Many of you are probably already familiar with Leonard Read’s famous 1958 story I, Pencil. Told through the eyes of a pencil, it describes the process of producing a pencil and how many people are involved in doing so, but without ever having met or consciously, deliberately set out a plan under the control of …
Pencil or Peach, Either Way, a Marvel of Decentralized Coordination Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Whether the topic is retail sales or higher education (or some other application), the role of digital technology raises the question of how, if at all, online activity substitutes for physical, face-to-face activity. That relationship differs case-to-case; you wouldn’t expect the effects of online shopping on bricks-and-mortar shops to have the same patterns …
Lynne Kiesling The disruptive digital innovations that have transformed music, movies, and news are now changing business models in higher education. This month’s Cato Unbound features a set of essays on the possible effects of changes like universities offering MOOCs (massive online open courses) at zero price. In the lead essay, Alex Tabarrok argues that …
Michael Giberson Last summer I had a lot of fun at the too-short IHS Liberty and the Art of Teaching workshop. Well, I say “too short,” but the truth is that they packed so much information into 2 days that I couldn’t absorb it all. I did absorb a few bits, though, as related in …
Ihs’s Great Summer Workshop for College Teachers Read More »
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 …
Economic Understanding: “There’s a Lot of Confirmation Bias out There” Read More »
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 …
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 …
John List’s $10 Million Crazy Idea Field Experiment in Education Read More »
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, …
Haidt on Political Bias Among Social Psychologists Read More »
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 …
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 …
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