Monthly Archives: May 2013

Outsourcing Grading

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From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

In Swarthmore College’s Honors Program, at least when I went there, grading also was outsourced. The professor sent the syllabus to an outside examiner, who made up the exam and graded it. This was considered a good thing.

Perhaps the graders who work for EduMetry are not as skilled as the outside examiners used by Swarthmore. Still, what is the next best alternative? Multiple-choice tests on Scantrons? Computerized grading?

As a practical matter, the alternative is not careful, skillful feedback provided by distinguished professors. However, I do expect that many professors at lesser-ranked colleges will see this as a threat to “quality,” meaning their incomes.

By the way, if you are looking for yet another article on MOOCs, the Richmond Fed has one. I am quoted a couple of times. This whole education-technology thing is reminding me of the early days of the Web in the mid 1990s, when there were lots of articles about stuff that seemed important at the time but which has long since been forgotten. Magazines like Business Week ran cover stories on “push technology,” “browser wars,” “applets,” etc.

David Boaz on Libertarianism

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He lists the top ten ways that he tries to explain it.

the number 1 way to talk about libertarianism — or at least a sentence I found effective when I was talking about Libertarianism: A Primer on talk shows: “Libertarianism is the idea that adult individuals have the right and the responsibility to make the important decisions about their lives.” Every word is important there: We’re talking about individuals. We’re talking about adults; the question of children’s rights is far more complex. Responsibility is just as important as rights.

The objection from progressives is that this ignores a lot of harm in the world–the harm that people do to themselves, the harm of market failures, and the harm of oppression. To meet this objection, I would say that I believe that humans make mistakes in the context of government that do more harm than the mistakes that they make when pursuing their individual interests in the context of the market.

The objection from conservatives is that this ignores the need for collective action to suppress barbarism, both as an external threat and as an individual tendency. To meet this objection, I would say that I believe that government enforcement of civilized values is more often than not an oxymoron.

Moises Naim Watch

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Mark Manson writes,

One of my best friends recently told me that the prestigious multinational corporation he worked for was itching to permanently send him to India. They wanted him to manage their expansion into that market. And, obviously, India is a huge emerging market. They gave him the Godfather offer to go — enough money to live in a mansion, with personal chefs, private drivers, everything. The irony, of course, was that my friend is a first generation Indian-American. His parents gave up everything decades ago and fought their way to the US to give their kids opportunities they would never have had back in India. They succeeded. What they didn’t expect was that that opportunity for their son they gave up everything for? It was back in India.

One of my big take-aways from Naim’s The End of Power is that emerging economies have a lot going for them. If the future belongs to auto-didacts, it also belongs to people who are comfortable living in more than one country.

Energy Breakthroughs?

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The latest issue of MIT Technology Review lists ten (not-yet-proven) breakthrough technologies. Two that caught my eye:

Solar panels that are twice as efficient as current designs. Although I strongly oppose subsidizing current solar industries, I do hope for a “solar singularity,” meaning that at some point solar power becomes more efficient than other sources of energy and then continues to increase its advantage.

A new circuit breaker that would allow the electric grid to operate on direct current, which

can efficiently transport electricity over thousands of kilometers and for long distances underwater

High School Education

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Julie Berry Cullen, Steven D. Levitt, Erin Robertson, and Sally Sadoff write,

our advice to high schools when it comes to underperforming students is to redefine the mission and eschew traditional success metrics like test scores, focusing instead on more pragmatic objectives like keeping kids out of trouble, giving them practical life skills, and helping with labor market integration. That conclusion will no doubt be unsatisfying to many readers. In an ideal world, high schools would perform miracles, bringing struggling students back from the brink schools and launching them towards four-year college degrees.

So far, I could call this Journal of Economic Perspectives symposium on education “Living with the null hypothesis.”

On Early Childhood Education

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President Obama says that the science is clear. Greg J. Duncan and Katherine Magnuson are not so sure.

We find that the evidence supports few unqualified conclusions. Many early childhood education programs appear to boost cognitive ability and early school achievement in the short run. However, most of them show smaller impacts than those generated by the best-known programs, and their cognitive impacts largely disappear within a few years. Despite this fade-out, long-run follow-ups from a handful of well-known programs show lasting positive effects on such outcomes as greater educational attainment, higher earnings, and lower rates of crime. Since findings regarding
short and longer-run impacts on “noncognitive” outcomes are mixed, it is uncertain what skills, behaviors, or developmental processes are particularly important in producing these longer-run impacts

John Cochrane on Housing Finance

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He writes,

Suppose that mortgages were bundled into securities, intermediated by mutual funds whose values float, just like those of equity mutual funds, and held around the world in retirement accounts, pension funds, and our endowments’ portfolios, without government guarantees at every step. This would be a terrific financial structure

I think that this would be an improvement. However, the household demand for risk-free assets might lead banks or money-market funds to offer fixed-rate instruments backed by these floating-rate securities. Add enough leverage and you have a very shaky financial structure. In any case, I continue to believe that if there were no government actions distorting the price differential between a thirty-year mortgage with an interest rate fixed for just five years and a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, the latter would cease to dominate the housing finance system in the U.S.

Burt Malkiel vs.John Cochrane on Investment Managers

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In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Malkiel writes,

The major inefficiency in financial markets today involves the market for investment advice, and poses the question of why investors continue to pay fees for asset management services that are so high. It is hard to think of any other service that is priced at such a high proportion of value.

Cochrane writes,

After all, active management and fees have survived 40 years of efficient-market disdain. Economists who would dismiss “people are stupid” as an “explanation” for a pricing anomaly that lasts 40 years surely cannot use the same “explanation” for the persistence of active management. Economists who think the evidence favors lots of “inefficiencies” in the market are even less well placed to deplore active management. They should conclude that we need more, or at least better, active management to They should conclude that we need more, or at least better, active management to correct the market’s inefficiencies. Their puzzle is the inability of existing managers correct the market’s inefficiencies. Their puzzle is the inability of existing managers to pick low-hanging fruit. to pick low-hanging fruit.

I suppose that one can believe that there are a lot of inefficiencies in the market and also believe that active managers are so bad at finding these inefficiencies that they actually make things worse.

Anyway, read the whole essay.

What I’m Reading

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New books by Kevin Williamson and by Tim Kane and Glenn Hubbard. Both take as their premise the thesis that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal course. In The End Is Near and It’s Going to be Awesome, Williamson treats this as an opportunity, while in Balance, Kane and Hubbard treat it as a threat. Perhaps it would be appropriate at some point to jointly review them at length.

If I might boil the Kane-Hubbard book down to one sentence, it would be that without a balanced budget amendment to avert fiscal collapse, America will lose its great power status. I can imagine conservatives, thinking in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis, nodding firmly in agreement. However, by the same token, I can picture progressives and libertarians shrugging with indifference.

Williamson appears to be in the latter category. So far (I am less than 1/3rd finished), the book is assembling a standard array of libertarian arguments. Anyone who already resonates to the freedom-coercion axis is bound to like it. My guess is that Williamson is headed toward an embrace of what I have called civil societarianism. So far, it looks as though he is arguing for views that I share, although he expresses them with greater certitude.

From Permanent Press to Permanent Clean

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Walter Russell Mead writes,

A Kickstarter success story making the rounds of the Internet this week caused us to perk up our ears here at Via Meadia. A Brooklyn-based company called Wool & Prince has developed a dress shirt that doesn’t require ironing and can be worn for extended periods of time without it starting to stink.

Pointer from Nick Schulz, who reminds me that in our book we talked about the progress represented by permanent press and speculated that in the future we might see permanent clean.