Category: Education

Services as gifts

A friend of mine told me about a gift she’d just received that’s a
perfect example of this kind of generosity.  Her friend told her, “For
Christmas, I’m going to replace every burned-out lightbulb in your
house.”  And she did.  She went around the house, took out every
burned-out bulb, went to the hardware store to buy replacements, and
put fresh bulbs in every empty socket.

That is from The Happiness Project.  I told Yana that for my birthday this year I want a working TiVo system, that means time on the phone to their help desk, we will see what I get.

My Law and Literature reading list

Bible, Book of Exodus

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Ambler, Eric, A Coffin for Dimitrios

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Saramago, Jose, Blindness

Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast

J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, translation by Neugroschel

Verissimo, Luis Fernando, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans

Year’s Best SF9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

White, T.H. The Once and Future King

Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, Perennial Library edition

Glaspell’s Trifles, on the web

Moby Dick, excerpts, on the web, the parts of the common law of whaling

Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Depending on time we will view some movies, start by buying Double Indemnity.

The reading list is much changed.  There are fewer classics, more genre fiction, and more Latin fiction.   On the plane back from Miami I reread Eric Ambler’s Coffin for Dimitrios; few people know this novel but it is one of the best spy/detective stories, period.

How does nudeness affect human behavior?

The NYT reports that nude parties are popular at Yale and Brown.  One commentator suggests:

“The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party.  People are so conscious of how they’re coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated.  You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other night.”

One senior remarked that the skinny people look ugly.  A graduate "describe[d] the parties as an overload of the “liberal college environment where everyone’s talking about unfair conventions, post-structuralism, ‘boxes.’ I don’t know.”

I would expect the parties to be more socially egalitarian, given that clothing cannot be used for social signalling, or for that matter for social concealing.  I would expect less flirting, less drinking, less aggressive behavior, less lying, and more social seriousness.  These effects should also wear off over time, as people get used to nudity and develop other means of signalling and concealing.  Presumably there is informal data on such questions from nudist societies, although such groups may have greater selection biases than nude parties in the Ivy League.

Does graduate school performance predict job placement?

For economists, that is.  A superstar team of co-authors — Susan Athey, Larry Katz, Alan Krueger, Steve Levitt, and Jim Poterba — writes:

…students’ grades in required core courses are highly correlated across subjects.  The Ph.D. admissions committee’s evaluation of a student predicts first-year grades and Ph.D. completion, but not job placement.  First-year performance is a strong predictor of Ph.D. completion.  Most importantly, we find that first-year Micro and Macro grades are statistically significant predictors of student job placement, even conditional on Ph.D. completion.  Conditional on first-year grades, GRE scores, foreign citizenship, sex, and having a prior Masters degree do not predict job placement.  Students who attended elite undergraduate universities and liberal arts colleges are more likely to be placed in top ranked academic jobs.

Here is the paper.  This bit comes at the end:

Our results raise an interesting question: Why are some characteristics much stronger predictors of grades than of job placements?  Foreign-trained and male students achieve substantially higher first-year grades, on average, but do not appear to be placed into much higher ranked jobs.

In my time, twenty years ago, foreign-trained students are more likely to have already seen the core material.  It may also be that many elite, non-U.S. educational systems are better geared toward producing good grades than producing independent researchers.

Which universities are declining for revolutionary science?

The American West is rising, Harvard is falling:

Nobel laureates nations and research institutions
were measured between 1947-2006 in 20 year segments.  The minimum
threshold for inclusion was 3 Nobel prizes.  Credit was allocated to
each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time of
award.  Over 60 years, the USA has 19 institutions which won three-plus
Nobel prizes in 20 years, the UK has 4, France has 2 and Sweden and
USSR 1 each.  Four US institutions won 3 or more prizes in all 20 year
segments: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech.  The most successful
institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by
Stanford (9), Columbia and Chicago (7).   But the Western United States
has recently become the world dominant region for revolutionary
science, generating a new generation of elite public universities:
University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Washington at Seattle;
and the University of California institutions of Santa Barbara, Irvine,
UCSF, and UCLA; also the Fred Hutchinson CRC in Seattle.  Since 1986 the
USA has 16 institutions which have won 3 plus prizes, but elsewhere in
the world only the College de France has achieved this.  In UK’s
Cambridge University, Cambridge MRC unit, Oxford and Imperial College
have declined from 17 prizes in 1967-86 to only 3 since then.  Harvard
has also declined as a revolutionary science university from being the
top Nobel-prize-winning institution for 40 years, to currently joint
sixth position. 
Although Nobel science prizes are sporadically won
by numerous nations and institutions, it seems that long term national
strength in revolutionary science is mainly a result of sustaining and
newly-generating multi-Nobel-winning research centres.  At present these
elite institutions are found almost exclusively in the USA.  The USA is
apparently the only nation with a scientific research system that
nurtures revolutionary science on a large scale.

That is from a forthcoming paper by Bruce Charlton, here is the full link.

Economics for children

A loyal MR reader asks:

I would like to start introducing my daughter (age 8) to the concepts
of economics.  She is a voracious reader so I thought that might be a
great place to start her thinking like an economist (on the other had,
she dismisses anything her father tells her out of hand)

 

Do you have any suggestions on books that would be great for a 3rd or 4th grader?

Any suggestions?

Silly guessing games, part II

Go to an old-style movie theater where you can tell which are the people coming out of the feature you wish to see.  As they file past, make a guess about their personal qualities.  Possible guesses are "immature," "pretentious," "dopey," "sad sacks," "not very attractive," and so on.

Then pick up the mirror, so to speak, and start believing that you hold this same quality more than you used to think you did.

I played this game last night at Bergman Island (recommended, the best part is when he calls bad conscience "a petty conceit"), with distressing results.

Here is the previous installment of Silly Guessing Games.

The deadweight loss of Christmas, continued…

As if you didn’t have enough problems:

Every buy a gift for someone that you’re absolutely certain they’ll
love only to realize that you’re totally off the mark?  New research
suggests that the better you know someone, the harder it can be to
predict their taste.  According to researchers at Tilburg University and
Kathiolieke University, we rely too heavily on preconceived notions
because we often think we’re much more similar to the people we love
than we actually are.

Here is more.  Here is my previous post on the deadweight loss of Christmas.

Tim Harford on long-distance relationships

In today’s FT:

Economist Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, has
pointed out that the Alchian-Allen theorem applies to any long-distance
relationship.

The theorem, briefly, implies that
Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine than Californians,
and vice-versa, because it is only worth the transportation costs for
the most expensive wine.  Similarly, there is no point in travelling to
see your boyfriend for a take-away Indian meal and an evening in front
of the telly.  To justify the trip’s fixed costs, you will require
champagne, sparkling conversation and energetic sex.  Insist on it.

Meanwhile,
optimal-experimentation theory suggests that at this tender stage of
life you are highly likely to meet someone even better.  Socialise a lot
while your boyfriend is not around.

Here is Trudie on that same topic.  By the way, here are two clips from Tim’s BBC Econ TV show, on YouTube.

Earnings inequality and academia

I’ve observed the economics job market for the last twenty years or so, and I’ve noticed a marked increase in earnings inequality in the last ten or so years.  The mega-stars get paid lots more, yet many other wages stagnate.  I’ve heard of economist salaries of $400,000 and above, plus perks and benefits, but in 1990 almost any salary in six figures was a big deal.

This change is not because the union was broken, not because of the Bush tax cuts, and not because of growing globalization.

What then?

Markets seem more interested in measuring, bidding for, and rewarding quality.  The academic world is also far more competitive than before.  Many more institutions have the resources, and the will, to make a run at the big name players and bid up their salaries.  Just look at, say, NYU or Washington University.  The Internet means those same professors don’t feel a compelling need to have their collaborators right next door.

I conclude that the academic world, ten or fifteen years ago, was much less competitive than today.  It was also less of a meritocracy (I mean that in the Clarkian W=MP sense, not the moral sense), and we were more likely to observe a "pooling equilibrium" when it came to salaries.

I also conclude that many apparently competitive sectors aren’t nearly as competitive as they look at first glance.

Now I don’t have any evidence that this same trend explains the growth of wage inequality in the broader economy.  But it would be wrong to dismiss that possibility out of hand.

Politically incorrect paper of the month

Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences.  We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients.  We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions.  We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates.  However, family characteristics have different impacts on women’s and men’s promotion probabilities.  Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection.  Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men’s likelihood of advancing.

Here is the NBER version, here is a non-gated version.  Alas, I have not had time to read this piece, although I know and respect the work of Shu Kahn, one of the authors.

Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.

The productivity performance of universities

This paper presents new evidence on research and teaching productivity
in universities using a panel of 102 top U.S. schools during 1981-1999. 
Faculty employment grows at 0.6 percent per year, compared with growth
of 4.9 percent in industrial researchers.  Productivity growth per
researcher is 1.4-6.7 percent and is higher in private universities. 
Productivity growth per teacher is 0.8-1.1 percent and is higher in
public universities.  Growth in research productivity within
universities exceeds overall growth, because the research share grows
in universities where productivity growth is less.  This finding
suggests that allocative efficiency of U.S. higher education declined
during the late 20th century.  R&D stock, endowment, and post-docs
increase research productivity in universities, the effect of
nonfederal R&D is less, and the returns to research are
diminishing.  Since the nonfederal R&D share grows and is higher in
public schools, this may explain the rising inefficiency.  Decreasing
returns in research but not teaching suggest that most differences in
university size are due to teaching.

Here is the full paper.  Here is a non-gated version

I take "the returns to research are diminishing" to be the fundamental point.  The authors also find that private universities are about twice as research productive as public universities, and that private universities have a higher rate of research productivity growth.  Public universities have superior teaching productivity.