Category: Education
The WV Canary in the Coal Mine
West Virginia University has announced a preliminary plan to cut 7% of its faculty and 9% of its majors:
Among the programs recommended for discontinuance, World Languages including all 32 faculty positions. WVU is also recommending the elimination of several programs in the College of Creative Arts, graduate programs in higher education administration and special education.
On twitter there is a lot of bemoaning about the importance of languages but the students are voting with their feet. Indeed, most of these programs are only sustained by foreign language requirements which are increasingly otiose in a world with ubiquitous instant translation. The students are correct, the value of learning a second language has fallen.
Where the ax should fall may be debatable but the ax must fall somewhere because of demographics. College enrollment peaked in 2010 and has since fallen by 15%. What’s going on in WV is thus a reflection of national trends, magnified by West Virginia’s own decline in population. Full paying foreign students from China are also way down. Now add to declining college demographics, budgets hit by the great recession and then the pandemic. Now add in the rise of online learning which means that universities can outsource low-demand classes to other universities and save money and quite likely increase quality. (Indeed, the local teacher might have been teaching online anyway so why not substitute with a world expert and great teacher who has the backing of an entire team of delivery experts?) Finally, add in the fact that a substantial part of the electorate would like to see a decline in programs they see as politicized.
Put it all together and the only surprise is how long it has taken for the ax to fall. You can be sure, however, that there is more chopping to be done.
Public school choice programs in Los Angeles
Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns. Oh how underrated school choice programs were five to ten years ago!
My very excellent Conversation with Paul Graham
Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sat down at his home in the English countryside to discuss what areas of talent judgment his co-founder and wife Jessica Livingston is better at, whether young founders have gotten rarer, whether he still takes a dim view of solo founders, how to 2x ambition in the developed world, on the minute past which a Y Combinator interviewer is unlikely to change their mind, what YC learned after rejecting companies, how he got over his fear of flying, Florentine history, why almost all good artists are underrated, what’s gone wrong in art, why new homes and neighborhoods are ugly, why he wants to visit the Dark Ages, why he’s optimistic about Britain and San Fransisco, the challenges of regulating AI, whether we’re underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities, walking, soundproofing, fame, and more.
Of course mostly we talked about talent selection, here is one bit:
COWEN: If you think that something has gone wrong in the history of art, and you tried to explain that in as few dimensions as possible, what’s your account of what went wrong?
GRAHAM: Oh, I can explain this very briefly. Brand and craft became divorced. It used to be that the best artists were the best craftspeople. Once art started to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines and things like that, you could create a brand that wasn’t based on quality.
COWEN: So, you think it’s mass media causing the divorce between brand and craft?
GRAHAM: It certainly helps.
COWEN: Then talent’s responding accordingly. Fundamentally, what went wrong?
GRAHAM: You invent some shtick, right?
COWEN: Right.
GRAHAM: And then — technically, it’s called a signature style — you paint with this special shtick. If someone can get some ball rolling, some speculative ball rolling, which dealers specialize in, then someone buys the painting with your shtick and hangs it on the wall in their loft in Tribeca. And people come in and say, “Oh, my goodness, that’s a so and so,” which they recognize because they’ve seen this shtick. [laughs]
COWEN: Say, if we have modernism raging in the 1920s, and the ’20s mass media is radio for the most part —
GRAHAM: No, no, no, newspapers were huge. Modernism was well —
COWEN: But not for showing paintings, right? There’s no color in the papers. You had to be —
And here is one exchange on talent:
COWEN: Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way?
GRAHAM: Boy, what a fabulous question. I wish you’d asked me that an hour ago, so I could have had some time to think about it between now and then.
COWEN: [laughs] You’re clearly good at boosting ambition, so you’re pulling on some lever, right? What is it you do?
GRAHAM: Oh, okay. How do I do it? People are, for various reasons — for multiple reasons — they’re afraid to think really big. There are multiple reasons. One, it seems overreaching. Two, it seems like it would be an awful lot of work. [laughs]
As an outside person, I’m like an instructor in some fitness class. I can tell someone who’s already working as hard as they can, “All right, push harder.”
[laughter]
It doesn’t cost me any effort. Surprisingly often, as in the fitness class, they are capable of pushing harder. A lot of my secret is just being the person who doesn’t have to actually do the work that I’m suggesting they do.
COWEN: How much of what you do is reshuffling their networks? There are people with potential. They’re in semi-average networks —
GRAHAM: Wait. That was such an interesting question. We should talk about that some more because that really is an interesting question. Imagine how amazing it would be if all the ambitious people can be more ambitious. That really is an interesting question. There’s got to be more to it than just the fact that I don’t have to do the work.
COWEN: I think a lot of it is reshuffling networks. You need someone who can identify who should be in a better network. You boost the total size of all networking that goes on, and you make sure those people with potential —
GRAHAM: By reshuffling networks, you mean introducing people to one another?
COWEN: Of course.
GRAHAM: Yes.
COWEN: You pull them away from their old peers, who are not good enough for them, and you bring them into new circles, which will raise their sights.
GRAHAM: Eh, maybe. That is true. When you read autobiographies, there’s often an effect when people go to some elite university after growing up in the middle of the countryside somewhere. They suddenly become more excited because there’s a critical mass of like-minded people around. But I don’t think that’s the main thing. I mean, that is a big thing.
Definitely recommended.
Video quiz on the supply curve
The Disparate Impacts of College Admissions Policies on Asian American Applicants
Dept. of Yikes, but at this point who is surprised?:
…we estimate the odds that Asian American applicants were admitted to at least one of the schools we consider were 28% lower than the odds for white students with similar test scores, grade-point averages, and extracurricular activities. The gap was particularly pronounced for students of South Asian descent (49% lower odds). We trace this pattern in part to two factors. First, many selective colleges openly give preference to the children of alumni, and we find that white applicants were substantially more likely to have such legacy status than Asian applicants, especially South Asian applicants. Second, after adjusting for observed student characteristics, the institutions we consider appear less likely to admit students from geographic regions with relatively high shares of applicants who are Asian.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Joshua Grossman, Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay C. Page, and Sharad Goel.
Sort of Middlebury markets in everything
Middlebury lacks sufficient housing for all the students planning to attend this fall. After exhausting other options, the college plans to pay 30 students $10,000 each to stay away.
Clever idea, but I’m sure you all noticed the “After exhausting other options” clause in there. Here is from the rest of the story:
But the nonresidential buildings could not be renovated in time to add necessary safety features, and the college decided not to house students at Bread Loaf due to the logistics of running a satellite operation, as well as negative feedback from students who had lived there earlier in the pandemic and said they’d felt isolated from the main campus.
I say Granny Flats and beans! It is not for long, so let the learning continue. The article does not discuss the stance of the town of Middlebury, but as it is an exclusive village of about 9,000 I can take a wild guess…
Clean Hands, Clear Conclusions: Ignaz Semmelweis as a Pioneer of Causal Inference
My next series is a few things at once. It’s a reminder that sometimes people will do everything in their power to present evidence supporting scientific facts, be unpersuasive and be sent to a mental hospital by their best friend where they spend the next two weeks being beaten by guards mercilessly and then die. But it’s also a discussion of difference-in-differences, and perhaps the challenges of estimation if you’re not entirely clear what the treatment is. And the last thing is just a puzzle I wanted to share in the context of trying to make a broader point about precisely what is implied by the identification elements of a traditional difference-in-differences design.
An excellent introduction to Ignaz Semmelweis, a pioneer in causal inference and medicine, by Scott Cunningham.
New Econ Lesson Plans!
The latest video for Marginal Revolution University’s Principles of Micro course is on a topic near and dear to our hearts: marginal thinking! (Not to mention the sunk cost fallacy and bell-bottom jeans.)
MRU is also featuring this video in a new high school unit plan, “Introduction to Economics.” This unit has a week’s worth of lesson plans, class exercises, games, and interactives covering incentives, institutions, markets, and more. Teachers can get the unit plan for free at https://mru.io/pg7.
Emergent Ventures India, Cohort Five
The following was compiled by Shruti Rajagopalan, who directs Emergent Ventures India. I will not indent the material:
Ankita Vijayvergiya is a computer Science Engineer and an entrepreneur. She founded BillionCarbon along with her co-founder Nikhil Vijayvergiya, to work on solving two problems that plague India – soil degradation and managing biodegradable waste. At BillionCarbon, they are nutrient mining from biodegradable waste to convert it into liquid bio-fertilizer. Their EV grant is to execute proof of concept with pilots, field trials, and technology validation.
Sujata Saha is an Associate Professor of Economics at Wabash College, Indiana. Her primary research interests are in International Finance and Trade, Open Economy Macroeconomics, and Financial Inclusion. She received her EV grant to study entrepreneurship and economic development in Dharavi, Mumbai, the largest slum in the world.
Aditya Mehta is an Arjuna Award-winning professional snooker player. Through the non-profit organization, The ACE Snooker Foundation, he aims to teach and promote cue sports in India. He is creating a technology-based digital cue sports coaching solution, specifically aiming to develop a curriculum-based approach for schools and colleges across India.
Aditi Dimri (PhD, Economist) & Saraswati Chandra (Engineer, Entrepreneur) co-founded Cranberry.Fit to develop a virtual menstrual health coach with the aim to break through the traditional silence and apathy regarding painful periods and menstrual health. The EV grant supports the development of the virtual coach to help manage menstrual symptoms with the help of a personalized habits plan.
Vedanth Ramji is a 15-year-old high school junior from Chennai, passionate about research at the intersection of Math, Computer Science, and Biology. He is currently a student researcher at the Big Data Biology Lab at QUT, Australia, where he develops software tools for Antimicrobial (AMR) research. He received his EV grant to travel to his lab at QUT, to develop deeper insights into AMR research and collaborate with his team on a publication which he is currently co-authoring.
Abhishek Nath is a 43-year-old entrepreneur tackling public restroom infrastructure and sanitation in urban areas head on. He is determined to bring Loocafe – a safe, hygienic, and accessible restroom for everyone – to cities around the world. He seeks to ensure that no city is more than a kilometer away from accessing a safe public toilet, providing youth easy and safe access to hygienic urban sanitation.
Sandhya Gupta is the founder of Aavishkaar, a teacher professional development institute that aims to educate, equip, and enable teachers of K-10 to become excellent science and math educators. Sandhya and Aavishkaar received an EV grant to help create an army of female Math educators helping students enjoy Math while chartering a career pathway for themselves in STEM fields.
Ankur Paliwal is a queer journalist and founder of queerbeat, a collaborative journalism project to cover the historically underserved LGBTQIA+ community in India. Over the last 13 years, Ankur has written narrative journalism stories about science, inequity, and the LGBTQIA+ community. He received an EV grant to build an online community and newsletter alongside queerbeat, to help transform public conversation about LGBTQIA+ persons in India.
Arsalaan Alam is a web developer, machine learning enthusiast, and aspiring rationalist. He is working on improving the conditions of harmonic coexistence between humans and wildlife. He got his Emergent Ventures grant to continue building Aquastreet, which consists of a hardware device that can be attached beneath a boat, after which it takes in audio of fish’s voices and converts the audio into a MEL frequency and then performs machine learning to classify the fish species, which is then displayed on the Aquastreet mobile app.
Soundarya Balasubramani is a 26-year-old writer, author, and former product manager. She moved to the United States to pursue her master’s at Columbia University in 2017. Immigrants in the US face several barriers, including the decades-long wait times to get a green card for Indians, the lack of a startup visa for entrepreneurs, and the constant political battle that thwarts immigration reform. To reduce the barrier skilled immigrants face, Soundarya is has written a comprehensive book (Unshacked) and is building an online community where immigrants can congregate, get guidance, and help each other.
Aadesh Nomula is an engineer focused on cybersecurity. He is working on a single-point cybersecurity device for Indian homes and small-scale factories. His other interest is Philosophy.
Aurojeet Misra is an 18-year-old biology student at IISER Pune. He received his EV grant for his efforts on a radioactive tracing system to detect and locate forest fires. He hopes to test a prototype of this system to better understand its practical feasibility. He is interested in understanding different scientific disciplines like molecular biology, public health, physics, etc., and working on their interface.
Divyam Makar is a 24-year-old entrepreneur and developer working on Omeyo, a platform to connect local pharmacists, which aims to provide a large inventory to users with all the needed items, along with being super low-cost and interactive. They aim to deliver medicine to their users in as little as 20 minutes.
Divas Jyoti Parashar is a 23-year-old climate entrepreneur from Assam. He founded Quintinno Labs, a cleantech company driving the electric vehicle revolution by developing power banks for EVs. These compact and portable devices that fit in your car’s trunk aim to reduce range anxiety and offer emergency relief to EV users in developing countries that lack a charging station network. He is also working on deploying hydro-kinetic turbines in Assam to generate clean energy from flowing water. His recent passion project was a documentary about the impact of the 2021 volcanic eruption on the local population in La Palma Island.
Ray Amjad is prototyping scalable tools for finding and supporting the lost Einsteins and Marie Curies of the world – young people with exceptional math and science ability from under-resourced backgrounds. He received his EV Grant to help him find collaborators. He graduated from Cambridge, where he filmed many educational videos.
Amandeep Singh is a 22-year-old inventor and entrepreneur interested in machine learning and deep learning. He is building ‘Tiktok for India’, a short video-sharing app that allows people to edit and share videos with the world, create communities, and deliver authentic video content. Prior to this, he founded an AI surveillance startup, particularly for CCTV cameras.
Govinda Prasad Dhungana is an assistant professor at Far Western University, Nepal, and a doctoral candidate at Ghent University, Belgium. He is a public health researcher and co-founder of the Ostrom Center and he designs and implements high-impact HIV/Family Planning programs in marginalized communities. His EV grant will be used for piloting the community-based distribution (using Ostrom’s Design Principles and behavior change models) of a new self-injectable contraception (Sayana Press).
Kalash Bhaiya is a 17-year-old high-school student and social entrepreneur. She founded Fun Learning Youth (or FLY), a nonprofit that employs cohort-based mentorship by volunteers in their localities and received her EV grant to help reduce middle-school dropouts within underserved communities.
Kranthi Kumar Kukkala is a serial entrepreneur and technologist from Hyderabad. He is working on a health care device – HyGlo – a non-invasive anemia diagnosing device. HyGlo is similar to a pulse oximeter, when a person puts their finger in the device probe, it investigates blood inside the finger without taking a blood sample and finds the hemoglobin percentage in the blood. This device can help young girls and women manage anemia (a big problem in India).
Kulbir Lamba is a 35-year-old researcher and practitioner, interested in understanding the startup landscape and received an EV grant for studying the evolution of DeepTech startups in India.
Keshav Sharma is a 23-year-old entrepreneur working at the intersection of design, technology & marketing. Two years ago, he founded Augrade, a deeptech startup with his college friends. Augrade is an AI+AR platform to streamline the creation, editing, validation & visualization of 3D models at scale.
Srijon Sarkar is a 19-year-old researcher from Kolkata interested in mathematical oncology and applied rationality. He received his EV grant to study cancer systems, particularly Epithelial/Mesenchymal Plasticity through a lens of mathematical models and statistical algorithms, during his gap year. He will start his undergraduate degree (mathematics and biology) with a full scholarship at Emory University starting Fall 2023.
Shubham Vyas s an advocate for open discourse and democratic dialogue in India. With a background in data science and interest in philosophy, he received his EV grant to build his venture “Conversations on India,” into a multi-platform media venture to help shape the Indian political and economic discourse landscape.
Navneet Choudhary is an entrepreneur, and his journey started when he was 21 with a food delivery app for trains and buses across 70 cities in India. He received his EV Grant to develop LAMROD, a mobile application-based platform to manage trucking and cargo fleet operations at one place.
Srinaath Krishnan is a 20-year-old entrepreneur from Chennai. He received his EV grant to work on Zephyr, a start-up making credit scores universal and mobile, to enable immigrants to qualify for financial products using their international credit history.
Venkat Ram is an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur, researching the development and deployment of human capital. He received his EV grant to study the structure and functioning of labor addas (proverbial marketplaces most daily wage laborers in India find work).
Arvind Subramanian, is a 25-year-old sailor from Chennai and works as a product manager at Sportstar, the oldest sports magazine in India. He won his EV grant to enable his (and his team’s) participation in the 2022 J80 World Sailing Championship in Rhode Island, USA. He is working towards building and scaling the niche sporting scene in India.
Some past winners received additional grants:
Karthik Nagapuri, a 21-year-old programmer and AI engineer, for general career development.
Akash Kulgod is a 23yo cognitive science graduate from UC Berkeley founded Dognosis, where he is building tech that increases the bandwidth of human-canine communication. His grant will go towards launching a pilot study in Northern Karnataka testing the performance of cyber-canines on multi-cancer screening from breath samples. He writes on his Substack, about effective altruism, talent-search, psychedelics, and sci-fi uplift.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, and fourth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Emergent Ventures winners, 27th cohort
Tanner Greer and The Center for Strategic Translation, to fund translation into English of important Chinese works, so that Westerners may understand China better.
Nabeel Qureshi, New York City, to support his next project.
Matthew Adelstein, Ann Arbor, for the study of utilitarianism and to become a public intellectual.
Kris Gulati, UC Merced, CA and Cambridge, Mass., to support his work in the economics of science.
Amos Wollen, Oxford Freshman, philosophy. General career development, podcasting, and travel.
Max Thilo, London, to travel to Singapore and study their health care system.
Juliette Sellgren, University of Virginia and Arlington, to attend a Civic Future conference in Cambridge, general career development.
Olutoba Ojo, Nigeria/Newark, Delaware, 17, computational biology, general career development.
Maggie Li, University of Toronto, physiological changes in brain vasculature with aging, and conference attendance. Personal website here.
Jordan Dworkin, Federation of American Scientists, NYC, a pledge toward a metascience experimentation prize.
Anna Claire Flowers, George Mason University, travel grant to Civic Future conference in Cambridge, UK, general career development.
Julia Pamilih, starting at Harvard Kennedy School, formerly Westminster, to become a leading expert on Indonesia.
Lada Nuzhna, San Francisco (originally Ukraine), for patent-related efforts, related to her work on gene expression.
Adithya Chakravarthy, Toronto, for his YouTube channel for advanced math videos.
Rebecca Lowe, Oxford, political philosopher, to support her writing of a book on the philosophy of freedom, Twitter here.
Ukraine tranche
Viktoriia Schcherba, Kyiv, now Harris School, Chicago, to study economic and political reconstruction.
Dmytro Semykras, Ukraine and Graz, Austria, to develop his career as a pianist.
Congratulations to all! Here are previous cohorts of EV winners.
My Conversation with the excellent Noam Dworman
I am very pleased to have recorded a CWT with Noam Dworman, mostly about comedy but also music and NYC as well. Noam owns and runs The Comedy Cellar, NYC’s leading comedy club, and he knows most of the major comedians. Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler sat down at Comedy Cellar with owner Noam Dworman to talk about the ever-changing stand-up comedy scene, including the perfect room temperature for stand-up, whether comedy can still shock us, the effect on YouTube and TikTok, the transformation of jokes into bits, the importance of tight seating, why he doesn’t charge higher prices for his shows, the differences between the LA and NYC scenes, whether good looks are an obstacle to success, the oldest comic act he still finds funny, how comedians have changed since he started running the Comedy Cellar in 2003, and what government regulations drive him crazy. They also talk about how 9/11 got Noam into trouble, his early career in music, the most underrated guitarist, why live music is dead in NYC, and what his plans are for expansion.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you do stand-up comedy for decades at a high level — not the Louis C.K. and Chris Rock level, but you’re successful and appear in your club all the time — how does that change a person? But not so famous that everyone on the street knows who they are.
DWORMAN: How does doing stand-up comedy change a person?
COWEN: For 25 years, yes.
DWORMAN: Well, first of all, it makes it harder for them to socialize. I hear this story all the time about comedians when they go to Thanksgiving dinner with their family, and all of a sudden, the entire place gets silent. Like, “Did he just say . . .” Because you get used to being in an atmosphere where you could say whatever you want.
I think probably, because I know this in my life — and again, getting used to essentially being your own boss, you get used to that. Then it just becomes very, very hard to ever consider going back into the structured life that most people expect is going to be their lives from the time they’re in school — 9:00 to 5:00, whatever it is. At some point, I think, if you do it for too long, you would probably kill yourself rather than go back.
I’ve had that thought myself. If I had to go back to . . . I never practiced law, but if I had to take a job as a lawyer — and I’m not just saying this to be dramatic — I think I might kill myself. I can’t even imagine, at my age, having to start going to work at nine o’clock, having a boss, having to answer for mistakes that I made, having the pressure of having to get it right, otherwise somebody’s life is impacted. I just got too used to being able to do what I want when I want to do it.
Comedians have to get gigs, but essentially, they can do what they want when they want to do it. They don’t have to get up in the morning, and I think, at some point, you just become so used to that, there’s no going back.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
The Economics of Export Bans
India recently banned the export of non-Basmati rice. What are the economics of export bans? An export ban will tend to decrease the world supply thereby raising world prices but some of the previously exported goods will flow to the domestic market reducing domestic prices, which is the typical reason for an export bans.
FT: India’s ministry of consumer affairs said on Thursday it would prohibit exports to “lower the price as well as ensure availability in the domestic market”. Rice prices in India have risen 11.5 per cent over the past year and 3 per cent over the past month, according to the ministry, reflecting a 35 per cent year-on-year surge in export volumes between April and June.
As noted, in the very short run, an export ban will reduce domestic prices as export stocks flood the domestic market (although even here we have to be a bit careful as a temporary ban could lead to distributors storing–“hoarding”–grain in the expectation of a lifting of the ban). As producers adjust to the lower price and start to produce less, however, the quantity supplied will decrease and domestic prices will rise from Psr to Pban, as shown in the diagram.
Even in the long run the domestic price (Pban) will be below the free trade price (Pft) so the export ban helps domestic rice consumers, i.e. increases their consumer surplus (the green area). India has a lot of rice consumers who vote so the goal here is obviously political. The export ban, however, hurts rice producers, i.e. producer surplus declines (the hatched area). Moreover, producer surplus declines by more than consumer surplus rises so the net effect of the export ban is to reduce domestic welfare.
Rice producers in India are often small family farmers and the government tries to help these farmers with other policies like subsidies so the export ban goes against the grain of other government policy. Moreover, the decline in rice producer incomes will hurt rural incomes more generally. Thus, the export ban protects urban consumers at the expense of typically poorer rural farmers and is likely to increase inequality.
In the long run, an export ban means a smaller farm sector. An export ban is like prohibiting a hotel from raising prices during seasons of high demand. That’s nice if you can get a room but it means fewer hotels. In other words, more hotels will enter the market if they know that they can offset low profits in periods of low demand with high profits in periods of high demand. In the same way, preventing farmers from selling at high prices reduces farmer profits which reduces long run entry and production.
The United States had an export ban on crude oil for 40 years. It’s sometimes said that the export ban was non-binding because the US was a big oil importer. I suspect, however, that the export ban reduced the speed of the fracking revolution. The US export ban also lead to a lot of bizarre mispricing. The ban didn’t apply to refined oil products, for example, so the US went more heavily into refineries and over-produced refined oil products even when (on the margin) exporting crude oil at market prices would have been more profitable.
The Indian government does hold buffer stocks of rice. Strategic reserves have their own problems but it might have been better to draw on the strategic reserve rather than ban exports. Rice and circuses for the capital city at the expense of rural farmers is not a good long run strategy for economic development.
David J. Deming now has a Substack
Forked Lightning, he is from the Harvard Kennedy School, and he is a co-author on the piece with Chetty and John N. Friedman featured on MR earlier today.
In his inaugural post he explains some further results from the paper in more detail:
The second part [of the paper] shows the impact of attending an Ivy-Plus college. Do these colleges actually improve student outcomes, or are they merely cream-skimming by admitting applicants who would succeed no matter where they went to college?[2]
We focus on students who are placed on the waitlist. These students are less qualified than regular admits but more qualified than regular rejects. Crucially, the waitlist admits don’t look any different in terms of admissibility than the waitlist rejects. We verify this by showing that being admitted off the waitlist at one college doesn’t predict admission at other colleges. Intuitively, getting in off the waitlist is about class-balancing and yield management, not overall merit. The college needs an oboe player, or more students from the Mountain West, or whatever. It’s not strictly random, but it’s unrelated to future outcomes (there are a lot of technical details here that I’m skipping over, including more tests of balance in the waitlist sample – see the paper for details). We also show that we get similar results with a totally different research design that others have used in past work (see footnote 2).
Almost everyone who gets admitted off an Ivy-Plus college waitlist accepts the offer. Those who are eventually rejected go to a variety of other colleges, including other Ivy-Plus institutions. We scale our estimates to the plausible alternative of attending a state flagship public institution. In other words, we want to know how an applicant’s life outcomes would differ if they attended a place like Harvard (where I work) versus Ohio State (the college I attended – I did not apply to Harvard, but if I did I surely would have been *regular* rejected!)
We find that students admitted off the waitlist are about 60 percent more likely to have earnings in the top 1 percent of their age by age 33. They are nearly twice as likely to attend a top 10 graduate school, and they are about 3 times as likely to work in a prestigious firm such as a top research hospital, a world class university, or a highly ranked finance, law or consulting firm. Interestingly, we find only small impacts on mean earnings. This is because students attending good public universities typically do very well. They earn 80th-90th percentile incomes and attend very good but not top graduate schools.
The bottom line is that going to an Ivy-Plus college really matters, especially for high-status positions in society.
In a further Substack post, Deming explains in more detail why the classic Dale and Kruger result (that, adjusting for student quality, you can go to the lesser school) no longer holds, due to limitations in their data. Of course all this bears on the “education as signaling” debates as well.
By the way, it took the authors more than five years to write that paper. Deming adds: “The paper is 125 pages long. It has 25 main exhibits (6 tables and 19 figures), and another 36 appendix exhibits.”
Here is Deming’s home page. He is a highly rated economist, yet still underrated.
The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges
This is a long abstract, but it is meaty, and note that papers by these authors have held up well:
Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.
I’ll just pull out and bold a key sentence from there:
Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success.
It would be so easy to change all this, right? Use scores and grades more, legacy less, extracurriculars less, and athletics less for admission purposes. Yet so many of them won’t make that switch. Why not? Model that!
The NBER working paper is by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman. Here is some NYT coverage of the piece.
When is best in life to read or reread many of the greatest classic novels?
First of all, and most of all, read them when you are young (teens and 20s) so they can still influence the longer trajectory of your life!
But let’s say you are past that point. It seems to me an optimal amount of waiting is in order. You want at least one of your rereads to come at the near-peak of your knowledge, understanding, and emotional development. So age 60 might be better than age 47, if only to maximize appreciation?
I suspect that at age 80 you have lost a bit too much emotional energy to appreciate them as much as possible? But that is debatable, and perhaps for some people that point sets in before age 60.
Most generally, another reread is usually a good idea, no matter what your age.
Should you spread those rereads out over time, or is there a case for bunching at a single mini-era in your life?
In London and Siena I have been rereading Thomas Hardy’s 1878 Return of the Native, Hardy of course being one of the all-time greats.