Category: Education
The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills
This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills—potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
My first trip to Tokyo
To continue with the biographical segments:
My first trip to Tokyo was in 1992. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and my friend Dan Klein contacted me and said “Hey, I have a work trip to Tokyo, do you want to meet me there?” And so I was off, even though the flight was more of a drag than I had been expecting. It is a long way up the Pacific.
Narita airport I found baffling, and it was basically a two hour, multi-transfer trip to central Tokyo. Fortunately, a Japanese woman was able to help us make the connections. I am glad these days that the main flights come into Haneda.
(One Japan trip, right before pandemic, I decided to spend a whole day in Narita proper. Definitely recommended for its weirdness. Raw chicken was served in the restaurants, and it felt like a ghost town except for some of the derelicts in the streets. This experience showed me another side of Japan.)
We stayed in a business hotel in Ikebukuro, a densely populated but not especially glamorous part of Tokyo. It turned out that was a good way to master the subway system and also to get a good sense of how Tokyo was organized. I had to one-shot memorize the rather complicated footpath from the main subway station to the hotel, which had been chosen by my friend’s sponsors. As we first emerged from the subway station, we had, getting there the first time, to ask two Japanese high schoolers to help us find the way. They spoke only a few words of English, but we showed them the address in Japanese and they even carried our bags for us, grunting “Hai!” along the way, giving us a very Japanese experience.
In those days very little English was spoken in Tokyo, especially outside a few major areas such as Ginza. You were basically on your own.
I recall visiting the Sony Center, which at the time was considered the place to go to see new developments in “tech.” I marveled at the 3-D TV, and realized we had nothing like it. I felt like I was glimpsing the future, but little did I know the technology was not going anywhere. Nor for that matter was the company. Here is Noah, wanting the Japanese future back.
Most of all, Tokyo was an extreme marvel to me. I felt it was the single best and most interesting place I had visited. Everywhere I looked — even Ikebukuro — there was something interesting to take note of. The plastic displays of food in the windows (now on the way out, sadly) fascinated me. The diversity, order, and package wrapping sensibilities of the department stores were amazing. The underground cities in the subways had to be seen to be believed (just try emerging from Shinjuku station and finding the right exit). The level of dress and stylishness and sophistication was extreme, noting I would not say the same about Tokyo today. This was not long after the bubble had burst, but the city still had the feel of prosperity. Everything seemed young and dynamic.
I also found Tokyo affordable. The reports of the $2,000 melon were true, but the actual things you would buy were somewhat cheaper than in say New York City. It was easy to get an excellent meal for ten dollars, and without much effort. My hotel room was $50 a night. The subway was cheap, and basically you could walk around and look at things for free. The National Museum was amazing, one of the best in the world and its art treasures cannot, in other forms, readily be seen elsewhere.
Much as I like Japanese food, I learned during this trip that I cannot eat it many meals in a row. This was the journey where I realized Indian food (!) is my true comfort food. Tokyo of course has (and had) excellent Indian food, just as it has excellent food of virtually every sort. I learned a new kind of Chinese food as well.
The summer heat did not bother me. I also learned that Tokyo is one of the few cities that is better and more attractive at night.
I recall wanting to buy a plastic Godzilla toy. I walked around the proper part of town, and kept on asking for Godzilla. I could not figure out why everyone was staring at me like I was an idiot, learning only later that the Japanese say “Gojira.” So in a pique of frustration, I did my best fire-breathing, stomping around, “sound like a gorilla cry run backwards through the tape” imitation of Godzilla. Immediately a Japanese man excitedly grabbed me by the hand, walked me through some complicated market streets, and showed me where I could buy a Godzilla, shouting “Gojira, Gojira, Gojira!” the whole time.
I came away happy.
My side trip, by the way, was to the shrines and temples of Kamakura, no more than an hour away but representing another world entirely. Recommended to any of you who are in Tokyo with a day to spare.
Now since that time, I’ve never had another Tokyo trip quite like that one. These days, and for quite a while, the city feels pretty normal to me, rather than like visiting the moon. Fluent English is hard to come by, but most people can speak some English and respond to queries. You can translate and get around using GPS, AI, and so on. The city is much more globalized, and other places have borrowed from its virtues as well.
Looking back, I am very glad I visited Tokyo in 1992. The lesson is that you can in fact do time travel. You do it by going to some key places right now.
UCSD Faculty Sound Alarm on Declining Student Skills
The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills—a warning that has been sounded before, but this time it’s coming from within the building.
At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.
Moreover, weaknesses in math and language tend to be more related in recent years. In 2024, two out of five students with severe deficiencies in math also required remedial writing instruction. Conversely, one in four students with inadequate writing skills also needed additional math preparation.
The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8.
Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).
In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021)
(The figure gives some examples of remedial class material and the percentage of remedial students getting the answers correct.)
The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”
…This situation goes to the heart of the present conundrum: in order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding (e.g. with lower retention rates, higher DFW rates, and longer time-to-degree).
The report exposes a hard truth: expanding access without preserving standards risks the very idea of a higher education. Can the cultivation of excellence survive an egalitarian world?
Educational for-profit charter schools do worse in Sweden
I estimate the long-run earnings impacts of for-profit and non-profit charter high schools in Sweden. Since the 1990s, privately managed schools have expanded dramatically—driven entirely by for-profit providers—and now enroll nearly half of urban high school students. Unlike in many other settings, there are no schools operating outside of the public system: all schools rely on equal public funding, cannot charge top-up fees, and are subject to the same regulation. Using a combination of value-added and regression discontinuity methods, I find that charter school attendance reduces long-run earnings by 2% on average—comparable to the returns to half a year of schooling in similar settings. For-profits generate these losses by hiring less-educated, lower-paid teachers, consistent with concerns around cost-cutting. By contrast, non-profits reduce earnings by specializing in arts programs: conditional on such specialization, they perform as or even better than public schools. In a discrete choice framework using rank-ordered school applications, I show that students’ preferences are weakly related to schools’ earnings impacts. Most of the for-profit market share is explained by student demand for attractive locations and study programs, presenting a trade-off between satisfying short-run demand and boosting long-run economic outcomes.
That is the job market paper from Petter Berg, from Stockholm School of Economics.
Emergent Ventures India, 12th cohort
Harish Ashok, 16, received his grant to build a multi-purpose rover.
Dev Patel, economist, received his grant to expand his method combining machine learning and geophysics to detect and forecast floods across Indian villages.
Saurabh Chandra, Pranay Kotasthane, and Khyati Pathak received their grant for Puliyabaazi Hindi Podcast, to expand and develop articles and video formats in simple, conversational Hindi.
Vishrant Dave, Ayush Ranjan and Prateesh Awasthi received their grant for Armatrix, hyper-redundant robotic arms for inspection and maintenance in hard-to-reach and hazardous industrial environments.
Akhil Reddy K received his grant for Livestockify, to develop solar-powered IoT sensors for real-time poultry disease and health monitoring.
Mohil Ahuja, 19, received his grant to develop a low-cost algae-based air purification system addressing indoor pollution.
Reivanth Kanagaraj received his grant for ColourCryption, to create low-cost anti-counterfeiting solutions using fluorescent inks.
Kaviraj Prithvi, 23, received his grant for uDot, to build a tactile display enabling blind students to study STEM.
Tawheed Rahman, highschooler, received his grant to build a low-cost prosthetic robotic arm.
Keya Shah, 22, received her grant to develop a prosthetics solution in Bangalore.
Sanjay Ganguli received his grant to acquire equipment for documenting wildlife stories from India.
Avhijit Nair, 26, received his grant for HydroPlas Tech, to produce graphene from waste plastic.
Rain Rejius received his grant for TRIPd, to develop a wearable revolutionizing personal temperature control through thermoreceptors.
Pragyaan Gaur, 18, received his grant to build technology reducing industrial sulfur dioxide emissions.
Wajih ur Rehman received his grant to develop an aerosol-technology-based solution to curb air pollution in Pakistan.
Rakshith Aloori, 25, received his grant to build desalination machines solving the water crisis.
Prashansa Tripathi, doctoral student at IIT Jodhpur, received travel and conference support to attend the cognitive neuroscience skills training program at Cambridge University.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
TC again: I thank Shruti for preparing this blog post, and for all the work behind it!
Very good sentences
TL;DR: AI now solves university assignments perfectly in minutes. Students often use LLMs as a crutch rather than as a tutor, getting answers without understanding. To address these problems, I propose a barbell strategy: pure fundamentals (no AI) on one end, full-on AI projects on the other, with no mushy middle. Universities should focus on fundamentals.
That is from Simas at Inexact Science.
UATX Is Ending Tuition Forever
Thanks to a $100 million gift from Jeff Yass — the largest donation since UATX was founded in 2021 — we’re breaking the chains. His gift marks the launch of a $300 million campaign to build a university that sets students free.
Our bet: Create graduates so exceptional they’ll pay it forward when they succeed, financing the tuition of the next generation. When our students build important companies, defend our nation, advance scientific frontiers, build families, and create works that elicit awe, they’ll remember who made their excellence possible. And they’ll give back.
Here is the full announcement.
My excellent Conversation with Sam Altman
Recorded live in Berkeley, at the Roots of Progress conference (an amazing event), here is the material with transcript, here is the episode summary:
Sam Altman makes his second appearance on the show to discuss how he’s managing OpenAI’s explosive growth, what he’s learned about hiring hardware people, what makes roon special, how far they are from an AI-driven replacement to Slack, what GPT-6 might enable for scientific research, when we’ll see entire divisions of companies run mostly by AI, what he looks for in hires to gauge their AI-resistance, how OpenAI is thinking about commerce, whether GPT-6 will write great poetry, why energy is the binding constraint to chip-building and where it’ll come from, his updated plan for how he’d revitalize St. Louis, why he’s not worried about teaching normies to use AI, what will happen to the price of healthcare and hosing, his evolving views on freedom of expression, why accidental AI persuasion worries him more than intentional takeover, the question he posed to the Dalai Lama about superintelligence, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What is it about GPT-6 that makes that special to you?
ALTMAN: If GPT-3 was the first moment where you saw a glimmer of something that felt like the spiritual Turing test getting passed, GPT-5 is the first moment where you see a glimmer of AI doing new science. It’s very tiny things, but here and there someone’s posting like, “Oh, it figured this thing out,” or “Oh, it came up with this new idea,” or “Oh, it was a useful collaborator on this paper.” There is a chance that GPT-6 will be a GPT-3 to 4-like leap that happened for Turing test-like stuff for science, where 5 has these tiny glimmers and 6 can really do it.
COWEN: Let’s say I run a science lab, and I know GPT-6 is coming. What should I be doing now to prepare for that?
ALTMAN: It’s always a very hard question. Even if you know this thing is coming, if you adapt your —
COWEN: Let’s say I even had it now, right? What exactly would I do the next morning?
ALTMAN: I guess the first thing you would do is just type in the current research questions you’re struggling with, and maybe it’ll say, “Here’s an idea,” or “Run this experiment,” or “Go do this other thing.”
COWEN: If I’m thinking about restructuring an entire organization to have GPT-6 or 7 or whatever at the center of it, what is it I should be doing organizationally, rather than just having all my top people use it as add-ons to their current stock of knowledge?
ALTMAN: I’ve thought about this more for the context of companies than scientists, just because I understand that better. I think it’s a very important question. Right now, I have met some orgs that are really saying, “Okay, we’re going to adopt AI and let AI do this.” I’m very interested in this, because shame on me if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO, right?
COWEN: Just parts of it. Not the whole thing.
ALTMAN: No, the whole thing.
COWEN: That’s very ambitious. Just the finance department, whatever.
ALTMAN: Well, but eventually it should get to the whole thing, right? So we can use this and then try to work backwards from that. I find this a very interesting thought experiment of what would have to happen for an AI CEO to be able to do a much better job of running OpenAI than me, which clearly will happen someday. How can we accelerate that? What’s in the way of that? I have found that to be a super useful thought experiment for how we design our org over time and what the other pieces and roadblocks will be. I assume someone running a science lab should try to think the same way, and they’ll come to different conclusions.
COWEN: How far off do you think it is that just, say, one division of OpenAI is 85 percent run by AIs?
ALTMAN: Any single division?
COWEN: Not a tiny, insignificant division, mostly run by the AIs.
ALTMAN: Some small single-digit number of years, not very far. When do you think I can be like, “Okay, Mr. AI CEO, you take over”?
Of course we discuss roon as well, not to mention life on the moons of Saturn…
Andrej and Dwarkesh as philosophy
If you follow AI at all, you probably do not need another recommendation of the Andrej Karpathy and Dwarkesh Patel podcast, linked to here:
I hardly ever listen to podcasts, but at almost two and a half hours I found this one worthwhile and that was at 1x (I don’t listen to podcasts at higher speed, not wanting to disrupt the drama of the personalities). What struck me is how philosophical so many aspects of the discussion were. Will this end up being the best “piece of philosophy” done this year? Probably. Neither participant of course is a trained philosopher, but neither were Plato or Kierkagaard. They are both very focused on real issues however, and new issues at that. And dialogue is hardly a disqualifying medium when it comes to philosphy.
Some guy on Twitter felt I was slighting this book in my tweet on the matter. I’ll let history judge this one, as we’ll see which issues people are still talking about fifty years from now (note I said nothing against that book in my tweet, nor against contemporary philosophy, I just said this podcast was philosophical and very good). I’ve made the point before (pre-LLM) that current academic philosophers are losing rather dramatically in the fight for intellectual influence, and perhaps more of a serious engagement with these issues would help. I’ve seen plenty of philosophical work on AI, but none of it yet seems to be interesting. For that you have to go to the practitioners and the Bay Area obsessives.
Observations on browsing economics job market candidates
The number of people on the market seems much lower this year, perhaps because of the lag with Covid, as well as more general demographic trends. Even adjusting for the lower number of candidates, I found fewer interesting papers this year than usual, as research interests continue to narrow. There is too much emphasis on showing quality technique by answering a small question well, rather than addressing more important questions more imperfectly. Harvard had by far the most interesting students, as most of them were considering questions I cared about. LSE looked pretty good too. In terms of topics, I saw a lot of papers on educational testing, urban economics and mobility, and AI. Theory seems to be permanently on the wane. The number of co-authors continues to rise.
Overall I came away with a bad feeling from this year’s perusal, noting there are some departments I have not looked at yet. In the aggregate it did not seem vital enough or exciting enough to me?
I still will be putting up some more of the papers I found of interest.
“Gender without Children”
What would the lives of women look like if they knew from an early age that they would not have children? Would they make different choices about human capital or early career investments? Would they behave differently in the marriage market? Would they fare better in the labor market? In this paper, we follow 152 women diagnosed with the Mayer-Rokitanski-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) type I syndrome. This congenital condition, diagnosed at puberty, is characterised by the absence of the uterus in otherwise phenotypically normal 46, XX females. Using granular health registries matched with administrative data from Sweden, we confirm that MRKH is not associated with worse health, nor with differential pre-diagnosis characteristics, and that it has a large negative impact on the probability to ever live with a child. Relative to women from the general population, women with the condition have better educational outcomes, tend to marry and divorce at the same rate, but mate with older men, and hold significantly more progressive beliefs regarding gender roles. The condition has also very large positive effects on earnings and employment. Dynamics reveal that most of this positive effect emerges around the arrival of children in women in the general population, with little difference before. We also find that women with MRKH perform as well as men in the labor market in the long run. Results confirm that “child penalties” on the labor market trajectories of women are large and persistent and that they explain the bulk of the remaining gender gap.
That is from recent work by Tatiana Pazem, with co-authors Camille Landais, Peter Lundberg, Erik Plug & Johan Vikstrom. Tatiana is on the job market from LSE, with her main job market paper being “Pension Reforms and Consumption in Retirement: Evidence from French Transactions and Bank Data.”
Does economics make you more sexist?
We provide direct evidence on explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. We conducted a large scale survey among undergraduates in Chile, among both entering first-year students and students in years 2 and above, combining a wide battery of measures to create an index of gender bias. Economics students are more biased than students in other fields. There is some evidence that economics students are more biased already upon entry, before exposure to economics classes. The gap becomes more pronounced among students in years 2 and above, especially for male students.
That is from a newly published paper by Valentina Paredes, M. Daniele Paserman, and Francisco J. Pino.
*The Master of Contradictions*
The author is Morten Jensen, and the subtitle is Thomans Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain. An excellent introduction to Mann’s tome, and it many fine discussions. Here is one excerpt:
It becomes possible, then, to read The Magic Mountain as a novel partly about the limits and failures of the more positivistic strain of nineteenth-century liberalism — a triumphalist worldview that failed to recognize or halt Europe’s drift toward nationalism, reaction, and the industrial carnage of the First World War. Settembrini, the noveläs representative of this worldview, shares its myriad flaws, beliving, for instance, that self-perfection is the ultimate goal of humankind. And like so many nineteenth-century liberal utopians, he celebrates technology as “the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations.
…More than just a vessel for a philosophical point of view, however, Settembrini is, or becomes, one of The Magic Mountain’s most endearing characters. One cannot help but smile a little — half with affection, half with pity — whenever he enters the stage. It’s one of the novel’s great distinctions that its central characters are never merely reducible to the philosophical worldview they represent; Settembrini, even when Mann is at his most sarcastic, is always first and foremost Settembrini, as if Mann were gradually convinced by his fictional creation as a dynamic individual rather than a static representation.
Recommended.
Emergent Ventures India, 11th cohort
Saket Sinha is an accomplished bansuri virtuoso with more than seventy students worldwide. His grant enables a move to Mumbai.
Riddhi Jain, 17, received her grant to build an AI-powered mental health system addressing unaffordable and stigmatized therapy.
Advik Kapoor, 16, received his grant for Exerton, to help builders get started with their dream projects.
Vibhuti Bafna, Aliya Mamadfozilova, Julian Drotkiewicz and Enya Dumitru are high-schoolers in four different countries. They received their grant for Waste2o, turning agricultural waste into potable water.
Ishan Khire, 18, received his grant for Rural Analytics, to make rural development data more accessible for researchers.
Nikitaa Sivaakumar received her grant to develop interactive visual aids for high school science teachers.
Jhillika Trisal (with Falguni Shrivastava and Souvik Ghosh) received her grant for building Cognitii, an AI‑plus‑human learning platform for children with special needs; the grant scales pilots and the personalization engine.
Piyush Jha, 18, founder of Vasudeva Innovations, received his grant to turn wastewater into clean energy while earning carbon credits.
Ambreen Deol is an aspiring surgeon who has rotated at Cleveland Clinic, Stanford, Mount Sinai and UAB, received her grant for travel and general career support.
Anjali Jayaraman, 14, received her grant for Repay Smart, to help young adults make smarter financial decisions using gamification.
Arjun Khemani received his grant for the Arjun Khemani Podcast, and work on his writing. His latest book Lords of the Cosmos (With Logal Chipkin) is out now.
Adwait Dandwate received his grant for Vardhishnu, to create learning spaces for children from vulnerable backgrounds.
Amruth Ravindranath is a neuroscience researcher, and received his grant to develop cognitive assessments and AI models that personalize mental health chatbots to each person’s unique cognitive fingerprint.
Shaunak Agarkhedkar is a novelist, and received his grant to write novels challenging myths about stray animals.
Kaustubh Bankapure received his grant to create an online learning model of applied theatre education for Indian educators.
Kavish Garg, 18, a sophomore studying math and philosophy at Stanford, received his grant for conference and travel support.
Ria Khurana and Tanmaya Gulati, both 22 and studying medicine, and founders of RNT Health Insights, received their grant to develop medical devices detecting early-stage gastrointestinal cancers.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, fourth cohort, fifth cohort, sixth cohort, seventh cohort, eighth cohort, ninth cohort, and tenth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
TC again: I thank Shruti for writing this post for me.
Harvard graduate admissions
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.
The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.
The reductions — detailed by five faculty members and in emails obtained by The Crimson — stipulate smaller Ph.D. admissions quotas across dozens of departments. Departments were allowed to choose how they would allocate their limited slots across the next two years.
Here is the full article, via Chris Brunet.