Results for “Tests” 772 found
What is the best interview question of all time?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, also picked by the WaPo. Excerpts:
“What are the open tabs in your browser right now?”
…First, the question measures what a person does with his or her spare time as well as work time. If you leave a browser tab open, it probably has some importance to you and you expect to return to the page. It is one metric of what you are interested in and what your work flow looks like.
It’s not just cheap talk. Some job candidates might say they are interested in C++ as a programming language, but if you actually have an open page to the Reddit and Subreddits on that topic, that is a demonstrated preference…
The question also tests for enthusiasm. If the person doesn’t seem excited about any of those open browser tabs, that may be a sign that they are blasé about other things as well. But if you get a heated pitch about why a particular website is the best guide to “Lord of the Rings” lore, you may have found a true nerd with a love of detail. That will be a plus for many jobs and avocations, though not all.
There is much more at the link, and to consider some other competing questions, do see my new book with Daniel Gross Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, publication date is today!
And do note that this particular question comes from Daniel.
Monday assorted links
1. Surgeon quality really matters.
2. Further observations on the Russian Army.
3. The Trump tariffs hurt Hollywood in China.
4. Heckman and Zhou vs. test scores.
5. Who went to BLM protests? Some of you will enjoy this point: “Finally, we provide novel evidence of overlap: attending a Black Lives Matter protest increases the likelihood of attending a protest calling for fewer public health restrictions.”
New evidence on schooling and pandemic learning
We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020-21 school year on students’ pass rates on standardized tests in Grades 3–8 across 11 states. Pass rates declined from 2019 to 2021: an average decline of 12.8 percentage points in math and 6.8 in English language arts (ELA). Focusing on within-state, within commuting zone variation in schooling mode, we estimate districts with full in-person learning had significantly smaller declines in pass rates (13.4 p.p. in math, 8.3 p.p. in ELA). The value to in-person learning was larger for districts with larger populations of Black students.
That is from a new paper by Rebecca Jack, Claie Halloran, James Okun, and Emily Oster.
France analysis of the day
Macron had promised to reduce state spending — then a record at more than 56 per cent of gross domestic product — by about 5 percentage points. Instead, under pressure from protests and the pandemic, state spending rose to a staggering 60 per cent of GDP. France’s government spending is 15 points above the average for developed economies.
Moreover, that gap is explained less by heavy spending on education, health or housing than on welfare programmes, which at 18 per cent of GDP is nearly double the average for developed economies. France is stuck in a welfare trap, spending generously on income transfers but pushed by voters to spend even more, given discontent with the rising cost of living and with inequality.
Here is more from Ruchir Sharma at the FT. And this:
Total billionaire wealth doubled under Macron to 17 per cent of GDP, and nearly 80 per cent of French billionaires’ wealth is inherited — among the highest in the world.
The benefits of educational migration
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, and I offer up a very concrete proposal:
The educational migration idea also has potential for the U.S., though with additional hurdles. American universities typically offer some tuition aid to foreign students, but they could pledge to do more. Imagine if every school in America offered 10 additional zero-tuition slots a year to students from very poor countries. The strain on the facilities of most schools would be minimal, yet with about 5,000 institutions of higher education in America, that could amount to tens of thousands of new slots for educational migrants.
Given the great and justified interest in helping emigrants from Ukraine, the U.S. and other countries might also consider special programs for Ukrainian students. Millions are leaving Ukraine, and while the charitable response has been impressive, over the longer term these individuals will need to find good jobs. Education is one major step toward this end.
And some caveats:
It remains to be seen how readily educational migration can be scaled. Not all students from poor countries have the linguistic and cultural preparation to study in the West. They may require mentoring, and they may have difficulties navigating the university application process. Universities, and the charities working with them, may have to work harder to create admissions tests that are relevant, challenging and secure. Still, they may get better at those tasks the more they try to make educational migration work.
For the original pointer I thank Richard Nerland.
Shruti Rajagopalan podcast with Lant Pritchett
There is plenty on India, RCTs, economic development, and education. Here is one bit from Pritchett:
Everybody is getting a crappy education. One of the few times I’ve gotten a spontaneous standing ovation was, I was giving a talk about Indian education to a group, mainly of IAS officers—and who were elites of the education system, who have emerged as elites from the system. I was talking about the deficits in the Indian education system. I just said, “Look, I know everybody in this room is intrinsically smarter than I am by a lot, because imagine where you would be had anyone given a shit about what you actually learned.”…
It was that the curriculum is so out of touch and the teaching is so out of touch with good teaching that by not learning the fundamentals early, it’s not the case that the elite are getting a great education. Indonesia is another place I’ve worked and lived and have a lot of love for. When the OECD did adult literacy tests, fact of the matter is that adult literacy of tertiary graduates in Jakarta—this is just a sample of the most elite city, the most elite—were lower than high school dropouts in the OECD.
Again, I think there’s this illusion that there’s this very steep gradient in a low-performing system and that the elite are coming out with super good educations. I agree that the elite coming out of the Indian system are super impressive, amazing people because no way could I have survived the education system. I’m not claiming the Indian elite aren’t unbelievably world-competitive with any elite everywhere. There’s a reason why the Indian elite come out and are now CEOs of major American corporations, but it isn’t because the education system has been this wonderfully value-added process.
It’s been an unbelievably brutal selection process, which select on a bunch of overcoming features like grit and determination and drive that then might be good signals of who could be an effective CEO. If you can survive the Indian education system, of course you can run Google.
And:
RAJAGOPALAN: How has your Utah-Idaho background, lots of exposure to Mormonism—how has that affected or shaped your perspectives on economic development?
Interesting throughout.
Which Russians are getting cancelled?
The Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov has spent the past week distraught at the horror unfolding in Ukraine. Half his family is Ukrainian, he said in a telephone interview, and as a child he spent summers there, staying with his grandparents.
His maternal grandmother was still living in Kyiv, he said, “hiding from bombs in a bunker.”
Since Russia’s invasion began, Mr. Sokolov said he had signed two online petitions calling for an end to the war, an act that carries a risk in Russia, where thousands have been arrested for protesting the conflict, and some have reportedly lost their jobs.
Yet despite his antiwar stance, Mr. Sokolov on Monday learned that the Glasgow Film Festival in Scotland had dropped his latest movie, “No Looking Back.”
Here is more from Alex Marshall at the NYT. Remind me again — why is this better than “simple racism”? The Festival noted that the Russian government earlier had funded his film work. Surely that could be grounds for cancelling anyone who went to public school in Russia?
Monday assorted links
1. Good thread on how Russia has been thinking about this conflict. “Very good thread,” said one friend.
2. “In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of losing candidates.” Link here.
3. It seems higher-priced hospitals do not deliver higher quality care.
4. Are the real lessons of Harry Potter guns and libertarianism?
Monday assorted links
1. “Amid escalating concern over global access to Covid-19 vaccines, BioNTech (BNTX) disclosed details about its plans to boost production in Africa. But the effort was met with a mixed reaction because the approach snubs a parallel effort by the World Health Organization.” No need to even click on the link, really (plus it is gated).
2. New study of the English Enclosures.
3. Maybe he should be on Metaculus? And good Ulrich Speck thread on Putin and Ukraine. Speck’s view is very close to my own.
5. Does the marshmallow test replicate?
6. Very good Noah Smith interview with Emi Nakamura on macro.
Covid markets in everything, foreign intelligence edition
A government-approved Covid testing firm is being investigated by the UK’s data privacy watchdog after it emerged that it plans to sell customers’ DNA to third parties.
Cignpost Diagnostics, which trades as ExpressTest and offers £35 tests for holidaymakers, said it holds the right to analyse samples from seals to “learn more about human health” – and sell information on to third parties.
Individuals are required to give informed consent for their sensitive medical data to be used – but customers’ consent for their DNA to be sold now as buried in Cignpost’s online documents.
When buying tests, customers were asked to tick a box agreeing to a 4,876 privacy policy which links to a separate document outlining the research programme, The Sunday Times reported…
Cignpost was founded last year and is believed to have sold as many as three million tests. It supplies pre-departure and arrival tests for travellers, with walk-in centres at sites including Gatwick and Heathrow.
Here is the full story, via Michael J.
A blow to Canadian rule of law
Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau has invoked emergency powers in an attempt to quell protests against mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations that continue to grip the nation’s capital, drawing the ire of some provincial leaders.
Trudeau pledged at a press conference on Monday that use of the powers under the Emergencies Act — which gives the federal government broad authority, including the ability to prohibit public assembly and travel — “will be time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address”. He also said the military would not be called in to deal with blockades.
Chrystia Freeland, finance minister, said Canadian banks and other financial service providers will be able to immediately freeze or suspend accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund blockades. She also warned companies that authorities will freeze their corporate accounts and suspend insurance if their trucks are being used in the protests.
Here is more from the FT. Should not the Canadian police be able to solve this issue on their own?
Did Ireland really have a housing bubble?
Ireland was not a story of overbuilding caused by laissez-faire policy, or an experience that defied standard economics. Ireland built very few ghost towns – housing excesses, where they occurred, were a product of government tax policy, rather than irrational markets. And supply and demand perform very well in explaining the trends.
And:
How on earth, you might ask, has Ireland ended up with almost all parts of its policy system trying to get lots more housing built – but the key cogwheel doing its utmost to hold new housing back? The answer, ironically, is Ireland’s own policymakers falling for the myths of the last bubble. It seems that the key personnel of the OPR believe the north-west of the country built too many homes in the 2000s because of state inattention and a wayward market, rather than as the result of extraordinary state effort to bring about that outcome. Without those reliefs, there is now little risk that new homes will be built where there is no long-term need.
Here is more from Ronan Lyons at Works in Progress, volume 6. Irish housing is for the most part very expensive today. Dublin is one of the most expensive rental markets in the world. Here is the 2019 NYT on the housing crisis in Ireland:
Homeownership has dropped, evictions and homelessness have climbed sharply, surging demand for rental units has led to a shortage, and soaring rents are fodder for daily conversation, political campaigns and street protests.
So perhaps we should speak of the Irish housing panic of the downturn rather than the bubble of the upturn? The full history here remains to be written. Somehow these are episodes most commentators do not wish to revisit.
Fracking to Europe’s Rescue
Fracking has lowered energy prices and generated huge benefits to the US economy (e.g. here, here.) Western Europe in contrast has mostly banned fracking or put in place large regulatory barriers:
Bloomberg: Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Bulgaria all effectively ban fracking. The only major activity is in Ukraine, which is weaning itself off of Russian gas, and in the U.K., where the government is promoting the technology to help replace plunging domestic output from the North Sea. In October, Cuadrilla Resources won permission to frack as many as four wells in the U.K., ending a two-and-a-half year battle with local authorities. In 2011, tremors caused by an exploratory Cuadrilla rig in northwestern England led to a one-year moratorium on fracking in the country. In 2013, hundreds of protesters camped in a tiny village south of London until the company abandoned its well there. People in Zurawlow, a town in eastern Poland, successfully blockaded a fracking site in 2012 and Greenpeace activists have occupied a shale gas rig in Denmark.
The differences may be due to US land policy which recognizes the landowner rather than the state as the owner of mineral rights (the resources under the land)–thus, despite huge campaigns against fracking in the US, the landowners were a natural balancing constituent.
The US fracking revolution has made the US energy independent while Europe uncomfortably relies on large imports from Russia. Yet, even though Western Europe has mostly banned fracking they have begun to import lots of US liquid natural gas. The first LNG exports in the lower United States date only to 2016 but since that time exports have increased dramatically to China and Europe and the US will be the world’s largest exporter of LNG by the end of 2022.
European Commission: The European Union imports more and more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States to diversify and render its energy supply more secure. LNG imports from the U.S. have increased substantially since the first shipment in April 2016. Data show that at the end of 2019 LNG exports to the EU recorded the highest volume ever. In November 2019 imports reached 3 billion cubic meters and their value was estimated at €0.5 billion. In December 2019 LNG imports from the US reached a new monthly record: 3.2 billion cubic meters, with an estimated value of €0.5 billion.
European imports have only increased since that time as Europe has shut down nuclear reactors and the price of European energy has soared. A Russian invasion of Ukraine could increase US demand even more.
All hail the fracking revolution.
Wednesday assorted links
1. In nuclear war simulations, most people choose the escalatory options.
2. Reddit thread on which are the funniest comedies. Not many recent movies on that list.
3. Charles R. Morris has passed away (NYT).
4. Samosa markets in everything?
5. Has Magnus Carlsen played his last world championship match?
6. Will Mexico City ban bullfighting?
7. A possible theory as to why Omicron might be safer — important if true.
A cautionary note on Omicron
From my email from Ratufa:
I wanted to point out an issue with some of the metrics that are being used to assess the severity of Omicron.
The growth rate of an outbreak impacts the observed ratios of outcomes. Early in an outbreak those ratios will be biased towards lesser severity for faster spreading strains because more severe outcomes take longer to develop.
For example, it takes on average two days to be admitted to an ICU after hospital admission. The SA Omicron outbreak looks to have a growth rate of .21/day and the original Delta outbreak one of .1/day. Based on that we would expect the proportion of ICU admissions to hospital admissions to be ~20% lower [1-e^(-2*.11)] than Delta early in the pandemic. And incidental admissions have the potential to confound that number even more.
The impact on hospitalizations and deaths is more dramatic. Positive tests tend to lead hospitalizations by about 5 days and deaths by 2 to 3 weeks. So we would expect the ratio of hospitalizations to positive tests to be ~40% lower and deaths/positive tests to be ~80% lower than in the delta outbreak holding severity constant. Though both those estimates are quite sensitive to the lag and estimate of r.
The growth effect probably doesn’t explain the majority of the difference in outcomes that have been observed. But it is potentially material. And makes me more skeptical of claims of lesser severity I’ve seen so far.