Category: Education

Brad DeLong writes:

Altonji, Bharadwaj, and Lange do not know.

The whole post is interesting, but from this I can only conclude that Altonji, Bharadwaj, and Lange have never taught Introduction to Composition to a large group of freshman in a public university in the United States.  Anyone who has taught such a class — or for that matter talked to anyone who has — will have some inkling why more people are not going to college.  Herein lie the roots of growing inequality — on the bottom side at least — and don’t let anyone induce you to take your eye off the ball by playing switcheroo and bringing up the (separate) topic of the growing wealth of the top one percent.

Blog post of the day, from Brad DeLong, excerpt:

Somebody last week–was it Jan de Vries? John Ellwood? Somebody
else? I forget who, but it is not original to me–said that the right
model for Harvard over the past century is Yugoslavia. Remember the
story of the Yugoslavian socialist worker-managed firm? If you add
another worker to the firm, that worker gets a pro-rata share of the
firm’s value added. The firm’s value added has a component attributable
to the firm’s capital stock, a component attributable to the ideas
embedded in the firm, a component attributable to the firm’s market
position, and a component attributable to the workers. Hire another
worker, and only the last of these goes up: the first three do not, and
so average compensation falls.

This means that a worker-managed firm is likely to shrink whenever
it gets good news that makes it more productive–the larger is the
value added due to ideas, capital, or market position, the more
expensive does it become for the existing workers to replace workers
who leave, let alone hire enough workers to expand. While a competitive
market capitalist firm responds to good news about its productivity and
value to society by increasing employment, a Yugoslavian-model market
socialist firm responds to good news about its productivity and value
to society by shrinking. On this analysis, the very success of Harvard
over the past two generations together with its degree of worker
management has created enormous internal pressures not to expand, the
better to share out the surplus among the existing stakeholders.

Bryan Caplan presents us with his dilemma:

When I’m old, I want to be the octogenarian that the Young Turks
come to with their crazy new ideas. I don’t want to be the senior
professor that the whippersnapper assistant profs avoid. Above all
else, I never want to be a lunch tax – I like lunch too much.

Unfortunately, by the time I’m 80 I’ll probably be too befuddled to
figure out how to do any of this. So I want to figure it out now, tape
it on my office wall, and refer to it when the time is ripe.

…Not mentioning any names, what
are the biggest social mistakes elderly faculty make? What are some
simple strategies for them to ingratiate themselves to the next
generation? If you’ve got some good advice, I’ll thank you when I’m 80.
If I remember!

I remain a fan of Richard Posner’s book on old age, one of his best.  I ask Bryan: would he still take the advice that his 12-year-old self might have taped to a door?  Neurological changes aside, the elderly simply have less incentive to be deferential and to court their younger colleagues; Aristotle knew this too.

Bryan’s best lunchtime bet is that, when he is eighty, I am still around at ninety.

An alternative strategy is to find — today — the eighty-year olds who are still fascinating and run your new ideas by them.  Most of them will gladly receive you.  I used to fly out to Ann Arbor occasionally to meet with the great Marvin Becker, but in general I haven’t done much of this in my life.  Call that my failing but it’s another reason why so many eighty-year-olds don’t bother to appeal to Young Turks as a constituency.

Overall I am struck by how little beneficial trade there is between the generations.  I find this one of the most striking stylized facts of the social sciences; one simple model is that people don’t want to leave groups that produce fun and high relative status for them, and that is what switching across the generations usually entails.

Do you all have any other advice for Bryan?

Omkar, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I’m looking for an
apartment (Fremont), and it’s my first one. Do you think that most
people over or underinvest in the quality of their accommodations? On
one hand, it’s where you spend the most time (especially if you’re like
me and have in-house hobbies). On the other, I think it’s probably easy
to overestimate the impact an additional unit of luxury housing will
have on everyday life.

The standard results from the happiness literature are that people grow accustomed to lots of living space but that we undervalue the hassle of a lengthy or stressful commute.  Kahneman’s work also suggests you should spend more time with your friends, so maybe that means living near them as well.  I don’t know if these results are true at all margins.  Moving from a mid-sized mansion to a large mansion probably doesn’t make you happier, but the switch from a one- to two-bedroom apartment might.

Personally, I’ll stress the benefits of rooming with someone who is both compatible and intelligent, but that isn’t exactly the question that was asked.  Your apartment should also be a gateway to new experiences, so perhaps you should live near the highway. or other effective modes of transport.

So, readers, when we are looking for an apartment, what is the bias we are most likely to have?

You’ve heard the reasons why professors don’t trust RateMyProfessors.com,
the Web site to which students flock. Students who don’t do the work
have equal say with those who do. The best way to get good ratings is
to be relatively easy on grades, good looking or both, and so forth. But what if the much derided Web site’s rankings have a high
correlation with markers that are more widely accepted as measures of
faculty performance? Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation
between RateMyProfessors.com and a university’s own system of student
evaluations. Now, a new study is finding a high correlation between
RateMyProfessors and a student evaluation system used nationally.

Strike another victory for Web 2.0.  Here is more.

A loyal MR reader asks:

I am now beginning the process of choosing classes for next year. I thought your advice might again be useful. I am in the unusual position of finding nearly all fields potentially interesting. I also feel relatively capable of pursuing most of them, with the exception of pure theory or pure econometrics…I am tempted to do economic history + something else. If I do history, perhaps I ought to do finance, micro, or metrics in order to signal technical capability?

If you were in my place, what fields would you choose? Are their particular people…at XXXX…whom you would absolutely want to take a course with/work with? Is it possible to be a macroeconomist without doing extremely technical work? Are some fields more tolerant of heterodox views than others? You told us [once] that you thought econ. grad. school should be Micro 1 – Micro 16. Does this mean I ought to take more micro next year? Given my limited ability to know where my interests will lie in the future, how should I think about this decision?

A picture is here and yes they claim the finished version will have both male and female students and Western faculty.  A question we’ve been asking over lunch lately is the following: how much would it really cost to set up a first-rate university — and not just a technical school — in Asia?  Let’s say an Asian businessman were willing to put up $10 billion in endowment: how good would the school be?  I see three major problems:

1. Many Asian governments cannot precommit to respecting academic free speech; nor for that matter can the Saudis.

2. An excellent university must be part of an intellectual network near other excellent universities.  Arguably with the internet this effect is weakening over time.  Still, if they tripled my salary I wouldn’t move to Saudi Arabia or for that matter Japan and that is for reasons related to network effects.

3. Such universities could not precommit to the governance systems (please don’t laugh) that have been so effective in bringing American schools to dominate the world rankings.  In fact the more money that one person or government gave, the greater the commitment problem might be.  By these governance systems I mean faculty control of appointments, with academic-based monitoring by the Dean and Provost, independent boards, and Presidents willing and able to raise enough money to maintain financial independence for the future.  That’s a pretty tall order but you’ll find all those qualities in the successful American colleges and universities.  Long-run financial independence also requires a more general culture of philanthropy which is found only in the United States.

Technical schools aside, I do not expect American colleges and universities to lose their leadership role in the immediate future.  And if they do, the real competitors will prove to be Europe, the UK, and Canada, not Asia.

We find that employer learning about productivity occurs fairly quickly after labor market entry, implying that the signaling effects of schooling are small.

Here is much more.  And here is more yet; this second paper estimates the speed of employer learning and uses that estimate to bound the value of the signal at no more than 28 percent of the value of education.  I consider this devastating to the signaling hypothesis.  How can ?? years of schooling be needed to signal your quality, if your employer often knows your quality within months? 

In my view education is mainly about indoctrination to give you more productive habits.  So yes it is learning, but not in the way they might have told you, and that is why it so often does not feel like learning.

I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on
pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color
annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation,
I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire
flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I’ve
conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and
the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging
and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas,
references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a
five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago–at a touch, on my
laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can
easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.

I prefer to simply remember what was said.  Here is much more, on "How to Think," via Kottke.

With candy sales banned on school campuses, sugar pushers are the
latest trend at local schools. Backpacks are filled with Snickers and
Twinkees for all sweet tooths willing to pay the price.  "It’s created a little underground economy, with businessmen
selling everything from a pack of skittles to an energy drink,” said
Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville.

Here is more, with a thanks to Eric Nielsen for the link.  I would put it this way: school kids are more economically advanced than astronauts.

Dying is not always good for your citations:

The information content of academic citations is subject to debate. This paper views premature death as a tragic "natural experiment," outlining a methodology identifying the "citation death tax" — the impact of death of productive economists on the patterns of their citations. We rely on a sample of 428 papers written by 16 well known economists who died well before retirement, during the period of 1975-97. The news is mixed: for half of the sample, we identify a large and significant "citation death tax" for the average paper written by these scholars. For these authors, the estimated average missing citations per paper attributed to premature death ranges from 40% to 140% (the overall average is about 90%), and the annual costs of lost citations per paper are in the range 3% and 14%. Hence, a paper written ten years before the author’s death avoids a citation cost that varies between 30% and 140%. For the other half of the sample, there is no citation death tax; and for two Nobel Prize-caliber scholars in this second group, Black and Tversky, citations took off overtime, reflecting the growing recognitions of their seminal works.

Here is the paper.  As I interpret it, some people are trading (usually barter) for many of their citations and death hinders those trades.  These people are overrated to begin with.  Black and Tversky, on the other hand, are still underrated.  Bet on those scholars whose citations rise with their deaths.

If I had to guess whether
Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely
to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia. This
comparison should give us pause.

That’s me, writing for The New Republic.  But what does this all mean?  ("Sadly, the final lessons here are brutal.")  I consider the recent spate of fake biographies and memoirs and arrive at some conservative and traditionalist answers.

…the federal statistics provide evidence for another shift, in which the majority of full-time professional employees in higher education are in administrative rather than faculty jobs.

Here is more.

The Center for Union Facts will ask parents, students and other
teachers Tuesday to nominate the "worst unionized teacher in America."
The center says it will choose 10 and offer each $10,000 to quit;
"winners" must allow the center to write about them on its website.

More here. 

Thanks to Lee Spector for the link.