Category: Education
A simple approach to macroeconomic theorizing
I can’t say it is guaranteed to work, but I give it a high “p”:
1. Take the macroeconomic theory you hold and stick it into a box.
2. Take the major competing macroeconomic theory, the one you dislike, but taking care that you have selected an approach endorsed by high-IQ researchers. If you dislike them too, that does not disqualify the theory, quite the contrary.
3. Stick theory #2 into the same box.
4. Average the two theories.
5. Pull the average out of the box, and call it your new theory.
How many times should you apply this method? At least once I say.
I am indebted to Hal Varian for a useful conversation on related topics.
North Korean photos
Sorry for the bad link from yesterday, find them here. I thank Yana for the pointer.
The rise of the generalist
I don’t know if I’ve heard anyone say this and I am not quite sure what I think about it myself, but one way to view the economy in the Information Age is that the returns to specialization are falling.
So, those who like such things can go all the way back to Adam Smiths pin factory and think about all the tasks involved in making pins and how each person could become more suited to that task and learn the ins and outs of it.
However, in the information age I can in many cases write a program to repeatedly perform each of these tasks and record ever single step that it makes for later review by me. The individualized skill and knowledge is not so important because it can all be dumped into a database.
What really matters is someone who gets pins. Not the various steps involved in making pins but the concept of the whole pin. What makes a good pin a good pin. How do pins fit into the entire global market. What the next big thing in pins.
This individual will be able to outline a pin vision that she or just a few programmers can easily implement. One could say this is the story of Facebook or Twitter. Really good ideas and just a few people needed to implement them.
However, as IT progress and machines can do more things it could be the story of the economy generally.
In contrast to The Great Stagnation, I would call this The Rise of Generalist or perhaps to be consistent The Great Generalization.
Even if you stop and think for a minute about all of the things that your computer or now even your phone can do, are you now wielding the most generalized tool ever conceived?
I would add in turn that the Generalist boosts the reach of the Specialist, as the Generalist relies on many specialists to supply inputs for his or her outputs. It may be the “tweeners” in the middle who lose income and influence, and that the extreme generalists and specialists will prosper, intellectually and otherwise.
The world’s funniest analogies
From this longer list (funny throughout), presented by Bill Gross and (possibly) derived from student writings, Jason Kottke provides his favorites:
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
His comment:
That first one…I can’t decide if it’s bad or the best analogy ever.
I liked this one:
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a
real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or
something.
From the comments, on local employment of teachers
The scaling in the chart makes a big difference. Here’s the data behind the chart, which can by found by following a link on the site that Tyler links to: http://1.usa.gov/oOQXeO. For the local government column only and April figures. (May would be better but the series runs out at April 2011.) April 2011 was at 8.3 million, about 160K less than the peak two Aprils earlier. That’s about 1.5% difference.
That is from RZO, the link and context is here. In the same comment thread, Frank Howland notes that:
K-12 enrollments fell by 0.85% from 2007 to 2009
That’s not exactly the same years and the data go only to 2009 but could it be a general trend across 2009-2011? Given that context, there is still some decline in per capita local teacher employment. Note this is a sector where there is a growing realization that quite a few of the workers should, for non-cyclical reasons, be fired anyway.
Addendum: Karl Smith has a useful graph with seasonal adjustment, coming up with somewhat different numbers.
How many unemployed teachers are there?
This bit from Bruce Yandle challenges the conventional wisdom:
As to hiring teachers, total employment in local government education is already up by one million workers since August 2010. Teacher employment in state government nationwide is up 300,000 workers. The unemployment rate in education and health services at 6.3% is one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates. While the president implied that teachers were being cut from payrolls at a heavy pace, the data say otherwise. The president’s efforts are seen as misguided if the goal is to ease some of the pain in high unemployment sectors.
Here is another source:
As Figure 1 shows, state government education employment is up by 2.1 percent since the start of the recession while all other state government employment is down 1.9 percent — a substantially larger decline than in other parts of the state-local sector. State government non-education employment began falling less than a year into the recession, and fell below its pre-recession level about a year and a half after the start of the recession.
Do you wish to see more, including on local government education employment?
This BLS graph (look under “And which industries show declining employment over the summer?”) shows a strong seasonal trend which may confound some month-specific citations, but still the number seems to be back to where it had been in earlier years (admittedly the scaling and visuals are not what I would wish for) and more importantly it is hard to spot much effect of the recession at all:
So what exactly is the case here for stimulus of this sector? Is this really a sector to target? I would gladly see and consider alternate numbers and interpretations, but so far I file this under: “Yet another example of something the press should have reported about a President’s speech but didn’t.” Once again, it is the disaggregated demand which matters.
Turnitin: Arming both sides in the Plagiarism War
The internet has made plagiarism much easier and by most accounts plagiarism is increasing rapidly. As a result, over a million instructors now use services like Turnitin, a plagiarism detector that compares submitted manuscripts against a large database of material, including previously submitted manuscripts. What is less well appreciated is that Turnitin also sells its services to students. In fact, students whose professors use Turnitin are encouraged to pre-submit their work to Writecheck which will analyze and “verify” for the students that their paper has “properly quoted, summarized or paraphrased” previous work and it will also relieve students from “worrying that their paper will be recycled without their knowledge.” Uh huh.
In other words, WriteCheck will tell students if their essays will pass Turnitin! David Harrington summarizes nicely:
Turnitin is playing both sides of the fence, helping instructors identify plagiarists while helping plagiarists avoid detection. It is akin to selling security systems to stores while allowing shoplifters to test whether putting tagged goods into bags lined with aluminum thwart the detectors.
New working paper on the impact of economics blogs
This is from the blog Development Impact, but with much more added, the paper can be found here.
Robin Hanson is forming a forecasting team, Kling and Schulz have a new edition
In response to the Philip Tetlock forecasting challenge, Robin is responding:
Today I can announce that GMU hosts one of the five teams, please join us! Active participants will earn $50 a month, for about two hours of forecasting work. You can sign up here, and start forecasting as soon as you are accepted.
There is more detail at the link. Let’s see if he turns away the zero marginal product workers.
There is also a new paperback edition out of the excellent Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz book out, now entitled Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work. The book has new forecasts…
Ouch!, yet sometimes markets work
For-profit colleges are facing a tough test: getting new students to enroll.
New-student enrollments have plunged—in some cases by more than 45%—in recent months, reflecting two factors: Companies have pulled back on aggressive recruiting practices amid criticism over their high student-loan default rates. And many would-be students are questioning the potential pay-off for degrees that can cost considerably more than what’s available at local community colleges.
There is more detail here. The graphic on the paper version of the article (not on-line) shows that new University of Phoenix enrollment is down over 40 percent from last year, 47 percent from Kaplan.
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!”