Category: Education
True, false, or uncertain?
Let’s start with a measurement, namely that the current rate of unemployment for individuals with a college degree is about 3.7 percent.
Therefore if we cut government spending on the jobs of those individuals, they will be reemployed reasonably rapidly. We should not assign much weight to the aggregate rate of unemployment in making this judgment. True, false, or uncertain?
Variant: If we increase government spending to hire these individuals, it will not much lower the rate of unemployment. True, false, or uncertain?
Additional exercise: What percentage of the money spent on the labor of government military contractors is spent on individuals with a college degree?
I find it remarkable how infrequently these simple considerations are mentioned, much less analyzed.
New Editors at The Independent Review
After 17 years of tireless work, Bob Higgs the founder and editor of The Independent Review, is stepping down. I’ve been fortunate to work with Bob at TIR both as an author and as an assistant editor for many years. As I wrote in 2006 Bob is one of the great editors, he has improved every paper in TIR. No one can replace Bob which is why he is handing over the task of editorship to an excellent new team, Robert Whaples, Chris Coyne and Michael Munger. Here is the announcement
The Independent Review is a scholarly interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of political economy and the critical analysis of government policy. It publishes carefully researched, peer-reviewed scholarship and seeks to be provocative, lucid, and written in an engaging style. Ranging across the fields of economics, political science, law, history, philosophy, and sociology, The Independent Review takes a classical liberal approach and reaches a wide readership among academics, advanced students, policy analysts, journalists, and serious generalists.
Economic historian Robert Higgs, the journal’s founding editor will soon become its editor-at-large and is handing off editorial tasks to Robert Whaples (Wake Forest University), Christopher Coyne (George Mason) and Michael Munger (Duke).
The new editorial team welcomes high-quality article submissions. Please email your submissions (as a Word document) to [email protected].
Observations on meeting Bill Gates
I am pleased to have been invited to a small group session in New York City to meet Gates and hear him present his new letter. My observations are these:
1. Gates has a command of data and analytics in development economics better than that of most development economists, or for that matter aid professionals. He also expects everyone at the meeting to know everything about what he is talking about, or at least is willing to proceed on that basis. That said, when it comes to answering questions he sometimes assumes a stupider version of the question than what is actually being asked.
2. He is smart enough, and health-savvy enough, not to waste time with handshakes at the beginning of meetings. People as productive as Gates should not be required to shake hands, and the same can be said for people less productive than Gates.
3. He does not go on and on. His opening remarks were about two minutes long, with no notes, and all of his answers were to the point.
4. We were served water, at exactly the right cool temperature, yet without ice cubes. No cookies.
5. Unlike Gates, I am not convinced that “health” is the key breakthrough area for economic development, but there is enough low-hanging fruit out there that it doesn’t have to be. That said, when questioned on this his answers were closer to tautology than they needed to be. Much of their emphasis on measurement seemed to me to track absolute movement toward goals, rather than relative efficacies of different project investments.
6. Gates suggested that if he had been more careful tracking and organizing his AP credits, he might have been able to receive his undergraduate degree. That is one sense, in his words, in which he is barely a college drop out. In another sense, it makes him a very extreme college drop out.
7. He mentioned that he is an extremely eager consumer (and not just funder) of on-line education and The Teaching Company. And this is a man who could receive free (or paid) lectures from almost anyone he wants.
8. Empellon Tacqueria, in the West Village, has an excellent mackerel ceviche and I recommend also the quail eggs.
9. I have now run into Reihan Salam twice in the last two years, in random public places in Manhattan, without any reason for expecting to see him there. This should cause me to revise my prior on something or other, but I am not sure what. When changing/surfing the channels, which I do occasionally to “keep in touch,” I also run into him on TV a lot.
10. Gates understands the very high returns from better governance, but also sees it is not trivial to reap them.
11. In the context of U.S. education, he does not worry that teacher cheating will bias test results very much at the macro level.
12. He is more optimistic about charter schools than I am (though I favor them), and more optimistic about the results from giving teachers feedback about their performance. In my view, bad teachers don’t very much want to improve and it is not so much a matter of knowledge. Undergraduate college teachers are evaluated all the time, and it does help, but it hardly brings the rotten apples up to par and I don’t see it as the key to moving the system forward at lower levels.
Here is Jason Kottke’s account. Here is Dana Goldstein’s account.
Gates’s annual letter, which was released earlier this week, is here.
Economics Music Video Contest
The Hackley Endowment for the Study of Capitalism and Free Enterprise at Fayetteville State University is sponsoring an Economics Video Contest on the subject “Economic Value Is Subjective.” Entries are due Wednesday, May 15, 2013. First prize is $2,500, more info and rules here. The first entry, “big books” was pretty good once it got into the rap. Also, one of the big books looked familiar.
Gates, Thiel, Summers, and Thrun on on-line education
The video is here, Thomas Friedman moderates, and for the pointer I thank MG. I have yet to view it (starting right now), but it is fair to call it self-recommending.
The new bipartisan immigration bill
Here is the proposal. It is better than nothing, if only to show that something can be done. The “no path to citizenship until the border is secure” is simply kicking the can down the road, as that standard never will be met. In the meantime, lots of money will be spent and in due time drones will dominate the border; cult midnight showings of Blue Thunder will increase. U.S. universities will go crazy inflating the size of their graduate STEM programs, and it will become harder to flunk these people out. Economists will lobby for inclusion but fail. (Isn’t it better to simply increase the number of jobs-related visas?) The passage about the special importance of farm labor sounds like Orwellian satire. Dairy is mentioned too. Will this pave the way for a national ID card? More hi-tech workers will get in. Productivity will rise, and some individuals will have much better lives, but the country will feel less free. Republicans are trying to appeal to moderates here, not actual Latinos. We observe the ever-lingering influence of GWB.
The Wisconsin revolution?
…educators in Wisconsin are offering a possible solution by decoupling the learning part of education from student assessment and degree-granting.
Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor’s degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity.
No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.
In other words, you just have to pass the tests. The full story is here, and for the pointer I thank Brent D.
Drivers of inequality
Academic hiring committees play a role:
Robert Oprisko of Butler University found that half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not. These other 100 schools don’t even want to hire the sort of graduates they themselves produce. They want the elite credential.
That is from David Brooks.
Career advice from Richard Thaler
My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is… Work on your own ideas, not your advisor’s ideas (or at least in addition to her ideas). And spend more time thinking and less time reading. Too much reading leads people to think of small variations on existing studies. Admittedly my strategy of writing the paper first and only then reading the literature (or, more likely, letting the referees tell me what they think I should have read) is an extreme one, but it is better than trying to read everything. Try writing the first paper on some topic, not the tenth, and never the 50th.
Here is the rest of the interview.
edX course with Banerjee and Duflo
You will find it here, thanks to Yogesh for the pointer.
Why should we not recreate Neanderthals?
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.
Development Economics – Final Exam
We have posted the last section of our course on Development Economics to MRU and the final exam is now open. Have fun!
New courses coming soon!
Don’t pay for all of your kids’ college education
…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.
Interesting papers on higher education
As recommended by the excellent Kevin Lewis, find them here, a round-up of recent research.
For the pointer I thank Rob Raffety.