Category: Education

1. David Friedman has a novel coming out.

2. Here is another good reason to have sex.

3. Contracts for everything, a’ la Mary Blige.

4. Long compound German nouns.

5. Bird flu, standing on one foot, by EffectMeasure.  Here is a good analysis of avian flu in cats.

6. How baseball statistics confuse the transient and the permanent, pointer from Robert Schwartz.

7. George Lucas: "I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million."

8. How to moderate a panel, pointer from Chris Masse.

Here is a fascinating interview, much of which (not the gay part) describes me as well.  In case you don’t already know it, here is Jonathan’s earlier piece on introversion.

…something is missing from many applications: a class ranking, once a major component in admissions decisions…In
the cat-and-mouse maneuvering over admission to prestigious colleges
and universities, thousands of high schools have simply stopped
providing that information, concluding it could harm the chances of
their very good, but not best, students.

One college administrator notes:

"The less information a school gives you, the more whimsical our
decisions will be," he said. "And I don’t know why a school would do
that."

Here is the full article.  As implied, colleges will still form rough expectations of what your rank would be.  Given this response, we can see at least one reason why parents, and thus high schools, might prefer a fuzzy or ambiguous class ranking to a definite one.

Let us say your kid is smart but has a small chance of making it into a top school.  At Yana’s high school (Woodson, in Fairfax) I’ve seen folders of students with 4.0 and 1600 SAT scores who did not get into Harvard or Yale.  Getting into those places has elements of a crapshoot.  You are gambling, with the odds against you, and a payoff varying only at some threshold level of success (i.e., getting in is what matters; if your kid doesn’t get in, it doesn’t matter how close he came.)  Those are the classical conditions where the gambler prefers to take more risk.  On the upside, your chance of getting in goes up and on the downside, the longer left-hand tail doesn’t hurt you.

Consider an analogy and assume I am trying to date Salma Hayek.  Should I tell her what car I own (GeoPrizm, basically the same as a Toyota Corolla), or should I be vague?  Now Salma is no dummy.  If I am vague, she will not infer that I own a Rolls-Royce.  But a GeoPrizm is clearly below her cut-off point, so with vagueness there is at least some chance she will not nix me right off the bat.

When I was a kid, a great resume meant you could go to Brown (and you only needed a Cadillac to date Raquel Welch).  There was less reason to be ambiguous about class rank, as vagaries could hurt your chances in a very real way.  You started off with something to lose, and being fifth in your class put you in pretty good stead.

Natasha tells me that many good law schools no longer provide class rank for their students.  Is the same mechanism at work here, with many people chasing after a few hard-to-get plum jobs?  Can you think of other examples where the principle of deliberately ambiguous rankings applies?  Can this rationalize grade inflation?

Dear Sir or Madam:
You may love to see me smile, but I, however, love to see me eat.
Please send me coupons for free McDonald’s product, so that I may
continue to eat (and smile).
Thank you well in advance,

Tom Locke, eating enthusiast

CVS got this:

Dear Sir or Madam:
I am a health and wellness addict. Please send me a random product
which you think I would enjoy. It doesn’t have to be something big,
just something nice! I like surprises.
Thank you in advance,

Tom Locke, health enthusiast

What would happen if you sent one hundred letters like that to the leading consumer product corporations in the United States?  Read here.  You also could call this post "How to spend $39," "How to measure industrial concentration," "How to find corporate addresses," "Experimental economics, for real," or (how many of you get this one?) "Hoping for a durable goods monopolist."

Here is part (but not all) of the upshot:

Wrigley’s (#6) basically told me to buy my own gum – as well as exactly where to buy it.
I guess they figured since they’re nice enough to keep making it, I should be nice enough to keep
buying it.  And I probably will.  It’s interesting to note that Wrigley’s letter starts out,
"Thank you for visiting Wrigley.com".  I didn’t visit Wrigley.com.  I visited the post office.

Smuckers
(#40) basically just said no. Nothing fancy or elaborate. Just no. And
a cute little Smuckers logo on their letterhead to top it off. Well…
the joke’s on Smuckers. I plan to run that letter through my juicer
and make my own jellies and jams. Boom!

Thanks to Cynical-C blog for the pointer.

Spread your wife’s birthday gifts out over the day, rather than giving them all at once.

And – expected utility theory notwithstanding – people adapt more
easily to 100% certain bad events than to 95% certain bad events.

Here is more.

Further thoughts: I can see how the possibility of fertility treatments might make a couple worse off, if those treatments don’t work.  But is it better to feel "I will never have sex again," or would you rather hold on to the five percent chance?  What exactly makes these two cases different?

Word by word, Mr. Amith is creating an extensive archive of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs at the time of the 16th century Spanish conquest and now the first language of 1.5 million Mexican Indians. He records fables and personal histories, collects plants and insects, and keeps up a nonstop patter with locals, searching for information to add to a Web site he is building that is part dictionary, part encyclopedia and part storybook.
   
His goal is both daring and quixotic: to preserve Nahuatl so that native speakers don’t discard their language as they turn to Spanish, which they need to compete in contemporary Mexico…

"[Jonathan Amith] harkens back to the 19th century tradition of the
adventurer-scholar who says, "I’ll go out and do something and the
world be damned," says Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University economist
who studies Nahuatl-speakng villages.

For more, see the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal,
center column.  By the way, tomato, coyote, avocado, and chocolate are all English words which came from Nahuatl.  Nahuatl is the most beautiful language I have heard.  Here is Jonathan’s web page.  I think of Jonathan as an obsessive collector of words, in the best sense of that term.  He is one of the most remarkable men I have met and his knowledge of the social sciences is phenomenal.  Here are some MP3 files
of Jonathan’s linguistic work.  Here is my book on the village, which also
profiles Jonathan.  Comments are open, especially if you have a link to the article ("Scholar’s Dictionary of Aztec Language May Take a Lifetime," by Bob Davis); it should appear on-line at some point.

The question: I have a friend who is a functional alcoholic. Every day after work he stops by a bar, and within two hours consumes two pitchers of beer. Needless to say he drives home. He’s not sloppy drunk, nor does he exhibit signs of being drunk, but I’m sure his reaction time is impaired. Two years ago he was arrested for drunk driving. After hiring a lawyer who used to work as a police officer, he got the charges dropped to reckless driving. The lawyer advised him that next time he is pulled over not to submit to any tests, but to request a lawyer. He was pulled over again last week and did as he’d been advised. He spent the night in jail, allowing the alcohol level in his blood to drop, making it pointless to test him. I don’t want to see him get away with this anymore. I don’t know what to do. I fear that confronting him will do nothing. I feel if I make an ultimatum in regard to our friendship, he will choose alcohol, which won’t stop his drinking and driving. Part of me wonders if I should anonymously inform the police of information that would help prove their case against my friend, but I feel this would be a huge betrayal. I just want to stop this behavior and help him avoid harming an innocent bystander.

—Afraid for a Friend

Read Prudie’s answer here, but basically she says lie in wait for him at a bar and then call in the police to track him and arrest him.  I suggest a different approach…

1. He shouldn’t be your friend in the first place.

2. Turning him in to the police will make him your ex-friend.  That is in some ways a good start, but I suggest you have only weak duties to help your "soon to be ex-friends." 

3. If you wish to help innocent bystanders, forget about your friend and stand outside a popular bar with a cell phone.  Or work overtime and invest the money in third world micro-finance.  There is no good consequentialist reason to target your friend’s drinking and driving.  (Did I just call him your "friend"?)  It is unlikely that is the area of your greatest effectiveness, especially since the guy doesn’t care much about you.

4. What is she trying to get out of her system?  Has he neglected her in favor of the alcohol?  Often you can infer the real motivations by taking the opposite of the "pen name," in this case "Afraid for a Friend."

Let us do one more: 

Question: I have a fiance who has an anxiety problem for which he takes medication. He wants to bring his guitar with him on our honeymoon because he said since he can’t bring his piano (he’s a classically trained pianist), he needs some instrument to play. He said that he needs the guitar or else he will feel anxious, because he would not have any instrument to practice. It irks me to no end that if he doesn’t have an instrument and he’s sharing company with me, that’s what he’s focusing on even though we’re watching TV or at dinner, etc. When we have gone away for a weekend and he has not brought his guitar, he drinks instead. He does not get drunk, but he does drink enough over time that the alcohol keeps him from "performing." Is it selfish to want to have my honeymoon with just my husband and not have him leaving to go to another room to practice for a couple hours? I want undivided attention! Yet, I don’t want to have him drinking and not able to perform, nor yearning to play an instrument while he is with me. Shouldn’t I be enough, at least for our honeymoon?

—Feeling Not Important Enough

Prudie says you are a pain in the neck and you should split with a man you obviously do not love or even like.  I’ve been known to offer this advice myself, but let’s give it another spin.  There is a reason why "Feeling Not Important Enough" made a bad choice in the first place.  If she splits with him, she will be "drawing from the urn without replacement," as they say.  And what a very special urn it is.  Should she think that simply making another choice will yield something much better?  At least this first pick a) plays at least two musical instruments, and b) is taking medication, which is more than you can say for the median impotent, nervous, obsessive-compulsive, alcoholic musician. 

A loyal reader writes:

I’d like to expand my economics knowledge. However, as I just finished 4 years of night school, I do I want to start another degree program in a brick and mortar institution.  Indeed, my wife would likely divorce me if I did.

Do you know of any reputable on-line Masters degrees in Economics?  I need something more structured than independent reading but less time consuming than attending class. I am not that concerned if the degree and/or the granting institution is not generally accepted in the Econ field as long as the content is sufficient.  I do not plan on using it as a major résumé item.  I am skeptical of online degrees, but that cannot mean all are worthless.  I’ve googled the subject, but I do not have enough information to pick the good from the bad.  Any information will be appreciated. 

I have no idea.  Readers…?  Comments are open.  In the early days of MR Alex argued that professors will soon become obsolete (and follow up here) as technology like CDs and podcasts of [fill in your favorite economist] come to dominate the market.  I said no way, there is something about having the person right in front of your face that triggers your biological "pay attention" alert mechanisms…

The best predictors would appear to be a high math GRE score, being foreign, and having recommendation letters from "quality professors."  Here is the paper and data.  Those indicators also predict research productivity.  Thanks to Craig Newmark for the pointer; here is his source. 

Do beware the general problem with this kind of study.  It is easy to set up a model where GRE scores do not predict later academic success, precisely because GRE scores are used as a dominant criterion for admission.  An admitted student with low scores presumably has some other virtue in his favor.  Yet it would be wrong to conclude that scores, in the population pool, are not correlated with quality.  The real trick would be to look at a broader pool of applicants, not just those who were accepted and attended.

"You treat me like property."

…If I
treated her as if she were my property, after all, it means that I
would take care of her, protect her, and treat her well above all
things not in my possession.

Suddenly, I realized the look on her face did not reflect the combusting happiness within me.

Then, I
realized my error. We are all self owners, she as much as I. But let’s
say I were treating her like property. That raises the extremely
important issue:

"Do you mean public or private property?"

Chat-up lines, and other openings used to initiate a relationship with a woman, can be viewed as male displays. How well does their effectiveness accord with predictions from evolutionary psychology? 205 undergraduates (142 female, 63 male) rated 40 vignettes; in each vignette, a man approached a woman and the raters judged whether she would continue the conversation. Openings involving jokes, empty compliments and sexual references received poor ratings. Those revealing, e.g., helpfulness, generosity, athleticism, ‘culture’ and wealth, were highly rated. Although the length of the vignette–confounded here with item content–affected the rating, differences remained after the effects of length were eliminated. The success of openings which demonstrated culture was predicted from Miller’s (2000) ‘mating mind’ hypothesis; the success of others could be predicted from patterns of parental investment.

Here is the paper, and further discussion, including an audio recording of the author.  Here are some examples of the pick-up lines used.  My personal view is that demeanor and dress matter more than what you say or more than looks for that matter.  I also suspect that respondents are trying to look good in the eyes of the surveyors, and that "non-cultured" (my polite term) pick-up lines work only with personal delivery and in direct life context, not on paper.  So all you nerds out there, don’t waste your time talking about the Steinway.

Question: After several years of searching for Mr. Right, I have met someone who holds great promise for a long-term relationship. He is a soft-spoken man who treats me with great respect. He’s been a widower for many years, raising his children alone and doing a marvelous job. He’s a hard worker, honest, and seems very smitten with me. We have a great deal in common including our profession, which has been a real challenge for me since I have a nontraditional job in agriculture. The problem is, he’s an awful kisser, something I find pretty important when it comes to intimacy. How do you tell someone that the way they kiss is a real turnoff and not hurt their feelings? It’s not like we’re kids, we’re in our 50s.

Tyler: This is a signal that you don’t adore him as much as you think.  Some basic technique is required, but kissing is ninety percent psychology and connection.  Cut through the self-deception and ask yourself the honest questions.  Why didn’t you write "I love him"?  Your second, fourth, and fifth sentences make him sound like a dullard whom you will grow to despise.

The economist can be brutal, no?  Let us try another one:

I been involved with a lady for two months. We have much in common, and in many ways it’s a very satisfying relationship. Recently she dropped a bomb. In the middle of conversation she announced that she was going to kill herself when she was 75. Did not want to go through the usual body/mind deterioration. She made this choice at 18, after watching Harold and Maude. I watched the movie but could see little that would cause one to make such a brutal decision and stick with it. She’s 51 now. We are on a month’s sabbatical from the relationship. I’m just coming out of deep mourning and feel it’s my role now to try to convince her of the wrongness of her decision. I’ve decided it’s the most selfish, arrogant act imaginable. She wants family and friends there to cheer, "What a wonderful life. What a glorious death." Out of love, I must try to dissuade her from this wasteful end. Any advice? Why did she have to tell me this late?

Tyler: Have you heard of "cheap talk equilibria"?  It is unlikely she means to carry out her plan.  Probably when she was eighteen she thought she would kill herself at age 51.  That being said, read my advice to the first question above.  You probably don’t want her anyway, and you are writing Prudie [Tyler] to put off facing this unpleasant truth about yourself.  You are still not out of your mourning, and that will wreck this relationship whether you want it to or not.

Let’s skip the question about non-intersecting offer curves and move to the next:

I am engaged and we are in the process of planning our wedding. There is a huge debate over what is OK to put in the invitations and what is not. My fiance and I have been living together for a little over a year and we aren’t planning on registering because we already have so much. So, monetary gifts would be great for us! Now, how do you put this in your invitation? A few suggestions have come up but we don’t want to seem rude or crass. Please help!

Oh, what a softball.  We have already blogged on the deadweight loss of gift-giving, here and here.  So my major advice is simply to read MarginalRevolution on a regular basis.  I can add only that if you are going to ask for money, set up a college fund.  Your kids-to-be are not yet experiencing the impatience of waiting for the money, which implies an arbitrage opportunity with g > r, or the growth rate of the funds greater than the rate of time discount.  Nor do I think that the mechanisms of Ricardian Equivalence will fully offset this transfer.  Got that?

I sometimes find evidence of cheating on exams but I rarely take action, I don’t have to.  Almost invariably the cheaters get abysmally low grades even without penalty.  Some people I know get annoyed when students without evident handicap ask for and receive special treatment such as extra time on exams.  I comply without rancor as the extra time never seems to help.  Over the years I have had a number of students ask for incompletes.  None have ever become completes.

I call this the law of below averages.

Addendum: Any student who attempts to take advantage of my lax attitude should first reflect on the Lucas Critique.  Comments are open if you have experiences to share.

I posed this question (off-site, not during a session) to the bloggers (and John Nye) at the Liberty Fund conference on luxury I attended last week.  Both areas involve repetition, basic animal instincts, the quest for endless variations on something slightly but not very new, pleasures of the senses, and both fields attract a not-so-small number of obsessives.  Gastronomy has a more exalted social status, but perhaps that is just phoney-baloney.  Can you guess what the best answer to the query was?

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