Category: Education
The David Network
I am pleased to have spoken at their yearly conference yesterday. If I understand them correctly (here is their web site), it is for elite college students — grad and undergrad — at Harvard, MIT, Stanford and the rest of the Ivies. No other schools. The group is explicitly religious (across religions and denominations) and also right-leaning and explicitly elitist. [Correction: Unlike as previously stated, Robert George of Princeton does not have a leadership role in the group, though he has a speaker role. The Network is run by volunteers.]
Here is the thing — there were about five hundred people at the event. That shocked me. Overall the energy and talent levels in the rooms seemed high.
The group is four years old, and I had never heard of them before, so I am passing this information along. As I’ve said in the past, the most important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers (and I’m not one of them). Today I am upping my “p” on that prediction.
Addendum: My comments were on higher education, and they were more optimistic than what the other panel members expressed. There is a good chance they will put it on-line.
Open AI will partner with Arizona State University
- OpenAI on Thursday announced its first partnership with a higher education institution.
- Starting in February, Arizona State University will have full access to ChatGPT Enterprise and plans to use it for coursework, tutoring, research and more.
- The partnership has been in the works for at least six months.
- ASU plans to build a personalized AI tutor for students, allow students to create AI avatars for study help and broaden the university’s prompt engineering course.
Here is the full story. After a very brief lull, AI progress is heating up once again…
How is AI education going to work?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the first part of the argument:
Two kinds of AI-driven education are likely to take off, and they will have very different effects. Both approaches have real promise, but neither will make everyone happy.
The first category will resemble learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Duolingo, GPT-4, and many other services. Over time, these sources will become more multimedia, quicker in response, deeper in their answers, and better at in creating quizzes, exercises and other feedback. For those with a highly individualized learning style — preferring videos to text, say, or wanting lessons slower or faster — the AIs will oblige. The price will be relatively low; Khan Academy currently is free and GPT-4 costs $20 a month, and those markets will become more competitive.
For those who want it, they will be able to access a kind of universal tutor as envisioned by Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age. But how many people will really want to go this route? My guess is that it will be a clear minority of the population, well below 50%, whether at younger or older age groups…
Chatbots will probably make education more fun, but for most people there is a limit to just how fun instruction can be.
And the second part:
There is, however, another way AI education could go — and it may end up far more widespread, even if it makes some people uneasy. Imagine a chatbot programmed to be your child’s friend. It would be exactly the kind of friend your kid wants, even (you hope) the kind of friend your kid needs. Your child might talk with this chatbot for hours each day.
Over time, these chatbots would indeed teach children valuable things, including about math and science. But it would happen slowly, subtly. When I was in high school, I had two close (human) friends with whom I often talked economics. We learned a lot from each other, but we were friends first and foremost, and the conversations grew out of that. As it turns out, all three of us ended up becoming professional economists.
This could be the path the most popular and effective AI chatbots follow: the “friendship first” model. Under that scenario, an AI chatbot doesn’t have to be more fun than spending time with friends, because it is itself a kind of friend. Through a kind of osmosis, the child could grow interested in some topics raised by the AI chatbot, and the chatbot could feed the child more information and inspiration in those areas. But friendship would still come first.
Worth a ponder.
Duke History of Economic Thought Summer Institute
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 3-12, 2024. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as newly minted PhDs will also be considered.
Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive free housing, access to readings, and stipends for travel and food. The deadline for applying is March 10.
We are very excited about this year’s program, which will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the history of economic thought. There will also be sessions devoted to showing how concepts and ideas from the history of economics might be introduced into other classes. The sessions will be run by Duke faculty members Jason Brent, Bruce Caldwell, Kevin Hoover, and Steve Medema. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, https://hope.econ.duke.edu/2024-summer-institute
My “writing every day” awards
Since I recommend the practice of writing every day, or virtually every day (every day is better!), I thought I should give awards for 2023.
Clear winner in my view in Noah Smith, who just keeps on writing and being productive and improving. Here is Noah’s Substack.
Runner-up awards go to the blog Economists Writing Every Day (duh).
Cass Sunstein remains extraordinarily prolific, and Rainer Zitelmann keeps on writing books, he has a new one Unbreakable Spirit: Rising Above All Odds.
I wonder if the exact same people will win next year? If you don’t see these awards given again, that means the answer has been “yes.”
How women are perceiving the economics profession
Fewer women reported being satisfied with the climate in the economics profession in 2023 compared to five years ago, despite efforts during that time to improve conditions for women in the field, according to a new survey.
About 17% of women in economics said they strongly agreed or agreed with a statement about being satisfied in the profession, down from 20% in 2018, according to the topline results of a survey conducted in the fall. The preliminary findings were presented by University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist Marianne Bertrand Friday at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in San Antonio.
The gap between women and men’s experience in economics widened slightly over the past five years, with 39% of men saying they were satisfied with the profession’s climate, compared to 40% in 2018.
Women made up just 17.8% of full economics professors in 2022. While representation is higher among students and associate professors, the share of new economics doctoral degree recipients that were women fell in 2023, Bertrand said Friday.
The culture that was East German
This paper studies important determinants of adult self-control using population-representative data and exploiting Germany’s division as quasi-experimental variation. We find that former East Germans have substantially more self-control than West Germans and provide evidence for government surveillance as a possible underlying mechanism. We thereby demonstrate that institutional factors can shape people’s self-control. Moreover, we find that self-control increases linearly with age. In contrast to previous findings for children, there is no gender gap in adult self-control and family background does not predict self-control.
That is from the Economic Journal by Deborah A Cobb-Clark, Sarah C Dahmann, Daniel A Kamhöfer, and Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My history of economic thought reading list
History of Economic Thought syllabus
The honor code applies to this class. Accommodations will be made for disabilities in accord with the policies of George Mason University.
Your grade is 2/3 based on your paper, 1/3 based on a final exam. You are required to submit short progress reports on your paper on a regular basis.
Reading list:
Commerce, Culture, & Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith, edited by Henry C. Clark.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.
Tyler Cowen, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?, free and on-line.
GPT-4, paid version, mandatory, $20 a month.
Phind (free, good for giving you reliable references)
Perplexity.AI, free, usually better than Google these days
The internet
I will assign other readings, predominantly on-line, depending on the topics we end up covering.
My podcast with Brink Lindsey
He is starting a new podcast and I am perhaps the first episode? There is video and text and audio. Here is an excerpt:
Lindsey: Did they recognize early on that you were different and that they had a job to do to push you, or no?
Cowen: Well, my father thought I was weird, so he thought I was different, but it would’ve been easier for him if I had, say, been a football player in the way that he was captain of his high school football team. He accepted what I became but I was not obviously doing things he had done. My mother was very open-minded. But when I was quite young, I’m not even sure how young, she took me repeatedly to the public library. At first, it was a Carnegie library in the town of Kearney, New Jersey, but later to Bergen County libraries. And without those library trips, I would’ve been very different. And then my father’s mother, my grandmother, lived with us for a while and she taught my sister how to read. And I was about two and I learned by looking over her shoulder. And so my grandmother had to big influence on me. And my grandmother loved to read. She loved Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, John O’Hara, and also liked Ayn Rand even though she was not a partisan of any one of those things. So my grandmother too was a real influence.
And:
Lindsey: You’re now known for your incredible diversity of intellectual interests. Was that from the start? Did your curiosity just naturally pull you in a million different directions, or was there some point where you recognized, “Hey, my specialty is breadth and I need to lean into that”?
Cowen: Well, I think when I was quite young, I was much more conservative in the small-c sense of that word. I didn’t have an interest in traveling. I was more reserved. If you’re a chess player when you’re a kid, that’s extremely narrow. And that was the main thing I did with a bit of science fiction. So the breadth, I think, came gradually and most of all in my very late teens with classical music, beginning to travel. So I don’t think it was in me at the beginning in any obvious way.
Lindsey: But it came out in adolescence?
Cowen: Yes. But someone looking at me at age seven would not have predicted breadth later on.
Interesting throughout…and do subscribe to Brink’s Substack.
What should I ask Jonathan Haidt?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him. Here is my previous Conversation with him, almost eight years ago. As many of you will know, Jonathan has a new book coming out, namely
Cultural Values and Productivity
By Andras Ek, forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy:
This paper estimates differences in human capital as country-of-origin-specific labor productivity terms in firm production functions, making it immune to wage discrimination concerns. After accounting for education and experience, estimated human capital varies by a factor of around three between the 90th and the 10th percentile. When I investigate which country-of-origin characteristics most closely correlate with human capital, cultural values are the only robust predictor. This relationship persists among children of migrants. Consistent with a plausible cultural mechanism, individuals whose origin places a high value on autonomy hold a comparative advantage in positions characterized by a low degree of routinization.
Here are less gated versions of the paper.
The Sullivan Signal: Harvard’s Failure to Educate and the Abandonment of Principle
The current Harvard disaster was clearly signaled by earlier events, most notably the 2019 firing of Dean Ronald Sullivan. Sullivan is a noted criminal defense attorney; he was the director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and he is the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, he advised President Obama on criminal justice issues, he represented the family of Michael Brown. He and his wife were the first black Faculty Deans in the history of the college.
Controversy erupted, however, when Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team. Student protests ensued. The students argued that they couldn’t “feel safe” if a legal representative of a person accused of abusing women was also serving in a role of student support and mentorship. This is, of course, ridiculous. Defending an individual accused of murder does not imply that a criminal defense attorney condones the act of murder.
Harvard should have educated their students. Harvard should have emphasized the crucial role of criminal defense in American law and history. They should have noted that a cornerstone of the rule of law is the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, irrespective of public opinion.
Harvard should have pointed proudly to John Adams, a Harvard alum, who defied popular opinion to defend hated British soldiers charged with murdering Americans at the Boston Massacre. (If you wish to take measure of the quality of our times it’s worth noting that Adams won the case and later became president—roughly equivalent to an attorney for accused al-Qaeda terrorists becoming President today.)
Instead of educating its students, Harvard catered to ignorance, bias and hysteria by removing both Sullivan and his wife from their deanships. Harvard in effect endorsed the idea, as Robby Soave put it, that “serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus.” Thus Harvard tarred Sullivan and his wife, undermined the rule of law and elevated the rule of the mob. Claudine Gay, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, contributed to the ignorance, bias and hysteria. (It’s also notable, that Sullivan also criticized Harvard’s handling of the investigation of Roland Fryer as being “deeply flawed and deeply unfair.” This may have been Sullivan’s real sin, as the investigation of Fryer was under Dean Claudine Gay.)
Thus, we see in the Sullivan episode disregard for free speech, unprincipled governance in which different rules are applied to different actors in similar situations, and a bending to the will of the mob, all issues which have repeated themselves under the Gay regime. Sad to say, however, that these flaws were not so much ignored at the time as lauded.
Harvard followed the mob and when the mob turned and the season changed it had left itself no defense.
Addendum: See also Tyler, My thoughts on the Harvard mess.
Sure on non-profit university board motives (from the comments)
2023 CWT retrospective episode
Here is the link, here is the episode summary:
On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including the most popular and underrated episodes, the origins of the show as an occasional event series, the most difficult guests to prep for, the story behind EconGOAT.AI, Tyler’s favorite podcast appearance of the year, and his evolving LLM-powered production function. They also answer listener questions and conclude with an assessment of Tyler’s top pop culture recommendations from 2013 across movies, music, and books.
And one excerpt:
COWEN: That’s a unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don’t even want to do it, but you feel, “If I don’t do it, I’ll regret not having done it.” Just like we didn’t get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he’s far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is.
I thought half of Chomsky was quite good, and the other half was beyond terrible, but that’s okay. People, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. They had this picture — what’s it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? Then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that’s what they came for, like a horror movie.
HOLMES: The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, “I turned it off. I couldn’t listen to it.” But actually, most people listened to it. It did, actually, probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode, on average, people listen to.
COWEN: How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No.
Fun and interesting throughout. If you are wondering, the most popular episode of the year, by far, was with Paul Graham.
My thoughts on the Harvard mess
Some of you have asked for this. I’ll list a few points that have been in the forefront of my mind, noting they are partly subjective in nature:
1. Harvard is by no means “wrecked.” In 2023, as in every other single year, Harvard along with MIT had the best and most interesting job market papers in economics. That isn’t about to change. I see good evidence that Harvard remains excellent in many other fields as well. Perhaps the humanities are in trouble there, I don’t know enough to speak to that.
2. There is still a lot else wrong about Harvard, especially at the level of undergraduate education and pressures for peer conformity. And academic pressures placed on faculty, and lack of freedom of speech, and inconsistent standards at the administrative level, depending on the particular issues at stake in a disciplinary case. On all those issues, Harvard gets poor marks, much poorer marks than my own George Mason University. That shouldn’t be the case for what is supposed to be “America’s best university.”
3. I don’t usually like to engage in internet pile-ons, especially if the person involved might have some personal or personality problems. So I’ve let that topic sit. In any case, I believe the core issues here are clear, and I haven’t felt I have new insight to add.
5. The point I would like to add, if I may be a bit rude, is that Harvard, upon closer examination, seems to have a quite mediocre governing board. I believe there are a few exceptions on the list of names, but nonetheless I see a lot of evidence for a critical mass of poor decision-makers, many of them also lacking in courage. Furthermore, they are bad at the things they are supposed to be good at.
Just as Harvard has many of the best faculty, and many of the best students, I had expected the school would have a super-distinguished and super-competent board, even if it was a board I might have disagreed with on many key issues. I had never looked at the Harvard board before. So I was naive. But in fact the board of “the Corporation” is a big, big disappointment (WSJ), relative to the rest of the institution. Harvard seems to do best when the relevant decisions are not being made by the governing board. More fundamentally, viewed as a political economy problem, I don’t see which are the institutions or incentives in place to make the board really, really good, as it ought to be. Nope. So this month I learned something big about Harvard.
The first step toward reform and improvement would be for a significant portion of the board to realize — if only to itself — that it is not very good at precisely the matters its members are supposed to be good at. And then make plans to step down, and to have the remainder of the board set up better institutions to govern board membership in the future. I don’t expect that to happen, though there may be a resignation or two over time. In any case, that is my recommendation, noting that procedures for choosing future board members is a “collective choice” problem without a simple answer. Many of the very best boards are great for circular reasons, namely you have great members over time choosing other great members. That is the way to go, when you can.
I believe many people — including insiders — know and agree with what I have written under this point, but I haven’t seen it spelt out as explicitly as it should be. So there you go.
Here is the link, though not on the whole worth threading through.