Category: Education
Shanghai ranking of world universities in the social sciences
I can’t vouch for the method, but the top ten are quite plausible: Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Berkeley, Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, U. Penn, and NYU. The top twenty and thirty are plausible too. GMU, by the way, turns up at #41. Economics/Business rankings are here, with a nearly similar top ten.
For the pointer I thank Dan Houser.
Childrens Books With Economics Lessons
NYTimes: Justin Wolfers, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, cited “Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type” by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin, a book about cows that withhold milk from a farmer until he provides electric blankets. Mr. Wolfers read the book to his 1-year-old daughter, Matilda, during the Wisconsin protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on union rights.
Me? I read my kids The Little Red Hen–sort of like Atlas Shrugged for children.
Sentences to ponder
I am coming more and more to think that with the government essentially paralyzed for the foreseeable future, the only way we’re going to get jobs is by turning to actual job creators: business itself.
That is from yesterday’s NYT.
What is the causal impact of researchers reading blogs?
Again from the World Bank, here is a study of that question, with the blog in question being Development Impact. Summary excerpt:
There are large impacts on dissemination of research; significant benefits in terms of the bloggers becoming better known and more respected within the profession; positive spillover effects for the bloggers’ institutions; and some evidence from our experiment that they may influence attitudes and knowledge among their readers. Blogs potentially have many impacts, and we are only measuring some of them, but the evidence we have suggests economics blogs are playing an important role in the profession.
The culture that is Germany why the eurozone will fail
A society in Germany which advises on etiquette and social behaviour has called for kissing to be banned in the workplace.
The Knigge Society says the practice of greeting colleagues and business partners with a kiss on the cheek is uncomfortable for many Germans.
The society’s chairman, Hans-Michael Klein, says he has received concerned emails from workers on the issue.
He advises people in the workplace to stick to the traditional handshake.
Speaking to the BBC, he admitted it would be impossible to ban kissing in the workplace outright.
“But we have to protect people who don’t want to be kissed,” Mr Klein added.
“So we are suggesting that if people don’t mind it, they announce it with a little paper message placed on their desk.”
Mr Klein said he had received 50 emails this year alone on the rise of kissing on the cheek – sometimes both cheeks – as a greeting at work.
“People say this is not typical German behaviour,” he said.
“It has come from places like Italy, France and South America, and belongs in a specific cultural context. We don’t like it, they say.”
The society held a meeting on the issue, and carried out a survey of people both on the street and at their seminars, he said.
“Most people said they didn’t like it. They feel there is somehow an erotic aspect to it – a form of body contact which can be used by men to get close to a woman.”
He said there is, in Europe, a “social distance zone” of 60cm (23in) which should be observed.
The Knigge Society, named after the German term for a guide to good manners, is based in a castle 80km from Dortmund in western Germany.
It has reportedly previously ruled on the correct way to end a relationship via text message, and how to deal with a runny nose in public.
The link is here and for the pointer I thank Jacob Levy on Twitter. When the Knigge Society issues its proclamation on the Eurobond idea, I will be sure to let you know.
In German, here are some other Knigge rules, including for soup. Here is their home page. Here is a Knigge quiz: “Wie höflich lieben Sie?” [How politely do you love?] And more tips, including “Wie viel Kinderlärm ist erlaubt?”, buffet rules, and “Dos und Don’ts bei der Baby-Visite.” Here are rules for behaving yourself in 13 different countries, again all in German. For the USA, don’t respond with an elogy to “How are you?”, compliment people on their achievement and teamwork rather than their looks, and “Bedanken Sie sich ständig!”
The status of scientists
When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist.
Here is more.
The Coming Education Revolution
From Metafilter:
Stanford’s ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course will be offered free to anyone online this fall. The course will be taught by SebastianThrun (Stanford) and PeterNorvig (Google, Director of Research), who expect to deal with the historically large course size using tools like Google Moderator.
There will two 75 min lectures per week, weekly graded homework assignments and quizzes, and the course is expected to require roughly 10 hours per week. Over 10,000 students have already signed up.
In 2003, I argued that professors were becoming obsolete, giving a 10 to 20 year time for a big move to online education. Later, I pointed out that the market was moving towards superstar teachers, who teach hundreds at a time or even thousands online. Today, we have the Khan Academy, a huge increase in online education, electronic textbooks and peer grading systems and highly successful superstar teachers with Michael Sandel and his popular course Justice, serving as example number one.
One of the last remaining items holding back online education is a credible system to credential and compare student achievement across universities. Arnold Kling has that covered with a new business model.
For superstars and strong researchers, life in the ivory tower remains good. But for most teachers the cushy life is gone; tenure is just a dream for a majority of university teachers, salaries are low and teaching requirements have risen.
As in other fields what we are seeing is an increase in teaching inequality, at the top are high-salary superstars surrounded by apprentices who work long hours at low pay for a lottery ticket that for most will not payoff and at the bottom are lots of mid-skill adjuncts who do the drudge work of teaching remedial English and math.
Addendum: Tim Worstall points to the UK’s University of London as a model for the future.
Keynes v. Hayek Debate
The Keynes v. Hayek BBC debate at the LSE which pits Lord Robert Skidelsky and Duncan Weldon arguing for Keynes against George Selgin and Jamie Whyte arguing for Hayek is now available in an online podcast.
Do exogenous increases in the # of children lower child quality?
Maybe not (in which I channel Bryan Caplan):
So what does it mean for an older brother when Mom and Dad come home for the hospital with twins? What’s it like to be the younger sister of twins?
First, you get less computer time. Frenette finds that, even after controlling for family income, education, and myriad other factors, having twin siblings reduces the number of computers per child by 14.1 percentage points.
Second, you are less likely to be enrolled in private school — youth are 4 percentage points less likely to in private school when there are twins in the family, all else being equal.
Third, parents are less likely to save money for their children’s post-secondary education in families with twins.
And the impact of fewer computers, less private school, and less saving for post-secondary education on children’s academic performance is…not much.
Fifteen year olds from families with twins do no worse than other children in international standardized assessments of reading achievement. If anything, they appear to do slightly better — but there are too few families with twins in Frenette’s sample to know whether the difference is statistically significant.
As a parent, I find these results encouraging. Even if your resources are stretched, and you can’t do everything you’ve planned for your kids, they might turn out just fine anyways.
The possibly gated paper is here and here. For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Facts about Leon Walras
1. He twice failed the entrance exam at the Polytechnique in Paris because of his weak math skills.
2. He enrolled in a mining engineering school, wrote novels, and was an art critic for a while.
3. He was self-taught in economics.
4. Walras thought he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize, though he failed to win one.
That biographical information is from Cocktail Party Economics: The Big Ideas and Scintillating Small Talk about Markets, by Eveline J. Adomait and Richard G. Maranta. I can imagine this book as a good supplement to an undergraduate economics class with a very good basic text; it is mostly basic analytics with scattered interesting features throughout the book. Here is a short interview with one of the authors.
Hire him
And the student who simplified a subject by writing about it “in Lehman’s terms” baffled Iain Woodhouse, senior lecturer in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, until he read the phrase aloud (“layman’s terms” was intended).
Will Norway get a do-over?
In large countries, single events are not usually taken as defining that country. So if the police in America botch a response to a mass murderer, soon enough another mass murderer will come along. There is almost always a do-over, usually many of them. If need be, we Americans can start a new war to create a do-over.
Norway doesn’t work this way. The country won’t soon have an event which generates comparable international or national publicity to the recent murders. That makes those murders, and the lack of an effective police response, sting all the more. There is no do-over on the horizon.
It turns out for instance that the helicopter crew of the Oslo police force was on vacation. In expected value terms, maybe that wasn’t a mistake but it sure didn’t turn out well. Here is an article on Norway not very much arming its police force.
The Norwegian resistance movement from WWII has a heroic reputation, but now there’s been a do-over of Norwegian response capability, so to speak, or at least a perceived do-over.
Americans have a hard time understanding the concept of not getting many do-overs.
When it comes to our debt-ceiling crisis, we are acting as if we will get a do-over for sure; I wonder if that’s justified.
New and excellent manuscript on the economics of the family
By Martin Browning, Pierre-André Chiappori, and Yoram Weiss, you will find it here, on-line and free. Perhaps in this post-Freakonomics era you are jaded and feel you have seen too many “economics of the family” books. This is a scholarly rather than popular manuscript, and it is full of data and (simple) models. At some point it will come out from Cambridge University Press.
For the pointer I thank Scott Cunningham; “All of the models of household production, bargaining, sorting in marriage and dating, and the numerous other strands within this literature have been finally brought together into one place.”
IHS does Liberty Academy
Welcome to Liberty Academy! We’ve created learning paths to help you navigate the ideas of liberty through specific disciplines. Each path contains several lessons. The lessons are ordered to improve the learning process but you can skip around if you prefer.
Each lesson contains the following elements:
- A LearnLiberty short video explaining the concept
- Suggested resources for delving deeper into the topic
- Questions to enhance your understanding
- A discussion area to share your insights and ask questions
Model this
As we have written before, private colleges and universities are by far the biggest offenders on grade inflation, even when you compare private schools to equally selective public schools.
There are charts and further information at the link. By the way:
…about 43 percent of all letter grades given were A’s, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. The distribution of B’s has stayed relatively constant; the growing share of A’s instead comes at the expense of a shrinking share of C’s, D’s and F’s. In fact, only about 10 percent of grades awarded are D’s and F’s.
It’s worth trying to model that too.