Tuesday assorted links
Legacy Admissions
I admire but do not necessarily approve of the genius at UVA admissions who slyly inserted legacies into the essay prompt, yet shrewdly combined it with race, slavery and history to make the package defensible.
If you have a personal or historic connection with UVA, and if you’d like to share how your experience of this connection has prepared you to contribute to the University, please share your thoughts here. Such relationships might include, but are not limited to, being a child of someone who graduated from or works for UVA, a descendant of ancestors who labored at UVA, or a participant in UVA programs.
“Eating alone”
Bowling alone was just the beginning:
Even pizza, typically shared among family or friends, is downsizing.
In February, Domino’s Japan, the nation’s largest pizza delivery chain, introduced My Domino’s, a meal set that allows customers to order a small, 7-inch pizza with two side dishes for a reasonable price.
“Single consumers are growing, not only in Japan but in the world, and the question is how we can reach these people, how we can offer something special for these customers,” says Martin Steenks, CEO of Domino’s Japan. “The bento is always for one person, so why not create a pizza for one person? This was actually the biggest reason for us behind this whole set up.”
The concept proved a hit and according to Domino’s Japan, more than 2 million orders had been placed as of July 15. In addition, the company offers pizza rice bowls and pizza sandwiches — also targeting single consumers — and is trying to reach out to older customers who are typically less tech savvy compared to their younger counterparts.
Here is the full story.
How will we know when higher education is reforming itself?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the intro:
When the revolution in higher education finally arrives, how will we know? I have a simple metric: When universities change how they measure faculty work time. Using this yardstick, the US system remains very far from a fundamental transformation.
And:
This system [of numerically well-defined courseloads], which has been in place for decades, does not allow for much flexibility. If a professor is a great and prolific mentor, for instance, she receives no explicit credit for that activity. Nor would she if she innovates and discovers a new way to use AI to improve teaching for everyone.
This courseload system, which minimizes conflict and maximizes perceptions of fairness, is fine for static times with little innovation. If the university administration asks you for two classes, and you deliver two classes, everyone is happy.
But today’s education system is dynamic, and needs to become even more so. There is already the internet, YouTube, and a flurry of potential innovations coming from AI. If professors really are a society’s best minds, shouldn’t they be working to improve the entire educational process, not just punching the equivalent of a time clock at a university?
Such a change would require giving them credit for innovations, which in turn would require a broader conception of their responsibilities. Ideally, a department chair or dean or provost ought to be able to tell them to add a certain amount of value to the teaching and student development process — through mentoring, time in the classroom or other ways. The definition of a good job would not be just fulfilling the “2-2” teaching load called for in a contract, it would be more discretionary.
This would be hard to make work, of course, and many faculty would hate it. If the teaching requirement is discretionary, and in the hands of administrators, many professors will fear being bargained into a higher workload. Almost certainly, many (not all) professors would be bargained into a higher workload.
Definitely worth a ponder. The problem of course is that universities are in some regards low trust institutions, so renegotiating class load requirements simply isn’t going to go very well.
Monday assorted links
Claudia Goldin Wins Nobel
Claudia Goldin wins the Nobel! Goldin is an economic historian, she was inspired to go into economics by Alfred Kahn (later the architect of airline deregulation) and became a student of Robert Fogel at the University of Chicago. Goldin pioneered the historical analysis of the labor market and gender. If you want to read a single Goldin piece then very fortuitously and appropriately her NBER paper called…Why Women Won just appeared as an NBER working paper! The Nobel Prize committee’s Scientific Background is a good summary of her work including her important work on education with Larry Katz.
Goldin is well known at MR which makes covering this year’s Nobel easy as I can point to our MRU videos on Goldin and her podcast with Conversations with Tyler.
First, an overview of Goldin and her work, especially interesting on her archival work. Goldin wasn’t just downloading datasets she discovered and developed them!
Next is my video on one of Goldin’s key papers (with Katz) about how the development of the pill vastly accelerated women entering the workforce especially in the professions (we also cover Goldin’s paper in Modern Principles.)
Women working: What’s the Pill Got To Do With It?
Then there is Tyler’s Conversations with Tyler podcast with Goldin. I am struck by how little Goldin is willing to speculate, pontificate or advocate in that conversation and instead sticks to the data.
Finally, here are many other MR posts on Goldin.
“Why Women Won”
That is the title of a new NBER working paper, published today, by…Claudia Goldin. Here is the abstract:
How, when, and why did women in the US obtain legal rights equal to men’s regarding the workplace, marriage, family, Social Security, criminal justice, credit markets, and other parts of the economy and society, decades after they gained the right to vote? The story begins with the civil rights movement and the somewhat fortuitous nature of the early and key women’s rights legislation. The women’s movement formed and pressed for further rights. Of the 155 critical moments in women’s rights history I’ve compiled from 1905 to 2023, 45% occurred between 1963 and 1973. The greatly increased employment of women, the formation of women’s rights associations, the belief that women’s votes mattered, and the unstinting efforts of various members of Congress were behind the advances. But women soon became splintered by marital status, employment, region, and religion far more than men. A substantial group of women emerged in the 1970s to oppose various rights for women, just as they did during the suffrage movement. They remain a potent force today.
I will read it soon…
Do looks matter for an academic career in economics?
We show that physical appearance plays a role in the success of economics PhD graduates and investigate the underlying mechanisms driving this relationship. Leveraging a unique dataset of career and research productivity trajectories of PhD graduates from leading economics departments in the United States, we provide robust evidence that appearance is a predictive factor for both research productivity and job placement. Our analysis goes beyond establishing the association between attractiveness and success within the profession. By jointly examining appearance, job outcome, and research productivity, as well as the longitudinal development of the latter two over time, we show that the effect of appearance can be partially, but not fully, attributed to its role as a predictor of research productivity, with the remainder of the effect reflecting an intrinsic demand for attractiveness.
That is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, by Galina Hale, Tali Regev, and Yona Rubinstein. Via Rolf Degen. And here is a recent piece on lookism and fund managers.
Sunday assorted links
*Maestros and Monsters*
The author is Robert Boyers and the subtitle is Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, and the book appears to be an account of their friendship, and also rivalry. Here is one early passage:
Still, it ought to have been obvious that what made Susan authentically cool was not principally her image or her beauty but her demeanor, the almost impossibly self-possession stamped on everything she wrote and in her every utterance. She was, after all, rigorous even about pleasure. She had little or no patience with those who wanted to relax. She wanted her pleasures rare and immoderate. In her presence, I felt my own impulses quicken. I felt smarter, more alert, poised to be contradicted, even undermined. I never doubted the force and ferocity of her will, never minded that to be in her company was to revolve around her. She was cool because she knew how to make conversation dangerous. There was no inclination in Susan towards the obvious or self-evident. Though she could be down to earth, even somewhat vulnerable, with those who were permitted to come close, she rarely let down her determination to be demanding. Cool was in her a perfect, unstudied resistance to banality and incoherence. Responsive to enigma and sublimity, she had no feeling for child’s play or frivolity. She had her chosen masters but was always also masterful in the exercise of her own seductive powers.
I will keep reading…
Who will win the next Nobel Prize in economics?
My prediction is a joint prize for Tim Bresnahan and Ariel Pakes, for Industrial Organization, a mix of game theory and empirical methods. Usually I am wrong (sorry guys!).
What are your predictions?
Note that for reasons of time zone and travel, I might not be around to cover the Prize this coming Monday, apologies! We will see. I believe that Alex in any case will be here…
What I’ve been reading
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Have you ever been confused by Naomi Klein vs. Naomi Wolf? Intellectually they are both pretty crazy. And they are both named Naomi. Some might think they bear some resemblance to each other. Well, here is a whole book on that confusion! And it is written by Naomi Klein. How much insight and self-awareness can one intellectually crazy person have about being confused for another intellectually crazy person? Quite a bit, it turns out. Recommended, though with the provision that I understand you never felt you needed to read a whole book about such a topic.
Benjamin Labutut, The Maniac. Chilean author, he has penned the story of von Neumann but in the latter part of the book switches to contemporary AI and AlphaGO, semi-fictionalized. Feels vital and not tired, mostly pretty good, thoiiugh for some MR readers the material may be excessively familiar.
J.M. Coetzee, The Pole. Short, compelling, self-contained, again deals with older men who have not resolved their issues concerning sex. Good but not great Coetzee.
Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker. I am honored to have blurbed this book.
Richard Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans is one mighty fine book.
Shuchen Xiang, Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea. Chinese cosmopolitanism, there was more of it than you might have thought. Should we be asking “Where did it go?” Or is it there more than ever?
A few implications
I am not saying these are rational, or not, in any case they are predictions:
1. The momentum for gun control in the United States will weaken. There is a claim on Twitter that only two percent of Israeli households have guns at hand. May or may not be exactly true, but many people will become more attached to the idea of gun ownership as a means of defense.
2. We Americans will indeed build The Wall on our southern border.
3. The doctrine of deterrence has taken a beating. Few doubt that Israel can strike back at Gaza in a very powerful way, and yet that wasn’t enough to stop the attacks. I am still trying to digest this one.
4. A certain kind of military-flavored AI accelerationism will win out. Given #3, it no longer suffices to think you can deter a drone attack from your enemies, even if your country is very powerful. Rather you need your own drones, and your intelligence, to forestall major casualties in the first place.
Japan fact of the day
Employee earnings have dropped 2% in real terms in the past year and by 8% in the past decade.
Saturday assorted links
1. Model this.
2. A bunch of claims about nobles, genetics, and violence.
3. New results on interpretability. And much more detail. Potentially very good news. One interpretation. Some are becoming less pessimistic.
4. Arnold Kling on the trouble with books. Remedies will come!