Category: Education
Master’s in economics at GMU
The Mercatus MA Fellowship is a two year fellowship designed for students and young professionals who want to enter into or advance a career in public policy. Students have gone onto careers in government (both federal agencies and Capitol Hill) and think tanks, and three have been named presidential management fellows.
Jim Yong Kim nominated to head World Bank
Of course he is likely to get the nod. He is currently president of Dartmouth, and Wikipedia tells us this about his public health background:
Over the past few years, Kim has been involved in the development of a new field focused on improving the implementation and delivery of global health interventions. He believes that progress in developing more effective global health programs has been hindered by the paucity of large-scale systematic approaches to improving program design. This new field will rigorously gather, analyze, and widely disseminate a comprehensive body of practical, actionable insights on effective global health delivery. In order to develop this field, Kim co-founded the Global Health Delivery Project, a joint initiative of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine and the Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. The global health field case studies produced by this project form the core of a new global health delivery curriculum now taught at Harvard School of Public Health. Kim’s team has also developed a web-based “community of practice”, GHDonline.org, to allow practitioners around the world to easily access information, share expertise, and engage in real-time problem solving. Kim is on the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO formed to develop the Health Impact Fund proposal.
And:
Kim has 20 years of experience in improving health in developing countries. He is a founding trustee and the former executive director of Partners In Health, a not-for-profit organization that supports a range of health programs in poor communities in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi and the United States.
From 2004 to 2006, Kim served as Director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, a post he was appointed to in March 2004 after serving as advisor to the WHO Director General. Kim oversaw all of the WHO’s work related to HIV/AIDS, focusing on initiatives to help developing countries scale up their treatment, prevention, and care programs, including the “3×5” initiative designed to put three million people in developing countries on AIDS treatment by the end of 2005.
He was born in Korea but is an American citizen. He is an expert on tuberculosis. Here is a video of Kim as a rapping spaceman. Here is one good Twitter comment.
International PPP for faculty salaries
Not exactly what I would have thought:
Canada comes out on top for those newly entering the academic profession, average salaries among all professors and those at the senior levels. In terms of average faculty salaries based on purchasing power, the United States ranks fifth, behind not only its northern neighbor, but also Italy, South Africa and India.
Selgin reviews Bernanke on the Gold Standard
George Selgin reviews Bernanke’s course at GWU. He is not happy:
Bernanke’s discussion of the gold standard is perhaps the low point of a generally poor performance, consisting of little more than the usual catalog of anti-gold clichés: like most critics of the gold standard, Bernanke is evidently so convinced of its rottenness that it has never occurred to him to check whether the standard arguments against it have any merit. Thus he says, referring to an old Friedman essay, that the gold standard wastes resources. He neglects to tell his listeners (1) that for his calculations Friedman assumed 100% gold reserves, instead of the “paper thin” reserves that, according to Bernanke himself, were actually relied upon during the gold standard era; (2) that Friedman subsequently wrote an article on “The Resource Costs of Irredeemable Paper Money” in which he questioned his own, previous assumption that paper money was cheaper than gold; and (3) that the flow of resources to gold mining and processing is mainly a function of gold’s relative price, and that that relative price has been higher since 1971 than it was during the classical gold standard era, thanks mainly to the heightened demand for gold as a hedge against fiat-money-based inflation. Indeed, the real price of gold is higher today than it has ever been except for a brief interval during the 1980s. So, Ben: while you chuckle about how silly it would be to embrace a monetary standard that tends to enrich foreign gold miners, perhaps you should consider how no monetary standard has done so more than the one you yourself have been managing!
Read the whole thing for more.
How to raise your child, or yourself, an atheist
That is a discussion from Justin L. Barrett’s new and interesting Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. He gives more than equal time to how to raise your child to be religious, but we’re already pretty good at that. Here are his atheism tips, noting that I am excerpting and paraphrasing:
1. Have less-than-average fluency in reasoning about minds.
2. Do not have children.
3. Stay safe.
4. Get in the habit of crediting or blaming humans for whatever you can.
5. Learn to like pseudoagents (including abstractions).
6. Take time to reflect.
7. Add to these factors indoctrination of the young against religion.
The key theme of Barrett’s book is HADD — Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, and how pronounced it is in most human beings.
Lunch with Scott Sumner (and others) at China Star
How is that for self-recommending? Here in a short paragraph is my current take on where Ben Bernanke would differ from Scott. As the shadow banking system was imploding in 2008, due to a downward revaluation of collateral, nominal gdp stabilization would have required that the Fed resort to the medium of currency printing on a very large scale. Scott favors such a move. Bernanke would worry that the collapse of (some) intermediation would mean you get most of the output losses anyway, while the printing of currency would create subsequent problems with management of expectations, relative sectoral shocks (currency is only a partial substitute for credit), and medium-term adjustment once the smoke has cleared, not to mention political relations with Congress and interest groups within the Fed system itself. Therefore Bernanke didn’t want to do it, even though in principle he likes to see nominal gdp stabilized, and has written and said as such.
I am not suggesting that Scott agrees with this perspective.
Price discrimination for higher ed *classes*
Faced with deep funding cuts and strong student demand, Santa Monica College is pursuing a plan to offer a selection of higher-cost classes to students who need them, provoking protests from some who question the fairness of such a two-tiered education system.
Under the plan, approved by the governing board and believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, the two-year college would create a nonprofit foundation to offer such in-demand classes as English and math at a cost of about $200 per unit. Currently, fees are $36 per unit, set by the Legislature for California community college students. That fee will rise to $46 this summer.
The classes would be offered as soon as the upcoming summer and winter sessions; and, if successful, the program could expand to the entire academic year. The mechanics of the program are still being worked out, but generally the higher-cost classes would become available after state-funded classes fill up. The winter session may offer only the higher-cost classes, officials said.
That is some premium for reading and writing! The naive might have thought that would have been guaranteed. The story is here and for the pointer I thank Robert Tagorda.
Sentences to ponder
Richard H. Thaler, a former colleague at Cornell and another contributor to the Economic View column, once remarked about an unsuccessful candidate for a faculty position, “What his résumé lacked was five bad papers.”
The rest is from Bob Frank.
Markets in Everything: US Public Schools
Reuters: Across the United States, public high schools in struggling small towns are putting their empty classroom seats up for sale.
In Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, and Lake Placid, New York, in Lavaca, Arkansas, and Millinocket, Maine, administrators are aggressively recruiting international students.
They’re wooing well-off families in China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and dozens of other countries, seeking teenagers who speak decent English, have a sense of adventure – and are willing to pay as much as $30,000 for a year in an American public school.
The end goal for foreign students: Admission to a U.S. college.
So far the numbers are small. US high schools do outperform those in many other countries but the quality is modest relative to other developed countries and it’s hard for me to see this as a boom market. Nevertheless, I think I will warn my teenager that an exchange program with South Korea is an option.
Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.
Charles Murray on the role of economic forces
This has been debated by Brooks, Krugman, and around the blogosphere, so let us hear from the man himself:
“OK, let’s try this,” he said. “If you get a rising economy, for example, if Barack Obama could say we are going to bring on seven years of incredibly low unemployment, then he would argue that this would do a lot of good to the working class, wouldn’t he?” I agree. “But we already had that in the 1990s, and yet the dropout from the labour force continued to go up, people on social disability went up. Divorce went up. We have no evidence that a robust economy has much to do with these problems at all.”
I point out that many employers complain of a shortage of skills – a large chunk of America’s workforce is not as well equipped as it used to be relative to the rest of the world. If you don’t have the skills to make a living, how can you feel pride in your situation? “Well, that’s a different problem,” says Murray, looking suddenly uninterested. “If you are arguing that 22-year-old men are saying to their girlfriends, ‘I just need a job and then I’ll behave responsibly …’ Well, that’s just bullshit. If you ask women in working class communities, they will say, ‘Why should I marry these losers? It’s like taking another child into the household.’ ”
That is from his FT interview, I am not sure if it is gated for you. The closing paragraph is this:
I feel mildly guilty at having spoiled Murray’s jovial mood but he quickly bounces back. The bill arrives. I disguise my shock at its size. As we get up to leave, Murray says: “Here is an interesting commentary: I was willing to talk to the Financial Times under the influence of alcohol but I’m not willing to play poker under the influence. What does that say?” Don’t worry, I reply, you won’t lose your shirt. Murray laughs. As we are shaking hands, he adds, “I really enjoyed that. We must do it again some time.” Then he strides off in what looks to me like a straight line.
Sentences to ponder
There are all kinds of detailed facts to extract: like that the average fraction of keys I type that are backspaces has consistently been about 7% (I had no idea it was so high!).
That is from Stephan Wolfram, and it is only the beginning. Here is his on-phone probability:
The entire post is interesting. There are these words too:
And as I think about it all, I suppose my greatest regret is that I did not start collecting more data earlier.
For the pointer I thank Brandon Robison.
Apprenticeships v. College
In my post, College has been oversold, I discussed the 40% college dropout rate. In a piece in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Tuning in to the Dropping Out, I reprise some of this material but also discuss high school dropouts and the importance of alternative education paths.
In the 21st century, an astounding 25 percent of American men do not graduate from high school. A big part of the problem is that the United States has paved a single road to knowledge, the road through the classroom. “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years,” we tell the students, “and all will be well.” Lots of students, however, crash before they reach the end of the road. Who can blame them? Sit-down learning is not for everyone, perhaps not even for most people. There are many roads to an education.
Consider those offered in Europe. In Germany, 97 percent of students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college. In the United States, we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college. So are German students poorly educated? Not at all.
Instead of college, German students enter training and apprenticeship programs—many of which begin during high school. By the time they finish, they have had a far better practical education than most American students—equivalent to an American technical degree—and, as a result, they have an easier time entering the work force. Similarly, in Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, between 40 to 70 percent of students opt for an educational program that combines classroom and workplace learning.
…In the United States, “vocational” programs are often thought of as programs for at-risk students, but that’s because they are taught in high schools with little connection to real workplaces. European programs are typically rigorous because the training is paid for by employers who consider apprentices an important part of their current and future work force. Apprentices are therefore given high-skill technical training that combines theory with practice—and the students are paid! Moreover, instead of isolating teenagers in their own counterculture, apprentice programs introduce teenagers to the adult world and the skills, attitudes, and practices that make for a successful career.
For more see Launching the Innovation Renaissance and–showing the opportunity for consensus on this topic–a recent post on apprenticeships from the Shanker blog.
Did Oprah steal book sales with her reading club?
There is a new paper (pdf) from the excellent Craig Garthwaite, here is the abstract:
This paper studies the economic effects of endorsements. In the publishing sector, endorsements from the Oprah Winfrey Book Club are found to be a business stealing form of advertising that raises title level sales without increasing the market size. The endorsements decrease aggregate adult fiction sales; likely as a result of the endorsed books being more difficult than those that otherwise would have been purchased. Economically meaningful sales increases are also found for non-endorsed titles by endorsed authors. These spillover demand estimates demonstrate a broad range of benefits from advertising for firms operating in a multiproduct brand setting.
What are the best sources on how to be a good teacher?
Charlie Clarke, a Finance PhD student at UConn, and a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
Hi Tyler,
I’m a grad student teaching for the first time, and I was wondering if you had any recommendations for a book relaying evidence based advice for teaching methods. I know Cowen’s law, “There is a literature on everything.” Just hoping there is a good book or two synthesizing that literature so that I can use it to improve my teaching.
Love the blog.
The most important lesson is to use the right textbook. Beyond that:
1. Give a damn.
2. Get to the point when you speak.
3. Expect something from them.
4. Teach to the students who are interested in learning.
5. At all levels, do not overestimate the attention span of your audience.
6. Do not be afraid to be idiosyncratic, provided you adhere strictly to #2.
Those are my tips. But to be honest, I do not consider them RCT-tested and I am not sure they maximize social welfare. They instead start from the premise that the key question is what kind of person do I want to be, and then the method asks the students to conform to that vision. Some or all of them might prove RCT-neutral, or worse. Nonetheless, the approach is a good way to motivate me and that is part of the problem.
Doesn’t Bryan Caplan have a post on this? Here is John Baez on how to teach. Peoples, what can you recommend from the literature?
Why is there a shortage of talent in IT sectors and the like?
There have been some good posts on this lately, for instance asking why the wage simply doesn’t clear the market, why don’t firms train more workers, and so on (my apologies as I have lost track of those posts, so no links). The excellent Isaac Sorkin emails me with a link to this paper, Superstars and Mediocrities: Market Failures in the Discovery of Talent (pdf), by Marko Terviö, here is the abstract:
A basic problem facing most labor markets is that workers can neither commit to long-term wage contracts nor can they self fi nance the costs of production. I study the effects of these imperfections when talent is industry-specifi c, it can only be revealed on the job, and once learned becomes public information. I show that fi rms bid excessively for the pool of incumbent workers at the expense of trying out new talent. The workforce is then plagued with an unfavorable selection of individuals: there are too many mediocre workers, whose talent is not high enough to justify them crowding out novice workers with lower expected talent but with more upside potential. The result is an inefficiently low level of output coupled with higher wages for known high talents. This problem is most severe where information about talent is initially very imprecise and the complementary costs of production are high. I argue that high incomes in professions such as entertainment, management, and entrepreneurship, may be explained by the nature of the talent revelation process, rather than by an underlying scarcity of talent.
This result relates also to J.C.’s query about talent sorting, the signaling model of education, CEO pay, and many other results under recent discussion. If it matters to you, this paper was published in the Review of Economic Studies. I’m not sure that a theorist would consider this a “theory paper” but to me it is, and it is one of the most interesting theory papers I have seen in years.