Category: Education

Here are Brad DeLong’s picks for such a class. I’ll add Derek Parfit to the list, and maybe Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, in his Second Discourse, questioned the identification of wealth with welfare. Instead he saw market society as leading individuals into “approbational traps,” whereby they seek more approval but find themselves on a fruitless treadmill in this regard. Parfit asks whether utilitarianism (or consequentialism more generally) can ever dovetail with common sense intuitive morality. I also would have them read McCloskey on economic rhetoric, to better understand the nature of economic argumentation. Then you could add Thomas Schelling on multiple selves, to illustrate the complexities of individual choice; Parfit chips in on this topic as well. If I taught the class for twenty-five weeks, I would consider using Plato’s Republic, which pretty much contains every argument ever made since.

Hey, I taught that class two years ago…!

…I was left wondering if anybody knew what education was really about. I have begun to suspect that economic development causes education to develop even if governments don’t force it as Korea has done.. After all, that’s how education got started. When we were all hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago, we did not have time for education…Only when our productivity for food production increased did we have time for other things.

…It’s possible that poor countries today will not get out of their poverty traps without political changes. Those political changes may only be possible with broader education. The point is, however, that education is not a constraint on the ability of today’s workforces to achieve substantial productivity improvement around the world. Constraints on productivity improvements are the reason education is not developing faster around the world.

That’s from William Lewis’s interesting The Power of Productivity.

My take: I’ve never drawn many real conclusions from the cross-sectional correlations between education and economic growth. These statistical methods are not ideal for ferreting out causal relationships. Hours of television watched probably correlates with growth as well. That being said, I do see at least one special feature of education. If a family in a developing country decides to invest heavily in the education of the children, it is a very special signal. That family has crossed a particular line and is taking a very definite stance within its community. That family will almost certainly be a positive force for growth. In this regard investing in education is a bit like converting to Mormonism. The decision to become a Mormon, for growth, can be at least as important as Mormon doctrine itself. Mormon families in Latin America typically are committing to a greater work ethic, tight family bonds, no alcoholism, entrepreneurial aspirations, and close connections to their religious peers.

Addendum: This paper argues that IQ outperforms education in traditional growth equations.

And what ever happened to micro-credit?

Here is just one excerpt:

The principals at the two schools in Oslo where the girls attend are horror-stricken by the fact that the girls are willing to go this far to finance their bus.

«This is something [sic] of the most shocking I have ever had the misfortune to experience,» said one of the principals to the paper. «Don’t doubt for a second that I will discuss this with the class immediately.»

It’s that strict Norwegian discipline kicking in at the end. Here is another Norwegian update, you can now file your tax return by cell phone.

Less than three percent of the highest-paid U.S. executives are women. Why? In Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences, a new paper in the Aug. 2003 QJE, the authors suggest an intriguing answer.

The authors compare male and female performance at solving mazes across different incentive systems. In a simple piece-rate system men perform slightly but not markedly better than women, on average the men solved 11.23 mazes in 15 minutes compared to 9.73 for the women, a difference of 1.5. But in a tournament, in which only the highest-paid performer wins, the men significantly improve their performance and the women hardly improve at all. As a result, the gender-gap in performance rises (men complete 15 mazes, the women only 10.8 for a difference of 4.2, stat. significant at p=0.034).

Now here is where it gets really interesting. One might think that this shows that women are less competitive than men. To test this the authors run single-sex tournaments. Surprisingly, in the single-sex tournaments the women’s performance improves considerably relative to both their performance in the piece rate system and to their performance in the mixed tournament. Women do like to compete just not against men! Men’s performance stays about the same as in the mixed tournament. As a result, when comparing the peformance of the all-male groups versus the all-female group, the gender gap shrinks considerably. Results are summarized in the figure below.

What could account for these differences? Tournament theory suggests one answer. In a tournament only the best player wins; so if some of the players are known to be better than the others, this reduces the incentives to compete. Why expend effort if the other player will amost surely win anyway? The men are slightly better at the task than the women and this effect is magnified by the numbers – there are 6 players (3 men, 3 women) so the women have to contend with 3 people who on average have slightly higher maze-solving ability.

If this explanation were the case, however, then we would expect men and women of the same ability to perform similarly but in fact women compete less aggresively than men of the same ability. This suggests another possibility. Relative to women, men may be more (over?) confident. As a result, they think they have a greater chance of winning the tournament and therefore they compete more vigorously. When given the option of choosing what level of maze to solve (with increasing rewards for more difficult mazes) the men do systematically chose more difficult mazes than the women.

What do we make of all this? First, we have an additional explanation for wage differences between men and women, especially at the highest levels where competition for promotion is a tournament. Second, we have added support for single-sex education and perhaps even single-sex firms (Astute readers will recall what happened to the women on The Apprentice before and after the groups were mixed). See also the related first volume in this series.

The authors focus on a third potential implication – the benefits of making women feel more confident (e.g. in reducing drop out rates in science and engineering). The latter, conclusion, however, doesn’t take into account the costs of effort. If men are over-confident about their abilities then they put too much effort into tournaments. Increasing women’s confidence would only make them (and the men) worse off. Other than restaurant customers, would anyone be better off if more people thought they could become a Hollywood star?

Milwaukee school vouchers appear to have performed well, read more here. Here is the original research, by Caroline Hoxby.

Four months ago Tyler enthusiastically recommended EconPhd.net for students thinking about graduate work in economics. I second his recommendation and add some observations:

1. The site makes clear that getting accepted to the top tier economic graduate programs is difficult. Christian Roessler, who runs the site, discusses “PhD fields in order of difficulty of entry” and concludes that of 28 graduate fields, economics ranks fourth-toughest (below computer science, physics, and math). In strong support of this conclusion is some information about individual students accepted and rejected during 2002 and 2003 for 47 schools (Excel spreadsheet). These students were not randomly selected, so we must take care in generalizing, but if one examines the thumbnail sketches of the applicants who were rejected by Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, the conclusion seems inescapable.

2. If an applicant is undeterred by these odds, it’s clear that he or she should be well prepared in math. Susan Athey, Stanford professor, writes, “Real analysis is an especially important class because it tends to be demanding everywhere, and forces you to do logical and formal proofs. Get a good grade in this class.” Roessler writes, “If you really want to delight the adcoms (you do), take topology and functional analysis (real analysis II) too.” For more on the math used, Google “math camp” economists. The ambitious student can also look at what mathematics courses Professor Thomas Sargent suggests for economics Ph.D. students .

3. Fortunately, there are a lot of very fine economics programs below the ones in the top tier. Roessler has listed, for many schools, each school’s particularly strong fields (Excel spreadsheet).

4. It seems like a good idea for any student applying to graduate school in economics to apply to more than just a couple of schools. One aspiring economist, Chris Silvey, has posted his results:

Rejections: Duke, UCLA, Minnesota, Rochester, Wisconsin, U. of Washington, Berkeley.

Acceptances: UC San Diego, Ohio State, Maryland, Cornell, Texas A&M (all with money); UC Davis and Virginia (financial aid to be announced).

Wait-listed: U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

5. It also seems like a good idea to read about the experiences of some current graduate students. Here are three who have many interesting things to say: Ngan Dinh (U. of Chicago) first year, second year; Santosh Anagol (Yale); and Rob McMillan (Stanford).

6. The economics department at Davidson College has collected some useful information and links.

…there is a great deal of confusion about basic facts relevant to policy. Almost half the public, and a quarter of those over age 55, thought Medicare already provided drug benefits for outpatients before legislation providing such coverage was enacted. More than half could not hazard a guess about the size of the budget deficit. The average person thinks 37 percent of Americans lack health insurance, more than twice the actual percentage.

From where do Americans learn about the economy? By far the most common source is television. Those who rely on television the most, however, tend to be among the least informed.

The second most common source is local newspapers, which were cited much more frequently than national or big-city papers.

Friends and relatives came in third, followed by political leaders, radio and economists. The Internet was next, although a sizable contingent listed it as their most important source.

Those who consulted more sources, and consulted them more often, were a bit better informed – but not much. That’s a sobering fact for the media.

People who said they voted in the last presidential election were better informed than nonvoters.

Liberals, moderates and conservatives all did about equally well on the test of economic facts. But those who said they hadn’t thought much about their ideological leanings – one in three people – were appreciably less knowledgeable.

That’s all from Alan Krueger, writing in The New York Times. His bottom line is that ideology, not self-interest, predicts public opinions about economics.

On the same topic, here is one of my favorite essays by Bryan Caplan. Here is one good bit:

In stark contrast to income, education exerts a powerful influence over a wide range of economic beliefs… The typical cab driver with a Ph.D. in philosophy shares the economic outlook of other Ph.D.’s, not other cab drivers. Given the strong correlation between income and education, though, widespread misconceptions about the “beliefs of the rich” are quite understandable.

Further below Craig Newmark offers remarks on related topics.