Category: Education
The academic job market for history and for economics
During the 2009-10 academic year, the number of positions listed with the American Historical Association dropped by 29.4 percent, according to a study the group will release today. That follows a 23.8 percent drop the year before. Last year, the association announced that the number of listings it received — 806 — was the smallest in a decade; this year's total of 569 marks the smallest number in 25 years.
But in data also being released this week, the American Economic Association is announcing that its job listings in 2010 recovered from a 21 percent decline in 2008. Further, the number of academic jobs exceeded the number in 2008. (Economics job listings include positions in the finance and consulting industries, in addition to academic slots.)
Here is more. And:
…The total number of listings with the AEA rose to 2,842 in 2010, up from 2,285 in 2009, and only 43 jobs shy of the 2008 total. Because many of the 2008 openings that were listed were for searches that were subsequently called off, the AEA report — prepared by John J. Siegfried, secretary-treasurer of the association — says that it believes job openings are now above 2008 levels.
New academic jobs increased to 1,884 in 2010, up from 1,512 in 2009, and now exceed 2008 totals by 24. The vast majority of the academic jobs are at universities with graduate programs.
The top area of specialization in job listings, by far, was mathematical and quantitative methods, followed by microeconomics, macroeconomics and financial economics, international economics, and macroeconomics and monetary economics.
Skating Lessons
Yesterday I inaugurated the New Year by taking the kids ice skating. Naturally this got me to thinking about economics, specifically Dan Klein's modern classic, Rinkonomics: A Window on Spontaneous Order.
Long ago people didn't know anything of skating. Imagine yourself one of them. Imagine that a friend walks up to you and tells you with great enthusiasm about his new idea for a business:
"I'll build a huge arena with a smooth hard wooden floor and around the perimeter a naked iron hand-rail. I'll invite people to come down to the arena and strap wheels onto their feet and skate round n' round the arena floor. They won't be equipped with helmets, shoulder-pads, or knee-pads. I won't test their skating competence, nor separate skaters into lanes. Speedsters will intermingle with toddlers and grandparents, all together they will just skate just as they please. They'll have great fun. And they'll pay me richly for it!"
Knowing nothing of skating, you would probably expect catastrophe. You exclaim: "How are 100 people supposed to skate around the arena without guidance or direction?…The arena will be a scene of collision, injury, and stagnation. Who will pay for that?!"…
Yet, we have all witnessed roller skating, and we know that somehow it does work out. There are occasional accidents, but mostly people stay whole and have fun, so much so that they pay good money to participate. The spectacle is counter-intuitive. How does it happen?…
An important quality of collision is mutuality. If I collide with you, then you collide with me. And if I don't collide with you, you don't collide with me. In promoting my interest in avoiding collision with you, I also promote your interest in avoiding collision with me.
The key to social order at the roller rink is this coincidence of interest.I do not intend to promote your interest. I am not necessarily even aware of it. Still, by looking out for myself I am to that extent also looking out for you. My actions promote your interest.
Skating on the floor of the roller rink is an example of what Friedrich Hayek called spontaneous order.
John Stossel memorably demonstrated the alternative process of centrally planned skating in this video (starting about 3:16).
What falsehood would you most likely think is true?
Is that the best way to sum up the question? S.L., a loyal MR reader, asked:
What is the thing that would with highest likelihood be true if you didn't know it was probably not? This is extremely interesting but also too broad to get a handle on—easier to think about in certain areas. E.g. what is the economic non-fact that satisfies this, or the physical ("god does not play dice" is up there).
I will try "that the universe as we know has not been there forever." When I was a kid it seemed obvious to me that the sky and stars had always been there, albeit with some recycling of content, much like they changed the TV shows every few years or so. I was surprised to learn about the Big Bang, at first held out hope for steady state matter theories, and now again see that some form of constancy may survive at the level of the metaverse.
How about in economics? I am surprised how little power real interest rates have to predict investment. I am surprised how few investors can consistently violate/beat the weak efficient markets hypothesis (aren't lots of people simply smarter than the marginal investor?). And I am surprised that the Industrial Revolution ever took place, after not having taken place for so long.
Your picks?
James Heckman bleg
When it comes to the idea of "early intervention," and the claims that it offers very high rates of return, does he have serious published critics?
Facts about Brazil
[Rio favela] Complexo do Alemao ranks lower than the African country of Gabon on the United Nations Human Development Index, a world survey of living standards that measures factors like access to education and health care. By comparison, the Development Index scores of upscale Rio neighborhoods like Gavea and Leblon are higher than Norway, the world’s top-ranked country.
Here is more, mostly on the war against the drug gangs.
Free Money
Christopher Beam's piece on libertarianism had some amusing moments:
Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered
only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a
courts system. I’m a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does
the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well,for that we’d need a central bank–otherwise you’d have a thousand
banks with a thousand different types of currency.
A monetary system with thousands of banks issuing their own currency! Ho, ho, ho….those wacky libertarians where do they get their crrrrrazy ideas?
Images from Nick Szabo, the Minneapolis Fed, the San Francisco Fed, the Philadelphia Fed and Larry Schutts.
Addendum: Scott Sumner has other bones to pick.
How they are teaching English in South Korea
The robots, which display an avatar face of a Caucasian woman, are controlled remotely by teachers of English in the Philippines — who can see and hear the children via a remote control system.
Cameras detect the Filipino teachers' facial expressions and instantly reflect them on the avatar's face, said Sagong Seong-Dae, a senior scientist at KIST.
"Well-educated, experienced Filipino teachers are far cheaper than their counterparts elsewhere, including South Korea," he told AFP.
Apart from reading books, the robots use pre-programmed software to sing songs and play alphabet games with the children.
"The kids seemed to love it since the robots look, well, cute and interesting. But some adults also expressed interest, saying they may feel less nervous talking to robots than a real person," said Kim Mi-Young, an official at Daegu city education office.
Kim said some may be sent to remote rural areas of South Korea shunned by foreign English teachers.
The full story is here and I thank the ever-excellent Daniel Lippman for the pointer. There is more here.
Win Steven Landsburg’s Money. Not!
Last week Steven Landsburg posted the classic puzzle:
There's a certain country where everybody wants to have a son. Therefore each couple keeps having children until they have a boy; then they stop. What fraction of the population is female?
Being clever and worldly you may suppose that you know the answer, just as I did. 50%, right?
Every birth has a 50% chance of producing a girl. This remains the case no matter what stopping rule the parents are using. Therefore the expected number of girls is equal to the expected number of boys. So in expectation, half of all children are girls.
Clever! Except Landsburg being even more clever shows that the correct answer is in fact less than 50% (with the exact number depending on how many families there are in the country).
Clever people don't like to be told they are wrong, however, so even after much explanation (follow Landsburg in the comments to the answer post) there remains disagreement. So Landsburg is offering a big money bet:
I am therefore offering to bet him $15,000 that I’m right (with detailed terms described below). If you agree with Lubos, this is your chance to get in on the action. I will take additional bets up to $5000 per person from all comers until such time as I decide to cut this off.
If you want in, you can read the conditions and bet against Steve here.
N.B.: The correct answer does not rely on selection effects (e.g. some families have a greater propensity to have girls) nor does it involve changing the question to the average fraction of girls in a family.
Women and alcohol
Is there a better blog post title? Here is the abstract of a new paper, "Women or Wine, Monogamy and Alcohol":
Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.
That's by Mara Squicciarini and Jo Swinnen.
Ahead of their tenure clock
This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that’s because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.
Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It’s the culmination of a project called ‘i, scientist‘, designed to get students to actually carry out scientific research themselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick, Blackawton’s head teacher. But the work is all their own.
The class (including Lotto’s son, Misha) came up with their own questions, devised hypotheses, designed experiments, and analysed data. They wrote the paper themselves (except for the abstract), and they drew all the figures with colouring pencils.
One version of the story is here, which offers an excellent account and lots of background detail. The experiment had not been done before. The abstract was the one part of the paper they could not write on their own.
The paper is here. There are no statistics and no references to previous literature. The first paragraph of the introduction is this:
People think that humans are the smartest of animals, and most people do not think about other animals as being smart, or at least think that they are not as smart as humans. Knowing that other animals are as smart as us means we can appreciate them more, which could also help us to help them.
What economics project could you imagine eight-year-olds doing and publishing?
For the pointer I thank numerous sources on Twitter.
Is there an ancestor effect?
An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.
Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers – what the researchers called having a 'promotion orientation'.
The full account is here. I would like to see this replicated, and subject to more variation, but in the meantime it's an interesting idea.
Best economics books for five- to ten-year olds
At FiveBooks, from Yana van der Meulen. The first pick is Cloud Tea Monkeys ("This book focuses on a woman who is very poor") and I have not heard of any of them so I cannot judge the list.
Between the ages of five and ten, I liked books on science, books with maps, and by age ten I liked books on chess and also on cryptography and mathematics, most of the Trachtenberg method of speed arithmetic. An alternative approach is to give your kid books which invest in analytical capacity, without trying to teach economics at all. Is economics a topic or a mode of thought? Perhaps it matters what age you are at.
By the way, did you know that the awesome FiveBooks has now merged with the awesome The Browser? Let's hope the antitrust authorities let that one proceed…
The wisdom of Jeff Ely
1. Is your marriage a repeated game? And if so, what kinds of things have you learned with each iteration?
It started out as a repeated game. Now it's a game of repeating. My wife repeats the same thing over and over and I always give the same response: ”take-out.” (alternatives: ”your hair looks great as it is,” “it wasn’t me,” etc.)
…5. Does being an economist make you better or worse at resolving conflict with your wife?
As an economist and game theorist I have a unique understanding of the secrets of conflict resolution. And my marriage will be peaceful and harmonious once my wife accepts that.
Here is more, including a loving photo. I wonder how Natasha would answer these same questions…
The Ethics of Random Clinical Trials
In New York City a random clinical trial over a housing program has many people upset (as Tyler noted earlier):
…some public officials and legal aid groups have denounced the study as unethical and cruel, and have called on the city to stop the study and to grant help to all the test subjects who had been denied assistance.
“They should immediately stop this experiment,” said the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. “The city shouldn’t be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable.”
The controversy brought to my mind this story from Dr. E. E. Peacock:
One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”
God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”
Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy.
Hat tip for the quote source to Raw Meat.
Think about the children
In today's world of now, now, now and me, me, me! It's nice to know that one company wants you to think about the next generation.
Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.