Category: Education

A fact or two which Krugman leaves out about the Medicare drug coverage:
— If you don’t want a doughnut hole, you don’t have to have it.
> In every area, there are plans which cover drugs in that coverage
> gap.
>
> — There are also plans offering no deductible.
>
> — The original estimate of premium was $37. Then it went down to
> $32. In every state but Alaska, you can get coverage for less than
> $20. And in many states, there are plans for less than $10 month.
>
> — When the Medicare bill became law, people said no companies would compete for the Medicare drug coverage. That has turned out not to be true, and the competitive marketplace has helped drive down costs for taxpayers and those in Medicare.

Example:

Clothing

When to buy: Thursday evenings, six to eight weeks after an item arrives in stores.

Why:
After an item lingers in stores a month or more, retailers start
dropping its price to get it out the door, says Kathryn Finney, author
of "How to Be a Budget Fashionista." These season-end clearances tend
to be the same month that designers host fashion weeks (February and
September) to preview the next fall or spring collections. So smart
buyers can check the catwalk to see if any of this season’s trends –
say, leggings or military-style jackets – will still be hot next year,
and then scoop them up on clearance.

Hitting the mall on a weekday ensures you’ll get a good
selection. "On the weekend, you’ll only get picked-over stuff because
the stores don’t have time to restock," she says. By Thursday, most of
the weekend sales have begun, but everything available is on the floor.

Here is the overall list of ranked professors, mostly male.  Here is a photo of the number one female on the list.  She is very pretty, and comments are closed.

Here is number three, from Canada.

The pointer is from Craig Newmark.

Seth Godin…posed
an idea I call "Real Life University."  Seth questioned whether four
years in a place that teaches how to be normal filled with students who
are looking for a degree helps me.  He wondered aloud whether two years
on the road traveling in different cultures, and two years reading
books and meeting mentors, would be a better experience.

From that point forward my opinion on the matter became clear: I
want to spend four years of my life learning.  I don’t want to graduate
from high school and just start more businesses.  After all, business is
only kind of interesting.  I want to learn.  I want to explore.

"Real Life University" – four years of reading and exploration,
guided by a "board of trustees" of advisors and mentors – became a real
idea I refined and held in my back pocket.

Here is the post, here is Ben’s blog.  Here is Ben’s bio.  Here is Ben on his GPA and why not every good college will take him.  Tomorrow Ben will tell us where he will go in a year’s time.  But should he spend four years of his life at a college?

Hire Ben, in a job with real possibilities; if need be give him a "pre doc" to just sit around.  If need be, give him part of the year off.

Ben is a living test of whether college education signals the dedication of students to hard work.  If Ben does not get or indeed even start his degree, does it mean he is undisciplined?  And yes you can see a potential source of worry toward the end of his second paragraph from above.

I have met Ben and he is very nice.  I have read Ben’s blog.  I spent three minutes with Ben, but I will bet my reputation as a judge of talent that Ben will be a future star of some kind.  He is already a star.  And someday he will own you.

Hire Ben Casnocha, and test economic theory in the process.  Contribute to building a data set for the economics of education.

I’ll give you all an update a year from now.

By the way: I have always thought that the peer effects of college were the
biggest problem with the idea; ideally the smart kids should be sent to
a college full of adult students, if only this were possible.

"Capitalism is thoroughly immoral and has no moral foundation," said Kirkpatrick Sale…"In fact, it celebrates all of what we know of as the seven deadly sins except for sloth."

A new center at Clemson University, focused on the moral foundations of capitalism, puts forth a different view.  The pointer is from www.politicaltheory.info.

Here is the query:

I have fallen in love with a woman I knew from childhood and ran into
again after not seeing her for 20 years.  As kids we hardly noticed each
other, but when we met again after all these years we felt an immediate
[sic] attraction.  The problem is that when I was 12 years old I did something
terrible that caused an accident that killed her father.  No one ever
found out it was me and I’ve never told anyone after all these years.  I
feel horrible about what happened, but it was a long time ago and I’ve
gotten on with my life.  But now what?  Should I tell this woman that I
caused her father’s death many years ago?  I’m afraid it would ruin our
relationship and we love each other a great deal.  The accident occurred
when I was in a cornfield at night—we were throwing corn at cars when
they drove by.  We couldn’t see the cars because we were hidden in the
field.  An ear of corn I threw went through the open car window and
struck her father in the head, causing him to lose control of the car
and crash into a tree.  I ran from the scene and was never implicated.

Prudie thinks this is a tough moral dilemma, but that the guy has to come clean for his self-respect ("You cannot build a healthy relationship on such deceit"), admitting that her lawyers give the opposite advice. 

Trudie starts from a different framework, namely that falling ln love is not entirely a spontaneous event.  It is planned by our subconscious more than we realize.  What could prevent us from falling in love with someone?  Trudie could not, for instance, fall in love with a woman Trudie knew to be a communist, even if, like the younger Yoko Ono, she were extremely smart, attractive, and loved atonal music.  Trudie also could not fall in love with a woman whose father he had killed, however "accidental" the event (what *was* he aiming the corn cob at, at what angle did it enter the window, and did he glue a rock to it?)

The simplest hypothesis, based on the near-universality of self-deception, is the following: a) the guy is a murderer, and b) he loves having the power over this girl that follows from having murdered her father and then holding this secret from her.  He feels he can reduce her to a quivering mass of jelly anytime by coming forward with the information.  He loves having that power so much that first he falls in love with her (who has he been dating in the meantime?) and then he writes into an advice columnist so as to report that power to other people, even at the risk of legally incriminating himself.  Sick, sick, sick.

If that scenario is true, if only with some positive probability, what advice should Prudie give the guy?  And under what conditions can you fall in love?  Can you trust your conscious self-reporting of what you are doing any more than the murderer who wrote  Prudie?

If only Tim Harford were here to set us straight…

Here is a rough paraphrase of my words yesterday to one of my doctoral students:

"It is not I, Tyler Cowen, your doctoral advisor, who will give you the most aid on this dissertation.  It is the Phantom Tyler Cowen inside your head.  You have a model of me, a pretty good one, and you know what I will object to and what will delight me.  The Phantom Tyler Cowen objects, in your head, before the real Tyler Cowen has much of a chance.

That is why the real Tyler Cowen is sometimes so silent."

Here is a new policy paper by Caroline Hoxby, written for a New Zealand context.  It is an admirable brief summary of the U.S. evidence on school choice, almost like a response to Ezra Klein.  Here is a summary.  Her conclusions are that successful school choice requires:

• Supply flexibility, which means that schools should have the ability to open where there is demand for them, expand with increased demand and contract with reduced demand
• Money should follow students, which means that funding policies must be designed so that schools that are in demand have the funds to expand and those that are not in demand lose funds and must contract; and
• Independent management of schools, which means that schools must be free to innovate in a range of areas, including pedagogy, teacher pay, budget allocation, and the way the school is organised.

Hoxby stresses that these conditions are rarely found together.  By the way, the paper does not cover either Chilean or Colombian experience with vouchers.

Like this:

Outcomes are strongly increasing in measured looks.  In fact, the looks ratings variable has the strongest impact on outcomes among all variables used in the Poisson regression analysis.  Men and women in the lowest decile receive only about half as many e-mails as members whose rating is in the fourth decile, while the users in the top decile are contacted about twice as often.  Overall, the relationship between outcomes and looks is similar for men and women.  However, there is a surprising “superstar effect” for men.  Men in the top five percent of ratings receive almost twice as many first contacts as the next five percent; for women, on the other hand, the analogous difference in outcomes is much smaller.

Or this:

Height matters for both men and women, but mostly in opposite directions. Women like tall men (Figure 5.4).  Men in the 6’3 – 6’4 range, for example, receive 65% more first-contact e-mails than men in the 5’7 – 5’8 range.  In contrast, the ideal height for women is in the 5’3 – 5’8 range, while taller women experience increasingly worse outcomes.  For example, the average 6’3 tall woman receives 42% fewer e-mails than a woman who is 5’5.  We examine the impact of a user’s weight on his or her outcomes by means of the body mass index (BMI), which is a height-adjusted measure of weight.  Figure 5.5 shows that for both men and women there is an “ideal” BMI at which success peaks, but the level of the ideal BMI differs strongly across genders.  The optimal BMI for men is about 27.  According to the American Heart Association, a man with such a BMI is slightly overweight.  For women, on the other hand, the optimal BMI is about 17, which is considered under-weight and corresponds to the figure of a supermodel.  A woman with such a BMI receives 90% more first-contact e-mails than a woman with a BMI of 25.  Finally, regarding hair color (using brown hair as the baseline), we find that men with red hair suffer a moderate outcome penalty.  Blonde women have a slight improvement in their outcomes, while women with gray or “salt and pepper” hair suffer a sizable penalty.  Men with long curly hair receive 18% fewer first-contact e-mails than men in the baseline category, “medium straight hair.”  For women, “long straight hair” leads to a slight improvement in outcomes, while short hair styles are associated with a moderate decrease in outcomes.

pp.21-22 tell us about income and education.  And this:

38% of all women, but only 18% of men say that they prefer to meet someone of their own ethnic background.

African-American and Hispanic men get only half as many first-contact emails from white women as do white men; Asian men get only about one-quarter as many.

Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific research journals, has embarked on an experiment of its own.

In addition to having articles submitted for publication subjected to peer reviews by a handful of experts in the field, the 136-year-old journal is trying out a new system for authors who agree to participate: posting the paper online and inviting scientists in the field to submit comments praising — or poking holes — in it.

Lay readers can see the submitted articles as well, but the site says postings are only for scientists in the discipline, who must list their names and institutional email addresses.  Nature says its editors screen out those they find irrelevant, intemperate or otherwise inappropriate.

Meanwhile, the papers also make their way through the journal’s traditional peer-review gauntlet.  Nature says it’s taking both sets of comments into account when deciding whether to publish.

So far, there have been only 70 posts on the 62 papers that authors have decided to put on the Web site, according to Linda Miller, U.S. executive editor of Nature, published by a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

The experiment (at http://blogs.nature.com/nature/peerreview/trial/) is an early sign of how the scientific publishing establishment is pushing the limits of its hallowed but opaque peer-review system.  Critics of the traditional process say it lets not only low-quality papers, but also sometimes fraudulent ones, slip through the gates.  The Nature trial of a Web-based system could usher the spirit of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia edited by its readers, from the margins of scientific publishing to the mainstream.

That is part of an article by the excellent Nicholas Zamiska, in today’s Wall Street Journal, p.B1.  I have long wanted to see this happen, but I fear for economics, and perhaps other fields, it will not work.  The simple problem is that not enough people care about the results of enough papers to start a fruitful dialogue.  Still, at least opening up the papers for on-line comments seems to be a simple free lunch, at least for the world if not always for the reputation of the authors and journal editors.

Comments are on this post are…open…

Harvard just announced it would abolish early admission, and with Yana going away next year to college, this question has in any case been on my mind.

Marriage, of course, is run on an "early admissions" basis.  You ask one woman (man), get an answer, and you are then more or less bound to go through with it.

In my Mexican village, they run marriage more like we run college admissions.  Marriage-ready males propose to several women in one "season," and eligible women court more than one proposal.  At the magical moment, some of the prime candidates accept best offers and the rest of the market scrambles to clear.  But some men can, and do, propose "early admission" to their preferred females on an exclusive basis.

The musical chairs method makes sense if a) people definitely want to marry at a certain age, b) there is greater interchangeability of partners, and c) "being engaged" gives you an excuse to have sex with the person in the meantime or otherwise try them out.

Now let us say that one woman in the village is prettier than the others and also a harder worker.  She may wish to rule out "early admission" marriage proposals, out of fear she will have to turn down her second choice before having sounded out the interest level of her first choice.  (One question is whether a woman is a more populous community still might have enough market power to enforce such a policy with profit.)

Harvard says that early admission hurts diversity and the chances of minorities.  But, thinking about the marriage analogy, I wonder whether banning early admission a sign of Harvard’s growing desirability and market power…

Addendum: Greg Mankiw is happy about the change, Arnold Kling is not.  Here is another economic analysis, based on matching theory.

1. Go live in a very poor country for a while, and I don’t mean in the fancy part of town.

2. Go live in a wealthy but distant country for a while.  Canada doesn’t count.

3. Try raising some money for your university or non-profit and maintain regular contact with the donors for a period of years.

4. Try meeting a payroll for at least twelve months.

5. Work for a short period of time (or longer) on a trading floor or rapid-fire trading environment of some kind.

6. Testify in court.

7. Consult for a local business; the stupider the owner the better.

8. Work as an editor.

9. Work as a manual laborer; in my case I wrapped produce in a New Jersey supermarket for two years as a teenager.

10. Fire someone, especially someone you like.

11. Spend at least one year in government.

12. Work on at least one major project with a multilateral institution.

I am weakest on #5 and #11, with involvement on #4 but relying on the competent help of others.  The other experiences have all contributed significantly to my views on economics and of course politics.  My lack of #11 truly is a big gap, but I am simply physically unable to put myself in one of those rooms downtown and stay there all day long.  Brad DeLong and Greg Mankiw are stronger he-men than I am.  Much stronger.  Qué lástima!

Surely Arnold Kling can add to this list…

I did enjoy and indeed finish it.  The book defends the liberal nature of the university but more importantly it has an excellent discussion of "the postmodern novel" (the author’s field, apparently), including a brilliant take on William Dean Howells and a good discussion of The Great Gatsby.  Its portrait of the American university, however flawed, is closer to the truth than what one finds in the right-wing scaremongers.

But reading this book shows me — contrary to the author’s intentions — why so many college students have turned to the so-called "Right."  Michael Bérubé, the author:

1. Believes that David Horowitz is a very powerful man.

2. Claims that libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong.  At least libertarians are "quite smart now and then" and yes that is a quotation.

3. Repeatedly rejects political views by citing the (supposed) moral failings of their undergraduate proponents.

4. Claims conservatives hate social security "because it works."  By the way, that is also why conservatives hate universities.

5. Argues that "the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to right-wing demogoguery…"

6. Believes that he is holding genuine dialogue with alternative political views.

If we bundle this all up and put it against the "…the world is a fragile place and liberty is dear.  Let us start with an ethic of individual responsibility, family values, strong national defense, low taxes, and a deep belief in the sacred nature of mankind, and no we cannot elevate every injustice," I know which vision the American people — including their undergraduates — will choose.  (For new MR readers, I should note that those are not exactly my views, it is just one shorthand description of parts of the American right.)

Bérubé, by the way, has a brilliant performance art-worthy fantasy segment on why 50 percent tax rates would not (should not?) deter anyone from working or producing.  Excerpt:  "I find it hard to imagine a Clever Entrepreneur who thinks, "Well, I’ve made ten million this year, but if I make another two million I only get to keep one million of it, so I’m going to stop developing and promoting my product right now."" (p.286).  Ah, if only all taxes fell on pure profit.  It is even sadder to learn that many wealthy people are "hoarding it [their money]," rather than creating jobs with it.

I consider American universities to be a marvel of the modern world.  And yes diversity does mean that not every outcome can be controlled.  I remain grateful for this freedom, while admitting its external costs.

One of my favorite professors edited a book called The Essential Stalin, and yes he was sad he had to cut some pieces from the selection.  He was the guy who introduced me to Melville and Hammett and Lem and Stapledon.  I’ll never forget the last day of class when one mousey, dewey-eyed girl in the back of the room finally raised her hand and said in a mix of shock and exasperation: "But Dr. Franklin, those are all the Communist countries!"

The Cuban guy in the room did not approve, but that’s part of education too.  My rather excellent paper on the labor theory of value received only a B, due to its conceptual errors in characterizing the transformation problem (and not because this was a freshman class in English literature).  But at least with that professor one knew where one stood.