Category: Education
Texas Covid and school reopenings
Mostly I think American schools have been closed for way too long, but I am typically wary when I read “dogmatic” cases for universal school reopenings, especially when those reopenings are not done under the proper circumstances, namely good data and plenty of testing, or low case levels. Here is one new piece that sheds some new light on the topic:
This paper examines the effect of fall 2020 school reopenings in Texas on county-level COVID-19 cases and fatalities. Previous evidence suggests that schools can be reopened safely if community spread is low and public health guidelines are followed. However, in Texas, reopenings often occurred alongside high community spread and at near capacity, making it difficult to meet social distancing recommendations. Using event-study models and handcollected instruction modality and start dates for all school districts, we find robust evidence that reopening Texas schools gradually but substantially accelerated the community spread of COVID-19. Results from our preferred specification imply that school reopenings led to at least 43,000 additional COVID-19 cases and 800 additional fatalities within the first two months. We then use SafeGraph mobility data to provide evidence that spillovers to adults’ behaviors contributed to these large effects. Median time spent outside the home on a typical weekday increased substantially in neighborhoods with large numbers of school-age children, suggesting a return to in-person work or increased outside-of-home leisure activities among parents.
That is a new NBER working paper by Charles J. Courtemanche, Anh H. Le, Aaron Yelowitz, and Ron Zimmer. In other words, having the kids at home kept the adults tied down and less mobile. Of course, even with this result, there is still a case for reopening the schools, but I am happy to see some of the trade-offs recognized.
The Essential James Buchanan
The Essential James Buchanan is an excellent new primer on Buchanan written by Don Boudreaux and Randy Holcombe. It’s part of the Essential Scholar series from the Fraser Institute which also includes Hayek, Nozick, Locke, Smith and Hume among others. Each book can be downloaded in entirety or by chapter and each comes with introductory videos and a guide to further readings. Boudreux and Holcombe’s chapter on Buchanan on government debt is especially clear and concise. All the books in the series are written by experts, such as Erik Mack on John Locke, Steven Landsburg on Milton Friedman and Sandra Peart on John Stuart Mill. Recommended.
Should the CIA be putting out “Woke” ads?
I am fine with the idea, for reasons I outlined in my latest Bloomberg column:
If you wanted to dilute wokeness, and limit its appeal to young radicals, what could be better than a CIA endorsement? I, for one, would like to make wokeness decidedly uncool — and if this video can recruit some new talent to the CIA at the same time, what’s not to like?
If you are a passionate young person, deeply concerned with social justice, you will be looking for causes rejected by the Establishment and embraced by a cool, in-the-know vanguard. Think of Marlon Brando’s line in “The Wild One,” when he is asked what he is rebelling against: “Whadda you got?”
The CIA, which just recently rebranded itself, just went a long way toward making wokeness feel ordinary and anodyne. Wokeness isn’t going to disappear, so the sooner wokeness becomes like the Unitarian Church — broadly admired but commanding only a modicum of passion and commitment — the better.
For similar reasons, those skeptical of wokeness should not be overly worried about so many American businesses embracing the concept, at least rhetorically. Some left-wing radicals might even consider the notion of woke and inclusive CIA assassins to be sinister, just as they fear that international conglomerates will neuter wokeness by embracing it.
Have you ever been walking through a department store and heard the Muzak version of John Lennon’s “Imagine”? Do you know the line: “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can”? Maybe hearing the accompanying melody, perhaps while browsing the men’s wear section, made you think that Karl Marx had taken over the world. Or maybe — if you’re like me — your reaction was that John Lennon had found his place in history, and that both capitalism and conservatism were more robust than he had imagined.
Recommended, there are some subtle points in the longer exposition.
Are women making progress in academic economics?
Here is a new paper by Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn:
This study uses data from Academic Analytics to examine gender differences in promotion to associate professor in economics. We found that women in economics were 15% less likely to be promoted to associate professor after controlling for cumulative publications, citations, grants and grant dollars. In contrast, we found no significant gender differences in promotion in other fields including biomedical science, physical science, political science, mathematics and statistics, and engineering. We separated the sample by the research intensity of institutions and found suggestive evidence that these results were being driven by less research-intensive institutions.
What is the best model for understanding this result? The “ol’ boys’ network” matters more at lower-tier institutions? Something else? There doesn’t seem to be a gender tenure penalty at higher-ranked research institutions.
Solve for the education equilibrium
Astonishing job losses in American higher education. https://t.co/4cnlxyk2i0 pic.twitter.com/6wAwKE2j9E
— Nicholas Poggioli (he) (@nalanpog) May 1, 2021
Via Ilya Novak.
My excellent Conversation with Shadi Bartsch
She is a Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, and recently published a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Here is the audio, visual, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Shadi joined Tyler to discuss reading the classics as someone who is half-Persian, the difference between Homer and Virgil’s underworlds, the reasons so many women are redefining Virgil’s Aeneid, the best way to learn Latin, why you must be in a room with a native speaker to learn Mandarin, the question of Seneca’s hypocrisy, what it means to “wave the wand of Hermes”, why Lucan begins his epic The Civil War with “fake news”, the line from Henry Purcell’s aria that moves her to tears, her biggest takeaway from being the daughter of an accomplished UN economist, the ancient text she’s most hopeful that new technology will help us discover, the appeal of Strauss to some contemporary Chinese intellectuals, the reasons some consider the history of Athens a better allegory for America than that of Rome, the Thucydides Trap, the magical “presentness” of ancient history she’s found in Italy and Jerusalem, her forthcoming book Plato Goes to China, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: You may not agree with this, but many readers I speak with tend to think that Homer is somehow deeper, more mystical, or just more fun to read than Virgil. What accounts for that perception and how might you challenge it?
BARTSCH: I think they think that because both of Homer’s epics are not, per se, about politics or governments. They don’t offer etiologies of a state. They don’t talk about history. They are stories in the true sense. They are about heroes in the true sense, not about some guy who’s pushed around the world by the gods, constantly getting into trouble, crying, wishing he didn’t have to go found Rome, etcetera.
Achilles — figure larger than life. His pride is everything to him. He stops fighting in the Trojan War because he’s been insulted. The drama is, what compels him to go back into battle after that insult?
Odysseus — a fairy tale of a man wandering from island to island, meeting ever stranger creatures, but eventually making it back home. It’s a great yarn. You don’t have to learn history to read these. You get involved in the psychology of the characters, their tragedies and their triumphs.
Nobody is really interested in getting involved in the psychology of the state and its triumphs. On the one hand, you’ve got a poem that’s an etiology for a particular government. On the other hand, you have two amazing stories. I can see how reading The Aeneid would be considered duller for some.
Excellent throughout, and again here is Shadi’s excellent translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.
What should I ask Richard Prum?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is part of his Wikipedia page:
Richard O. Prum (born 1961) is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.
Prum describes himself as “an evolutionary ornithologist with broad interests in diverse topics,” including phylogenetics, behavior, feathers, structural coloration, evolution and development, sexual selection, and historical biogeography.
Prum holds that birds are the living descendants of theropod dinosaurs, a once disputed finding that is now almost universally accepted in the ornithological and evolutionary biology scientific communities.
Prum grew up in rural Vermont and took his bachelor’s degree at Harvard in 1983, and received his Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Michigan. After gradually losing his hearing throughout the early 1990s due to illness, Prum moved from primarily doing field work to conducting research on plumage pigmentation, feather evolution, and Darwin‘s sexual selection theory. He released a book in 2017 on the role of beauty in natural selection: The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – And Us.
So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Lex Fridman
2 hours 9 minutes long, Lex is one of the very best interviewers/discussants in the sector. Here is the video, here is the audio. Plenty of new topics and avenues, including the political economy of Russia (note this was recorded before the massing of Russian forces on the Ukraine border). Lex’s tweet described it as follows:
Here’s my conversation with @tylercowen about economic growth, resisting conformity, the value of being weird, competition and capitalism, UFO sightings, contemporary art, best food in the world, and of course, love, death, and meaning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Grseeycor4
Recommended.
My Conversation with the excellent Dana Gioia
Here is the audio, transcript, and video. As I mention in the beginning, Dana is the (only?) CWT guest who can answer all of my questions. Here is part of the summary:
Dana and Tyler discuss his latest book and more, including how he transformed several businesses as a corporate executive, why going to business school made him a better poet, the only two obscene topics left in American poetry, why narrative is necessary for coping with life’s hardships, how Virgil influenced Catholic traditions, what Augustus understood about the cultural power of art, the reasons most libretti are so bad, the optimism of the Beach Boys, the best art museum you’ve never heard of, the Jungianism of Star Trek, his favorite Tolstoy work, depictions of Catholicism in American pop culture, what he finds fascinating about Houellebecq, why we stopped building cathedrals, how he was able to effectively lead the National Endowment for the Arts, the aesthetic differences between him and his brother Ted, his advice for young people who want to cultivate their minds, and what he wants to learn next.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why is Olaf Stapledon an important writer?
GIOIA: It’s not a question I expected.
COWEN: How could you not expect that?
GIOIA: Well, first of all, I hope people know who Olaf Stapleton was. Tremendously influential, rather clumsy, visionary, early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Man. What Olaf Stapleton did was I think he was the first really great science fiction writer to think in absolutely cosmic terms, beyond human conceptions of time and space. That, essentially, created the mature science fiction sensibility. If you go even watch a show like Expanse now, it’s about Stapledonian concerns.
COWEN: He was also a Hegelian philosopher, as you know. My friend Dan Wang thinks Last and First Men is better than Star Maker. Though virtually all critics prefer Star Maker.
GIOIA: Michael Lind, the political writer, and historian, Stapledon is one of his formative writers. Star Maker is kind of an evolution of the Last and First Men. Odd John is kind of the odd, the first great mutant novel.
Definitely recommended. And I am very happy to recommend Dana’s latest book (and indeed all of his books) Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life.
How open and face to face will fall semester be?
I am pleased to see Cornell mandating vaccination for all of its students. Of course other colleges and universities can do the same. Even if they do not take that step, it still seems it will be “safe enough” to hold most classes in-person in the Fall, if not sooner.
And yet.
Here is what I think is the issue. Universities these days are not very good at “leaving people behind,” at least not as an act of open and deliberate commission. What about students or faculty who just had organ transplants and who thus might have compromised immune systems and also high vulnerability to Covid? Rather than the Coase theorem being applied, schools might make professors offer a hybrid option, namely that some students take the class face to face, and other students take it over Zoom, with a computer hooked up to cover the classroom.
Of course the mixed mode doesn’t work very well. I’ve learned from meetings that an all on-line meeting usually is (much) better than a mixed meeting where some people are present and others on-line, or in the old days on the phone.
So imagine universities giving every student the option to check a box: “I want this class on-line so please make it a hybrid option.”
Except they don’t make anyone prove that they just had an organ transplant.
And then ten percent of the students prefer to live in Pakistan, California, Florida — wherever. Those students check the box to make the class a hybrid option. What happens?
Many classes “might just suck.”
Another option is that the class evolves into mainly on-line as a least worst option.
Another option — #3 — is that the university forgets about the box-checking option but nonetheless uses this as a chance to evolve toward a larger and more sensible on-line presence.
#3 might happen, but I don’t think it will be in place by this fall. And thus you can see my worry about the pending fall semester in many institutions. Will they have the stones to say “No, we’re just going to offer this one face to face”?
Stay tuned.
A Miniature Masterpiece
Superb NYTimes disquisition on a masterpiece of Indian miniature painting. The text, formatting, visuals, all beautifully done–better than any museum exhibit I can recall.
In addition to the subject matter this piece has a lot to say about online education and how news is becoming a winner take-most market. Note what Tyler and I said on endogenous fixed costs in our piece on online education in the AER and consider how many newspapers could put together a display of this quality.
Shaked and Sutton (1987) and Sutton (1998) show that when quality is primarily vertical, meaning that there is a measure of quality such that all consumers agree that higher quality is more preferred, then increased market size does not result in reduced concentration. Instead, as market size increases, firms invest more in quality, which endogenously increases economies of scale and maintains market concentration.
Along related lines, Berry and Waldfogel (2010) show that there are many more restaurants in larger than smaller cities, but even as city size increases by a factor of 10 there is no tendency for the number of newspapers to increase. Larger cities have more restaurants than smaller cities because economies of scale are limited and quality differs “horizontally,” according to taste (thus, larger cities have more diverse restaurants). Yet larger cities are served by roughly the same number of newspapers as smaller cities because quality is more vertical, most newspaper consumers want more coverage, better writers and more features.
Addendum: Tim and Marcos remind of previous items in this series which I also loved, The Birth of the Self Portrait and A Picture of Change.
$1000 submission fee to the AER?
I saw that circulating as an April Fool’s joke, but is it such a crazy idea? Here would be a few effects:
1. Submissions would decline, thus liberating some time for editors and referees. This is valuable in its own right, and furthermore remaining decisions might be made with greater care. And presumably the remaining submissions would be those with a higher chance of acceptance.
2. To some extent departments would pick up the submission fee. This would favor researchers in wealthier departments, though whether this is good or bad I am not sure. And even the most flush departments would find this pretty steep and I don’t think would offer carte blanche reimbursement.
3. It would favor senior and wealthier colleagues over junior colleagues. That sounds bad to most people, but is it? Favoring the wealthier senior colleagues might help limit the arms race for “here is my 90-page paper that has performed every possible cross-check of the results.” It also might lower the return to technique, as younger researchers tend to be more up on the latest math but they are also less broad and by definition less experienced.
4. Graduate students in particular would be less likely to submit, especially from lower-tier departments. It would be harder for job candidates from the non-top schools to prove themselves by publishing in the AER.
5. Papers would be “shopped around” more to seminars before being submitted.
6. Papers would become longer, which is probably a bad thing.
7. It might select for overconfident economists from wealthier families.
8. The AER would no longer “get all the best papers,” at least as such things are perceived. That could very well be good! Why should one journal have such a lock?
Would the AEA take in more revenue with this plan?
What else? What is in fact the optimal submission fee for a journal where publications can be worth tens of thousands of dollars (or sometimes much more) there? Why should the authors/submitters be charged so little?
Why don’t more people go to college?
This new piece in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics seems to be channeling some parts of Bryan Caplan’s argument:
Despite increases in the college earnings premium to persistently high levels, investment in college education remains low. We can understand this apparent puzzle by considering the risk of attending college and, in particular, the possibility of failing to graduate. Students with a reasonable probability of completing college already enroll, and for those who do not enroll, the low chance of completion blunts the impact of the rising college premium. In the absence of improved college readiness, our quantitative results suggest that continuing long-standing trends in skill-biased technological change can be expected primarily to increase earnings inequality rather than college attainment.
From Kartik Athreya and Janice Eberly. The implied discontinuity in the de facto talent distribution also echoes some themes from my own Average is Over.
The mortality of scholars
After recovering from a severe mortality crisis in the seventeenth century, life expectancy among scholars started to increase as early as in the eighteenth century, well before the Industrial Revolution. Our finding that members of scientific academies—an elite group among scholars—were the first to experience mortality improvements suggests that 300 years ago, individuals with higher social status already enjoyed lower mortality. We also show, however, that the onset of mortality improvements among scholars in medicine was delayed, possibly because these scholars were exposed to pathogens and did not have germ theory knowledge that might have protected them. The disadvantage among medical professionals decreased toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Here is more from Robert Stelter, David de la Croix, and Mikko Myrskylä. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty
Using a survey of 7218 professors in PhD-granting departments in the United States across eight disciplines in STEM, social sciences, and the humanities, we find that the estimated median childhood household income among faculty is 23.7% higher than the general public, and faculty are 25 times more likely to have a parent with a PhD. Moreover, the proportion of faculty with PhD parents nearly doubles at more prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years.
Here is the full paper, via all over Twitter.