Category: Education
My favorite things *Modern Principles* (Cowen and Tabarrok)
I'm writing to thank so many of you for your interest in Modern Principes: Microeconomics, Modern Principles: Macroeconomics, and the two-in-one edition. Alex and I have been pleased to see how many of you have adopted the book or shown interest in it; all the books are doing great and thanks to your interest. Translations to other languages are already in the works.
Here are a few of my favorite things Modern Principles:
1. It has the most thorough treatment of the interconnectedness of markets and the importance of the price system; most texts only pay lip service to this.
2. It is the most Hayekian of the texts on micro theory without in any way ignoring the importance of externalities, public goods and other challenges to markets.
3. It has an entire chapter on ethics and economics. We do present economics as a value-free science, yet we all know how much ethics shapes people's economics views. The book helps the student sort out common confusions and explains the ethical presuppositions behind many "economic" arguments.
4. It has an entire chapter on incentives and incentive design (e.g. piece rates, tournaments, pay for performance). Oddly, many micro books do not discuss this crucial topic.
5. International examples–from Algeria to Zimbabwe–are written into the core of the book and not just ghettoized in a single "international chapter."
6. It is obsessed with the idea of teaching students to think like economists.
7. It is grounded in the belief that reading an economics text should be fun, not a chore.
8. It has balanced coverage of neo-Keynesian and real business cycle approaches.
9. It covers Solow "catch-up" growth, and Paul Romer's increasing returns, much more thoroughly than do the other texts. The macro book (section) starts off with the idea of why growth matters and is central to macroeconomics.
10. The financial crisis was written into the core of the book, rather than being absent or treated as an add-on. This means for instance plenty of coverage of financial intermediation and asset price bubbles.
11. The book's blog, a teaching tool with lots of videos, powerpoints and other ideas for keeping teaching exciting, is lots of fun and updated regularly (FYI, this is a great resource for any instructor of economics.)
In addition, of course, there is a full range of supplements including lecture powerpoints, test banks, student's guide, Aplia support and coming in the fall EconPortal (even better than Aplia, IMHO).
More Assorted Links
1. What economists and sociologists can learn from Akerlof and Kranton's Identity Economics; a review by Tom Slee.
2. Everyone on TV reads the same newspaper.
3. The Rise of the Order of Assassins.
4. Clay Shirky: "It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity."
Books in the house are correlated with good outcomes for children
A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is "as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father." Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.
That's from Laura Miller.
Back in Berlin
The President of Germany had to resign over this? On the bright side, it doesn't seem as important as Lena winning the Eurovision contest.
And so I am back in Berlin and for a good bit of time. I've already blogged my 1985 visit to East Berlin with Kroszner, which remains one of my strongest and most influential memories. I also returned the summer after the Wall fell, and spent about two days walking and driving around the Eastern part, more or less pinching myself to see if it was real. The same people who had been afraid to talk to me five years before suddenly were friendly and open. It felt remarkably like West Germany…and yet not. I don't expect to personally witness a comparable liberation in my lifetime and those days too have stuck with me deeply. For a number of reasons, just stepping foot in Germany is for me an emotional experience.
Twenty years later, I experience Berlin as a normal city for the first time. But I just arrived, so we'll have to see.
It is striking how cheap rents are. I have a two-bedroom apartment, fully furnished, short-term, in a neighborhood comparable in quality to Manhattan's Upper East Side and yet it costs less than many a mediocre place in Fairfax.
How to answer questions about your sexual orientation
As an aside, I cannot refrain from relating another anecdote, which is told of Gore Vidal. In a TV interview he was asked: "Was your first sexual experience with a man or with a woman?" To which he replied: "I was too polite to ask."
That is from Žižek citing Dolar, p.121. It's a shame that Kagan does not have the liberty to answer in the same manner.
Ramban, a 12th century Jewish Biblical Commentator
Doni Bloomfield sends me this passage:
Set aside a sum of money that you will give away if you allow yourself to be angered. Be sure that the amount you designate is sufficient to force you to think twice before you lose your temper… (Ramban: A letter for the Ages translated by Avrohom Chaim Feuer Reishit Chochmah, Shaar Ha'anavah Chapter 3)
The link to the source is here.
Incorporated Men and Women
In my post on The Unincorporated Man “framing” writes:
Instead of saying that a corporation can own shares in your income, how about saying it is like a loan that you wont get into trouble ever paying back, but will have to pay more if you become rich.
Exactly. In fact, I have written about income-contingent loans before and how one of them got Bill Clinton through college. At the PSD blog Ryan Hahn also points to Lumni, a new firm that is investing in human capital in the developing world:
Lumni designs, markets and manages “Human capital funds”, an innovative investment vehicle for financing education. Students agree to pay a fixed percentage of their individual incomes for a predetermined number of months after graduation. The arrangement traspases part of the risk of investing in education from the student to the investor, who is in a better position to diversify it.
Lumni is the brainchild of economics professor Miguel Palacios. Here is his book and Cato paper on human capital contracts.
Gattaca University
From the NYTimes, Berkeley will give its students genetic tests.
…this year’s incoming freshmen at the University of California, Berkeley, will get something quite different: a cotton swab on which they can, if they choose, send in a DNA sample.
The university said it would analyze the samples, from inside students’ cheeks, for three genes that help regulate the ability to metabolize alcohol, lactose and folates.
Those genes were chosen not because they indicate serious health risks but because students with certain genetic markers may be able to lead healthier lives by drinking less, avoiding dairy products or eating more leafy green vegetables.
Don't be surprised if this is soon canceled.
Adam Wheeler’s resume
You'll find it here. He's the fraud who lied his way into Harvard. Here is the description of his "book" (supposedly) under review at Harvard University Press:
The Mapping of an Ideological Demesne
– Under review with Harvard University Press 2008-2009
The massive proliferation, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, of technologies for measuring, projecting, and organizing geographical and social space produced in the European cultural imaginary an intense and widespread interest in visualizing this world and alternative worlds. As the new century and the Stuart era developed, poets and dramatists mediated this transformation in the form of spatial tropes and models of the nation. I examine the geographical tropes by which Tudor and Stuart writers created poetic landscapes as a mode of engagement with the structures of power, kingship, property, and the market. Accordingly, each of the texts that I examine betrays an awareness of writing as a spatial activity and space as a scripted category. The critical topographies that these writers created are maps of ideology, figural territories within which social conflict and political antagonism are put into play.
I've read worse. How you react to that description is a Rorschach test of sorts, especially if you are not thinking it is fraudulent. Here is a TNR post on Wheeler. Here is a Princeton University Press post about Wheeler and the book he claimed to have under contract with them, to be co-authored with Marc Shell, a very well-read scholar.
Why are none of the sources reporting how well he actually did at Harvard and elsewhere? Isn't that an interesting question? How much would the world differ if Harvard reserved a fifth of its entering class for those individuals who showed the most talent for fraud? I don't mean that question in a cynical light, it is one genuine way of trying to think about how education adds value to labor market outcomes.
Questions that are rarely asked
If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?
That's from Hudson Collins, loyal MR reader. I've always liked the chess marks "!?" and "?!" and wondered why they weren't used in standard English. The former refers to a startling move which is uncertain in merit and the latter refers to a dubious move which creates difficult to handle complications. Plus "N" could be used to mark sentences with novel ideas. I also would ask for a punctuation mark meaning: "This sentence adds an "N+1" understanding to a problem which everyone else is discussing at an "N" level." Maybe the mark could be an arrow pointing up to the sky. Similarly, you could imagine an arrow pointing downwards to hell.
What kind of punctuation mark would you add?
Sentences to ponder
"There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers–holders of power, not its critics."
True sentences
Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.
That's from Malcolm Gladwell.
Are you an asker or a guesser?
Austin Frakt forwards me the following intriguing article. Here is one excerpt:
This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that's achieved minor cult status online. We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."
Neither's "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline. If you're a Guesser, you'll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it's a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they're diehard Askers.
As for myself, I am an asker when it comes to information, but a guesser when it comes to making demands.
Where is economics headed?
Andrew Oswald has a new and interesting paper on what kinds of articles now get published. The piece starts off as follows:
When I was a PhD student, in Oxford in the late 1970s, I was taught nothing about the experimental method or how to weigh evidence, and indeed comparatively little about data. Consciously or subconsciously, we were encouraged to think of economics as a branch of (not very applied) mathematics. My first published paper relied on a fixed-point theorem; it contained no numbers. We were not exposed to, for example, any empirical findings from the psychology literature or the intellectual approach of researchers like epidemiologists.
Amazing, is it not? Turn to p.5 to see one of his basic counts, which puts experimental papers in the lead.
Are girls now worse drivers than boys?
This was only one study, but it fits into some broader social trends:
In a survey of teenage drivers, Allstate Insurance Co. found that 48% of girls said they are likely to drive 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. By comparison, 36% of the boys admitted to speeding. Of the girls, 16% characterized their own driving as aggressive, up from 9% in 2005. And just over half of the girls said they are likely to drive while talking on a phone or texting, compared to 38% of the boys.
Nor are these teens meta-rational:
The study found that 65% of the respondents, male and female, said they are confident in their own driving skills, but 77% said they had felt unsafe when another teen was driving. Only 23% of teens agree that most teens are good drivers.