Category: Education
Education and raises
The unwrapped saltine cracker
Every now and then I give informal talks on how the economics job market operates. I tell the listeners that they are like an “unwrapped saltine cracker.” They are wasting assets, to borrow a phrase from options pricing theory. If a day goes by and they did not accomplish something important, they decline in value. For most candidates, holding steady is not a viable strategy. You need either publications or some stellar letters from credible writers, preferably both. (At the very top level, publications at the job market stage are less important because it is expected they will come and the recommendations are trusted more.)
Unwrap a saltine cracker, let it sit for months, and then try to eat it. Will you even try?
Shimon Peres on Foreign Aid
Shimon Peres gave a press conference for a small group of bloggers. He was very impressive. When asked about foreign aid, specifically foreign aid to some Arab regimes he had this to say (again a paraphrase from my notes, the clever lines are his, the order may have changed somewhat and this is incomplete).
Look, the West can’t help everyone and the regimes would be insulted if we tried. But they don’t need our help. The greatest poverty in our time has been in China and India. Did these countries reduce poverty because of our help? No. They did it themselves.
Giving is problematic. We take money from poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries. Aid sometimes creates corruption.
And suppose we gave people computers. Would computers help? No. There is no technology without civilization, civilization is the carriage of technology. It is a matter of institutions. If a country discriminates against women, for example, no computers will help. Do you know who are the greatest opponents of democracy in the Middle East? The husbands. As long as husbands discriminate against their wives the husbands will support the dictators.
Now, however, there is a young generation who are realizing that the glory is within. The glory [of civilization] it is within their power to grasp.
Peres was also great on science, a question I asked. More on that later.
In other news Dr. Ruth criticized social media, “I like to touch my friends.”
Anadolu University
It’s in Eskisehir, central Anatolia, a long way from home. And yet the campus looks remarkably like George Mason University. It has about the same number of students, the same kind of suburban feel, the same kinds of sculptures and fountains scattered around campus, the buildings use steps in a similar way, the cars are parked in similar configurations, there is similar signage, and there are related styles of architecture for the buildings. Here are some photos. All in all, it is quite unheimlich.
Both schools have women wearing Islamic head scarves, slightly more here. The Anadolu campus was designed by an economist, unlike George Mason, and the school is a leader in distance education.
I would describe Eskisehir as the Curitiba of Turkey. I am told it used to be much worse.
Here is a good recent piece on Eskisehir.
Bryan Caplan vs. Amy Chua debate
Here I am, sitting on a bench in downtown Budapest, reading the Guardian, when on p.20 I see a published debate between Bryan Caplan and Amy Chua. If I have one wish, it is that Chua would put her anecdotal points in the form of a statistical argument. Which assumption behind the twin adoption studies is she rejecting? Or where are those studies engaged in too much aggregation? I suspect she will never tell us. Coming back to the hotel room, I now find Bryan’s commentary on the debate. The two have very different senses of humor, and I bet she wouldn’t think that Bryan’s jokes are funny either.
“It is too soon to tell” — the real story China fact of the day
The impact of the French Revolution? “Too early to say.”
Thus did Zhou Enlai – in responding to questions in the early 1970s about the popular revolt in France almost two centuries earlier – buttress China’s reputation as a far-thinking, patient civilisation.
The former premier’s answer has become a frequently deployed cliché, used as evidence of the sage Chinese ability to think long-term – in contrast to impatient westerners.
The trouble is that Zhou was not referring to the 1789 storming of the Bastille in a discussion with Richard Nixon during the late US president’s pioneering China visit. Zhou’s answer related to events only three years earlier – the 1968 students’ riots in Paris, according to Nixon’s interpreter at the time.
How so?
At a seminar in Washington to mark the publication of Henry Kissinger’s book, On China, Chas Freeman, a retired foreign service officer, sought to correct the long-standing error.
“I distinctly remember the exchange. There was a misunderstanding that was too delicious to invite correction,” said Mr Freeman.
He said Zhou had been confused when asked about the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. “But these were exactly the kinds of terms used by the students to describe what they were up to in 1968 and that is how Zhou understood them.”
But will this revelation diminish the use of this story? Dare I say it is too soon to tell? By the way:
The oft-quoted Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”, does not exist in China itself, scholars say.
The furor over the new British college
Read all about it. Excerpt:
Current London students also protested that New College students would be allowed to use publicly funded facilities such as the main University of London Senate House Library in Bloomsbury.
As the anger grew, Dawkins distanced himself from the launch, while David Latchman, master of Birkbeck, released a statement making clear that Grayling had resigned from his post to lead New College.
Meanwhile, questions were raised about investors in the venture, which will be one-third owned by academics, with much of the rest of the money coming from wealthy individuals, including a manager at a Swiss private equity firm.
Addendum: Tim Worstall sends along this useful link.
The new British university model?
Well, it’s certainly star-studded. A new private university in London, devoted to the humanities, will have the philosopher and public intellectual A.C. Grayling as its “master.” Richard Dawkins will teach evolutionary biology, Niall Ferguson economic history, Steven Pinker psychology, and Ronald Dworkin the philosophy of law.
Christopher Shea has more. Daniel Davies notes correctly that few if any of these illustrious names will be resigning their normal academic posts. That is the real innovation of this business model. Why not rent illustrious names rather than paying the whole set of fixed costs? Then hire excellent teachers — mostly not top researchers — to provide most of the actual instruction. If say Dawkins teaches an intensive two-week course, that is perhaps more than a student would see of him anywhere else, while benefits of certification and affiliation remain in play. I predict this has a good chance of succeeding, and since the illustrious lecturers hold equity shares in the venture, their incentive is to talk it up. It doesn’t have to outcompete Harvard, it simply has to draw international interest from students/families who cannot get into Harvard or who do not wish to donate the required $$.
My TEDx talk on The Great Stagnation
You will find it here.
And tomorrow the physical version of the book is available from Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com, and in book stores.
The Global War on Drugs has Failed
The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.
…End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others. Challenge rather than reinforce common misconceptions about drug markets, drug use and drug dependence.
…This recommendation applies especially to cannabis, but we also encourage other experiments in decriminalization and legal regulation that can accomplish these objectives and provide models for others.
…Break the taboo on debate and reform. The time for action is now.
- Asma Jahangir, human rights activist, former UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Executions, Pakistan
- Carlos Fuentes, writer and public intellectual, Mexico
- César Gaviria, former President of Colombia
- Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico
- Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former President of Brazil (chair)
- George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece
- George P. Shultz, former Secretary of State, United States (honorary chair)
- Javier Solana, former European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Spain
- John Whitehead, banker and civil servant, chair of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, United States
- Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, Ghana
- Louise Arbour, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, President of the International Crisis Group, Canada
- Maria Cattaui, Petroplus Holdings Board member, former Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce, Switzerland
- Mario Vargas Llosa, writer and public intellectual, Peru
- Marion Caspers-Merk, former State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Health
- Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, France
- Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve and of the Economic Recovery Board
- Richard Branson, entrepreneur, advocate for social causes, founder of the Virgin Group, co-founder of The Elders, United Kingdom
- Ruth Dreifuss, former President of Switzerland and Minister of Home Affairs
- Thorvald Stoltenberg, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Norway
The report of The Global Commission on Drug Policy is very strongly worded and the commissioners are so stellar it will be difficult to ignore.
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, is a hallucinatory BBC documentary that hyperwarps across continents and through time to draw shadowy connections between Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, the “rise of the machines”, anarchism, the financial crisis and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Need, I add and much more!?) Incongruous images and a surreal soundtrack give it a Lynchian feel. Not your usual documentary. Evaluated as a whole, it’s madness but delicious madness. Here is the first episode.
http://youtu.be/Uz2j3BhL47c
FYI, especially interesting in the first episode is Loren Carpenter’s Pong experiment. You can read more about that here.
Does this technique reliably increase your fluid intelligence?
I am passing this along without endorsing it (travel prevents me from going through the research):
The n-back task involves presenting a series of visual and/or auditory cues to a subject and asking the subject to respond if that cue has occurred, to start with, one time back. If the subject scores well, the number of times back is increased each round. The task can be done with dual auditory and visual cues, or with just one or the other.
A few years ago, Jonides and his colleagues Martin Buschkuehl, Susanne Jaeggi, and Walter Perrig demonstrated that dual n-back training increased performance on tests of fluid intelligence. But the current work extends that finding in several ways.
“These new studies demonstrate that the more training people have on the dual n-back task, the greater the improvement in fluid intelligence,” Jonides said. “It’s actually a dose-response effect. And we also demonstrate that the much simpler single n-back training using spatial cues has the same positive effect.”
In the so-called real world, who actually gets this kind of training?:
According to Jonides, the n-back task taps into a crucial brain function known as working memory—the ability to maintain information in an active, easily retrieved state, especially under conditions of distraction or interference. Working memory goes beyond mere storage to include processing information.
For the pointer I thank MR commentator JamieNYC.
What is on the horizontal “Q” axis of this female demand curve?
Scott Peterson, who was convicted in California of murdering his wife and unborn child, had dozens of women pleading for his mailing address the first day he arrived in prison. “The more notorious, the stronger the allure,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied what he calls “death row groupies.” “These are usually women who would love to date a rock star or rap idol, but if they wrote to a musician, they might get a letter. Here they could get a marriage proposal.” At the same time, he says, “The inmate is seen as evil by society, but only these women see the gentle side of their man. That makes them feel important.” The husband’s legal case adds purpose to her life.
Here is much more, hat tip goes to The Browser. Oh, don’t forget this part of the story:
Most wives, when they learn something about their husband’s past, don’t have to confront the idea that he burned a toddler’s mouth with a cigarette and broke the child’s arms and legs.
…Crystal, who had recently heard someone describe Randy as “someone who breaks the arms and legs and skull of a baby,” apparently had never heard all the details of the crime.
“What are they talking about?” she asks.
There is fascinating dialogue between the couple, at the link, and then it comes to this:
She goes silent again.
“Babe?”
No response.
“I’m sorry about all this,” he tells her.
“I know you are,” Crystal says as she changes the subject back to the driving trip. “I’m behind a big yellow bus.”
Before he lets it go, Randy tells her that he’s really good with children. “You know how some people are just natural with children? That’s me.”
After just a few minutes of discomfort, they are back to small talk and professions of love. They exchange “I love you”s at the end of nearly every 15-minute call, so often that Crystal starts to joke about their “soap-opera moments.”
“Honey, I just want to look at you. I don’t have to eat,” she says, in a soap-star voice.
Do “gifted and talented” sections improve educational outcomes?
Maybe not, according to Sa A. Bui, Steven G. Craig, and Scott A. Imberman (ungated versions here):
In this paper we determine how the receipt of gifted and talented (GT) services affects student outcomes. We identify the causal relationship by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility requirements and find that for students on the margin there is no discernable impact on achievement even though peers improve substantially. We then use randomized lotteries to examine the impact of attending a GT magnet program relative to GT programs in other schools and find that, despite being exposed to higher quality teachers and peers that are one standard deviation higher achieving, only science achievement improves. We argue that these results are consistent with an invidious comparison model of peer effects offsetting other benefits. Evidence of large reductions in course grades and rank relative to peers in both regression discontinuity and lottery models are consistent with this explanation.
Do the smarter kids choose a peer group to maximize…– what variable? Maybe it’s a mistake to hang around with people who are too much smarter than you are and maybe a lot of kids know that. How well do they choose their peer groups? Can the authorities improve the outcomes of non-troubled kids by manipulating their peer groups? Here is another new paper on peer effects.
In yet another new paper, early kindergarten seems to hurt not help children’s subsequent educational outcomes.
Katrina’s Silver Lining
Here is Amy Waldman writing in The Atlantic in 2007:
The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school system—an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance. That system had begun with great promise, in 1841, as one of the first in the Deep South. It had effectively ended, in 2005, in disaster—and not just the natural kind. Its defining characteristics were financial high jinks and low academic performance. On the last state achievement test before Katrina hit, 74 percent of eighth-graders had failed to demonstrate “basic” skills in English/Language Arts, and 70 percent scored below “basic” in math. The Orleans Parish School Board, which ran the city’s schools, was $450 million in debt. Yet these numbers did not begin to capture the day-to-day texture of the schools: when students held a press conference to express their post-Katrina wishes, they asked for textbooks, toilet paper, and teachers who liked them.
…New Orleans, barely a presence in the charter-school movement before the storm, now had a higher proportion of charter schools than any other American city—and unlike most of the country’s 4,000 such schools, these had the backing of the establishment. Most radical of all, the neighborhood school had been banished—parents would have total freedom to choose which school their children would attend, no matter where they lived. Introducing school choice and weakening teachers’ unions had both long been goals of many educational reformers. Circumstance had made New Orleans the laboratory for these ideas. Ben Kleban, a charter-school proponent drawn to New Orleans by this flourishing, called it “the biggest experiment in a system of schools of choice we’ve ever seen.” Leslie Jacobs, a member of the state school board, called it “the most market-driven system in the United States.”
So what are the results? Here is an article from Tuesday’s Times-Picayune:
Standardized test scores improved for the fourth year in a row for students in the state’s Recovery School District, providing more evidence that the radical reforms undertaken after Hurricane Katrina are producing results.
New state data show results in the RSD, a state body that took over most city schools after the 2005 storm, progressed somewhat unevenly, but once again outpaced the rest of Louisiana.
Since 2007, the proportion of students in the district scoring “basic” — essentially at grade level — or better has now more than doubled from 23 percent to 48 percent, rising faster than any other district in the state.
Many problems remain, of course, and educational reform has a way of nearly always disappointing. I have not crunched the numbers or looked at controls but the gain is impressive and the growth in scores is higher in the RSD region compared to other Louisiana regions.
It’s amazing that getting rid of “neighborhood schools”, i.e. neighborhood monopolies, should be considered a radical reform but it is and I am pleased that the signs are positive.
Bonus Discovery: Treme explained, a guide to the series.