Results for “age of em” 17236 found
Katrina’s Silver Lining
Here is Amy Waldman writing in The Atlantic in 2007:
The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school system—an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance. That system had begun with great promise, in 1841, as one of the first in the Deep South. It had effectively ended, in 2005, in disaster—and not just the natural kind. Its defining characteristics were financial high jinks and low academic performance. On the last state achievement test before Katrina hit, 74 percent of eighth-graders had failed to demonstrate “basic” skills in English/Language Arts, and 70 percent scored below “basic” in math. The Orleans Parish School Board, which ran the city’s schools, was $450 million in debt. Yet these numbers did not begin to capture the day-to-day texture of the schools: when students held a press conference to express their post-Katrina wishes, they asked for textbooks, toilet paper, and teachers who liked them.
…New Orleans, barely a presence in the charter-school movement before the storm, now had a higher proportion of charter schools than any other American city—and unlike most of the country’s 4,000 such schools, these had the backing of the establishment. Most radical of all, the neighborhood school had been banished—parents would have total freedom to choose which school their children would attend, no matter where they lived. Introducing school choice and weakening teachers’ unions had both long been goals of many educational reformers. Circumstance had made New Orleans the laboratory for these ideas. Ben Kleban, a charter-school proponent drawn to New Orleans by this flourishing, called it “the biggest experiment in a system of schools of choice we’ve ever seen.” Leslie Jacobs, a member of the state school board, called it “the most market-driven system in the United States.”
So what are the results? Here is an article from Tuesday’s Times-Picayune:
Standardized test scores improved for the fourth year in a row for students in the state’s Recovery School District, providing more evidence that the radical reforms undertaken after Hurricane Katrina are producing results.
New state data show results in the RSD, a state body that took over most city schools after the 2005 storm, progressed somewhat unevenly, but once again outpaced the rest of Louisiana.
Since 2007, the proportion of students in the district scoring “basic” — essentially at grade level — or better has now more than doubled from 23 percent to 48 percent, rising faster than any other district in the state.
Many problems remain, of course, and educational reform has a way of nearly always disappointing. I have not crunched the numbers or looked at controls but the gain is impressive and the growth in scores is higher in the RSD region compared to other Louisiana regions.
It’s amazing that getting rid of “neighborhood schools”, i.e. neighborhood monopolies, should be considered a radical reform but it is and I am pleased that the signs are positive.
Bonus Discovery: Treme explained, a guide to the series.
Profile of Tyler
Brendan Greeley of Bloomberg has an excellent profile of Tyler, both amusing and accurate. Here’s one bit:
When Tyler Cowen was 15, he became the New Jersey Open Chess Champion, at the time the youngest ever. At around the same age, he began reading seriously in the social sciences; he preferred philosophy. By 16 he had reached a chess rating of 2350, which today would put him close to the top 100 in the U.S. Shortly thereafter he gave up chess and philosophy for the same reason: little stability and poor benefits.
He’d been reading economics, though. He figured that economists were supposed to publish, and by age 19 he had placed two papers in respected journals. As a PhD candidate at Harvard, he published in the “Journal of Political Economy” and the “American Economic Review.”
“They were weird, strange pieces,” he says, “but still in good journals, top journals. That cemented my view that I could, you know, somehow fit in somewhere.” I ask him what he was like, what made him doubt he could fit in.
“I was like I am now.”
“You’ve always been like that?”
“Always. Age 3. Whatever.”
“What did you do at age 3?”
“Read a lot of books.”
Read the whole thing especially for more on the sociology of the economics profession.
Oh and here is an interesting development, the hot new restaurants are now tweeting about Tyler. Strange world.
Assorted links
1. Do positive fantasies make it harder to achieve your goals?
2. Via Chris F. Masse, Peter Thiel’s whiz kids.
3. Interview with Emmanuel Todd on the Arab Spring and whether Germany is in the core of Europe.
4. Recommended Spanish-language novels, and all the good books coming out this year.
5. The black middle class is more likely to reach the NBA.
6. John Tomasi will be guest-blogging at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
Open entry schools, the university as forum
I’ve been reading the fascinating A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander et.al., a book which I recommend to all urbanists, all architecture fans, Jane Jacobs fans, and Hayekians. In passing, the authors toss out a proposal for reorganizing modern universities. It has two simple principles:
1. Anyone can take a course…
2. Anyone can give a course…
Maybe that would make Peter Thiel happy. The authors also believe that a university should consist of a series of relatively low buildings, with a lot of pedestrian pathways, with the buildings at fifty foot intervals. (The book is in large part about how the organization of space and construction shapes spontaneous orders.)
It sounds a bit outrageous to turn Harvard into Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner, but Harvard admin. could publish a list of approved courses, all other courses you take your chances. There still could be a “Harvard admin.-approved degree,” based on those courses, even if not everyone goes that route. (How many current Harvard classes could keep reasonably high enrollments in the face of such competition?) If you still find this proposal either unpalatable or commercially unpersuasive, are you prepared to admit how much the current university model is based on the idea of exclusion? And how would you square that emphasis with university ideals more generally?
Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday
It is today, here are a few underrated highlights of his career:
1. No Direction Home, the biopic directed by Martin Scorsese. It’s one of the best documentaries on American music more generally, and a superb albeit hagiographic portrait of Dylan and his music.
2. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan and Blood on the Tracks and most of all Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits volume II are the albums I listen to most often. The last one sounds horrible from its name, but it was conceived conceptually, avoids the traditional problems of greatest hits albums (unlike Vol. I), and has some not otherwise available tracks; highly recommended. Then comes Time Out of Mind. I think of Bringing it All Back Home as the “best” Dylan album, but I enjoyed it so much at age fifteen that I don’t listen to it much today. Blonde on Blonde is overreaching and Highway 61 Revisited is half wonderful, half embarrassment in the lyrics.
3. Dylan as disc jockey is first-rate, and you can buy his XM Satellite Radio selections of early American music. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the period.
4. As a singer Dylan is influenced by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, as an acoustic guitarist he remains underrated.
5. Dylan once said that Barry Goldwater was his favorite politician.
Do our intuitions about deadweight loss break down at very small scales?
I’ve been thinking about high-frequency trading again. Some of the issues surrounding HFT may come from whether our intuitions break down at very small scales.
Take the ordinary arbitrage of bananas. If one banana sells for $1 and another for $2, no one worries that the arbitrageurs, who push the two prices together, are wasting social resources. We need the right price signal in place and the elimination of deadweight loss is not in general “too small” to be happy about.
But at tiny enough scales, we stop being able to see why the correct price is the “better” price, from a social point of view. Think of the marginal HFT act as bringing the correct price a millisecond earlier, so quickly that no human outside the process notices, much less changes an investment decision on the basis of the better price coming more quickly. (Will we ever use equally fast computers to make non-financial, real investment decisions in equally small shreds of time? Would that boost the case for HFT? Is HFT “too early to the party”? If so, does it get credit for starting the party and eventually accelerating the reactions on the real investment side?)
HFT also lowers liquidity risk in many cases (it is easier to resell a holding, especially for long-term investors, as day churners can get caught in the froth), and thereby improving the steady-state market price, again especially for long-term investors. That too could improve investment decisions, even if the improvement in the price is small in absolute terms.
Some decisions based on prices have to rely on very particular thresholds. If no tiny price change stands a chance of triggering that threshold, we encounter the absurdity of there being no threshold at all. We fall into the paradoxes of the intransitivity of indifference and you end up with too many small grains of sugar in your coffee.
So maybe a tiny price improvement, across a very small area of the price space, carries a small chance of prompting a very large corrective adjustment, with a comparably large social gain. Yet we never know when we are seeing the adjustment. The smaller the scale of the price improvement, the less frequently the real economy gains come, but in expected value terms those gains remain large relative to the resources used for arbitrage, just as in the bananas case. It’s not obvious why operating on a smaller scale of price changes should change this familiar logic. Is the key difference of smaller scales, combined with lumpy real economy adjustments, a greater infrequency of benefit but intact expected gains?
In this model the HFTers labor, perhaps blind to their own virtues, and bring one big grand social benefit, invisibly, every now and then. Occasionally, for real investors, their trades help the market cross a threshold which matters.
I am reminded of vegetarians. Say you stop eating chickens. You are small relative to the market. Does your behavior ever prompt the supermarket to order a smaller number of chickens based on a changed inventory count? Or are all the small rebellions simply lost in a broader froth?
What is the mean expected time that HFT must run before it triggers a threshold significant for the real economy?
Aren’t the rent-seeking costs of HFT near zero? Long-term investors do not have to buy and sell into the possible froth. HFTers thus “tax” the traders who were previously the quickest to respond, discourage their trading, and push the rent-seeking costs of those traders out of the picture. More fast computers, fewer carrier pigeons. Are there models in which total rent-seeking costs can fall, as a result of HFT? Does it depend on whether fast computers or pigeons are more subject to production economies of scale?
*1493*
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, is one of my favorite books ever, in any field. And now there is a “sequel,” namely 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, due out in August. Excerpt:
Incredibly, the Basque-Vicuña war had almost no effect on the flow of silver. Even as Basques and Vicuñas fought in the streets, they cooperated on mining and refining the silver, then shipping it from Potosi. The last was a huge task. One account describes how a single shipment of 7,771 bars left the city in 1549, four years after the lode’s discovery. Each bar was about 99 percent silver and weighed more than eighty pounds. All were stamped with serial numbers by the foundry and marked with the owner’s stamp, the foundry stamp, and the taxman’s stamp. By the time the assayer individually certified its purity with his stamp, the bar looked as if it had been graffiti-tagged by a demented numerologist. Each llama could carry only three or four bars. (Mules are bigger than llamas, but need more water and are less surefooted.) The shipment required more than two thousand of the beasts. They were watched by more than a thousand Indian guards who in turn were watched by squads of Spanish pistoleros.
Is 1493 as good as 1491? That’s hard to say, but I can report this. I am spellbound reading it, it will be one of the best books of this year, and, although I know this area somewhat, I am learning fascinating information on literally every page. Mann stresses how much it mattered to suddenly be living in the “Homogenocene,” where Asia, Europe, and the New World suddenly started becoming more alike. Mexico City had the world’s first Chinatown and was the first global city. The discussion of the importance of the potato, and in general New World agriculture, surpasses previous accounts and he explains the importance of knowing how to make chuño.
I have an irrational fondness for this sentence of Mann’s:
The First World War distracted governments from the task of monitoring insect movements.
Definitely recommended. By the way, here is Mann’s piece on soil erosion and the economics of dirt. Here is Mann’s home page. Journalists, if anyone is crying out to be the subject of a fascinating profile, it is Charles C. Mann.
The wisdom of Josh Barro
Unfortunately, it’s also possible (as many other voices on Wall Street are warning) that a default would permanently raise Treasury spreads, drive investors to find alternative safe havens, cause a double-dip recession, and unleash various other evils. So, if they are willing to create the possibility of a default, Republicans in Congress are willing to expose America to severe downside risk.
It’s important to step back and consider the stakes here. Republicans say it is important, above all else, to rein in federal government spending. But the risk with excessive spending is not that government will literally become unaffordable or that we will be unable to service our debts. The United States has tremendous available fiscal capacity, as demonstrated by significantly higher tax burdens in most other first-world countries. The real risk of elevated spending is that we’ll adopt a permanently higher level of taxation.
That is a risk, but not a catastrophic one. While there is a link between government spending and economic growth, it is not as strong as conservatives like to believe. For example, Mueller and Stratmann find that a one percentage point rise in government spending as a share of GDP will tend to reduce annual GDP growth by a bit under one-twentieth of a percentage point. If we take Simpson-Bowles as an example of the sort of deficit deal that might be achieved in the medium term without the need to flirt with a bond default, then we’re talking about a difference of one to two points of GDP in government spending compared to an all-Republican plan.
There is also nothing special about government spending as a share of GDP as opposed to other determinants of economic growth, such as rule of law, freedom of contract, immigration policy, free trade and the structure of the tax code—not to mention policies on infrastructure, land use and education. Basically, we could make up a sub-0.1 percentage point hit to long term GDP growth with policy improvements elsewhere.
Which is to say, it does not make sense to create a risk that U.S. Treasuries will be dislodged as the world’s safe-haven investment as a strategy to shift the size of government by a percentage point of GDP or two. Winning this fight is not so important that it makes sense to throw caution to the wind, but that is what Republicans in Congress appear willing to do. The gamble looks even worse when you consider that a debt-limit-impasse-gone-wrong would not necessarily lead to Republicans getting their way on the long-term fiscal adjustment.
The full post is here.
Star Children: Return to Home
DARPA, believe it or not, has a request for information on what they call the 100 YEAR STARSHIP™ STUDY.
Neither the vagaries of the modern fiscal cycle, nor net-present-value calculations over reasonably foreseeable futures, have lent themselves to the kinds of century-long patronage and persistence needed to definitively transform mankind into a space-faring species.
The 100 Year Starship™ Study is a project seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible….
We are seeking ideas for an organization, business model and approach appropriate for a self-sustaining investment vehicle. The respondent must focus on flexible yet robust mechanisms by which an endowment can be created and sustained, wholly devoid of government subsidy or control, and by which worthwhile undertakings—in the sciences, engineering, humanities, or the arts—may be awarded in pursuit of the vision of interstellar flight….
Responses should describe the:
• Organizational structure;
• Governance mechanism;
• Investment strategy and criteria; and
• Business model for long-term self-sustainment.
The best model we have of such an organization is a religion. Business organizations such as the Hudson’s Bay Company have occasionally lasted hundreds of years but more by accident than by design. Universities have lasted hundreds of years, although often with government support and vague missions. A few foundations have lasted for a long period of time but often with big mission changes.
Many religions, however, have maintained themselves more or less intact for over a thousand years. Even in the modern age, new religions appear to be quite capable of forming and maintaining themselves for long periods of time. Mormonism has been on-going for nearly two centuries, the Unification Church and Scientology (n.b. started by a science-fiction writer) have been on-going for over half a century. A religion with a million or so adherents can easily last for hundreds of years while generating substantial revenues and while maintaining focus.
Humanity was born of the stars, our very atoms forged in the heart of a million suns. It is in the stars that we lost travelers will find our true home and our true destiny. The twinkling lights of the yawning sky gently call to us each night to return to the place of our birth. We must answer that call. Star-children, return to home.
(See what I mean? This could work. )
Hat tip: Daniel Kuehn.
More Assorted Links
1. The CDC explains how to prepare for a Zombie apocalypse. Yes really, the CDC.
2. The Business of Bounty Hunting on Freakonomics radio, includes yours truly and legendary bounty hunter Bob Burton. It’s always interesting to me to hear how easy the professionals Dubner and Ryssdal make excellent radio sound.
3. Matt Yglesias warns (?) us about the Rise of the Robot Proletariat. Is this the beginning?
Assorted links
1. PBS Newshour segment on The Great Stagnation, including an excellent MIT critique by Erik Brynjolfsson.
2. How David Brooks fits into Britain.
4. Famous science fiction writers recommend science fiction.
6. Tim Harford on unexpected and underappreciated economics books.
What do we know about population and technological progress?
Bryan Caplan writes:
The more populous periods of human history–most obviously the last few centuries–clearly produced more scientific, technological, and cultural innovations than earlier, less populous periods. More populous countries today produce many more scientific, technological, and cultural innovations that less populous countries… Here’s a challenge for you: Name the most credible measure of idea production that isn’t at least moderately positively correlated with population.
Is this about the absolute number of ideas generated or ideas as a percentage contributor to economic growth? If we are estimating the costs and benefits of greater population, or the future of economic growth rates, the latter is arguably the more important variable. In any case, most plausible theories of economic growth imply that higher populations should lead to higher rates of ideas generation, as measured in terms of value. Ideas are non-rival and can be enjoyed by the entire group, thus yielding a higher social rate of return. There are also larger markets to pay for the ideas or award more fame to the inventors.
Here is a famous Michael Kremer paper arguing for a version of Caplan’s position. That all said, it is far from obvious that Caplan is correct:
1. The measured rate of technological progress, as it contributes to gdp, seems to have peaked in the 1930s. At that time total population, including the population of scientists, was much lower than today. “Effective” total population was yet lower, given the backward nature of transportation and communications and trade at the time, compared to today.
2. A recent paper by Ashraf and Galor (it’s also worth reading for other reasons) concludes: “…population density in pre-industrial times was on average higher at latitudinal bands closer to the equator.” Yet the countries closer to the equator did not end up being the drivers of industrial progress, even though they sometimes had higher rates of progress in agricultural times. Northern Europe, with the exception of the Dutch Republic, was never the star for population density. This paper also indicates that technology drives population growth — more than vice versa — and that “time elapsed since a region’s neolithic breakthrough” predicts later technological progress fairly well.
If you add an extra baby to most societies, ceteris paribus, the rate of expected idea generation does indeed go up in theory. But how important a factor is that, compared to other influences on ideas generation?
Or: at very gross time scales (“the last few hundred years” vs. “the dark ages”) a positive relationship holds between population and ideas production, or at very gross numerical comparisons (“one million people” vs. “ten people”). But viewed at finer granulations (by the way, the evidence in the Kremer paper is quite gross; e.g., pp. 710-712), the relationship isn’t nearly as strong as one might expect. In the time series, it’s been largely a negative relationship for the last eighty years or so, as mentioned above.
What model might give you a positive relationship between population and innovation at grosser scales but not finer scales? Let’s say there are various technological “platforms,” such as “fire,” “agriculture,” and “fossil fuels,” and maybe someday “uploads.” At any point in time, growth rates depend on how much a region has exhausted the potential of its current platform. This is largely independent of current population. That said, larger population areas may have a greater chance of progressing to the next platform, so there is a long-term, gross correlation between population size and levels of technology. Furthermore, if all regions have more or less exhausted the current platform, the larger region has a greater chance of leading the next breakthrough and thus being first to have the new and higher growth rate, even if most of the time it doesn’t have a higher growth rate for technological progress. That view is hardly anti-population, but it explains why you will find screwy population-innovation correlations all over the place. Finally, further breeding, as a recipe for progress, is an extreme lottery ticket and it only works at some special margins.
Sentences to ponder
When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average.
Republicans also gave black students lower grades than their colleagues. In both cases, the researchers stressed, there was no way to know which approach better reflected students’ performance.
From Christopher Shea, here is more, including a link to the paper.
*A Convergence of Civilizations*
That’s the new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World. I read it as offering three major messages: a) there is no unique pattern for Muslim demographic evolution, b) there is more civilizational convergence than divergence, and c) the demographic data we observe explain a good deal about various Muslim countries. Here are some specific points:
1. In 1998-1999 about 55 percent of married women in Burkina Faso lived in polygamous relationships. In the Muslim parts of Nigeria, rates of polygamy can run forty to fifty percent, as opposed to about thirty percent in the Christian parts of Nigeria.
2. Demographically, Iran is very much a Western country with a 2.08 fertility rate, and the authors strongly hint that Iran has a reasonable chance of modernizing as Turkey has; the authors also worry that Turkey has not made a complete demographic transition and thus is vulnerable to backsliding. In general the authors seem to believe that the modernizing properties of Shiism are underrated.
3. Less than five percent of Uzbek or Tajik women are unmarried at age thirty. In Morocco it is 41 percent unmarried at age thirty, in Tunisia it is 54 percent, 50 percent in Lebanon, and a staggering 58 percent unmarried at age thirty in Algeria.
4. Palestinian birth rates are not as high as they are often made out to be: “If one takes Israel and the occupied territories together, one can grasp the absurdity of the demographic confrontations: The high fertility rate of Israeli Arabs is an internal threat to the Jewish state, whereas the high fertility rate of the Jewish settlers threatens Palestinian predominance in the West Bank.” (p.67)
5. In Shiite Azerbaijan, there are almost twice as many abortions per woman as live births, 3.2 to 1.7.
6. Among the Muslims of Europe, the Kosovars are arguably the least religious but also the most demographically conservative.
7. The Muslim Malays seem to have combined high birth rates with relatively high status for women.
Speculative throughout, as they say, but always interesting. Here is one short but accurate review. For the original pointer to the book I thank Chris F. Masse. Chris also points us to the DSK prediction market.
Vance isn’t sure if this article is a parody or not
Emotions are running high in the Northbrae area of Berkeley, and the friendly spirit of the neighborhood is at stake, according to a number of small merchants who are afraid they will not survive in the wake of what is being perceived as aggressive marketing strategies at Monterey Market.
Several small businesses say the owners of Monterey Market have begun to deliberately stock items that they specialize in — including certain cheeses, wine and flowers — and they are selling them at predatory prices, which threatens the local merchants’ livelihoods.
A group of Northbrae neighbors has distributed a hand-out in support of the small local merchants in which it criticizes Monterey’s approach. ”We are making a moral and ethical appeal,” said Tom Meyer, speaking for the group. Signatories on the hand-out include Monterey Fish, Gioa Pizzeria, Hopkins Launderette, and Storey Framing. (See the hand-out here.)
…Meyer said that recently the group had been approached by a representative of Monterey Market to set up a meeting. “That discussion will determine where we go from here,” he said.
Asked what he expected from the Market, Meyer said: “They should talk to their fellow merchants about how they could all flourish.”
The story — if that’s what it is and I believe it is — is here. The caption on the photo reads: “Shirley Ng, owner of Country Cheese Coffee Market, says Monterey Market is under-cutting her prices.”