Category: Education
The New Republic covers MRU
I very much enjoyed this new article by Marc Tracy. (The site is now up! And if we haven’t processed your registration yet it is because we are swamped with numbers, our apologies, please bear with us.) Excerpt:
The videos, several of which were made available to me, are indeed more friendly than the stuff you typically find on Coursera, if not as viscerally captivating as, say, a TED talk. Manufactured with Microsoft PowerPoint and a $4 iPad app, they tend to last in the neighborhood of five to eight minutes—Cowen, who possesses a parody of an economist’s precision, noted on his blog, “The average video is five minutes, twenty-eight seconds long”—with segments frequently summarizing and highlighting the most interesting parts of academic papers (“Seasonal Food Prices and Policy Responses: A Narrative Account of Three Food Security Crises in Malawi”); these papers are duly credited and usually available online for free.
Narrated by Cowen or Tabarrok, the videos share the curiosity, eclectic interests, and tongue-in-cheek dryness of the blog. For example, Cowen riffs off a paper that showed that when cable television was introduced to several Indian villages, the fertility rate fell. He intones, in a studied deadpan reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s belabored enunciation: “We don’t know, however, whether this is because women or families have better information about birth control, or simply that they’re exposed to alternative visions of different lifestyles on TV, and maybe want to spend their time in ways other than just having more children.”
Maybe today you should go visit MRUniversity.com
The link is here, and we thank you for your interest. Read Alex’s opening statement for more information:
Welcome to MRU! At right you will find our first course, Development Economics. Click the + to see the videos in each section. New sections will be released at the beginning of every week and there will be bonus sections released during the middle of some weeks. Practice questions for each video provide some simple feedback.
Anyone can watch videos and take the practice questions but to truly participate by asking and answering questions, posting material, partcipating in chats and so forth you will need to register. Please do register as this will also help us to plan for future courses. There is no charge for registering.
In order to make our material as widely available as possible the videos default to low resolution, 380p, but if you have good bandwidth we recommend bumping them up to 480p which will increase video and audio resolution. You can do this on many platforms (not all) by clicking near the bottom right of the video and then clicking the settings button.
The course is designed for videos but every lecture also includes a downloadable MP3 in the section Related Materials.
The “How to Use” section (link in bar at top), includes ideas such as flipping the classroom and some basic directions for making your own videos.
In coming weeks, we will be releasing new features and announcing virtual and live chats!
Women economists see the world differently
The biggest disagreement: 76% of women say faculty opportunities in economics favor men. Male economists point the opposite way: 80% say women are favored or the process is neutral.
As for politics:
Female economists tend to favor a bigger role for government while male economists have greater faith in business and the marketplace. Is the U.S. economy excessively regulated? Sixty-five percent of female economists said ‘no’ — 24 percentage points higher than male economists.
The story is here. The article is “Are Disagreements Among Male and Female Economists Marginal at Best? A Survey of AEA Members and Their Views on Economics and Economic Policy,” Ann Mari May, Mary G. McGarvey and Robert Whaples, Contemporary Economic Policy (forthcoming), but I can’t seem to find a copy on-line.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
A cultural guide for Afghanis
After eleven years, we are trying a new approach:
“Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you,” the guide instructs.
“When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind,” it explains. “They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”
This is news to me, though I would like to see it confirmed:
Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.
Finally:
NATO’s coalition is described as a “work of art.”
For my house, I might rather have a Suzani.
The culture that is Germany
Men are in particularly high demand because many parents don’t want their children looked after exclusively by women. According to a study carried out on behalf of the Ministry of Family Affairs, more than a third of mothers and fathers prefer day care facilities that have male staff. The higher the parents’ educational and income levels, the more important they consider having male child care workers.
Here is much more.
From the Institute for New Economic Thinking
We would like to introduce our new blog on the website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) entitled ‘Reading Mas-Colell’, which will initially run in the fall of 2012, alongside our teaching of a course which uses the textbook on microeconomics by Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green. We hope to make a modest contribution to economic thinking by engaging in selective close reading and commentary on a very influential text, which in certain ways has become a ‘Bible’.
Our goal is to help through the blog to change the way in which economics teaching is approached at the Ph.D. level (many agree that it is limited and limiting). We hope to generate a lively conversation on how economics is taught and practiced today.
You can find the blog on the INET website at:
http://ineteconomics.org/blog/reading-mas-colell
We very much hope that you and your readers will participate in the conversation that we hope to generate.
Best wishes,
Sanjay G. Reddy and Raphaele Chappe
Economic education in Italy
Prof. Antonio Nicita emails to me:
Following a long period of cooperation in the field of Economics, the Universities of Florence, Pisa and Siena announce a new joint regional PhD program, with 10 three years scholarships, supported by Regione Toscana.
The Doctorate courses will provide students the knowledge, analytical skills and capabilities to conduct their research at the frontier of economics. Our programme gives emphasis to economic history and the history of economic thought, and recognizes the importance of exposing students to different theoretical perspectives.
First year courses will mainly be held at the University of Siena, where students are welcome to apply for accommodation facilities. In the following years students will rely on the academic environment and facilities in one of the three universities, according to their research interests.
For additional information please refer to the site: http://www.econ-pol.unisi.it/dottorato/, or to the official sites of the Tuscan Universities
MR is Going to Korea: Gangnam Style!
Tyler and I will both be in South Korea in early October for the Asian launch of Marginal Revolution University. Tyler will be speaking at the World Knowledge Forum (Oct. 9-11). The WKF is known as the Asian Davos. In addition to Tyler, the speakers include Paul Krugman, Daron Acemoglu, Malcolm Gladwell, Cass Sunstein, Dani Rodrik, a number of other well known economists and social scientists and a host of political and business leaders.
Coincidentally, Google invited me to speak in South Korea on Oct. 9. I will be speaking on Innovation at the Google Big Tent event in Gangnam! I will also be on several panels at the WKF on the 10th and 11th.
Neither Tyler nor I have been to Korea before so we are looking forward to the trip. Recommendations welcome in the comments.
We are committed to making MRU a global player in online education.
The bias against stale labor
Rational or not? Brian Leiter reports:
Philosopher Daniel Weiskopf (George State) calls my attention to a quite startling ad for a job in English at Colorado State University, which requires that applicants have earned the PhD since 2010! As the linked post notes, given the state of the humanities job market, everyone knows there are lots of very good candidates with PhDs from 2009, 2008 and, horrors, even 2007 who still haven’t found suitable appointments. This ad promises to consign them to the discard pile without even looking at them.
There is another example here. By the way, here is a Leiter post updating us on Grayling’s New College of the Humanities.
Does work or school boost your vocabulary more?
From the new James R. Flynn book:
It appears that the world of work, which follows university, has been the main force behind the adult vocabulary gains of the last half-century…Note that in 1953, low-IQ people enhanced their vocabularies over the ages of 17 to 22 far more than low-IQ people did in 2000. I suggest the hypothesis that they were more likely to be settled in apprenticeships or adult jobs in those days than today. Even the high-IQ people increased their vocabularies more between the ages of 17 to 22 in 1953 than in 2000. Apparently being placed in work was more potent than being in a tertiary institution.
Isn’t it also the case that we have been moving to a flatter, simpler English for a long time? Try reading some James Fenimore Cooper. Plus schools are less likely to make you memorize long, classic poems, which is another good way of building vocabulary.
Still the No Brainer Issue of the Year
In The No Brainer Issue of the Year I wrote:
Behind Door #1 are people of extraordinary ability: scientists, artists, educators, business people and athletes. Behind Door #2 stand a random assortment of people. Which door should the United States open?
Once again, as the NYTimes reports, our dysfunctional political system has opted for Door #2:
A Republican bill to provide permanent resident visas for foreigners who graduate from American universities with advanced degrees in science and technology failed to pass the House on Thursday, a setback for technology companies that had strongly supported it.
…[The bill] would have eliminated an annual lottery and instead allocated 55,000 visas for legal permanent residency, known as green cards, each year to foreigners who have completed master’s and doctoral degrees from American universities in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Sentences to ponder
Real earnings for young college grads have fallen by over 15% since 2000, or by about $10,000 in 2011 dollars
Michael Mandel’s tweet is here, and link to the underlying material is here.
Don’t be misled by claims of a “high” or “rising” college premium, that is indeed true relative to high school (or less), but many of those wages are down even more. In absolute terms the return to college is not doing well.
Dan Searle fellowships in economics
The Dan Searle Fellowships in Economics offer the opportunity for newly minted PhDs to spend two years pursuing research as postdoctoral fellows before entering the academic job market. Before applying, applicants must identify an appropriate mentor in a highly ranked economics department and reach a tentative arrangement to spend two years at the prospective host department.
There is more information here. I know a fair number of people who have benefited greatly from this program.
Fox and Mitchum on the Flynn Effect and how it works
James R. Flynn recommends this paper, by Fox and Mitchum, in his new book:
Secular gains in intelligence test scores have perplexed researchers since they were documented by Flynn (1984, 1987). Gains are most pronounced on abstract, so-called culture-free tests, prompting Flynn (2007) to attribute them to problem solving skills availed by scientifically advanced cultures. We propose that recent-born individuals have adopted an approach to analogy that enables them to infer higher-level relations requiring roles that are not intrinsic to the objects that constitute initial representations of items. This proposal is translated into item-specific predictions about differences between cohorts in pass rates and item-response patterns on the Raven’s Matrices, a seemingly culture-free test that registers the largest Flynn effect. Consistent with predictions, archival data reveal that individuals born around 1940 are less able to map objects at higher levels of relational abstraction than individuals born around 1990. Polytomous Rasch models verify predicted violations of measurement invariance as raw scores are found to underestimate the number of analogical rules inferred by members of the earlier cohort relative to members of the later cohort who achieve the same overall score. The work provides a plausible cognitive account of the Flynn effect, furthers understanding of the cognition of matrix reasoning, and underscores the need to consider how test-takers select item responses.
The paper is here (pdf).
From a loyal MR reader
I read through the Heckman debate. He does what he always does. One response is terrible (quality of early intervention doesn’t matter, just do a lot of it) but most of them make decent points. Carol Dweck hints at the problem of writing people off.
No one considers neurodiversity. No one considers that many successful people take big risks, follow their impulses, fail to comply, have bad habits, and otherwise misbehave. Heckman himself may be an example.