Category: Education
The MR bot, John McDonnell working with Bryan Gilbert Davis
From John:
“I actually built a bot to produce “an MR take”:
It’s live here: https://www.vibecheck.network/
Intro video here: https://www.loom.com/share/e307765429db4fe38efd2fc822bb4529
(We applied to the stability AI grant but didn’t get it)
I think the results need to get a bit better (“Are aliens real” is pretty good, “What should I eat in Oaxaca?” is not good). I put some decent queries in the postscript.
Regarding your article I actually think attribution will be really important. AIs have a tendency to confabulate (the term d’art in the literature seems to be “hallucination”). Attribution is what tells you that the information is real and wasn’t just invented or pulled from some other hallucinating AI.
What would you want this world to be like? A couple thoughts I had:
- I agree that compactness will be desirable, but also “authentic” non-AI content will be valued. Imagine custom briefings about daily trends with a few of the “best” tweets pulled into the briefing.
- Who do you trust? You don’t want your AI pulling from any old source. There are few universal authorities anymore. I’m imagining that there may be “webs of trust” where e.g. I trust Tyler, he trusts someone else so I trust that other source at least a little. The DSA might publish lists of “approved socialist sources”.
- How do you want to feel? Can I make you a feed that’s “uplifting”? “Insightful”? Maybe if people can control their own algorithms we get a sort of do-over on social media and people get control of their attention back.
- “Idea lineage” … can I select the term “mood affiliation” on a recent post and get a lineage of the way the blog uses that term, hopefully get a contextual definition, etc…
- I’m curious about combining every source in someone’s digital life. What if we could link article, highlights, notes, emails, Slacks, etc? This is sort of huge but could get interesting.
If we were to iterate on Vibecheck are there ideas you’d like to see prototyped?
…PS a few queries that have decent answers:
* What is the Great Stagnation?* What do Russians believe about Ukraine?* Are aliens real?* Should I start a startup?* Should I support the TPP?”
TC again: I am already impressed. But I think many of you don’t understand what this looks like when hundreds of trillion (yes, trillion) of parameters are brought to bear on the problem, as will someday (soon) be evident.
Education sentences to ponder
If Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests. pic.twitter.com/ackCK2MTtI
— Kathleen Porter-Magee (@kportermagee) October 24, 2022
Is it worthwhile to teach self-regulation?
Children’s self-regulation abilities are key predictors of educational success and other life outcomes such as income and health. However, self-regulation is not a school subject, and knowledge about how to generate lasting improvements in self-regulation and academic achievements with easily scalable, low-cost interventions is still limited. Here we report the results of a randomized controlled field study that integrates a short self-regulation teaching unit based on the concept of mental contrasting with implementation intentions into the school curriculum of first graders. We demonstrate that the treatment increases children’s skills in terms of impulse control and self-regulation while also generating lasting improvements in academic skills such as reading and monitoring careless mistakes. Moreover, it has a substantial effect on children’s long-term school career by increasing the likelihood of enrolling in an advanced secondary school track three years later. Thus, self-regulation teaching can be integrated into the regular school curriculum at low cost, is easily scalable, and can substantially improve important abilities and children’s educational career path.
That is from a new Nature Human Behavior paper by Daniel Schunk, Eva M. Berger, Henning Hermes, Kirsten Winkel, and Ernst Fehr. There should be more good papers on this topic…
A Vision of Metascience
Lots to praise and to ponder in this excellent piece by Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu on improving the discovery ecosystem with metascience. The piece contains some pop-ideas to stimulate thinking such as:
- Fund-by-variance: Instead of funding grants that get the highest average score from reviewers, a funder should use the variance (or kurtosis or some similar measurement of disagreement5) in reviewer scores as a primary signal: only fund things that are highly polarizing (some people love it, some people hate it). One thesis to support such a program is that you may prefer to fund projects with a modest chance of outlier success over projects with a high chance of modest success. An alternate thesis is that you should aspire to fund things only you would fund, and so should look for signal to that end: projects everyone agrees are good will certainly get funded elsewhere. And if you merely fund what everyone else is funding, then you have little marginal impact6,7.
But it’s really not about one one idea but about understanding why scientific tools are rarely applied to science itself and what can we do to improve metascience. Lots of bad news but there are some positive examples. Thereplication revolution (no longer a crisis!) appears to be working:
There are encouraging signs that pre-registered study designs like this are helping address the methodological problems described above. Consider the following five graphs. The graphs show the results from five major studies89, each of which attempted to replicate many experiments from the social sciences literature. Filled in circles indicate the replication found a statistically significant result, in the same direction as the original study. Open circles indicate this criterion wasn’t met. Circles above the line indicate the replication effect was larger than the original effect size, while circles below the line indicate the effect size was smaller. A high degree of replicability would mean many experiments with filled circles, clustered fairly close to the line. Here’s what these five replication studies actually found:
As you can see, the first four replication studies show many replications with questionable results – large changes in effect size, or a failure to meet statistical significance. This suggests a need for further investigation, and possibly that the initial result was faulty. The fifth study is different, with statistical significance replicating in all cases, and much smaller changes in effect sizes. This is a 2020 study by John Protzko et al90 that aims to be a “best practices” study. By this, they mean the original studies were done using pre-registered study design, as well as: large samples, and open sharing of code, data and other methodological materials, making experiments and analysis easier to replicate…In short, the replications in the fifth graph are based on studies using much higher evidentiary standards than had previously been the norm in psychology. Of course, the results don’t show that the effects are real. But they’re extremely encouraging, and suggest the spread of ideas like Registered Reports contribute to substantial progress.
The story of Brian Nosek is very interesting:
Many people have played important roles in instigating the replication crisis. But perhaps no single person has done more than Brian Nosek. Nosek is a social psychologist who until 2013 was a professor at the University of Virginia. In 2013, Nosek took leave from his tenured position to co-found the Center for Open Science (COS) as an independent not-for-profit (jointly with Jeff Spies, then a graduate student in his lab). Nosek and the COS were key co-organizers of the 2015 replication paper by the Open Science Collaboration. Nosek and the COS have also been (along with Daniël Lakens, Chris Chambers, and many others) central in developing Registered Reports. In particular, they founded and operate the OSF website, which is the key infrastructure supporting Registered Reports.
…The origin story of the COS is interesting. In 2007 and 2008, Nosek submitted several grant proposals to the NSF and NIH, suggesting many of the ideas that would eventually mature into the COS95. All these proposals were turned down. Between 2008 and 2012 he gave up applying for grants for metascience. Instead, he mostly self-funded his lab, using speaker’s fees from talks about his prior professional work. A graduate student of Nosek’s named Jeff Spies did some preliminary work developing the site that would become OSF. In 2012 this got some media attention, and as a result was noticed by several private foundations, including a foundation begun by a billionaire hedge fund operator, John Arnold, and his wife, Laura Arnold. The Arnold Foundation reached out and rapidly agreed to provide some funding, ultimately in the form of a $5.25 million grant.
To do this, Nosek had to leave the University of Virginia? Why? He was then attacked by many in the scientific community. Why? Read the whole thing for much more.
Emergent Ventures, 22nd cohort
Emily Karlzen, Arizona, Founder and CEO of Arch Rift, to develop an astronaut helmet for commercial space flight.
Mehran Jalali, for building energy storage systems, NYC, grew up in Iran.
Kyle Redlinghuys, a further award, recently launched an API to make the data from the James Webb Space Telescope available.
Pranav Myana, 18, University of Texas, Austin, working on incorporating renewable power into the grid.
Brian Chau, Waterloo (Canada), general career support for writing and podcasting. Here is his Substack.
Cathal J. Nolan, historian, Boston University, to write a book on the relationship between war and progress. Just learned he was born in Dublin.
Cynthia Haven, Stanford University, to write a book on John Milton and the 17th century. Twitter here.
Harsehaj Dhami, 17, lives in Ontario, to visit a Longevity conference in Copenhagen. LinkedIn here.
Jackson Oswalt, Knoxville, builds things, AR/XR stuff, for general career support. In the Guinness Book of World Records for achieving a nuclear fusion reaction at age 12.
Miguel Ignacio Solano and Maria Elena Solano, Bogota/Cambridge, MA, co-founders of VMind, an artificial intelligence project.
Brian Kelleher, 18, Dublin, to improve software for doctors.
Devon Zuegel, to develop a new village and community, Twitter here.
Rodolfo Herrera, Pensamiento Libre, market-oriented Facebook and YouTube videos for Mexico.
Alia Abbas, 19, Maryland, to study biochemistry and materials and for general career development.
There are two other projects not yet ready for public announcement.
Ukraine tranche: There is now a new Emergent Ventures Ukraine.
Julia Brodsky, Maryland, former instructor of astronauts. To support educational efforts to teach on-line STEM and other subjects to Ukrainian children in refugee camps.
Uliana Ronska, 17, Prague and Netherlands currently. She is doing research on problems of triangulating fast-moving stars. It was also under her leadership that her team won ExPhO, CETO, and 2 all-Ukrainian Motion physics olympiads. For general career development.
Demian Zhelyabovskyy, currently at Bromsgrove School in the UK, from Kyiv. Last year he won first place in the All-Ukrainian Physics Marathon; also he and his teammates won the Experimental Physics Olympiad (ExPhO) and Computer Experiment Team Olympiad (CETO). For general career support, and for the physics paper he is currently co-authoring.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, representing the Kyiv School of Economics, to nurture talent development for Ukraine. Tymofiy as an individual was also the very first Emergent Ventures winner.
Congratulations to all, I am honored to be working with you!
My Conversation with the excellent Walter Russell Mead
Here is the audio and transcript, here is the summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss how the decline of American religiosity has influenced US foreign policy, which American presidents best and least understood the Middle East, the shrewd reasons Stalin supported Israel, the Saudi secret to political stability, the fate of Pakistan, the most likely scenario for China moving on Taiwan, the gun pointed at the head of German business, the US’s “murderous fetishization of ideology over reality” in Sub-Saharan Africa, the inherent weakness in having a foreign policy establishment dominated by academics, what he learned from attending the Groton School, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How would you change or improve the training that goes into America’s foreign policy elite?
MEAD: Well, I would start by trying to draw people’s attention to that, over the last 40 years, there’s been an enormous increase in the number of PhD grads engaged in the formation of American foreign policy. There’s also been an extraordinary decline in the effectiveness of American foreign policy. We really ought to take that to heart.
COWEN: Do you think of it as an advantage that you don’t have a PhD?
MEAD: Huge advantage.
COWEN: How would you describe that advantage?
MEAD: I don’t really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. I start from reality. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there’s a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines — you start from a bunch of really smart, engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, “We’ll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try, in some systematic way, to organize our thinking of this.”
I think you do get some gains from that, but you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward navel-gazing. “What’s the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this?” The discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological and internally focused and less pragmatic.
I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule . . . They become socialized into the academy, just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison.
The American academy is actually a terrible place for coming to understand how world politics works. Recently, I had a conversation with an American official who was very proud of the way that the US had broken the mold by revealing intelligence about Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine, and pointed out how that had really helped build the NATO coalition against Russian aggression, and so on.
So far as he goes, it’s true. But I said, however, if you really look at the total message the US was projecting to Russia in those critical months, there were two messages. One is, “We’ve got great intelligence on you. We actually understand you much better than you think.” It was shocking. I think it shocked the Russians. But on the other hand, we’re saying, “We think you’re going to win quickly in Ukraine. We’re offering Zelenskyy a plane ride out of Kyiv. We’re pulling out all our diplomats and urging other countries to pull out their diplomats.”
The message, actually the totality of the message that we sent to Putin is, “You are going to win if you do this.”
And this, on what makes for talent in the foreign policy arena:
…you can’t know too much history. A hunger for travel. I think too many foreign policy types don’t actually get out into the field nearly as much as they should. Curiosity about other cultures. A strong grounding in a faith of your own, which can be a secular ideology, perhaps, in some cases, but more often is likely to be a great religious tradition of some kind.
A very good conversation. And I am happy to recommend Walter’s new book The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.
India: The Revolution in Private Schooling
A whopping 50%+ of secondary school students in India are educated in private schools. Do private schools increase human capital or merely skim the best students? My paper, Private Education in India: A Novel Test of Cream Skimming made a simple but telling point:
…As the private share of school enrollment increases simple cream skimming becomes less plausible as the explanation for a higher rate of achievement in private schools. If the private schools cream skim when they are at 10% of public school enrollment how much cream can be left in the public school pool when the private schools account for 60% of total enrollment? Thus, if this simple form of cream skimming is the explanation for the higher achievement rate in private schools, we would expect the “private effect,” the difference between private and public scores, to be smaller in regions with a high
share of private schooling.
In fact, what I find is the private advantage, although larger in districts with smaller shares of private schooling (suggesting some skimming), stabilizes and doesn’t disappear even as the share of private schooling heads towards 100%. I also show that mean scores across all students, public and private, increase with the share of private schooling which is inconsistent with cream skimming (which predicts a constant mean). At right a picture showing that private scores continue to outpace public scores even in districts where private schools educate a majority or larger share of students.
In a new paper, Bagde, Epple and Taylor study 4 million students in thousands of villages in India during 2004-2014. In the early years of the study, none of the villages have private schools but entry starts to occur in 2007-2009 and the authors look at who switches to private schools. They find significant selection from higher income, higher caste, higher ability, and males towards private schools but no evidence that public school students are harmed.
The authors give a nod to the possibility that stratification could generate problems down the line if it increases inequality but they don’t mention the key point that, as with arguments for cream skimming, stratification concerns diminish the more students are in private schools and disappear altogether if 100% of students are in private schools.
More generally, India is pioneering private education on a grand scale and the entire world should pay attention to these innovations.
Addendum: See also my previous post on a key paper by Muralidharan and Sundararaman, Private Schooling In India: Results from a Randomized Trial.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
Hemma bäst—or, English versus native language: Illustrating with Sweden and economics, Eva Forslund and Magnus Henrekson question the English-language pull where English is not the native language. Commentary essays are provided by Lars Engwall and by Alberto Mingardi.
What are your most underappreciated works? Responding to an open invitation, 18 scholars with 4k+ Google Scholar cites point to a decade-or-more old paper with cite count below his or her h-index. The contributors are Doug Allen, Niclas Berggren, Christian Bjørnskov, Peter Boettke, Nick Bostrom, Bryan Caplan, Joshua Gans, Terri Griffith, Zoe Hilton, Dan Klein, Douglas Noonan, Michael Ostrovsky, Sam Peltzman, Eric Rasmusen, Paul Rubin, Steve Sheffrin, Stefan Voigt, and Richard Wagner.
Cooked: Higher temperatures decrease the rate of economic growth in the United States, according to Riccardo Colacito, Bridget Hoffmann, and Toan Phan. David Barker criticizes their JMCB article on two counts, makes the improvements, dissolves the results, and uses alternate data yielding a sign reversal though also not statistically significant.
Erroneous Erratum: Previously, Stephen Walker criticized an article in Journal of Accounting Research (here and here). Now the authors, Yang Bao, Bin Ke, Bin Li, Y. Julia Yu, and Jie Zhang, have issued an Erratum in JAR, citing Walker’s critiques. Walker takes a hard look and calls on JAR to do an investigation into research misconduct.
Justice to Hutt: Phil Magness and Art Carden appreciate W. H. Hutt, in rebutting William Darity, M’Balou Camara, and Nancy MacLean.
Film incentive programs revisited: Picking up on an earlier exchange (Bradbury’s critique, O’Brien and Lane’s reply), Bruce Bird, Hilde Patron, and William Smith bring scrutiny to the reply, new data to bear, and renewed doubts about the original paper, which was published in Regional Studies.
Not being tread upon: Ryan Murphy rejoins to Jan Ott on the understanding of freedom in the Fraser economic freedom index, and Ott supplies a second reply.
Classical liberalism in Finland, 1900–2022: Previously, Jens Grandell told of liberalism in Finland to about 1900. Now Grandell completes the story. The essays contribute to the Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country series.
Adam Smith’s View of Man: “Smith would not have thought it sensible to treat man as a rational utility-maximiser.” The University of Chicago professor Ronald Coase’s Journal of Law and Economics essay from 1976, republished here by permission, focuses especially on Smith’s Moral Sentiments.
Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning: In this little-known essay from the 1750s, Edmund Burke warns against “confined” learning: “The End of learning is not knowledge but virtue; as the End of all speculation should be practice of one sort or another.”
EJW Audio:
Eva Forslund and Magnus Henrekson on English vs. the Native Language
USA (Sweden) fact of the day
Middle-age mortality increases among non-Hispanic Whites from 1992 to 2018 are driven almost entirely by the bottom 10 percent of the education distribution.
Here is the newly published paper, by Paul Novosad, Charlie Rafkin and Sam Asher (AEA gate). In another new paper, by Randi Hjalmarsson and Matthew J. Lindquist, being sentence to extra time in a Swedish prison is good for your health.
What should I ask Paul Salopek?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is Wikipedia:
Paul Salopek (born February 9, 1962 in Barstow, California) is a journalist and writer from the United States. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was raised in central Mexico. Salopek has reported globally for the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, National Geographic Magazine and many other publications. In January 2013, Salopek embarked on the “Out of Eden Walk”, originally projected to be a seven-year walk along one of the routes taken by early humans to migrate out of Africa, a transcontinental foot journey that was planned to cover more than 20,000 miles funded by the National Geographic Society, the Knight Foundation and the Abundance Foundation.
Salopek received a degree in environmental biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1984. Salopek has worked intermittently as a commercial fisherman, shrimp-fishing out of Carnarvon, and most recently with the scallop fleet out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1991. His career in journalism began in 1985 when his motorcycle broke in Roswell, New Mexico and he took a police-reporting job at the local newspaper to earn repair money.
As far as the walk goes, he has made it to China. So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Byron Auguste
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is my introduction:
TYLER COWEN: Today I am here…with Byron Auguste, who is president and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a civic enterprise which aims to improve the US labor market. Byron served for two years in the White House as deputy assistant to the president for economic policy and deputy director to the National Economic Council. Until 2013, he was senior partner at McKinsey and worked there for many years. He has also been an economist at LMC International, Oxford University, and the African Development Bank.
He is author of a 1995 book called The Economics of International Payments Unions and Clearing Houses. He has a doctorate of philosophy and economics from Oxford University, an undergraduate econ degree from Yale, and has been a Marshall Scholar. Welcome.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As you know, more and more top universities are moving away from requiring standardized testing for people applying. Is this good or bad from your point of view?
AUGUSTE: I think it’s really too early to tell because the question is —
COWEN: But you want alternative markers, not just what kind of family you came from, what kind of prep you had. If you’re just smart, why shouldn’t we let you standardize test?
AUGUSTE: I think alternative markers are key. This is actually a pretty complicated issue, and I’ve talked to university administrators and admissions people, and it’s interesting, the variety of different ways they’re trying to work on this.
But I will say this. If you think about something like the SAT, when it first started — I’m talking about in the 1930s essentially — it was an alternative route into a college. It started with the Ivies. It was started with James Conant and Harvard and the Ivies and the Seven Sisters and the rest, and then it gradually moved out.
The problem they were trying to solve back in the ’30s was that up until that point, the way you got into, say, Dartmouth is the headmaster of Choate would write to Dartmouth and say, “Here’s our 15 candidates for Dartmouth.” Dartmouth would mostly take them because Choate knew what Dartmouth wanted. Then you had the high school movement in the US, where between 1909 and 1939, you went from 9 percent of American teenagers going to high school to 79 percent going to high school.
Now, suddenly, you had high school students applying to college. They were at Dubuque Normal School in Iowa. How does Dartmouth know whether this person was . . . The people from Choate didn’t start taking the SATs, but the SAT — even though it was a pretty terrible test at the time, it was better than nothing. It was a way that someone who was out there — not in the normal feeder schools — could distinguish themselves.
I think that is a very valuable role to play. As you know, Tyler, the SAT does, to some extent, still play that role. But also, because now that everybody has had to use it, it also is something that can be gamed more — test prep and all the rest of it.
COWEN: But it tracks IQ pretty closely. And a lot of Asian schools way overemphasize standard testing, I would say, and they’ve risen to very high levels of quality very quickly. It just seems like a good thing to do.
Most of all we cover jobs, training/retraining, and education. Interesting throughout.
Taxing Mechanical Engineers and Subsidizing Drama Majors
In The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think I argued that the Biden student loan plan would incentivize students to take on more debt and incentivize schools to raise tuition with most of the increased costs being passed on to taxpayers through generous income based repayment plans. Adam Looney at Brookings takes a deep dive into the IDR plan and concludes that it’s even worse than I thought. Here are some of Looney’s key points:
- As recently as 2017, CBO projected that student loan borrowers would, on average, repay close to $1.11 per dollar they borrowed (including interest). Borrowing was often perceived to be the least favorable way to pay for college. But under the administration’s IDR proposal (and other regulatory changes), undergraduate borrowers who enroll in the plan might be expected to pay approximately $0.50 for each $1 borrowed—and some can reliably expect to pay zero. As a result, borrowing will be the best way to pay for college. If there’s a chance you’ll not need to repay all of the loan—and it’s likely that a majority of undergraduate students will be in that boat—it will be a financial no-brainer to take out the maximum student loan.
- The data shows that roughly half of Americans with some college experience but not a BA would qualify for zero payments under the proposal, as would about 25% of BA graduates. However, the vast majority of students (including more than 80% of BA recipients) would qualify for reduced payments.
- [A] lot of student debt represents borrowing for living expenses, and thus a sizable share of the value of loans forgiven under the IDR proposal will be for such expenses…A graduate student at Columbia University can borrow $30,827 each year for living expenses, personal expenses, and other costs above and beyond how much they borrow for tuition. A significant number of those graduates can expect those borrowed amounts to be forgiven. That means that the federal government will pay twice as much to subsidize the rent of a Columbia graduate student than it will for a low-income individual under the Section 8 housing voucher program…
Looney agrees that the incentive to increase tuition will apply to some graduate and professional programs but he thinks there is less room to increase tuition at undergraduate programs because borrowing is capped (currently! AT) at fairly low rates. But he offers an even more plausible but disheartening scenario that takes us in exactly the wrong direction.
Because the IDR subsidy is based primarily on post-college earnings, programs that leave students without a degree or that don’t lead to a good job will get a larger subsidy. Students at good schools and high-return programs will be asked to repay their loans nearly in full. Want a free ride to college? You can have one, but only if you study cosmetology, liberal arts, or drama, preferably at a for-profit school. Want to be a nurse, an engineer, or major in computer science or math? You’ll have to pay full price (especially at the best programs in each field). This is a problem because most student outcomes—both bad and good—are highly predictable based on the quality, value, completion rate, and post-graduation earnings of the program attended. IDR can work if designed well, but this IDR imposed on the current U.S. system of higher education means programs and institutions with the worst outcomes and highest debts will accrue the largest subsidies.
Looney does a back of the envelope calculation and estimates that typical graduates in Mechanical Engineering will on average get a 0% subsidy but graduates in Music will get a 96% subsidy, in Drama a 99% subsidy and Masseuses a 100% subsidy on average. This of course is exactly the wrong approach. If we are going to subsidize, we should subsidize degrees with plausible positive spillovers not masseues.
The problem is not just the subsidy but the encouragement this gives to create low-value programs:
- …institutions will have an incentive to create valueless programs and aggressively recruit students into those programs with promises they will be free under an IDR plan….The fact that a student can take a loan for living expenses (or even enroll in a program for purposes of taking out such a loan) makes the loan program easy to abuse. Some borrowers will use the loan system as an ATM, taking out student loans knowing they’ll qualify for forgiveness, and receiving the proceeds in cash, expecting not to repay the loan….I suspect that such abuses will be facilitated by predatory institutions.
Overall, the student loan program, as currently written, is looking to be one of the most costly, inefficient and unwise government programs of the 21st century. As I said in my first post, “fixing” the program is likely to drive ever more increasing intervention into higher education much as has happened with health care. My guess is that no one really thought this albatross through.
John Stuart Mill was Woke and Based
I love that John Stuart Mill was woke and based:
Looking at democracy in the way in which it is commonly conceived, as the rule of the numerical majority, it is surely possible that the ruling power may be under the dominion of sectional or class interests, pointing to conduct different from that which would be dictated by impartial regard for the interest of all. Suppose the majority to be whites, the minority negroes, or vice versâ: is it likely that the majority would allow equal justice to the minority? Suppose the majority Catholics, the minority Protestants, or the reverse; will there not be the same danger? Or let the majority be English, the minority Irish, or the contrary: is there not a great probability of similar evil? In all countries there is a majority of poor, a minority who, in contradistinction, may be called rich. Between these two classes, on many questions, there is complete opposition of apparent interest.
Richard Hanania interviews me
78 minutes. With transcript. It starts off as a normal “talent conversation,” but soon takes other paths. We discuss feminization in some detail, libertarianism too. Here is part of Richard’s summary:
Another one of Tyler’s traits that came out in this conversation is his detached skepticism regarding fashionable intellectual trends. For example, I’d taken it for granted that social media has made elite culture more pessimistic and angry, but his answer when I asked about the topic made me reconsider my view.
Interesting throughout, and here is one excerpt:
Tyler: It seems to me social media are probably bad for 12- to 14-year-old girls, and probably good for most of the rest of us. That would be my most intuitive answer, but very subject to revision.
Richard: I think it’s good. I mean, I think it’s good for me…
Tyler: But they’re bad for a lot of academics. I guess, they get classified in…
Richard: They might be at the…
Tyler: They get lumped in with the 12 to 14-year-old girls, right?
Richard: [laughs] There might be a similarity there.
Tyler: They have something in common.
Recommended.
Is “imposter syndrome” a good thing?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Impostor syndrome is a positively good thing. When searching for talent, I look for people who feel they suffer from impostor syndrome. If you think you are not qualified to do what you are doing, it is a sign you are setting your sights high and reaching for a new and perhaps unprecedented level of achievement…
Another advantage to feeling like an impostor is that it gives you better insight into your fellow humans. Estimates vary, but up to 82% of people may suffer from some form of impostor syndrome. Even if that is on the high side, impostor syndrome is very common. On a professional level, if you want to be in better touch with your colleagues, maybe it is a good idea for you to try out some new and unfamiliar tasks, and they can too. It will make everyone more understanding and more sympathetic — especially important qualities for being a successful boss.
Recommended. And if you are not currently an impostor, perhaps you should try impersonating one!