Marginal Utility

by Ken Houghton

The last time around, this may have worked. Can doubling-down pay off?

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman and Colorado Governor Roy Romer and former Republican National Committee Chairman and Bush White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman were the guests at Thursday's Monitor breakfast. Mr. Romer is chairman and Mr. Mehlman is a trustee of Strong American Schools. The organization describes itself as a nonpartisan campaign to make education a top national priority by making the subject a centerpiece of the 2008 election.

"This nation has been drifting back in comparison with the rest of the world for the last 20 years in education," Romer said. After serving as governor, Romer was superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District from 2001 to 2006. "Where we used to be No. 1 or No. 2, we are now, if you compare 15-year-olds," 21st among 30 industrial nations in science, he said. "The rest of the world has advanced very rapidly in education, and we have been making some advances but not nearly at the same pace," he argued.

Mehlman gets the history correct: the rise of the high school graduate, the G. I. Bill (which more than met the political goal of keeping the post-war unemployment rate lower), and the subsequent National Defense Education Act pretty much cover the pre-OPEC productivity booms. Romer pere puts it in terms even Congress can understand:

The US would profit economically if our educational system improved, Romer said. "There is an entirely different economic future that we are going to be living in and education is the key to that future," he said. If US students improved to where their test scores matched the midpoint of European student achievement, the US gross domestic product would grow an additional 5 percent over the next 30 years, producing trillions of dollars of added resources for the US, he said.

Is it more important than improving the health care system? I don't know, but it may just help to do that too.

More tomorrow.

Labels: education, human capital, Politics

by Ken Houghton

First she caught Tyler Cowen (and, through him, Brad DeLong's) attention with this paper (NBER; gated).

Today, Ben Muse looks two papers earlier and finds "The Economic Value of Teeth."

I haven't seen anyone go four papers forward to discuss this one yet, but I haven't hit the Health Care blogs yet today.

Labels: Economics, education, Health Care

by Ken Houghton

In comments at DeLongville, save_the_rustbelt notes:

The University of California at Berkeley has accumulated a $1.1-billion “war chest” to fend off Ivy League poachers, the Bloomberg news service reported today.

Berkeley administrators hope the money, which will go toward endowed chairs for 100 professors, will dissuade faculty members from defecting to wealthier competitors like Harvard and Yale, where salary offers are significantly higher.

For the 2006 fiscal year, full professors at Berkeley earned an average of $134,672 and associate professors $88,576 — about 15 percent less than peers at private institutions. And, since 2003, the California university has lost at least 30 faculty members to its eight main competitors, chief among them Harvard.

This appears to be in reaction to rumors summarized concisely by David Warsh a few weeks ago:

Private universities raise tuitions at will and keep enrollments small while public universities, constrained by legislatures, must keep fees down while increasing their enrollments.

Something of a test of the balance of power may come this spring at the University of California at Berkeley, where professors in the economics department, one of the top half-dozen in the nation, are targets of ten outside offers. Every spring departments all over the country seek to improve their standing by hiring from their rivals, a little like free agent season in big league sports. Bids are always out. But the suspense at Berkeley this year is unusually intense.

Development economist Chang-Tai Hsieh already has preferred an offer from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago to one from Stanford. Other targets of multiple offers include applied microeconomist David Card, a [John Bates] Clark medalist who is a department unto himself; husband-and-wife macroeconomists Christina and David Romer; growth economist Charles Jones; public finance specialist Raj Chetty; not to mention several members of Berkeley’s remarkable junior faculty, led by wunderkind theorist Yuliy Sannikoff and international economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas. Meanwhile, star information economist Hal Varian has gone off to be chief economist for Google (to whom he consulted for many years, growing wealthy from his options grants), and Nobel laureate George Akerlof, a youthful presence in Evans Hall, is retiring.

Akerlof turns 68 this year. Varian got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (and got rich from the options he had received before; maybe not Mankiw-rich, but rich enough). Card (Class of 1950) and Christina Romer (Class of 1957) already have endowed chairs, as does David Romer (Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy).

On the other hand, Chetty is an Associate Professor and is on leave, as are Professor Jones and Assistant Professor Sannikov. Gournichas is an Assistant Professor, a rung lower than Chetty.

And the institution will still have a host of riches:

Its behavioral economists are led by Nobel laureate Daniel McFadden, Oliver Williamson and Clark Medalist Matthew Rabin. The presence of Joseph Farrell, Michael Katz, Enrico Moretti, Daniel Rubinfeld and Carl Shapiro give it a lock on a certain kind of applied industrial organization. Maurice Obstfeld, Alan Auerbach, J. Bradford DeLong and Emmanuel Saez assure that Berkeley macroeconomics won’t wink out altogether.

Only after bemoaning all of this does Warsh note that UC-Berkeley isn't exactly just being taken in this roundelay:

The department has its own offers out, too, naturally, including one to James Hines of the University of Michigan. What Berkeley economics desperately needs is a faculty entrepreneur to serve as department chair, someone to wheel and deal for it the way John Dunlop did for Harvard economics in the 1960s. But the next chair has yet to be chosen.

There are some things Warsh seems to get wrong. His overall frame suggests that UCLA, not the obvious choice, would [have] supplant[ed] Berkeley before that $1.1 Billion came in. And the mere fact that Cal can raise a $1.1B "war chest" strongly suggests that its not exactly going to be the loser in these battles.

The losers are going to be the "land-grant schools," such as Minnesota, and the other schools whose budgets are being slashed and that don't have access to the type of war chest that Cal does.

But David Warsh won't write about those, and they'll only raise large sums of money if it's for a new football stadium.

Maybe I should change the title of this post.

Labels: Economics, education, Rutgers

by Ken Houghton

Woke up this morning to the news that there was an explosion in Times Square. A bicyclist is being pursued, and the whole thing was apparently done on a shoestring:

The bomb consisted of some kind of "low-order explosive" contained in a military-style ammunition box, [Police Commissioner Ray] Kelly said.

"This was not a particularly sophisticated device," he said.

Turns out that wasn't the only problem with explosives last night (via the Chronicle of Higher Education):

Normal class schedules are under way at UC Davis on Thursday following the arrest of an 18-year-old student after two pipe bombs were found in his dormitory room Wednesday night, authorities said.

The discovery about 9 p.m. Wednesday resulted in the evacuation of 455 freshmen from seven dormitory buildings in the Tercero complex. The students spent the night in the common dining area at the complex and are expected to be allowed to return soon. No one was injured, and classes were not disrupted by the incident.

Dodged a bullet there, as it were. And apprehended a suspect, too:

Officers questioned four students and released three, the Bee reported.

The fourth student, Mark Christopher Woods, a freshman economics major, has been arrested on two felony charges, possession of chemicals to make explosives and possession of explosive materials on school grounds, the university said in a written statement. [emphasis mine]

And that one would have done some damage:

Police said bomb-making materials were found on a table in the dorm room, along with two empty pipe bomb shells, and police Capt. Joyce Souza said she could not reveal what materials were found but that it was "bad stuff...."

"At first glance, it looked like pretty serious and volatile material," Souza said. "Once they did an evaluation, they were able to determine the way all the materials were sitting, it wasn't as serious because it wasn't mixed."

Yet another case of reputational risk? Good thing there aren't many of these...

Labels: Economics, education, just life, terrorism

by Ken Houghton

Amazingly, school vouchers work as a transfer mechanism for money, but don't improve education.
To make it local-ish (for Tom, at least):

To support his idea, Mr. [Sol] Stern pointed to Milwaukee’s experiment with school vouchers.

"Milwaukee’s public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years," Mr. Stern wrote. "Violence and disorder throughout the system are as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no 'Milwaukee Miracle,' no transformation of the public schools, has taken place."

and this is not exactly coming from one of the Milwaukee experiment's detractors:

[Stern's] 2003 book, “Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice,” relied on his own trips to Milwaukee to measure the impact of the voucher system on public schools there. In the book, he found much to praise about vouchers, saying they would give needed competition to the failing schools. But now he says more recent evidence has fallen short.

The opposition fails Economics 101:

In his online opposition, Mr. [Jay P.] Greene [like Stern, a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute] said he was particularly bothered because the essay was being widely interpreted as setting up a choice between vouchers and curriculum changes.

"There’s no reason you can’t have both — just like you like brownies and ice cream," Mr. Greene said. "You shouldn’t be made to choose."

When you reallocate funds from the school system to the vouchers, you limit the monies available for curriculum changes.

Labels: education, public v. private

by Ken Houghton

The January 25th issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education features an article on democracy:

Americans were shocked at the photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. They were horrified by the assault on Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant molested with the broken end of a broomstick by New York City police officers in August 1997. A decade earlier, they were horrified by revelations that New York police officers had used stun guns to coerce confessions from young Hispanic and African-American suspects in 1985 and 1986.

Our outrage is predictable because we reject the idea that democracies engage in torture. That's something authoritarian states do — in the words of a World War II poster, "the method of the enemy."

So far, this sounds like a Jonah Goldberg book. But the article has a better grasp of the history of democracies:

[D]emocracies often set the pace in torture innovation. Legalized torture was a standard part of Greek and Roman republics, our ancient models of democracy. Roman judges used various tortures, most famously the short whips, ferula and scutica, to coerce confessions and get information. Torture was also a standard part of Italian republics like Venice and Florence, our other historical models of democracy. Those city-states adopted some of the same techniques as the inquisitors of the Roman Catholic Church. They often used the strappado, a technique in which guards tied a victim's hands behind his back, hoisted him from the ground by means of a hook and pulley, and repeatedly dropped him to the floor. The political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli was subjected to that process thrice. Before World War II, the British, the Americans, and the French all practiced torture: the French in Vietnam, the British in their mandate of Palestine, the Americans in the Philippines, not to mention what our police were doing in cities large and small. Police in democratic states used electrotorture, water torture, painful stress positions, drugs, and beatings. They did so sometimes on their own, sometimes in collusion with local citizens, and sometimes with the quiet approval, if not explicit authorization, of their governments. All this before the Central Intelligence Agency [if not the OSS--kh] ever existed.

As I said, I don't want to discuss torture per se as part of democracy. But the sidebar is too interesting to ignore. Read the whole thing, as they say.

Labels: Democracy, education, History

by Ken Houghton

NYT article #1 (United States, early in the process):

Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed....

By contrast, many urban and low-income districts, which also serve many immigrants, are experimenting with ways to teach more than the basic skills so that their students can not only get to college, but earn college degrees. Some states have begun to strengthen their graduation requirements.

“This is transformational change,” said Dan Challener, the president of the Public Education Foundation, a Chattanooga group that is working with the area public schools. “It’s about the purpose of high school. It’s about reinventing what high schools do.”

NYT Article #2 (India, further in the process):

Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India’s social ladder.

The children in this school come from the poorest of families — those who cannot afford to send away their young to private schools elsewhere, as do most Indian families with any means.

India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for its young, even as it has promoted high-quality government-financed universities. But if in the past a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people — and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it.

That they remain ill equipped to do so is clearly illustrated by an annual survey, conducted by Pratham.... The latest survey, conducted across 16,000 villages in 2007 and released Wednesday, found that while many more children were sitting in class, vast numbers of them could not read, write or perform basic arithmetic, to say nothing of those who were not in school at all.

Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India’s prospects for continued growth. [emphases mine]

The boost in high school graduation rates was the revolution that sparked the 20th century U.S. economy.* If you want a bigger piece of the pie, you don't stand still. Otherwise, you end up with the Indian economy—skills short, training deprived, and unprepared to take the next step.

*It is certainly true that the destruction much of the established non-US infrastructure from 1939 to 1945 helped set the table for the post-WW II boom—but it is even truer that it is only because the U.S. was prepared to take advantage of the opportunity (unlike, say, in 1918) that it worked as well as it did.

Labels: Economic Development, education, human capital

by Ken Houghton

Via Professor mochi_tsuki (and Tina –ed), a great website that also serves a great cause.

Learn definitions (well, when you guess correctly, at least) and Feed the World. Send the rugrats, after they're done with their costumes, explicit or exotic.

Labels: blogging, education, Meme-A-Riffic

by Tom Bozzo

My good buddy Drek has advice for new graduate students (and a refresher course for the not-so-new) which is about a thousand times more useful than Drek's characteristically self-deprecating post title suggests. I'd written some of this to a correspondent just last week, so Drek has saved me a lot of cutting, pasting, and expanding had I any inclination to have shared my "wisdom" more broadly.

Anyway, the frosh should heed #1-3 especially. The rest of y'all might be advised that failure to heed #6 and #9 led to the most pointless washout from graduate school I'd witnessed. [*] And all should make note of #20-21 but not #22.

[*] That is, the person in question both wanted to finish and was intellectually capable of doing so. But never fear, by some standards the person in question failed upwards.

Labels: education, public service announcements

by Ken Houghton

Via Reuters, (h/t Marc Andreessen):

For every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants aged 8 to 16 months understood an average of six to eight fewer words than babies who did not watch them, Frederick Zimmerman of the University of Washington and colleagues found.

The lump of labour specificity raises its head in a second post today:

"The results surprised us, but they make sense. There are only a fixed number of hours that young babies are awake and alert," said Andrew Meltzoff, a psychologist who worked on the study.

"If the 'alert time' is spent in front of DVDs and TV, instead of with people speaking in 'parentese'-- that melodic speech we use with little ones -- the babies are not getting the same linguistic experience," Meltzoff added....

"Old kids may be different, but the youngest babies seem to learn language best from people."

This implies:

Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute who worked on the study, said parents frequently asked him about the value of such videos.

"The evidence is mounting that they are of no value and may in fact be harmful," Christakis said.

And just this year, the State of the Union cited Baby Einstein founder Julie Aigner-Clark as "represent[ing] the great enterprising spirit of America."

Damn the consequences, full steam ahead!

Labels: Bushonomics, education, human capital, Kids

by Ken Houghton

Via Economics Roundtable comes an article on using Henry V* to learn Leadership at Wharton. What caught my eye was this:

"To be a great leader, you have to understand people," said Carol Adelman, who led the session with her husband Ken, founders of Movers & Shakespeares. After distinguished careers in government service, they have conducted sessions on Shakespeare and leadership in diverse business, educational, and government organizations.

Hmmm. Ken Adelman. And he wants to teach the students what:

With little discussion, Henry makes his decision to go into battle.

But before this meeting, Henry astutely had aligned the interests of all the major players. For the nobles, the conquest of France offered access to rich resources and plunder. The clergy, by offering a religious justification for the invasion, gained the king's support to kill a pending bill in Parliament that would have taken half of church lands and imposed heavy fines. The king himself saw the French campaign as a chance to demonstrate his leadership, secure his hold on the English throne, and make his indelible mark on history. None of these issues is discussed during the meeting, but the work in building coalitions was done beforehand. The meeting is a formality that ensures that everyone has bought into the plan. "It can be a very costly mistake if you don't do this kind of consensus building," said Ken Adelman.

Sounds like a smart guy, a consensus builder. But where have we heard that name before? Oh, yeah. This piece from 13 February 2002:

Two knowledgeable Brookings Institution analysts, Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O'Hanlon, concluded that the United States would "almost surely" need "at least 100,000 to 200,000" ground forces [op-ed, Dec. 26, 2001]. Worse: "Historical precedents from Panama to Somalia to the Arab-Israeli wars suggest that . . . the United States could lose thousands of troops in the process."

I agree that taking down Hussein would differ from taking down the Taliban. And no one favors "a casual march to war." This is serious business, to be treated seriously.
In fact, we took it seriously the last time such fear-mongering was heard from military analysts -- when we considered war against Iraq 11 years ago. Edward N. Luttwak cautioned on the eve of Desert Storm: "All those precision weapons and gadgets and gizmos and stealth fighters . . . are not going to make it possible to re-conquer Kuwait without many thousands of casualties." As it happened, our gizmos worked wonders. Luttwak's estimate of casualties was off by "many thousands," just as the current estimates are likely to be.

I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps. [empahsis mine]

And what was Agincourt?:

Henry V invaded France for several reasons. He hoped that by fighting a popular foreign war, he would strengthen his position at home. He wanted to improve his finances by gaining revenue-producing lands. He also wanted to take nobles prisoner either for ransom or to extort money from the French king in exchange for their return.

Yep, that's what Ken Adelman should be teaching students, all right.

*Yes, I know the title of this post is from Richard III. Bear with me.

Labels: Economics, education, Iraq, Politics

by Ken Houghton

Jeremy notes that he is not the only one leaving Bucky Country.

While Wisconsin's (and Jeremy's) favorite legal scholar is likely staying, the situation provokes idle speculation and, therefore, probably makes retaining the remaining faculty more expensive than it could have been without the supplemental.

And I note for the record that Joe Soss's move to the University of Minnesota is a continuation of that university's plans discussed here in the Dark Ages (10 May 2005).

Labels: Academia, Economics, education

by Ken Houghton

Paul the Spud at Shakespeare's Sister notes Sean Hannity and Neil Boortz's latest entry in the "Worse than Al Qaeda" derby.

BOORTZ: Right. Look, Al Qaeda, they could bring in a nuke into this country and kill 100,000 people with a well-placed nuke somewhere. Ok. We would recover from that. It would be a terrible tragedy, but the teachers unions in this country can destroy a generation.

HANNITY: They are.

BOORTZ: Well, they are destroying a generation.

HANNITY: They are ruining our school system.

What Paul doesn't note is that Steve Jobs agrees with them:

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said.

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically. [Michael] Dell sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap.

But when he spoke, he Spoke Truth to Power:

Dell responded that unions were created because "the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.

"So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed."

Dell also blamed problems in public schools on the lack of a competitive job market for principals.

Tell me about it. There's nothing like living in a city with a bloated, capricious Administration that decides teachers shouldn't have a contract and students should suffer for their incompetence to remind you that the contract-negotiating AFT is the sole check on abusive management.

So Dell scores well there. Has he also learned the other reality (via /.)?

The top six requests at Dell's new Customer Service website (number 1 is by a WIDE margin; see link above):

1. Pre-Installed Linux | Ubuntu | Fedora | OpenSUSE | Multi-Boot
   
2. Pre-Installed OpenOffice | alternative to MS Works & MS Office
   
3. NO EXTRA SOFTWARE OPTION
   
4. linux laptop
   
5. No OS Preloaded
   
6. Have Firefox pre-installed as default browser

Apparently, the power of the "free" market has been tethered for quite a while by the power of the monopoly. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Labels: education, Linux, Monopoly, MSFT, unions

by Ken Houghton

It appears that, in the new Russia, buying software from a vendor makes you entirely liable if it turns out not to be legal.

The reaction in the Russian educational community is as should have been expected:

Rather than attacking mobsters who peddle pirated copies of Windows directly to companies, the Russian [police] decided to lock up aSepich headmaster who bought hot Windows software which came from Perm region’s Capital Construction Administration.

Microsoft says that the incident has nothing to do with them, but it appears that Russian schools in the area are so scared about being shipped off to a Siberian Gulag, that they are buying Linux gear instead.

Memo to Mr. Gates. The next time Mikhail Gorbachev asks you to intervene, a response of "don't blame us" probably won't be considered responsive. As we noted in the case of Romania, the pirates of today are the developers of tomorrow. (And, as Emil-Nicolaie noted in comments to that post, MSFT did themselves no long-term good in Romania either.)

UPDATE: The Russian court system does the right thing; it is left as an exercise to the reader whether MSFT should consider the case "trivial."

Labels: Economic Development, education, MSFT, Russia, schools, software piracy