Category: Education
Peter Orszag’s tip for discipline
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.
Harvey Mansfield on economists
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.
The Case Against Breast Feeding
Hanna Rosin's article on breastfeeding in the latest Atlantic is excellent and would make a topical and accessible introduction to causality studies in an econometrics or statistics class. (And lest that sound damning it's also a great read.)
The general point will be familiar to the audience at Marginal Revolution. The studies that show breastfeeding leads to lower weight, fewer ear infections, less allergies, less stomach illnesses and so forth are almost all observational studies.
An ideal study would randomly divide a group of mothers, tell one half to breast-feed and the other not to, and then measure the outcomes. But researchers cannot ethically tell mothers what to feed their babies. Instead they have to settle for “observational” studies. These simply look for differences in two populations, one breast-fed and one not. The problem is, breast-fed infants are typically brought up in very different families from those raised on the bottle. In the U.S., breast-feeding is on the rise–69 percent of mothers initiate the practice at the hospital, and 17 percent nurse exclusively for at least six months. But the numbers are much higher among women who are white, older, and educated; a woman who attended college, for instance, is roughly twice as likely to nurse for six months.
Moreover, the better we control for other factors that might account for differences in child outcomes between mothers who breastfeed and those who do not, the less evidence there is for breastfeeding's benefits. Even looking at children within the same family (still far from the gold standard of randomization), shows many fewer benefits from breastfeeding than studies that look across families. Some modest evidence suggests a gain in IQ and better evidence suggests minor improvements in avoiding some diarrhea. Rosin does not discount these benefits (so the title of her piece is unnecessarily sensationalistic) but she very appropriately does point to opportunity cost.
The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.
One final point, Rosin's article is also usefully read as a study in propaganda and social psychology.
This is not not a dog
Beware the “por favor”
I enjoyed this article, which is interesting throughout. Excerpt:
English-speakers are keen to say please politely in other languages,
even if those languages do not express politeness by constantly saying
please. So English tourists say ‘por favor’ to waiters and barmen in a
way that sounds too insistent to a Spaniard. It is as if someone were
to say: ‘A glass of wine, if you please, my good man.’ If you want the
butter passed in Spanish, you say, ‘Pass the butter.’ To add por favor
can smack of impatience.
What does the Dale and Krueger education paper really say?
It was reported in the media as showing that, controlling for all the right variables, going to an elite college or university as an undergraduate doesn't really matter for your future prospects or income. But Robin Hanson, with money on the line, investigated further. After reading the relevant pieces closely, he reports [what follows is Robin, not me, but with the multiple indentations I haven't indented everything again]:
"In fact his original 1998 working-paper abstract said:
Half Sigma screams from the rooftops:
23 percent is quite a bit of money, it’s almost like getting two college degrees instead of one! They also discovered that there was a benefit to attending a more expensive school. The more expensive tuition resulted in a lifetime internal rate of return of 20% for men and 25% for women."
Rejecta Mathematica
There is a new journal:
Rejecta Mathematica is a new, open access, online journal that
publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed
journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the
mathematical sciences.
Isn't that like almost every other journal? Not quite:
Many authors of a rejected paper may simply have disagreed with or
chosen to not address the original reviewers' concerns. Rejecta
Mathematica also gives those authors the chance to speak out in defense
of their own paper.
One very unique aspect of Rejecta Mathematica is that each paper
includes an open letter from the authors discussing the paper's
original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper and
stating the case for the paper's value to the community.
Triya offers comment. Maybe they should start a comparable journal for rejected blog posts…
Do influential people develop more conventional opinions?
Following up on Robin's question I think the answer is yes, mostly. We are talking about the time series here, as people rise in influence. I see a few mechanisms:
1. People "sell out" to become more influential.
2. As people become more influential, they are less interested in offending their new status quo-oriented friends.
3. As people become more influential, their opinion of the status quo rises, because they see it rewarding them and thus meritorious.
4. The status quo is good at spotting interesting, unusual people who will evolve (sell out?) and elevating them to positions of influence.
5. Oddballs who are influential arrive first at where the status quo is later headed, and eventually they end up looking conventional.
6. Influential people are asked to write increasingly on general interest topics ("How to Be Nice to Dogs") and thus they find it harder to be truly unconventional. They cultivate skills of conventionality because that is what they are paid for or allowed to express.
Can you think of other mechanisms? Who are some test cases for these hypotheses?
Answering the multi-request
AO has lots of questions:
What's the newest research and the current state of the literature on
school vouchers? Is there a good economics of education blog you
follow? You teach one part of the PhD I.O. sequence at GMU and have
given us your reading list, who teaches the other part and can we have
their reading list as well? Would decriminalization of drugs make us
worse off (by increasing the black market for drugs without allowing
the creation of legal markets) even though complete legalization would
make us better off? Are there other policies where marginal steps
towards the right direction make us worse off? Debate Nassim Taleb or
Dean Baker on bloggingheads.tv! More bloggingheads.tv with any
economists that you find large disagreement with!
In a nutshell: vouchers are better than the status quo but overrated by many market-oriented economists; evidence from Chile and Colombia and Sweden — the more systematic experiments — does show gains. In the U.S. the key question is how selectively or universally to apply vouchers; universal application creates a new middle-class entitlement and brings the federalization of education. In the old days I would read Joanne Jacobs on education. Alex teaches the other part of IO! Decriminalization for drugs keeps the rents from turning into profits for drug gangs; marginal steps in the right direction are usually all we have. Likely I am soon doing a Bloggingheads with Peter Singer; Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling are on the list as well.
Markets in everything China-Israel fact of the day
Addendum: Patrick Walsh comments:
I asked my Chinese friend to translate it and he started giggling. He
says that it is something that you attach to the bottom of a toilet
seat so that when someone lifts it up there is a tiny explosion that
emits a loud noise.
I kind of want one now.
The fifteen strangest college courses in America
Via Jason Kottke, here is the list. Call me warped, but I was impressed at how sensible the offerings were. "Learning from YouTube" strikes me as more valuable than 80 percent of what is currently on tap. I also think it is often useful to teach science through the medium of a TV show or to teach philosophy through The Simpsons. It fosters personal involvement and if you don't, most of the students aren't learning anything anyway.
But I have to say (call me a philistine if you wish), I was dismayed at "Underwater Basket Weaving," as it is taught at the University of California, San Diego. Might they have Mark Machina give a guest lecture on the relevance of non-expected utility models for underwater basket weaving?
Maybe not.
How much is popularity in high school worth?
Steve Levitt reports:
They find that each extra close friend in high school is associated
with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life after controlling
for other factors. While not a huge effect, it does suggest that either
that a) the same factors that make you popular in high school help you
in a job setting, or b) that high-school friends can do you favors
later in life that will earn you higher wages.
Read his caveats as well. I would like to know more about the shape of the distribution. I would think that the most popular people achieve only mediocre results, whereas the very high earners are either loners (but not necessarily “unpopular” in the sense of being disliked) or had above-average popularity but not extreme popularity. Too much popularity too early produces the feeling that other things will come easily, too easily.
Personally I still receive benefits and favors from high school friends and I once wrote a book with one.
How much is a trillion?
In case you had forgotten, via James Hamilton:
A trillion dollars used to be a sum that never naturally came up in
normal conversation. Now all of a sudden, it's the standard unit we
seem to be using to talk about our economic problems and what we're
trying to do about them. Fortunately, I think I finally got a handle on
what $1 trillion really means.
A trillion dollars is about the total amount collected in income
taxes by the U.S. federal government in fiscal year 2006– $1.04
trillion, if you're curious to use the exact number.
That gives me a simple rule of thumb for personalizing these numbers.
If I want to know what an additional trillion dollars in government
borrowing or spending will mean for me, I just imagine what it would be
like to pay twice as much in federal income taxes for one year.
So, for example, with the President's proposed budget
calling for deficits of $1.75 trillion for 2009 and an additional $1.17
trillion for 2010, after 3 years of paying twice as much as I paid in
2006, I'd have about paid off my share of the bill for the first two
years of the proposal.
Read the whole thing.
Should you go to graduate school in a recession?
Penelope Trunk says no:
Applications to the military increase in a bad economy
in a disturbingly similar way that applications to graduate school do.
For the most part, both alternatives are bad. They limit your future in
ways you can’t even imagine, and they are not likely to open the kind
of doors you really want. Military is the terrible escape hatch for
poor kids, and grad school is the terrible escape hatch for rich kids.
And:
7. Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job.
When I worked on a French chicken farm,
I thought I’d learn French, but I didn’t, because I was so foreign to
the French farm family that they couldn’t talk to me. However I did
learn a lot of other things, like how to bargain to get the best job in
the chicken coop, and how to get out of killing the bunnies. You don’t
need to be learning the perfect thing in your job. You just need to be learning. Don’t tell yourself you need a job that gives your life meaning. Jobs don’t do that; doesn’t that make you feel better? Suddenly being in the workplace doesn’t seem so bad.
8. Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk.
In a world where people did not change careers, grad school made sense. Today, grad school is antiquated.
You invest three to six extra years in school in order to get your
dream career. But the problem is that not only are the old dream
careers deteriorating, but even if you have a dream career, it won’t
last. You’ll want to change because you can. Because that’s normal for
today’s workplace. People who are in their twenties today will change
careers about four times in their life. Which means that grad school is
a steep investment for such a short period of time. The grad school
model needs to change to adapt to the new workplace. Until then. Stay away.
I don't completely agree, but this is a refreshing tonic.
Bryan to Alex over lunch today
"You're better than all those loser doers!"
That one I can verify the source.