Category Archives: Education

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

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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.)

Raising a generation of grittier children

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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.

Stay in school

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Michael Giberson

A few years ago I attended a free concert in the park in Arlington, Virginia by The Grandsons. Between songs lead guitarist Alan MacEwen observed that the bass player had a gig in Atlantic City, New Jersey the night before and had barely arrived at the park moments before the concert was to begin. The bass player – I don’t recall who it was at the time – offered an explanation that ran something like this:

I haven’t actually had any sleep yet, so I hope I can keep up. But it was a lot of fun to play with [name of band leader since forgotten]. Actually we played the early show at [casino name forgotten], we opened for [band name forgotten] and were done by 10:30 or so last night. But [other person's name] and I decided to gamble, and had a few drinks. Then we met [members of some other band] and drank some more and gambled some more. This continued until we got hungry, and went for breakfast. It was light outside and I said, “Hey, I’ve got to be back in Virginia by noon,” so we grabbed some food and hopped in the car and drove like madmen down I-95. And [musicians name] was in the back feeling sick, and I’m saying to hold it in because I got to get back to Virginia, and …

At this point the bass player stops the story and looks out at the crowd. It is a sunny Sunday afternoon, a few clouds in an otherwise bright blue sky. Families have picnic blankets spread out. Kids are frolicking.

He blinks a few times, and then sums up:

So, kids, remember: [with emphasis] stay in school, take your vitamins, and always listen to your parents!

Okay, so I wasn’t taking notes, the story might not be exactly as depicted. Given the bass player’s demeanor that day, I’m not sure his account was reliable in the first place. But I remembered the moral of the story.

I was reminded of the episode by Derek Thompson’s post at the Atlantic Business Channel, Go to college, in which he makes his point by reference to unemployment statistics.

Probably a better argument, even if less memorable.

Mankiw on the B-School Economist

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Michael Giberson

Mankiw speculates on the differences between Econ department economists and business school economists. Among his suggestions, self-selection by the faculty member, the kind of research rewarded in each place, and this remark about the focus of students:

Faculty who teach PhD students are used to being asked, “How did you derive that first-order condition? How can you prove that the equilibrium exists and is unique?” Faculty who teach MBA students are used to being asked, “Is that really how it works?”

I wonder how economists in law schools differ from economists in Econ departments and business schools?

Lubbock Cycling Chic

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Michael Giberson

Tomorrow is the annual “Lowrider/Dream bike” parade on the Texas Tech University campus. The event is part of program in which TTU art students and science and engineering students mentor middle schoolers who assemble and customize a bicycle. There are a lot of very sound pedagogical reasons to think that such hands-on activities are powerful ways to teach abstract problem-solving skills.

Strikes me as a very cool project.

But listen to the video, produced by the TTU communications and marketing department, and what is the primary selling point? Here’s the opening:

For a group of nearly 50 kids at Adkins Middle School, getting a free bike was cool in itself, having the chance to trick it out was even better, but – don’t tell them – they are also acquiring problem solving skills that just could help them on standardized testing ….

Great. The big goal of Texas public education, acquire problem solving skills that “just could help … on standardized testing.” Continue listening and you realize that the standardized testing angle is not just the video producer’s framing, it seems pretty important to the middle school teachers too.

The next four words in the video are “…and in real life.” Oh, real life skills, too, once the standardized testing is taken care of?

That is a relief.

(The post title is a nod to the very stylin’ Copenhagen Cycle Chic.)

Reiham Salam on the angelheaded hipsters at SXSW Interactive

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Michael Giberson

At The Atlantic‘s business blog, Reiham Salam invokes sci-fi author Vernor Vinge as he contemplates the meaning of what he saw at the SXSW Interactive Festival, but his post put me more in mind of these famous opening lines:

       I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
              madness, starving hysterical naked, 
       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
              looking for an angry fix, 
       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- 
              ery of night

Except, you know, in a good way.

Salam said one company’s offering suggested to him a kind of “hipster Second Life that involves dancing alone” and he was “reminded of the anomic dystopia vividly described in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.”  Maybe it was his use of the word “hipster” so near the phrase “anomic dystopia vividly described” that put me in mind of Ginsberg’s Howl.

Nonetheless, Salam finds reasons to hope for the future, reasons to think that the Austin-gathered angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient wireless connection to the starry dynamo will produce something fantanstic, something capable of enabling the further flourishing of human civilization in all of its diverse manifestations.  (Salam also cites Will Wilkinson, another writer I’m a fan of; the ‘enabling the flourishing … diverse manifestations’ phrase is my mangled nod to Wilkinsonian themes.)

Ginsberg and Bloom may have been pessimistic in the face of all the diverse manifestations of the world, but I’m going with Salam and the future on this one.

Because it is not news until it is on Comedy Central; or, carbon taxes their brains

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Michael Giberson

Carbon tax and cap-and-trade fun, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and bloggers at Common Tragedies.

In brief: on Monday the WSJ lead editorial complained about the distributional effects of cap-and-trade, correctly noting that the effect of pricing carbon would depend on consumption but misleadingly illustrated with a chart based on carbon-emitting production by state.  Two economists at Resources for the Future sent a letter to the editor pointing out the problem, and after the WSJ said it would not run the letter, one of the economists – Rich Sweeney – posted it on his blog at Common Tragedies.

Subtlety being the soul of blogging, he headlined the post: “The Wall Street Journal is an idiot.”

This morning at CT, Sweeney is back with, “Write a letter to the editor, and nobody cares. Call someone an idiot on the internet and…….”

The answer is: get your letter published in the WSJ. Nearby on the editorial page is a rejoinder, where the editorialists, in their words, “try to take their [the RFF economists'] argument seriously.” [What?  Does this mean the first editorial was done without considering recently published work by the mainstream-if-slightly-staid folks at the pre-eminient environmental policy think tank?  I guess for the second editorial, the difference was that the WSJ editors were actually wearing their thinking caps.]

Elsewhere in the house of WSJ, Environmental Capital blogger Keith Johnson pulls up a chair ringside, “Knockdown, Dragout: Think Tank v. WSJ Edit Page on Cap-and-Trade.”

Johnson concluded:

The RFF guys responded this morning: “Now the question is whether the WSJ really cares about the true net effect of carbon policy on households in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, or if they’re simply clinging to any story that will allow them to politically undermine cap and trade.”

It’s certainly fodder for a lively debate. The only thing that would make it better would be moving it to Comedy Central.

I’m all for getting this debate onto Comedy Central.  We will be talking about cap-and-trade and carbon taxes in a few weeks in the Energy Economics class.

Students here are leaving for Spring Break this afternoon.  I figure Comedy Central is about the only chance I have got to get a serious energy econ idea entertained by even a handful of students for the next 9 days.

[Note to Jon Stewart: Call me.  I can play straight man.]

Students of energy in universities today will find themselves in a new world tomorrow

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Michael Giberson

The post title is drawn from the conclusion of Roland Horne’s essay, “The future of petroleum — and of petroleum education.” The essay runs through a peak oil explanation – citing advocates and critics of the concept – and offers a sort of mild endorsement of peak oil theories. However, Horne suggests that peak oil would be good news, not bad news, for students now studying in petroleum-oriented university programs (from petroleum engineering, geology, and land management programs to energy finance and energy economics). As oil becomes harder to find, as remaining reservoirs become harder to develop, the return on an investment in related human capital will increase.

Horne’s conclusion:

Students of energy subjects in universities today will find themselves in a new world tomorrow. Oil demand will outstrip supply, probably within a few years and certainly within a few decades. Oil will not ‘run out’, but the cheap ‘easy oil’ of the twentieth century has already been replaced with resources that require huge investments, advanced technology and high levels of expertise from its industrial workforce. These challenges should be an incentive rather than a deterrent, as in fact they represent tremendous opportunities for young professionals. To capitalize on these opportunities, today’s graduates need to attain technical abilities that are both flexible and advanced. Professionals in the oil industry will work in a global context, and will need to master understanding of other cultures and other languages. Finally, students who begin their careers now as petroleum professionals will probably retire in 40 or 50 years as energy professionals. [Emphasis added.]