point of view, there is George Church and Ed Regis, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.

Don’t pay for all of your kids’ college education

by  Tyler Cowen in

…a new study…found that the more money (in total and as a share of total college costs) that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.

The findings — particularly grouped with other work by the researcher who made them — suggest that the students least likely to excel are those who receive essentially blank checks for college expenses.

The Inside Higher Ed piece is here.  The NYT piece is here.  Here is a summary of the research from the researcher, Laura Hamilton.  Here is the paper itself, forthcoming in the American Sociological Review, available to subscribers and university systems only I suspect.

I should note that this piece includes all of the appropriate controls, but still we do not know how good those controls are and perhaps parental paying practices are proxying for other features of the situation.

Law and Literature reading list for 2013

by  Tyler Cowen in

The New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition

Billy Budd and Other Tales, by Hermann Melville.

The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka.

In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott.

Conrad Black, A Matter of Principle.

Kate Summerscale, Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady.

Glaspell’s Trifles, available on-line.

Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, volume 1.

I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov.

Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville, excerpts, chapters 89 and 90, available on-line.

Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Running the Books, by Avi Steinberg.

Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman.

The Pledge, Friedrich Durrenmatt.

The Crime of Sheila McGough, Janet Malcolm

Errol Morris, A Wilderness of Error.

Leslie Katz, “John Keats’s Attitudes to Lawyers,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1307146

Some additions to this list will be made as we proceed, mostly a few short articles.

We also will view a small number of movies on legal themes. You will be responsible for obtaining these or for viewing them in the theater.  These include:

Capturing the Friedmans

Anatomy of a Murder

A Separation

Memories of Murder

MRU videos live

by  Tyler Cowen in

That last two sections of MRU’s Economic Development course (“Migration” and “Population and environment”) are now live, you will find them at the site here.  Michael Clemens has been one big influence, as you can see in our video on whether there is a brain drain problem.  Here is our video on remittances.  Here is our video on the evidence for and against the Malthusian argument.  There is more at the site.

Our final exam will be posting soon.

p.s. We will be starting new courses later this month!  More on that soon…

MRU on iTunes

by  Tyler Cowen in

We are excited to announce that our Development Economics course is now available on iTunes as an audio podcast. You can grab the audio for any of the 232 videos we’ve released so far! For those who use a different program to manage your podcasts, the direct link for the podcast xml feed is here.

And by the way, on the main site this week’s videos on “Education” and “Politics, democracy, and war” are now live.  Take a look at whether China is likely to democratize soon, and why some of the Middle Eastern and nearby states have such a difficult time democratizing.  Here is Alex’s video on testing for educational cream skimming in private schools, in India.  There is much more on the site.

Peter Boettke’s Ph.d grading strategy

by  Tyler Cowen in

…your final draft of your paper will be due on April 29th and I will submit your papers (blind) to external referees as well as myself for assessment, an A grade will be limited to those papers, and only those papers, that are recommended for acceptance or conditional acceptance, a B grade will be assigned to those papers that receive a recommendation of revise and resubmit, and a C grade will be assigned to those papers that are rejected by the external referees and myself.  I will be available throughout the semester to discuss and read your drafts, so don’t be a stranger.

The source is here, and for the pointer I thank Jacob T. Levy.

How many bankruptcies to come in higher education?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bryan Caplan doubts that on-line education will lead to many bankruptcies in higher education.  To provide a contrasting point of view, I see the landscape as follows:

1. The absolute wages of college graduates have been falling for over a decade, even though the relative premium over “no college degree” is robust.  Still, absolute wages do determine the long-term viability of any revenue model.  And note that a pretty big chunk of the relative college wage premium is captured through post-secondary education only.

2. The “debt bubble” behind a lot of recent higher education expansion won’t be repeated anytime soon.

3. A large number of institutions in the top one hundred will move to a hybrid on-line model for a third or so of their classes and they will do so gradually, without seriously disrupting norms of conformity or eliminating campus life.  In fact this will become the new conformity and furthermore through time-shifting it may increase the quantity and joy of drunken parties and campus orgies.  Eventually these on-line classes will be sold for credit to outside students.  Some top schools will sell credits in this manner, even if the more exclusive Harvard and Princeton do not.  Many lesser schools will lose a third or so of their current tuition revenue stream.  Note that the prices for these on-line credits, even if hybrid, will likely be much lower, plus lesser schools lose revenue to the schools better at designing on-line content.

4. Some state governors will try to put out a supposedly semi-passable degree from their state schools for 10k a year, with some on-line components of course.  That will put price and revenue pressure on many other schools.

So let’s say you are Trinity International University, in Deerfield, Illinois, 1,265 students, nominal tuition about 26k.  I had never heard of that place before doing a quick search through U.S. News rankings.  Still, it is rated in the second tier.  Will it survive?  Maybe their Evangelical orientation will push them through.  Maybe it will sink to 500 students.

How about Lynn University, in Florida, also second tier, nominal tuition listed as 32k?  1,619 students, but how many by say 2032?

I don’t think bankruptcy, literally interpreted, is the likely legal outcome (for one thing, these schools probably don’t have enough debt for bankruptcy law to be relevant).  Still, I think it is quite possible that one hundred or more schools in the U.S. News rankings will find their enrollments or at least their tuition revenue streams cut in half or more within twenty years.  They will be shells of their former selves, though on-line education might not even be their major economic challenge.  It will be one of three or four major whammies facing them.  Higher education as a general practice of course still will thrive, as will community colleges.

One key question is whether on-line education will encourage consolidation or not.  Under one vision, on-line offerings shore up the smaller schools, because you can go to them for the atmosphere while taking German III purely on-line.  (Even then, they survive but the revenue stream takes a huge whack.)  Under another vision, on-line — for most students — works best in hybrid form, mixed with various face-to-face forms, and the larger schools will have a much easier time getting this off the ground in a workable manner.

Two additional comments on Bryan’s post.  First, he thinks that for on-line education “…the dollars of venture capital raised are laughable.”  Yet keep in mind that the major players are or can be backed by the endowments of the top universities.  In any case, why raise extra money before you are able to spend it?  If these on-line efforts get any traction at all, the funding and lines of credit will be there.

Second, advocates of the relevance of the signaling model should be relatively optimistic about on-line education.  Because it is hard to pay attention in the on-line schoolhouse, it provides an especially potent signal!  And you always face the temptation to upgrade your signal by subbing in some Top School on-line credits for some of your Podunk University credits.  (Sooner or later Podunk will have to accept such credits.)  Social pressures for conformity will encourage rather than stop that trend.  On the other hand, if you subscribe to a learning model for higher education, there are some very legitimate questions as to how well the on-line product can teach you what you need to know, at least for people with some fairly wide variety of learning styles.

Conformity pressures and signaling may militate against the “stay at home all day” forms of on-line education, but not against on-line education more generally, in fact quite the contrary.  In my view Bryan is underestimating the economic problems to be faced by a wide range of colleges and universities, and putting up a not very plausible model of non-conformist on-line ed as the major threat.

Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.

MRU videos on poverty and health

by  Tyler Cowen in

A new set of MRU videos is up.  In these videos, we cover:

·      How the poor spend their money

·      How stress can create a “tax” on the poor’s decision-making, focus, and cognitive abilities

·      Causes of “missing women” in developing countries and what is really the bottom line on this claim

·      The economics of child labor, and what is the nature of the potential market failure when sending children to work

·      How a test involving a pregnant mare’s urine illustrates the value of randomized controlled trials

·      Why private health insurance is relatively rare in poorer developing countries (hint: it’s not adverse selection)

·      Can cash transfers help with low birth weight?

·      How community participation can affect the success of health care programs

·      And finally, the ugly effects of cholera, diarrhea, worms, and HIV/AIDS in developing countries

Click here to get started on these videos, with an introduction to randomized control trials.  Or browse the whole list at MRUniversity.com, click on the Course section on the right to see the menu.

Elephants engage in Mengerian indirect exchange

by  Tyler Cowen in

At the main Pondicherry temple, an elephant will bless you — by tapping its trunk on your head — if you hand it some money.  Of course this is a temple elephant and it is also a Mengerian elephant.  The elephant has no use for money but understands that it is a general medium of exchange.  The elephant hands the money over to the temple authority and is later rewarded with food.

The elephant is not merely trading, but it is engaged in indirect exchange and thus in monetary economics.

There is in fact a sign up forbidding such Mengerian transactions, but the elephant seems not to notice it.

And yet this is not the end of the story.  In many parts of Tamil Nadu, temple elephants have attained so much prosperity through Mengerian indirect exchange, and been able to consume so much leisure, that now elephant obesity is a more serious problem than elephant malnutrition.