Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

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Economic understanding: “there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there”

May 18, 2011

Michael Giberson

Do liberals or conservatives of libertarians tend to have a better understanding of economics? It is a question that Daniel Klein and Zeljka Buturovic investigated in a pair of papers appearing in Econ Journal Watch (one and two). The first paper appeared to show that a college education didn’t lead to much improvement in economic understanding, but self-identified “very conservative” persons and libertarians seemed to have a better grasp of the issues than self-identified liberals and progressives.

As it turned out, however, the questions asked were ones in which the correct answer tended to be the answer a conservative or libertarian would favor on ideological grounds. When in the second study they asked more questions for which economic analysis tended to favor liberal rather than conservative views, the performance of liberals improved and the performance of conservatives dropped off.

As Matt Iglesias put it in commenting on the papers, ”there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there.”

HT to Marginal Revolution.

Posted in Economics, Education | Comments Off

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Bainbridge’s broad brush criticisms on empirical legal studies slams all interdisciplinary legal work

March 4, 2011

Michael Giberson

Criticisms of the growing field of empirical legal studies by UCLA law professor  Stephen Bainbridge were issued in such broad brush strokes that he ended up blasting just about every law academic engaged in any sort of interdisciplinary work, especially so if the academic seeks to examine data of some sort. The main claims showed up recently in a National Law Journal article, which quoted Bainbridge:

“A lot of the people I see who are empiricists, often with doctorates in the social sciences, aren’t very good lawyers,” he said. “I’ve read numerous papers that just got the law wrong. The problem is that we’re hiring people with Ph.D.s in other fields, but their law credentials are middling at best. Someone who is a brilliant economist wants to be in a economics department, so we get second-rate lawyers who are second-rate in their academic field.”

Perhaps phrasing the criticism in that way touched a nerve with Josh Wright, a law professor at George Mason University who holds both a PhD in economics and a law degree from UCLA. Wright responds at Truth on the Market, noting among other things that Bainbridge is asserting many facts about the state of the world without actually pointing to any evidence (much less adequately testing the evidence once it is identified).

Posted in Education, Law, Science | 4 Comments »

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John List’s $10 million crazy idea field experiment in education

February 25, 2011

Michael Giberson

Bloomberg Markets Magazine has a feature on economist John List and his $10 million research project on education. Along the way we get an introduction to List’s work on field experiments in economics, a splash of lab-based economics back story, and the reaction of education specialists who think List’s project is wholly off target.

List, along with collaborators Steven Levitt and Roland Fryer, has obtained a $10 grant for a program which randomly assigned 3-5 year old students to one of three groups: (1) free all-day preschool, (2) “parenting academy” for the student’s parent or guardian, or (3) a control group with neither intervention. The program intends for follow the students into adulthood in order to assess the long-term effects of the intervention.

List says he doesn’t know much about education theory, so he enlisted specialists to consult on the preschool curriculum. One such consultant, Clancy Blair, a New York University professor of applied psychology, says he was astonished by the size of the project and by how it focuses on financial incentives without looking at such variables as how the parents interact with their children.

“That’s a crazy idea,” says Blair, who studies how young children learn. “It’s not based on any prior research. This isn’t the incremental process of science. It’s ‘I have a crazy idea and I convinced someone to give me $10 million.’”

List says too many decisions in fields from education to business to philanthropy are made without any scientific basis. Without experimenting, you can’t evaluate whether a program is effective, he says.

“We need hundreds of experiments going on at once all over the country,” he says. “Then we can understand what works and what doesn’t.” …

“What educators need to know are what are the best ways to educate kids, and this is trying to short-circuit that,” Blair says. “We have fundamental problems in education, and this is sort of a distraction.”

List says he understands the objections. “If I was in the field, I’d hate me, too,” List says in November while driving to his sons’ indoor baseball practice in one of Chicago’s south suburbs. “There should be skeptics.”

Posted in Economics, Education, Science | Tagged , | 4 Comments »

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Haidt on political bias among social psychologists

February 9, 2011

Michael Giberson

Several days ago we discussed Jonathan Haidt’s research on libertarianism (see post). In his New York Times column, John Tierney discusses Haidt’s work on political bias among social psychologists:

Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting. …

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

(Links in source.)

Posted in Education, Politics | Tagged , | 6 Comments »

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Could be special pleading on higher education

October 25, 2010

Michael Giberson

The Wall Street Journal reports on recent efforts to make sure that taxpayers are getting their money’s worth from state universities.  Acknowledging that his comments “could be taken as special pleading,” a blogger who is also a Texas state employee providing university students with advanced instruction in financial economics offers his insights about the “perils of high powered incentive systems in multi-task environments, something first analyzed rigorously by Holmstrom and Milgrom in JLEO in 1991.”

Our financial economist sums up the idea as: “In many ways, this multi-tasking problem is captured by Einstein’s aphorism that not everything that counts can be measured, and that not everything that can be measured counts.”

The challenge for administrators is that, in addition to all of the other wonderful things that universities are, they are also economic enterprises with revenue streams and cost streams and somehow these base considerations must impinge on operations. The challenge for administrators is that it is hard to impinge on operations in a coherent way.

Posted in Economics, Education | Comments Off

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Vehicle-to-grid income and analysis

February 22, 2010

Michael Giberson

If you are already a rock star and can’t imagine doing anything else, then “money for nothing and your chicks for free” may be a reasonable characterization of your situation.  On the other hand, if you’re a teenage boy picking up a guitar and hoping to attain wealth and women, you should consider the start-up costs involved.  Some discussions of “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) revenue potential seem a bit like the “money for nothing and your chicks for free” kind of analysis.

Consider the Financial Times article, “Grids to Harness Power of Electric Cars,” a story that builds on recent V2G presentations at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in San Diego.

The first experimental V2G system has just gone live at the University of Delaware, where three electric cars are connected to the grid whenever they are not being driven. “They are making five to ten dollars a day just by being plugged in,” said Kenneth Huber, technology manager for the PJM grid, which covers the mid-Atlantic states.

The two-way connection not only pulls in power to recharge the battery but also sends electricity back to the grid. V2G vehicles work like an electrical sponge, absorbing excess energy when demand for power is low, and returning some to the grid when demand is high, said Willett Kempton, project leader at the University of Delaware.

…  Prof Kempton says his project suggests that an investment in V2G technology could pay off very fast for an electric car owner. Once the technology is commercialised, the additional costs of fitting a V2G-enabled battery and charging system would be about $1,500 – and the owner could make $3,000 a year through a load-balancing contract with the grid.

V2G is economically viable because electric car owners are buying batteries anyway, so it makes sense to use them for communal energy storage. It would be much more costly for electric grids to install stationary battery banks or other storage systems dedicated to load balancing.

It is dangerous to leap to conclusions based on a newspaper summary of research, but the characterization above suggests that a few assumptions may be key.  The assumption that “electric car owners are buying batteries anyway” may mean that the V2G analysis treats the battery as a free resource, and so compares V2G revenue estimates just to the incremental costs of V2G capability and operations.

I suppose it is a perfectly reasonable assumption for anyone who is going to buy an electric car anyway, and then is considering adding V2G capability. If, on the other hand, the intention is to advocate V2G revenue possibilities as an inducement to buy the electric car in the first place, a more inclusive analysis seems reasonable.

(For more on Dire Straits, “Money for nothing”: YouTube, Songfacts.)

Posted in Education, Electricity, Energy markets | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

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Local TV news coverage of the proposed end of 90+ years of electric competition in Lubbock

November 5, 2009

Michael Giberson

I was interested when one of the local news shows  ended their 6 o’clock news segment yesterday on the proposed purchase of Xcel’s Lubbock electric system by Lubbock Power & Light by saying, “Coming up tonight on NewsChannel 11 at ten we hear from an economist and teacher who tells us the other side of the issue and how citizens and taxpayers could be affected.”

“Good,” I thought to myself, so far we’ve heard what the city and the utility think, so let’s see “the other side of the issue.”  I anticipated they would talk to one of my colleagues across campus at the economics department, but there are a few other economists in town.

Here is what we saw on the 10 o’clock news:

“To have everything in one hand is scary to some,” says former stock broker and Lubbock High School AP economics teacher….  She says this deal is all about efficiency.

“But what we do know is this type of monopoly is present in almost every city in America. It is so expensive to build infrastructure of electric company that it’s best to put it one place,” adds Moore.

The efficiency of monopoly?  Huh?  The news segment then jumped to quoting from the president of the regional Xcel operating unit, who said the biggest change will be the elimination of the two sets of power lines.

Other side of the issue???  No, this is the city’s official story.  What happened to “how citizens and taxpayers could be affected”?

I guess I’ll go see what news the morning newspaper has to offer.

Posted in Economics, Education, Electricity | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

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In principle I’m in favor of spending money on economists

October 29, 2009

Michael Giberson

George Soros has promised to spend $5 million a year for 10 years to support an Institute for New Economic Thinking to be hosted at Central European University in Budapest.  According to the INET website, the Institute will make research grants, convene symposia, and establish a journal. As part of the announcement, Soros said:

The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm and rebuild from the ground up. I decided to sponsor INET to facilitate the process. I hope others will join me.

I’d be surprised if we could find any significant part of the “global financial market” that wasn’t thoroughly entangled with law, regulation and politics, so I’m not sure which edifice he is talking about or where it has been erected. Furthermore, the idea that we can discard an existing social system, “find a new paradigm and rebuild from the ground up”, strikes me as intellectual arrogance of a very high order.

But he’s going to spend a lot of money on economists, and in any case I accept the premise that philanthropists should largely be left to their own devices, so I say he should go for it.  It’s Soros’s money – largely built up from participating in that edifice of global financial markets, I understand – and he may as well spend it this way as on fancy cars or the Center for American Progress.

(But whatever you think of economics, economists, or heterodox viewpoints, it seems odd to characterize winners of the Nobel price in economics and other distinguished economists as having been “marginalized” in the profession, as Michael Hirsch does in this Newsweek story on the INET announcement when he mentions the board of advisers.  Yes, yes, pity the poor economist who was “marginalized” into tenured faculty position at some of the top universities in the world: Cal-Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge.  In addition to the Nobel Prize, we have John Bates Clark awardees, former members of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and so on.  The INET board of advisers is a collection of talented and honored members of the profession.  Hirsch is discovering victims who perhaps didn’t notice their victimization during the recent spell of “free market fundamentalism” Hirsch observes in economics.)

Posted in Economics, Education | Tagged , | 4 Comments »

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Raising a generation of grittier children

October 23, 2009

Michael Giberson

Do we need “grittier” children?  No, not messier children, but children with more grit, as in more stick-to-it-iveness and dedication.  A growing body of evidence is supporting the obvious – that success requires dedication and effort as much or more than intelligence.  Maybe obvious, but for decades the U.S. educational system and career counselors have been sorting people based on intelligence tests and trying to find ways to boost IQ scores.  That growing body of evidence is suggesting that we need ways to boost grittiness (will we be sorted by GQ scores?).

Author Jonah Lehrer (How we decide, Proust was a neuroscientist) wrote in “The truth about grit“:

One of the most important elements is teaching kids that talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort. Carol S. Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, refers to this as a “growth mindset.” She compares this view with the “fixed mindset,” the belief that achievement results from abilities we are born with. “A child with the fixed mindset is much more likely to give up when they encounter a challenging obstacle, like algebra, since they assume that they’re just not up to the task,” says Dweck.

In a recent paper, Dweck and colleagues demonstrated that teaching at-risk seventh-graders about the growth mindset – this included lessons about the importance of effort – led to significantly improved grades for the rest of middle school.

Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit.

More recently Lehrer writes about “Learning from mistakes“:

Conventional pedagogy assumes that the best way to teach children is to have them repeatedly practice once they know the right answer, so that the correct response gets embedded into the brain. (According to this approach, it’s important to avoid mistakes while learning so that our mistakes get accidentally reinforced.) But this error-free process turns out to be inefficient: Kids learn material much faster when they screw-up first. In other words, getting the wrong answer helps us remember the right one.

So, if I try to translate this into my daily work teaching college students, I guess I should give students opportunities to screw-up first so that they will learn much faster later.

I’m always trying to improve my pedagogical skills, but I will say (with some pride, I might add) that some of my students are way out ahead of me on this front.

[Note: I should probably point out that this last line is intended to be a joke.  It probably isn't very funny.  Professional driver on closed course.  Your mileage may vary.  Never mind.  It's been a long week.]

HT to Broken Symmetry.

Posted in Education, Miscellany | Tagged , | Comments Off

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The least frequently asked question ever

July 1, 2009

Michael Giberson

Robert Rapier asks what is likely the least frequently asked question ever: “What if I’m wrong?“

Rapier explores that question with respect to his beliefs on peak oil and global warming, but it is good, all-around, general purpose question that should be put to more frequent use.

Posted in Education, Energy markets, Miscellany | Comments Off

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