Category: Education
Academic wage stickiness
The percentage of faculty members receiving no salary increase this year is 21.2 percent, while 32.6 percent had their salaries reduced, with a median decrease (among those who saw a decrease) of 3 percent.
Here is more information. I see the overall trend as toward lower wages, with many cut-deserving people put at zero to shut them up. We'll see how long they stay there.
*Country Driving*
The author is Peter Hessler and the subtitle is A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory. It is the account of the author's driving journeys throuh the Middle Kingdom. Here is one bit:
…Chinese drivers haven't grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it's pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions — in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don't mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. But if you switch on your lights during a rainstorm, approaching drivers will invariably flash their brights in annoyance.
I found this to be an excellent travel memoir, a very good book on transportation economics, a wonderful book on China, and most of all a first-rate study of the adjustments and changing norms which accompany rapid economic development. I also found it to be a very funny book and, for whatever reason, I don't find most books funny.
Here is another bit on China:
Often I passed billboards dedicated to the planned-birth policy, whose catchphrases ranged from tautology ("Daughters Also Count as Descendants") to unsolicited advice ("Marry Late and Have Children Late") to outright lies ("Having a Son or a Daughter Is Exactly the Same"). As I drove west, the messages became bigger, until barren hillsides were covered with slogans, as if words had swelled to fill the empty steppes, "Everybody Work to Make the Green Mountain Greener" — this in forty-foot-tall characters across an Inner Mongolian mountain that was neither green nor the site of a single working person.
Recommended.
Theory of optimal punishment, Stanley Kubrick edition
The headmaster of the school where children are forced to listen to classical music as a punishment for bad behaviour said infractions of school rules have dropped by about 60 per cent since he began the special detentions.
"What he's saying in effect is children don't like classical music and we will exploit this fact by using it as a punishment against them," O'Neill said in an interview Wednesday with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.
The state school system seems to have abandoned the idea of educating children about great culture, he added.
Diane Ravitch turns on school choice and testing
Her new book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. Her bottom line is this:
The more uneasy I grew with the agenda of choice and accountability, the more I realized that I am too "conservative" to embrace an agenda whose end result is entirely speculative and uncertain. The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something market-based began to feel too radical for me. I concluded that I could not countenance any reforms that might have the effect — intended or unintended — of undermining public education.
Ravitch of course was once the number one advocate of these very ideas; read this excellent article on her intellectual evolution.
Overall it is a serious book worth reading and it has some good arguments to establish the view — as I interpret it — that both vouchers and school accountability are overrated ideas by their proponents. (Short of turning the world upside down, some school districts will only get so good; conversely many public schools around the world are excellent.) But are they bad ideas outright? Ravitch doesn't do much to contest the quantitative evidence in their favor. There are many studies on vouchers, some surveyed here. Charter schools also seem like a good idea.
Is American public education such a huge success these days that it should be immune from significant restructuring? I don't think so. One of the best arguments for our current system is simply that — because it is lax — it doesn't waste too much time for the really smart kids who want to be doing other things. That's an important factor but hardly a ringing endorsement for the system as a whole.
This is Chile, not Haiti
"There is a certain lawlessness in this country that the government enabled," he said in Spanish. "They don't protect people and people don't respect them and criminal elements get out of control. People also have a high sense of entitlement. They expected the government to have water and power and things under control."
There is much more at the link or try this tweet: "The situation in Concepción is deteriorating. Citizens have taken up arms to defend themselves and their stores. 8 PM to 12 PM Army curfew." By no means is it just a bunch of people trying to feed themselves: "…many residents in the most damaged areas have not only taken food from supermarkets, but also robbed banks, set fires and engaged in other forms of lawlessness."
Haiti, on the other hand, remains fairly orderly and there have been reports that police corruption has gone down significantly.
One implication here is that I fundamentally distrust the use of "social trust" or "social capital" indicators in cross-country growth regressions. Repeat three times after me: context-dependence, context-dependence, context-dependence. The lessons for social science run deep.
My deeper worry is that this event will change Chile and set it back more than the damage alone would indicate. It will alter their self-image and national unity could decline. An alternative story is that Chile will become more progressive, as there will be greater common knowledge of income divisions and it will be harder to pretend everything is just fine.
Maybe it is a sign of social health to have some looting after an earthquake. In this part of blogland we do not dismiss the counterintuitive conclusion out of hand. For instance perhaps Haiti is so orderly because a) looters would be killed on the spot, and b) the entire fate of the nation is at stake and thus every small event is taken very seriously. Neither factor is exactly good news.
Jamie Lawrence’s principles for judging books
He writes me an email:
We somehow ended up talking about things we absolutely judge by first impression. We both read a lot and widely in general, and it was a fun topic.
An easy one for me to note was that I skip technical/professional/academic work that is far enough outside of my expertise that I know the baseline knowledge assumptions are beyond me. Imperfect, but in general, a good filter.
I skip nearly all books by politicians, executives, and similar people. Even when people tell me that one is good, it usually isn't.
I really dislike reading music reviews. They almost never seem insightful, and rarely tell me anything I didn't realize I wanted to know.
Sort of the opposite of the above filters, I tend to really enjoy reading applied trade books for things far outside my expertise. An example is that about six months ago, I read a treatise on elevator traffic management that was fascinating.
What other principles can you think of? I go to Mary Riley Styles Falls Church Public Library and check the non-fiction Return carts, to see what other people have been reading.
The economics of placebos for self-remitting diseases
Daniel Carpenter, who just wrote the very impressive FDA book, has an interesting paper on his home page:
I develop a simple stochastic model of inference and therapeutic utilization in the presence of placebo effects, when the underlying medical condition may be self-remitting. In the model, expectations generate a “felt” health state which can mimic the medically cured health state even when the treatment in question has no real curing power. This effect may be augmented by self-limitation of the medical condition for which the treatment is utilized. A human agent then applies Bayes’ rule to the felt history as if it were generated pharmacologically. A more sophisticated agent knows of placebo effects but does not know the precise extent to which they contribute to curing. I describe the bias that attends inference and the under – or overutilization of therapies under such a model. A central result of the model is that human placebo learning is generally subject to greater bias in estimating treatment efficacy when diseases are self-limiting. Human agents may commit several types of decision errors under placebo learning. They may continually choose a more costly (expensive, hazardous) treatment when a less costly one would work as well, or they may continually use inferior treatments for life-threatening illnesses. When diseases are self-limiting, both these types of error are more likely when the human agent has high initial beliefs about the treatment. Possible applications of the model include the patent medicine industry, the robustness of markets for herbal and nutritional supplements, and the contemporary stability of counterfeit drug operations.
Of course this applies a lot more broadly than to medicine. It helps explain why people overuse and underuse "treatments" of many different kinds, including education. Here is Dan Carpenter's page on fly fishing.
Do imperatives in the past tense exist?
Douglas Krupka refers me to the following:
Although in discussion of the imperative clause type it is routinely denied that it could ever feature a past tense, imperatives in the past tense do exist. Specifically, past imperatives can be found in (Northern) Dutch and Frisian, many speakers of which can produce and understand sentences like (1) and (2).
(1) At liever eens wat minder! (Dutch)
ate rather once somewhat less
The English equivalent seems odd to me, but you would think it is hard to translate into a language which does not have imperatives in the past tense. Best to put the English out of your mind and focus on the:
At liever eens wat minder!
You can do a Google search on the concept here.
Publish Referee Reports?
A number of prominent scientists working on stem-cell research have written a letter calling for peer-reviews to be made publicly available:
We suggest a simple step that would greatly improve transparency, fairness and accountability; when a paper is published, the reviews, response to reviews and associated editorial correspondence could be provided as Supplementary Information, while preserving anonymity of the referees.
In cutting edge fields such as stem-cell research it's very common for scientists to be working on exactly the same problem with the first to publish receiving the bulk of the plaudits. As a result, peer-sabotage can be a problem. Sabotage is not such a problem in economics because researchers rarely work on exactly the same problem but laziness and low-quality reviews are real concerns. (Note that my experiences with journal editors and reviewers has been more good than bad so I don't speak with sour grapes).
But would publishing anonymous referee reports really increase quality? Blog comments are public and anonymous and they can be stupid, rude, and ill-informed (not this blog of course). Indeed, the trend in blogs has been to remove anonymity as a way of increasing accountability and quality. In science, however, anonymity is essential because the opportunities for repeat play and thus collusion are too common.
The primary effect of published referee reports would be on editors who would have their work put under greater scrutiny. That is not necessarily a bad thing although editors are professionally under-rewarded in my view so more work is not necessarily going to lead to a better selection.
Note also that regardless of any change in quality, the value of the referee comments themselves should not be overlooked. Referees may also appreciate the opportunity to have their work published in some form. Early results from the EMBO Journal which recently switched to publishing referee reports online appear to be satisfactory. Thus, I favor experiments along these lines.
Here are previous MR articles on the peer-review process.
Addendum: Seth Roberts comments. See also Barkley Rosser in the comments.
The Dangers of Common Knowledge
WASHINGTON–The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after
unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke
shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a
meaningless and intangible social construct.…"Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed
will of course act appropriately if we…if we…" said Bernanke, who then
paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook
his head in utter disbelief. "You know what? It doesn't matter. None of
this–this so-called 'money'–really matters at all.""It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed
bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look
at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them.
Worthless."According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in
thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of
it–the money, our whole economy–it's all a lie!"Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of
the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with
the remains of torn currency.
More here.
Thomas Friedman proposes a new rate of marginal transformation
So here is my new rule of thumb: For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking – to boys and girls.
The full article is here. At those prices, how many missiles does the Yemeni government want fired? The Yemeni median voter? (Is there a single dimension in Yemeni politics? If so, what is it?) The average Yemeni teacher? By the way, how would we feel if each al Qaeda attack came with 50 new madrassas?
I usually think that building schools — in the absence of other, complementary inputs — doesn't help much.
We are told:
America’s last great ideological foe, Soviet Marxism, produced its share of violent radicals, but it also produced Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – because it believed in science, physics, math and the classics of literature. Islamism is not producing any Sakharovs.
Is the problem lack of school buildings? Is there a recipe for building a modern state and capitalist polity in Yemen? I'm all ears. The conclusion is:
…please, let’s end our addiction to oil, which is what gives the Saudi religious ministry and charities the money to spread anti-modernist thinking across this region.
Didn't the Saudis radicalize to a greater extent when their oil income fell? Will nailing the Saudis help Yemen, given Saudi Arabia is one of their main trading partners?
When I am blogging this material, you know I have too much time on my hands at home. I'm not usually this grumpy but I've been locked up for days. Here are related comments.
The last words of Socrates (according to Plato)
Shortly before dying, Socrates spoke his last words to Crito saying, "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt."
Here is one relevant link.
Supply and Demand
The sex ratio on many U.S. campuses is around 60/40 and rising. The NYTimes has an excellent piece on the predictable consequences for dating.
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges…Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority – that I know of.”
Only at the IVYs and universities with engineering schools does the sex ratio tend to even out (no doubt for obvious, albeit politically incorrect reasons), which in itself will have consequences for future sexual mores. A number of universities would like to institute affirmative action for males.
Temple Grandin’s theories on autism
As you probably know, the Temple Grandin biopic, starring Claire Danes, is showing this Saturday evening. Here is Temple on the movie. Grandin has done a great deal to benefit animals, by designing more humane slaughterhouses, stockyards, and encouraging other innovations. She also has promoted the idea of talented autistics and helped raise that notion to a very high profile. I have enormous respect for what she has done and I would gladly see her win a Nobel Prize if the appropriate category for such a prize existed.
That said, researchers disagree with Grandin's theories on autism in a number of ways and my own reading leads me to side with the researchers on some issues. Many non-autistics defer to Grandin on autism because of her life story, her remarkable achievements, and yes because of her autism. I thought it would be useful to offer a more skeptical view of a few of her claims:
1. Autistic individuals do not in general "think in pictures," though some autistics offer this self-description. Grandin repeatedly refers to herself in this context. I don't read her as claiming this tendency is universal or even the general rule, but the disclaimers aren't as evident as I would like them to be.
2. There is little evidence to support her view that autistics "think like animals." Here is one published critique of her theory: "We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants." You'll find a response by Grandin at that same link. I'm not totally on board with the critique either (how well do we understand savants anyway?), but at the very least Grandin's claim is an unsupported hypothesis.
3. Grandin tends to brusquely classify autistic children into different groups. She will speak of "the nerds who will do just fine" (see the eBook linked to below) as opposed to the "severely autistic," who require that someone take control of their lives and pound a bit of the autism out of them. There's a great deal of diversity among autistics, and autistic outcomes, but I don't see that as the most useful way of expressing those differences. Autism diagnoses are often unstable at young ages, there is not any useful or commonly accepted measure of "autistic severity," her description perpetuates stereotypes, and Grandin herself as a child would have met criteria for "severely autistic" and yet she did fine through parental love and attention, which helped her realize rather than overturn her basic nature. That's not even a complete list of my worries on this point; for more see my Create Your Own Economy.
4. Grandin supports some varieties of intensive behavioral therapy for autistics. Many research papers support those same therapies but those papers do not generally conduct an RCT and furthermore many of the said researchers have a commercial stake in what they are studying and promoting. In my view we don't know "what works" but my (non-RCT-tested) opinion is that giving autistic children a lot of fun things to do — fun by their standards — and a lot of information to study and manipulate, gives the best chance of good outcomes. (In any case "spontaneous improvement" is considerable, so anecdotally many therapies will appear to work when they do not; nor is there a common control for placebos.) Many of the behavioral therapies seem quite oppressive to me and if we don't know they work I am worried that they are being overpromoted. Grandin has in some ways the intellectual temperament of an engineer and I am worried that she has not absorbed the lessons of Hayek's The Counterrevolution of Science.
5. Grandin refers to herself as more interested in tangible results and less interested in emotions. She is entitled to that self-description, but it is worth noting that most individuals in the "autism community" would not consider this a good presentation of their attitude toward emotions.
There is a recent eBook (selling for only $4.00), consisting of a dialogue between myself and Grandin, mostly on autism and talented autistics but not just. For instance we also talk about our favorite TV shows, including a discussion of Lost, and there is a segment on science fiction and the future of humanity. I try to draw her out on autism, cognitive anthromorphizing, and attitudes toward religion, but she is reluctant to offer her opinions on that important topic. I would describe the eBook as a good introduction to her thought on autism and society, while also giving an idea of how someone else (me) might differ from some of her basic attitudes.
Bryan Caplan responds to criticisms of libertarianism
He makes many points, here is one of them:
E&O might be right that cynicism about government perversely increases support for government. But if so, libertarians shouldn't attack the public's justified cynicism. Instead, they should help people see the logical anti-government conclusion of their cynicism. Academics who are cynical about government generally are anti-government; see for yourself at the Public Choice Society meetings. Why not teach laymen to make the same connection?
I worry when I read this. Most of all, it is surprisingly meliorist; I once read a book that suggested voters were doomed to irrationality (albeit to varying degrees). If voters can be taught the correct sophisticated mix of cynicism and pro-liberty sentiment, can they not be taught to support good policies, thus making democracy a well-functioning system of government? The E&O criticism strikes at the heart of an important tension in libertarian thought. Outcomes which might be described as "good libertarian" also require important public goods to be produced at the level of overall public sentiment; there's no getting around that.
Admittedly, being pessimistic about public sentiment under democracy does not a priori mandate being pessimistic about the ability of public sentiment to support and maintain more libertarian settings. (You might for instance think that the public good can be produced under some settings but that democracy per se corrupts public opinion, because of its internal workings, electoral pandering, etc.) Nonetheless, I've yet to see good, well-fleshed out arguments to support the split claim Caplan is proposing, namely that public sentiment can be produced to support good libertarian outcomes but not good democratic outcomes.
Addendum: Caplan responds.