Category Archives: books and book reviews

Russ Roberts interviews Elizabeth Green

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She says,

when universities took over teacher training and created the first real professors of education, what they did was they recruited people from other disciplines to do this job. So, they would recruit people who studied psychology, for example–that was one of the first major fields to be imported into schools of education. And then they would have these psychologists. .. You are studying learning, and teaching is very related to learning. But the professors of education, even in psychology, did not have any interest in teaching. In fact, the guy who is known as the father of Educational Psychology, Edward Thorndike, he told people that he thought schools were boring; that he didn’t like to visit them. And when he once was speaking to a group of educators and a principal asked him a real problem of practice–you know, this thing happened in my school today, what should I do, what would you do, Professor Thorndike? And Professor Thorndike told him: ‘Do? I’d resign.’ He had absolutely no interest in real problems of practice. And I think that’s carried through. Today we have, in education schools, we have people in the history of education, the psychology of education, the economics of education. But we have very few people who study teaching itself as a craft. And as a result, the folks who are left to train teachers in teaching methods are drawing on a very impoverished science. And they have very little to draw on. There’s been a little bit of a change in the last 20 years, and that’s what I write my book about. I think there are emerging ideas about what teachers should be able to do. But kind of no surprise that teachers don’t leave teacher training prepared for the classroom when we haven’t really put any resources into figuring out what we should be preparing them to do.

As a teacher, you need to know things like how to explain something to a student who is not getting it, or when to keep reinforcing a concept and when to move on to something else, or how to manage a classroom so you can accomplish what you intend to accomplish. Those are “craft” issues, as opposed to “theory” issues.

There is an analogy with business management. A business school can bring in economists to teach profit maximization using calculus, but that is of little practical value in the business world. Harvard and other business schools try to use case studies rather than rely on pure theory. And there are many books on management that are “craft” oriented with respect to handling people or improving sales.

I say that teaching equals feedback. That means that teachers need feedback in order to improve their teaching. I agree with Green that there are better ways to organize schools so that teachers get faster feedback and incorporate it more effectively. How rapidly that can improve teaching is less clear to me.

Listen to the whole thing.

UPDATE: Her book is also reviewed in the New Republic (pointer from Mark Thoma). The review, by Richard D. Kahlenberg, is tendentiously political and uninformative. He says that Green has “one big idea” and then fails to mention what it is, and in fact he seems to have missed it completely. Kahlenberg really likes the idea of raising teacher salaries a lot. But if Green is correct that good teaching is not just a talent you are born with, then you should not need to attract talented people into teaching by paying them more. Instead, you should put those resources into giving teachers better feedback and training.

I see Kahlenberg’s review as an illustration of the way that people look at education through biased political lenses (not that I claim to be innocent here). This only increases my skepticism about anyone’s solution.

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.

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.

The Book on SecStag

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Timothy Taylor writes,

Coen Teulings and Richard Baldwin, who have edited a useful e-book of 13 short essays with a variety of perspectives on Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures. In the overview, they write: “Secular stagnation, we have learned, is an economist’s Rorschach Test. It means different things to different people.”

Read his whole post.

The interesting secular trends include low real interest rates, low productivity growth, and declining labor force participation among prime-age workers.

From a conventional AS-AD perspective, low real interest rates are a demand-side phenomenon. The other two are supply-side phenomena. I wish the secstag folks would get together and sort this out.

I think that the most important secular trends are:

1. The New Commanding Heights. That is, the shift in the economy toward a lower share of goods consumption and a higher share of consumption of education and health care services. The New Commanding Heights are sectors in which productivity is difficult to measure and government interference is rampant.

2. The Great Factor-price Equalization. That is, the ability of workers with a given level of skills in China and India to compete with workers of equivalent skills in the U.S. This benefits the median worker in China and India as well as high-skilled workers in all countries, but it threatens the median worker in the U.S.

3. Vickies and Thetes. Or what Charles Murray calls Belmont and Fishtwon. In the U.S., there is extreme cultural sorting going on. People with high intelligence and conscientiousness are moving in one direction, and people who are low in those traits are moving in the other direction.

I think that (1) explains the low productivity growth. It could be partly a measurement problem and partly a problem of government putting sand in the gears.

I think that (2) and (3) explain the labor force participation problem.

What about low real interest rates? This one has puzzled me for a decade. Is it possible that (1) is the explanation? That is, the New Commanding Heights are not nearly as capital-intensive as the old commanding heights of steel, electric power, and transportation. Also, investment may be deterred because of the way government affects these sectors.

Culture and Institutions

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Bryan Caplan writes,

Simple economics implies that government enterprises should be far worse than they really are.

I am reading (admittedly a bit late to the party) Peter T. Leeson’s collection of essays on anarchy. In at least one of the essays, he takes the view that the cultural margin is more important than the institutional margin. That is, he seems to be saying that there are no societies in which anarchy will work well but government would work poorly, or vice-versa. Instead, on the one hand there are well-developed cultures, which could have good government or good anarchy, while on the other hand there are poorly-developed cultures, which could have only bad government or bad anarchy.

I have referred often to the debate about the relative primacy of culture and institutions. I tend to side with the culturalists. The classic institutionalist counter-example is Korea. I think that it is reasonable to suggest that North Korea would be much improved under anarchy. But in general, I think that Leeson’s view, which I take to be one of cultural primacy, holds.

Health Care Innovation

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I review the book by Jonathan Bush and Stephen Baker. An excerpt:

Bush argues that for most medical services, flagship research hospitals are high-cost providers. He believes that in a rational marketplace, the leading hospitals would have to specialize in particular areas of expertise. A hospital with unique skills at treating a certain type of cancer might attract patients from all over the United States with that cancer. However, it would not treat local patients for ailments that are more common and more easily treated. Instead, those cases would be handled by smaller community hospitals or clinics.

Hookernomics

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Subtitled The Business of Sex, it is a recent book, which the author encouraged me to review. He profiles the contemporary prostitution industry and offers his views on the best policy for dealing with it. One of his suggestions is for a walled-garden approach, in which there are some areas where prostitution is at least de facto legal while there are other areas where laws against prostitution are enforced.

He offers some simple theoretical hypotheses, e.g. that better birth control technology shifts the supply curve to the right and that desirable mates will prefer marriage to prostitution, so that the median prostitute will not be a desirable mate. He offers some back-of-the-envelope estimates of various sorts of prostitution activity. Although the estimates are not based on any formal research by the author, they seem to offer useful, reasonable bounds on the true numbers.

I read the book on part of a plane ride, and I found it breezy and worth my time. However, the content is heavily weighted toward the author’s opinions, which I often found unpersuasive. The passage that stuck with me the most was this:

The obvious thing is that both prostitutes and their customers are notorious liars. Prostitutes are paid to lie. Their job is to flatter the customer and play any role he wants them to play…On one level it’s all about showbiz, and, in that context, there is nothing wrong with it.

I find myself reacting mostly to the “notorious liars” phrase, which is a complete turn-off for me. It probably explains why I do not share the author’s positive outlook on prostitution. The “showbiz” phrase suggests that one could be entertained by it, just as one can be entertained by going to a play or movie where you know that people are just acting. But when you go to a play you remain separate from what takes place on stage. When I interact with other people, I have a strong preference for authenticity.

Related: Scott Sumner discusses the daughter test, and the author takes the position that he would be ok with it. I would not.

Schucks

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David Henderson’s takeSchuck explicitly defends public choice from its critics, writing, “[P]ublic choice theory’s rational actor model explains and predicts far more observed official behavior than its main rival, public interest theory.” He then lays out how well public choice predicts the destructiveness of many government programs–programs that are destructive precisely because of the many perverse incentives that motivate politicians, bureaucrats, special interests, and voters. Schuck gives many historical and contemporary examples of government programs that cause large inefficiencies, including unemployment insurance (creates the incentive to stay unemployed); disability insurance (creates the incentive to claim disability and quit work); and the Dodd-Frank Act (creates moral hazard by broadening the government’s safety net for risk takers).

My take:

Schuck has an impressive grasp of neoclassical economics, but I think he gives it too much weight. Neoclassical economics is obsessed with the concept of equilibrium, and in turn it pays little attention to innovation. I believe that one of the biggest lessons of economics is the value of trial-and-error learning through entrepreneurial activity.

Incidentally, that is one of the important ideas that is, for all practical purposes, outside mainstream economics. The process of innovation has three steps: introducing experiments, learning from experiments, and evolving as a result of those experiments. The government is particularly inferior to the market when it comes to both experimentation and evolution. The government does not have the ability — or the will — to attempt as many experiments as private actors do. In the marketplace, when one organization won’t explore alternatives, another one often will.

Yuval Levin calls this the three-E’s model–experimentation, evaluation, and evolution.