Category: Education

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.

Learning comes from taking on challenges. Entrepreneurship is a constant, in-your-face challenge. Relative to that, college is a stroll in the park.

As Graham points out, the cost of starting a business is plummeting. Given that college expenses are going the other way, [for the exceptional] the learning-to-cost ratio has shifted in favor of entrepreneurship over college.

Read more here.

Exam week is just ending at GMU.  One day I hope to have the courage to give this exam as a final in all my classes.  I believe it would correlate well with more conventionally derived grades.

Why is no one else at work today?

Is this one reason why people don’t have more sex?

Today my six year old goes on his first real trip away from home, a camping trip with his school.  On Saturday he received his first credit card application.  Coincidence?  I think not.

A system giving students extra marks if they have suffered personal trauma is being defended by an exams authority.

GCSE and A-level pupils in England are given 5% more if a parent dies close to exam day or 4% for a distant relative.

They get 2% more if a pet dies or 1% if they get a headache.

The source:? "The guidelines are set out by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents England’s three main exam authorities.."  Here is the story, and thanks to Jacqueline Passey for the pointer.  She titled her post "Sorry, Fluffy, but I really need an A."