Category: Education
Accelerating India’s Development
What will India look like in 2047? Combining projections of economic growth with estimates of the elasticity of outcomes with respect to growth, Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development reports:
Even with a strong GDP per capita growth rate of 6 per cent, projections for 2047 paint a sobering picture if we maintain our current course. While India’s infant mortality is projected to halve from 27 per 1000 births to 13 in 2047, it will still be well above China’s current rate of 8. Child stunting will only decrease from 35.5 to 25 per cent, which is only a 10.5 percentage point or 30 per cent reduction in nearly 25 years. In rural India, 16 per cent of children in Class 5 will still not be able to read at a Class 2 level, and 55 per cent of them will still not be able to do division at the Class 3 level.
Bear in mind that this is assuming an optimistic 6% growth rate in GDP per capita. Even more telling is that if growth increased to 8%, infant mortality would only fall to 10 per 1000 (instead of 13). Growth is great. It’s the single most important factor but it’s not everything. If India can double the elasticity of infant mortality with respect to growth, for example, then at the same 6% growth rate infant mortality would fall to just 6 per 1000 by 2047–that’s millions of lives saved. The big argument of Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development is that India can get more development from the same level of growth by increasing the total factor productivity of the state.
There are many “big think” books on growth–Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich–but these books are primarily historical and descriptive. The big think books don’t tell you how to develop. Create institutions to strike “a delicate and precarious balance between state and society” isn’t much of a guide to development. Accelerating India’s Development is different.
“Accelerating” opens with two excellent chapters on the political economy of politicians and bureaucrats, outlining the constraints any reforms must navigate. It concludes with two chapters on the future, including ideas like ranked choice voting, representing its aspirations. It’s in-between the constraints and the aspirations, however, that Accelerating India’s Development is unique. I know of no other book that offers such a detailed, analytical, and comprehensive examination and evaluation of a country’s institutions and processes.
Muralidharan’s recommendations are often based on his own twenty years of research, especially in education, health and welfare, and when not based on his own research Muralidharan has read everyone and everything. Yet, he offers not a laundry list but a well-thought out, analytic, set of recommendations that are grounded on political and economic realities.
To give just one example, India’s bureaucracy is far over-paid relative to India’s GDP per capita or wages in the private sector. With wages too high, the bureaucracy is too small–a reflection of the concentrated benefits (wages to government workers), diffuse costs (delivering services to citizens) problem. Lowering wages for government workers is a non-starter but Muralidharan argues persuasively that it is possible to hire new workers from local communities at prevailing wages on renewable contracts. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), for example, is India’s main program for delivering early childhood education. There are 1.35 million anganwadi centers (AWCs) across India and typically a single anganwadi worker is responsible for both nutrition and pre-school education but they spend most of their time on paperwork!
A simple, scalable way to improve early childhood education is to add a second worker to AWCs to focus on preschool education….In a recent study, my co-authors and I found that adding an extra, locally hired, early-childhood care and education facilitators to anganwadis in Tamil Nadu doubled daily preschool instructional time…we found large gains in students’ maths, language and executive function skills. We also found a significant reduction in child stunting and malnutrition…We estimate the social return on this investment was around thirteen times the cost….the ECCE facilitators typically had only a Class 10 or Class 12 qualification and received only one week of training, and were still highly effective.
The example illustrates Muralidharan’s methods. First, the recommendation is based on a large, credible, multi-year study run in India with the cooperation of the government of Tamil Nadu. Second, the study is chosen for the book because it fits Muralidharan’s larger analysis of India’s problems, India has too few government workers which leads to high potential returns, yet the workers are paid too much so these returns are fiscally unachievable. But hiring more workers on the margin, at India’s-prevailing wages, is feasible. India has lots of modestly-educated workers so the program can scale–this is not a study about adding AI-driven computers to Delhi schools under the management of IIT trained educators, a program which would be subject to the heroes aren’t replicable problem. The program is also politically feasible because it leaves rents in place and by hiring lots of workers, even at low wages, it generates its own political support. Finally, note that India’s ICDS is the largest early childhood development program in the world so improving it has the potential to make millions of lives better. Which is why I have called Muralidharan the most important economist in the world.
One of the reasons state capacity in India is so low is premature load bearing. Imagine if the 19th-century U.S. government had attempted to handle everything today’s U.S. government does—this is the situation in India. When State Capacity/Tasks < 1, what should be done? In premature imitation, Rajagopalan and I advocate for reducing Tasks–an idea best represented by Ed Glaeser’s quip that “A country that cannot provide clean water for its citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue.” Accelerating India’s Development focuses on increasing State Capacity but without being anti-market. In fact, Muralidharan proposes making the state more effective by leveraging markets more extensively.
Indian policy should place a very high priority on expanding the supply of high-quality service providers, regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector.
Hence, Muraldiharan wants to build on India’s remarkably vibrant private schools and private health care with ideas like vouchers and independent ratings. Free to choose but free to choose in an information-rich environment. My own inclinations would be to push markets and also infrastructure more–we still need to get to that 6% growth! But I have few quibbles with what is in the book.
Accelerating India’s Development is an exceptionally rich and insightful book. Its comprehensive analysis and innovative recommendations make it an invaluable resource. I will undoubtedly reference it in future discussions and writings. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and improving life in the world’s largest democracy.
Basil Halperin, observations on academia and research
Miscellaneous things I learned in [econ] grad school: 1. The returns to experience are high(er than I thought) – Someone who has studied a single topic for a decade or two or three really does know a LOT about that topic
It is worth clicking through to read the whole thread. People should be writing more about how things actually work! This is oddly grossly undersupplied. His points about seminars are especially interesting and well-taken.
My Conversation with the excellent Michael Nielsen
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Michael Nielsen is scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He’s worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on scientific progress with Patrick Collison, and is a prolific writer, reader, commentator, and mentor.
He joined Tyler to discuss why the universe is so beautiful to human eyes (but not ears), how to find good collaborators, the influence of Simone Weil, where Olaf Stapledon’s understand of the social word went wrong, potential applications of quantum computing, the (rising) status of linear algebra, what makes for physicists who age well, finding young mentors, why some scientific fields have pre-print platforms and others don’t, how so many crummy journals survive, the threat of cheap nukes, the many unknowns of Mars colonization, techniques for paying closer attention, what you learn when visiting the USS Midway, why he changed his mind about Emergent Ventures, why he didn’t join OpenAI in 2015, what he’ll learn next, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you’ve written that in the first half of your life, you typically were the youngest person in your circle and that in the second half of your life, which is probably now, you’re typically the eldest person in your circle. How would you model that as a claim about you?
NIELSEN: I hope I’m in the first 5 percent of my life, but it’s sadly unlikely.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re 50 now, and you live to 100, which is plausible —
NIELSEN: Which is plausible.
COWEN: — and you would now be in the second half of your life.
NIELSEN: Yes. I can give shallow reasons. I can’t give good reasons. The good reason in the first half was, so much of the work I was doing was kind of new fields of science, and those tend to be dominated essentially, for almost sunk-cost reasons — people who don’t have any sunk costs tend to be younger. They go into these fields. These early days of quantum computing, early days of open science — they were dominated by people in their 20s. Then they’d go off and become faculty members. They’d be the youngest person on the faculty.
Now, maybe it’s just because I found San Francisco, and it’s such an interesting cultural institution or achievement of civilization. We’ve got this amplifier for 25-year-olds that lets them make dreams in the world. That’s, for me, anyway, for a person with my personality, very attractive for many of the same reasons.
COWEN: Let’s say you had a theory of your collaborators, and other than, yes, they’re smart; they work hard; but trying to pin down in as few dimensions as possible, who’s likely to become a collaborator of yours after taking into account the obvious? What’s your theory of your own collaborators?
NIELSEN: They’re all extremely open to experience. They’re all extremely curious. They’re all extremely parasocial. They’re all extremely ambitious. They’re all extremely imaginative.
Self-recommending throughout.
What Went Wrong with Federal Student Loans?
At a time when the returns to college and graduate school are at historic highs, why do so many students struggle with their student loans? The increase in aggregate student debt and the struggles of today’s student loan borrowers can be traced to changes in federal policies intended to broaden access to federal aid and educational opportunities, and which increased enrollment and borrowing in higher-risk circumstances. Starting in the late 1990s, policymakers weakened regulations that had constrained institutions from enrolling aid-dependent students. This led to rising enrollment of relatively disadvantaged students, but primarily at poor-performing, low-value institutions whose students systematically failed to complete a degree, struggled to repay their loans, defaulted at high rates, and foundered in the job market. As these new borrowers experienced similarly poor outcomes, their loans piled up, loan performance deteriorated, and with it the finances of the federal program. The crisis illustrates the important role that educational institutions play in access to postsecondary education and student outcomes, and difficulty of using broadly-available loans to subsidize investments in education when there is so much heterogeneity in outcomes across institutions and programs and in the ability to repay of students.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Adam Looney and Constantine Yannellis.
Can they reconstitute Philosphy & Public Affairs?
Here is a recent announcement of note:
We are unanimously resigning from our editorial roles at Philosophy & Public Affairs, published by Wiley, and launching a new diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH). All of us will play the same editorial roles in the new journal and will retain the aim of publishing the best philosophical work touching on matters of public importance.
Do read the whole text, but you can imagine how the arguments run. Lots of big names are behind this, including Sen, Scheffler, Srinivasan, Waldron, and others. I am rooting for them, but can this succeed?
How sticky are reputations anyway? Nine months from now, what percentage of people on a university-wide tenure committee will know about this change? Three years from now?
Or consider the new journal itself. Without the long history of famous articles behind it, might it, with the same set of editors, have a lower reputation? Talk about mood affiliation!
Or might the existence of a “naming squabble” itself lower the reputations of both the old journal and the new venture? “Well, if they can’t get along, both outlets will have trouble managing their future reputations…”
Or might some of the highly prestigious editors, over time, be more willing to leave than would have been the case under the old moniker? Perhaps the newly reconstituted board will not be able to get along with itself, not without the final backstop of “the company” (Wiley) to enforce a core on all the bargaining.
If I am in the second year of my tenure clock in a philosophy department, and I have a great paper, do I send it to the new journal? In its old manifestation it was a top top outlet, but is it still? What risks am I running? Or do I send it to the thing still named Philosophy & Public Affairs, which presumably still has some very good new editors.
I will be watching.
Emergent Ventures, 34th cohort
Kaavya Kumar, 16, Singapore, AI safety.
Asher Ellis, Yale, Indonesia studies and Pacific national security.
Sohi Patel and Teo Dimov, Yale, to work work on medical devices in the cardiovascular field.
Diego Sanchez de la Cruz, Madrid, to translate his new book on liberalism in Madrid into English.
Michael Ryan, Dublin, to build medical devices to monitor health.
Aden Nurie, 16, Tampa, to build an app to help people find soccer games.
Robert Davitt, Dublin/SF, starting a company to bring together visiting children with family and farm experiences.
Ulrike Nostitz, Dublin, to build out an Irish space law association.
Onno Eric Blom and Vinzenz Ziesemer, Netherlands, For a Dutch progress studies institute and a study on Dutch tech policy.
Katherine He, Yale, project to use LLMs to read and interpret legal codes.
Dan Schulz, San Francisco, podcasting.
Andrew Fang, Stanford, AI and real estate data project.
Ivan Zhang, San Francisco, AI safety.
Samuel Cottrell VI, Bay Area, general career support.
Julian Gough, Berlin/Ireland, book on black holes and the evolutionary theory of the universe.
Sean Jursnick, Denver, architect, website, competition, and Medium essays for single-stair reform to improve building codes.
Julia Willemyns and David Lawrence, London, to support studies for improving UK science policy.
Adam Mastroianni, Ann Arbor, to run a Science House.
Jacob Mathew Rintamaki, Stanford, Nanotech. Twitter here.
Agniv Sarkar, 17, San Francisco, neural nets.
Ukraine tranche:
Maria [Masha] O’Reilly, Kyiv, Instagram videos on Ukraine and its history.
Yanchuk Dmytro, Kyiv, to develop better methods for repairing electric station short circuits.
Yaroslava Okara, Kyiv/Kharkiv/LSE, to study internet communications, general career support.
Julia Lemesh, Boston, to send young Ukrainian talent to elite boarding schools abroad, Ukraine Global Scholars Foundation.
Innovation Matters
Innovation Matters a podcast of the United Nations Economic Cooperation and Integration Group interviews me on matters related to innovation.
If productivity growth had continued on the WWII-1973 track we would today be living in the world of 2097 rather than the world of 2024.
The education sector in the United States is underdoing a revolution. Since the pandemic we have had millions of children start homeschooling, private education with vouchers and charters are exploding. I hope with AI we can give every student a personal tutor, one who never gets tired, never gets grumpy.
In my view we should be subsidizing degrees with the greatest externalities and yet we are subsidizing degrees with the lowest wages and smallest externalities and we expect innovation out of that…no way, it’s not going to happen.
The US is a welfare-warfare state. We spend a tiny amount on innovation.
There can be multiple equilibria. If you focus on redistribution you can get low growth and then it makes sense to focus on redistribution because that is the only way to get more. But if you focus on innovation you can get high growth and then people are much less concerned with redistribution. Both equilibria can be stable. Which do we want?
The Generalist interviews me
I was happy with how this turned out, here is one excerpt:
I think we’re overestimating the risks to American democracy. The intellectual class is way too pessimistic. They’re not used to it being rough and tumble, but it’s been that way for most of the country’s history. It’s correct to think that’s unpleasant. But by being polarized and shouting at each other, we actually resolve things and eventually move forward. Not always the right way. I don’t always like the decisions it makes. But I think American democracy is going to be fine.
Polarization has its benefits. In most cases, you say what you think, and sooner or later, someone wins. Abortion is very polarized, for example. I’m not saying which side you should think is correct, but states are re-examining it. Kansas recently voted to allow abortion, and Arizona is in the midst of a debate. Over time, it will be settled—one way or another. Slugging things out is underrated.
Meanwhile, being reasonable with your constituents is overrated. Look at Germany, which has non-ideological, non-polarized politics. They’ve gotten every decision wrong. Their whole strategy of buying cheap energy from Russia to sell to China was a huge blunder. They bet most of their economy on it, and neither of those two things will work out. They also have no military whatsoever. It’s not like, “Ok, they don’t spend enough.” They literally had troops that didn’t have rifles to train with and were forced to use broomsticks.
Germany is truly screwed and won’t face up to it. But when you listen to their politicians speak – and I do understand German – they always sound intelligent and reasonable. They could use a dose of polarization, but they’re afraid because of their history, which I get. But the more you look at their politics, the more you end up liking ours, I would say.
I would note that Germany’s various “centrist” or “coalition of the middle” regimes have brought us AfD, which is polarizing in the worst way and considered to be an extremist party worthy of being spied upon.
And this:
What craft are you spending a lifetime honing?
Shooting a basketball. I’ve done that for the longest, outside of eating and breathing. I’m just not very good at it.
I started doing it when I was about eight. We moved close to a house with a hoop, and all the other kids would gather there and play. It was a social thing, and I started doing it. I kept it going in all the different places I’ve lived. The only country I couldn’t keep the habit going was Germany. But when I was living in New Zealand, I made a special point of it. It’s good exercise, it’s relaxing, you get to be outside. It’s a little cold today, but I did it yesterday, and I’ll do it tomorrow.
It’s important to repeatedly do something you’re not that good at. Most successful people are good at what they do, but if that’s all they do, they lose humility. They find it harder to understand a big chunk of the world that doesn’t have their talent or is simply mediocre. It helps you keep things in perspective.
I’m not terrible at it. I have gotten better, even recently. But no one would say I’m really good.
Interesting throughout, as they like to say.
A Conversation on AI with my Son
Son: Dad, you should text us more.
Alex: Ok, but why is that?
Son: Well, we are working on the Dad LLM but so far it just spits out economics and twitter quips. We need some sage Dad advice to help us out in the future.
Alex: So you want training data for my replacement?
Son: Well, at least until they unfreeze your brain.
Did Norwegian schools actually ban cell phones?
Some commentators are suggesting no real ban was in effect. I went back to the Sara Abrahamsson paper to confirm the following:
Schools where students are required to hand in their phones in the morning, and therefore cannot access them during breaks, are considered to have a strict policy against smartphones. Schools where students are allowed to access their phones during breaks but are required to have them on for instance silent [mode] during lectures are classified as having a lenient policy toward smartphones. For mental health, the effect between schools with a more lenient and strict policy is relatively similar, as shown in Figure 10.17. Four years post-ban, girls experience 3.48 and 2.3 fewer visits for specialist care related to psychological symptoms and diseases at schools with a lenient and strict policy respectively (p-values 0.036 and 0.068).18 For bullying, there is not much difference dependent on the type of policy implemented when it comes to bullying, neither for girls as documented in Figure 11, or boys as shown in Appendix Figure A21.
However, girls attending a middle school introducing a strict policy against smartphones, experience an increase by 0.12 standard deviations in GPA. This estimate is significant four years post-ban at the 5% level (p-value 0.032). Additionally, girls attending a middle school with a strict policy have significantly higher teacher-awarded test scores by 0.08 and 0.14 standard deviations, three and four years post-ban (p-values 0.075 and 0.011). These results, shown in Panel A and B in Figure 12, show that both GPA and average grades set by teachers for girls improve after strict smartphone bans in schools are implemented.
…However, there are no detectable differences in the likelihood of attending an academic high school track between schools with strict compared to more lenient policies
In other words, there were strict bans and they had only modest effects, including relative to the less strict bans. On p.34, Figure 2, you will see that 200 schools had strict bans, somewhat less than half the total (not every case is easy to classify). Note also that if smart phone bans could help with mental health problems in a big way, we still should see a change in mental health diagnoses, following the bans, yet we do not.
Here is my original post on the topic.
Introducing GPT-4o
And more here, including text.
Jerry Seinfeld Duke commencement speech
Edge Esmerelda
From Devon Zuegel:
“Edge Esmeralda is a month-long “popup village” for people who believe the future can be better and are actively working to make it happen.
- Replacing Aging, by Laura Deming from The Longevity Fund
- Hard Tech Weekend, by Eli Dourado from The Abundance Institute
- LabWeek Field Building, by Juan Benet from Protocol Labs
- Advance Market Commitments Unconference, by Nan Ransohoff who leads Stripe Climate
Learn more & sign up at edgeesmeralda.com.” And here is coverage from Sonoma Magazine.
My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How was it you ended up playing trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band?
HUGHES: I participated in the Charles Mingus high school jazz festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition, and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. I sat in with the band, and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey, and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights.
I was probably 16 or 17 at this point, so I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus Band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now my mentors — people like Ku-umba Frank Lacy, who is a fantastic trombone player; played with Art Blakey and D’Angelo and so forth. Then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.
COWEN: Why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is to me, but how would you articulate what it is for you?
Here is another:
COWEN: If I understand you correctly, you’re also suggesting in our private lives we should be color-blind.
HUGHES: Yes. Broadly, yes. Or we should try to be.
COWEN: We should try to be. This is where I might not agree with you. So I find if I look at media, I look at social media, I see a dispute — I think 100 percent of the time I agree with Coleman, pretty much, on these race-related matters. In private lives, I’m less sure.
Let me ask you a question.
HUGHES: Sure.
COWEN: Could jazz music have been created in a color-blind America?
HUGHES: Could it have been created in a color-blind America — in what sense do you mean that question?
COWEN: It seems there’s a lot of cultural creativity. One issue is it may have required some hardship, but that’s not my point. It requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it — that the people making it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities. And to them it’s not color-blind.
HUGHES: Interesting. My counterargument to that would be, insofar as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time. In the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in, say, New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially: interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc. Yes, I’d argue the ethos of jazz was more color-blind, in my sense, than the American average at the time.
COWEN: But maybe there’s some portfolio effect here. So yes, Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as I’m sure you know. And that works marvelously well. It’s just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this.
Can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is pulling from something deep in his being, in his soul — about his racial experience, his upbringing, the people he’s known — and that that’s where a lot of the expression in the music comes from? That is most decidedly not color-blind, even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson.
HUGHES: Yes. Maybe — I’d argue it may not be culture-blind, though it probably is color-blind, in the sense that black Americans don’t just represent a race. That’s what a black American would have in common — that’s what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia, is that we’re broadly of the same “race.” We are not at all of the same culture.
To the extent that there is something called “African American culture,” which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop — yes, then I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture.
COWEN: But then here’s my worry a bit. You’re going to have people privately putting out cultural visions in the public sphere through music, television, novels — a thousand ways — and those will inevitably be somewhat political once they’re cultural visions. So these other visions will be out there, and a lot of them you’re going to disagree with. It might be fine to say, “It would be better if we were all much more color-blind.” But given these other non-color-blind visions are out there, do you not have to, in some sense, counter them by not being so color-blind yourself and say, “Well, here’s a better way to think about the black or African American or Ethiopian or whatever identity”?
Interesting throughout.
Public Choice Outreach!
There are just a few spots left for the Public Choice Outreach Conference! This is a great opportunity to hear from excellent speakers including Garett Jones, Peter Boettke, Johanna Mollerstrom and more! The conference is a crash course in public choice. It’s entirely free. Indeed scholarships are available! More details in the poster. Please pass around. Applications are here!
