Results for “roland fryer”
38 found

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Why is the Iranian government opening the world’s biggest bookstore?

2. Interesting new books still to come in 2016, good offbeat but quality list.  And here is a more populist and more British Guardian summer reading symposium.

3. New Athey and Imbens survey of applied econometrics, 75 pp. pdf, probably very good.

4. Some major diseases are fading, and for mysterious reasons (NYT).  Yet if you are an astronaut, a mysterious syndrome is worsening your sight.

5. The Coasean, lobster-buying monks of Prince Edward Island.

6. Why are many insect populations declining?

7. It seems there is racial bias in police use of force, but not police shootings.  That is an NYT story, do note some limitations in the data, here is the Roland Fryer NBER paper.  Good Twitter comments here.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Neerav Kingsland on Roland Fryer’s RCT policy proposals for education.

2. Did public mechanical clocks boost economic growth in early modern Europe? (pdf)

3. What are the keys to an effective apology?  Article here.

4. A RAND study which is skeptical about the safety of autonomous vehicles.

5. Chinese hospital and doctor ticket scalpers.

6. Do institutional investors lead to sector-wide collusion? (NYT)

The gender gap in math is weak in Muslim countries

by  Tyler Cowen in

Moving to cross-country comparisons, we find earlier results linking the gender gap in math to measures of gender equality are sensitive to the inclusion of Muslim countries, where, in spite of women’s low status, there is little or no gender gap in math.

That is for students, not mathematicians, and it is from a new paper by Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt, hat tip goes to Chris Blattman.  Overall they conclude that the standard variables do not very well explain changes in the gender gap in math over time.

A non-gated version of the paper is here and it seems to be different.  Here is another version.

Perkins versus Promise Academy Charter School

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I was astounded to read in the NYTimes that Bill Perkins, state senator from Harlem, opposes charter schools:

Over the last decade, as charter schools have multiplied, Mr. Perkins has undergone a dramatic shift and emerged as their most outspoken critic in the Legislature, writing guest columns in newspapers and delivering impassioned speeches criticizing the “privatization” of public schools.

When officials of the city’s Department of Education announced last year that they planned to place a charter school inside the Public School 123 building in Harlem, Mr. Perkins was infuriated. With help from his chief of staff, several parents and teachers’ union representatives staged a protest there on the first day of school, holding signs that labeled charter schools as “separate and unequal.”

Perkins's opposition is astounding because among the charter schools he opposes are Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children’s Zone schools.  Here from the NBER Digest is a summary of recent research on these schools:

Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer find that in the fourth and fifth grade, the math test scores of charter school lottery winners and losers are virtually identical to those of a typical black student in the New York City schools. After attending the Promise Academy middle school for three years, black students score as well as comparable white students. They are 11.6 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level in sixth grade, 17.9 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level in seventh grade, and 27.5 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level by eighth grade. Overall, Promise Academy middle school enrollment appears to increase math scores by 1.2 standard deviations in eighth grade, more than the estimated benefits from reductions in class size, Teach for America, or Head Start.

These increases are very large and although supported by randomized experiment I wouldn't be surprised if future research cuts them down but if the true effect were even a quarter as large it would still be big news.  As Fryer told David Brooks “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes."

I don't know why anyone interested in the welfare of children would want to discourage this kind of experimentation.

The Ku Klux Klan

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the abstract from the new Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt paper:

The Ku Klux Klan reached its heyday in the mid-1920s, claiming millions
of members.  In this paper, we analyze the 1920s Klan, those who joined
it, and the social and political impact that it had.  We utilize a wide
range of newly discovered data sources including information from Klan
membership roles, applications, robe-order forms, an internal audit of
the Klan by Ernst and Ernst, and a census that the Klan conducted after
an internal scandal.  Combining these sources with data from the 1920
and 1930 U.S. Censuses, we find that individuals who joined the Klan
were better educated and more likely to hold professional jobs than the
typical American.  Surprisingly, we find few tangible social or
political impacts of the Klan.  There is little evidence that the Klan
had an effect on black or foreign born residential mobility, or on
lynching patterns.  Historians have argued that the Klan was successful
in getting candidates they favored elected.  Statistical analysis,
however, suggests that any direct impact of the Klan was likely to be
small.  Furthermore, those who were elected had little discernible
effect on legislation passed.  Rather than a terrorist organization, the
1920s Klan is best described as a social organization built through a
wildly successful pyramid scheme fueled by an army of
highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance,
and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.

I find this interpretation plausible; for many (evil) people, evil is downright fun, especially if you are bored in the first place.  Both Donnie Brasco and The Sopranos capture aspects of this equation.

Google does not generate a non-gated version, let us know in the comments if I missed one.

The economics of street charity

by  Tyler Cowen in

Freakonomics/NYT holds a symposium, including me, Nassim Taleb, Barbara Ehrenreich, Arthur Brooks, and Mark Cuban, with guest comments from Roland Fryer and Stephen Dubner.  My first sentence:

I’m not keen on giving money to the beggar.

Here is another bit of mine:

Oddly, the case for giving to the beggar may be stronger if he is an alcoholic.  Alcoholism increases the chance that he is asking for the money randomly, rather than pursuing some well-calculated strategy of wastefully investing resources into begging.  But in that case, I expect the gift will be squandered on booze, so I still don’t want to give him the money.

Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Wuhan, my hometown in Central China, plans to sell the right to name streets, bridges, public plazas and high-rise buildings to businesses in exchange for money the municipal government desperately needs to make up for a "funding shortage in government operations."

Here is the story, and thanks to Petras Kudaras for the pointer.

Robert Tagorda sends along a story of governments doing the buying rather than the selling:

State leaders have tried for years to get more minority and low-income high school students to take tougher classes. One group Thursday proposed an eye-opening idea: Pay students to take the classes.  The Minnesota Private College Council called on the state to spend $50 million a year to pay eligible high school students who take and pass college-prep classes.

Alex once blogged on Roland Fryer, and paying students to get better grades.

Poverty traps and demands for loyalty

by  Tyler Cowen in

The new Roland Fryer paper looks promising:

This paper develops a model of social interactions and endogenous
poverty traps. The key idea is captured in a framework in which the
likelihood of future social interactions with members of one’s group is
partly determined by group-specific investments made by individuals. I
prove three main results. First, some individuals expected to make
group-specific capital investments are worse off because their observed
decision is used as a litmus test of group loyalty – creating a
tradeoff between human capital and cooperation among the group. Second,
there exist equilibria which exhibit bi-polar human capital investment
behavior by individuals of similar ability. Third, as social mobility
increases this bi-polarization increases. The models predictions are
consistent with the bifurcation of distinctively black names in the
mid-1960s, the erosion of black neighborhoods in the 1970s, accusations
of ‘acting white,’ and the efficacy of certain programs designed to
encourage human capital acquisition.

I have observed similar behavior among small ideological groups.  The more some members from that group succeed, the stronger the litmus/loyalty test required from remaining members.  Polarization accelerates.  Those who are left behind are often worse off than if a pooling equilibrium — everyone together in the same boot — had held.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. New Freakonomics study guide, explained and downloadable here.  Elsewhere on the Steve Levitt front, he argues with Roland Fryer that black and white kids have roughly the same mental abilities when measured at age one.

2. Google map of Mars, hat tip to Yana.

3. Here is a new cost-benefit study of the war in Iraq, from a hawk-friendly point of view.  The authors are Steve Davis, Kevin Murphy, and Bob Topel; I’ll let you know more once I’ve read it.

Paying for Performance II

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Roland Fryer’s experiment to pay school children for better grades will go into effect next year reports the New York Post.

Under the pilot, a
national testing firm will devise a series of reading and math exams to
be given to students at intervals throughout the school year.

Students
will earn the cash equivalent to a quarter of their total score – $20
for scoring 80 percent, for instance – and an additional monetary
reward for improving their grades on subsequent tests….

Levin
said details about the number of exams, what grades would be tested,
funding for the initiative – which would be paid for with private
donations – and how the cash will be distributed are still being
hammered out.…

"There are people who are
worried about giving kids extra incentives for something that they
should intrinsically be able to do," Fryer said. "I understand that,
but there is a huge achievement gap in this country, and we have to be
proactive."

Thanks to Katie Newmark for the pointer.