Category: Education

A Taxonomy of Methods for Discriminating, Revisited

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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.

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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!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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!

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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?

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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?

by  Tyler Cowen in

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 Guardian, The 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

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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. 

Campus censorship and Israel-Palestine

by  Tyler Cowen in

Legacy Admissions

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I admire but do not necessarily approve of the genius at UVA admissions who slyly inserted legacies into the essay prompt, yet shrewdly combined it with race, slavery and history to make the package defensible.

If you have a personal or historic connection with UVA, and if you’d like to share how your experience of this connection has prepared you to contribute to the University, please share your thoughts here. Such relationships might include, but are not limited to, being a child of someone who graduated from or works for UVA, a descendant of ancestors who labored at UVA, or a participant in UVA programs.

How will we know when higher education is reforming itself?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is the intro:

When the revolution in higher education finally arrives, how will we know? I have a simple metric: When universities change how they measure faculty work time. Using this yardstick, the US system remains very far from a fundamental transformation.

And:

This system [of numerically well-defined courseloads], which has been in place for decades, does not allow for much flexibility. If a professor is a great and prolific mentor, for instance, she receives no explicit credit for that activity. Nor would she if she innovates and discovers a new way to use AI to improve teaching for everyone.

This courseload system, which minimizes conflict and maximizes perceptions of fairness, is fine for static times with little innovation. If the university administration asks you for two classes, and you deliver two classes, everyone is happy.

But today’s education system is dynamic, and needs to become even more so. There is already the internet, YouTube, and a flurry of potential innovations coming from AI. If professors really are a society’s best minds, shouldn’t they be working to improve the entire educational process, not just punching the equivalent of a time clock at a university?

Such a change would require giving them credit for innovations, which in turn would require a broader conception of their responsibilities. Ideally, a department chair or dean or provost ought to be able to tell them to add a certain amount of value to the teaching and student development process — through mentoring, time in the classroom or other ways. The definition of a good job would not be just fulfilling the “2-2” teaching load called for in a contract, it would be more discretionary.

This would be hard to make work, of course, and many faculty would hate it. If the teaching requirement is discretionary, and in the hands of administrators, many professors will fear being bargained into a higher workload. Almost certainly, many (not all) professors would be bargained into a higher workload.

Definitely worth a ponder.  The problem of course is that universities are in some regards low trust institutions, so renegotiating class load requirements simply isn’t going to go very well.