Category: Education

Returns to Education for Women in the Mid-20th Century: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws

Abstract: Women had a similar level of schooling to men during the mid-twentieth century United States, but research on the returns to education for women is scarce. Using compulsory schooling laws as instrumental variables, this paper examines the causal effect of education on women’s labor market and marriage market outcomes. I examine both outcomes because women frequently traded off employment and marriage due to marriage bars and gender norms against married women working. I show that an additional year of schooling increases women’s probability of gainful employment by 7.9 pp. and women’s wage earnings by 15 percent, which can be explained by women’s entry into skilled occupations. Given the large returns on earnings, education surprisingly does not increase women’s probability of never marrying, but it does increase the probability of divorce and separation. In addition, women’s education positively affects the husband’s and the household’s labor supply and earnings, conditional on marriage formation and the husband’s education.

That is from Sophie Li, who is on the job market from Boston University.  Her actual job market paper is: “The Effect of a Woman-Friendly Occupation on Employment: U.S. Postmasters Before WWII .”  Some of you will wince to hear me say this, but many of the most interesting job market papers this year are on the economics of gender.

My Conversation with Harriet Karimi Muriithi

This is another CWT bonus episode, recorded in Tatu City, Kenya, outside of Nairobi.  Harriet is a 22-year-old waitress.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Harriet is a 22-year-old hospitality professional living and working in Tatu City, a massive mixed-used development spearheaded by Jennings. Harriet grew up in the picturesque foothills of Mount Kenya before moving to the capital city as a child to pursue better schooling. She has witnessed Nairobi’s remarkable growth firsthand over the last decade. An ambitious go-getter, Harriet studied supply chain management but and wishes to open her own high-end restaurant.

In her conversation with Tyler, Harriet opens up about her TikTok hobby, love of fantasy novels, thoughts on improving Kenya’s education system, and how she leverages AI tools like ChatGPT in her daily life, the Chinese influence across Africa, the challenges women face in village life versus Nairobi, what foods to sample as a visitor to Kenya, her favorite musicians from Beyoncé to Nigerian Afrobeats stars, why she believes technology can help address racism, her Catholic faith and church attendance, how COVID-19 affected her education and Kenya’s recovery, the superstitions that persist in rural areas, the career paths available to Kenya’s youth today, why Nollywood movies captivate her, the diversity of languages and tribes across the country, whether Kenya’s neighbors impact prospects for peace, what she thinks of the decline in the size of families, why she enjoys podcasts about random acts of kindness, what infrastructure and lifestyle changes are reshaping Nairobi, if the British colonial legacy still influences politics today, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: How ambitious are you?

MURIITHI: On a scale of 1 to 10, I will say an 8.5.

This episode is best consumed in combination with the episode with the village elder Githae Gitinji.  The contrast between the two perspectives is startling.  And here is my CWT episode with Stephen Jennings, concerning Tatu City itself.

My Conversation with Githae Gitinji

This is a special bonus episode of CWT, Githae is a 58-year-old village elder who mediates disputes and lives in Tatu City, Kenya, near Nairobi.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

In his conversation with Tyler, Githae discusses his work as a businessman in the transport industry and what he looks for when hiring drivers, the reasons he moved from his rural hometown to the city and his perspectives on urban vs rural living, Kikuyu cultural practices, his role as a community elder resolving disputes through both discussion and social pressure, the challenges Kenya faces, his call for more foreign investment to create local jobs, how generational attitudes differ, the role of religion and Githae’s Catholic faith, perspectives on Chinese involvement in Kenya and openness to foreigners, thoughts on the devolution of power to Kenyan counties, his favorite wildlife, why he’s optimistic about Kenya’s future despite current difficulties, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: What do you do that the court system does not do? Because you’re not police, but still you do something useful.

GITHINJI: What we normally do, we as a group, we listen to one another very much. When one person reaches that stage of being told that you are a man now, you normally have to respect your elder. Those people do respect me. When I call you, when I tell you “Come and we’ll talk it out,” with my group, you cannot say you cannot come, because if you do, we normally discipline somebody. Not by beating, we just remove you from our group. When we isolate you from our group, you’ll feel that is not fair for you. You come back and say — and apologize. We take you back into the group.

COWEN: If you’re isolated, you can’t be friends with those people anymore.

GITHINJI: When we isolate you, we mean you are not allowed to interact in any way.

COWEN: Any way.

GITHINJI: Any business, anything with the other community [members]. If it is so, definitely, you have to be a loser, because you might be needing one of those people to help you in business or something of the sort. When you are isolated, this man tells you, “No. Go and cleanse yourself first with that group.”

If you find his Kikiyu accent difficult, just read the transcript instead.  This episode is best consumed in a pair with my concurrently recorded episode with Harriet Karimi Muriithi, a 22-year-old Kenyan waitress — the contrasts in perspective across a mere generation are remarkable.

A Taxonomy of Methods for Discriminating, Revisited

Twenty years ago, GMU law professor Lloyd Cohen (RIP) guest blogged at MR. His taxonomy of methods of discrimination in university admissions remains timely. What follow is from Lloyd (I have added only the two links). No indent.

Not all procedures for engaging in racial discrimination are equal. They differ in their legal standing, their social meaning, and their “economic” efficiency. The Supreme Court in distinguishing Grutter and Graatz, and the admissions regimes of the various state universities suggest a useful taxonomy.

There are three generic forms of racial discrimination not merely in admissions decisions but in other practices and policies as well: (1) express and objective (i.e., points and quotas); (2) facially neutral and objective (e.g., the top 10% of graduates from each high school); and (3) implied and subjective (“we look at the whole person”). From an efficiency perspective the first form of discrimination is the least harmful. It does not corrupt the measure of merit, it only sets a different standard for “minorities.” Its shortcomings are twofold. First, as the Supreme Court decisions in Grutter and Grattz makes abundantly clear it is the one method most likely to be found illegal. This is implicitly related to its second shortcoming, it is so barefaced. It makes clear to both those favored and those harmed that the favored are otherwise inferior in their qualifications.

The second method, using a facially neutral operational measure to achieve a suspect theoretical goal, now favored by the state universities of California, Texas and Florida, in granting admission to those who finish in the top X% of their high school class and by the United Network for Organ Sharing in granting more “points” in the organ allocation scheme for time on the waiting list, has the virtue of being an objective measure, and the virtue (?) of a disguise that reduces shame. Its shortcoming is that its effectiveness in bringing about the preferred ethnic distribution is tied to its inefficiency. It employs an objective measure of merit that substantially distorts. Thus, the rankings of both the favored and the unfavored groups are mis-aligned.

The third measure, a subjective, ad-hoc eclectic judgment, can in practice be a mimic of the first, the second, or anything else. The process becomes a beclouded mystery. This is both its virtue and its vice. There is no clear trail, evidence or standards that mark the favored as inferior–feelings are spared. On the other hand the absence of an objective measure means that the decisionmakers are effectively unanswerable and may indulge in any form of corruption.

Method (1) is clearly falling by the wayside. Is there likely to be a clear political winner between (2) and (3)?

The Great Depression is Over!

Throughout the 20th century, the Great Depression dominated macroeconomic discourse, engaging prominent economists such as Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Lucas, and Prescott. Most principles of macroeconomics textbooks spend considerable time analyzing the Great Depression as it was this event which galvanized thinking about aggregate demand, bank runs, fiscal policy and money policy. However, the Great Depression occurred nearly a century ago and in a vastly different world, rendering its analysis more relevant to economic history than contemporary macroeconomics.  We think it’s time to revise.

In the forthcoming edition of Modern Principles we excise the Great Depression and focus instead on the Great Financial Crisis and the Pandemic Recession as exemplifying the core of macroeconomics and policy. These events showcase a demand-driven recession followed by a supply-driven one, well illustrated by our dynamic AD-AS model. Focusing on these recessions also moves the lessons beyond the shifting of curves and towards important discussions of shadow banking, securitization, the microeconomics of externalities, and how monetary and fiscal policy must change when the goal – as during a pandemic — is not to get people back to work!

The lessons drawn from these significant and more recent recessions will inform policymakers as they deal with future recessions and will be the subject of analysis by economists for generations to come. A textbook for the 21st century must analyze the macroeconomics of the 21st century.

Ross Douthat, telephone!

In the ancient city of Exeter, three women were hanged for practicing witchcraft in the late 17th century, the last of such executions in England. Now, merely a short walk from where the hangings occurred, the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.

Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.

Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.

Christina Oakley Harrington, a retired academic of medieval history and the founder of Treadwell’s, a London bookstore specializing in literature on magic and spiritualism, said that many witches she knew were talking about the degree program, announced last week, and were thinking about enrolling.

Here is more from the NYT.  The school has received hundreds of inquiries in the last few days.

The Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Adults’ Subjective Wellbeing

Using four cross-sectional data files for the United States and Europe we show that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) have a significant impact on subjective wellbeing (SWB) in adulthood. Death of a parent, parental separation or divorce, financial difficulties, the prolonged absence of a parent, quarreling between parents, parental unemployment, sexual assault, experiencing long-term health problems, being bullied at school and being beaten or punched as a child all have long-term impacts on wellbeing. These experiences impact a wide range of wellbeing measures in adulthood including satisfaction with many aspects of everyday life, happiness and life satisfaction, self-assessed health, and are positively linked to measures of negative affect including the GHQ6. The evidence linking ACEs to lower SWB in adulthood is consistent across fifty different measures including sixteen positive affect and twenty-six negative affect measures relating to assessments of one’s one life, and eight variables capturing how the individual feels about the area she lives in, including unemployment, drugs, violence and vandalism plus democracy in their country. Trauma in childhood is long lasting.

That is from a new paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  Perhaps those are not surprising results, but these are some of the most important questions for human welfare.

Does alleviating poverty increase cognitive performance?

From an RCT by Barnabas Szaszi et.al, due to travel I have not yet had the chance to look at this one:

In this Registered Report, we investigated the impact of a cash transfer based poverty alleviation program on cognitive performance. We analyzed data from a randomized controlled trial conducted on low-income, high-risk individuals in Liberia where a random half of the participants (n=251) received a $200 lump-sum unconditional cash transfer – equivalent approximately to 300% of their monthly income – while the other half (n= 222) did not. We tested both the short-term (2-5 weeks) and the long-term (12-13 months) impact of the treatment via several executive function measures. The observed effect sizes of cash transfers on cognitive performance (b = 0.13 for the short- and b = 0.08 for the long-term) were roughly three and four times smaller than suggested by prior non-randomized research. Bayesian analyses revealed that the overall evidence supporting the existence of these effects is inconclusive. A multiverse analysis showed that neither alternative analytical specifications nor alternative processing of the dataset changed the results consistently. However cognitive performance varied between the executive function measures, suggesting that cash transfers may affect the subcomponents of executive function differently.

Via Michelle Dawson.

Some observations on universities and recent outrages

1. I feel stupid and unnecessary simply piling on with the usual observations and criticisms.  Nonetheless they are mostly deserved, for a varying mix of administrators, faculty, and students.

2. The real black-pill is to realize that the structural equilibria behind the outrages also play a role in more usual affairs.  Ultimately these cannot be entirely “segregated” incidents.  Through invisible hand mechanisms, there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions.

3. This is true for the economics profession as well, though few will tell you this.  They won’t tell you because they are the ones doing it, though often unintentionally or with genuine motives.  They are laying bricks in the edifice of intellectual conformity, if only through what they do not talk about.

3b. I don’t think GMU economics differs in kind here, so politically speaking the situation is symmetric with respect to bias.  Nonetheless mainstream policy views are far more prevalent than GMU-type policy views, so the actual net bias in practice is very much in the [fill in the blank ] direction.  (What should I call it?  The “Democratic Party direction”?  That doesn’t seem quite right, but it is the closest descriptor I have found.  Perhaps “the Democratic Party direction but passed through some intellectualizing filters”?)  If you really think there are enough checks and balances in place to prevent this bias and conformity and lack of self-awareness from arising, I hope the recent outrages have black-pilled you just a bit.

4. Those who perform the outrageous acts of commission or omission are not usually evil people, just as most Irish-American IRA supporters in America were not evil people.  Very often their failings stem from a mix of narcissism, mood affiliation, and fail to think through their professed views (perhaps they are indeed evil from a Randian point of view?).  They frame political issues in personal, emotional terms, namely which values ought to be elevated (e.g., “sympathy for victimhood”), and that framing determines their response to daily events.  Since their views on the personal and emotional side are held so strongly, it simply feels to them that they are right, even when they are glorifying groups and cultures that currently are failing badly and also performing some very bad and evil acts.  They get caught up in such glorifications, including through the medium of apologetics, and through the other twists and turns they need to make to sustain their intellectual positions, even if they are not fundamentally malevolent as human beings.

I think about twenty percent of “the outrageous ones in academia” genuinely have evil, malevolent views, the rest are victims of their narcissistic mood affiliation.

4b. Keep in mind the eighty percent often have a deeper sense than you do of the humanity and vividness of the groups and cultures that currently are failing badly.  That makes them all the more convinced that they are right and you are wrong.  They can indeed feel that you do not “know what is going on.”  In the meantime, you should try to acquire that deeper sense.  As it stands, there is a pretty good chance you don’t have it, and that means you are deficient too.  That is your own brand of narcissistic mood affiliation.

5. If you hear someone proclaiming a strong distinction between their “scientific views” and their “personal views,” usually they are in effect saying they don’t want their underlying “actual views on net” much challenged.  It is fine to proclaim agnosticism about areas you don’t do research in, but then you should actually be agnostic about the areas you don’t do research in.  I have never met such a person.  Unwillingness to recognize these bad practices is a fundamental problem in academic economics discourse today.  It cloaks so many of the current vices under the ostensible mantle of science.

6. The current backlash against academia is likely to remove or dampen the most egregious commissions and omissions on display, as we recently have been witnessing them, but without improving the underlying incentive structure more generally.  Academics will more likely put on a better face, but without much reducing their biases on net.  It might end up that such biases become more invisible and harder to detect and root out.

Have a nice day!

Further positive results on school choice

Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

That is from a new paper by Christopher and Caitlin Kearns in the QJE.

What should I ask John Gray?

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is from Wikipedia:

John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948) is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The GuardianThe Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.

Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.

John has a new book coming out The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.  So what should I ask him?

The “Deaths of Despair” narrative is somewhat wrong

Matt Yglesias does an excellent job laying out the case against the “deaths of despair” narrative and putting it bluntly. 

Over the past few years, Anne Case and Angus Deaton have unleashed upon the world a powerful meme that seems to link together America’s troublingly bad life expectancy outcomes with a number of salient social and political trends like the unexpected rise of Donald Trump.

Their “deaths of despair” narrative linking declining life expectancy to populist-right politics and to profound social and economic decay has proven to be extremely powerful. But their analysis suffers from fundamental statistical flaws that critics have been pointing out for years and that Case and Deaton just keep blustering through as if the objections don’t matter. Beyond that, they are operating within the confines of a construct — “despair” — that has little evidentiary basis.

Novosad, Rafkin, and Asher have provided a compelling analysis of a very concentrated problem of worsening health outcomes for the worst-off Americans. Case and Deaton, by contrast, have delivered a very misleading portrait of worsening health outcomes for the majority of Americans that (because they mistakenly think it’s a majority) they attribute to broad economic forces that exist internationally but which for some reason only cause “despair” in the United States.

…The point is that we face a set of discrete public health challenges that we need to think about both as policy matters and in terms of politics and public opinion. But there is no “despair” construct driving any of this, and the linkage to big picture political trends is simply that Republicans are more hostile to regulation. Case and Deaton, meanwhile, have sent us on the equivalent of a years-long wild goose chase away from well-known ideas like “smoking is unhealthy” or “it would be good to find a way to get fewer people to use heroin.”

I tend to agree with Matt but I would offer a few cautions. Case and Deaton have been too broad in identifying the at-risk population. Identifying more carefully the at-risk group(s) is important so that we can target different problems with different solutions. Indeed, part of what makes the very important opioid crisis so bedeviling is precisely that it is not limited to “despairing” populations but cuts across many groups.

I wouldn’t, however, throw out despair as an organizing principle. The evidence on “despair” goes beyond death to include a host of co-morbidities such as mental stress, marriage rates, labor force participation rates and other measures of well being. Regardless of the precise population to which these problems attach they are co-morbidities and I suspect not by accident. Education is a proxy for the underlying problem but likely not causal. Matt’s cheeky suggestion to promote ideas like “smoking is unhealthy” illustrates part of the issue. Education and information will not solve that problem. Smokers know that smoking is unhealthy but they do it anyway–perhaps because it’s one of the few easily available pleasures if you are unmarried, out of work and stressed.

Nevertheless, do read the whole thing