What are the best sources on how to be a good teacher?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Charlie Clarke, a Finance PhD student at UConn, and a loyal MR reader, writes to me:

Hi Tyler,

I’m a grad student teaching for the first time, and I was wondering if  you had any recommendations for a book relaying evidence based advice for teaching methods.  I know Cowen’s law, “There is a literature on everything.”  Just hoping there is a good book or two synthesizing that literature so that I can use it to improve my teaching.

Love the blog.

The most important lesson is to use the right textbook.  Beyond that:

1. Give a damn.

2. Get to the point when you speak.

3. Expect something from them.

4. Teach to the students who are interested in learning.

5. At all levels, do not overestimate the attention span of your audience.

6. Do not be afraid to be idiosyncratic, provided you adhere strictly to #2.

Those are my tips.  But to be honest, I do not consider them RCT-tested and I am not sure they maximize social welfare.  They instead start from the premise that the key question is what kind of person do I want to be, and then the method asks the students to conform to that vision.  Some or all of them might prove RCT-neutral, or worse.  Nonetheless, the approach is a good way to motivate me and that is part of the problem.

Doesn’t Bryan Caplan have a post on this?  Here is John Baez on how to teach.  Peoples, what can you recommend from the literature?

John Brown Smokehouse

by  Tyler Cowen in

25-08 37th Avenue (Crescent Avenue), Long Island City, Queens; (718) 361-0085.  Set in the middle of nowhere, these are the best burnt ends I’ve had, including Kansas City, and the best lamb sausage I’ve had, ever.  The pastrami is the other winner.  Quite possibly this is the best barbecue on the entire East Coast and it is one of the better barbecue experiences in the country.  Here is one review.

They let me sample about five other dishes, and while they were very tasty they did not compare to the absolute winners cited above.

Me: “I know this is a stupid question, but how come the food here is so good?”

The Pitmaster: “That’s how we make it.”

The balance sheet recession and The Great Stagnation

by  Tyler Cowen in

Many people point out that we are in a balance sheet recession.  I agree with this view but wish to push it one step deeper.  The negative wealth and income effects on debtors are positive wealth and income effects for the creditors.  If the creditors were keener to invest that money in useful, productive activities the economy would be much stronger.  Balance sheet recessions are most problematic when the investment channel is for some reason broken or especially weak.

You might think “Ah, the weak investment channel is due to weak AD.”  And in part it is.  But, if I may quote the Austrians, production takes time and recoveries do not take forever.  Investors are often keen to invest into the swoosh of a future, not too far away, post-recession boom.  But this desire has been much weaker than in many times past.  A lot of the weakness of AD comes from the investment side, and in fact it predated the recession.

From the comments, on the UK

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is from a loyal reader named “a”:

How high are marginal rates of deductions in the UK?:

Consider an employee paid £50,000 gross who gets a £1,000 pay rise.

Let’s assume they are yet to pay off their student loan and contribute 7.5% to a (underfunded*) pension scheme and get 8% employer contributions to their pension.

Our employee’s employer will also pay the government an extra £218 pension contributions and national insurance (payroll) contributions, 8% and 13.8% of gross earnings respectively.

So the total increase in cost to the employer is £1,218.

Of their pay rise our employee pays £75 pension contributions, £90 student loan repayments, and £370 in income tax, giving total employee deductions £555.

This gives a marginal deduction rate of 63.46% (£445/£1,218).

If our employee buys goods which are liable for VAT they will lose a further 20%, resulting in a 70.77% marginal rate of deductions.

Oh and our employee must pay a local government lump sum tax of around £1,500 from their net wages.

So our employee faces a marginal rate of deductions 63.46% on non-VAT items, 70.77% on VAT items, and an average rate of deduction of 52% of pre-deduction earnings.

A similar analysis on a worker paid the minimum wage (around £12,500 a year), or £1000 above the minimum wage results in a marginal rate of deduction of 32% and an average rate of deduction of 52%. This ignores the withdrawal of means tested benefits.

Might this be the supply side explanation Scott Sumner has been looking for?

* UK private pension schemes currently have a £265bn deficit.

China Fact of the Day: China Outsources to Europe

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Spiegel: Great Wall this week became the first Chinese automobile manufacturer to open an automobile assembly plant inside the European Union…

…Bulgaria, the EU’s poorest country, is attractive as a labor market because it is an oasis of cheap wages and low taxes. Workers are considered well educated and the country is ideal as the site for a company like Great Wall to launch. Given that wages for factory workers have risen considerably in China in recent years, assembly sites abroad have become increasingly attractive for some manufacturers.

Expect to see a lot more of this in coming years.. As wealth and consumption increases, China will also begin to import more from developed countries, including more finished goods.

Markets in everything, Friday cat blogging edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jordana Serebrenik may be New York City’s only for-hire pet-cat catcher. Her service, Catch Your Cat, Etc., does what it suggests: Ms. Serebrenik, a Murray Hill resident, will go to your home and corral your cat in situations when you cannot do so or prefer not to.

Her clients range from the old or physically impaired to those distraught at the idea of having to force their cat to go somewhere they do not want to go: the vet, for example.

“Some people just need someone who isn’t emotionally attached,” Ms. Serebrenik said.

Her business card — which asks, “Can’t get Fluffy into a carrier?” — is in veterinarians’ waiting rooms and pet supply stores around the city. Testimonials on her Facebook page are effusive.

A catch goes for about $80, and the video at the beginning is good.  Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Richard Herron.

Is charity a major source of deadweight loss?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the excellent Stefano DellaVigna, John List, and Ulrike Malmendier:

Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.80 for an in-state charity and $1.40 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower the utility of the potential donors.

Do read the whole thing, superb research design.  What percentage of human activity might be well-described by a similar hypothesis?

Here is my 2006 NYT column on John List’s work on charity, he is one of the leading economists today.

Hans-Werner Sinn on the “green paradox”

by  Tyler Cowen in

The period of real [energy] price declines coincided with the emergence of the “green” movement and the re-orientation of the world energy policies by way of inducing direct demand restraints and introducing incentive systems to foster the development of “green” replacement technologies.  Thus, the threat of market destruction may indeed have increased the supply of fossil fuels enough to more than offset the growing world demand, thereby inducing real energy prices to fall, contrary to what a forward-looking explanation along the lines of Hotelling’s theory would have suggested prima facie.

That is from Sinn’s new book The Green Paradox: A Supply-Side Approach to Global Warming.

Immigration fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Dan Griswold, via Bryan Caplan:

The typical foreign-born adult resident of the United States today is more likely to participate in the work force than the typical native-born American. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (2011), the labor-force participation rate of the foreign-born in 2010 was 67.9 percent, compared to the native-born rate of 64.1 percent. The gap was especially high among men. The labor-force participation rate of foreign-born men in 2010 was 80.1 percent, a full 10 percentage points higher than the rate among native-born men.

Labor-force participation rates were highest of all among unauthorized male immigrants in the United States. According to estimates by Jeffrey Passell (2006) of the Pew Hispanic Center, 94 percent of illegal immigrant men were in the labor force in the mid-2000s.