Category: Education
Dialogue with David Leonhardt
It's about how to spur innovation, read it here. Here is one excerpt:
I would also like to see more of our elite institutions of higher education take the explicitly meritocratic and indeed arguably anti-egalitarian approaches of Caltech and also University of Chicago. Those two institutions are big successes – M.I.T. too – yet they are not always so easy to copy. We should be trying harder. In terms of respect for intelligence, achievement, and science, we should be more like Singapore.
The question did not come up, but I also favor reduced liability standards for major new innovations. Take the various plans for robot-driven cars. They will kill some people, as do human-driven cars. We run the risk of having the status quo so locked into place, so grandfathered, and so implicitly favored by the realities of regulation and lawsuits, that such an idea might never get off the ground. That in turn affects the incentives of innovators ex ante.
The evolution of regionalisms on Twitter
Postings on Twitter reflect some well-known regionalisms, such as Southerners' "y'all," and Pittsburghers' "yinz," and the usual regional divides in references to soda, pop and Coke. But Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU's Machine Learning Department, said the automated method he and his colleagues have developed for analyzing Twitter word use shows that regional dialects appear to be evolving within social media.
In northern California, something that's cool is "koo" in tweets, while in southern California, it's "coo." In many cities, something is "sumthin," but tweets in New York City favor "suttin." While many of us might complain in tweets of being "very" tired, people in northern California tend to be "hella" tired, New Yorkers "deadass" tired and Angelenos are simply tired "af."
The "af" is an acronym that, like many others on Twitter, stands for a vulgarity. LOL is a commonly used acronym for "laughing out loud," but Twitterers in Washington, D.C., seem to have an affinity for the cruder LLS.
That is from Science Daily, hat tip goes to LanguageHat and the original paper (pdf) is here.
Stan Kenton and Leslie Kenton
I never knew my paternal grandfather, but I was told he loved the music of Bartok, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and above all, Stan Kenton. My grandfather was a professional jazz drummer in the era of big band, supposedly with more talent than workplace discipline. Maybe because it's a way of keeping a connection with Grandpa Tom, but I've been listening to the music of Stan Kenton for about thirty-five years. In any case the best Kenton cuts (download here) still strike me as underrated. Despite the clunky and sometimes elephantine side of Kenton's style, his work draws upon, and anticipates, developments in compositional jazz, European modernism, Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound," and early Latin rhythms, all topped off with an energetic American brashness. I eagerly lapped up last year's new Kenton biography. But now — what am I to do? I've just read Leslie Kenton's Love Affair: A Memoir of a Forbidden Father-Daughter Union, which among other things is a very good treatment of how little consent lies behind father-daughter incest (review here, and it was from ages 11 to 13).
None of Kenton's previous biographers seems to have suspected this horror and overall he had the reputation of a straight-laced man. I had long thought of him as a somewhat dour disciplinarian, firmly wrapped up in middle American values.
The lesson is how little we know of an individual life. And what do we still not know? When we judge others, or decide not to, that is worth keeping in mind.
How to make better decisions?
I never thought of this method:
What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst–psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women. If this man were able to suppress his sexual desire in this situation, would his hunger also subside? This is the sort of question Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, sought to answer in the laboratory.
Tuk came up with the idea for the study while attending a long lecture. In an effort to stay alert, she drank several cups of coffee. By the end of the talk, she says, “All the coffee had reached my bladder. And that raised the question: What happens when people experience higher levels of bladder control?” With her colleagues, Debra Trampe of the University of Groningen and Luk Warlop of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tuk designed experiments to test whether self-control over one bodily desire can generalize to other domains as well.
In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes–the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder–the researchers assessed participants’ self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.
The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.
“You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder,” Tuk says. So maybe you should drink a bottle of water before making a decision about your stock portfolio, for example. Or perhaps stores that count on impulse buys should keep a bathroom available to customers, since they might be more willing to go for the television with a bigger screen when they have an empty bladder.
The pointer is from Michelle Dawson, although I do not take her to be necessarily endorsing (or rejecting) the results. There is related work here and here (pdf).
I wrote this post with an empty bladder.
*Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms*
The author is Ralph Keyes and you can buy it here. Here are three excerpts:
Yesterday's polite euphemism is tomorrow's prissy evasion. "Cherry" was once considered more respectable than "hymen." Now, just the opposite is true. The former is thought to be vulgar, the latter decent.
And:
When the unfortunately named rapeseed oil had trouble competing with products that had nicer names, a Canadian strain low in saturated fat was dubbed Canola (i.e., "Canadian oil") in 1978 and has done rather well since.
And:
It used to be said that "Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow."
Most of all, this book was…interesting.
*Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids*
The author is Bryan Caplan and the subtitle is Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Both were true for me and I predict at least one will be true for you. It is now available for pre-order on Amazon. And here is Bryan, new to Twitter.
We are now on Facebook
That is correct, the Cowen-Tabarrok text, Modern Principles. It is a steady stream of resources for using the text, and learning and teaching economics more generally, updated on a very regular basis, organized using the wonders of Facebook.
Don't forget to click the "Like" button.
http://www.facebook.com/ModernPrinciples
Thank you Mark Zuckerberg! I rooted for you in the movie too.
Has school segregation gone down since MLK?
I received this very useful email from Ken Hirsch:
I looked into the basis for the statement I read on Marginal Revolution that "American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed". The source that was given did not actually have statistics going back to the 1960s, but the author of the report, Gary Orfield, pointed me to an earlier report, "Brown at 50: King's Dream or Plessy's Nightmare" (http://tinyurl.com/BrownAt50), which did contain a time series for one measurement, "Percent of Black Students at Majority White Schools". There's a graph of this statistic for Southern black children on the cover of the report which I am attaching to this email.
This statistic is quite problematic. Most starkly, in "majority minority" states, such as Texas and California, this statistic measures the *opposite* of integration. The more evenly distributed that ethnic groups are in schools, the lower the the number. If all schools in California had exactly the same ethnic make-up, there would be no majority white schools, so 0% of black students would be in them! Indeed, in Table 11 from this report (p. 27), California is given as the most segregated state by this measure.
The other two measures that Dr. Orfield uses have similar problems. Most of the change in all three are probably caused by the increase in the percent of Hispanics and the decrease in the percent of non-Hispanic whites, not by segregation. By most mathematically sensible measures, segregation has decreased and integration has increased over the last 20 years. See "Measuring School Segregation" by David M. Frankel and Oscar Volij for details: http://www.econ.iastate.edu/research/working-papers/p11808
The original post was here.
Crowd-sourced economics department rankings
Greg Mankiw will be happy, so far here is the list. I have heard of comparable lists for political science and philosophy and perhaps other fields. In my view the top ten is exactly right, I haven't scrolled through the rest yet.
The wisdom of Katja Grace
She puts together some very good points and aphorisms. It starts with this:
Do what your heart tells you ‘means ‘stop making up excuses and do what my heart tells you’. ‘Clearly’ means ‘so unclearly I don’t want to explain it’. ‘We’ means different things to those with different political leanings, which helps them disagree.
Aphorisms tend to be cynical because only knowledge you don’t want to believe is short and easily verifiable enough to be an aphorism. People are more inclined to praise long, poorly written writing than short well written ones because it is easier for the former to cheat quality heuristics. Thinking is more fun than reading because it is more like ‘chasing’ than ‘searching‘. It’s interesting that reading isn’t better suited to chasing.
There is much more, read the whole thing.
U.S. fact of the day
American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white.
Overall, a third of all black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent black and Latino.
That's via Ezra Klein, Dana Goldstein post here, source here. In the meantime, and quite on point, here is one of Chris Christie's biggest mistakes.
Addendum: Here is from Matt Yglesias, another contender for U.S. fact of the day:
If the country as a whole had the same average population density as New Hampshire (!) it would contain about 522 million people…
How to become sophisticated?
J., a nascent MR reader, requests:
Which journals, magazines and blogs should a 15yo read in order to be considered a widely sophisticated and educated person 20 years later (not necessarily to show off or to impress others but for one's own good feeling)?
I do not have a concrete answer. When I was 12-13, I was very interested in chess and not so interested in culturally sophisticated outputs, unless you count the Beatles and jazz guitar and baseball. I am glad that I spent most of my time then reading in those areas because I cared about them deeply at the time. Those investments will then help us learn other areas, so it is learning about how to learn. At age 21 it was all about German Romanticism for me, and at 22 analytic philosophy. Find grooves, and push on them until your ardor abates. Until the very end, there is always time to learn more areas, and always a very large number of areas one does not know at all.
It has become a cliche, but Samuel Johnson was close to the truth when he wrote:
"A man should read as his fancy takes him, for what he reads as a chore will do him little good."
I don't recommend that attitude for mastering technical subjects, but for general sophistication it is right on. The most sophisticated person is someone who really loves an area and has pursued it, and that's also the best magnet for attracting interested and interesting others. On related topics, here is Modeled Behavior and here is Robin Hanson.
I Chose Liberty
I Chose Liberty, a collection of short intellectual biographies of contemporary libertarians edited by Walter Block, is quite entertaining. Richard Epstein, Gordon Tullock, Judge Napolitano, John Hasnas, Ron Paul, Bryan Caplan, myself and many others are included.
Need I tell you whose biography begins:
When I was about thirteen, I decided I wanted to read all of the good books in the public library. I started with the Dialogues of Plato…
You can buy it here or here is the free pdf.
Hat tip: Bryan Caplan.
New paper on gene-environment interaction
The authors include Eric Turkheimer and the abstract is here (link to paper requires a university connection I believe):
Recent research in behavioral genetics has found evidence for a Gene × Environment interaction on cognitive ability: Individual differences in cognitive ability among children raised in socioeconomically advantaged homes are primarily due to genes, whereas environmental factors are more influential for children from disadvantaged homes. We investigated the developmental origins of this interaction in a sample of 750 pairs of twins measured on the Bayley Short Form test of infant mental ability, once at age 10 months and again at age 2 years. A Gene × Environment interaction was evident on the longitudinal change in mental ability over the study period. At age 10 months, genes accounted for negligible variation in mental ability across all levels of socioeconomic status (SES). However, genetic influences emerged over the course of development, with larger genetic influences emerging for infants raised in higher-SES homes. At age 2 years, genes accounted for nearly 50% of the variation in mental ability of children raised in high-SES homes, but genes continued to account for negligible variation in mental ability of children raised in low-SES homes.
I found this to be an important paper. One lesson is further confirmation that environment matters more for people in less fortunate circumstances (oddly, Progressive "dream policies" would bring about a world where genes matter much more at the margin than they do today). A second lesson is how early "early intervention" has to be for potency, two years and under and that is assuming the procedures work in the first place. The authors criticize Heckman but they do not follow up with much explanation.
For the pointer to the paper I thank Michelle Dawson. Via Bryan Caplan, here are other papers by Turkheimer.
Explaining France, a reader request
France. Explain
By which I mean this: relying solely on prejudice and snippets of information, it would seem to me that France should be an economic backwater. The rate of taxation, cost of labor, early pension age, large public sector, high welfare payments, etc., none of this suggests a highly dynamic and performative economy fit for the 21st century. Certainly, it would seem, nobody would use France as a model for restructuring their economy, but the country does seem to emerge from each crisis more or less unscathed, and remains highly prosperous, with an admirable quality of life. Why is this? What are they doing right? Are they just lucky? Or (more likely) am I just poorly informed?
In all fairness, previous talk of a "Franco-German economic alliance" has dwindled and Germany is now seen as the key to EU financial decision-making. And France has gone from the world's number one cultural power to a minor player. Still, the French economy has held up relatively well. A few points:
1. The French elite work very hard and are educated very well.
2. Contrary to stereotype, France has arguably the strongest work ethic in the world. Given the rates of taxation, and the difficulty of being fired, most people still do a fair amount of work and they do it fairly well. If that's not a work ethic, what is?
3. Esteem and approbation are especially important in France, as incentives. This is one reason, not always voiced as such, why immigration in such an issue there. It breaks down prevailing forms of status competition.
4. France has been well-positioned to benefit from the growth and economic integration of Europe. The more open the economy, the less domestic economic policy matters.
5. The French are very smart and able, and have been so for a long time. You'll note that a wide variety of French companies, whether Dannon or Carrefour, do well around the world. The French are preeminent globalizers.
6. The foreigners' view of France, and its charm, would be very different if all of the country's buildings dated from after World War II.
7. The French are the very best, and wisest, consumers in the entire world, whether it be for clothing, music, food, or for that matter Hollywood movies and American blues and jazz. The French government tries to influence this activity, or put up some nominal protectionist measures, but for the most part this French specialty and strength remains unregulated. It helps account for the very high living standard there.
8. If you see a "World Music" recording from a French record label, buy it.
Personally, what I find most distressing about France is the limited number of dimensions for status competition. Very often there is one right way to do things, to dress, and so on. But that's also part of what makes the place work.