Category: Education

Trudie told me:

Two problems are operating in tandem.  First, some people are never happy with anything.  Second, not all choices are convex (read: you can’t have .73 of a kid, or with ease marry 0.4(Tom) + 0.6 (Tony).  In this case the predominance of the first problem renders the second irrelevant.  "Do you want to hate just any man, or do you want to hate the man of your dreams?"  Given the costs of rent exhaustion, you might as well hate any man.

The normative upshot is not to marry, if only to maximize social welfare on the male side.  She hasn’t found any man "good enough" for her yet, which is a bad sign.  It would be more encouraging if she had written: "I once met Mr. Right — just the proper blend — but sadly he was married.  How can I find another just like him?"

The new problem is to precommit to not marrying.  That’s a tough one.  Investing in higher education no longer does the trick.  How about having an ugly kid?  Here is another strategy, but Tyler can ask his readers for better ideas.

Tyler is not so extreme and as you might expect he is just a wee bit more humane.  He recommends playing an imagined strategy of 0.4(low class guy) + 0.6(high class guy), but taking your time with the actual choice, so you can bask in the expectation of having it all…

There is a new view — or should I say an old view? — percolating in the blogosphere: "There is something special about IQ.  We must conserve IQ at very high cost, and gains in IQ will bring very high social returns." 

In practical terms, "Conservation of IQ" is used to argue for limits on immigration, against various meliorist attempts, and possibly even for eugenics.  I’ve heard it used to argue for outlawing marijuana, which of course destroys brain cells.

Imagine an evolutionary approach: given the Industrial Revolution and subsequent developments, perhaps IQ has higher social returns than was once the case.  So we must rebuild our intuitions to favor IQ more than otherwise.  When evaluating policy, one question is simply to ask whether it raises or lowers average IQ within a polity or region.

There is also a methodological argument: IQ is (arguably) prior to economic notions of rationality.  Perhaps economists should treat rationality as an open variable and dependent on IQ.

I don’t assign special status to The Conservation of IQ for two reasons.  The first is the Flynn effect, or the fact that measured IQs have been rising steadily over time.  This implies some combination of a) IQ gains come naturally under conditions of progress, and b) IQ statistics are to some extent phony and don’t measure real intelligence.  We can debate the mix, but either deflates fears that IQ is somehow especially scarce or endangered.  These data also suggest that IQ is an artifice to be unpacked rather than a primary category.

Second, defenders of the IQ view tend to read evolutionary biology and intelligence research.  My roots are in cultural history.  Clusters of amazing achievement come and go pretty quickly, usually through some mix of environmental effects and luck.  Look at Venetian painting.  It was much better centuries ago, but I doubt if Venetian IQs have been falling.  Once we see how such enormous differences can be explained by non-IQ factors, I again don’t obsess over the variable.

I do think economists should study IQ more.  And for sure I value it in friends.  But when analyzing social problems, institutions, social psychology, and economic mechanisms still command most of my analytic attention. 

A few of you had asked about IQ, I crammed my thoughts into this one post, so this is #04-07 in a series of 50.  Do, by the way, save your thoughts on immigration for other posts.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presided over the inauguration last week of the Paris School of Economics, a new institution that its founders hope will eventually rival economics powerhouses like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Here is much more, and note that the institution will be unencumbered by many French civil service restrictions.  This is a noble idea, and it has some serious people behind it.  It is often underestimated how much the quality of American higher education drives superior American economic performance, so of course Europe should make moves in this direction.  But can this graduate school succeed?  Until the European job market offers comparable opportunities to the United States (also known as systematic higher education reform), why pursue this Ph.d., only to be yanked away from the glorious land of non-pasteurized cheeses and sent to toil in Berkeley, Austin, or Princeton?

Did I mention this is an object lesson in why economic growth is so hard to manage and stimulate?  Thanks to Jacob Levy and Scott Cunningham for pointers.

Trudie related her answer to me:

The deadly clinker is that "nothing untoward" is going on.  If nothing else, sex in a relationship can serve as the equivalent of an "up or out," (no pun intended) rule, as in the principal-agent literature.  You don’t make partner in a law firm after some number of years, good-bye.  You don’t get academic tenure within six years, good-bye.  It’s not quite "three dates or marriage," but at some point a guy is either better than the available competition
or he is not.  It is not necessary to have sex within a month, but the couple should be on such a path, or at the very least engaged in a puritanical erotic blaze of repression and restraint.  And that must be done monogamously.  If she continues to see three dullards on such distant terms, each of whom has nothing better to do than to date her, we can narrow the options as follows:

a) she is afraid
of rejection, and uses the guys to hold each other at a distance, if
only in her own heart.

b) she is afraid of rejection, and seeks out the worst imaginable dullards.

c) she is the worst imaginable dullard.

These alternatives are not mutually exclusive.

The socially optimal policy is for her to see a fourth and yes indeed a fifth and possibly sixth dullard, if only to soak up their time and stop them from bothering other people in any way whatsoever.

Tyler adds that if he were seeing a woman under those terms, he would prefer that she were in another relationship, if only to rationalize her apparent total lack of interest in him.  The best case scenario is if the guys are assuming she is lying to them, think she is having bizarre sex orgies on the other nights, and believe she is holding them in some sort of frustrating but worthwhile queue.

And this "best case" scenario is not really all that good.

Addendum: If you are new to MR, here is one Trudie post, here is another, here is the first in the series, here are two others.

The subtitle says it all: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.

My reading of such books follows a formula.  Pick up said charge that voluntary individual behavior is leading to a crisis.  Sort author’s mush into a rational choice model with either social externalities or imperfections within the self.  Evaluate said model using evidence, in particular whether the other implied predictions are plausible.

So why might young women choose too much casual sex?

1. Their discount rates are too high.

2. There is an "arms race": the looseness of one woman makes the "putting out"  requirements more extreme for other women, but no single woman takes this effect into account.

3. Obsession with school work is the real problem.  Casual sex takes less time than a boyfriend, but girls overvalue how much good grades matter and underinvest in serious relationships.

4. Women are bad at estimating what will make them happy, a’la Daniel Gilbert.

5. Women underestimate the strength of their own addiction to causal sex.

6. Matters are efficient, but men are earning all the surplus.  Easy birth control allows men to use "loose women" as a threat point in the bargaining game.  (But hey, these *are* the loose women!)

7. We pursue the feeling of "being in control," even when it does not benefit us.  Women want to feel they are in control of their sex lives, and to feel they are not bound by social convention, although this is an illusory gain.

#1 and #4 are true but not essential to the question at hand.  #2 and #5 seem  inconsistent with the evidence — found in this book — of women pushing for a loosening of general standards.  The women are not supporting a local cartel of tighter sexual standards, quite the contrary.  #3 seems efficient to me, not a mistake.  I can see truth in #7, a quintessentially Cowenian theme.

Overall on this matter I am a Coasian who sees a Nash bargaining solution at work.  In other words, don’t worry.

Which doesn’t mean I am going to show this book to Yana.

Which is perhaps more evidence for #7.

Here is one insightful look at the book.  Note also that the author never adds up the welfare gains of the young men involved…

Here is Ben Casnocha’s list, to skip the explanations:

1. Losing Weight
2. Becoming a Better Writer
3. Becoming a Better Entrepreneur
4. Becoming a Better Parent

Ben says they are hard, but also simple.  I view #1 and #2 as simple, for reasons similar to Ben’s.  The hardest thing about being a parent is knowing when to punish and when to ignore.  The hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is, I suspect, other (competing) entrepreneurs.  I will nominate being happy as overcomplicated by society.  Your thoughts?

Addendum: Bryan Caplan — a man who does not overcomplicate — chimes in.

I’m not going to cite "the usual sources," most (all?) of which I read, so please don’t be offended if you write for them or edit them.  When it comes to media, I also love the following:

1. Entertainment Weekly; I devour it immediately upon arrival, there is no periodical I look forward to more.  I often disagree with their reviews, but I can always interpret the bottom line.  The coverage of good TV is without peer.

2. Fanfare, reviews of classical music, the reviewers maintain an impossibly high standard.  I read it the night it arrives, and I click on Amazon to get what I want, end of story.

3. New York magazine; it has proved itself consistently interesting, and I don’t even live in New York.

4. The modern love column for The Sunday New York Times; here is one example.  I read it closely every week.  I just ordered the book.

5. The marriage announcements in The Sunday New York Times.  I only read a few each week, but they keep my perspective real, albeit totally skewed toward the upper classes; the combination with the photo is essential.  To the extent that this is the real news in a given day, our world is a healthy place.

6. Variety magazine by far the best movie reviews.  Unlike newspapers, they don’t confuse how good the movie is with how popular it will be.  Expensive but worth it, plus the foreign coverage is first-rate.

7. The Art Newspaper, all the news in the world of museums, auctions, antiquities law, art fairs, and exhibits.  It is written at a very high intellectual level.

What am I missing?  I don’t find Spin that useful any more, World Beat has stopped arriving, then there are the science magazines, Discover and SA are favorites.

A loyal MR reader writes:

I teach Advanced Placement economics in high school.  I would appreciate if you could suggest a short list of articles, essays, or books that you would consider essential for students to read as they begin their study of economics.

Your ideas? 

Utah could be getting a reasonably serious school choice program.  In Friedman’s vision it is students that are funded not schools and students are funded equally regardless of where they choose to attend school – i.e. no fiscal discrimination.  In the Utah plan, in contrast, the voucher money is still less than is spent per public school student and it is means tested.  Nevetheless, the voucher is reasonably large and the program is state wide which together would make it the most significant voucher experiment in the United States.

Thanks to Fred Hastings for the pointer.

The list is from Harvard Business Review, worth a quick read, try this:

An entrepreneurial Japan–which once would have seemed oxymoronic–may ultimately overshadow the much touted start-up cultures in China and India.

A good bet.  Scrolling down to the bottom you will find Clay Shirky and also David Weinberger’s interesting "The Folly of Accountabilism."

The pointer is from Ben Casnocha.

Increasingly the answer looks like yes.  Zachary Schrag (he is my colleague at GMU but I don’t know him) says yes, here is his blog devoted to the topic.  Here is an article on his endeavors. 

Zachary writes:

The IRB regime rejects the free-speech approach of relying on tort law to deter bad behavior, and replaces it with the idea that all is forbidden unless it is specifically approved.

Zachary’s wife has excellent cultural taste, and a legal blog.

I expect Tyler Cowen
to jump in here and point out that this applies to food, too: you
should try something new frequently, rather than sticking to old
favourites.

Here is the modeler, a few remarks:

1. If you are in a good restaurant, try something that doesn’t sound appealing.  If it seems bad to most customers, it is on the menu for some other good reason, such as how it tastes.

2. The best argument against trying new things is wanting to keep the pleasures of anticipation.

3. Beware those who try many new things, it is often their sneaky form of conservatism.  In many fields of interest, trying new things is the only sustainable routine.

4. The person who tries new things only "every now and then" is often, in real terms, the greater innovator.  Such occasional quests for novelties have greater potential to be true earthquakes.

5. People have only so much toleration for novelty in them; no one embraces novelty consistently and in all fields of life.  Spend your tolerance for novelty wisely.

6. To prevent "trying new things" from becoming stale in its own terms, I have two tips.  First, spend time with children,.  Second, try "not trying anything new for a while," that is if you can.

7. Many people try new things for pre-emptive reasons; "I’d better try it before it tries me."

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.

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.