The academic bubble

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What were the most influential books of the past twenty years? The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a list provided by various academics. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Without doing an exact count, and of course I have only read some of the books myself, I think maybe, maybe one out of every four books in the list is not there because it reinforces leftist ideology. And of course there are zero books that challenge leftist ideology.

So let me try to correct the balance. I think that Haidt’s The Righteous Mind belongs on the list. Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Trilogy. Probably Richerson and Boyd Culture and the Evolutionary Process (I have not read it, but I think of Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success is a very important book and that book was influence by Richerson and Boyd, so if you’re talking about influential books, . . .). Something from Steven Pinker, probably The Blank Slate. How about Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist?

Anyway, the main point of this post is that it’s very likely that if you see a book that conforms closely to left-wing orthodoxy, it probably is dramatically over-rated in the academy. Conversely, if you see a book that departs from left-wing orthodoxy, I would be that it is dramatically under-rated in the academy. In a more balanced culture of higher education, Haidt or Pinker would be on more reading lists, while the books listed in the Chronicle would be on fewer.

Razib Khan on Harvard’s admissions strategy

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Khan writes,

a few years ago the president of Harvard declared that the institution was all about inclusion. On the face of it that is just a bald-faced lie, and everyone knows it. Harvard is about exclusion, selection, and curation. “Inclusion” actually meant that there are certain views and backgrounds that Harvard is going to curate and encourage. Which is fine. But an institution which excludes >95% of those who apply for admission is by definition not inclusive and open.

Pointer from a commenter.

Note that we take it for granted that a “selective” college chooses the students who are easiest to teach. One can imagine different criteria. You could auction slots to the highest bidder, regardless of ability. You can then try to prove that you know something about teaching. Or you could select low-ability and disadvantaged students only, since they need the most help. Or you could take a large initial random sample of applicants, retaining only those who do well in their first semester.

Anyway, the paragraph above, although well said in my opinion, is not Khan’s main point. His main point is this:

Harvard educates the American ruling class. And it wants to continue to educate the American ruling class. As such, it is self-conscious of the fact that it, therefore, can’t have the demographic profile of Cal-Tech.

Khan is inclined to predict that Harvard’s admissions policies will not really change, even if it loses in court. If they don’t change, what happens to the Asian applicants it rejects? More interestingly, what happens to the otherwise-qualified students it rejects because their profiles are too culturally or politically heterodox? They do go to college somewhere. Are their life outcomes affected by not having Harvard’s brand on their degrees? Do those other colleges take advantage of the opportunity to develop distinctive brands, or do they mostly just position themselves as slightly inferior versions of Harvard?

Selection effects

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A few weeks ago, Handle wrote,

The major problem with any mechanism that lets good people evade government control for good reasons, is that it lets bad people evade government control for bad reasons.

I have been thinking recently about which economic concepts are over-rated and which are under-rated. In general, I think that over-rated concepts fit with our intuition of small-scale society, and under-rated concepts deal with large-scale society. Thus, one under-rated concept is “selection effect.”

In a small scale society, you don’t have to worry about selection effects. You know everybody and you have repeated interactions with everybody.

In a large scale society, you don’t know the people with whom you transact. You apply rules, and those rules will, for better or worse, be attractive to people who like those rules when compared with other rules.

So, going back to the context of the comment, if you offer people the ability to make large financial transfers without being monitored by any government agency, you will attract people who don’t want that monitoring. Some of those people will be good people who are just annoyed by monitoring, but you are going to draw all the people whose motives for avoiding monitoring are not so good. You are going to select for criminals.

As another example, take mortgage origination rules that require the applicant to document income, employment, and assets. The rules are in some respects pretty inefficient. For any given set of mortgage applicants, the documents themselves add essentially no information for predicting default risk.

But when you change the rules to allow “no-doc” loans, you draw in a different pool of potential borrowers. You get the applicants who are not so conscientious and reliable. You get loans from mortgage brokers who do not have a problem coaching applicants to over-state what they earn or what they have in the bank. So even though their credit scores look ok, you are going to select for borrowers who are less conscientious from a pipeline of mortgage brokers who are less honest.

To take a more provocative example, consider the “____ studies” fields in academia. Even if they don’t explicitly require professors to have left-wing ideas, they select for such professors by making uncomfortable anyone with a different point of view. In other fields, this is less the case. But I fear that in those other fields, any lack of diversity along gender or racial lines will be used as a wedge to make them to come up with selection criteria that have the effect of pulling in people with a left-wing viewpoint. In economics, I call this the “road to sociology watch.”

TLP watch: the “caravan”

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On Twitter, Russ Roberts writes,

The caravan is a perfect example of @KlingBlog’s great insight into politics and ideology, the three languages of politics

He refers to the caravan of migrants trying to cross from Central America to the United States. Indeed, from a progressive point of view, the main point is that the migrants are an oppressed class and those who want to stop them are oppressors. From a conservative point of view, the main point is that clear national borders are part of civilization and crossing those borders without permission is barbarism. And from a libertarian point of view, national borders are used to keep people from engaging in voluntary exchanges: between worker and employer; between landowner and tenant, or buyer. I am pretty certain I could find all three types of commentary on the caravan.

A more subtle point is that the three languages help explain what gets into the news and sticks there. If an event can arouse strong outrage on all three dimensions, it sticks, regardless of its long-term significance, or lack thereof. So the NFL football players kneeling during the national anthem was a major story, as is the caravan. For a story to gain prominence, it helps if it can be quickly and easily digested into outrage along the three axes.

I cringe that these melodramas are classified as “politics.” We need a different term. Perhaps “outrage theater.”

Should taxation be regressive?

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Tyler Cowen said,

The best kinds of redistributions are those that, say, educate poor children or fix up their health or end malnutrition. And those also boost wealth. So if you follow the lode star of boosting wealth, you’ll be led toward the better rather than the worst redistributions.

. . .I’m way less enthusiastic about just taking money from rich people and giving it to poor. If the incentive on both sides is to work less and create less then I generally don’t wanna do it. I would just say stick with wealth enhancing redistribution. There’s plenty of that we can do, it’s very powerful.

If I were to try to summarize his latest book, Stubborn Attachments, standing on one foot, it would be this:

1. The future will include many people not yet born, and we should care about their welfare. To a first approximation, we should care about future people as much as we care about people who are alive today.

2. The way that economic growth compounds, the welfare of people in the future depends mostly on the growth rate.

3. Therefore, economic growth is really important.

Let’s push on that a bit. Suppose that there is a regressive tax scheme that enhances economic growth. It’s not hard to imagine. Tax consumption, but don’t tax income or savings.

You could use some of those tax proceeds to redistribute income to the poor. But let’s push a little harder. Suppose that a poor person will spend marginal dollars on wasteful purchases, while a rich person will put marginal dollars into investment. In that case, lower taxes and less redistribution could promote growth.

So it is possible that regressive policies today could improve welfare tomorrow.

Buchanan’s theory of consent

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Two essays on the econlib web site.

1. Pierre Lemieux re-examines James Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty.

“My approach,” he writes at the beginning of the book, “is profoundly individualistic, in an ontological-methodological sense” (emphasis in original); “[e]ach man counts for one, and that is that.” It follows that individual liberty is a value and that the social system should be based on unanimous consent. Any limit to liberty must thus be consented to by each and every individual.

2. I review Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage.

Sugden proposes what he calls contractarianism, which he credits to James M. Buchanan. Instead of thinking in terms of social decisions made by benevolent autocrats, Sugden’s contractarian treats decisions as made by individuals acting voluntarily and in concert. The job of the welfare economist is to act as a mediator, making individuals aware of opportunities for mutually agreeable bargains as suggested by the economist’s research.

Some issues in education policy

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“Education Realist” writes,

Changing the laws of public schools is what needs to happen. But allowing small little schools to skate the law and then bragged that they’ve fixed the problem will just make things worse.

I will comment on that below.

I have some core beliefs about K-12 education in the United States.

1. The null hypothesis. That is, the manner of schooling makes very little durable, long-term difference in lifetime outcomes.

2. Teachers’ unions wield too much power in some jurisdictions, including Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live. The result is that huge sums of money go for pensions and for “administrators” that are simply union featherbedding positions. This non-teaching staff adds to the burden of classroom teachers, rather than helping them.

3. Parents have fairly good instincts about when their children are thriving in school and when they are not. Parents’ instincts may not be perfect, but centralized evaluation systems, such as using test scores to measure “teacher value added,” are much, much worse.

4. Even the best teachers can only handle a limited amount of disruptive students. And note that Scott E. Carrel, Mark Hoekstra,
and Elira Kuka have a paper which claims that

exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 24 to 28 by 3 percent.

The methods used in this paper are suspect. Disruptiveness is a matter of degree, not kind. Also, I really think that the number of disruptive students matters. A lot of teachers can handle one disruptive student. I suppose a really exceptional teacher can deal with two or three. More than three and you are getting into no-hoper territory.

Next, consider three possible policies for handling education.

a) Force everyone to attend a government school, and do not allow affluent parents to segregate their children away from children of non-affluent parents.

b) Get government out of the school-provision business altogether. Instead provide vouchers to low-income families with school-age children. Provide supplemental vouchers for children with special needs, including students who have emotional problems that make them disruptive. Allow schools to decide which students to accept.

c) Stick with what we have now.

I think that it is impossible to satisfy Education Realist with (c). That is, as long as we have a mix of government-run and private schools, the playing field will never by level. Even within the system of government-run schools, allowing people to segregate by neighborhood makes the playing field uneven.

There are at least two interesting questions about what would happen under alternative systems. First, how much segregation by socio-economic class would take place? Second, what would happen to disruptive students? I think that it’s hard to get around the fact that parents like to self-segregate. It is also hard to get around the fact that disruptive students exist and pose a major challenge.

I think that (a) represents the ideal of public schooling. That is, when people defend public schools, they try to make it sound like public schooling creates egalitarian social integration and capably handles disruptive students. But I don’t think that this is the reality.

I would like to see us try (b), at least in some states, to see how it works. I wonder what the incentive has to be to get a school to take on a disruptive student. I wonder if socio-economic segregation would get worse. But I don’t think we can answer those questions without trying some experiments for several years.

What we have now includes a great deal of socio-economic segregation. As for disruptive students, I think that they ruin some classrooms. Affluent parents use private schools and affluent neighborhoods to try to keep their children out of such classrooms. Teachers opt out of classroom teaching and go into administration after they get fed up trying to deal with such classrooms.

Revisiting the Hidden Tribes poll

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Several commenters did not like the poll, and a reader suggested that I try the Hidden Tribes quiz. Ugh! What a terrible survey instrument.

I would like to believe that there is a large portion of the population that is tired of hyper-partisanship. But if there is such a majority out there, this poll is not a credible way to find it.

I would trust a survey based on my three-axes model more than I would trust the Hidden Tribes report. If the general public is more centrist or nuanced, that would show up as a lot of people not consisting aligning with any one axis.

The Diss Card Pile

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The Economist (warning: their site has lots of scripts* and is likely to crash your browser) writes,

Harvard’s lawyers hired David Card, a prominent labour economist at the University of California, Berkeley. His model includes factors like the quality of a candidate’s high school, parents’ occupations and the disputed personal rating. Under these controls, Mr Card claims that Asian-American applicants are not disadvantaged compared with whites. But given that these factors are themselves correlated with race, Mr Card’s argument is statistically rather like saying that once you correct for racial bias, Harvard is not racially biased.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The previous day, Tyler simply said Card is wrong.

I know of three works by Card. One is his paper, with Krueger, claiming that a higher minimum wage raised employment in an area. The criticisms of that paper are persuasive. The second is a paper claiming that college attendance helps people from poor families, controlling for ability. As I wrote in this paper (see the appendix), what he claimed was an instrumental variable (meaning it should have no independent correlation with the dependent variable) was anything but. The third is this latest piece of arrogantly-expressed unpersuasive analysis.

Card was awarded the Clark Medal, which is on par with a Nobel Prize. His body of work is enormous, and perhaps I have encountered the only three times he has been wrong. Perhaps he is only untrustworthy when he wades into a politically sensitive topic. But if you are looking for an economist’s work to examine to see how well it replicates, I have a name for you.

*All media sites do this, but The Economist really goes over the top. Just once I would like to see a major media site that does not invite you to “get notifications” and such. They are all apparently listening to the same Internet consultant, who is an idiot. If they want to listen to someone, they should listen to me. I proposed a better model almost twenty years ago. I knew they would resist it for a while, but I never thought it would be for this long.