Category: Education

Why don’t American kids respect their parents more?

First, you are welcome to challenge the premise that there is in fact less respect for parents in the United States.  But if it were true, what might be the possible mechanisms?

1. American parents have less time to discipline their kids, in part because women are more likely to work, wages are higher, and there is a general rush and hurry.

2. American culture is less closely tied to the entire notion of hierarchy and respect, whether or not kids are in the picture.

3. The American divorce rate is relatively high.

4. Balance is difficult, and a tipping point requires that someone be in charge.  In America that is the kids, although the underlying reasons for this difference may be quite small.

5. America is saturated in mass media, and that culture encourages the independence of the child, most of all because children are prime viewers of TV and drivers of Nielsen ratings.

6. Americans are more mobile, and thus less likely to live near grandparents, support structures, and other mechanisms of norm enforcement.

7. It is simply a time trend.  Americans are ahead of the rest of the world but everyone else is catching up.  Give them time, it’s just like how we will all come to resemble California someday.

8. "In America it depends on how parents behave and whether particular parents deserve to be treated with respect.  Parents don’t get respect automatically just because they are parents."  I’m not going to tell you who said that one.

9. Some other notion of American exceptionalism.

Your views?  Google appears to yield few answers to this question or even attempts at an answer…

Trudie and Prudie meet

Here is the link to the video.  Emily Yoffe, who writes the Prudie column at Slate.com, was extremely gracious and charming and articulate.  She vouched for the central role of self-deception in human affairs, and in the videocast she had an excellent anecdote about Steven Landsburg and his proposal to improve happy marriages.  Will Wilkinson was the moderator.

Here is an associated ten minute podcast, with me.  You can subscribe to Cato podcasts on iTunes here.

Tyrone on American unhappiness

Tyrone wrote to me:

1. It is a mistake to focus on the survey evidence on happiness; maybe at first it shocks Americans that their country doesn’t come in a clear first, but America is bound to end up in the top tier and that will prove hard to counter.  The Easterlin paradox, which turns purely on the meaning of words over time, is also weaker than is commonly believed and of course Tyler and Will were going to be ready for that.

2. Start with the disproportionately large number of Americans in prison.  They are not happy.  Furthermore they don’t get to answer most questionnaires.

3. Then ask: given how rotten prison is, why did those Americans take the chances that might put them in prison?  How many people were just as unhappy, or nearly as unhappy, but didn’t chance a crime or end up in prison?  What does the distribution of the process have to look like, and what are the implied levels of unhappiness, to place so many people in prison?  The answer to those questions will be ugly.

4. Then move to race and cite those studies showing that many white people say they wouldn’t want to be black for a million dollars.  There are a few different ways to interpret those answers, but none of them are favorable for the pursuit of happiness in America.

5. Cite statistics on how many Americans are obese.  Some of this is genetic variation, but still the happiness-generating process has to be pretty badly skewed to generate so many pounds.  Ask Tyler whether he thinks that most truly obese women are happy.

6. Ask Will to provide a running stream of consciousness of what runs through his mind when he visits a K-Mart in rural West Virginia.

7. Paint a convincing portrait of Americans as the people most prone to self-deception, self-puffery, and the most likely to lie about their own levels of happiness.  Attack the reliability of happiness studies.

8. Present moderation as a prerequisite of happiness, and argue that America is anything but a land of moderation.

9. Cite the millions of Americans — now one out of every ten women — who take Prozac or other anti-depressants.  Yes, there is strong evidence that Prozac makes people happier.  But surely such people can be said to have "failed in their pursuit of happiness."  They didn’t start off wanting to be happy by taking a drug.

10. Don’t push income volatility or poverty too hard.  It will collapse into "things aren’t perfect" and allow the other side to focus on America’s very considerable economic achievements.  Nor put too much blame on America’s relatively weak welfare state.  That is a symptom of American social illness, not a cause, and more fundamental is that the poor themselves don’t care enough about their own fate (so why then would anyone else either?).

11. And why do European women seem so much more self-assured than do American women?

Yes, that is what Tyrone thinks.  Poor, poor Tyrone.  No wonder he is so unhappy.  He thinks he is surrounded by so many other unhappy people.  That makes him contrarian by nature.

Some people say that the debates between Tyler and Tyrone are the most interesting of all.  But I know better.  When such debates end, Tyler is always happy, and Tyrone always unhappy.  Doesn’t that alone show that Tyler usually has the better of it?

Why are so many top terrorists engineers?

Diego Gambetta and Steffan Hertog report:

We find that graduates from subjects such as science,
engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist
movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic
groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently.  We also
find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates
in violent groups in both realms.  This is all the more puzzling for
engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and
only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. 
We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern.  Is the
engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history
amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them
attractive recruits?  Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a
particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous
radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in
Islamic countries?  We argue that the interaction between the last two
causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings…

Henry Farrell adds commentary.  I take the bottom line to be that engineers are systematizers by nature and in Islamic countries in particular they face difficult social  circumstances, relative to their human capital and ambition.  I suspect also that elites with a clear inherited path to the top do not become engineers.

I am less convinced by the parallels drawn with politically conservative engineers in the United States, but the piece offers (p.51) this fascinating bit:

…engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics – 66.5 per cent, followed again by 61.7 in economics [emphasis added by TC], 49.9 in sciences, 48.8 per cent of social scientists, 46.3 of doctors and 44.1 per cent of lawyers, the most sceptical of the lot.  Engineers and economists are also those who oppose religion least (3.7% and 3.0%), and, together with the humanities, those who more strongly embrace it…

Footnote 63 (p.58) is not satisfactory but nonetheless intriguing.  This is probably the best piece on terrorism I have read.

Why arranged marriage is costlier than you might think

…when parents are involved in mate choice,
sons are significantly less likely to marry college-educated women and women
engaged in the labor force, after controlling for individual and family
characteristics. I show that these effects are driven, at least in part, by
parental preferences and cannot entirely be attributed to correlation between
arranged marriages and unobserved characteristics. These results suggest that
lowering the incentive for parental control in mate choice may improve
investments in women’s human capital in India.

That’s from Divya Mathur; here is the paper, she is on the job market this year from Chicago.  I take the implicit model to be that parents want a wife who will obey her in-laws.  Sons want wives who will earn some money and be more interesting to talk to.  Put the son in charge and the supply of potential mates responds accordingly.

How popular music reshaped high school status networks

One side effect of the rise of popular musicians to media stars, and the displacement of couples dancing by musical performance-watching, was to make music concerts into an alternative gathering place to the arenas dominated by the traditional school elites, the jocks and popular party-goers and stars of the dating market.  As popular music consumption became the central identifying point of youth cultures, it also came to support greater pluralism in student status hierarchies, punk and other alternative culture groups acquired their own venues where they could generate their own collective effervescence, dominating in their own emotional attention spaces.  Moshers became the leading edge of punk culture, the attention-getters within their chief cultural rituals and gathering places.  Not surprisingly, there is strong antagonism between moshers and jocks, their chief counterparts in the use of controlled violence in the conventional youth culture.

That is from Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.  Here is my previous post on the book.  By the way, if you find questions like this interesting, it is yet another reason to watch the TV show Friday Night Lights.

Cheap Talk Incentive

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
said yesterday that he was considering a proposal to give some city
students free cellphones and to reward high performance with free
airtime, but emphasized that he had no intention of lifting the ban on
cellphones in the schools.

“It’s something we’ll take a look at,” the mayor said of the proposal
being pushed by Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist who joined the
Education Department this year as chief equality officer.

Berry College

How would we plan our trips without Wikipedia?

The Berry campus, easily the largest land mass campus in the world,
consists of fields, forests, and Lavender Mountain, designated portions
of which are open to the public for hiking, cycling, horse back riding,
and other outdoor activities. Present throughout the campus is a large
population of deer, which are estimated to outnumber students seven to
one. Fishing on some of the campus’ lakes and streams is permitted with
proper permits. Berry also has a wealth of wild turkeys, seasonal ducks
and geese, skunks, and squirrels.

And:

Berry is a college rich in heritage and campus customs are deeply
rooted. The most universal custom is that of greeting everyone on
campus with a smile, a wave, and a cheery “hello.” Freshmen usually
become familiar with this custom on their first day and realize that
much of the beauty of Berry is in this spirit of friendship which one
meets everywhere.

Borjas on Indoctrination

According to FIRE, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to
a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in
the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect
attitudes and beliefs….

The university’s views are forced on students through a
comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from
mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations.
Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are
required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one
meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate
these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things,
that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the
basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies
to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the
United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or
sexuality.”

George Borjas writes:

Why am I super-sensitive to this? Because as a young boy I myself went through a one-year course in ideological reorientation. I attended an elite elementary Catholic school in Havana. Castro took over, the Catholic school was shut down, and I got transferred to a revolutionary school where the entire day was spent teaching Marxist-Leninist ideology. Luckily, this lasted only a year and I continued my education in Miami (where the entire school day was instead spent talking about the upcoming football game). I am certain that the blind zealotry that I saw in the young teacher’s eyes that year turned me off from that particular way of viewing the world for the rest of my life. One can only hope that many of the students forced to attend the re-education programs at Delaware and other universities react in the same way.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone with first hand experience of the University of Delaware program.

School Choice: The Findings

This new Cato book is a good introduction to the empirical literature on vouchers and charter schools.  For my taste it places too much weight on standardized tests, but admittedly that is the main way to compare educational results over time or across countries.  I believe the lax nature of government schooling in the U.S. often leaves the upper tail of the distribution free to dream and create, but I would not wish to push that as an argument against vouchers.  If you’re interested in bad arguments against vouchers, and their rebuttals, Megan McArdle offers a long post.

Why do college costs outpace inflation?

Tuition and other costs, not including room and board, rose on average
to $6,185 at public four-year colleges this year, up 6.6 percent from
last year, while tuition at private colleges hit $23,712, an increase
of 6.3 percent…In recent years, consumer prices have risen less than 3 percent a year,
while net tuition at public colleges has risen by 8.8 percent and at
private ones, 6.7 percent.

Etc., and please note that explanations for high costs (i.e., lazy professors who won’t blog) do not automatically translate into explanations for rising costs.

Rrecall that 78 percent of the buyers in this market choose the public sector.  Tuition is going up because it can, to paraphrase the old saw about the dog (or is it the monkey?).  But too big a sticker shock across one year would irritate voters, who might then insist on tighter regulations on public sector higher education.  Think about the equilibrium.  Many state schools could earn more money by forgoing state aid and raising tuition to profit-maximizing levels, or some approximation thereof.  Step-by-step, we are moving toward some version of this outcome.

Why do low-tuition goodies for middle class parents no longer figure so prominently in the political calculus?  Could it be the aging of the population?  Or simply that some schools tried raising tuition and found that it did not backfire?. 

If the market discounters — who capture 78 percent of the customers — can raise their price, so can the other suppliers.

If more people want to get into Harvard, Harvard doesn’t have much incentive to increase the size of a yearly class.  The academic departments don’t want to lower standards by hiring more professors or adjuncts, and the development office seems OK with just raising the size of the required bribe for admission, rather than hoping that a bigger class means more donations thirty years from now.

At the same time the returns to skilled labor are rising, so many people even feel they’re getting their monies worth.  Toss in a dash of Robin Hanson’s "showing that you care" ("I’m sorry Johnny, but we won’t be spending a penny more on you") and the market seems to hang together.

Nor do universities have the best governance structures for controlling costs.  Here are some good comments on the problem.