Category: Education
Professionalism vs. amateurism
Here was one MR reader request, from Philip W:
Professionalism vs. Amateurism, the merits and demerits of each. And the relationship of these to science, or “science.” How large is the role of “common sense” in your way of thinking about the world? Should we wish that policymakers would have more professionalism, or more common sense?
Amateurism is splendid when amateurs actually can make contributions. A lot of the Industrial Revolution was driven by the inventions of so-called amateurs. One of the most revolutionary economic sectors today — social networking — has been led by amateurs. Maybe it is stretching the concept, but you can interpret Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as amateurs too.
Amateurs are associated with free entry and a lot of experimentation. Barbecue quality is very often driven by amateurs, and in general amateurs still make contributions to food and cooking. The difficulty of maintaining productive amateurs is one of the reasons why scientific progress periodically slows down. Specialization, however necessary it may be, can make big breakthroughs harder at some margin. (There is a good recent paper on this.) This is one aspect of the division of labor which Adam Smith did not fully grasp, though he hinted at it.
Through computers, and the internet, the notion of amateurs working together is becoming more important. This includes astronomical searches and theorem-proving, plus collection and collation of data, and Wikipedia; this is Shirky’s “cognitive surplus.”
On the latter part of the question, what is “common sense”? Most common sense, if one can call it that, is a highly refined product of a lot of trial and error. The real question is how to refine one’s common sense.
Policymakers need more of a sheer willingness to do the right thing, even if it means sacrificing reelection. Selection mechanisms, however, do not much favor that bravery. For a sane, well-adjusted person, the job is neither fun nor well-paying, so the job attracts people who love being in office and thus who fail to do the right thing.
When specialization proceeds very, very far, the difference between a professional and an amateur is sometimes no longer well-defined.
Who predicts well?
…what separated those with modest but significant predictive ability from the utterly hopeless was their style of thinking. Experts who had one big idea they were certain would reveal what was to come were handily beaten by those who used diverse information and analytical models, were comfortable with complexity and uncertainty and kept their confidence in check.
That is from Tetlock and Gardner, here is more. On that general, theme, here is Dan Gardner’s new book Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions are Next to Worthless, and You Can do Better.
Why is Finland so rich?
James, a loyal MR reader, has a request:
Why is Finland, with its tax distortions and subsidies, as rich as it is?
1. Finland’s taxes and subsidies do not much discourage the adoption of cutting-edge technologies and thus Finland has moved relatively close to “the frontier.” Ed Prescott and Stephen Parente have a very important paper about the difference between interventions which have this effect and those which do not. It’s one of the best papers on economic development.
2. Finland’s high taxes do discourage male labor supply and that is one reason why the country is not as wealthy, in per capita terms, as the United States.
3. There are extensive day care and child care subsidies, which in part counteracts the effects of high taxes on female labor supply.
4. Finland has one of the best educational systems in the world and high levels of human capital. You might re-ask your same question about living standards in Russia, which had far worse economic policies than Finland, yet is not too far from first world standards in the major cities.
5. Finland invested in communications and IT at exactly the right time. For a relatively small economy this had a huge payoff.
6. Some people might cite Finnish industrial policy as having driven growth; I am not sure how significant it was.
7. An open economy, with lots of trade, is usually much freer than traditional statistics will make it seem. International markets are a disciplining force and they cannot be ruled by the domestic government.
8. That all said, I am not especially optimistic about Finland. Their current investment and R&D stats are not those of an economy on the move. They will be hit hard by aging and they have not made immigration policy work in their favor. Public sector productivity is not as high as you might think (see also the McKinsey report). Do they have another big success on the way? Can they get further productivity gains in cell phones and timber? It’s not obvious. They’ll do “well enough,” however, see #1.
Here is a McKinsey study of Finland (pdf). Here is a good Charles Sabel essay (pdf) on the economic future of Finland.
*Why Marx was Right*
That’s the new Terry Eagleton book, which apparently needs no subtitle. Most of the claims in the book are correct, and they debunk superficial or incorrect readings of Marx. In that regard it is useful and it is also clearly written. Still, I have to judge it as a bad book, for instance:
But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the hostility of the capitalist West.
Or:
Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking, dispiriting task. It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it involves.
Or:
…there is a paradoxical sense in which Stalinism, rather than discrediting Marx’s work, bears witness to its validity.
Try this one:
Revolution is generally thought to be the opposite of democracy, as the work of sinister underground minorities out to subvert the will of the majority. In fact, as a process by which men and women assume power over their own existence through popular councils and assemblies, it is a great deal more democratic than anything on offer at the moment. The Bolsheviks had an impressive record of open controversy within their ranks, and the idea that they should rule the country as the only political party was no part of their original programme.
Ahem. Terry Eagleton…telephone!
The culture that is Manhattan James Heckman gone wild edition
A mad-as-heck Manhattan mom says her daughter’s Ivy League dreams have been all but dashed — and she’s only 4 years old.
Nicole Imprescia is suing the $19,000-a-year York Avenue Preschool, saying her daughter, Lucia, was forced to spend too much time with lesser-minded 2- and 3-year-olds when she should have been focusing on test preparation to get into an elite elementary school.
The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, notes that “getting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school” and says the Upper East Side school promised Imprescia it would “prepare her daughter for the ERB, an exam required for admission into nearly all the elite private elementary schools.”
But “it became obvious [those] promises were a complete fraud,” the suit says. “Indeed, the school proved not to be a school at all but just one big playroom.”
The miffed mom yanked her daughter after just three weeks — but the school is refusing to refund the $19,000 she had to pay up front, said her lawyer, Mathew Paulose.
The article is here. For the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald.
Very good sentences
"I’m one of the few people who went to Washington to get out of politics."
Can you guess who said it? Hat tip goes to Felix Salmon.
It’s time to reread Robin Hanson
Isn't it always?
Marketplace for retired economists
The AEA is attempting to make another part of the job market thick: it is linked from the main JOE page at http://www.aeaweb.org/joe/
Here is the direct link.
Available Retired Faculty Listing: "As an experiment, the AEA is initiating a listing of retired economists who may be interested in teaching on either a part-time or temporary basis. Individuals can add or delete their name at any time during the year. The listing will be active from February 1 through November 30 each year. Listings will be deleted on November 30; the service will be closed during December and January, re-opening on February 1."
Right now the list is waiting to be populated by retired faculty seeking part time or temporary work.
What to do about wage polarization?
I like this Paul Krugman column, but I would have given it a different ending. Krugman writes:
So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer – we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.
What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.
I would suggest three different points of emphasis:
1. Trade unions, even if they could become strong again (which is hard to see), would likely accelerate this process of substituting capital for labor, rather than counteracting it. A one-time union wage premium, even if it does not come at the expense of other workers, will put only a small dent in the long-term trend.
2. Let's reform education, so people either make effective teams with computers, or they specialize in areas where computers are not effective. The nature of "education" is not carved in stone, even if the sector is hard to reform.
3. I have never seen it suggested that this "hollowing out" process will lead to lower output, quite the contrary. Those gains go somewhere. This is a reason to encourage the ownership of capital and on a quite broad basis. Let's start by repealing Sarbanes-Oxley, but along these lines there is much more we could do. How about low-load mutual funds backed by claims to intellectual property or whatever else will prove the scarce input for the future? Identifying that scarce input is the key to making progress on this issue.
More on GaddafiGate
His resignation came as a US consultancy admitted mishandling a multimillion dollar contract with Libya to sanitise Gaddafi's reputation in the west. Monitor Group, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organised for academics and policymakers from the US and UK to travel to Tripoli to meet the Libyan despot between 2006 and 2008, as part of a $3m (£1.8m) contract.
In a related development, the director of LSE has resigned, there is more here. Hat tip goes to Kieran Healy.
Gas station tacos
R&R Tacqueria, 7894 Washington Blvd. (Rt.1); 410-799-0001, Elkridge, Maryland, 13 minutes north of the 495/95 intersection, look for the Shell sign.
This tacqueria is in a gas station, with two small counters and three chairs to sit on. It is the best huarache I have eaten, ever, including in Mexico. It is the best chile relleno I've had in the United States, ever. They serve among the best Mexican soups I have had, ever, and I have been to Mexico almost twenty times. I recommend the tacos al pastor as well. At first Yana and Natasha were skeptics ("Sometimes you exaggerate about food") but now they are converts and the takeaways have vanished. They even sell Mexican Coca-Cola and by the way the place is quite clean and nice, albeit cramped.
The highly intelligent proprietor is a former cargo pilot from Mexico City and speaks excellent English. The restaurant is called R&R after the names of his two sons.
For over twenty years I have sought such a place in the Washington, D.C. area and now I have one. For over twenty years people have been asking me how can they scratch this itch and now I have an answer. (The version of this post to appear on tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com will have photos of the food.)
Via Jodi Ettenberg, The Wall Street Journal reports on gas station tacos.
Wisconsin vs. Texas, on education
This piece is marred by some unfortunate polemics, but it makes one core point very effectively:
To recap, white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin,black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin,Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin.
I can't do cut and paste on this Mac, so here is the link: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
I thank several MR readers for the pointer.
What is the ultimate left-wing novel?
Isaac L. writes to me:
I am hoping you and your readers can help settle an issue. I am a left-leaning voter. A conservative friend and I recently discussed Atlas Shrugged, which he said was the ultimate right-wing novel. He challenged me to point him towards a left-wing novel that does for that side of politics what Rand does for the right. I think the book needs to do two things: justify the welfare state and argue the limitations of the invisible hand. While I can think of lots of non-fiction texts, I am drawing blank on fictional offerings.
Do you or your readers have any suggestions? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
What jumps to mind is Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, but if you read the request carefully it does not qualify. Here is a list of thirty famous left-wing novels, heavy on the mid- to late nineteenth century. There is Bronte, Dickens, Hugo, Sinclair, Zola, Gorky, Jack London, and Edward Bellamy. None of these books is as analytically or philosophically comprehensive as the novels of Ayn Rand.
I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways. It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes. Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing, there won't be a definitive example of the left-wing novel. Story-telling encourages context-dependent thinking, although not necessarily in an accurate manner. One notable feature of Atlas Shrugged is how frequently the story-telling stops for a long speech or an extended dialogue, in order to explain some first principles to the reader.
The quality of fiction vs. the quality of non-fiction
Marcos Jazzan, a loyal MR reader, requests:
The quality of fiction seems to be decreasing relative to the quality of non-fiction, or am I just biased against active fiction writers vs. dead ones?
I agree with this assessment, and I see a few mechanisms at work:
1. A lot of good non-fiction is based on current affairs, which are always changing, or progress in science or social science, or biographies of previous uncovered subjects. Fiction doesn't have a comparable source of new material, at least not since the modernist revolutions.
2. The internet makes it easier for people to be interested in a "culture of facts." It doesn't help long narratives in the same manner.
3. For a given level of IQ, people are more likely to agree on what is a good non-fiction book than what is a good fiction book. Internet reviews therefore make non-fiction purchases more reliable to a greater degree than they do for fiction.
4. Arguably literary fiction peaked in the 1920s, with Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Mann, and other important writers. Could it be that fiction took a bruising from the rise of radio and film at that time? Even if we compare the 1960s to today, fiction seemed to be more culturally central then.
What mechanisms am I missing?
How to make better decisions?
I never thought of this method:
What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst–psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women. If this man were able to suppress his sexual desire in this situation, would his hunger also subside? This is the sort of question Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, sought to answer in the laboratory.
Tuk came up with the idea for the study while attending a long lecture. In an effort to stay alert, she drank several cups of coffee. By the end of the talk, she says, “All the coffee had reached my bladder. And that raised the question: What happens when people experience higher levels of bladder control?” With her colleagues, Debra Trampe of the University of Groningen and Luk Warlop of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tuk designed experiments to test whether self-control over one bodily desire can generalize to other domains as well.
In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes–the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder–the researchers assessed participants’ self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.
The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.
“You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder,” Tuk says. So maybe you should drink a bottle of water before making a decision about your stock portfolio, for example. Or perhaps stores that count on impulse buys should keep a bathroom available to customers, since they might be more willing to go for the television with a bigger screen when they have an empty bladder.
The pointer is from Michelle Dawson, although I do not take her to be necessarily endorsing (or rejecting) the results. There is related work here and here (pdf).
I wrote this post with an empty bladder.