Can public libraries offer high school degrees? (hi future)
The Los Angeles Public Library announced Thursday that it is teaming up with a private online learning company to debut the program for high school dropouts, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.
It’s the latest step in the transformation of public libraries in the digital age as they move to establish themselves beyond just being a repository of books to a full educational institution, said the library’s director, John Szabo.
Since taking over the helm in 2012, Szabo has pledged to reconnect the library system to the community and has introduced a number of new initiatives to that end, including offering 850 online courses for continuing education and running a program that helps immigrants complete the requirements for U.S. citizenship.
The library hopes to grant high school diplomas to 150 adults in the first year at a cost to the library of $150,000, Szabo said. Many public libraries offer programs to prepare students and in some cases administer the General Educational Development test, which for decades was the brand name for the high school equivalency exam.
But Szabo believes this is the first time a public library will be offering an accredited high school diploma to adult students, who will take courses online but will meet at the library for assistance and to interact with fellow adult learners.
The article is here, and for the pointer I thank Robert Tagorda.
Assorted links
1. If you can trademark a cheese, why not a God (the God?) too?
2. Does Medicaid influence migration across states?
3. Dale Mortensen has passed away, and more here.
4. A short essay on Peter Temin.
5. Robot farmers.
6. Mysterious portraits of a young woman. There is a bit more here.
Should women brag more?
Here is the latest:
Women’s Bragging Rights: Overcoming Modesty Norms to Facilitate Women’s Self-Promotion
Jessi Smith & Meghan Huntoon
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcomingAbstract:
Within American gender norms is the expectation that women should be modest. We argue that violating this “modesty norm” by boasting about one’s accomplishments causes women to experience uncomfortable situational arousal that leads to lower motivation for and performance on a self-promotion task. We hypothesized that such negative effects could be offset when an external source for their situational arousal was made available. To test hypotheses, 78 women students from a U.S. Northwestern university wrote a scholarship application essay to promote the merits of either the self (modesty norm violated) or another person as a letter of reference (modesty norm not violated). Half were randomly assigned to hear information about a (fake) subliminal noise generator in the room that might cause “discomfort” (misattribution available) and half were told nothing about the generator (normal condition: misattribution not available). Participants rated the task and 44 new naive participants judged how much scholarship money to award each essay. Results confirmed predictions: under normal conditions, violating the modesty norm led to decreased motivation and performance. However, those who violated the modesty norm with a misattribution source reported increased interest, adopted fewer performance-avoidance goals, perceived their own work to be of higher quality, and produced higher quality work. Results suggest that when a situation helps women to escape the discomfort of defying the modesty norm, self-promotion motivation and performance improve. Further implications for enhancing women’s academic and workplace experiences are discussed.
That is via Kevin Lewis.
Books Average Previous Decade of Economic Misery
That is the new paper by Bentley, Acerbi, Ormerod, and Lampos, and here is the abstract:
For the 20th century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a ‘literary misery index’ derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates. We find a peak in the goodness of fit at 11 years for the moving average. The fit between the two misery indices holds when using different techniques to measure the literary misery index, and this fit is significantly better than other possible correlations with different emotion indices. To check the robustness of the results, we also analysed books written in German language and obtained very similar correlations with the German economic misery index. The results suggest that millions of books published every year average the authors’ shared economic experiences over the past decade.
Here is NYT coverage of that paper. Here are some related papers by Bentley and co-authors, note that American English is diverging from British English by its greater use of emotional words.
For the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
Assorted links
1. MIE: weird Japanese toothpastes. And here is a Swiss nihilist toothpaste.
2. French driverless vehicle available in the USA for 250k.
4. Where have all the Cantonese restaurants gone?
5. The economics of IBM’s Watson. There is further information here about the new business group behind Watson, more here.
6. Polar vortex map (the link uses obscenity, repeatedly).
Robert Laszewski (and Ezra Klein) on where Obamacare stands right now
This is a very good interview, read the whole thing, here is one bit from Laszewski:
There’s a big misconception that this is about young people. That’s baloney. It’s about healthy people. A healthy 20-year-old might only pay a $100 premium. You want healthy 40 and 50-year-olds. The big problem right now is really total enrollment. We only have about 10 percent of the uninsured in here. Insurers think you need more like 70 percent of a pool of people to sign up.
Here is another:
I have an interesting answer for that. I think the mandate is almost worthless because the word is getting around that they can’t really collect it. And by year three, it’s really a lot of money. I think there’ll be real pressure to just get rid of it. I don’t think you can force people to buy this insurance. If they don’t want it there’ll be a political groundswell to get rid of it. So in my mind the individual mandate is kind of irrelevant to this.
And another:
…I do have a concern that people are looking at these plans and not finding value. Some people are looking at paying 10 percent of their income for plans with huge deductibles, and then you have politics of Obamacare and the bad press of the launch and if you put all those things in a bag and mix them up, I am really concerned that the uninsured who are healthy are not finding Obamacare the value they hoped it will be. That’s the real risk for Obamacare.
Read the whole thing, for Ezra’s responses too.
“Elastic Multi-User Stochastic Equilibrium Toll Design with Direct Search Meta-Heuristics”
Here is the abstract of a sadly under-cited piece (pdf), by Dimitriou and Tsekeris, which is only now receiving some trial implementation attempts:
This study describes the use of a Direct Search (DS) meta-heuristic algorithm for solving the toll design problem, in terms of finding the optimum toll level, in private roads. The problem is formulated as a nonconvex, bilevel nonlinear mathematical program which seeks to maximize toll revenues while taking into account the travel responses of network users, through a multi-class stochastic user equilibrium traffic assignment model with elastic demand. The algorithm is implemented onto a real-life urban sub-network which includes a private highway. The results show the ability of the DS algorithm to relatively quickly find an optimal solution and signify its potential to provide a competitive alternative to the currently used genetic algorithm (GA) approach for solving such types of nonconvex bilevel programs in the sector of road transport services.
Bitcoin-like innovation without cryptocurrency
Eli Dourado reports:
Bitcoin also has applications that are not purely payments. As a distributed ledger, it can function as a notary service, providing proof that a given document existed at a particular time and date. Another innovative idea is to use Bitcoin as a bonded identity service. The proposal is to create a system of “Passports,” secure identities verified by the blockchain, backed by “fidelity bonds.” Essentially, you would create a unique identity in the system and then verifiably give a non-trivial sum of bitcoins away to whichever miner randomly processes your transaction. By making it costly to create an identity, this system could be used to ensure that dozens of new accounts are not simply created to engage in fraud, spam, or sock-puppetry. Passports could be portable across different online services, creating a persistent identity that is both pseudonymous and reputable. Reputation rating services could develop to ensure that Passport-holders who misbehave on one service are shunned on other services.
There is more here.
Introductory Korean drama
To an economist like me, this fondness for hospitals is surprising, because hospitals are expensive in Korea and much of the bill is not covered by Korea’s National Health Insurance system. Price-elasticity of demand does not seem to work in Korean drama.
That is from Princeton economist Uwe E. Reinhardt, from a document from his “class” on Korean Drama (pdf). He introduces the “class” with this explanation:
After the near-collapse of the world’s financial system has shown that we economists really do not know how the world works, I am much too embarrassed to teach economics anymore, which I have done for many years. I will teach Modern Korean Drama instead.
Although I have never been to Korea, I have watched Korean drama on a daily basis for over six years now. Therefore I can justly consider myself an expert in that subject.
By the way, I have been watching Boys Over Flowers lately, a Korean drama (it’s also on Hulu). Think of it as a mix of Heathers, Mean Girls, and Clueless, but set in a posh Korean high school, with lots of “Average is Over” value. There is definitely income-elasticity of demand in Korean drama, even if there is not much price-elasticity. There is also plenty on matching models, moral hazard, status competition, and repeated games, and not always with cooperative solutions.
For the pointer I thank Oriol Andres.
If they designed a hotel to please me (hotels for infovores)
I am enjoying the “new David Brooks” and his last column prompted me to consider what I actually look for in a hotel. It is pretty quirky and it involves:
1. Very flat pillows so the head can lie almost flat.
2. No fawning from service people.
3. Numerous ready to access electrical outlets, including a laptop outlet right next to the bed so I can lean up against the pillow while blogging.
4. A non-ventilated bathroom which allows you to steam clothes into submission, and clothes hangars which support the same.
6. NBA-relevant channels on the TV and an easy to operate remote control system which does not trap said user in irrelevant menus.
7. Good breakfast choices which do not have an excess of carbohydrates.
I am putting aside location and obvious matters such as “they don’t torture me with unscheduled wake-up calls at 4 a.m.” In any case, it is easy for an expensive hotel — boutique or not — to fail on most of those grounds.
The strongest Freestyle chess tournament since 2008
InfinityChess is pleased to announce a super strong Freestyle Tournament starting on February 4, 2014. It’s a round robin for 30 of the best freestyle and engine players from all over the world. The total prize money is $ 20,000 USD.
There is more information here, and note that these are likely to prove the best chess games played — ever — as well as a notable contribution to the science and data of man-machine interaction.
By the way, is there anyone who can donate temporary use of a leading edge server for remote use, 12-32 cores? Please email me if you can, thanks in advance, and credit (or anonymity) for you can be arranged if desired.
Given the suddenly prominent role of Freestyle chess in economics, Big Data, and the social sciences (see also The Second Machine Age), I hope this event receives some of the media attention which it deserves.
Assorted links
2. New Year resolutions for 2014.
3. Robin Harding FT piece on Piketty and inheritance: “In France, Prof Piketty charts how the annual flow of inheritances was between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of national disposable income in the 19th century. It fell to about 5 per cent in the middle of the 20th century after two world wars destroyed most of the inheritable capital stock, followed by rapid growth, high taxes on capital, inflation that eroded existing financial wealth and labour-friendly laws.
But the flow of inheritances in the country is now back to 19th-century levels; it is heading that way in the US and UK too.”
4. Can you still buy classical music in NYC these days?
5. Prison inmates think they are better than you are and morally superior. And when doctors Google their patients.
Is the Sugar Quota JUSTIFIED?
Justified, one of the best written and most entertaining shows on television, premiered last night. I liked this exchange between two drawling criminals:
Where’s the rest of the money?
That’s all we got from the candy company.
Yeah, what candy company is that Dillie?
The one that bought the sugar.
The joke is that we think the criminals are talking in street code about another white powder but, as we learn later, they actually are part of a sugar smuggling operation. The US sugar quota has increased the US price of sugar well above world levels and this has in fact pushed a number of candy companies to the wall. I suspect that few of them have turned to the black market for their sugar although I wouldn’t put this past some unethical confectioners. Nevertheless, sugar smuggling is not unknown.
In the 1980s when the US price of sugar was pushed as much as four times higher than the world price there were many smuggling schemes if not actual sugar-runners. In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss one scheme where Canadian entrepreneurs shipped super-sweet iced tea to the United States where the “tea” was then sifted and the sugar resold. And from 2000 here is a great moment for US democracy, namely US Senator Byron Dorgan rising in support of legislation:
…to prevent molasses stuffed with sugar from being allowed into this country.
As others have stated, the molasses in question is stuffed with South American sugar in Canada [those Canadians again, AT], and then transported into the United States. The sugar is then spun out of this concoction and sold in this country while the molasses is sent right back across the border to be stuffed with more sugar–and the smuggling cycle starts over again.
Jewish persecutions and weather shocks
There is a recent paper by Robert Warren Anderson, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama, and the abstract is this:
What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. Using panel data consisting of 1,366 city-level persecutions of Jews from 936 European cities between 1100 and 1800, we test whether persecutions were more likely in colder growing seasons. A one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature increased the probability of a persecution between one-half and one percentage points (relative to a baseline probability of two percent). This effect was strongest in regions with poor soil quality or located within weak states. We argue that long-run decline in violence against Jews between 1500 and 1800 is partly attributable to increases in fiscal and legal capacity across many European states.
In the Matt-Ezra debate over whether too hot or too cold is worse, this Irishman has to side against the blustery winter.
From the comments, on being a government economist
DC Economist writes:
I am in this cohort of economists (although ashamedly a non-responder to the NSF SED survey – I filled it out but neglected to mail it). And I did chose a government job over an academic offer and I’ve never been sorry that I did.
All my academic offers (2002) were from public institutions, mostly on the west coast and mid-west. For the next five years of my career, almost all of those departments had pay freezes. Meanwhile, I was quickly promoted in my government job. While the cost of living in DC eats a comfortable share of that salary differential, it was decidedly better financial move in retrospect to take the federal job. (I did not know that ex ante; my federal starting salary was actually lower than the starting pay for my best academic offer, and I assumed I was making a financial sacrifice to take a job I genuinely preferred.)
You can make even more money in consulting, but it’s a different world, and I’ve known a fair number of economists who move back and forth between consulting and government, depending on their relative preference for money vs. interesting work. Colleagues that have moved back and forth between academia and government have often voiced to me their extreme surprise how interesting and rewarding the work can be.
I just got back from recruiting at the AEAs and as always, I remain truly surprised how strongly candidates prefer academic jobs to government work. Academic jobs often have serious drawbacks — geography, teaching, collegiality (the incentives are stronger for us to all get along on this side of the market), the gut-wrenching uncertainty of the tenure track. Government jobs often offer better opportunities to do research (especially empirical work) and find similar co-authors. DC is also a great place to be an economist – lots of jobs, lots of interesting work – and the policy work is often more rewarding than teaching can often be. The one serious drawback is a lack of sabbaticals and summer research time. I often groan at the inevitable co-author email flood in May – let’s get back to our paper! – while I’m still working as hard in June as I was in March. But that’s not enough to tempt me back to academia – I’m much, much happier here.
But every year I offer a job to a junior candidate who turns me down for a really marginal academic job. I understand being turned down for a good-to-great academic offer, but turning this job down for a really marginal academic department makes no sense at all to me. And yet so many junior candidates can’t seem to imagine themselves in another line of work that they torpedo their own research opportunities to take a lower-paying, high-teaching load, academic job. Maybe they are just not that into research, and would rather have their summers off than be placed somewhere where they will work harder but have better opportunities for research. Or maybe they worry that all government jobs are being some boring government bureaucrat and they can’t see past that initial bias (those jobs do exist, but those agencies aren’t often looking for Ph.D. economists at AEAs to fill them).
Graduate students really should be more strongly considering some of the great government jobs in the DC area. You really can have a great, rewarding career here.