Category: Education

A famous economist is trying to capture terrorists by combing through data on banking records.  Wimpy. Wimpy. Wimpy.  A real rogue economist would go after them with his bare hands.  Grrrrr! 🙂

Today, I am in Baltimore, one of the roughest cities in the United States.  Not content to study bounty hunters from the safe confines of my desk I am going hunting with the real thing.  Is this my dangerous summer?  Nah, that is next summer!

I am really going to Baltimore to learn.  Tyler writes on development and globalization and spends a lot of time traveling and living in poor countries.  It’s a good model to emulate.  Blackboard economics can only get you so far.  I am working on a book about bounty hunting but also about bounties and prizes more generally.  I figure one less equation and one more story about Doc Rock and the Fugitive will double my sales.    

SAE also modifies the English auxiliary system by allowing for the use of more than one modal in a verb phrase. For instance, for most Southerners “I might could leave work early today” is a grammatically acceptable sentence. It translates roughly as “I might be able to leave work early,” but might could conveys a greater sense of tentativeness than might be able does. The use of multiple modals provides Southerners with a politeness strategy not available in other regional dialects. Although no generally agreed upon list of acceptable multiple modals exists, the first modal in the sequence must be might or may, while the second is usually could, can, would, will,should, or oughta. In addition, SAE allows at least one triple modal option (might shouldoughta) and permits useta to precede a modal as well (e.g., “I useta could do that”).

Read more here, and thanks to the ever-excellent www.geekpress.com for the pointer.  The comments are open for other good examples.

In the UK you can now "text" (that means cell phone, for you fogies) a query to the number 63336.  You receive an answer back in minutes, and for "only" one pound.

Here is more information, courtesy of Courtney Knapp.

Addendum: Jon tells me that Google does it for free.

Bryan Caplan hits the nail on the head:

I have a simple solution: stretch the scale upwards. If students call 60% of their professors "excellent," we need to add stronger adjectives to the list of responses. I suggest we add 6="best professor I’ve had this year" and 7="best professor I’ve ever had."

I still suspect students would overuse these options – during their four years, a student might give out ten 6’s and five 7’s, instead of four 6’s and one 7 like they should. But my reform would publicly distinguish teachers who do their job and appease complainers from professors who change their students’ lives but refuse to coddle them.

U.S. colleges and universities awarded 16,141 degrees to economics majors in the 2003-2004 academic year, up nearly 40% from five years earlier, according to John J. Siegfried, an economics professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who tracks 272 colleges and universities around the country for the Journal of Economic Education.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of students majoring in economics has been rising, while the number majoring in political science and government has declined and the number majoring in history and sociology has barely grown, according to the government’s National Center for Education Statistics.

The number of students majoring in economics has been rising even faster at top colleges. At New York University, for example, the number of econ majors has more than doubled in the past 10 years. At nearly 800, it is now the most popular major.

Economics also is the most popular major at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., where 964 students majored in the subject in 2005. The number of econ majors at Columbia University in New York has risen 67% since 1995. The University of Chicago said that last year, 24% of its entire graduating class, 240 students, departed with economics degrees.

Here is the full story, with a discussion of job prospects as well.

At lunch with Bryan and Tyler last week the question arose as to what we would do differently if we were immortal.  After a nerdy discussion to clarify what sort of immorality we were talking about; the kind where you can’t be killed but can be imprisoned or the kind where you are forever young but may be hit by a truck?  (it was the former) –  I answered that I would travel more.

Later the question was asked, what would you do differently if you found out you had only a short time to live.  I answered again that I would travel more.  Click, buzz, whirr…does not compute, does not compute.  Even before Bryan or Tyler could point out the inconsistency I realized there was a problem.  Given that I would travel more if I was to live either less or more the probability that I was at just that level of mortality that I should not be traveling now must be vanishingly small.

I leave for a solo trek to Machu Picchu July 25.  Lunch matters.

LeTendre and Baker led a team of researchers who analyzed educational data collected in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades in more than 40 countries in 1994, as well as data from an identical study in 50 countries, conducted five years later.

Virtualy wherever they looked, the researchers found no correlation between the average amount of homework assigned in a country and academic achievement.  For example, teachers in many countries with the highest scoring students — such as Japan, the Czech Republic and Denmark — gave little homework.  At the other end of the spectrum, countries with very low average achievement scores — Thailand, Greece and Iran — have teachers who assign a great deal of homework, Baker noted.

Note that U.S. teachers have been increasing homework amounts, while Japanese teachers have been decreasing it.  In neither country do general achievement levels appear to be responding.

That is from Richard Morin’s WP Unconventional Wisdom column, although this installment is not yet on-line (I added the link to the text).  Here is a good summary, with more information, it notes that homework may place a special burden on poor families. 

We need to be careful about drawing strong inferences from negative results on heterogeneous data, nonetheless this fits my priors.  I worry about this more than grade inflation, although I suspect the latter, by making grades less informative, induces overinvestment in extracurricular activities.

Last week I gave a talk on career and publishing advice to a cross-disciplinary audience of graduate students.  Here were my major points:

1. You can improve your time management.  Do you want to or not?

2. Get something done every day.  Few academics fail from not getting enough done each day.  Many fail from living many days with zero output.

3. Figure out what is your core required achievement at this point in time — writing, building a data set, whatever — and do it first thing in the day no matter what.  I am not the kind of cultural relativist who thinks that many people work best late at night.

4. Buy a book of stamps and use it.  You would be amazed how many people write pieces but never submit and thus never learn how to publish. 

5. The returns to quality are higher than you think, and they are rising rapidly.  Lower-tier journals and presses are becoming worth less and less.  Often it is the author certifying the lower-tier journal, rather than vice versa.

6. If you get careless, sloppy, or downright outrageous referee reports, it is probably your fault.  You didn’t give the editor or referees enough incentive to care about your piece.  So respond to such reports constructively with a plan for self-improvement, don’t blame the messenger, even when the messenger stinks.  Your piece probably stinks too.

7. Start now.  Recall the tombstone epitaph "It is later than you think."  Darth Sidious got this one right.

8. Care about what you are doing.  This is ultimately your best ally.

Here is a good article on academic book publishing and how it is changing.

A loyal reader asked me how I would improve economics graduate education.  I suggest the following ideas, only some of which are obviously unworkable:

1. Make everyone take a real class in history of economic thought and also in economic history.  These are vanishing as prerequisites.

2. Make all U.S.-born students spend a month in a rural third world village, preferably one without a shower.

3. Make all third world-born students take two full classes of education in the Western tradition, most of all The Enlightenment.  Make them read Adam Smith, The Federalist Papers, and if possible convert them into Freemasons.

4. Make sure everyone could pass a Chicago school-style oral exam from Aaron Director or a Turing-equivalent.  It is amazing how many current Ph.d. candidates have not learned basic price theory.

My recipe for George Mason, my own school, is different.  Most of the graduate students simply need to work harder.

Here is a new interview with Milton Friedman.  I liked this from the introduction:

San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed
the privatization of Social Security.

Asked why he dwells in liberalism’s den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel
laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn’t skip a beat.

"Not much competition here," he quipped.

I laughed at Alex’s recent post, which cited California legislation to limit textbooks to  200 pages.  But I now see the wisdom of our advanced cousins to the west.  Yana brought home her Advanced Placement textbooks the other day; the 1200-page plus Biology text weighs about four pounds; the others are only slightly less.  (Alex’s kids are younger, and need not cope with such monstrosities.)

The problem is carrying these books to and from school, not to mention the externalities imposed on parents who must give rides.  I am not sure I could manage to bring five texts to the school bus stop.  (NB: Carl Menger predicted these texts will not evolve into a common medium of exchange.)  The solution, of course, is to split the text into smaller parts, noting that the California legislation mandates greater use of web-based materials.

Note that a textbook supplier with some monopoly power can increase profits by bundling everything into one package.  So there is a motive for producers to make textbooks larger than is socially optimal.  Hoorah California, once again.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, there were 1,964 earmarks to 716 academic institutions costing a total of $2 billion in the 2003 fiscal year, or just over 10 percent of the federal money spent on academic research. From 1996 to 2003, the amount spent on academic earmarks grew at an astounding rate of 31 percent a year, after adjusting for inflation…

As academic earmarks have grown, so have universities’ lobbying expenditures. Spending on lobbying jumped to $62 million in 2003 from $23 million in 1998, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A study by John M. de Figueiredo of the University of California, Los Angeles and Brian S. Silverman of the University of Toronto, which will soon be published in The Journal of Law and Economics, finds that universities receive a high return on their lobbying dollars. The researchers related the amount each university received in earmarks to its lobbying expenditures from 1997 to 1999, and other factors.

Professors de Figueiredo and Silverman found that a $1 increase in lobbying expenditures is associated with a $1.56 increase in earmarks for universities in districts that do not have a senator or congressman on the crucial Appropriations Committees, and more than a $4.50 gain in earmarks for universities with a representative on one of the Appropriations Committees.

Even among universities that do not lobby, those that have a congressman or senator on the Appropriations Committees tend to be awarded more earmarked funds.

A university’s fortunes also tend to rise or fall when senators from its state join or exit the Appropriations Committee. For example, the year after Senator Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, a member of the committee, was defeated by John Edwards, who did not become a member, earmarks to universities in North Carolina fell by half.

But alas, all this money does not seem to pay off in terms of quality:

…a university’s academic standing, as measured by the National Academy of Science’s ranking of departments, is not related to the amount of earmarked funds it receives.

A. Abigail Payne, an economist at McMaster University in Canada, has studied how earmarks affect the quantity and quality of academic research, inferring quality from the number of times research studies are cited by subsequent studies. She concludes that "earmarked funding may increase the quantity of publications but decrease the quality of the publications and the performance of earmarked funding is lower than that from using peer-reviewed funding."

Indications are that academic earmarks crowd out spending on competitive peer-reviewed grants, at least in the short run.

Alan Krueger offers more.  Here is a very early version of the first cited paper.

Orin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy asks: "A standard question lots of employers use in job interviews asks the candidate, "What is your greatest weakness?""

Best answer from his readers: "Kryptonite."

Self-referential runner-up: "I lie in interviews."

The Teaching Company is offering two free lectures to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the year that Einstein, then an unknown patent clerk, published five revolutionary papers on the atomic nature of mattter, quantum physics and special relativity.  You can stream the audio or even download an MP3 to listen to on your morning jog.  Highly recommended but addictive.