Results for “age of em” 17234 found
Do children’s social and political movements tend to be effective?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Children are effective messengers because they are difficult to convincingly attack. It’s easier to forgive their excesses and their mistakes, and they are not constrained by having full-time jobs. The very fact that children are doing something attracts news coverage. If even a child sees the need to speak out, we all should be listening; they of course have the greatest stake in America’s future.
Today, President Donald Trump dominates media cycles in an unprecedented manner. It’s thus not surprising that two of the social movements that seem to be breaking through — #NeverAgain and the immigration reform pleas from the Dreamers — have children in prominent roles. Young people, like our president, are somewhat fresh and unfiltered, albeit with different content. They are harder to mock than, say, Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. Emma González, an attack survivor, only joined Twitter this month (@Emma4Change), and she already has more followers than does the National Rifle Association.
Do read the whole thing.
Amazon arbitrage, money laundering edition
The impersonator priced the book at $555 and it was posted to multiple Amazon sites in different countries. The book — which as been removed from most Amazon country pages as of a few days ago — is titled “Lower Days Ahead,” and was published on Oct 7, 2017.
Reames said he suspects someone has been buying the book using stolen credit and/or debit cards, and pocketing the 60 percent that Amazon gives to authors. At $555 a pop, it would only take approximately 70 sales over three months to rack up the earnings that Amazon said he made.
“This book is very unlikely to ever sell on its own, much less sell enough copies in 12 weeks to generate that level of revenue,” Reames said. “As such, I assume it was used for money laundering, in addition to tax fraud/evasion by using my Social Security number. Amazon refuses to issue a corrected 1099 or provide me with any information I can use to determine where or how they were remitting the royalties.”
Reames said the books he has sold on Amazon under his name were done through his publisher, not directly via a personal account (the royalties for those books accrue to his former employer) so he’d never given Amazon his Social Security number. But the fraudster evidently had, and that was apparently enough to convince Amazon that the imposter was him.
Here are additional points of interest, as the practice is more common than you might have thought. Via the estimable Chug.
What is the value of studying a foreign language in high school?
Bryan Caplan writes:
While promoting my new book, I’ve repeatedly argued that foreign language requirements in U.S. schools are absurd and should be abolished. For two distinct reasons.
Reason #1: Americans almost never use their knowledge of foreign languages (unless they speak it in the home).
Reason #2: Americans almost never learn to speak a foreign language very well in school, even though a two- or even three-year high school requirement is standard.
This double whammy is easily generalized. If studying X for years yields minimal knowledge, and you wouldn’t use X even if you knew it, you could defend X as an elective. But how could anyone defend X as a requirement?
My view is this:
1. Learning at least one language is of high value for America’s elite. It helps them see different points of view, and prepares a small number for careers in the foreign service or in other international capacities. It makes intellectuals deeper and improves their scholarship. This is a sliver of the population, but the global rate of return to having it is very high. And I suspect a significant portion of this population received its first exposure to a foreign language in high school (or even junior high), which in turn may have helped them do “study abroad.”
2. If we could target foreign language acquisition to this future elite, I would gladly let the vast majority of the student population off the hook. One move toward this end would be to use foreign language “tiebreakers” for those wishing to finish in the top quarter of their high school class. I would like to see a study of whether this would produce sufficiently accurate targeting.
3. Here is an estimate that knowing a foreign language brings a wage premium of about 2%; I have not read the paper, but I do not wish to overclaim on the causality front. It still is measuring something about quality.
4. Many European countries teach their citizens English (above all), French, and German with reasonable success and high returns, especially for English. So it is possible to succeed with this endeavor within a public education system.
5. As English is the closest we have to a global language, the imperative for Americans to learn another language is surely smaller than for say Danes to learn English.
6. I do not think opportunity costs during high school are especially high.
7. Overall, not only is education signaling, but an educational system itself is part aspirational and is also a signal. I see high returns to America having relatively cosmopolitan aspirations, and signaling that it does not take its dominant status, linguistic and otherwise, for granted. I do not mind commandeering language education toward this end. Let’s send the right signal rather than acquiescing in a civilizational retrogression.
8. My casual impression is that elite private high schools usually take foreign language training pretty seriously.
So I do not see big gains by eliminating foreign language requirements in American high schools, though I would consider moves toward more effective targeting. Most of all, I’d like to see the whole thing followed up more with additional study abroad programs at the later undergraduate level.
Addendum: Disagreement aside, I am so pleased that this year the two big exciting economics books so far are by Bryan and Robin Hanson. Do buy and read both! As for Bryan, maybe some of you are thinking you just can’t accept his argument about education being so wasteful. But I’ll say this: Bryan always defends his “absurd” views much better than you think he is going to be able to. Trinity College just announced it will be charging $71,660 next year — do you really think the value-added in terms of learning has gone up so much?
College average is over
Concord University in West Virginia and Clemson University in South Carolina were both founded shortly after the Civil War. During the 20th century, each grew rapidly. Now, the two public universities that sit just 300 miles apart face very different circumstances.
Clemson, a large research university, enrolled its largest-ever freshman class in 2017 and in December broke ground on an $87 million building for the college of business.
Concord, a midsize liberal-arts school, has seen its freshman enrollment fall 19% in five years. It has burned through all $12 million in its reserves and can’t afford to tear down two mostly empty dormitories…
According to an analysis of 20 years of freshman-enrollment data at 1,040 of the 1,052 schools listed in The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education ranking, U.S. not-for-profit colleges and universities are segregating into winners and losers—with winners growing and expanding and losers seeing the first signs of a death spiral.
The Journal ranking, which includes most major public and private colleges with more than 1,000 students, focused on how well a college prepares students for life after graduation. The analysis found that the closer to the bottom of the ranking a school was, the more likely its enrollment was shrinking.
That is from Douglas Belkin at the WSJ, via multiple MR readers, some of them excellent.
Many of you have asked me for further commentary on Bryan Caplan’s education book, which is doing very well. I’ll be doing a Conversation with Bryan, but for the time being I’ll say this: everyone obsesses over the mood-affiliated “I’m going to lower the status of education signaling argument.” Hardly anyone has discussed what to me is Bryan’s strangest assumption, namely a sociologically-rooted, actually anti-economics “conformity is stronger than you think” argument, which Bryan uses to assert the status quo will continue more or less indefinitely. It won’t. To the extent Bryan is correct (and that you can debate, but at least he is more correct than most people in the educational establishment will let on), competency-based learning and changes in employer behavior will in fact bring about a new equilibrium…not quickly, but certainly in well under two decades.
And what about on-line education? Well, a lot of students don’t like it because they have to actually work on their own and pay attention. To the extent education really is just signaling, that should give on-line options a brighter future all the more. But not in the Caplanian world view, as conformity serves once again as an intervening factor. For better or worse, Bryan’s book subverts economics as a science at least as much as it does education. Bryan of course is smart enough to see the trade-offs here, and he knows if the standard model of economic competition were allowed to reign supreme, we would (even with subsidies, relative to those subsidies) tend to see strong moves toward relatively efficient means of signaling, if only through changes in the relative sizes of institutions.
The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education
That is a new paper by Gjisbert Stoet and David C. Geary, here is the abstract, noting that the last sentence is perhaps the most important:
The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys’ science achievement and girls’ reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects.
So what is the implied prediction for our future?
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The twenty-page essay exam
Imagine giving all professional economists (and other academics) an essay test. Determine their area of expertise, and then ask them to write a twenty-page essay on one of the most basic questions in that field. So it might be “Why did China do so well?” Or “what are the determinants of economic growth?” Or “What causes business cycles?”
Some would be more specific, such as “What makes nominal prices sticky?”, or “Why are the special features of platform competition important?” How about “How can we encourage hospitals to compete more effectively?”
They can use some numbers, but mostly they should write out the best answers they can.
Then grade the exams.
At which universities would professors do the best? In which fields would the researchers do the best, recognizing that some face more difficult problems than do others? In which countries?
How much should our profession be focused on being able to write good answers to such questions?
I am indebted to Chris Blattman and Arnold Kling for useful exchanges related to this topic.
The advantages of organizing knowledge in terms of country and place
When a child is looking at a map, he or she is probably organizing some of the associated knowledge in terms of location or plac — “Hmm…so there’s a boot-shaped country at the bottom of Europe.”
If you say “I don’t know much about Algeria. I should read Alastair Horne on the country, watch Battle of Algiers, and try to speak with some Algerians,” you are again organizing knowledge, and your quest for knowledge, in terms of place.
Alternatively, you might organize your knowledge in terms of historical eras, of fields of science, or in terms of people you know — “that’s Johnny’s view of the world!” Of course we all use some combination of these methods and others.
I find that people who travel a great deal often organize their knowledge in terms of physical location. For instance, they might be curious about visiting parts of the world they have had no previous exposure to, or alternatively they might decide “I am going to specialize in Brazil.”
I see a few advantages from organizing knowledge in terms of place:
1. It encourages objectivity, as most of us do not have strong political or partisan opinions about most other countries. In contrast, if you set out to study “Does industrial policy work?”, you will approach your study of each place with a higher degree of bias. Instead, just study each place, and let your conclusions about industrial policy come to you. Quite literally, it has a useful “distancing” effect.
2. As I have mentioned, almost everyone in the world becomes an interesting potential partner in your quest for knowledge. Even if a person doesn’t know much theory, or is not a good storyteller, almost certainly they can teach you something about the places they have lived in.
3. There are many places, so you will never feel you know so much. And you can always be imagining the next quest.
4. Increasing returns to scale will drive your curiosity, much as one might seek to capture stones in the game of Go. Imagine knowing all the countries that surround Uzbekistan, but never having visited Uzbekistan itself. Oh how the passions would rise!
5. Even if distant travel is not available to you, you can study so many social science questions by comparing parts of your city, or by considering adjacent towns and their differences.
6. Folding over pages in a book, leaving books in piles on the floor, and trying to remember “where in a book you read something” are all methods of using space to better organize your knowledge. Subsequent innovations in VR and AR may help us advance on these techniques.
Organizing knowledge in terms of place does not always encourage theoretical reasoning or thinking in terms of models. It is therefore especially useful for people who tend to be systematizers in the first place.
In general, I believe that many people have a quite underdeveloped sense of how to use physical space as a cognitive tool. You may recall that many medieval and Renaissance memory systems (pre-Google!) instructed the user to imagine all of the information arrayed at different points in physical space, such as in a sequence along a road, or as rooms in a house.
Similarly, if you organize your knowledge of the arts, music, and economics by country and place, many of the underlying study objects may become much more vivid to you.
Valentine’s Day and Understanding the Price System
Valentine’s Day is coming up so here’s a reminder to get your loved one a present! Valentine’s is also a great time to teach your students about globalization, the signaling and incentive role of prices, and the power of the price system–all key aspects of Chapter 7 in our textbook Modern Principles of Economics. We have two superb videos to encourage understanding and discussion of the price system, I, Rose and A Price is a Signal Wrapped up in an Incentive (see below).
In addition, we have created a lesson plan with discussion prompts, exercises, practice questions, and pre- and post-class assignments. Finally, we provide supplementary resources such as additional data sources, relevant news articles and blog posts, and an episode of Planet Money. You can find all of this material in one convenient location here. Enjoy!
Police Union Privileges, Officer Misconduct and Systems Thinking
In Police Union Privileges I explained how union contracts and police bill of rights give police officers privileges not afforded to regular people. What differences do these privileges make? A new paper, The Effect of Collective Bargaining Rights on Law Enforcement: Evidence from Florida, suggests that police union privileges significantly increase the rate of officer misconduct:
Growing controversy surrounds the impact of labor unions on law enforcement behavior. Critics allege that unions impede organizational reform and insulate officers from discipline for misconduct. The only evidence of these effects, however, is anecdotal. We exploit a quasi-experiment in Florida to estimate the effects of collective bargaining rights on law enforcement misconduct and other outcomes of public concern. In 2003, the Florida Supreme Court’s Williams decision extended to county deputy sheriffs collective bargaining rights that municipal police officers had possessed for decades. We construct a comprehensive panel dataset of Florida law enforcement agencies starting in 1997, and employ a difference-in-difference approach that compares sheriffs’ offices and police departments before and after Williams. Our primary result is that collective bargaining rights lead to about a 27% increase in complaints of officer misconduct for the typical sheriff’s office. This result is robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls. The time pattern of the estimated effect, along with an analysis using agency-specific trends, suggests that it is not attributable to preexisting trends. The estimated effect of Williams is not robustly significant for other potential outcomes of interest, however, including the racial and gender composition of agencies and training and educational requirements.
This is important research but although I’m not surprised that collective bargaining rights lead to more misconduct I do find the size of the effect implausibly large. One reason is that police union privileges are only one brick in the blue wall. Juries, for example, often fail to convict police even when faced with video evidence that would be overwhelming in any other context [e.g. Philando Castile]. Police union privileges are unjust and should be abolished but solving the problems with policing requires more than a change in naked incentives.
To solve this problem we need to adopt the same kind of systems wide thinking that has led to large reductions in fatal accidents in anesthesiology, airplane crashes, and nuclear accidents. Criminologist Lawrence Sherman writes:
The central point Perrow (1984) made in defining the concept of system accidents is that the urge to blame individuals often obstructs the search for organizational solutions. If a system-crash perspective can help build a consensus that many dimensions of police systems need to be changed to reduce unnecessary deaths (not just but certainly including firing or prosecuting culpable shooting officers), police and their constituencies might start a dialog over the details of which system changes to make. That dialog could begin by describing Perrow’s central hypothesis that the interactive complexity of modern systems is the main target for reform. From the 1979 nuclear power plant near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania to airplane and shipping accidents, Perrow shows how the post-incident reviews rarely identify the true culprit: It is the complexity of the high-risk systems that causes extreme harm. Similarly, fatal police shootings shine the spotlight on the shooter rather than on the complex organizational processes that recruited, hired, trained, supervised, disciplined, assigned, and dispatched the shooter before anyone faced a split-second decision to shoot.
Gerrymandering encourages social liberalism
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
For instance, if you are a Democrat who is strongly pro-abortion rights, gerrymandering might be very much in your interests. That’s because the sharp polarization of today’s politics favors a lot of outcomes that are either the status quo or are easier to implement and enforce. That can favor social liberalism.
Note that many Republican representatives don’t actually want strong legal enforcement of the toughest social conservative positions — can you really imagine the government trying women for murder if they try to have abortions?
Whether you like it or not, American society seems to have hit on a pretty comfortable equilibrium — comfortable for our elected representatives that is. Democrats will strongly support liberal positions on social issues, and the Republicans will stake out more conservative positions. And Republicans will tolerate the Democrats getting their way for the most part. You can debate whether this mix is what a majority of voters want or should want, but it is the easiest outcome for us to agree upon.
Do read the whole thing.
Eliminating the mortgage tax deduction could boost homeownership
(3) Implications of US Tax Policy for House Prices, Rents, and Homeownership
Kamila Sommer and Paul Sullivan
This paper studies the impact of the mortgage interest tax deduction on equilibrium house prices, rents, homeownership, and welfare. We build a dynamic model of the housing market that features a realistic progressive tax system in which owner-occupied housing services are tax-exempt and mortgage interest payments are tax-deductible. We simulate the effect of tax reform on the housing market. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction causes house prices to decline, increases homeownership, decreases mortgage debt, and improves welfare. Our findings challenge the widely held view that repealing the preferential tax treatment of mortgages would depress homeownership.
Here is the link to the AER piece.
What is optimal group size for solving hard problems?
Galesic, M., Barkoczi, D., & Katsikopoulos, K. (2018). Smaller crowds outperform larger crowds and individuals in realistic task conditions. Decision, 5(1), 1-15.
Decisions about political, economic, legal, and health issues are often made by simple majority voting in groups that rarely exceed 30–40 members and are typically much smaller. Given that wisdom is usually attributed to large crowds, shouldn’t committees be larger? In many real-life situations, expert groups encounter a number of different tasks. Most are easy, with average individual accuracy being above chance, but some are surprisingly difficult, with most group members being wrong. Examples are elections with surprising outcomes, sudden turns in financial trends, or tricky knowledge questions. Most of the time, groups cannot predict in advance whether the next task will be easy or difficult. We show that under these circumstances moderately sized groups, whose members are selected randomly from a larger crowd, can achieve higher average accuracy across all tasks than either larger groups or individuals. This happens because an increase in group size can lead to a decrease in group accuracy for difficult tasks that is larger than the corresponding increase in accuracy for easy tasks. We derive this non-monotonic relationship between group size and accuracy from the Condorcet jury theorem and use simulations and further analyses to show that it holds under a variety of assumptions. We further show that situations favoring moderately sized groups occur in a variety of real-life situations including political, medical, and financial decisions and general knowledge tests. These results have implications for the design of decision-making bodies at all levels of policy.
I have heard a number of CEOs and directors claim that organizations change fundamentally once they start exceeding fifty employees, a number only slightly above the cited optimum here. But if only for reasons of sales and marketing and branding, it does in fact make sense, on net, for many institutions to exceed that number of employees.
Here is the paper, and for the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Rule of law implies a somewhat slack enforcement of immigration restrictions
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg article, here is one bit:
What is striking about immigration, and immigration policy, is the very simple but oft neglected fact that it concerns human bodies. Any exercise of immigration law thus requires some violence, either explicit or implicit, against those bodies. It will mean the rounding up and forcible restraint of bodies, the widespread use of prisons and other coercive holding chambers, and tearful scenes of airport separation. Those methods will be applied to individuals who do not enjoy the full protections of the U.S. Constitution, who are vulnerable to mistreatment during the process, and who do not always have full fluency in the English language or a full understanding of their legal rights. The resulting problems are especially high costs, not only because of the associated dollars, but also because our precious self-image as a humane country implies keeping such episodes to a minimum. Too many violent stories and images, even when they technically can be justified by laws, damage our conception of our country. Eventually that will shape our future behavior and not for the better.
A somewhat lax enforcement of immigration restrictions is in fact the friend of the future of the rule of law, not the enemy.
Do read the whole thing.
Average is over, NYC private school edition
Compensation for the heads of some elite private K-12 schools in New York City is nearing $1 million.
Much in the city’s private school world can seem beyond the norm: the tuition and fees (topping $50,000 a year), the kindergarten application process (interviews for 4-year-olds), the facilities (climbing walls). And so too executive compensation that exceeds the pay of many college presidents.
Pay packages often include deferred compensation and perks like housing, housekeeping, social club dues and free tuition for heads’ children. Chiefs of New York City schools earn far more than the national average, due to the high cost of living, ambitious fundraising duties, competition for talent, relatively large enrollments and other factors, according to the National Association of Independent Schools.
The median base salary for heads of the city’s private schools is $493,478 this academic year among 44 city schools in a survey by the association. That compares to $275,000 nationwide. The group says the city’s pay for heads grew faster as well: Its median salary jumped 70% in a decade, compared with 45% nationwide.
At least nine heads of private K-12 schools in New York City earned total yearly packages topping $800,000, according to 2015 federal tax forms, the most recent year available.
Here is the WSJ piece, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Is marrying your cousin bad for democracy?
The title of the paper is “The Churches’ Bans on Consanguineous Marriages, Kin-Networks and Democracy” and the author is Jonathan F. Schulz, here is the abstract:
This paper tests the hypothesis that extended kin-groups, as characterized by a high level of cousin marriages, impact the proper functioning of formal institutions. Consistent with this hypothesis I find that countries with high cousin marriage rates exhibit a weak rule of law and are more likely autocratic. Further evidence comes from a quasi-natural experiment. In the early medieval ages the Church started to prohibit kin-marriages. Using the variation in the duration and extent of the Eastern and Western Churches’ bans on consanguineous marriages as instrumental variables, reveals highly significant point estimates of the percentage of cousin marriage on an index of democracy. An additional novel instrument, cousin-terms, strengthens this point: the estimates are very similar and do not rest on the European experience alone. Exploiting within country variation support these results. These findings point to the importance of marriage patterns for the proper functioning of formal institutions and democracy.
I recall reading related ideas in the MR comments section from Steve Sailer and others. For the pointer I thank Alexander B.