The school without WiFi
Until recently, a nearby radio telescope meant the local school could not use WiFi. And how did that go?
In many ways, Green Bank was an unintentional experiment in pedagogy. While the rest of the country rushed to bring tech into classrooms, Green Bank remained stuck in 1999. Without WiFi, the school’s 200 students couldn’t use Chromebooks or digital textbooks, or do research online. Teachers couldn’t access individualized education programs online or use Google Docs for staff meetings. Even routine tasks such as state-mandated standardized testing became challenging, with students rotating through a small, hardwired computer lab where they took the exams.
“The ability to individualize learning with an iPad or a laptop — that’s basically impossible,” said teacher Darla Huddle, who previously taught in Pennsylvania. The school uses the Eureka Math curriculum, which also has a large digital platform with interactive videos and customizable instruction, but those add-ons aren’t available in Green Bank’s classrooms.
“Without the online component of our curriculum fully working, it’s really detrimental to our instruction,” said teacher Sarah Brown, who has worked in schools in North Carolina. “It feels very antiquated because the technology that we’re using is so out of date.”
Proposals had been floated over the years for the school to get WiFi without interfering with the observatory. One idea was to install LiFi, which emits low-range WiFi through lightbulbs, but the technology was finicky and expensive. Another thought was to pile an enormous dirt mound behind the school to prevent the WiFi from radiating toward the telescopes, but that would have destroyed the soccer fields.
While those discussions dragged on, students fell further behind in math and reading, with Green Bank consistently posting the lowest test scores in the county. “Our kids are no different than the other kids in the county,” said Principal Melissa Jordan. “The only difference, in my opinion, is their lack of access to engaging technology.”
Here is the full WaPo story, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Saturday assorted links
*How to be a Public Ambassador for Science*
The subtitle is The Scientist as Public Intellectual, and the author is my very good friend Jim Olds, who works at George Mason University. A very timely topic, here is one excerpt:
I was only about eight weeks into my new job. I’d been sworn in and found myself very much thrown into the pool’s deep end. First, the job was much more than serving as the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) lead for President Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project. Second, the learning curve was very steep. There were meetings full of acronyms that meant nothing to me. And these were my meetings — with my direct reports. I had learned the hard way that the Eisenhower Conference Center in the White House complex was made of steel and acted like a Faraday cage: cell phones didn’t work there. Tuesdays started with breakfast at 7:30 a.m. and went straight through for 12 hours with meeting after meeting.
Recommended, most of all informative about the NSF and also neuroscience.
The robustness reproducibility of the American Economic Review
We estimate the robustness reproducibility of key results from 17 non-experimental AER papers published in 2013 (8 papers) and 2022/23 (9 papers). We then subject each robustness report to two independent, expert reviews. Including robustness tests rated as equally or more valid than the original analyses by expert reviewers, the fraction of significant robustness tests (p<0.05) varies between 0% and 93% across papers with a mean of 51%. The mean relative t/z-value of our robustness tests varies between 11% and 152% with a mean of 70%. Surveyed economists overestimate robustness but are able to predict which papers are most robust.
That is from a new paper by Douglas Campbell, Abel Brodeur, Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, Joseph Kopecky, Lester Lusher, and Nikita Tsoy. Here is very useful Twitter coverage from Douglas Campbell.
Philosophy of freedom podcast with philosopher Rebecca Lowe
Here is the audio and transcript. Here is one excerpt:
Tyler: I think there are many notions of freedom, more than just three, but positive and negative are by far the most important. And they’re the ones you can at least try to build into political systems. A greater number of people understand what you’re talking about. And if you can manage to take care of those two in a reasonably satisfactory manner, odds are you’ve just succeeded. And I wouldn’t be too fussy about the others.
But I bet if you sat down, you could come up with 57 different kinds of freedom that are relevant. Look at Amartya Sen’s Paretian liberal paradox. Well, what would you choose if the choice affected only you? For him, that’s a significant part of liberty. I think it’s an insignificant part, but if he insists on putting it on his list, okay, it can go on the list.
And:
Rebecca: So when you talk about positive freedom, I think maybe what you’re talking about is something like an agent-focused framing of freedom. So I think one of the problems with the kind of negative framings generally, so if we think about the classic, particularly on the kind of liberal/libertarian side, people might want to say something like freedom is non-interference, freedom is non-coercion. The republicans might say it’s non-domination.
One risk with these things is I think it avoids centring the person who it is who’s doing the free thing, the person who has freedom, the agent. Is that fair?
Lots of lengthy threads and back and forth, so not so easy to excerpt. This podcast was almost entirely fresh material, and of course it is recommended.
We also decided to leave in the post-podcast discussion of the podcast itself. A good practice which should spread more widely, here is part of that:
TYLER
Let me give you a sense of where I think we’ve arrived at, and tell me if you agree. See if this is some kind of constructive progress. You want to defend societies based on freedom with some kind of metaphysics and you want to build up that metaphysics. I want to defend societies based on freedom, which are roughly the same societies as you want to defend, with a minimum of metaphysics. I’m always trying to push the metaphysics out the door. So a lot of this conversation has been Rebecca drags in the metaphysics…
REBECCA
This is my life! You know this!
TYLER
… and then Tyler… the baseball is thrown at him, he sort of quickly has it in his hands, and then tosses it to the other side of the room. Metaphysics, get away! And then Rebecca is frustrated because the metaphysics are gone and she throws more metaphysics at him. And that’s what we’ve been doing. Is that a fair characterisation of, you know, the show so far, as they call it?
Here is Rebecca’s Substack and podcast more generally, the emphasis is on people doing philosophy.
Friday assorted links
1. New results on the detection of AI writing.
2. Jasmine Sun visits China and Shenzhen.
3. Emotional intelligence measures for different LLMs.
4. One description of the new cultural vibes. Not exactly my view, but of interest.
5. Africa needs lots of large private sector firms.
Resources for Teaching Tariffs
Trump has put tariffs on the economics agenda in a way that hasn’t been true for decades. As a new semester of principles of economics begins, here are some resources for teaching tariffs.
Comparative Advantage (video)
The Microeconomics of Tariffs and Protectionism (video)
Why Do Domestic Prices Rise with Tariffs? (post)
Trade Diversion (Why Tariffs on More Countries Can Be Better) (post)
Manufacturing and Trade (post), Manufacturing Went South (post) and Tariffs Hurt Manufacturing (post)
Three Simple Rules of Trade Policy (Lerner symmetry, imports are inputs, trade balances and capital flows; post)
Tariffs and Taxes (post), Tariffs are a Terrible Way to Raise Revenue (Albrecht post) and Consistency on Tariffs and Taxes (post)
Globalization: Economics, Culture and the Future (video)
The Tariff Tracker, great source for real time tracking of prices such as below (the data can be downloaded):
The War on Roommates: Why Is Sharing a House Illegal?
Boarding houses were made illegal by zoning that enforced single family homes and by rules limiting occupancy, demanding every room have a private bathroom, outlawing shared kitchens, requiring parking spaces for every resident etc.
How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Lowest-Cost Housing Option is an excellent, hard-hitting piece making and extending these points and significantly it’s not from a libertarian think tank but Pew:
Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities. Well into the 20th century, SROs were the least expensive option on the housing market, providing a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen for a price that is unimaginable today—as little as $100 to $300 a month (in 2025 dollars).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landlords converted thousands of houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings into SROs, and by 1950, SRO units made up about 10% of all rental units in some major cities. But beginning in the mid-1950s, as some politicians and vocal members of the public turned against SROs and the people who lived in them, major cities across the country revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate SRO units and to prohibit the development of new ones. Over the next several decades, governments and developers gradually demolished thousands of SROs or converted them to other uses, including boutique hotels for tourists. And as SROs disappeared, homelessness—which had been rare from at least the end of the Great Depression to the late 1970s—exploded nationwide.
The Pew piece does an excellent job of documenting how laws are beginning to change. I especially appreciated this point: the simplest reform is to stop making it illegal for unrelated people to share a home!
Perhaps the simplest method of creating low-cost shared housing is to allow unrelated individuals to share a house in the same way that relatives are allowed to share a house.67 But many communities limit the number of unrelated people who can live together—in some places, to as few as two. Such laws make sharing a house for a group of roommates—which usually enables rents lower than having an individual apartment—illegal. The U.S. has a record number of unused bedrooms, but many cannot be rented because of restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates, even if that would be the most profitable use for the landlord and the most affordable option for the tenants.68 To enable this low-cost housing option, Iowa, Oregon, and Colorado all passed bipartisan legislation to strike down local codes that prohibit house-sharing (in 2017, 2021, and 2024, respectively).69
So many of our problems are created by busybodies and do-gooders who prevent people from using their own property.
Discrimination on #EconTwitter
This paper documents discrimination in the formation of professional networks among academic economists. We created 80 bot accounts that claim to be PhD students differing in three characteristics: gender (male or female), race (Black or White), and university affiliation (top- or lower-ranked). The bots randomly followed 6,920 users in the #EconTwitter community. Follow-back rates were 12 percent higher for White students compared to Black students, 21 percent higher for students from top-ranked universities compared to those from lower-ranked institutions, and 25 percent higher for female compared to male students. Notably, the racial gap persists even among students from top-ranked institutions.
That is from a new AERInsights paper by Nicolás Ajzenman, Bruno Ferman, and Pedro C. Sant’Anna. Here is a useful picture from the paper. Being at a top school, or at least pretending to be, is what really matters?
A Model of Populism as a Conspiracy Theory
We model populism as the dissemination of a false “alternative reality,” according to which the intellectual elite conspires against the populist for purely ideological reasons. If enough voters are receptive to it, this alternative reality—by discrediting the elite’s truthful message—reduces political accountability. Elite criticism, because it is more consistent with the alternative reality, strengthens receptive voters’ support for the populist. Alternative realities are endogenously conspiratorial to resist evidence better. Populists, to leverage or strengthen beliefs in the alternative reality, enact harmful policies that may disproportionately harm the non-elite. These results explain previously unexplained facts about populism.
That is from the latest AER, by Adam Szeidl and Ferenc Szucs. In other words, a lot of you are falling for it.
The worst news you will hear today (where are they?)
Tremendous progress in the field of prebiotic chemistry has shown how simple compounds available on ancient Earth could have given rise to the molecular building blocks of life1. The current challenge is to work out how these building blocks could have assembled into functional polymers, such as peptides and nucleic acids, in the absence of biological systems. Prebiotic peptide assembly from amino acids is particularly difficult to establish, given that the intricate biological machinery used today to synthesize peptides obscures the origins of the process. Writing in Nature, Singh et al.2 report chemistry that could plausibly have facilitated a key step of peptide synthesis during the prebiotic era.
Here is the link. Here is WaPo coverage.
Thursday assorted links
Abundance lacking!
Amtrak is launching a new high-speed Acela train, but there is one wrinkle: It isn’t actually faster, yet.
Five next-generation Acela trains begin service Thursday as part of a $2.45 billion project to improve service along the key Washington-to-Boston corridor. But two of them running from Washington to Boston will actually travel more slowly than their predecessors do on the same route Thursday, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Amtrak’s schedule. These new trains are scheduled to take at least seven hours and five minutes to complete the trip, compared with the average time of six hours and 56 minutes on the older Acela trains.
Here is more from the WSJ. Via Anecdotal.
Equity shares in Intel
I am against it. Here is my Free Press column, and an excerpt:
This won’t be the last government takeover—or at least that’s what Trump is promising. Trump says he wants to do more of this with other companies, with TSMC, Micron, and Samsung as other potential targets.
Over the longer run, who is to know what might come next? A bank or two? A private equity firm? Something in crypto? How about an artificial intelligence company?
Indeed, just yesterday National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett mentioned a plan for a sovereign wealth fund. Trump is saying, “I want to try to get as much as I can.”
If you are a major CEO, the message could not be clearer: Tread very, very carefully. Think again before you criticize this president or this White House.
…Sadly, the Republicans are no less culpable, thinking only of the short run. How will they like it, some number of years from now, when a younger Bernie Sanders (AOC?) turns this logic against them, takes some equity in a subsidized company, and steers it toward left-wing ends? But only a modest number of pundits and commentators on the right have criticized the president for this move.
I am all for advance purchase agreements to address issue of national security, which yes in my view include chips. But this arrangement will prove counterproductive. If nothing else, it is a huge tactical error to connect the “do something about chips” cause with the “expand the executive powers of Trump” cause.
How well did Katrina reconstruction go?
…the federal government did something extraordinary: It committed more than $140 billion toward the region’s recovery. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than was spent on the post-World War II Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe or for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks. It remains the largest post-disaster domestic recovery effort in U.S. history…
Today, New Orleans is smaller, poorer and more unequal than before the storm. It hasn’t rebuilt a durable middle class, and lacks basic services and a major economic engine outside of its storied tourism industry.
The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will. Federal dollars were funneled into a maze of state agencies and local governments with clashing priorities, vague metrics and near-zero accountability. Billions went to contractors and government consultants services such as schools, transit, health care and housing were neglected. For example, one firm, ICF International, received nearly $1 billion to administer Road Home, the oft-criticized state program to rebuild houses.
Here is more from Mark F. Bonner and Mathew D. Sanders at the NYT.