Academia: what is the scandal?

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1. Tyler Cowen writes,

these bribes only mattered because college itself has become too easy, with a few exceptions. If the bribes allowed for the admission of unqualified students, then those students would find it difficult to finish their degrees. Yet most top schools tolerate rampant grade inflation and gently shepherd their students toward graduation. That’s because they realize that today’s students (and their parents) are future donors (and potential complainers on social media). It is easier for professors and administrators not to rock the boat. What does that say about standards at these august institutions of higher learning?

The fundamental scandal is that elite colleges are a positional good for parents. The whole process is built around that. Colleges go all-out to recruit applicants in order to issue large numbers of rejections and thereby show that they are selective. As Tyler points out, when it comes to deciding who gets to graduate, these same colleges are hardly selective at all.

Imagine a different world, in which colleges abolish their admissions departments. Let anyone apply. If demand exceeds the available slots, then use a lottery. Grade rigorously, so that unqualified students flunk out. Parents who think too highly of their children will end up wasting tuition money. That seems like a more just world to me.

2. Daniel Klein on the ideological groupthink of academia.

There are many important points, including the tendency that once you have a solid majority with one viewpoint, they tend to lose touch with and demonize other viewpoints.

Pointer from Bryan Caplan, who seems to think it doesn’t matter, because nobody listens to those silly professors, anyway. I think Bryan is wrong on that. Some day, he may find himself living under an authoritarian regime because enough people do listen to these leftist professors. He may even find himself not protected by his own bubble.

In my view (2) is the real scandal. What I resented most when I saw the “admissions cheating” scandal was that these parents actually wanted so badly to get their kids into these schools. I think that the worst mistake that I made as a parent was sending my youngest daughter to one of the more prestigious colleges. If I were given a do-over, I would bribe that admissions office to issue a rejection.

Learning concepts vs. asking questions

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On my essay on Minerva, a commenter writes,

It seems to me that centralization and hierarchies can be useful in contexts where a unitary goal exists and where information is concentrated (e.g. performing surgery, waging war). On the other hand, decentralization and emergent approaches are useful when multiple/unclear goals exist and information is dispersed/local (e.g. politics, consumption choices).

Applying this to education, centralization (e.g. adherence to lessons plans, strong professor guidance) should then be relatively more useful when students are first learning a concept they are unfamiliar with since the goal is clear (learn the concept) and information is concentrated (with the professor). On the other hand, decentralization (e.g. open-ended discussions, student-led activities) is relatively more useful when students are applying concepts they have already learned since the goal becomes less defined (deepening knowledge can occur in many ways) and information is now dispersed (students can bring in their own views once the concept is understood).

Think of two ways of learning to read. The centralized way is for a teacher to systematically explain the letters and how they form words. The decentralized way is to sit in your parent’s lap while they read and to acquire reading skills by gradually learning to associate the symbols on the page with what the parent is saying. The parent responds to your curiosity about the symbols on the page. I think that we tend to over-estimate the efficacy of the centralized approach and to under-appreciate the role of the decentralized approach.

At a college level, think about concepts as tools to answer questions. So if I learn accounting, I have a tool that I can use to analyze a business.

With a centralized approach to education, you teach accounting, and you tell students, “You are going to need this.” With a decentralized approach, you trust that the students who become interested in analyzing businesses will sooner or later become interested and motivated to learn accounting.

When I say that the future belongs to auto-didacts, I am saying that a motivated college student should be capable of coming up with questions that serve to direct that student’s learning. The best role for a professor is to be a guide or mentor.

Kevin Erdmann watch

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1. Joel Kotkin writes,

In fact, as a new Brookings study shows, millennials are not moving en masse to metros with dense big cities, but away from them. According to demographer Bill Frey, the 2013–2017 American Community Survey shows that New York now suffers the largest net annual outmigration of post-college millennials (ages 25–34) of any metro area—some 38,000 annually—followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Diego. New York’s losses are 75 percent higher than during the previous five-year period.

. . .The top 20 magnets include Midwest locales such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Columbus, and Kansas City, all areas where average house prices, adjusted for incomes, are half or less than those in California, and at least one-third less than in New York.

2. I now have a review copy of Shut Out. On p. 5, he writes,

we did not have a housing bubble. We had a housing supply bust–first in the places where people want to live, in places where there is more economic opportunity. That supply bust caused prices to rise to extreme levels in those cities–most notably in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco–metropolitan areas I call the Closed Access cities. After the turn of the century, millions of households flooded out of those cities because of a shortage of housing–so many that they overwhelmed cities in the main destinations for those households, such as inland California, Arizona, and Florida. Then we imposed a credit and monetary bust on the entire country in a misplaced attempt to alleviate the problem.

I have a difficult time wrapping my head around the idea of a “supply bust.” It suggests a supply curve rapidly shifting to the left. I find it more plausible to think of housing supply in the Closed Access cities as relatively fixed, with demand increasing rapidly. But how to reconcile “demand increasing rapidly” with net out-migration without resorting to a Yogi Berra theory?

One possibility is non-resident foreign buyers making up the difference. Another possibility, going back to the supply bust idea, is that there is a lot of reconstruction taking place with the existing housing stock, and while these houses are being fixed up, no one is living in them.

Overall, there are a lot of cross-currents here, and there are multiple housing markets even within a single metropolitan area. It’s a difficult picture to sort out.

Newer versions of the marshmallow test

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James Andreoni and others write,

We find that time preferences evolve significantly as children age, with younger children displaying more impatience than older children. This is in line with related work that finds a similar association with age (Bettinger and Slonim, 2007; Angerer et al., 2015; Deckers et al., 2015; Sutter et al., 2015). We also find a strong association with race: black children are significantly more impatient than white or Hispanic children, even while controlling for socio-economic status, cognitive skills and executive function skills.

. . .We do not observe a correlation between preferences of parents and their children. We might have expected such a correlation due to genetics or social learning.

. . .The fact that our early interventions, which were quite broad, did not lead to durable changes in time preferences suggests that such preferences may be difficult to change with education programs for 3-5 year-olds.

. . .the experiment was conducted one-on-one with a trained experimenter and each decision was accompanied by physical containers holding the number of rewards that would be earned by the child for each alternative. The rewards were always candies

Thanks to a reader for forwarding the paper to me.

The rewards were candies, with more offered if the child would wait a day. Frankly, my inclination is to be skeptical of the whole study. You are telling me that interventions do not matter, parental inclinations do not matter, but race matters? I can come up with a clever story to explain such an outcome (perhaps the children of different races reacted differently to the race of the “trained experimenter”), but I would put most of my chips on “results fail to replicate.”

Time consistency problems with life decisions

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Agnes Callard writes,

This is true of all big personal decisions: we will know what is great about a college education once we have one; we will know what it is like to love our children only after they exist; we will know what living as an immigrant entails, for us, only after we have emigrated. In these cases, our grasp of the target and its value (e.g. married life) is a matter of living rather than thinking. Marriage is itself a learning experience, one that cannot be pre-empted by calculative reasoning, no matter how sophisticated. We cannot take the measure of our lives in advance.

If I may abuse some jargon, I would say that big life decisions entail a time inconsistency problem, in that you will be a different person after the decision has played out.

Your perspective on quitting a job to start a new career is going to be different years after you make the decision than it was before you make the decision. That is true either way. Your future self will live with a decision that your present self has to make.

One of the most interesting decisions is when to risk either a personal or occupational divorce. How will your future self look at these decisions? As best I can discern by observing myself and others, I would say that

1) if you’ve got a marriage that you feel sort of lukewarm about, then the risk/reward ratio from trying to find someone else is probably higher than you anticipate. It’s worth making more effort to improve your relationship with your spouse.

2) if you’ve got a job that you feel sort of lukewarm about, then the risk/reward ratio of trying a new employer is probably lower than you realize. You probably have already put too much effort into trying to improve your relationship at work.

Heritability and social justice engineering

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Heritability estimates and eugenics drew a lot of comments, including one from the author of the piece to which I linked. Apparently I misinterpreted his abstract, and I apologize for that.

I am going to wade into this controversial area again. The 6 points below are just throat-clearing. My main point follows that.

1. My reading of the data is that individual differences typically swamp differences by race of gender. That is, you may find a difference on average between men and women. Suppose that women on average are better at verbal communication. That does not mean that when you encounter a man it is safe to assume that his verbal communication skills are weak.

2. Many characteristics are highly heritable. You cannot perfectly predict the characteristics of a child based on the characteristics of the parents. But as a statistical matter, a child is more likely to have characteristics of the parents than some other child chosen at random from the population.

3. There are average differences by race that are due to heritability and average differences by gender that are due to biology.

4. In my opinion, the government should not deliberately establish policies with the intent of influencing who should reproduce and who should not reproduce. My choice of whether to reproduce or not reproduce could be mistaken in some way, but I trust myself to make that choice rather than hand that responsibility to a government official.

5. Plenty of policies can have the unintended effect of varying the incentives to reproduce, but those policies can be judged based on their own merits, without focusing on their demographic implications.

6. I am even more strongly opposed to eugenic social engineering that involves killing or sterilizing people.

But here is my main point:

Social engineering takes another form, based on the denial that heritability matters or that average differences by race and gender have a basis in heritability or biology. This engineering for social justice takes it as given that the distribution of rewards or opportunities ought to be what one would expect if there were no heritability and no average differences. It assumes that any outcomes that one dislikes must be due to discrimination. As an aside, social justice engineers tend to overlook some distributional outcomes, such as the distribution of dangerous jobs.

There is an economic argument that one person’s unjust discrimination is another person’s profit opportunity. Therefore, discrimination tends to be driven out by the market process. By the standard of perfection, this economic mechanism fails. But that does not provide a rationale for social justice engineering, which involves affirmative action, demands for redress when high-status occupations are disproportionately held by white males, etc. To defend social justice engineering, you have to be able to show that government officials in the real world (not just in some theoretical model) develop and implement policies that work better than the decentralized decisions of individuals. Even worse than social justice engineering by government officials is social justice engineering by the mob.

In short, I think that in the real world, social justice engineering does more harm than good. It is the mirror image of government-imposed eugenics. Both ignore point (1) about individual differences, and both inject someone into a decision-making process who is not directly involved in the decision. If it were up to me, social justice engineering would be just as taboo as social engineering for eugenic purposes.

William Easterly feeds the trolls

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Easterly writes,

Naidu, Rodrik, and Zucman may have trouble finding debate partners who will defend ideological, fundamentalist, fetishist neoliberalism. As a personal favor to the authors, whom I like and respect, I will volunteer to be at least a neoliberal—I hope to be excused from the other labels.

If the publication had asked me to engage with Naidu, Rodrik, and Zucman, I would have insisted that first they rewrite their essay to take out all of the boo-words and straw-man accusations. To tolerate below-the-belt intellectual punches because you “like and respect” the perpetrators is to commit a version of the ad hominem fallacy.

Or to boil it down: Don’t feed the trolls.

Martin Gurri watch

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Noah Smith suggests that from a historical perspective, the revolt of the public is not new. He cites the period from 1789-1848 as well as the 1960s.

These were two former eras, one far in the past, one recent, in which spontaneous activism and popular rage led to widespread rejection of elites and endemic political chaos. And yet in each case, the public didn’t need Facebook or Twitter to revolt – all it needed were pamphlets, independent newspapers, books, or that ultimate information technology, word of mouth.

So the Revolt of the Public might not be such a new thing under the sun. Instead, it might be a recent manifestation of a recurring phenomenon – a periodic eruption of popular discontent. Such a cycle might be driven by improvements in information technology – the printing press, telephones, radio, blogs, and now social media. Each time information technology improves, it might lead to an explosion of chaos and rage while elites and institutions struggle to adapt. But each time in the past, the slow-moving engines of government, business, and media have eventually figured out how to put the lid back on public rage. It may turn out similarly this time.

The poverty trap

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“>Ariel J. Binder and John Bound write,

The existing literature, in our view, has not satisfactorily explained the decline in less-educated male labor-force participation. This leads us to develop a new explanation. As others have documented, family structure in the United States has changed dramatically since the 1960s, featuring a tremendous decline in the share of less-educated men forming and maintaining stable marriages. We additionally show an increase in the share of less-educated men living with their parents or other relatives. Providing for a new family plausibly incentivizes a man to engage in labor market activity: a reduction in the prospects of forming and maintaining a stable family, then, removes an important labor supply incentive. At the same time, the possibility of drawing income support from existing relatives creates a feasible labor-force exit. We suspect that changing family structure not only shifts male labor supply incentives independently of labor market conditions, but also moderates the effect of a male labor demand shock on labor-force participation. Since male earning potential is an important determinant of new marriage formation, a persistent labor demand shock which reduces male earning potential exerts an impact on male labor-force participation which operates through the marriage market.

Thanks to a reader for forwarding the paper.

Let me add to their story. Once upon a time, a woman with a child needed a husband for support. But in recent decades, government benefits have provided support. Moreover, these benefits go away as a household earns income. At the margin, a man who earns a modest wage has his income implicitly taxed at a high rate should he marry the mother of his child. The woman has little or no economic incentive to marry him, because together they cannot keep much of the income that he earns. And so he drops out of the labor force, because he no longer is motivated to work in order to get married.

Most studies fail to show an effect on labor supply of policies that change the way that benefits are provided and taxed. But these studies are limited to short time periods. In my view, our benefits policies have over a long period of time created a poverty trap by changing cultural habits. If we were to change those policies, and in particular replace existing means-tested programs with a universal basic income, it would take a long time for cultural habits to re-adjust. But my hope is that if government stopped holding people in the poverty trap, cultural habits eventually would improve.