Category: Education
What is the correct Bayesian inference from this British message?
I found a little card in my bathroom, perched above the toilet and near the shower:
This bath has a non slip surface in part. If you would like a rubber bath mat in addition please contact housekeeping.
And so what does that mean? Here are some options:
1. The part without the non slip surface is really, really slippery. Watch out!
2. We are boasting about having a non slip surface “in part,” yet without appearing to be boasting too explicitly.
3. We are not sure which is your best course of action (there is human heterogeneity), but we want to get you thinking about the non slip surface and also the slip surface. We are sure you will put the information to good use and also we are showing our respect for your decision-making and autonomy.
4. We have attempted to word this message as emotionally neutrally as possible. We are therefore signaling that we are a quality hotel, without intending to offer any particular advice about the non slip surface or for that matter the slip surface. We also did not fall into the trap of hyphenating “non slip” (though we did elsewhere in the bathroom hyphenate “co-operation”), nor did we place a comma after “addition” as you barbarians might have done.
I am not intelligent enough to discern which of these might be true.
More Peter Thiel lecture notes
You will find them here, listed under “Founder as Victim, Founder as God.” Excerpt:
PayPal’s founding team was six people. Four of them were born outside of the United States. Five of them were 23 or younger. Four of them built bombs when they were in high school.
You will see the influence of Rene Girard. For the pointer I thank Blake Masters.
Should B. emigrate from England?
A request from a loyal blog reader. I attended a talk in Oxford by Martin Wolf from the FT a few months ago, in which he gave a very pessimistic assessment of prospects for the British and European economies. A member of the audience asked what his advice for a young graduate entering the job market would be, and his response was ’emigrate’.
So two requests, really:
(1) Do you agree?
(2) If so, where should I go?To put things in context, I am a 21-year-old male, a final year student at Oxford University reading for a BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (concentrating on the latter two subjects). I have work experience in the financial sector, moderate language ability (high school level French and German, but a fast learner), and I am willing to consider a wide range of locations. I am an EU citizen, so obviously have freedom of movement within the EU. I am open to staying somewhere for a relatively long period, but at the moment I am more inclined to think of it as a below-ten-year stay. Assume, perhaps, the prospect of permanent residence is not excluded. Feel free to edit the request as appropriate for the blog.
I say:
1. The key data point is the polarization of labor market returns, including in the United Kingdom and much of Western Europe. Given that your background and reading habits signal smarts and hard work, you probably will do fine staying at home.
2. Switching languages will set you back by years, even if you are a quick study. Stick to the Anglo world, or to an English-speaking job at least.
3. It is not already obvious to B. that he should move to the United States. That’s fine, so perhaps he quite likes England already and indeed who wouldn’t? That lack of obsession with America also means he does not have a diehard commitment to maximizing pecuniary returns and that is yet further evidence he should stay in England.
4. If you want to travel and live abroad, try to start with an English multinational and then signal a willingness to move far afield. Or consider the foreign service. Or work for a year or two and then do a Jodi Ettenberg for as long as you can. All of those options sound better to me than moving to Stuttgart and trying to master the intricacies of “dass ich nicht habe lachen mussen,” (or is it “dass ich habe nicht lachen mussen”?, or do they mean different things?) while petitioning the Knigge Society for a knowledge of manners.
5. “A man who is tired of London is tired of life.”
Why were we obsessed with flying cars?
David Graeber has a fascinating albeit uneven essay about our changing visions of the future, here is one excerpt:
Why, these analysts wonder, did both the United States and the Soviet Union become so obsessed with the idea of manned space travel? It was never an efficient way to engage in scientific research. And it encouraged unrealistic ideas of what the human future would be like.
Could the answer be that both the United States and the Soviet Union had been, in the century before, societies of pioneers, one expanding across the Western frontier, the other across Siberia? Didn’t they share a commitment to the myth of a limitless, expansive future, of human colonization of vast empty spaces, that helped convince the leaders of both superpowers they had entered into a “space age” in which they were battling over control of the future itself? All sorts of myths were at play here, no doubt, but that proves nothing about the feasibility of the project.
And this bit:
The growth of administrative work [in universities] has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years.
Interesting throughout, as they say. For pointers I thank Umung Varma and Kevan Huston.
Cheating and Signaling
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on cheating in online courses and some of the high-tech measures being used to detect such cheating:
As the students proceeded, they were told whether each answer was right or wrong.
Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of possible questions in the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends got together to take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they saw into the shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The schemers would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their work as they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never seen the material before…The next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet, and subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took turns going first.
…”So the grades are bouncing back and forth, but we’re all guaranteed an A in the end,” Mr. Smith told me. “We’re playing the system, and we’re playing the system pretty well.”
…A method under consideration at MIT would analyze each user’s typing style to help verify identity, Mr. Agarwal told me in a recent interview. Such electronic fingerprinting could be combined with face-recognition software to ensure accuracy, he says. Since most laptops now have Webcams built in, future online students might have to smile for the camera to sign on.
Some colleges already require identity-verification techniques that seem out of a movie. They’re using products such as the Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors watch students remotely on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.
The cheater-detector arms-race is interesting but also makes me think about the signaling theory of education. Cheating works best if the signaling model is true. If education were all about increasing productivity and if employers could measure productivity then cheating would be a waste of time. As illustrated by Mr. Smith, however, at least some students care about the A that cheating produces more than the knowledge that learning produces. Mr. Smith must believe either that education (in at least this class) doesn’t increase productivity or that employers don’t learn about productivity. Employers have big incentives to learn about productivity so my bet is on the former.
If students perceive the situation correctly we also have an interesting hypothesis: students should cheat more in those courses that offer the least productivity gains. Studies on cheating find mixed results across major, with some finding that business majors cheat more and others not, but these studies are cross sectional, i.e. across individuals. A better test of the theory that I propose would look at cheating by the same individuals across courses. Absences should also be higher in courses with lower productivity gains.
Public Choice Outreach!
Students are invited to apply to the Public Choice Outreach Conference. The Conference is an intensive lecture series on public choice and constitutional economics that will be held at George Mason from Friday August 10 to Sunday August 12. Speakers will include Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Peter Boettke, Nobelist Jim Buchanan and many others. It will be a lot of fun!
Graduate students and advanced undergraduates majoring in economics, history, international studies, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, public administration, religious studies, and sociology have attended past conferences. Applicants unfamiliar with Public Choice and students from outside of George Mason University are especially encouraged. A small stipend is available and meals and rooms will be provided by the conference (for non-locals). Space, however, is very limited.
Applications are due June 22. You can find more information here. Contact Lisa Hill-Corley if you have further questions about applications.
I, Robot?
In experiments at six public universities, students assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on “machine-guided learning” software — with reduced face time with instructors — did just as well, in less time, as their counterparts in traditional, instructor-centric versions of the courses. This largely held true regardless of the race, gender, age, enrollment status and family background of the students.
Here is more. The report was led by William Bowen, an economist who is famous for, among other things, having described education as subject to an inexorable “cost disease” for lack of labor-saving innovation.
The Rotten Kid theorem?
According to Adecco, nearly a third of parents are helping their kids find work, and nearly one in ten are taking them to job interviews.
…Three percent of recent college grads say their parents have actually sat in with them during interviews, and one percent claim Mom or Dad wrote their thank you notes afterwards.
Nearly one in four say they would not take a job they were otherwise interested in if they could not make or receive personal phone calls at work. Twelve percent say they wouldn’t work at a place that wouldn’t let them check in on Twitter or Facebook. Finally, my favorite, five percent — one in 20 recent grads — say they wouldn’t take a job where they couldn’t shop online, and the same amount would say no to employment where they couldn’t check sports scores.
The story is here, and for the pointer I thank John Chilton.
The Myth of Chinese Meritocracy
No doubt you have heard how the leadership of China is meritocratic and composed of technocrats with PhDs. Minxin Pei suggests that there is less than meets the eye.
…Contrary to the prevailing perception in the West (especially among business leaders), the current Chinese government is riddled with clever apparatchiks like Bo who have acquired their positions through cheating, corruption, patronage, and manipulation.
One of the most obvious signs of systemic cheating is that many Chinese officials use fake or dubiously acquired academic credentials to burnish their resumes. Because educational attainment is considered a measure of merit, officials scramble to obtain advanced degrees in order to gain an advantage in the competition for power.
The overwhelming majority of these officials end up receiving doctorates (a master’s degree won’t do anymore in this political arms race) granted through part-time programs or in the Communist Party’s training schools. Of the 250 members of provincial Communist Party standing committees, an elite group including party chiefs and governors, 60 claim to have earned PhDs.
Tellingly, only ten of them completed their doctoral studies before becoming government officials.
Simply put, Chinese institutions are not as good as those in say Mexico. Thus, China will not overtake Mexico in terms of GDP per capita any time soon, hence Chinese growth rates will fall. All we are seeing today is the logic of the Solow model in action.
Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Teachers
- Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
- Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
- When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
- Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
- Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
- Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
- Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
- Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
- Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Hat tip: Brainpickings.
The Big Easy’s School Revolution
Interesting op-ed in the Washington Post on schools in New Orleans.
…the levees broke and the city was devastated, and out of that destruction came the need to build a new system, one that today is accompanied by buoyant optimism. Since 2006, New Orleans students have halved the achievement gap with their state counterparts. They are on track to, in the next five years, make this the first urban city in the country to exceed its state’s average test scores. The share of students proficient on state tests rose from 35 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2011; 40 percent of students attended schools identified by the state as “academically unacceptable” in 2011, down from 78 percent in 2005.
….Most of the buzz about the city’s reforms focuses on the banishment of organized labor and the proliferation of charter schools, which enroll nearly 80 percent of public school students, up from 1.5 percent pre-Katrina. But what really distinguishes New Orleans is how government has redefined its role in education: stepping back from directly running schools and empowering educators to make the decisions about hours, curriculum and school culture that best drive student learning. Now, state and school-district officials mostly regulate and monitor — setting standards, ensuring equity and closing failing schools. Instead of a traditional school system, there is a system of schools in what officials liken to a fenced-in free market. Families have more choice about where their children can best succeed, they say, and educators have more opportunity to choose a school that best aligns with their approach.
The population of New Orleans changed pre and post-Katrina so it’s difficult to compare pre and post-Katrina test scores; although given the state of the schools pre-Katrina it’s hard to believe that the schools have not greatly improved. What really drives innovation, however, is not a simple substitution of private for public but a system substitution of competition for monopoly. The key therefore is to expand charters and voucher programs.
The state of Louisiana just passed a voucher program that although limited to poor and middle class students in failing schools will offer as many as 380,000 vouchers to be used at private schools or apprenticeships. Indiana has passed a potentially even larger program that would make about 500,000 students voucher-eligible. Keep in mind that at present there are 50 million public school students and only 220,000 voucher students nationwide.
My ideal program would fund students not schools and would make vouchers available to all students on a non-discriminatory basis. We are far from that ideal but we are slowly moving in the right direction. Charters and the expansion of voucher programs around the country are starting to bring more competition, dynamism and evolutionary experimentation to the field of education.
The Armchair Economist-Revised Edition
The Armchair Economist includes my favorite line in all of popular economics:
Economic theory predicts that you are not enjoying this book as much you thought you would.
I laugh every time I read that line and I think what a brilliant opening to an essay on auction theory and the winner’s curse! And then I think, but in fact I am enjoying this book more than I thought!
I first read Landsburg’s book some twenty years ago and dipping into the revised edition over the weekend I can see how influential The Armchair Economist has been on my own teaching and writing, particularly Landsburg’s wonderful and deep essay, Why Prices are Good: Smith v. Darwin. Around 1997, the Armchair Economist also inspired my (now) colleague Bryan Caplan to create a listserv to discuss economics with a small cadre of like minded readers. Many of the people on that listserv would later become well-known econ bloggers. My history makes me assume that everyone has read The Armchair Economist, after all, all my friends have read The Armchair Economist! More rational reflection tells me that time and the flowering of popular economics means that there is a whole new generation of readers ready to be delighted and inspired.
California fact of the day
Data available from the UC Office of the President shows that there were 2.5 faculty members for each senior manager in the UC system in 1993. Now there are as many senior managers as faculty. Just think: Each professor could have his or her personal senior manager.
And there is this:
A report on administrative growth by the UCLA Faculty Association estimated that UC would have $800 million more each year if senior management had grown at the same rate as the rest of the university since 1997, instead of four times faster.
What could we do with $800 million? That is the total amount of the state funding cuts for 2008-09 and 2009-10, and four times the savings of the employee furloughs. Consider this: UC revenue from student fees has tripled in the last eight years. The ratio of state general fund revenue to student fee revenue in 1997 was 3.6:1. Last year it was 1.9:1. If we used that $800 million to reduce student fees, the ratio would go back to the 1997 value. To put another way, it could pay the educational fees for 100,000 resident undergraduates.
Here is more. For the pointer I thank David Colquhoun.
Thiel’s Law
Thiel’s law: A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
That is from the new section of Peter’s lecture notes, recommended of course. To pose a simple question, how many other people are there in the world you would rather listen to? Does that not mean Peter is one of the seminal public intellectuals of our time, albeit working through some non-traditional media of communications?
Hat tip goes to The Browser, which by the way is better than The Tatler ever was.
Development economics of education bleg
What should I read? There is no need to re-recommend Banerjee and Duflo, Lant Pritchett, or James Tooley on this topic, namely education in developing countries. What else? I thank you in advance for your counsel.