Results for “age of em” 17234 found
Don’t pay for all of your kids’ college education
…a new study…found that the more money (in total and as a share of total college costs) that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.
The findings — particularly grouped with other work by the researcher who made them — suggest that the students least likely to excel are those who receive essentially blank checks for college expenses.
The Inside Higher Ed piece is here. The NYT piece is here. Here is a summary of the research from the researcher, Laura Hamilton. Here is the paper itself, forthcoming in the American Sociological Review, available to subscribers and university systems only I suspect.
I should note that this piece includes all of the appropriate controls, but still we do not know how good those controls are and perhaps parental paying practices are proxying for other features of the situation.
Richard McKenzie writes a tribute to James Buchanan
You will find it under the fold…
At a conference organized in the early 1990s to celebrate Professor James M. Buchanan’s Nobel Prize in Economics, the speakers were asked to tie their comments on economic education to Professor Buchanan’s prodigious works. My opening line crystallized the importance of my serendipitously coming within Professor Buchanan’s orbit of influence: “When I was in Professor James Buchanan’s microeconomics class in the fall of 1969, he taught me very little. I say that with pride here in this august setting because Professor Buchanan would be the first among you to realize that I could not offer a higher compliment. He understands, as he got me to see, that the measure of good teaching is not how much you teach, but how much is learned by students – and then how much students can do with what little is taught and learned. The first principle in economics should be economy in the principles covered,” a point rarely driven home for young economists today.
With his death at age 93, much will be written about Professor Buchanan’s prodigious scholarship that has changed the way people view political and government arenas. My perspective is more personal, that of a student who came to know an admirable side of Professor Buchanan that his critics and devoted readers will never know. Professor Buchanan was my dissertation director. Most dissertation directors take weeks, if not months, to return first drafts of their students’ dissertations. In my case, I vividly remember placing all 250 pages of my first draft on Professor Buchanan’s desk just before 5 PM one day, only to find a marked-up version, as well as an untold number of typed single-spaced pages of comments, the very next morning!
After graduating and taking an assistant professorship, I started churning out a stream of papers, anxious to move up the academic ladder. But I had an advantage that other young professors could only wish for. I had Professor Buchanan in my corner, giving generously of his time to review and comment on my work, and all with unbelievable promptness. I would send Professor Buchanan a paper, and he would have it back to me in no time at all, with pages of comments – long ago, when papers and messages traveled at the snail’s pace of the Post Office. He was so prompt and predictable on getting papers back that on occasion I would put a paper in an envelope and then go to one of my colleagues and say something to this effect: “Notice that I am putting this paper in the mail to Jim Buchanan today. I am willing to bet you a cup of coffee that I will get this paper back with one or more single-spaced pages of comments a week from now.” Without fail, I won the bets and had any number of cups of coffee off Professor Buchanan’s tireless generosity with his time and wisdom with a former student.
I once told Professor Buchanan’s longtime assistant Betty Tillman how remarkable it was that he would get my papers back so promptly and with obvious attention to detail. I was struck by her reaction, “Honey, I hate to tell you this, but he doesn’t just do it for you. He does it for everyone. There’s hardly a day that goes by that he doesn’t get at least one paper in for review, and he almost always has his comments written by the next morning.”
Professor Buchanan’s comments on my papers followed a somewhat predictable format. He would always start by saying something positive about the content, perhaps focusing on how well the paper was written, if lost for positive comments on content. He would then add his incisive comments, which sometimes forced me to set the paper aside. But on one paper I remember well that he didn’t start with his usual positive remarks. He wrote to this effect: “Dear Dick, we all write good papers and bad papers. With some papers we pursue publication. With others, we trash them. In the process of writing any number of papers, we acquire great wisdom in deciding which papers are which. You will acquire great wisdom in deciding what to do with this paper.” I didn’t need for him to say more, which he didn’t. I never tried to revise that paper.
Today, I am pleased to call James Buchanan my professor for pressing on me a remarkably simple but important point that escapes so many colleagues across the country: Being a professor is a privileged position. It demands scholarship, but it also demands that you give of yourself in ways that will never show up on your resume, or in your obituary.
Richard McKenzie is the Walter B. Gerken Professor of Economics and Management Emeritus in the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.
Assorted links
The Army of Economists
In a wide-ranging and interesting conversation Daniel Dennett reflects on hypocrisy and whether it may sometimes be optimal:
Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I’ll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They’re all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it’s as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.
Which army do you want on the front lines? It’s very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you’re saying is we’ll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It’s extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’—or philosophers’—sort of thinking, since it might lead to them to think: am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they’re doing the right thing? What if I’m clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It’s a dilemma that I don’t know what to do about, although I think we should confront it at least.
It would be astounding if there were never a situation in which a lie was effective in producing a good result, i.e. a noble lie. But is a rule of noble lies effective? In a long sequence of calls to war, how many have been just and wise and how many have been driven by vainglorious leaders and foolish pride–so which army do you want? I prefer the silver.
Note also that Dennett mixes narrow self interest and rationality in his description of “economists.” But one can be fully rational without being narrowly self-interested. Dennett, for example, cheats a bit with his puzzle. The premise is some “horrific, terrible enemy” but then later the economists ask “am I so sure this cause is just”, to which the answer should be, given the premise, yes. In which case fighting is a rational response.
Hat tip: Brian Donohue.
How Japan does gun control
Call this optimistic or pessimistic, either way:
“In Japan, no civilian is allowed to have a gun,” he stated simply. “In order to prevent atrocious crimes using firearms, possession of small arms was banned in 1965, with strict penalties for violations of the law. As time has gone on the penalties have increased and every year we try to drive down the number of people owning guns.”
Japan does allow the possession of hunting rifles and air guns (for sporting use), but the restrictions and checks are extremely strict.
And there is this:
Under current laws, if a low-level yakuza is caught with a gun and bullets that match, he’ll be charged with aggravated possession of firearms and will then face an average seven-year prison term. Simply firing a gun carries a penalty of three years to life. And for the “accomplice” reasons above, a yakuza boss may decide a death sentence is more appropriate if his thug miraculously gets released on bail before going to jail.
One mid-level yakuza boss told me, “Having a gun now is like having a time bomb. Do you think any sane person wants to keep one around the house?”
The police are not given a free hand in using guns either. Internal controls make it very difficult for a gun or even a single bullet to fall into the hands of criminals.
“When we go to the firing range, we get an allotted number of bullets, Detective X said. “When we’re done firing, we collect the shells and return the gun. If one shell is missing, the police station goes into a panic.”
The full story is here, courtesy of the ever-excellent Wonkbook.
James Buchanan (1919-2013), Appreciations
Here a number of appreciations and memories of Jim Buchanan. Steve Horwitz has a good, concise summary of some of his intellectual contributions:
Buchanan’s work changed political economy in fundamental ways. Thanks to him and his colleagues, three things are true: No one who wishes to talk responsibly about politics can be ignorant of public choice theory. No one should ever invoke the language of market failure (including externalities) without having digested his work on government failure. And people who run around talking about the constitution better be able to understand something of his contributions to constitutional political economy.
I agree entirely with Robert Higg’s portrait:
I first encountered Jim when he came to Johns Hopkins to present a seminar paper while I was a graduate student there, in 1967, as I recall. He did not make a good impression on me then. His presentation, like all his work, was nontechnical, and Hopkins specialized in a much more formal, mathematical style of economic analysis. When Professor Bela Belassa asked him a technical question, Jim shrugged it off as if its answer didn’t matter much one way or the other. In the grad students’ minds, this attitude toward the very sorts of things we were agonizingly trying to master suggested that he was a lightweight. In this respect, we could scarcely have been more wrong.
Indeed, the hallmark of Buchanan’s work from beginning to end was a deep seriousness of purpose and procedure that not many economists have matched in the past century. Unlike the typical mainstream economist, Jim was never just fooling around, toying with a tweaked model or a trivial, throw-away idea. To a rare degree, he kept his eyes focused on the prize of true economic understanding.
…. He gave me a deeper understanding of the market process than anyone else had given me. He raised many worthwhile questions that I continue to ponder. He offered me a shining example of the economist as a serious thinker, not simply an idiot savant fooling with models.
The NYTimes quotes Tyler:
Over the years since Dr. Buchanan won the Nobel, much of what he predicted has played out. Government is bigger than ever. Tax revenue has fallen far short of public programs’ needs. Public and private borrowing has become a way of life. Politicians still act in their own interests while espousing the public good, and national deficits have soared into the trillions.
…In a commentary in The New York Times in March 2011, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason, said his colleague Dr. Buchanan had accurately forecast that deficit spending for short-term gains would evolve into “a permanent disconnect” between government outlays and revenue.
“We end up institutionalizing irresponsibility in the federal government, the largest and most central institution in our society,” Dr. Cowen wrote. “As we fail to make progress on entitlement reform with each passing year, Professor Buchanan’s essentially moral critique of deficit spending looks more prophetic.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal our colleague Don Boudreaux also points to Jim’s work on the true burden of the debt–stop the we owe it to ourselves madness! Lars Christensen looks at one of Buchanan’s many interesting ideas, the brick standard for monetary policy. Randall Holcombe remembers his teacher. The Washington Post and Bloomberg offer useful commentaries as does political scientist Tim Groseclose.
Of course you should not ignore Buchanan’s own writings which spans more than 20 volumes, 10 of which are available online. Buchanan’s classic Politics without Romance offers a short introduction as does his Nobel lecture.
Buchanan’s Nobel lecture illustrates why, even today, many other economists don’t get Buchanan. While other economists are looking for “efficiency” and “optimality” in models Buchanan had a very different concept of welfare economics.
[Buchanan]…sought to bring all available scientific analysis to bear in helping to resolve the continuing question of social order: How can we live together in peace, prosperity, and harmony, while retaining our liberties as autonomous individuals who can, and must, create our own values?
On a personal note, I was fortunate to have Buchanan both as a teacher and as a colleague. He founded the Center for Study of Public Choice that today I direct.
Buchanan wrote not for the hour or the day but for the age and his influence will continue far into the long run.
Assorted links
2. Fukuyama on Albert Hirschman.
3. We have a spending problem and a health care cost problem, and is Obamacare causing health insurance premiums to rise?
4. Carolabinder, new macro blog from Berkeley.
5. How penicillin boosted a sexual revolution (pdf), and why are thieves bartering so much laundry soap?
*Bleeding Talent*, the Tim Kane critique of the U.S. military
Here is a review from The New York Times:
In “Bleeding Talent” (Palgrave Macmillan, $30), Mr. Kane gives us a veteran’s proud, though acutely critical, perspective on the American military. He offers an illuminating view of the other “1 percent” — not the privileged upper crust, but the sliver of Americans who have accepted the burden of waging two of the longest wars in our history.
The military is perhaps as selfless an institution as our society has produced. But in its current form, Mr. Kane says, it stifles the aspirations of the best who seek to serve it and pushes them out. “In terms of attracting and training innovative leaders, the U.S. military is unparalleled,” he writes. “In terms of managing talent, the U.S. military is doing everything wrong.”
The core problem, he argues, is that while the military may be “all volunteer” on the first day, it is thoroughly coercive every day thereafter…
ACCORDING to Mr. Kane, “the root of all evil in this ecosystem” is the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act, enacted by Congress in 1980 to standardize military personnel policies. But the system has defied efforts by successive defense secretaries to bring about change.
That act binds the military into a system that honors seniority over individual merit. It judges officers, hundreds at a time, in an up-or-out promotion process that relies on evaluations that have been almost laughably eroded by grade inflation. A zero-defect mentality punishes errors severely. The system discourages specialization — you can’t expect to stay a fighter jock or a cybersecurity expert — and pushes the career-minded up a tried-and-true ladder that, not surprisingly, produces lookalikes.
Tim is a frequent (unofficial) member of the GMU lunch crew, and you can buy his book here. Here is Tim’s Wikipedia page.
Self-recommending and immediately pre-ordered
My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love, by Karl Knausgaard.
Here is my coverage of book one. For the pointer I thank David Archer, who also points me to the broader 2013 book preview.
Should we mint the platinum coin?
The economics of such a move would work fine, and I understand the game-theoretic rationale, but still I agree (strongly) with Kevin Drum’s “no” answer. I don’t know if the courts would uphold such a move, but I do know they would not uphold such a move instantaneously. The uncertainty would in the meantime whipsaw and shut down the markets and the shadow banking system.
And let’s say that — somehow — the whole thing miraculously worked out well from start to finish. The testier Republicans would in fact get exactly what they want. They would receive isolation from any negative consequences from brinksmanship, and a new narrative about how President Obama is a fascist incarnate. Keep in mind that since the coin would bear the sparkling image of Sayyid Qutb, there are even some members of the American electorate who would find such charges plausible.
This is a bad idea, and Obama has been wise to try to take it off the table from the get go. He knows that Congress actually needs to sign off on a solution, as indeed they have twice in the last year. It also confirms Paul Krugman’s view that he would not in fact make a good Secretary of the Treasury.
Addendum: Felix Salmon has good comments.
Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics
That is the new paper by David Card and Stefano DellaVigna, here is the abstract:
How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-5 journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-5 journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. Second, the total number of articles published in these journals actually declined from 400 per year in the late 1970s to 300 per year most recently. As a result, the acceptance rate has fallen from 15% to 6%, with potential implications for the career progression of young scholars. Third, one journal, the American Economic Review, now accounts for 40% of top-5 publications, up from 25% in the 1970s. Fourth, recently published papers are on average 3 times longer than they were in the 1970s, contributing to the relative shortage of journal space. Fifth, the number of authors per paper has increased from 1.3 in 1970 to 2.3 in 2012, partly offsetting the fall in the number of articles per year. Sixth, citations for top-5 publications are high: among papers published in the late 1990s, the median number of Google Scholar citations is 200. Seventh, the ranking of journals by citations has remained relatively stable, with the notable exception of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which climbed from fourth place to first place over the past three decades. Eighth, citation counts are significantly higher for longer papers and those written by more co-authors. Ninth, although the fraction of articles from different fields published in the top-5 has remained relatively stable, there are important cohort trends in the citations received by papers from different fields, with rising citations to more recent papers in Development and International, and declining citations to recent papers in Econometrics and Theory.
Assorted links
1. Charles C. Mann reviews Bernard Bailyn.
2. Becker and Murphy on whether we have lost the war on drugs.
3. How loud should religious announcements be?
4. A paper on lead exposure and crime, internationally (pdf), and some predictions here, including that Latin American crime will fall sharply.
5. Is it too easy to meet someone new?
*The Bankers’ New Clothes*
That is the new book by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig and the subtitle is What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about it. Here is their bottom line:
We have argued that if banks have much more equity, the financial system will be safer, healthier, and less distorted. From society’s perspective, the benefits are large and the costs are hard to find; there are virtually no trade-offs.
I agree with the proposal, though not with the claim that this is virtually costless, as is laid out in their chapter seven (oddly they focus on the question of whether debt and equity “require” comparable rates of return, rather than the general notion of opportunity cost). In any case this is a major net work on banking and its regulation. Here is the book’s home page. Here is Admati on YouTube.
The culture that is Republican
House Republicans signaled Thursday they will not follow rules in President Obama’s healthcare law that were designed to speed Medicare cuts through Congress.
The House is set to vote Thursday afternoon on rules for the 113th Congress. The rules package says the House won’t comply with fast-track procedures for the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a controversial cost-cutting board Republicans have long resisted.
Here is more, via Brad DeLong.
A skeptical perspective on African development
Rick Rowden thinks manufacturing is a key:
We can look at whether manufacturing has been increasing as a percentage of GDP, or whether the manufacturing value added (MVA) of exports has been rising. In these cases the comparison between Africa and East Asia is actually quite revealing — as demonstrated by a recent U.N. report that paints a far less flattering picture of Africa’s development prospects.
It finds that, despite some improvements in a few countries, the bulk of African countries are either stagnating or moving backwards when it comes to industrialization. The share of MVA in Africa’s GDP fell from 12.8 percent in 2000 to 10.5 percent in 2008, while in developing Asia it rose from 22 percent to 35 percent over the same period. There has also been a decline in the importance of manufacturing in Africa’s exports, with the share of manufactures in Africa’s total exports having fallen from 43 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2008. In terms of manufacturing growth, while most have stagnated, 23 African countries had negative MVA per capita growth during the period 1990 – 2010, and only five countries achieved an MVA per capita growth above 4 percent.
The report also finds that Africa remains marginal in global manufacturing trade. Its share of global MVA has actually fallen from an already paltry 1.2 percent in 2000 to 1.1 percent in 2008, while developing Asia’s share rose from 13 percent to 25 percent over the same period. In terms of exports, Africa’s share of global manufacturing exports rose from 1 percent in 2000 to only 1.3 percent in 2008.
The pointer is from the excellent @FGoria.