Category: Education

How can you spot a good professor?

An infamous study by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations From Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” shows that students can predict a teacher’s ratings with significant accuracy after watching a 30-second silent video clip of the teacher at work.  Resist the urge to attribute this to the superficiality of students’ ratings.  What is the nonverbal magic that an audience recognizes so quickly?

I believe self-confidence is the critical non-verbal quality which audiences pick up on very quickly.  Do you agree?  Here is more, full of good advice, via Greg Mankiw (now a member of the American Academy) and Craig Newmark.

How to get good grades

Reading, Writing, and S*x: The Effect of Losing Virginity on Academic Performance:

Controlling for a wide set of individual- and family-level observables
available in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health,
ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates show that sexually active
adolescents have grade point averages that are approximately 0.2 points
lower than virgins.  However, when information on the timing of
intercourse decisions is exploited and individual fixed effects are
included, the negative effect of sexual intercourse disappears for
females, but persists for males.  Taken together, the results of this
study suggest that while there may be adverse academic spillovers from
engaging in intercourse for some adolescents, previous studies’ estimates
are overstated due to unmeasured heterogeneity.

That is from economist Joseph J. Sabia.  Robin Hanson, my source, wrote:

My interpretation:  Teen boys who want sex out of teen girls have to
spend a lot of time in sports, fights, clubs, signaling their
attractiveness.  Teen girls who want sex just have to say
"yes", and the sex itself takes little time, especially given
that teenage boys are the partners. 

The Ultimate Resource – Tonight

Bob Chitester who produced Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose series has a new show airing tonight on HDNet at 10pm EST, The Ultimate Resource.  The show covers the world and features Muhammad Yunus, Hernando de Soto, and James Tooley among many others.  HDNet has limited distribution but the show looks to be of very hgh quality and teachers can get the first episode for free at izzit.org.

Thanks to Lance at ASecondHandConjecture for the pointer.

What is failure?

Robin Hanson writes:

I’ll take credit for creating some ideas the world has found useful, but I have completely failed both the market test and the academic test.  That is, I can’t convince any business to let me join them to deliver my ideas at scale, and I can’t convince any top journal to publish my ideas.

Prediction markets are now known by all the people who read the top journals, so the final complaint may reflect an underrewarded Robin but not a failure of Robin.  I also doubt if businesses will ever bite the bullet and adopt prediction markets on a large scale.  The very reason we resort to a firm, rather than the market, is to build consensus and morale, not to forecast the truth.  Prediction markets would tend to break down firms, but of course they still can flourish in Arrow-Hahn-Debreu space.  Here is my previous post on why businesses don’t leap on the bandwagon.  The pointer is from Chris Masse.

Does self-citation pay?

in a word, yes:

Self-citations – those where authors cite their own works – account for a significant portion of all citations.  These self-references may result from the cumulative nature of individual research, the need for personal gratification, or the value of self-citation as a rhetorical and tactical tool in the struggle for visibility and scientific authority.  In this article we examine the incentives that underlie self-citation by studying how authors’ references to their own works affect the citations they receive from others. We report the results of a macro study of more than half a million citations to articles by Norwegian scientists that appeared in the Science Citation Index.  We show that the more one cites oneself the more one is cited by other scholars.  Controlling for numerous sources of variation in cumulative citations from others, our models suggest that each additional self-citation increases the number of citations from others by about one after one year, and by about three after five years.  Moreover, there is no significant penalty for the most frequent self-citers–the effect of self-citation remains positive even for very high rates of self-citation.  These results carry important policy implications for the use of citations to evaluate performance and distribute resources in science and they represent new information on the role and impact of self-citations in scientific communication.

Well, that explains some observations.  Here is the paper, indirectly the pointer is from Aleks.

The Making of an Economist, Redux

That book is by David Colander of Middlebury.  Can I do better than to quote that weird blogger guy who wrote the blurb?:

The Making of an Economist, Redux is self-recommending.  David Colander’s work on the profession of economics is by far the best we have.  A significant follow-up to his book of twenty years ago, it will become the standard account of what economics graduate school is like.

This book isn’t for all MR readers, but if you think it might be for you, it is.  Here is the book’s home page.

The Liberty not to be Subordinate

I once asked a wise professor of mine what the best thing about being a professor was.  He replied, "The fact that I can go into the office of the department chair, tell him he’s an #*$!%! and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it."  Shocked, I said, "but you’re a level headed, nice guy, you would never want to do that."  He replied "yeah, I never would, but the thought that I could if wanted to is worth a huge amount."

The lesson?  Liberty is not always an instrumental value subordinate to positive capabilities.   

My worry about vouchers

Here is one good bit, you can trace back an interesting debate through Kevin Drum, Matt, Ezra (can’t find the link), and Jane.  I have two worries:

1. The federal government will pay for vouchers, to some extent, and thus extend its control over schooling.  Admittedly this is happening anyway.

2. No politically feasible vouchers program will apply immediate depth charges to current public schools or even reduce their initial budgets ("oh, you aren’t letting public schools compete…).  That means the new money must come from somewhere.  That means our taxes will go up.

Vouchers would create a new middle class entitlement, ostensibly aimed at education but often simply capitalized in the form of cash.  In the meantime public schools would require additional subsidies to stay open.  How pretty a picture is this?

For sure, I favor selective vouchers for inner cities and voucher experiments.  But Yana is finishing high school now, and we have had quite a cozy local arrangement in Fairfax County.  I don’t wish we had had vouchers, and I’m a libertarian (Bryan can laugh if he wants).  That’s why the vouchers idea has not really gotten off the ground.

I would be happier with vouchers if we were starting from scratch in designing educational institutions.  And while I agree with Jane that children have a positive right to an education, I think the out-and-out laissez-faire option doesn’t get enough attention.  Keep the public schools we have, but make them charge tuition.  I’m not sure that the number of good educations obtained would actually go down.  Even if we can’t institute this reform today, might it become possible at some level of per capita income?

When it comes to teachers’ unions, I don’t have much sympathy.

Policy phonics

I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay
schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children.  I plan
to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market
That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn’t it?  I think it’s
the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft,
sensuous labials of the first syllable.

Here is more.

Genius among insects

That is the praise given by one EconLog commentator to Bryan Caplan summarizing his next book

This will be a good popular book, but I don’t yet understand Bryan’s attack on education.  The private return to education has been rising for some while.  This premium can be usefully broken down into a training/learning component, consumption (college is fun), and a signaling or credentials component.  Note that only the latter of the three is wasteful; while signaling helps achieve a good sorting of workers to jobs, it also has a zero- or negative-sum component based on getting ahead of the other guy.

Now if the total premium to education is going up, I would expect that the signaling component is going up as well.  That means more educational waste, as Bryan is suggesting.  But I also expect that the training and consumption components of education are going up as well.  Those returns are not wasteful.  Why should we be surprised at more absolute waste in a growing market?

I think of parallels from culture.  The bigger the music market gets, the more people engage in (partially) wasteful competition to be the number one act.  But this does not mean we should be telling a chiding story about the music market as a whole.  There is also greater diversity of music and a higher quality supply in the eyes of consumers.  Furthermore the "wasteful race to the top" helps fund the infrastructure that produces the other benefits.

I view the contemporary higher education story as "more value" and "more waste" coming together.  Bryan will have an easy time pinpointing and mocking the waste, but can he deny the concomitant value?

Here is Arnold on Bryan.  Here is my post on why education is valuable, namely for acculturation.  I think Bryan’s own very constant personality misleads him.  He didn’t need to be acculturated very much into the world of learning, but most other people do.