Category: Education

If David wants to start a private school, he must slay four Goliaths [in California]:

The State Environmental Quality Act, which imposes several obstacles to acquiring a piece of land or modifying a structure on that land;

City zoning requirements, which impose restrictions on the location of the private school;

City parking requirements; and

State and local building codes, which deal with the school building itself.

Plus, of course, tuition will not be free.  But we frequently underestimate the role of "micro-regulation" in stifling competition and innovation.  Read the whole thing, courtesy of the Reason Foundation.

Steve Levitt is hot on the trail of another scoop:

Along with Brian Jacob, I have written two papers that explore a very different concern regarding high-stakes testing — cheating on the part of teachers and administrators. As incentives for high test scores increase, unscrupulous teachers may be more likely to engage in a range of illicit activities, such as changing student responses on answer sheets, or filling in the blanks when a student fails to complete a section. Our work in this area represents the first systematic attempt to identify empirically the overall prevalence of teacher cheating and to analyze the factors that predict cheating.

…Empirically, we find evidence of cheating in approximately 4 to 5 percent of the classes in our sample…this estimate is likely to be a lower bound on the true incidence of cheating.

Here is a full account, courtesy of Mahalanobis.

Most shoppers have a "looking mode" and a "buying mode."  Once they shift into the buying mode, they can do enormous damage. 

"It’s a change in mindset," Dhar says. "You go from carefully weighing pros and cons to buying. You don’t stop to think. You get into a frenzied mindset. You start looking for things to buy."

[And a] utilitarian purchase, he says, apparently gives you the justification to do something fun. "Essentials drive momentum," he says.

To quote the study: "Shopping momentum arises from this reasonable idea that shopping has an inertial quality, that there is a hurdle to shift from browsing to shopping, which, once crossed, makes further purchases more likely."

Knowing this in advance, how can you constrain yourself?  Leaving your credit cards at home might be too costly.  Two alternatives are suggested:

1. Make your first purchase a guilty pleasure, not a necessity, thereby causing initial remorse to set in.  In other words, take your indulgence up front.

2. Go to stores with multiple checkout counters and use them; customers tend to spend more when they can take all purchases to the same counter.  Paying more than once tends to break momentum, and to focus your attention on the cost.

Here is the full story.

Addendum: Here is the fixed link.

Las Ultimas Noticias (LUN) – The Latest News – is Chile’s most widely read newspaper today, setting tongues wagging, talk-show hosts chatting, celebrities and politicians denying, serious folks wailing, and advertisers calling.

No, it’s not a tabloid, insist the employees at the slightly shabby downtown newsroom. Rather, they say, it’s a revolution in journalism, a reader-driven product that reflects the changing values and interests of a postdictatorship public that grew up on a diet of establishment news and now wants more. Or, as some say – because of the often low-brow content – less.

This revolution has occurred, says the paper’s publisher Augustine Edwards, thanks to his decision to listen to "the people." Three years ago, under Edwards’s guidance, LUN installed a system whereby all clicks onto its Web site (www.lun.com) were recorded for all in the newsroom to see. Those clicks – and the changing tastes and desires they represent – drive the entire print content of LUN. If a certain story gets a lot of clicks, for example, that is a signal to Edwards and his team that the story should be followed up, and similar ones should be sought for the next day. If a story gets only a few clicks, it is killed. The system offers a direct barometer of public opinion, much like the TV rating system – but unique to print media.

What news, then, did readers choose in a week when a dozen world leaders gathered in Santiago for an important trade meeting? Among the top stories: Where Secretary of State Colin Powell went to dinner and what he ate (shrimp with couscous). Also, a rundown – with a photo of scantily clad waitresses – of which delegations gave the best tips (Japan).

Note that blogs, by drawing away some smart readers, may in fact hasten the "dumbing down" of some other media sources.  I predict that mainstream newspapers will become less intellectual in their coverage, while (and because) niche options expand dramatically.

Here is the full story.  Here is the newspaper, don’t worry about the Spanish, the photos make it easy to vote.  Circa Thursday, here was the leading entry under the category of "Economia", no we won’t ask her to guest blog.

John Quiggin offers some time management tips over at CrookedTimber.org.  I’ll second his call for a daily "word quota", but express horror at his notion that you should ever devote a morning to "8-10 jobs that ought to take 5 minutes each."

Here are my suggestions:

1. There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.

2. Do the most important things first in the day and don’t let anybody stop you.  Estimate "most important" using a zero discount rate.  Don’t make exceptions.  The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.

3. Some tasks (drawing up outlines?) expand or contract to fill the time you give them.  Shove all these into times when you are pressed to do something else very soon.

4. Each day stop writing just a bit before you have said everything you want to.  Better to approach your next writing day "hungry" than to feel "written out."  Your biggest enemy is a day spent not writing, not a day spent writing too little.

5. Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always "now."

1. My hosts retitled my lecture "Globalization Destroying the World Culture."

2. I arrived on time but the talk started over ninety minutes late.  Even after the midpoint of the talk, more people were filing in.

3. I was put on a dais at least twelve feet high.  A large purple, gold, and pink ribbon was pinned on me, perhaps to indicate I was the speaker.

4. Everyone listened with absolutely rapt attention, but it seemed only the communists understood much English.

5. Those same communists were greatly agitated about American world hegemony and the onset of "Hollywood lesbianism" in India.

6. Before speaking I was fed a delicious fish and shrimp curry in Bengali mustard sauce.

Wiki Travel offers details and observations not found in mainstream guidebooks. Five hours after the experience, I read the following:

You should, if you are indiscriminately gobbling chaat sold by a man with a cart along Ridge Rd, be aware that the chaat might not have been prepared with bottled water.

What is the point of writing a blog if you can’t occasionally link to a piece that hardly any of one’s readers care about or perhaps even understand?

Thanks to CrookedTimber.org for the pointer.

One of the most puzzling results in the literature on economic growth is that it is difficult to show that increases in human capital increase economic growth. In regressions, sometimes human capital shows up positive and significant but sometimes it’s not significant, sometimes it’s null and sometimes it’s negative depending on the precise set of countries and time periods examined. (See Tyler’s earlier post for further skepticism on the link between human capital and growth).

A team of economists at the University of Ottawa, working with Statistics Canada, has concluded that the problem may be one of measurement. They argue that literacy scores (i.e. actual skills) might be a better proxy for human capital than the typical measure, years of schooling, and furthermore, literacy scores are not subject to the usual problems related to the comparability of education systems across countries. Their human capital indicators are based on the results of the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey, as nicely explained by The Economist:

They use the International Adult Literacy Survey, which tested 16-65-year-olds in [1994], to estimate the skills of people in 14 countries entering the workforce at different times between 1960 and 1995. This is achieved by looking at tests of different age cohorts. For example, the literacy levels of people aged [51-59 when tested in 1994] are used to estimate the competencies of 17-25-year-olds in 1960, and hence the human-capital investment that had just been made in the course of that cohort’s education.

The biggest flaw of that study is that the indicators impute levels of literacy to individuals earlier in their lives, without correcting for the adjustement in the quality of human capital that occurs during an individual’s lifetime through learning and human capital depreciation, however, as The Economist notes, “the fact that it finds such a strong correlation between skills and growth gives a significant boost to human-capital theory”. Click here to read the executive summary or click here to read the entire study.