Category: History
The economics of declining teacher quality
I hear this topic discussed quite often, yet rarely does this 2006 paper by Darius Lakdawalla, “The Economics of Teacher Quality,” come up in the popular conversation. Here is the abstract:
Concern is often voiced about the quality of American schoolteachers. This paper suggests that, while the relative quality of teachers is declining, this decline may be the result of technological changes that have raised the price of skilled workers outside teaching without affecting the productivity of skilled teachers. Growth in the price of skilled workers can cause schools to lower the relative quality of teachers and raise teacher quantity instead. Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth demonstrates that wage and schooling are good measures of teacher quality. Analysis of U.S. census microdata then reveals that the relative schooling and experience-adjusted relative wages of U.S. schoolteachers have fallen significantly from 1940 to 1990. Moreover, class sizes have also fallen substantially. The declines in class size and in relative quality seem correlated over time and space with growth in the relative price of skilled workers.
The jstor link is here, this version is (I think) ungated for you. Here is an ungated, earlier version with some related results. Here is a good sentence from the middle of the paper:
Both schooling and experience-adjusted wages entered a period of relative decline for teachers beginning with the cohorts entering the labor force during the 1950s.
On pp.318-318 Lakdawalla discusses the importance of superior labor market opportunities for women for the argument. Here is Lakdalla’s earlier argument that Medicare benefits the poor to a disproportionate degree.
I was reminded of the education paper by a tweet from Austan Goolsbee.
How to kill bedbugs, 1777
“Spread Gun-powder, beaten small, about the crevices of your bedstead; fire it with a match, and keep the smoak in; do this for an hour or more; and keep the room close several hours.”
The Complete Vermin-Killer: A Valuable and Useful Companion for Families, in Town and Country, 4th ed. (London, 1777), 4.
The link is here. That is from a new-to-me blog, askthepast.blogspot.com. Here is “How to Make Pink Pancakes, 1786,” and you will find numerous other excellent items. Try “How to Sober Up, 1628” or “How to Grow a Beard, 1539.”
For the pointer I thank the excellent Hollis Robbins.
How depressing is the moral regression of Syria?
Syria is undergoing moral regression (one NYT update here), just as Lebanon did in the 1970s or the former Yugoslavia did in the 1990s or for that matter Germany in the 1930s. The behavior of the government is far more evil and oppressive than before, while the moral quality of the opposition is worse than what we might have expected several decades ago.
That said, most of the world is not regressing morally and arguably can be seen as advancing morally, at least on the fronts of general tolerance, democracy, and the moral virtues which are encouraged by prosperity and market exchange.
Syria is only a small percentage of the broader world and there are only a few other places which count as (possibly) morally regressing. In total they will not sum to a billion people. Just for purposes of argument, if you toss in DRC and parts of Pakistan and Egypt, along with a few other areas, let us say it runs at five percent of the world’s population which is morally regressing (though DRC has made some very recent progress and is arguably the new undervalued nation).
One worry is that observed regression draws our attention to the contingency of moral progress. It can be argued whether Syria is one data point or millions of data points. I don’t understand very well what observed moral progress is contingent upon, and the histories of Germany and Yugoslavia make this especially tough. Both locales seemed to have bright futures when they fell apart, morally speaking that is. So I am not all cocky about moral progress continuing indefinitely.
Is it possible there is more moral regression in the world today than say five years ago? Does moral regression have a unit root? Serial autocorrelation? Do we understand the causes of moral regression better as time passes? I don’t see that.
Another worry is how well the rest of the world can cope with five (?) percent of its citizens undergoing moral regression. “Quite fine” it seems so far, although this may be contingent on technology and furthermore Israel and Lebanon may not feel the same way. In any case the moral regression of Syria may be a more serious problem when insect-sized drones can enable strategic assassinations, including outside of Syria.
The technologies and prices of fifty years from now may require much higher moral standards of us — “every man a Denmark” — than the world of today. More generally, we dismiss the possibility of moral regression at our peril.
For a useful conversation on this topic I am indebted to SL.
Deirdre McCloskey’s *Crossing*
From an email I received, I believe you can get a free e-copy of the book here.
Micah Tillman defends Edmund Husserl
I allowed him three paragraphs, and he emails me the following:
Husserl was a mathematician whose desire to understand how (and why) mathematics actually works turned him into a philosopher of logic, science, language, and mind. Without the movement he inaugurated, Heidegger (and therefore everyone who followed Heidegger), Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, and Derrida (and even John Paul II) would not have become the philosophers we know them as today.
Husserl was inspired by Hume and Kant, but believed both made a fundamental mistake. Empiricists like Hume became skeptics after concluding that all we truly know are our own sensations; we never experience the “real things” we think we do. Idealists like Kant essentially agreed (we experience only phenomena, never noumena) but believed that at least we could discover the universal rules of the human mind.
Husserl argued that the “things themselves” actually show up for us through our experiences and therefore we can learn about the real world through a study of the structures (patterns, types, and forms) of human experience. In the process, he reconciled empiricism and idealism. The empiricist insistence on experience over speculation is central to phenomenology, as is the idealist claim that the study of the mind is the path to knowledge of ultimate reality. With the combination of the two, every area of the world, and every part of life, became a subject for philosophical investigation, and philosophy experienced a kind of second birth.
Earlier I had named Husserl as “the worst philosopher.” But of course I am delighted to present a contrasting view. Micah is a professional philosopher and an adherent of phenomenology, his web page is here. His recently completed dissertation was “Empty and Filled Intentions in Husserl’s Early Work.” He describes the “things themselves” — in less than 140 characters — here.
Who is the worst philosopher?
That was one of the questions I was asked at my Jane St. Capital talk on Wednesday night.
My answer was Edmund Husserl, at least if we restrict the question to philosophers of renown. I believe his work is a waste of time and I write that as someone who does not believe Heidegger is a (total) waste of time, especially in the essays. As for Husserl, we can pull this bit off Wikipedia:
Therein, Husserl in 1931 refers to “Transcendental Subjectivity” being “a new field of experience” opened as a result of practicing phenomenological reduction, and giving rise to an a priori science not empirically based but somewhat similar to mathematics. By such practice the individual becomes the “transcendental Ego”, although Husserl acknowledges the problem of solipsism. Later he emphasizes “the necessary stressing of the difference between transcendental and psychological subjectivity, the repeated declaration that transcendental phenomenology is not in any sense psychology… ” but rather (in contrast to naturalistic psychology) by the phenomenological reduction “the life of the soul is made intelligible in its most intimate and originally intuitional essence” and whereby “objects of the most varied grades right up to the level of the objective world are there for the Ego… .” Ibid. at 5-7, 11-12, 18.
The Stanford Encyclopedia gives you more detail on his philosophy. Here is Husserl presented on YouTube, in his own words as they say.
I suggested both Aristotle and Nietzsche as overrated philosophers, although clearly both are still great philosophers, worthy of major reputations. But neither should be considered a real candidate for “greatest philosopher ever,” which is what you sometimes hear. I’ll reserve that for Plato and Hume.
From the comments
This is from Mark A. Sadowski, who makes some other good comments in the same thread:
Marcus Nunes’ post caused me to reread E. Cary Brown’s “Fiscal Policy in the “Thirties: A Reappraisal” (American Economic Review, Vol. 46, No. 5, December 1956, pp. 857–879) and Larry Peppers’ “Full Employment Surplus Analysis and Structural Changes” (Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 10, Winter 1973, pp. 197–210), both of which are mentioned in the Douglas A. Irwin’s paper on gold sterilization and the recession of 1937-38 which Marcus discusses in his excellent post.
Peppers’ paper shows how to calculate cyclically adjusted budget balances from Brown’s paper. By my arithmetic, according to Brown’s data the cyclically adjusted general government balance increased by 3.0% of potential GDP in calendar year 1937. Peppers only looks at the federal budget, and he finds that the cyclically adjusted federal government balance increased by 3.5% of potential GDP in calendar year 1937 and another 0.1% in 1938 for a total of 3.6% of potential GDP.
According to the April 2013 IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) the U.S. general government structural (cyclically adjusted) balance will increase by 3.9% of potential GDP between calendar years 2010 and 2013. And the March 2013 CBO estimates of the cyclically adjusted federal budget balance show it will rise by 4.6% of potential GDP between fiscal years 2009 and 2013.
So apparently we have repeated the fiscal mistakes of 1937 with approximately a 30% bonus and yet the economy has not plunged into a renewed depression.
We know what Scott Sumner would say. Furthermore he would be right. It’s called “monetary offset.”
Still looking in vain for that darned liquidity trap Krugman keeps talking about!
Very good sentences
This raises an interesting, tangentially related question. Liberals fulminate constantly against outrageous conservative obstruction, yet often seem nevertheless surprised by its effectiveness. Why is that? My guess is that liberals are sometimes deceived by assumptions about the scope of liberalising moral progress. Modern history is a series of conservative disappointments, and the trend of social change does have a generally liberal cast. The surprisingly rapid acceptance of legal gay marriage is a good example. Liberals are therefore accustomed to a giddy sense of riding at the vanguard of history, routed reactionaries choking in their dust. But all of us, whatever our colours, overestimate the moral and intellectual coherence of our political convictions. We’re inclined to see meaningful internal connections between our opinions—between our views on abortion and regulatory policy, say—when often there’s no connection deeper than the contingent expediencies of coalition politics. For liberals, this sometimes plays out as a tendency to see resistance to all liberal policy as an inevitably losing battle against the inexorable tide of history. This occasionally leads, in turn, to a slightly naive sense of surprise when a hard-won political victory isn’t consolidated by a decisive, validating shift in public opinion, but instead begins to be ratcheted back.
That is from Will Wilkinson.
What did I learn from (another) re-read of Adam Smith?
Here is my MRU video on precisely that topic.
By the way, Brandon Dupont has done for us this excellent video on John Law.
The most provocative, fascinating, and bizarre piece I read today
The author is Ron Unz, and the topic is what the media chooses to cover or not. His thoughts run in directions very different than mine (I favor invisible hand mechanisms to a much greater degree, for one thing), but here is the essay.
It is entitled “Our American Pravda.” It is difficult to summarize. Maybe some parts of this essay are totally, completely wrong, so I urge you to read it with caution. But still I thought it was worth passing along; if nothing else you can read it as a study in how a situation can look “very guilty” even if perhaps it is not.
One excerpt is this:
These three stories—the anthrax evidence, the McCain/POW revelations, and the Sibel Edmonds charges—are the sort of major exposés that would surely be dominating the headlines of any country with a properly-functioning media. But almost no American has ever heard of them. Before the Internet broke the chokehold of our centralized flow of information, I would have remained just as ignorant myself, despite all the major newspapers and magazines I regularly read.
Am I absolutely sure that any or all of these stories are true? Certainly not, though I think they probably are, given their overwhelming weight of supporting evidence. But absent any willingness of our government or major media to properly investigate them, I cannot say more.
However, this material does conclusively establish something else, which has even greater significance. These dramatic, well-documented accounts have been ignored by our national media, rather than widely publicized. Whether this silence has been deliberate or is merely due to incompetence remains unclear, but the silence itself is proven fact.
The original pointer came from @GarethIdeas, who describes the piece as “totally fascinating.”
Why is there no Milton Friedman today?
You will find this question discussed in a symposium at Econ Journal Watch, co-sponsored by the Mercatus Center. Contributors include Richard Epstein, David R. Henderson, Richard Posner, Daniel Houser, James K. Galbraith, Sam Peltzman, and Robert Solow, among other notables. My own contribution you will find here, I start with these points:
If I approach this question from a more general angle of cultural history, I find the diminution of superstars in particular areas not very surprising. As early as the 18th century, David Hume (1742, 135-137) and other writers in the Scottish tradition suggested that, in a given field, the presence of superstars eventually would diminish (Cowen 1998, 75-76). New creators would do tweaks at the margin, but once the fundamental contributions have been made superstars decline in their relative luster.
In the world of popular music I find that no creators in the last twenty-five years have attained the iconic status of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, or Michael Jackson. At the same time, it is quite plausible to believe there are as many or more good songs on the radio today as back then. American artists seem to have peaked in enduring iconic value with Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, mostly dating from the 1960s. In technical economics, I see a peak with Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow and some of the core developments in game theory. Since then there are fewer iconic figures being generated in this area of research, even though there are plenty of accomplished papers being published.
The claim is not that progress stops, but rather its most visible and most iconic manifestations in particular individuals seem to have peak periods followed by declines in any such manifestation.
David Brooks on the words we use
Daniel Klein of George Mason University has conducted one of the broadest studies with the Google search engine [TC: the paper is here]…On the subject of individualization, he found that the word “preferences” was barely used until about 1930, but usage has surged since. On the general subject of demoralization, he finds a long decline of usage in terms like “faith,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “evil” and “prudence,” and a sharp rise in what you might call social science terms like “subjectivity,” “normative,” “psychology” and “information.”
Klein adds the third element to our story, which he calls “governmentalization.” Words having to do with experts have shown a steady rise. So have phrases like “run the country,” “economic justice,” “nationalism,” “priorities,” “right-wing” and “left-wing.” The implication is that politics and government have become more prevalent.
So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.
This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.
Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.
Here is more, interesting throughout.
The Adam Smith segment of the Great Economists course is underway
You will find it here, at MRUniversity.com. We have recorded videos covering, annotating, and explaining every single chapter of Smith’s masterwork Wealth of Nations, along with some coverage of surrounding historical material. Having to explain a book “along the way” is a very interesting way to read, and I was surprised how much Wealth of Nations rose in my eyes as a result of this project. I would like to do Keynes and Hayek and perhaps Marx in this manner as well.
On the proper interpretation of “The Great Stagnation”
Will Hutton writes:
At least Summers sees some underlying economic dynamism. For techno-pessimists such as economist Professor Tyler Cowen the future is even darker. It is not only that automation and robotisation are coming, but that there are no new worthwhile transformational technologies for them to automate. All the obvious human needs – to move, to have power, to communicate – have been solved through cars, planes, mobile phones and computers. According to Cowen, we have come to the end of the great “general purpose technologies” (technologies that transform an entire economy, such as the steam engine, electricity, the car and so on) that changed the world. There are no new transformative technologies to carry us forward, while the old activities are being robotised and automated. This is the “Great Stagnation”.
Such views make for a convenient target, but that is not close to what I wrote in The Great Stagnation. For instance on p.83 you will find me proclaiming, after several pages of details, “For these reasons, I am optimistic about getting some future low-hanging fruit.” Those are not Straussian passages hidden like the extra Nirvana audio track at the end of Nevermind. The very subtitle of the book announces “How America…(Eventually) Will Feel Better Again.”
I also argue in the book that the internet is the next transformational technology, and that it is already here, though it needs some time to mature and pay off. I devoted an entire separate book to this theme, namely The Age of the Infovore, which suggests that for autistics and other infovores massive progress already has arrived.
It is also odd that Hutton mentions robots and automation. My next book considers those factors in great detail, but you won’t find either term or variants thereof in the index of The Great Stagnation. Nor do I have the dual worry that both everything will be automated and there is nothing left to automate, as stated by Hutton.
The lesson perhaps is that if a book has a pessimistic-sounding title, mentions of optimism will go unheeded, even if they are in the subtitle. Might that be an example of the fallacy of mood affiliation?