Category: Education

Libya Dissertation Fact of the Day

by  Alex Tabarrok in

From a 2007 PhD Dissertation awarded by the LSE:

This dissertation analyses the problem of how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions, exploring the approach of a more formal system of collective decision-making by the three main actors in global society: governments, civil society and the business sector….

The thesis explains and adopts three philosophical foundations in support of the argument. The first is liberal individualism; the thesis argues that there are strong motivations for free individuals to seek fair terms of cooperation within the necessary constraints of being members of a global society. Drawing on the works of David Hume, John Rawls and Ned McClennen, it elaborates significant self-interested and moral motives that prompt individuals to seek cooperation on fair terms if they expect others to do so. Secondly, it supports a theory of global justice, rejecting the limits of Rawls’s view of international justice based on what he calls ‘peoples’ rather than persons. Thirdly, the thesis adopts and applies David Held’s eight cosmopolitan principles to support the concept and specific structures of ‘Collective Management’.

The author? Saif "we will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet" Gaddafi (son of Muammar).

More background and discussion with David Held, one of his dissertation advisers, here.

Hat tip to Boing Boing.

Archibald and Feldman respond on education

by  Tyler Cowen in

The discussion, which includes a reply to my previous post, is here, excerpt (but do read their entire response):

Next, we don’t see strong barriers to entry on the institutional side, either. In 1970, eight million students were enrolled in 2,000 American colleges and universities. Today, over 18 million are enrolled in roughly 4,300 institutions, according to the Digest of Educational Statistics. There has been a veritable explosion of places at for-profit and not-for-profit institutions alike. To take one example from the traditional nonprofit sector, the University of Central Florida has mushroomed from a start-up to one of the largest institutions in the nation in a relatively short period of time.

Competition among pre-existing universities has also grown more intense. As Caroline Hoxby has noted, the fraction of students attending schools within their own state has declined steadily since the 1940s.

"The quantity supplied is going up" does not equal "the quantity supplied is not restricted."  There is a lot more non-pasteurized cheese consumed in this country than twenty years ago, but it is still very much restricted. 

Accreditation constraints and social signaling constraints (a market failure, I might add) are two reasons why we don't see more effective competition in the higher education sector.  In what other economic sectors are the major quality players more or less the same decades later?  Apart from adding on a west coast, the list of top players hasn't changed all that much in a century.  There's something funny about this sector which we are not being told about, although I will agree the exact nature of the reputational stickiness remains a bit mysterious.  It is related to why the U.S. edge in higher education remains relatively robust, even when we have lost our edge in many other sectors.  Catch-up is hard.

On UCF, it is ranked #97 among public universities.  It seems to offer reasonable value, as such schools go, but it has hardly turned the market upside down.  George Mason also has grown from small to huge (about 30,000 students).  The question is why this kind of entry hasn't lowered prices.  What I see is lots of "more of the same" competition, little scope to experiment with true cost-cutting and different products, and so growing supply matches demand but has not been a force for major price declines relative to median wages.

The growing polarization of U.S. labor market outcomes has helped, indirectly, subsidize a lot of inefficiency in the upper tiers of U.S. higher education.  People are willing to pay for the ticket, just as the airlines can get away with more inefficiency when travel and migration demands are high. 

If I'm analyzing the high and growing prices for U.S. colleges and universities, I would start with some of these basic observations.  

What looks difficult but is in fact easy

by  Tyler Cowen in

A request from Nels:

My 8 year old daughter was bemoaning the fact the things that look simple are often difficult. Then she turned to me and asked what things look difficult, but in reality are easy?

When I was ten years old, I thought that "paying bills" was going to be quite difficult.  I don't mean generating the income, but rather the literal act of paying the bills.  I didn't understand how you would find out where to send the money and also how to keep track of it all.  It turns out that the suppliers make that fairly easy for us.  They hook up service, or send the magazine, and then they send you the bill.  They keep track of it for you.  I hadn't read Adam Smith yet. 

That said, I'll pay months of a bill in advance to avoid having to deal with it.  I can never tell when I have renewed a magazine or not and I puzzle over the game-theoretic problem  (how many renewal notices should they send, and do they send, given my rational response is to ignore them for a while?).  I probably could not balance a checkbook. 

So was I wrong in the first place?  Maybe it is really hard!

Which is why I find this question difficult to answer.  Even though it looks easy.

What do twin adoption studies show?

by  Tyler Cowen in

"A case in point is provided by the recent study of regular tobacco use among SATSA's twins (24). Heritability was estimated as 60% for men, only 20% for women. Separate analyses were then performed for three distinct age cohorts. For men, the heritability estimates were nearly identical for each cohort. But for women, heritability increased from zero for those born between 1910 and 1924, to 21% for those in the 1925-39 birth cohort, to 64% for the 1940-58 cohort. The authors suggested that the most plausible explanation for this finding was that "a reduction in the social restrictions on smoking in women in Sweden as the 20th century progressed permitted genetic factors increasing the risk for regular tobacco use to express themselves." If purportedly genetic factors can be so readily suppressed by social restrictions, one must ask the question, "For what conceivable purpose is the phenotypic variance being allocated?" This question is not addressed seriously by MISTRA or SATSA. The numbers, and the associated modeling, appear to be ends in themselves."

Why does college cost so much?

by  Tyler Cowen in

David Leonhardt serves up a dialogue with Robert B. Archibald, and also David H. Feldman.  Archibald starts by citing the cost disease and also the heavy use of skilled labor in the sector.  I don't think they get to the heart of the matter, as there is no mention of entry barriers, whether legal, cultural, or economic.  The price of higher education is rising — rapidly — and yet a) individual universities do not have strong incentives to take in larger classes, and b) it is hard to start a new, good college or university.  The key question is how much a) and b) are remediable in the longer run and if so then there is some chance that the current structure of higher education is a bubble of sorts. 

I never see the authors utter the sentence: "There are plenty wanna-bee professors discarded on the compost heap of academic history."  Yet the best discard should not be much worse, and may even be better, than the marginally accepted professor.  Such a large pool of surplus labor would play a significant role in an economic analysis of virtually any other sector.

When it comes to solving the access problem, the word which pops up is "financial aid," not "increased competition."  Why might that be?

Matt Yglesias once had a good post on how innovation in higher education may come through the proliferation of cheaper and "inferior" alternatives; more on that here.  And here is more from Matt.

The Nordic triangle?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Via Conor Friedersdorf, and Bagehot, here is a discussion of Henrik Berggren and Lars TrägÃ¥rdh:

Conor writes:

Here's an interesting frame for the difference between America, Germany, and Sweden: every society has a different relationship to "the triangle formed by reverence for the Family, the State and the Individual." 

Bagehot writes:

Americans favour a Family-Individual axis… suspecting the state as a threat to liberty. Germans revere an axis connecting the family and the state, with a smaller role for individual autonomy. In the Nordic countries… the state and the individual form the dominant alliance.

Here is Reihan on this topic.  Here is my earlier and very directly related post on Sweden and the Swede as individualist.  Does anyone have a link to the Pippi Longstocking paper itself?

Here is Bagehot again:

(Before you scoff, you should perhaps know that the French–a conservative and statist lot–have a very complicated relationship with Pippi Longstocking as a children's book. For many years, the only French translation available was a bowdlerised version, that played down Pippi's wilder, anti-authoritarian side. There is a moral in there somewhere.)

Stagnation is not just about technology

by  Tyler Cowen in

According to data based on students who graduated in June, 2009, 5.1 percent of Rochester students who entered high school in the 2005-06 school year graduated school prepared for college or a career.

Rochester's graduation rate for that period was 46.6 percent, but because few of those graduates passed regents exams with scores of 80 or higher in math and 75 or higher in English, they were not deemed college or career ready.

The story is here.  In Syracuse and Buffalo, the readiness rate was a much higher fifteen percent.  Of course when it comes to gdp, all of these expenditures on their high schools are valued at cost.

Creative style and achievement in ADHD adults

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the abstract:

Previous research has suggested that adults with ADHD perform better on some measures of creativity than non-ADHD adults. The present study replicated previous findings using a standardized measure of creativity (the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, Goff & Torrance, 2002) and extended previous research by investigating real-world creative achievement among adults with ADHD. Results indicated that adults with ADHD showed higher levels of original creative thinking on the verbal task of the ATTA and higher levels of real-world creative achievement, compared to adults without ADHD. In addition, comparison of creative styles using the FourSight Thinking Profile (Puccio 2002) found that preference for idea generation was higher among ADHD participants, whereas preference for problem clarification and idea development was greater among non-ADHD participants. These findings have implications for real-world application of the creative styles of adults with and without ADHD.

The paper, by Holly A. White and Priti Shah, is here.  Note that ADHD individuals score high on "verbal originality."  Here is a previous White paper on ADHD and creativity.

It's also worth repeating the more general point that many (most?) ADHD individuals have a high variance of focus abilities, not a complete inability to focus on something.  They can be some of the world's best focusers, under the right circumstances.

How do Maryland and Virginia differ?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Jared Sylvester, a loyal TCEDG reader:

I was reading through your dining guide, looking for a place to go with my father this weekend.  In your write up of Crisfields [http://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/?p=561] you said "The accompanying visit to Silver Spring is an object lesson in how Maryland and Virginia differ."  I was wondering if you would mind blogging on that topic.

Let's restrict (most of) this to the adjacent parts of each state.  The food says a lot: Maryland has kosher food and Caribbean food.  Virginia has better Bolivian, Vietnamese, Korean, Afghan, Ethiopian, and Persian food.  (Here is a new piece on minorities in Virginia.)  Both have excellent Sichuan food.  Both have very good El Salvadoran and Thai food.  Neither has real barbecue.  Maryland used to have better Indian food, now Virginia has much better Indian food, including dosas.  Apart from Bethesda, Maryland has virtually no "fine dining."  Maryland has many more Russians, albeit without a decent restaurant. 

Virginia has Tysons Corner, Tysons Mall I and II, The Palm, and a Ritz-Carlton, or in other words a lot of tacky, revenue-generating corporate assets.  Virginia has better and more consistent school systems.  Virginia has better Beltway on- and off-ramps.

Bethesda is better integrated into DC than is any part of Virginia, with Arlington playing catch-up.  Virginia has the airports, the Pentagon, a better business climate, and lower taxes.

The Pentagon and the military are central to my theory of why Virginia is such a well-run state.  Virginia has a major cash cow, to provide employment and taxable incomes, yet unlike Alaska's oil revenue, it is not one that the state government can get its hands on beyond general sources of tax revenue.  The Pentagon, as a natural asset, does not foster corruption or complacency in the Virginia state government.  It is politically untouchable.  It makes Virginia a conservative yet interventionist and technocratic state.  Maryland has more inherited blight. 

Virginia has more ugly colonial houses, and more arches and pillars, Maryland has more tacky old American box houses.  I dislike ugly colonial.

Virginia feels more like an assortment of minorities working within an essentially Protestant framework.  Maryland was originally founded as a Catholic colony.

Looking to the state as a whole, Virginia doesn't have a proper city; Norfolk and Virginia Beach are agglomerations based around what are traditionally non-urban rationales.  I bet people in California, or for that matter Shenzhen, don't even know they are cities at all.  The third largest city, Chesapeake, no one has heard of, or cares about, if not for the nearby Bay.  Other parts of Maryland, such as you find along the Susquehanna, were long integrated into more northerly and westerly trade routes.  Virginia's major waterways lead to the sea.

I've long lived in Virginia, and never wanted to live in Maryland, even if I could equalize the commute.

Observations about Chinese (Chinese-American?) mothers

by  Tyler Cowen in

I agree with many of Bryan Caplan's views on parenting, and Yana can attest that I have never attempted a "dragon mother" style.  Yet I think that Bryan is overreaching a bit in rejecting virtually all of Amy Chua's claims.  The simpler view — which most Americans intuitively grasp — is that some Asian parenting styles do make kids more productive, and better at school, although it is less clear they make the kids happier.  It remains the case that most people overrate how much parenting matters in a broader variety of contexts, and in that regard Bryan's work is hardly refuted.  Still, I see real evidence for a parenting effect from many (not all) Asian-American and Asian families.

1. James Flynn argues, using evidence from tests, that Chinese families boosted their children's IQs by intensive parental techniques.  Based on some very specific research, he claims the parenting was causal and the IQ boost followed.  I hardly consider this the final word, but it's more to the point that the adoption studies and the like, which don't try to measure this effect directly and don't have measures of strict Asian parenting.

2. It is obvious that some Asian parenting techniques make the children much more likely to succeed as classical musicians.  It's a big marginal effect upon whatever genetic influence there might be (and in this case the genetic influence might well be zero or very small; Chinese hardly seem genetically superior in music.)  The only question is how much longer this list can become.  What else can the parents make their kids better at, even relative to IQ?  Future engineering success?  If violin is a slam dunk, I don't see why engineering is a big stretch.

3. I suspect that Bryan and his wife do, correctly, apply the notion of "high expectations" to their children and to the benefit of those kids. 

4. Bryan, like Judith Harris, argues that the influence of parents is typically mediated through peers and peer effects.  But we should not confuse the partial and general equilibrium mechanisms here.  For any single parent, the peers may well carry the chain of influence to their child and a lot of the parenting style applied to that individual kid will appear irrelevant.  But for the culture as a whole, the peers can serve this function only because of the general influence of culture and parenting on all of the peers as a whole.  In other words, peer quality is endogenous and a single family is free-riding upon the parenting efforts of others.  That's a better model than just looking at the partial equilibrium coefficient on the parent effect and concluding that parenting doesn't matter.  This is a mistake commonly made by Harris fans.

5. As an aside, I wonder how much there is a common Chinese parenting or mothering style.  Chua, of course, is from the Philippines.  It is estimated that about 20 percent of the children are China are "abandoned" by their parents — mothers too – typically as the parents move to the cities to take better jobs.  When Chua writes, to what extent is she referring to Chinese immigrant parenting styles, uniquely suited to new situations, and derived from Chinese culture but distinct nonetheless.

6. There is a significant literature on Chinese immigrant parenting styles, based on lots of empirical evidence, but I don't see anyone giving it much of a close look.  Here is a simple and well-known piece, not about Asians per se, arguing that "authoritative parenting" leads to superior performance in school.  There is also evidence that the effects accumulate rather than disappear over time.  There is a lot of research here, often quite disaggregated in its questions, and it goes well beyond the twin studies and it does not by any means always yield the same answers.

7. I expect great things from Scott Sumner's children.

Dialogue with David Leonhardt

by  Tyler Cowen in

It's about how to spur innovation, read it here.  Here is one excerpt:

I would also like to see more of our elite institutions of higher education take the explicitly meritocratic and indeed arguably anti-egalitarian approaches of Caltech and also University of Chicago. Those two institutions are big successes – M.I.T. too – yet they are not always so easy to copy. We should be trying harder. In terms of respect for intelligence, achievement, and science, we should be more like Singapore.

The question did not come up, but I also favor reduced liability standards for major new innovations.  Take the various plans for robot-driven cars.  They will kill some people, as do human-driven cars.  We run the risk of having the status quo so locked into place, so grandfathered, and so implicitly favored by the realities of regulation and lawsuits, that such an idea might never get off the ground.  That in turn affects the incentives of innovators ex ante.

The evolution of regionalisms on Twitter

by  Tyler Cowen in

Postings on Twitter reflect some well-known regionalisms, such as Southerners' "y'all," and Pittsburghers' "yinz," and the usual regional divides in references to soda, pop and Coke. But Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU's Machine Learning Department, said the automated method he and his colleagues have developed for analyzing Twitter word use shows that regional dialects appear to be evolving within social media.

In northern California, something that's cool is "koo" in tweets, while in southern California, it's "coo." In many cities, something is "sumthin," but tweets in New York City favor "suttin." While many of us might complain in tweets of being "very" tired, people in northern California tend to be "hella" tired, New Yorkers "deadass" tired and Angelenos are simply tired "af."

The "af" is an acronym that, like many others on Twitter, stands for a vulgarity. LOL is a commonly used acronym for "laughing out loud," but Twitterers in Washington, D.C., seem to have an affinity for the cruder LLS.

That is from Science Daily, hat tip goes to LanguageHat and the original paper (pdf) is here.