Category: Education
Incorporated Men and Women
In my post on The Unincorporated Man “framing” writes:
Instead of saying that a corporation can own shares in your income, how about saying it is like a loan that you wont get into trouble ever paying back, but will have to pay more if you become rich.
Exactly. In fact, I have written about income-contingent loans before and how one of them got Bill Clinton through college. At the PSD blog Ryan Hahn also points to Lumni, a new firm that is investing in human capital in the developing world:
Lumni designs, markets and manages “Human capital funds”, an innovative investment vehicle for financing education. Students agree to pay a fixed percentage of their individual incomes for a predetermined number of months after graduation. The arrangement traspases part of the risk of investing in education from the student to the investor, who is in a better position to diversify it.
Lumni is the brainchild of economics professor Miguel Palacios. Here is his book and Cato paper on human capital contracts.
Gattaca University
From the NYTimes, Berkeley will give its students genetic tests.
…this year’s incoming freshmen at the University of California, Berkeley, will get something quite different: a cotton swab on which they can, if they choose, send in a DNA sample.
The university said it would analyze the samples, from inside students’ cheeks, for three genes that help regulate the ability to metabolize alcohol, lactose and folates.
Those genes were chosen not because they indicate serious health risks but because students with certain genetic markers may be able to lead healthier lives by drinking less, avoiding dairy products or eating more leafy green vegetables.
Don't be surprised if this is soon canceled.
Adam Wheeler’s resume
You'll find it here. He's the fraud who lied his way into Harvard. Here is the description of his "book" (supposedly) under review at Harvard University Press:
The Mapping of an Ideological Demesne
– Under review with Harvard University Press 2008-2009
The massive proliferation, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, of technologies for measuring, projecting, and organizing geographical and social space produced in the European cultural imaginary an intense and widespread interest in visualizing this world and alternative worlds. As the new century and the Stuart era developed, poets and dramatists mediated this transformation in the form of spatial tropes and models of the nation. I examine the geographical tropes by which Tudor and Stuart writers created poetic landscapes as a mode of engagement with the structures of power, kingship, property, and the market. Accordingly, each of the texts that I examine betrays an awareness of writing as a spatial activity and space as a scripted category. The critical topographies that these writers created are maps of ideology, figural territories within which social conflict and political antagonism are put into play.
I've read worse. How you react to that description is a Rorschach test of sorts, especially if you are not thinking it is fraudulent. Here is a TNR post on Wheeler. Here is a Princeton University Press post about Wheeler and the book he claimed to have under contract with them, to be co-authored with Marc Shell, a very well-read scholar.
Why are none of the sources reporting how well he actually did at Harvard and elsewhere? Isn't that an interesting question? How much would the world differ if Harvard reserved a fifth of its entering class for those individuals who showed the most talent for fraud? I don't mean that question in a cynical light, it is one genuine way of trying to think about how education adds value to labor market outcomes.
Questions that are rarely asked
If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?
That's from Hudson Collins, loyal MR reader. I've always liked the chess marks "!?" and "?!" and wondered why they weren't used in standard English. The former refers to a startling move which is uncertain in merit and the latter refers to a dubious move which creates difficult to handle complications. Plus "N" could be used to mark sentences with novel ideas. I also would ask for a punctuation mark meaning: "This sentence adds an "N+1" understanding to a problem which everyone else is discussing at an "N" level." Maybe the mark could be an arrow pointing up to the sky. Similarly, you could imagine an arrow pointing downwards to hell.
What kind of punctuation mark would you add?
Sentences to ponder
"There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers–holders of power, not its critics."
True sentences
Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.
That's from Malcolm Gladwell.
Are you an asker or a guesser?
Austin Frakt forwards me the following intriguing article. Here is one excerpt:
This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that's achieved minor cult status online. We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."
Neither's "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline. If you're a Guesser, you'll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it's a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they're diehard Askers.
As for myself, I am an asker when it comes to information, but a guesser when it comes to making demands.
Where is economics headed?
Andrew Oswald has a new and interesting paper on what kinds of articles now get published. The piece starts off as follows:
When I was a PhD student, in Oxford in the late 1970s, I was taught nothing about the experimental method or how to weigh evidence, and indeed comparatively little about data. Consciously or subconsciously, we were encouraged to think of economics as a branch of (not very applied) mathematics. My first published paper relied on a fixed-point theorem; it contained no numbers. We were not exposed to, for example, any empirical findings from the psychology literature or the intellectual approach of researchers like epidemiologists.
Amazing, is it not? Turn to p.5 to see one of his basic counts, which puts experimental papers in the lead.
Are girls now worse drivers than boys?
This was only one study, but it fits into some broader social trends:
In a survey of teenage drivers, Allstate Insurance Co. found that 48% of girls said they are likely to drive 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. By comparison, 36% of the boys admitted to speeding. Of the girls, 16% characterized their own driving as aggressive, up from 9% in 2005. And just over half of the girls said they are likely to drive while talking on a phone or texting, compared to 38% of the boys.
Nor are these teens meta-rational:
The study found that 65% of the respondents, male and female, said they are confident in their own driving skills, but 77% said they had felt unsafe when another teen was driving. Only 23% of teens agree that most teens are good drivers.
College students are working less hard, it seems
Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report:
Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.
An earlier, different and ungated version is here. A closely related paper, by the same authors, is here.
How to control your impulse reading
Scott Golder reports:
Even after a merciless purge, my Google Reader still has over 90 feeds in it, which generates several hundreds of things to read every day. After a quick skimming and culling, there’s at least a dozen or two dozen articles or long blog posts a day I’d like to read. Combine that with the things my Twitter followees post (a higher signal/noise ratio than the RSS feeds) and it’s more than I can responsibly spend time on.
Today I thought of a nifty hack to control my “impulse reading” – things that I read on a whim during a bout of web surfing. It adapts a popular trick from personal finance to control impulse spending, which is to wait 30 days before making a purchase.
When I encounter an article I’d like to read, I open it in a new tab in Firefox and leave it there. Right now I have about a dozen tabs open. Some of them have been there for days. Invariably, when I make my way back through them, I read maybe 1/3 of them. Most of them just don’t seem as interesting anymore.
Here is Scott's blog. Scott also sometimes blogs at Permutations, which covers mathematical sociology.
Blogs about the professions and what they are like
Richard, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
For the last couple months I've been following the FemaleScienceProfessorblog (http://science-
professor.blogspot.com/). It's basically about the professional life of a biology professor. It's not fascinating or thought-provoking in the way MR is. Much of the time, it's really rather mundane, which is the whole point. Reading it, I feel like I know much more about what it's like to be in a professional position much like hers. It's not cluttered with really any other random stuff; every new post that comes in from her, I know what I'm getting.Here's my request: I'd love to find 5-10 more blogs like this. I don't even particularly care what professions, but I'd like to get a non-glamorized, relatively even-handed inside view of other professions. I certainly would have loved to have had a few dozen of these to follow when I was trying to make career choices…
This is a good question, but I have nothing to offer. Would MR readers care to make some suggestions?
Cloning thoughts
I am disappointed in many of the responses which you offered to Bryan on the cloning question. First, I think he is assuming that cloning can work, not postulating hundreds of unethical experiments to try to get there.
So many of you cited reasons why you didn't like it, but hardly anyone performed a sober assessment of the relevant trade-offs. It seems we get an extra person out of the deal, for one thing, and I am taken aback that a number of you would regard this person as a net negative. For others, "I can find some reason to object to this" seemed like a decisive argument. Bryan's joy in the arrangement seemed to bug the readers all the more; I had the feeling many of you would have found it perfectly OK if he had expressed resignation at something like this being an accidental occurrence.
I don't have the same preference as Bryan, far from it. I think most of us desire children who are "too similar to us" and there are obvious Darwinian reasons why this is the case. Nonetheless we should try to overcome this attitude and there are many successful instances of adopted children or various other "mixed" arrangements, such as foster parents. We can only hope there will be more and that means we need a greater flexibility of intuitions about parenting and inheritance.
As a proud step-parent, I find it increasingly odd how many of you insist on the "fifty percent solution." Ew! What if it — heaven forbid — looks like you? What if you're both economists named Keynes? But there's more: the rest of your daughter looks just like the woman you chose to marry? Yuck!!!!! And so on. Maybe you all think that fifty percent is great but one hundred percent is unacceptable, when it comes to the genes. Good luck arguing that one with a committed nominalist. And I bet most of you don't find it repugnant if a father wants a son rather than a daughter, but similarity of gender is pretty important too.
If I have any criticism of Bryan, it's that he's pro-natalist (fine in my book) but I've never heard him promote the idea of adopting a child or defend the idea of raising a biological child who is, for whatever reason, very different from his or her parents. (Don't overreact here and interpret his silence in a negative way, I'm simply goading him to take up these issues, which I think will force him to revise his thought.) Furthermore I think his intuitions about similarity, and child-rearing, will change once (some of) his kids start rebelling against him.
Most of all, I found this thread to be a lesson in how quickly smart people will side with their Darwinian intuitions, and attack another smart person with intolerance, just because something feels icky to them. It's not so different from how some people find gay people, and also "what they do," to be disgusting. They also don't want gay people to be adopting children because they see that as offensive too. It's not, least of all for the child.
That all said, I guess he shouldn't put the passage in his book.
Margin notes in books: why bother?
Chug asks me:
Tyler, do you scrawl notes in the margins of the books you read?
No. The key constraint for me is finding the page, not remembering the associated idea, and I find it odd that other people are not also this way. (That said, I do know I am the outlier. But really: do you write the notes to actually remember something? Or do you do it to make the reading experience more real in the first place, much like taking notes in class?) So in some of my books I dog-ear the pages which are important for me. In other books I write those page numbers on the inside book jacket.
In the longer run I expect "annotated" books will be available for full public review, though Kindle-like technologies. You'll be reading Rousseau's Social Contract and be able to call up the five most popular sets of annotations, the three most popular condensations, J.K. Rowling's nomination for "favorite page," a YouTube of Harold Bloom gushing about it, and so on.
The Back-up Plan
The journals of the American Economic Association have started an experiment that acknowledges the reality that papers move from one publication to another — and the system could save authors considerable time, and publications money. In the experiment, authors of papers that are rejected from the flagship journal — American Economic Review — can now opt to have referee reports sent directly to one of four other journals published by the association.
So far it looks like a near-Pareto improvement. Here is more detail; by the way, editors from sociology and anthropology say that plan wouldn't work in their disciplines, though neuroscience has a reviewing consortium.