Category: Education

The class gap in academic career progression

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is a new and excellent paper by Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez on this topic:

Unlike gender or race, class is rarely a focus of research or DEI efforts in elite US occupations. Should it be? In this paper, we document a large class gap in career progression in one labor market: US tenure-track academia. Using parental education to proxy for socioeconomic background, we compare career outcomes of people who got their PhDs in the same institution and field (excluding those with PhD parents). First-generation college graduates are 13% less likely to end up tenured at an R1, and are on average tenured at institutions ranked 9% lower, than their PhD classmates with a parent with a (non-PhD) graduate degree. We explore three sets of mechanisms: (1) research productivity, (2) networks, and (3) preferences. Research  productivity can explain less than a third of the class gap, and preferences explain almost none. Our analyses of coauthor characteristics suggest networks likely play a role. Finally, examining PhDs who work in industry we find a class gap in pay and in managerial responsibilities which widens over the career. This means a class gap in career progression exists in other US occupations beyond academia.

Here is a first-rate tweet storm by Stansbury on the paper.  Via Aidan Finley.

AI teaching assistants?

by  Tyler Cowen in

“Morehouse College is planning to use AI teaching assistants to help crack the code of education.

Why it matters: Morehouse professor Muhsinah Morris says every professor will have an AI assistant in three to five years.

  • Morris says the technology has taken off in the last 24 months faster than it has in the last 24 years. Meanwhile, baby boomers are leaving the workforce amid national teacher shortages and burnout.

How it works: Morehouse professors will collaborate with technology partner VictoryXR to create virtual 3D spatial avatars. The avatars use OpenAI to have two-way oral conversations with students.

  • The avatars use professor-created content and 3D models for lessons, such as molecules for chemistry lessons, to help students.
  • Avatars can also respond to unrelated topics raised by students and redirect the students back to the lesson.
  • Students will have 24/7 online access to the avatar, which can communicate in a student’s native language.

What they’re saying: Morris called the avatars the world’s first spatial AI teaching assistants.”

That is all from Axios.  Via Anecdotal.

Finland knows how to troll MR commentators

by  Tyler Cowen in

Perhaps that is why I like the country so much:

Ideally, Marianne Korkalainen’s high school in Rautavaara, a tiny town in eastern Finland, would enroll at least 20 new pupils each year. This autumn, her shrinking municipality will send her only about 12. But Ms Korkalainen, the head teacher, has a plan: she intends to invite half a dozen youngsters from poorer countries to help fill her empty seats. Eager adolescents from places such as Myanmar, Vietnam and Tanzania will swap their tropical cities for her snowy bolthole. They will receive a Finnish education, at Finnish taxpayers’ expense.

Here is more from The Economist.  Finland soon will have a shrinking population, and worse yet:

By 2030 the country could have nearly 10% fewer children aged 4-18, according to eu projections. By 2040 their ranks might be smaller by a fifth. This spells trouble in particular for rural schools, which suffer both from having few births and from migration to the cities. Hundreds have shut their doors in recent decades. Some now offer local youngsters bungs, such as free driving lessons and small cash “scholarships”, in the hope of keeping them around.

There is even a Finnish start-up, Finest Future, that sells Finnish lessons to poorer students around the world, in the hope of preparing them for a Finnish taxpayer-subsidized education in Finland.  The belief is that recruiting individuals this way is easier and more effective than trying to find good job candidates abroad and also train them in Finnish later on.  Stuff the Kalevala down their throats!

Finland has a foreign-born population of about 9 percent, well below the Western European average.  I don’t know if this schools policy is a good idea, but I do know most people are not good at thinking about it in cost-benefit terms.

Claims about Brits (and Americans), by Gillian Tett

by  Tyler Cowen in

But what generally goes unmentioned is a more important distinction: that single-table conversations rarely happen in Britain. I first realised this when I started attending friends’ dinners in London a few years ago, when I was visiting from New York: when I tried to start a single conversation, I was told to stop because it was “too serious”.

There are multiple reasons for this, here is one;

In Britain, however, hustle is not so readily admired and ambition is sometimes derided as being pushy or showing off. Thus if you are brilliantly clever, you are admired for concealing the fact or cracking jokes about it at your own expense. Few Brits stand up in public and shout that they want to be public intellectuals; or not without a self-deprecating laugh.

The entire FT column is interesting, do note that Tett’s background is in anthropology.

Accelerating India’s Development

by  Alex Tabarrok in

What will India look like in 2047? Combining projections of economic growth with estimates of the elasticity of outcomes with respect to growth, Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development reports:

Even with a strong GDP per capita growth rate of 6 per cent, projections for 2047 paint a sobering picture if we maintain our current course. While India’s infant mortality is projected to halve from 27 per 1000 births to 13 in 2047, it will still be well above China’s current rate of 8. Child stunting will only decrease from 35.5 to 25 per cent, which is only a 10.5 percentage point or 30 per cent reduction in nearly 25 years. In rural India, 16 per cent of children in Class 5 will still not be able to read at a Class 2 level, and 55 per cent of them will still not be able to do division at the Class 3 level.

Bear in mind that this is assuming an optimistic 6% growth rate in GDP per capita. Even more telling is that if growth increased to 8%, infant mortality would only fall to 10 per 1000 (instead of 13). Growth is great. It’s the single most important factor but it’s not everything. If India can double the elasticity of infant mortality with respect to growth, for example, then at the same 6% growth rate infant mortality would fall to just 6 per 1000 by 2047–that’s millions of lives saved. The big argument of Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development is that India can get more development from the same level of growth by increasing the total factor productivity of the state.

There are many “big think” books on growth–Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich–but these books are primarily historical and descriptive. The big think books don’t tell you how to develop. Create institutions to strike “a delicate and precarious balance between state and society” isn’t much of a guide to development. Accelerating India’s Development is different.

“Accelerating” opens with two excellent chapters on the political economy of politicians and bureaucrats, outlining the constraints any reforms must navigate. It concludes with two chapters on the future, including ideas like ranked choice voting, representing its aspirations. It’s in-between the constraints and the aspirations, however, that Accelerating India’s Development is unique. I know of no other book that offers such a detailed, analytical, and comprehensive examination and evaluation of a country’s institutions and processes.

Muralidharan’s recommendations are often based on his own twenty years of research, especially in education, health and welfare, and when not based on his own research Muralidharan has read everyone and everything. Yet, he offers not a laundry list but a well-thought out, analytic, set of recommendations that are grounded on political and economic realities.

To give just one example, India’s bureaucracy is far over-paid relative to India’s GDP per capita or wages in the private sector. With wages too high, the bureaucracy is too small–a  reflection of the concentrated benefits (wages to government workers), diffuse costs (delivering services to citizens) problem. Lowering wages for government workers is a non-starter but Muralidharan argues persuasively that it is possible to hire new workers from local communities at prevailing wages on renewable contracts. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), for example, is India’s main program for delivering early childhood education. There are 1.35 million anganwadi centers (AWCs) across India and typically a single anganwadi worker is responsible for both nutrition and pre-school education but they spend most of their time on paperwork!

A simple, scalable way to improve early childhood education is to add a second worker to AWCs to focus on preschool education….In a recent study, my co-authors and I found that adding an extra, locally hired, early-childhood care and education facilitators to anganwadis in Tamil Nadu doubled daily preschool instructional time…we found large gains in students’ maths, language and executive function skills. We also found a significant reduction in child stunting and malnutrition…We estimate the social return on this investment was around thirteen times the cost….the ECCE facilitators typically had only a Class 10 or Class 12 qualification and received only one week of training, and were still highly effective.

The example illustrates Muralidharan’s methods. First, the recommendation is based on a large, credible, multi-year study run in India with the cooperation of the government of Tamil Nadu. Second, the study is chosen for the book because it fits Muralidharan’s larger analysis of India’s problems, India has too few government workers which leads to high potential returns, yet the workers are paid too much so these returns are fiscally unachievable. But hiring more workers on the margin, at India’s-prevailing wages, is feasible. India has lots of modestly-educated workers so the program can scale–this is not a study about adding AI-driven computers to Delhi schools under the management of IIT trained educators, a program which would be subject to the heroes aren’t replicable problem. The program is also politically feasible because it leaves rents in place and by hiring lots of workers, even at low wages, it generates its own political support. Finally, note that India’s ICDS is the largest early childhood development program in the world so improving it has the potential to make millions of lives better. Which is why I have called Muralidharan the most important economist in the world.

One of the reasons state capacity in India is so low is premature load bearing. Imagine if the 19th-century U.S. government had attempted to handle everything today’s U.S. government does—this is the situation in India. When State Capacity/Tasks < 1, what should be done? In premature imitation, Rajagopalan and I advocate for reducing Tasks–an idea best represented by Ed Glaeser’s quip that “A country that cannot provide clean water for its citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue.” Accelerating India’s Development focuses on increasing State Capacity but without being anti-market. In fact, Muralidharan proposes making the state more effective by leveraging markets more extensively.

Indian policy should place a very high priority on expanding the supply of high-quality service providers, regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector.

Hence, Muraldiharan wants to build on India’s remarkably vibrant private schools and private health care with ideas like vouchers and independent ratings. Free to choose but free to choose in an information-rich environment. My own inclinations would be to push markets and also infrastructure more–we still need to get to that 6% growth! But I have few quibbles with what is in the book.

Accelerating India’s Development is an exceptionally rich and insightful book. Its comprehensive analysis and innovative recommendations make it an invaluable resource. I will undoubtedly reference it in future discussions and writings. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and improving life in the world’s largest democracy.

Basil Halperin, observations on academia and research

by  Tyler Cowen in

Miscellaneous things I learned in [econ] grad school: 1. The returns to experience are high(er than I thought) – Someone who has studied a single topic for a decade or two or three really does know a LOT about that topic

It is worth clicking through to read the whole thread.  People should be writing more about how things actually work!  This is oddly grossly undersupplied.  His points about seminars are especially interesting and well-taken.

My Conversation with the excellent Michael Nielsen

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Michael Nielsen is scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He’s worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on scientific progress with Patrick Collison, and is a prolific writer, reader, commentator, and mentor. 

He joined Tyler to discuss why the universe is so beautiful to human eyes (but not ears), how to find good collaborators, the influence of Simone Weil, where Olaf Stapledon’s understand of the social word went wrong, potential applications of quantum computing, the (rising) status of linear algebra, what makes for physicists who age well, finding young mentors, why some scientific fields have pre-print platforms and others don’t, how so many crummy journals survive, the threat of cheap nukes, the many unknowns of Mars colonization, techniques for paying closer attention, what you learn when visiting the USS Midway, why he changed his mind about Emergent Ventures, why he didn’t join OpenAI in 2015, what he’ll learn next, and more. 

And here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Now, you’ve written that in the first half of your life, you typically were the youngest person in your circle and that in the second half of your life, which is probably now, you’re typically the eldest person in your circle. How would you model that as a claim about you?

NIELSEN: I hope I’m in the first 5 percent of my life, but it’s sadly unlikely.

COWEN: Let’s say you’re 50 now, and you live to 100, which is plausible —

NIELSEN: Which is plausible.

COWEN: — and you would now be in the second half of your life.

NIELSEN: Yes. I can give shallow reasons. I can’t give good reasons. The good reason in the first half was, so much of the work I was doing was kind of new fields of science, and those tend to be dominated essentially, for almost sunk-cost reasons — people who don’t have any sunk costs tend to be younger. They go into these fields. These early days of quantum computing, early days of open science — they were dominated by people in their 20s. Then they’d go off and become faculty members. They’d be the youngest person on the faculty.

Now, maybe it’s just because I found San Francisco, and it’s such an interesting cultural institution or achievement of civilization. We’ve got this amplifier for 25-year-olds that lets them make dreams in the world. That’s, for me, anyway, for a person with my personality, very attractive for many of the same reasons.

COWEN: Let’s say you had a theory of your collaborators, and other than, yes, they’re smart; they work hard; but trying to pin down in as few dimensions as possible, who’s likely to become a collaborator of yours after taking into account the obvious? What’s your theory of your own collaborators?

NIELSEN: They’re all extremely open to experience. They’re all extremely curious. They’re all extremely parasocial. They’re all extremely ambitious. They’re all extremely imaginative.

Self-recommending throughout.

What Went Wrong with Federal Student Loans?

by  Tyler Cowen in

At a time when the returns to college and graduate school are at historic highs, why do so many students struggle with their student loans? The increase in aggregate student debt and the struggles of today’s student loan borrowers can be traced to changes in federal policies intended to broaden access to federal aid and educational opportunities, and which increased enrollment and borrowing in higher-risk circumstances. Starting in the late 1990s, policymakers weakened regulations that had constrained institutions from enrolling aid-dependent students. This led to rising enrollment of relatively disadvantaged students, but primarily at poor-performing, low-value institutions whose students systematically failed to complete a degree, struggled to repay their loans, defaulted at high rates, and foundered in the job market. As these new borrowers experienced similarly poor outcomes, their loans piled up, loan performance deteriorated, and with it the finances of the federal program. The crisis illustrates the important role that educational institutions play in access to postsecondary education and student outcomes, and difficulty of using broadly-available loans to subsidize investments in education when there is so much heterogeneity in outcomes across institutions and programs and in the ability to repay of students.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Adam Looney and Constantine Yannellis.

Can they reconstitute Philosphy & Public Affairs?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a recent announcement of note:

We are unanimously resigning from our editorial roles at Philosophy & Public Affairs, published by Wiley, and launching a new diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH). All of us will play the same editorial roles in the new journal and will retain the aim of publishing the best philosophical work touching on matters of public importance.

Do read the whole text, but you can imagine how the arguments run.  Lots of big names are behind this, including Sen, Scheffler, Srinivasan, Waldron, and others.  I am rooting for them, but can this succeed?

How sticky are reputations anyway?  Nine months from now, what percentage of people on a university-wide tenure committee will know about this change?  Three years from now?

Or consider the new journal itself.  Without the long history of famous articles behind it, might it, with the same set of editors, have a lower reputation?  Talk about mood affiliation!

Or might the existence of a “naming squabble” itself lower the reputations of both the old journal and the new venture?  “Well, if they can’t get along, both outlets will have trouble managing their future reputations…”

Or might some of the highly prestigious editors, over time, be more willing to leave than would have been the case under the old moniker?  Perhaps the newly reconstituted board will not be able to get along with itself, not without the final backstop of “the company” (Wiley) to enforce a core on all the bargaining.

If I am in the second year of my tenure clock in a philosophy department, and I have a great paper, do I send it to the new journal?  In its old manifestation it was a top top outlet, but is it still?  What risks am I running?  Or do I send it to the thing still named Philosophy & Public Affairs, which presumably still has some very good new editors.

I will be watching.

Emergent Ventures, 34th cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

Kaavya Kumar, 16, Singapore, AI safety.

Asher Ellis, Yale, Indonesia studies and Pacific national security.

Sohi Patel and Teo Dimov, Yale, to work work on medical devices in the cardiovascular field.

Diego Sanchez de la Cruz, Madrid, to translate his new book on liberalism in Madrid into English.

Michael Ryan, Dublin, to build medical devices to monitor health.

Aden Nurie, 16, Tampa, to build an app to help people find soccer games.

Robert Davitt, Dublin/SF, starting a company to bring together visiting children with family and farm experiences.

Ulrike Nostitz, Dublin, to build out an Irish space law association.

Onno Eric Blom and Vinzenz Ziesemer, Netherlands, For a Dutch progress studies institute and a study on Dutch tech policy.

Katherine He, Yale, project to use LLMs to read and interpret legal codes.

Dan Schulz, San Francisco, podcasting.

Andrew Fang, Stanford, AI and real estate data project.

Ivan Zhang, San Francisco, AI safety.

Samuel Cottrell VI, Bay Area, general career support.

Julian Gough, Berlin/Ireland, book on black holes and the evolutionary theory of the universe.

Sean Jursnick, Denver,  architect, website, competition, and Medium essays for single-stair reform to improve building codes.

Julia Willemyns and David Lawrence, London, to support studies for improving UK science policy.

Adam Mastroianni, Ann Arbor, to run a Science House.

Jacob Mathew Rintamaki, Stanford, Nanotech.  Twitter here.

Agniv Sarkar, 17, San Francisco, neural nets.

Ukraine tranche:

Maria [Masha] O’Reilly, Kyiv, Instagram videos on Ukraine and its history.

Yanchuk Dmytro, Kyiv, to develop better methods for repairing electric station short circuits.

Yaroslava Okara, Kyiv/Kharkiv/LSE, to study internet communications, general career support.

Julia Lemesh, Boston, to send young Ukrainian talent to elite boarding schools abroad, Ukraine Global Scholars Foundation.

Innovation Matters

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Innovation Matters a podcast of the United Nations Economic Cooperation and Integration Group interviews me on matters related to innovation.

If productivity growth had continued on the WWII-1973 track we would today be living in the world of 2097 rather than the world of 2024.

The education sector in the United States is underdoing a revolution. Since the pandemic we have had millions of children start homeschooling, private education with vouchers and charters are exploding. I hope with AI we can give every student a personal tutor, one who never gets tired, never gets grumpy.

In my view we should be subsidizing degrees with the greatest externalities and yet we are subsidizing degrees with the lowest wages and smallest externalities and we expect innovation out of that…no way, it’s not going to happen.

The US is a welfare-warfare state. We spend a tiny amount on innovation.

There can be multiple equilibria. If you focus on redistribution you can get low growth and then it makes sense to focus on redistribution because that is the only way to get more. But if you focus on innovation you can get high growth and then people are much less concerned with redistribution. Both equilibria can be stable. Which do we want?

The Generalist interviews me

by  Tyler Cowen in

I was happy with how this turned out, here is one excerpt:

I think we’re overestimating the risks to American democracy. The intellectual class is way too pessimistic. They’re not used to it being rough and tumble, but it’s been that way for most of the country’s history. It’s correct to think that’s unpleasant. But by being polarized and shouting at each other, we actually resolve things and eventually move forward. Not always the right way. I don’t always like the decisions it makes. But I think American democracy is going to be fine.

Polarization has its benefits. In most cases, you say what you think, and sooner or later, someone wins. Abortion is very polarized, for example. I’m not saying which side you should think is correct, but states are re-examining it. Kansas recently voted to allow abortion, and Arizona is in the midst of a debate. Over time, it will be settled—one way or another. Slugging things out is underrated.

Meanwhile, being reasonable with your constituents is overrated. Look at Germany, which has non-ideological, non-polarized politics. They’ve gotten every decision wrong. Their whole strategy of buying cheap energy from Russia to sell to China was a huge blunder. They bet most of their economy on it, and neither of those two things will work out. They also have no military whatsoever. It’s not like, “Ok, they don’t spend enough.” They literally had troops that didn’t have rifles to train with and were forced to use broomsticks.

Germany is truly screwed and won’t face up to it. But when you listen to their politicians speak – and I do understand German – they always sound intelligent and reasonable. They could use a dose of polarization, but they’re afraid because of their history, which I get. But the more you look at their politics, the more you end up liking ours, I would say.

I would note that Germany’s various “centrist” or “coalition of the middle” regimes have brought us AfD, which is polarizing in the worst way and considered to be an extremist party worthy of being spied upon.

And this:

What craft are you spending a lifetime honing?

Shooting a basketball. I’ve done that for the longest, outside of eating and breathing. I’m just not very good at it.

I started doing it when I was about eight. We moved close to a house with a hoop, and all the other kids would gather there and play. It was a social thing, and I started doing it. I kept it going in all the different places I’ve lived. The only country I couldn’t keep the habit going was Germany. But when I was living in New Zealand, I made a special point of it. It’s good exercise, it’s relaxing, you get to be outside. It’s a little cold today, but I did it yesterday, and I’ll do it tomorrow.

It’s important to repeatedly do something you’re not that good at. Most successful people are good at what they do, but if that’s all they do, they lose humility. They find it harder to understand a big chunk of the world that doesn’t have their talent or is simply mediocre. It helps you keep things in perspective.

I’m not terrible at it. I have gotten better, even recently. But no one would say I’m really good.

Interesting throughout, as they like to say.