Monthly Archives: September 2014

An Elite Higher-ed Peculiarity

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Steven Pinker writes,

The common denominator (belying any hope that an elite university education helps students develop a self) is that they [students] are not treated as competent grown-ups, starting with the first law of adulthood: first attend to your priorities, then you get to play.

Later,

Is this any way to run a meritocracy? Ivy admissions policies force teenagers and their mothers into a potlatch of conspicuous leisure and virtue. The winners go to an exorbitant summer camp, most of them indifferent to the outstanding facilities of scholarship and research that are bundled with it. They can afford this insouciance because the piece of paper they leave with serves as a quarter-million-dollar IQ and Marshmallow test. The self-fulfilling aura of prestige ensures that companies will overlook better qualified graduates of store-brand schools. And the size of the jackpot means that it’s rational for families to play this irrational game.

Pinker’s main suggestion is to de-emphasize factors other than aptitude test scores in admissions. However, I do not think that the worst problem with elite schools is the oddity of their admissions process. I think it gets back to not treating students as grown-ups. Part of that is rewarding students for reciting politically correct catechisms rather than for thinking.

I Wish I Knew More About This

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From Technology Review.

Heimerl’s innovation comes in a gray box roughly the size of a microwave oven. It has solar panels on the outside to power cellular equipment inside, along with the software for management functions like billing and analytics. Secure the box somewhere and link it via satellite to a voice-over-IP network, and you’re ready to open shop as a mobile service provider. Heimerl’s nascent company, Endaga, sells it for $10,000

…Just one hitch: it’s illegal. Regional mobile providers hold licenses to the necessary airwaves. Indonesian officials were willing to look the other way, but in general, regulation is a significant hurdle for Heimerl’s vision of universal access. To resolve that issue, he has helped develop a “white space” workaround that occupies unused radio frequencies until another network needs them.

The Endaga company web site does not tell me much.

What I’m Also Reading

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A review copy of How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness. So far, my favorite passage:

Because of our romantic views of their happiness and importance, we are happy, in Smith’s eyes, to be subservient to the politically powerful and even to tolerate their abuse. Even the tyrant can be adored because of our inclination to be overly sympathetic to greatness…we idealize his greatness and happiness.

The book is a reformulation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Roberts takes Smith’s positive theories and draws normative lessons.

What I’m Reading

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Building a Better Teacher, by Elizabeth Green. p. 281:

infrastructure had three elements: a common curriculum suggesting what students should study; common examinations to test how much of that curriculum they learned; and finally, teacher education to help teachers learn to teach exactly what students are supposed to learn.

She argues that

1. Good teachers make a difference.
2. Teaching itself is a skill that can be taught.

I remain skeptical on both points. On (1), why do researchers like Heckman consistently find support for what I call the null hypothesis, which is that no educational interventions make a large, reliable, long-term difference?

On (2), suppose that there are 50 habits that a great teacher has, and each of these habits can only be learned with intensive practice and immediate feedback. Suppose that it takes two months to learn each habit. If a natural teacher starts with 40 of these habits, it will be a lot less costly to train that teacher than to train a teacher that starts out with just 5 of these habits.

As the author pointed out in a live talk at a local bookstore, there are inevitable tensions in the teaching process. When some students get a concept and others do not, when do you move on?

Also, students respond to a teacher’s authenticity and love. How much rote technique can a teacher use before you lose that?

Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, smothers its teachers in the common curriculum and common examinations components of infrastructure. The result is that teachers feel stifled by the requirement to be on lesson x on day y. I would add that whenever I have looked at the data, Montgomery County test scores are mediocre. The county spends much more per pupil than other counties in the state, but its test scores are in the middle of the pack. One consequence of the infrastructure is that the student-teacher ratio is high even though the student-staff ratio is low. Actual classroom teachers work very long days and have very little time to receive and reflect on feedback.

I would note that higher education in America has even less of the infrastructure components than does K-12 education, yet higher education is said by some to work well here.

The strength of the book is that it gives us a picture of what better teaching looks like. The author’s descriptions of quality lessons and of schools that develop and guide their teachers are inspiring. If she is correct, and what works idiosyncratically can be made to work systematically, then reading the book would motivate educational leaders to try.

Health Policy Proposals

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From a RAND paper.

The first five options would decrease costs and risks of inventing new products or
obtaining regulatory approval for products that would advance our two policy goals.

1. enabling more creativity in funding basic science
2. offering prizes for inventions
3. buying out patents
4. establishing a public interest investment fund
5. expediting FDA review.

The last five options would increase the market rewards for inventing products
that would advance our two policy goals. These options are
1. reforming Medicare payment policies
2. reforming Medicare coverage policies
3. coordinating FDA approval and CMS coverage processes
4. increasing demand for products that decrease spending
5. producing more and more-timely technology assessments.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor, who comments

I confess that as I look over their list of policy recommendations, I’m not sure they suffice to overcome the incentives currently built into the U.S. healthcare system.

Question from a Commenter

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In your three-languages model of politics, it is usually the conservatives using the barbarism-civilization axis, and the progressives using the oppression-oppressed axis.

But given the recent murder of Sotloff by Islamic State terrorists, the vocabulary being used highly progressive sources to describe the event are very conservative sounding. Just today I heard President Obama, Secretary Kerry, reporters and commentators on NPR and C-SPAN have all talked about the event specifically using the words, “uncivilized”, “barbaric”, “savages”, “fiends”, “monstrous”, “beastly”, and so on.

It seems that they are being quite genuine in using these words as their honest appraisals and not paying lip service to the concepts.

So, what do you make of all that?

I have not been following these statements. Do they apply to the act or to the group? If you call an act barbaric without calling a group barbaric, then you are not really using the civilization-barbarism axis. If the progressives are calling ISIS as a whole barbaric, then that would represent a shift toward using conservative’s rhetoric. I have not seen a similar shift in rhetoric on Hamas–I do not know of any progressives who have described Hamas’ tactics as barbaric. I have not seen progressive use the word “barbarism” in describing Rotterham (Indeed, that story has been easy to miss if you only follow liberal media. The Washington Post put in the “religion” section quoted a member of a Muslim youth group as saying that the police “failed us,” so that the story fits the oppressor-oppressed axis). So on the whole–and again, I have not been following the statements on ISIS–I do not get the sense that progressives have undergone a major shift in their outlook.

Labor Force Participation

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From a paper by Bill Wascher and many co-authors.

participation rates among youths have been declining since the mid-1990s, in part reflecting the higher returns to education documented extensively by other researchers, but also, we believe, some crowding out of job opportunities for young workers associated with the decline in middle-skill jobs and thus greater competition for the low-skilled jobs traditionally held by teenagers and young adults. Such “polarization” effects also appear to have weighed on the participation of less-educated prime-age men and, more recently, prime-age women. In contrast, increasing longevity and better health status, coupled with changes in social security rules and increased educational attainment, have contributed to an ongoing rise in the participation rates of older individuals, but these increases have not been large enough to provide much offset to the various downward influences on the aggregate participation rate.

…the nearly 2¼ percentage point decline in the aggregate participation rate we project over the next decade will continue to hold down trend output growth by a little less than ½ percentage point per year through the end of the decade.

Gender and Risk-Taking

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Jason Collins favorably reviews The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, a book by John Coates, who says that hormonal responses to success and failure serve to reinforce risk-taking and risk aversion. I note from the book description on Amazon:

Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk in men, especially younger men—significantly, the fear of risk is not reduced in women.

I count this as additional support for what I have said I would do if I were financial regulatory czar: change the gender of the CEO’s of the largest banks.