Category: Education

A handsome teacher in China is offering pupils autographed photos of himself to encourage them to work harder.

Ji Feng, also vice principal of Zhiyuan Foreign Language Elementary School, is so popular among students that a lot of them were asking him for pictures.

"I came up with the idea of giving them my signed pictures as a reward," he told the Nanjing Morning Post.

Students who put in exemplary work can now pose for a picture with Ji who then signs the printed photograph.

Ji added: "It absolutely is not narcissism, but a way of encouragement. And only the students who perform the best can get such a reward."

Here is the story, the pointer is from Allison Kasic.

17 year old Magnus Carlsen won a chess game today and is probably now, unofficially, ranked #1 in the world.  (World champion Anand lost and fell behind in rating points.)  Here is an illuminating recent profile of Magnus.  I believe Paul Samuelson is the closest to an economics prodigy we have had.  He was thirty-two when his Foundations of Economic Analysis was published but I have heard that he wrote the book at a much earlier age (does anyone know the exact age?).  He was probably one of the best economists in the world when he received his undergraduate degree at Chicago at the age of 20.  Frank Ramsey is another example of an economics prodigy although he didn’t even think of himself as an economist per se.  Can you think of other prodigies in mathematical economics?  I attribute their scarcity to the relative aesthetic poverty of mathematical economics (for most people it’s not that fun or beautiful) rather than the need for complementary experience-acquired wisdom.  Do you agree?

Addendum: Andrew Gelman considers statistics.

The number of Chileans who studied Ph.d. economics at the University of Chicago in the 1990s: 4

The number of Chileans studying there since 2001: 10

According to this interesting article, studying at Chicago no longer bears the stigma of association with the Pinochet regime.  Nor do those who study at Chicago aspire to be hard-core market reformers.  This is a sign of how "normal" Chile has become, and also a sign of how "normal" the University of Chicago has become, but most of all the former.

I loved this post by Bryan Caplan, even if I don’t quite agree with it.  Here’s his bottom line:

The best games are inter-disciplinary, combining economics and
psychology. Games of pure strategic reasoning like chess are dry. Games
of pure social interaction are a little silly. But games that bring
together strategic reasoning and social interaction are a joy for heart
and mind.

I do believe that Bryan’s claim is true for smart people with no managerial or administrative responsibilities but not for those who experience such joys in the course of daily life and thus do not need the game.  Similarly, I believe that people with highly analytical day jobs do not usually go to chess clubs at night, even if they in principle enjoy the game of chess.

A simple one variable theory is that the qualities of the games you play reflect the qualities which are missing in your regular life.

There are a number of obvious exceptions to this theory.  For instance highly social people may play highly social games because their marginal utility for sociable activities does not decline very rapidly if at all.  Or you might play a particular game just because your wife makes you.  Still, my one variable theory is a starting point for understanding which people enjoy which games.

If you’re wondering, I don’t play any games at all.  I’m not saying I’m so wonderfully complete, but overall I prefer stories to games, at least at my current margins in life.

On average, full-time faculty members at the University of New Mexico’s
Gallup campus were being subsidized to the tune of $10,554 apiece.

The word subsidization, in this context, refers to the subsidy from the university and not from government per se.  That’s the difference between the cost of the professor minus the revenue he or she brings in from tuition.  Here is the full article, with further links.  I am not sure how this estimate allocates various fixed costs (does a professor have to "pay for" the lawn care service?), but for the time being does that matter?  The important truth is that while universities think in these terms all the time, they are rarely if ever willing to make their implicit estimates public or see how those estimates might be improved.

…the numbers reflect is a situation I’ve heard is
fairly common: in the College of Business & Economics, the 26 full
professors’ listed salaries have a median of $86,155; the 15 assistant
professors’ listed salaries have a median of $86,802. One of the
assistant professors has a reported salary higher than any of the full
professors. Another assistant professor has a reported salary higher
than all but one of the full professors.

That’s for the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; it’s not true for the University of Michigan or for that matter Harvard.

Read John’s response here (the original letter is here).  In my view the damning bit is this one:

…it is to me sadder still how atrociously written this
letter is. These people devote their lives to writing on social issues, and
teaching freshmen (including mine) how to think and write clearly.  Yet
it’s awful.

Recommended for those who like polemic and mutual recrimination.

I thank a loyal MR reader for the pointer.

This is from the comments and in the context of the financial market bailouts:

"Why aren’t you free-marketeer crusaders screaming your heads off?!"

My answer is that I have been. Reporters have interviewed me about it and sometimes they report my "screams" and sometimes they don’t. Re Tyler’s blase response, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion, after having read his site almost daily for over a year, that Tyler is not a free-market crusader. He’s a first-rate economist, but his passion seems to be almost solely about the analytics rather than the policies.

Am I wrong, Tyler?

I would note a few points:

1. I have very much favored the "bailouts" to date.  I don’t favor that they were necessary but of course that latter attitude may or may not be libertarian in its derivation.

2. My tone stems from my personality, namely that I rarely get mad.  And in any policy debate, I don’t assume that the people on my side intellectually are somehow morally superior or more honest.  In any particular case I usually give that 50-50.  It’s also worth noting that perhaps we shouldn’t judge partisanship from tone, just as we shouldn’t judge linguistic fluency from the quality of a person’s accent (which we tend to do).

3. A good blog should be subversive and help you see the faults in the author’s own positions.  Ask whether the blogs you are reading in fact provide that service.  Self-subversion ought also, in the long run, to benefit liberty and other important values.

4. I think very often in international terms, so I see even most left-wing Americans (e.g., Ezra Klein) as having a relatively similar world view to my own.  Why focus on the local political conflict when so many presuppositions are shared?  When it comes to all-important questions about "how should we live?" it may well be that Ezra and I are pretty close together.  We should attach greater value to those commonalities of perspective.

5. I am very libertarian compared to the American center but moderate compared to most libertarians.

I am not sure I have answered David’s question.

The DVD is called Miteiru dake (Just Looking),
and it features various talent/models just staring straight ahead.
That’s right, the models on the DVD do very little other than stare
straight at the camera. According to the website, the idea is to get
young males who aren’t used to socializing with women to become more
accustomed to making eye contact and/or handle the fact that a sentient
being sits across from them and awaits interaction. The DVD hopes to
cure those afflicted with shyness so that they may rejoin society.

Here is more information, with an embedded video at the link.  Thanks to Justin Mancinelli for the pointer.  Of course the market offers real variety:

The result,
from what one can see on the website, is strangely disconcerting. A
girl will stare back at you for an extended period of time,
expressionless and periodically blinking (the blinks are eerily
profound). Once in a while the model will utter a phrase like "ohayoo"
(good morning) or make a move to say something, but for the most part
there is just an uncomfortable silence. Most of the women on the DVD
are jimusho-based talento (most have blogs on Ameba
and other DVDs of their own to sell), but there are also foreign women,
young girls, and older women thrown in the mix to give the viewer
experience in handling long, uncomfortable silences with those of
different races and ages.

Here are the data, based on one study; I am surprised that psychology is "tops," with a 58.7% rate of political correctness.  The other "winners" are not hard to predict, though "art" comes in at a surprisingly low 14.6%.  Economics is rated at 4.7%, noting that beneath us lie Marketing, Accounting, Computer Science, Biology, and now into the zero percent category, Finance, Management Information, and Mechanical and Electrical Engineering.  OK, wise guys, give the best single sentence (you are allowed one comma) account of these numbers that you can.

…it’s been a revelation and confirmation of an intuition: in some ways,
gay men may benefit from marriage more than any other group.

That’s Andrew Sullivan, responding to the spot-on Megan McArdle, who also believes that men benefit more from marriage than do women.

Jonathan Bydlak seeks to match donors directly with students, rather than matching donors to universities.  Here is his group.  One advantage of the idea is greater competition:

…the current system ties the amount of accessible financial
aid to the schools that students attend, giving schools with more
resources a distinct advantage…students accepted to a Princeton or Harvard face virtually no
quality vs. price trade-off.

What this means for higher education as a whole is that the
current financial aid system, whereby alumni and other prominent donors
contribute to schools, rather than individuals, reinforces the
perceived status of those schools that are considered “top-tier.”

While demand for high quality higher education continues to increase
massively,
the supply of top-tier higher education has not changed much
at all (one need only look at the lack of variability in the U.S. News
rankings for proof of this point).  And as any Econ 101 student can
tell you, when demand far outstrips supply, costs are inevitably pushed
upward.

I like the idea but fear that institutions of higher learning can offer donors greater perks than can intermediaries that match donors to students.  Might it be possible to, say, offer donors the chance to support students through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the Met taking a lower cut than Harvard does, yet still handing out donor perks?

And for that matter hail Seth Weidman:

It was a classic case of supply and demand.

Entering his senior year at Pittsburgh Allderdice High School, Seth Weidman felt there was demand for an Advanced Placement economics class.

So he decided to supply one.

At least one night a week for nine months, Seth taught college-level economics to a group of his fellow Allderdice students, traveling from living room to living room with his dry-erase board in tow.

Fueled by Doritos, pretzels and the occasional homemade tiramisu, Seth’s students in the "Weidman School of Economics" numbered 18, with nine of them eventually taking at least one of the two AP economics tests offered.

Thus far, the results have been spectacular. The students took 12 total tests, and of the eight scores that have come in this month, six are 5’s — the highest possible on a scale of 1 to 5 — and two are 4’s.

Greg Mankiw and Aplia appear in the story as well.  Seth loves Hayek’s Road to Serfdom: ""It made me see that economics isn’t just about a bunch of guys sitting on CNBC," he said. "It’s more about incentives. It gives you a cool perspective to understand the world."

Here is the full story.  Seth will be attending the University of Chicago next year.  Here is material on Joseph Lancaster and I thank Eric Crampton for the pointer.