Category: Education

It's funny but to me this story is more surprising than the usual fare of prediction markets on whether bronzed bones of your ancestors will be transcribed into binary code for your Kindle, or simultaneously used as collateral for CDS swaps and bundled with adultery insurance:

Reached on the phone, Richard A. Hanson isn't quite sure he's ready
to give an interview about this week's sale of Waldorf College. The
college's president has talked quite a bit locally, trying to assure
students, professors and the residents of Forest City, Iowa, that
selling the liberal arts institution to a for-profit, online university
is the best (in fact, only) option.

What persuaded Hanson to
talk about what's happening at Waldorf is the question of whether he
thinks other colleges will soon be facing the same choice. "You are
going to be seeing a lot more of this from colleges like us," he said.

They're actually selling the college.  Hurrah.

In one previously undisclosed fight, Trinity College in Connecticut
is facing government scrutiny for its plan to spend part of a $9
million endowment from Wall Street investing legend Shelby Cullom Davis.

Trinity's Davis professor of business, Gerald Gunderson, says he
believed the plan, which would have funded scholarships for
international students, violated the wishes of the late Mr. Davis. He
alerted the Connecticut attorney general's office. Then, Mr. Gunderson
said in notes submitted to the agency, Trinity's president summoned him
to the school's cavernous Gothic conference room, where he called the
professor a "scoundrel" and threatened not to reappoint him.

Gunderson is a market-oriented economist; here is the full story.

Yesterday I chaperoned a group of ten year-olds to the Smithsonian.  As the bus rolled by, I pointed out the Federal Reserve to my kid and one of the other boys his eyes all aglow said "ooohh, that's where Ben Bernanke works!"  Even taking into account the possible uber-nerdiness of the group, this was a surprise.

On another note, five years ago (!) I pointed to a sign at the Smithsonian warning of another ice age and recent global cooling – well the sign (or something like it) is still there only now it does have a little placard above saying that this exhibit will soon be changed to reflect more recent science.

Here is a new paper:

This paper estimates the effect of the childhood environment on a large
array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years, for both
the affected cohorts and for their children. To do this, we exploit a
natural experiment provided by the 1949 Magic Carpet operation, where
over 50,000 Yemenite immigrants were airlifted to Israel. The
Yemenites, who lacked any formal schooling or knowledge of a
western-style culture or bureaucracy, believed that they were being
"redeemed," and put their trust in the Israeli authorities to make
decisions about where they should go and what they should do. As a
result, they were scattered across the country in essentially a random
fashion, and as we show, the environmental conditions faced by
immigrant children were not correlated with other factors that affected
the long-term outcomes of individuals. We construct three summary
measures of the childhood environment: 1) whether the home had running
water, sanitation and electricity; 2) whether the locality of residence
was in an urban environment with a good economic infrastructure; and 3)
whether the locality of residence was a Yemenite enclave. We find that
children who were placed in a good environment (a home with good
sanitary conditions, in a city, and outside of an ethnic enclave) were
more likely to achieve positive long-term outcomes. They were more
likely to obtain higher education, marry at an older age, have fewer
children, work at age 55, be more assimilated into Israeli society, be
less religious, and have more worldly tastes in music and food. These
effects are much more pronounced for women than for men. We find weaker
and somewhat mixed effects on health outcomes, and no effect on
political views. We do find an effect on the next generation – children
who lived in a better environment grew up to have children who achieved
higher educational attainment.

Here is an ungated version.

Bouncers, ex-soldiers and former police officers are being brought into schools to provide "crowd control" and cover absent teachers' lessons, a teacher has revealed.

One
school, thought to be in London, employed two permanent cover teachers
through an agency for professional doormen, the National Union of
Teachers annual conference in Cardiff heard today.

Bouncers, who
more usually work nights keeping order in pubs and clubs, are being
employed in schools because they are "stern and loud", said Andrew
Baisley, a teacher at Haverstock school in Camden, north London.

Here is the story.

BECAUSE THE CEOs THINK KIDS ARE BORING.

That's Penelope Trunk, here is much more. 

Erika Eiffel and Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer; not my thing personally but I say "why not?"  Compare it to the many people who have no love in their lives at all.  Video here.

If you are tempted to snicker, first think long and hard about all the money, time and effort you put into listening to music.

Orszag has employed this knowledge while training for a marathon.

"If
I didn't achieve what I wanted to, a very large contribution would
automatically come out of my credit card and go to a charity that I
very much didn't support," Orszag says of his training strategy. "So
that was a very strong motivation, as I was running through mile 15 or
16 or whatever it was, to remind myself that I really didn't want to
give the satisfaction to that charity for the contribution."

He declines to name the charity.

The source is here.

Kent Guida sent me this very interesting article; here are a few bits:

The economists I know are generally, as individuals, sober and
cautious, the most respectable of all professors and in their honesty
and reliability representing the best in bourgeois virtue. But when
they get together as economists, they give way to boyish irrational
exuberance over the accomplishments and prospects of economics as a
science.

…Overconfidence in overcoming chance is the way of life recommended by
economists. It is the way of life known as progress by liberals and as
growth by conservatives, who are secretly united by overconfidence in
their knowledge of the future which they describe diversely and call by
different names.

…Now, the main consequence of living the over-confident life is to
believe that virtue is not necessary. Perhaps this is the main cause as
well as consequence of that life. Virtue is a chancy quality because
you may not have it or live up to it. It seems less reliable than
self-interest with its allies, fear and greed. Everybody has
self-interest, which is not true of virtue. But at least virtue does
not depend on predicting the future. On the contrary, virtue is a
resource for everyone when bad times come–something to fall back on,
to give cheer, to restore. On top of that, virtue will save you from
being corrupted by good fortune as well. This is the great truth taught
by the Stoics.