Category: Education
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.
Sentences to ponder
My guess is that if you want to improve health outcomes in the United States, ignore health insurance and focus on literacy.
That is from Arnold Kling.
Endogenous parenting and twin adoption studies
I'm not sure how convincing I find this piece, by Alessandro Lizzeri and Marciano Siniscalchi, but it's worth a read if you've been following the debates over twin adoption studies. In the model, parents both expose their children to learning and protect them. Parents also judge a successful child by how much that child has their abilities, so in equilibrium the more a child differs from a parent, the more the parent intervenes to direct the path of the child's development.
Again, in the model children of "better" parents have better outcomes on average, above and beyond genetic transmission as a mechanism. When it comes to adopted children, parents intervene more and parents also bring more similar interventions to bear on identical twins than on fraternal twins.
In twin adoption studies it will appear that parenting does not matter when in fact it does. Here is a neat passage from the paper:
Thus, differential sheltering by biological and adoptive parents provides a countervailing force to common rearing…We can also reinterpret this countervailing force…Differential sheltering by biological and adoptive parents implies that, despite being reared apart, adopted twins are in fact subject to a shared environmental influence–namely, adoption itself. This intuitively leads to greater phenotypic correlation by compensating for the lack of the direct commonrearing effect.
The piece ended up being published in the QJE 2008.
For the pointer I thank a loyal MR writer.
Who will still be famous in 10,000 years?
Sam Hammond, a loyal MR reader, asks me:
Who do you think will still be famous in 10,000 years? People from history or now. Shakespeare? Socrates? Hawking?
This requires a theory of 10,000 years from now, but let's say we're a lot richer, not computer uploads (if so, I know the answer to the question), and not in a collapsed dystopia. We still look like human beings and inhabit physical space. If you wish, postulate that not all of those 10,000 years involved strongly positive economic growth.
In that case, I'll go with the major religious leaders (Jesus, Buddha, etc.), Einstein, Turing, Watson and Crick, Hitler, the major classical music composers, Adam Smith, and Neil Armstrong. (Addendum: Oops! I forgot Darwin and Euclid.)
My thinking is this. The major religions last for a long time and leave a real mark on history. Path-dependence is critical in that area.
Otherwise, an individual, to stay famous, will have to securely symbolize an entire area, and an area "with legs" at that. The theory of relativity still will be true and it may well become more important. The computer and DNA will not be irrelevant. Hitler will remain a stand-in symbol for pure evil; if he is topped we may not have a future at all. Beethoven and Mozart still will be splendid, but Shakespeare and other wordsmiths will require translation and thus will fade somewhat. The propensity to truck and barter will remain and Smith will keep his role as the symbol of economics. Keynesian economics may someday be less true, as superior biofeedback, combined with markets in self-improvement, ushers in an era of flexible wages, while market-based expected nominal gdp targeting prevents a downward deflationary spiral.
The fame of those individuals will not perish, in part, because the more distant future will produce fewer lasting mega-famous people. Achievement will be more decentralized and more connected to teams. The dominance of Edison and Tesla, in their breakthroughs, will not be repeated. There won't be a mega-Einstein eighty years from now, to make everyone forget the current Einstein, even if (especially if) science goes very well.
Western intellectuals and Gadhafi
Robert Putnam was once called to a meeting with Gadhafi. Here is an excerpt from his account:
Students of Western political philosophy would categorize Col. Gadhafi as a quintessential student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: He made clear that he deeply distrusted any political group that might stand between individual citizens and the "General Will" as interpreted by the Legislator (i.e., Col. Gadhafi himself). When I argued that freedom of association could enhance democratic stability, he vehemently dismissed the idea. That might be so in the West, he insisted, but in Libya it would simply strengthen tribalism, and he would not stand for disunity.
Throughout, he styled our meeting as a conversation between two profound political thinkers, a trope that approached the absurd when he observed that there were international organizations for many professions nowadays, but none for philosopher-kings. "Why don't we make that happen?" he proposed with a straight face. I smiled, at a loss for words. Col. Gadhafi was a tyrant and a megalomaniac, not a philosopher-king, but our visit left me convinced that he was not a simple man.
Was this a serious conversation or an elaborate farce? Naturally, I came away thinking–hoping–that I had managed to sway Col. Gadhafi in some small way, but my wife was skeptical. Two months later I was invited back to a public roundtable in Libya, but by then I had concluded that the whole exercise was a public-relations stunt, and I declined.
Hat tip goes to Monkey Cage and ultimately, the fabled Daniel Lippman. But that's not all — Benjamin Barber also had some visits to meet with the Libyan leader, here is his account:
Written off not long ago as an implacable despot, Gaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country's role in a changed and changing world.
And:
Surprisingly flexible and pragmatic, Gaddafi was once an ardent socialist who now acknowledges private property and capital as sometimes appropriate elements in developing societies. Once an opponent of representative central government, he is wrestling with the need to delegate substantial authority to competent public officials if Libya is to join the global system. Once fearful of outside media, he has permitted satellite dishes throughout his country, and he himself surfs the Internet.
Libya under Gaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally.
Here is Barber's piece on Libya from 2011. It starts like this:
I offer my views about Libya here not just as a democratic theorist and HuffPost regular, but as a member of the International Board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation until this morning, when I resigned.