Ideating on Social Responsibility

If only real life were a Frank Capra movie.  Then warm-hearted generosity might very well triumph over greed, selfishness, and disdain for others.  Then this victory in the war of competing ethos would happen because people have become quite fatigued with the alternative, yet they maintain a hopeful idealism that society can be restored to something that reflects their ethos, simply by having enough other people take up the same point of view, without the need to launch a painful and destructive counterrevolution to achieve this end.  That is the punchline for where I'd like to end up with this post.

But it is a long path to follow before reaching that conclusion.  I want to take up first why during junior high and the first couple of years of high school (fall 1966 - spring 1970) schmaltzy movies were so important to me in shaping my views on social responsibility, and it's not just It's a Wonderful Life that comes to mind. This is true even though I started to read the newspaper then (first the Herald Tribune, then after it folded the New York Times), some serious fiction for pleasure (the first of which was The Grapes of Wrath which I read in summer camp after 7th grade), and by 9th grade and perhaps earlier I was subscribing to The New Republic and reading that from cover to cover.  Yet all this reading was about the world out there.  I should know about that, sure.  But it didn't really help to answer what bits of it I should bring into my own little world and incorporate within my personal makeup.  The schmaltzy movies were better for me that way.

Let me give an example. For a while, I was quite taken with the Gregory Peck character in To Kill a Mockingbird. I have a distinct memory of wanting my next pair of eyeglasses to have tortoiseshell frames, in imitation of that character.  That we first learn to be ourselves by imitating others strikes me as offering a good insight into my development as an adolescent, particularly regarding ethical matters.  The character that Gregory Peck played, Atticus Finch, is associated with the line about walking round in somebody else's shoes. How, exactly, does one do that?  I have one particular example of how that played out in my case, which I wrote about in a post called Retards.  The first part of that post talks about my last year at summer camp, where several of my bunkmates regularly picked on a kid named Gary, and more or less by default I became something of Gary's defender, not something I sought out but it needed doing and there was nobody else who would take it on.

Alas, as I got older the world out there seemed to intrude more and more on my little world, and even though I matured and became more knowledgeable in areas of interest to me, I was often less efficacious in achieving the ends that I would have liked to see.  This is particularly true in the teaching I did in retirement - one course a year, an upper level undergraduate class on the economics of organizations.  I put in a substantial amount of time in the teaching, much more so than I would had I been working full time.  And I used a nonstandard methodology (in re teaching economics) where I had the students write weekly blog posts as part of their homework and where I would give extensive comments on their posts. This effort notwithstanding, I would seemingly reach only a few students in the class.  The vast majority remained unchanged by the experience, with no evidence at all that they were making personal connections to the subject matter.  

And as a true introvert, once this teaching came to an end, Covid wasn't the cause but it cemented that there would be no return to teaching, I no longer went to campus and spent less and less time in face-to-face conversations with others, instead mainly living in my head without being part of a community to share responsibility.  My wife is a far better neighbor than I am, spending a good chunk of her time in her garden, then chatting with others as the situations arise, and being helpful if need be.  I do that only rarely.  I do donate to a couple of local charities, but it is a passive form of contribution.  So, as to social responsibility, particularly of the informal kind, I am definitely not a role model.

This gets me to the normal functions we associate with good citizenship, voting and paying taxes.  And here I want to focus on these functions at the national level.  As to the voting, that is in both primaries and actual elections in even numbered years, and it is for Congressional office as well as the Presidency.  As to taxes, this is filing the income tax return with the IRS, which I do for our household, and arranging in advance for the amounts withheld from our pensions, so the tax is paid, more or less, on a rolling basis.  While as someone who usually follows the rules I do these things, I will note that I'm powerless in determining which candidates appear on the ballot I see, what the major issues are for these candidates, and how they will act if and when they assume office.  Likewise, I have no say as to the level of income taxes I should pay or my fellow citizens should pay.  As one among tens of thousands of voters in my Congressional District and one among millions of voters in the State of Illinois, I'm only a drop in a very large bucket.  It is only when a large mass of voters speak with a common voice, where their message will be heard.  If I were part of such a large mass who are trying their best to act in a socially responsible way, what then is the message we should want to send? I will try to give an answer to that question below.

Before doing that, let me note that it is far easier this way for the plutocrats.  As they say, money talks, and they have plenty of money.  Too many of them, it seems to me, are willing to be self-centered and quite socially irresponsible.  So, it is natural for others to want to pushback at that.  That may be necessary for tactical reasons, given our politics, but I think it is unnecessary as far as articulating what needs to be done from a socially responsible perspective.  So, I hope not to get hung up on this in what follows.

I've recently read Kurt Vonnegut's debut novel, Player Piano.  The copyright is 1952, a few years before I was born.  It's about a dystopia, where machines have fully replaced humans in production, with only a small elite group of engineers and managers to oversee the productive activity, and where this elite group receives a disproportionate share of the economic rewards.  Sounds familiar, doesn't it?  Given how long ago that it was written and that Vonnegut readily admitted he borrowed freely from other dystopian novels, notably Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, I don't want to claim that Player Piano provides interesting commentary on the situation today, particularly on a society that may soon be dominated by AI.  Instead, I want to focus on only one aspect of the story, but I think it is key.  The material needs of the bulk of population are provided for, although not in a generous way.  But their mental health suffers greatly nonetheless because they feel they aren't making a social contribution, and their sense of self-worth is caught up in that.  Further, the protagonist of the story and one of his friends, both of whom are from the elite group, indeed they are the elite of the elite, nonetheless feel that their work is artificial and without real purpose.  So they too are experiencing a decline in their mental health.  It is this linkage between one's mental health and the feeling that one's work needs to be making a real contribution to societal well being which we should take from Vonnegut's book.

Of course, in actuality some may work simply to put food on the table and a roof overhead, drawing their sustenance elsewhere, perhaps from friends and family, maybe in pursuit of some hobby which provides the venue for self-expression yet is not a source of income.  Those who do this well probably are not depressed, because there is some joy in their lives.  But it seems nowadays that many struggle to make ends meet and this inadequacy of income can then make them quite depressed, especially if they feel this situation is likely to be permanent.  No doubt inadequate income can be a source of mental health issues.  Further, apart from income, if they were asked about it many of these people would report that the work itself is alienating.  So, even if their income were adequate, they might report that work itself was a source of mental health issues, which would happen when these outside-of-work factors failed in providing sustenance.  Thus, even with Vonnegut's novel to serve as a guide, there is some complexity to confront in considering this issue of mental health.

To compound matters further, one should be aware of the relevant economic history, as this has had considerable impact on current attitudes and mores.  This would include consideration of the decline in manufacturing, the decline in private sector unions, the expropriation of worker pension funds via hostile takeovers in the 1980s, the dramatic increase in income inequality in the overall economy since 1980, and other factors as well.  I think it fair to say there has been a broad scale emasculation of woking class men, who were ill equipped to adjust to changes in the labor market, particularly to finding jobs in the service sector.  This was likely compounded by how veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were treated after returning home, with an alarmingly high suicide rate among this population.  Evidently, people directly impacted by these events became frustrated and angry.  They needed to blame someone other than themselves for their misfortunes. A good chunk of our national politics might be explained by this observation.

Depression can be caused by highly idiosyncratic and personal issues, in which case simply being there for the person might be the right answer.  For me, the schmaltzy movie that comes to mind to illustrate is The Apartment, with the Shirley MacLaine character jilted to the point of desperation and the Jack Lemon character playing the role of the unlikely hero.  Nowadays when you hear about depression, seemingly quite often, the issue arises whether there is therapy readily available.  That last semester I taught, fall 2019, about 1/3 of my students admitted to feeling depressed and since it seemed to be an issue all over campus, the big concern was whether there were a sufficient number of mental health professionals to handle the load.  Items from Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education confirmed that this was a serious problem around the country.  

That then suggests the underlying issues were likely systemic (and quite possibly may still be with us).  Hence, one wants to know whether the system itself can be modified or changed outright to produce improved mental health outcomes for the vast majority of students.  Similarly, one wants to know whether our economic system can be modified sufficiently to produce improved mental health outcomes for the vast majority of citizens.  A socially responsible person, in my view, would take up this issue quite seriously.  If and when an affirmative answer were identified, the person would then devote considerable energy and personal resources toward making that change a reality, hoping to identify enough other like-minded individuals that this wasn't merely a tilting-at-windmills exercise but a reasonable expectation to pursue.

Now let me pause rather than provide a solution here.  What I have offered above is one possible framing of the societal problem, one that is largely based on economic matters.  I have noodled with solutions elsewhere, most recently in this post, but based on some preliminary discussions with a few friends, it is far from perfect.  Likewise, the framing I've offered above is only one possible framing.  I will briefly try another one, below.  But even restricted to frames with an economic basis, mine might very well be flawed for a variety of reasons, in which case an improvement or an outright replacement is desirable.  It is my hope that the entire process - frame development, frame embrace, effort to achieve an effective solution, and finally delivering a good result - can be viewed metaphorically as a very long relay race.  This post, if it were successful, might get the race started.  But then the baton is passed to others, who advance it further.  Ultimately, this process must emerge from a collaborative effort that then becomes popularized.

Actual discussions about national politics seem mostly to focus on specific policy alternatives.  Framing is at best implicit in these discussions.  You are either for or against the policy.  Modifications are off the table, except for backroom negotiations that occur when a bill needs to be passed. This lack of explicit framing is something which bothers me and was one of the main reasons for writing this post.  Are others likewise bothered by this?  I was an academic economist who would construct theoretical math models in consideration of some economics issue I wanted to analyze.  That background may predispose me to want the framing to be overt in national politics, but others may not be so predisposed.  They might prefer anecdotes, adult versions of Aesop Fables, if you will.  I will try to illustrate.

My household is in the top 10% of the income distribution, but is not close in income to those in the top 1% of the distribution.  As a group, we are largely ignored in the discussion about national politics.  That too has bothered me.  I conjecture that we're ignored because we are already financially comfortable, so don't need a handout from Uncle Sam, yet we are not part of the uber rich, so for that reason alone are regarded by political insiders as folks who should not be a target for additional taxation.  Yet I believe we have an important role to play, especially if the majority of our group are willing to take socially responsible positions.  The most important of these, in my opinion, is for group members to be willing to accept a higher tax burden on their own households and do so of our own accord.  Doing that would, in aggregate, raise substantial tax revenue.  It would also provide cover for raising the taxes on the top 1%.  How would I convince fellow households in my income category to be willing to accept this higher tax burden?  Consider the story of the Major League Baseball player, Ron Hunt.  For 7 years in a row he lead the National League in a category that is not frequently considered - being hit by a pitch.  It's got to hurt a lot to be hit by a pitch thrown in the major leagues and recognizing that gives a nice visualization for the expression - taking one for the team.  If we citizens in the U.S are each the teammates of fellow citizens, then accepting a higher tax burden for our own household is taking one for the team.  And if it is only those at the high end of the income distribution who would be experiencing that, why would anyone have a problem with it?

I didn't say this in the previous paragraph, but I believe that many people choose to go along with the crowd when making their own choices rather than always reason through the choice from first principles.  If so, then the group embrace of a novel social decision might very well look like how innovation diffuses as described, for example, in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. Pursuing that thought in depth could itself be its own post.  Here I only want to observe that it is connected to the relay-race metaphor I mentioned above and that there is some interconnection between the framing and the diffusion, which needs to be worked out in full to have a workable plan.

Let me proceed to a different framing, something I promised above, while attempting to keep it brief so as not to try the reader's patience more than I already have.  The basis is enmity about race, religion, or national origin.  (Additional identifiers could be included here, but this suffices to make the points I'd like to include.)  This form of prejudice has been weaponized politically.  In my view, the plutocrats have used this to distract the MAGA types from focusing on economic issues, thereby making it possible to legislate still more tax cuts for the uber rich.  Given that the socially responsible goals on the economics front aim to defeat the plutocrats in achieving their end and to raise the standard of living for the masses, if this is successful will this enmity fade away of its own accord or does it need to be addressed directly?  Further, even if it will fade away of its own accord eventually, should it be addressed earlier because the wait itself will be intolerable?  I wish I knew the answer to these questions.  My point here is that thoughtful answers need to be developed, which can then serve as guide for socially responsible people.  Now a couple of other points.

I may have sandbagged above by calling To Kill a Mockingbird a schmaltzy movie.  Others might not agree with that designation.  I did so because I wanted to articulate the line about walking around in somebody else's shoes.  To me, it is an essential part of being a socially responsible person.  Yet I rarely see it happen.  In particular, on the racial/religious front, while I quite frequently read about a within-group person making a group defense, I rarely if ever read about an out-of-group person making a like defense.   Perhaps what I do see amounts to a bonding activity for within-group people.  Maybe that is necessary.  But, if so, it is quite unlikely to persuade those who are not part of the group.  I have one possible example that might work otherwise and I wanted to relate it here.

About a dozen years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates had a piece in The Atlantic called The Case for Reparations.  As it turns out, my mother, who was a Holocaust survivor and passed away a couple of years before Coates' essay appeared, had received what amounts to reparation payments, both from Germany and from Austria.  If I recall correctly, this was compensation for denial of education.  My mother was born in 1920 and would have been of junior high/high school age when the Nazis came to power.  I had started to manage my parents' finances in 1998 (my dad passed away a year later).  So I was the one who facilitated the German payments being deposited into my parents' checking account.  (I can't remember now whether that was monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually.)  The money from Austria accrued there, only to be claimed after some todo a year after my mother passed.  My siblings and I were the beneficiaries, but I was the one to manage the money flow.  All of this background contributed to my being positively disposed to Coates' ideas.  So I wondered if family members of other Holocaust survivors who had likewise received such payments were to read Coates' essay, how would they react to the arguments made in the piece?  It seems an interesting social experiment to try, if it can be implemented.

Now, a different point, one more tactical.  LBJ was President during my junior high years and the first half of 9th grade as well.  During that period, a lot of powerful legislation was passed under LBJ's mantle, the Great Society. Both of the frames I've considered were represented in this legislation.  Yet we hardly mention the Great Society today.  Instead, news of the time was dominated by the War in Vietnam, which ended up fracturing American society.  The imprint of the Great Society was lessened as a consequence and from the point of view of social progress much of it was negated after Ronald Reagan became President.  

That bit of history should inform how the socially responsible coalition positions itself.  One implicit goal is to enable the coalition to endure and not cause such strong counter reaction that it undermines all that has been achieved until then.  Another implicit goal is to make real progress from the get go.  Regarding the latter, no doubt that if a Democrat takes control of the White House in 2029, much attention will have to be given to either restoring Federal government function that had been disabled by Trump, or starting from scratch at building alternative function that aims to improve on what existed before Trump became President.  Some of this might overlap with the agenda I've described, but how much of an overlap I really can't say, and to the extent that the two are disjoint, they will compete for our attention and might fracture the overall support.  This can be anticipated in advance.  

Nowadays, even a moderate sports fan like me is well aware of the prevalence of sports betting.  It makes me wonder how I would bet now that a successful socially responsible coalition will develop.  In spite of my great desire to see it happen, at present I would bet against.  

What might be done to improve the odds enough so I can bet the other way and get likeminded people to do so as well?

Some Reflection on Instructor Self-Protection Against the Campus LMS Failing

Given the recent hacking of Canvas and the dislocation that occurred as a result on campuses across the country, many must be asking themselves - was this a Black Swan or a portent?  If instructors assign a non-zero probability to the latter, they then will want to know what they can do in advance to mitigate the consequences of the next event.  This post is motivated by those concerns.

Now it's time for the disclaimer, my usual one and another that is specific to the content of this post.  I write these posts primarily to provoke the reader's thinking on the matters of concern.  My proffered solutions may very well be off base.  I want to admit that up front.  Nonetheless the post can be useful in getting the reader to consider other possibilities that would be better.  That value of the post, then, is in getting readers to reflect on the issues in a serious manner, rather than to just have them worried but with no strategy on how to self-protect.  I also need to note here that I am a has-been.  I last taught in fall 2019, so have no experience as to the consequences of AI on instruction.  Further, I retired back in 2010 from doing ed tech work, first for the Campus at Illinois, then for the College of Business.  At the time, I might have been considered to be an informed insider.  This commentary which initially appeared in then Educause Quarterly, Dis-Integrating the LMS, reflects my mindset from back then, and which continued into the time when I was teaching the one course a year on the Economics of Organizations that I did in retirement.  The rest of the post leverages those experiences, even if they are now out of date.

There is an obvious form of self-protection an instructors might take - use an alternative host (or set of hosts) other than the campus LMS, hosts that are less likely to experience an outage at a critical juncture in the course, perhaps because those hosts are used mainly for functions other than teaching and learning.  But I can't leave well enough alone, so I am going to take a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone approach.  Once alternative hosts are on the table, might that readily enable an improvement in pedagogy as well?  Some of my suggestions below will be along those lines.

Make Much of the Course Website Publicly Available

This is first and foremost to reflect an ideal from 20+ years ago - Information wants to be free.  I will try to illustrate some of the learning benefits from doing so in what follows, but let me start with this one.  As this use of an alternative host is done by instructor opt-in and not as a requirement by the instructor's academic department or the campus, it is a way for the instructor to demonstrate some pride in how the instructor goes about teaching.  Further, once having made such a commitment, it places an implicit obligation on the instructor in sustaining the quality of the online content that is posted on the course Website.

For the sake of illustration, here is my course site from a decade ago. This is the penultimate page on the site, as I made a few posts there after the course concluded that are less relevant for illustration purposes.  The page that is displayed shows the end-of-semester posts.  Let me also distinguish the course site itself from course content that I created.  As to the latter, go to the tabbed page called Useful Links.  The first of these was to Moodle, which the College of LAS supported as an alternative to the Campus LMS.  I used it sparingly, but I did use it.  The next link is to my PowerPoint files (and some PDFs as well) that are in my Box.com account.  These files are publicly available, but are probably not discoverable without the Useful Links page.  Because I subsequently required my students to make "Virtual Elevator Speeches" as part of their course projects (and because some students would only add the course during the second week of the semester), the file First Class Session.pptx is done in that style.  I encourage the interested reader to download it and have a look.  The slides themselves have images to illustrate the ideas and only a limited amount of text.  There is discussion in the Notes pane.  The presentation autoplays in slideshow mode, and then has musical accompaniment.  This is both to convey a sense of motion and to time the entire presentation to coincide with the duration of the musical selection.

The reader might like the effect created, but balk at the idea of creating similar such presentations, as it is quite time consuming to do so.  Let me get back to that issue later in the post.  Likewise, the next link to my Excel files also requires some explanation, which I want to defer till later as well.

I want to note that there is also some video content of my own creation, which was produced to illustrate the economics in the Excel files.  Each of those videos is embedded in a post on the class site.  Here is an illustration of that.  I also embed a variety of content that I've found on the open Internet and that is relevant for course purposes.  This gets me to the next point.

A significant sticking point with having an open class site is the use of copyrighted material, where the instructor does not have permission to use the content in an open manner.  This will happen, for example, if the instructor utilizes content supplied by the textbook publisher.  The reader will note that in my class, while I had a textbook, it was more or less a reference book for the students and I didn't teach to it at all.  I'm on record that we need to be moving away from textbooks in college instruction and toward inquiry based methods.  If wishing would make it so.  My hope is that self-protecting against the campus LMS failing might encourage a step in that direction.

Let's push on. Anyone looking at my course page will notice the Student Blogs in the left sidebar.  I want to give a bit of background on this and how I used student blogs in this course.  I first taught with student blogs back in fall 2009, in a course for students in the Campus Honors Program called Designing for Effective Change, so it wasn't an economics course. My experience there informed my later use of student blogs in my economics course as I will describe below.  I wrote about that initial experience in a piece for Inside Higher Ed called Teaching With Blogs.  

The first lesson, one I hadn't figured out in advance, is that the student blogging constitutes formative thinking on their part.  They are okay doing that, provided the environment is safe.  Here, safety refers to whether a potential future employer can see the student posts.  They were afraid that might happen.  Having students blog under an alias addresses this concern.  So, in the economics course I assigned each student an alias, the name of a famous economist concatenated with the course rubric and the semester the course was being offered.  This way, the aliases remained unique, even as I reused the names of the famous economists from one year to the next.  

The next lesson is about the prompts I gave to the students on which they based their blog posts.  (They were also free to blog on a topic of their own choosing that was relevant to the class, but that happened only rarely.) I wanted them to build connections between the various economics ideas we were studying and their own experiences, as I thought they would better learn the economics that way.  This bringing in their own experiences also served to differentiate their posts somewhat.  As I read each post and commented on it, I needed to maintain a freshness of perspective.  I tried to have my comments situated in what the student wrote rather than comment about the intended lessons from the underlying economics.  This gave some novelty to the comments and made commenting more enjoyable and less drudge work for me.  Also, I required each student to respond to my comment with their own comment, to acknowledge what I had said.  Sometimes other students would comment as well.  This student blog provides a good example along these lines. 

And while it is not possible to observe this, the expectation is that students would have done considerable pre-writing before making their posts.  I referred to the pre-writing as mental puttering and wrote this piece to explain that it is tied with making connections among the ideas but that forming such connections doesn't happen in such a straightforward manner.  As such, it is time consuming, which brings to mind the question, can this sort of approach survive now that AI is so prevalent?  My guess is that it can't for the following reason.  Many students view coursework as a series of obstacles, which they try to get past as quickly as possible.  The thought of mental puttering is alien to such students and they would use AI to produce a tolerably good post in as short a time as possible.  That there are aspects of the post that pertain to their own experience might slow them down a bit.  But would that be sufficient?  I doubt it.  Before considering what might work let me make the following observation.

As I believe that most students are way too grade conscious, I did not assign grades to individual blog posts.  This is in accord with the view I articulated here.  Instead, I borrowed an idea from the Art and Design folks and embraced portfolio grading.  While students would get a small credit for each post they submitted, halfway through the course I'd give one grade on all the posts till then.  At the course conclusion I would give a grade for the remaining posts.  The reality is that even for the earnest student it would take a while to get comfortable with the blogging, so one would expect to see some improvement in performance simply based on that.  Then one might hope thereafter that the posts would become a bit more nuanced.  For the better students that actually happened.

And I'd like to note a learning benefit from having the student blogs made public.  Students who are finding it difficult to write posts or who have received commentary from me that they view as somewhat harsh can read the posts of other students and my comments on those. They might then emulate in approach the posts they found that were well received.  This is a way of learning to write, by reading what other writers have done and then basing one's own style on the reading that was most enjoyable.  Further, they might come to understand that my comments, even if critical, are intended to improve their writing.  The comments, then, are a form of coaching.  Even if it is awkward at first to receive such coaching, I would hope that eventually the students would want that, as they can see it is helpful for their own learning.  

Can the approach be modified sufficiently that it remains effective even in the presence of AI yet produces similar outcomes to what I was able to achieve 10 years ago?  I've been mentally toying with various tweaks that might be tried to achieve this end.  One of those is to have students, either in pairs or groups of three, have online video chats that are recorded.  During these chats part of what the students would say is similar to what they would have posted in their blog in the past, including their personal experience that is relevant to the economics under consideration.  But, as listeners, they'd also then react to what the other student says, asking clarifying or follow up questions, so the chat very much becomes a conversation. The instructor would get to see the video itself, but to preserve a sense of anonymity for the students, only the transcript of the video would be made public. If these chats were viewed as giving a performance to be seen by the instructor, then students might feel it necessary to prepare in advance for them.  Such preparation would be akin to the pre-writing I mentioned above, even if AI were utilized as part of the preparation.  Perhaps this can work.  I'd like to encourage others to try it to see if it can.

Have students complete weekly assignments where the students bring in their relevant personal experiences that that are published on the course Website under a student alias.  The instructor should comment on these submissions, but only grade submissions in batches, once or twice a semester.

There may be subject matter that is too disembodied for prior student experience to matter.  In my class the pure economic theory students were to learn fits in this category.  The standard way to present this theory is via mathematical modeling.  Yet undergraduate students who are neither math nor engineering majors, most econ majors are in this category, may be uncomfortable with abstract presentation of the math modeling.  Is there a way for these students to visualize the economic theory without them finding the presentation off-putting?  The Excel homework I designed for the course was aimed at addressing this question.  Those workbooks are examples of what I had earlier referred to as Dialogic Learning Objects. 

To get a sense of this, go back to the Useful Links tab on the Course Website and this time choose the Excel Files link.  Select the Excel Tutorial file and download it.  This is a tutorial about how Excel was to be used in my course.  Enter some short textual content in the NetID box and then choose an alias from the pulldown menu.  You need to include that information for the completed tutorial to generate a "key" which can then be submitted to get credit for completing the tutorial.  Like the individual blog posts, the tutorials are credit - no credit.  All the questions must be answered correctly to get credit.  But what is submitted is only the key.  

You should be able to complete the rest of the tutorial without difficulty and can submit your key if you'd like via the form link that is provided.  I used Google Forms for that function.  I included a comment box on the form and, surprisingly, a fair number of students used it to make an impromptu comment about the homework.  That was a pleasant surprise.

If you are ambitious, you can try some of the real homework.  The first of these in the course, one that doesn't require too much prior knowledge of microeconomics, is the one on Efficiency and Equity Concepts.  The one on Math of Risk and Risk Preference is interesting in that each time a question is answered correctly part of the graph is drawn, so this really should help the students visualize what is going on.

The feedback that is given is generated by the IF function, along with conditional formatting.  And many of the questions are parameterized in a way that students will see different numbers for the same question, with their alias determining what does show up.  This is one step in the direction of preventing the students from cheating on the homework.  Of course, a real math nerd could figure out the underlying parameterization and give the answers to other students that way.  Fortunately for me, I never had that happen.

One might want to know whether other types of dialogic learning objects might be made that don't rely on Excel but do require AI in their construction.  Posing this question is easy.  Answering it, however, is beyond my expertise.  If it is possible, might the instructor make a few as means of illustration and then have students make others, as their course projects?  It is said that you really learn the subject matter deeply when you teach it.  Might that also be true in designing learning objects to illustrate the subject matter?

I have been fascinated with this idea for some time.  And then these learning objects that were course projects one semester might become learning tools for other students in future semesters.  (As there is a copyright issue here, the students who made the objects as their course projects would need to give their permission for the reuse of these objects.) Alternatively, if a similar course were being taught at some other campus, might the courses share such learning objects?

All of this is meant as background for discussing the issue of instructor time devoted to instruction and how that time should be best spent.  In my case, I was retired when I taught the Economics of Organizations Course and only taught that one course in the fall each year.  I was still working when I taught that CHP class, but it was comparatively small with only 18 students.   The Econ of Organizations class typically had fewer than 30 students, so providing the comments on the student blogs wasn't too much of a time commitment.  And the design of learning objects, whether Excel files, or PowerPoints, or videos would typically be done before the course started.  What about other instructors, who have larger classes, a full class load, and other obligations that make them far from time abundant?  Let me offer a first pass at answering this question.

If you go to the url for the course Website and change the year, say from 2016 to 2015, you will find another course Website similar to but not identical to the one that we've considered.  Indeed, you can do this back to 2012 as well as forward to 2017 and 2019 (I didn't teach in 2018).  The point is that there were changes in the course from one year to the next, as I liked to experiment to address issues that arose in the teaching, but a large part of the course was done according to a template that was fixed by the second time I offered the class.  So, with that, I suggest the following.

Instructors should develop a rolling plan about how to teach their course with a Website that is out in the open, one that balances their idealistic goals for instruction with the realistic limitations placed by the time they actually can devote to the course, recognizing that they will teach the course again, make further changes then, and develop a better overall approach.  

Let me wrap up. I think I got carried away in writing this, giving a full spiel about pedagogy even while that wasn't what the title of the post seems to be about.  Maybe the post will serve to generate posts by other authors who stick more to the topic.  Or maybe some will be inspired to also write about pedagogy out in the open, but come up with many other different ways to proceed.  I would be delighted to read such pieces, should they come to light.

Trying to Flatten My Personal Downslope from Aging

For machines, parts wear out and then are either repaired or replaced.  And if not that, the entire machine is replaced.  While that last one is definitely true for capital equipment, I'm going to try to steer away from it as a metaphor in this post.  I'll keep the first two in mind in what I write below.

Let me begin with my eyes.  I first got glasses when I was 8, around the time when JFK was assassinated.  I have a distinct memory of the drive back home from the place where we got the glasses.  It was nighttime.  The streetlights seemed so much brighter; everything appeared much clearer.  Alas, that sensation didn't last.  And for much of adult life my vision has been somewhat off, even with the correction provided by the glasses.  For the past 20 years or so I've had bifocals - the continuous kind. While I was quick to adjust to those, I'm never really sure whether I'm looking at something through the right part of the lens.  Since then I've been diagnosed with the triple whammy - macular degeneration, glaucoma, and cataracts.  I've got friends my age who have had surgery to remove their cataracts, but they didn't have the other issues.  My optometrist, instead, has me on a regime of eye drops, 3 times a day with dorzolomide and once a day with latanoprost.  In addition, I take an eye vitamin pill twice a day, currently PreserVision.  I then go for checks at the doctor's office on a regular basis, some of which is just to monitor pressure in the eyes while the rest is to check field of vision.  My right eye has already declined some in that regard.  The left eye is better.  But there is no expectation that the deterioration will reverse course and begin to show improvement.  The goal now is to slow down the decline.  

I've made various accommodations to deal with the situation.  One of those is relying on my Kindle Fire when I read books, where the font is large and there is substantial line spacing that I've inserted.  I now much prefer that to reading paper books.  My main computer is an iMac and I keep the screen resolution quite low, so items look large.  That works for me.  And then, as to driving, I try to avoid doing it at night, particularly in areas where there aren't streetlights.   With this I function reasonably well.  If my vision were to deteriorate much beyond where it is now, I'm not sure whether I could find a suitable alternative approach, so I'm hoping I don't have to anytime soon.

Let me move on to my other health concerns.  For more than 20 years, there have been three foci of those concerns.  One of those is my weight, which was close to normal when I got married in 1990, but after 9/11 it ballooned upwards as my knees gave out so I could no longer go jogging for exercise.  And, foolishly, I didn't find an immediate substitute exercise activity.  I was extremely busy at work, so I let that absorb this other time.  In retrospect, it was a big mistake.  I want to note here something I've only come to realize recently.  While a singular event that causes me stress can be dealt with in an undo way, I need a healthful response to repeated sources of stress or it will be debilitating for me.  In my case it wasn't just the overeating and lack of exercise.  It was drinking too much as well.  And all of that becomes habitual.  Bad habits are hard to break.  When the subject matter is not my own person, I can be objective, logical, and sometimes insightful.  It makes you wonder how I could be so stupid when it came to my own health.  But, no doubt, I was.

Another focus was my blood pressure, which also was quite high.  I received medication for that to keep it under control.  Initially, that was lisinopril/hydrochlorothiazide, which I took twice daily.  After several years of that, I began to show improvement (from lifestyle changes) so the dosage was reduced to once per day.  Eventually, even that seemed like too much medication, so I went to straight lisinopril.  But that was less than effective so I went back to hydrochorothiazide, as a separate pill.  It worked to lower the blood pressure but it has a negative side effect on my feet.  So now I take it every other day, while taking the lisinopril every day.  

The third focus was physical pain, mainly due to arthritis, to which I'm genetically disposed.  The issue is how to contain it or avoid it entirely.  Over the years, I've had physical therapy sessions with multiple therapists, to address different loci of pain.  And while I'm told to do exercises that are taught in those sessions, the reality is that I stick with those as long as the therapy sessions are ongoing and then for a while longer, after which the pain seemingly goes away, and then I stop doing the exercises.  I think the psychology of this is understandable as the exercises are something of a nuisance, but that is not a real excuse for making this mistake.  

Now let me make an aside, which is relevant for what follows.  In 2018 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, for which I ultimately received radiation treatment.  The cancer is now in remission, tracked by an annual PSA blood test.  Here is the real point I want to make.  As prostate cancer is eminently treatable, and as I later learned most men will get it eventually if they live long enough, in itself it wasn't that big a concern.  But the oncologist made it clear that there was a risk the cancer could spread to nearby bones or other tissue.  That thought truly frightened me, as it was the first time that I really contemplated my own mortality.  More than one scan was done to see if the cancer had indeed spread.  Those scans turned up several false positives.  I learned that the scans themselves don't distinguish well between cancer and arthritis spots, one needs additional diagnostics to identify which it is, and that arthritis actually riddles my entire body, even while at many of those sites there is no pain.  My fear of dying in the not too distant future disappeared, but fear that I will face a lifelong struggle with pain thereafter intensified.

Later that same year I was experiencing a lot of pain in my right hip and my lower back.  I saw an orthopedist, who said I was a candidate for a hip replacement.  My mom had many of those and each time the hip would get infected, so the prothesis had to be removed.  Armed with this knowledge, I was concerned that I would have a similar experience if I had this procedure.  So I opted to delay and in the meantime try to lose a good chunk of weight, thereby increasing the likelihood that the procedure would not create undo complications.  I now had incentive to lose weight for other than vanity reasons.  (As I sometimes fret about the gray hairs in my eyebrows, I certainly don't want to claim that I'm not vain, yet that has never given me sufficient reason to diet seriously.)  And then I learned from experience that the weight loss itself might very well lessen the pain in the hip and the back.  Had I understood that ahead of time, I might have done more about weight loss earlier.

Let me fast forward to the present.  I still haven't had a hip replacement even though I've lost 100 pounds since 2018.  In 2025, the orthopedist said that there are so many other things going on in the area of the hip that I'd still have substantial pain even with a hip replacement and I'd be better off having the pain doctor address my situation.  He had me get physical therapy, for itself and partly as a necessary preparation to be eligible for a steroid injection in my back, which I subsequently got.  At the time I started physical therapy I couldn't walk 1/4 of a mile. Now I can go for long walks.  Earlier this afternoon, I was able to do about 5 miles at an estimated 20 minutes/mile.  That's been my recent experience when I walk outside.  (Champaign is comparatively flat with the few hills we have quite modest.) On the treadmill I don't walk for as long but I do go faster.  I much prefer to be outside, if it is warm enough for that. But when I'm inside I do a bit of other exercise that maybe I should be doing once in a while in any event.  I try to do some exercise at least 5 days a week unless I'm really hurting.  Playing through pain is for young people, but not for me.

Here is one other episode to round out the picture.  In early 2023 I was having abdominal pain and felt very gassy.  I was diagnosed with SIBO (Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth).   Subsequently I had a colonoscopy which found I had a tortuous colon, a partial explanation for the SIBO as well as why I'd likely experience constipation with some frequency.  For the SIBO, they also tested for intolerance to certain foods; lactose is the one I remember; I didn't have lactose intolerance.  And maybe they did gluten too.  An antibiotic was prescribed and I was put on a Low FODMAP Diet. That was a 6 weeks regime.  It's the lessons I took from that experience that really matter for now.  Berries and other fruits became a staple of my diet, as did green vegetables.  Now I restrict my carbohydrate intake quite a bit, almost never having pasta or white potatoes, bread (whole wheat) only in limited quantities, also modest amounts of protein mainly chicken, lean pork, salmon, cod, and tuna from a can.  (I gave up beef in 2018 when my urologist said that doing so was a way to keep the prostate cancer from coming back.)   And I seem to have stopped eating ice cream, something I would never have predicted in advance.  My weakness is the occasional sweet roll at breakfast time.  I'm particularly vulnerable to those extra large chocolate chip cookies which seem in vogue now.  So as to the diet it isn't an absolute thing, but I don't stray too far from where I want to be.  And then, once in a while, I will skip a meal or two, either because I simply don't feel hungry or because I was a bad boy the day before and want to make up for that.  

I wish the story would end there, because that's the picture I'd like to paint.  But my experience is that aging seems to move the goalposts with regard to health.  The first sign of this for me was when my blood tests started to show a high Creatinine number, an indicator of some issue with the kidney.  While my Creatinine number is now in the normal range, they started to measure the GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) and while mine has bounced around some it has been consistently below 90 (the cutoff for normal) with the most recent reading being 68.  Based on that evidence I've been diagnosed with Stage 3A of Chronic Kidney Disease.  Apart from the other steps to promote good health that I've mentioned above, I need to stay hydrated (nighttime is a challenge for this because I go to the bathroom frequently and I don't want to increase the frequency by drinking water then) and to avoid salt as much as I can.  While I never salt my food, I do wonder how much salt I take in with processed food, such as tunafish or canned chick peas.  If it comes down to that, I will need to get somebody else to do my food preparation, a person who can take explicit steps to reduce the salt in the food.

Then, a couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with a fatty liver, based on what the blood tests showed.  The AST was a bit high in November 2024, though it has come down since.  The ALT has been normal throughout the time that it has been measured.  Based on this I had a FibroScan in April 2025.  The CAP score was high then while the Liver Stiffness score was normal.  I was told to lose weight, which I've done.  The FibroScan was repeated just 9 days ago.  The CAP score had come down into the normal range.  Hurray for that.  But the Liver Stiffness score jumped up and now I'm in Stage 2 of a Fibrosis diagnosis.  (Stage 4 is consistent with cirrhosis of the liver.)  I've been told to give up drinking alcohol.  You'll pardon the pun, but that's a tough pill to swallow.  However, mainly out of fear I've been on the straight and narrow for the last 8 days.  Sticking to this regime is another matter.  Writing this post is one way I'm trying to come to grips with that.

I have learned a few facts about Fibrosis.  The good news is that it is reversible, provided the liver damage isn't too bad.  So I can hope that if I do stick to a regimen of not drinking alcohol that eventually I will go back to Stage 0 and Fibrosis won't be a concern.  Then my brother, who is a doc, told me that there is something called a FIB-4 score, which makes a probabilistic Fibrosis forecast based on the results from a blood test.  (It would be nice if the FibroScan and the blood test painted a similar picture.)  My current FIB-4 score is 2.3, a middling number that I suppose corresponds reasonably well to a Stage 2 diagnosis.  The last thing I learned is that it can take months and months of abstinence for the results to show up, though 6 months should be sufficient to detect any changes.  Alas, the way health insurance works these days, my next blood test and FibroScan will be a year from now.

This makes the not drinking quite different from the dieting, where I can weigh myself on a daily basis, and the monitoring of my blood pressure, which I can also check at my whim.   I won't get feedback on the not drinking for quite a while.  I need to take it on faith that progress is being made.  There is a well-known paper (to economists) by Koopmans called Measurement without Theory.  This is theory without measurement.  I find it somewhat unsettling.

But I do know a couple of things from my own casual empiricism in regard to my own drinking.  If I have more than one drink, it tends to raise my blood pressure and dehydrate me.  Further, my self-control is diminished so with regard to eating those bad things - chips, candy, leftovers that should be saved for tomorrow - I'm much more prone to do so after a couple of drinks.  These reasons provide some evident motivation for abstinence.

I've also learned a few ways to cope.  Recently I've taken to drink decaf on the rocks, in a tumbler which I have previously used to have some alcoholic drink on the rocks.  The feel in my hand is the same.  The taste is obviously different and I'm prone to drink the decaf quickly where I would try to slowly sip the alcohol.  It is not a perfect substitute, for sure, but it is something.  And I've taken to having non-alcoholic beer  on occasion, with my favorite being Coors Edge.  This is closer in taste to the Real McCoy, but without the kick.  Let me get back to that because it gets to the motivation for drinking alcohol.

And I've taken a page from the book Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler, on how to discourage the drinking up front.  Again, my casual empiricism suggests, that my wanting to have an alcoholic drink is dependent on time of day.  It is nil in the morning and early afternoon.  Then it begins (it must be 5 PM somewhere - the time when Happy Hour starts) and probably continues for several hours thereafter.  If I go to sleep early, which is my own personal nudge, I don't need to be disciplined that long and then can go the entire evening without drinking.  When the Illinois Basketball game starts late and I feel that fan loyalty means I should watch it live rather than view a recording the next morning, that presents a challenge and I'm more prone to drink then.

Now let me briefly discuss motivation for drinking and then try to bring this post to a close.  As a habit, it can be a form of celebration.  It can be enjoyed for the taste as it is consumed rather than for the after effects.  When I drink alcoholic beer and I'm the one who buys it, how it tastes matters a great deal.  Both of these I would term drinking for pleasure.  Sometimes, however, when the arthritis pain seems especially intense, and the Tylenol I take doesn't seem to be that effective in reducing the pain, then the drinking is done as a way to feel numb to it all, an alternative to taking a narcotic.  The numbing also seems needed when I'm feeling heavily under stress and want some relief from that.  It would be healthier if I could reduce or eliminate the source of the stress in advance.  This is one real reason why I have greatly reduced reading the news.  Absent that source reduction, however, the stress becomes very much like a physical pain and then one drinks to numb that.  Taken together, these reasons can make drinking habitual, which it has been for me.

But, I hope what I've written above indicates that I've taken real effort to break that habit.  However, I have not gotten anywhere close to complete abstinence.  And I'm scratching my head now as to what else I need to do to achieve that.  Further, if the reality is abstinence much of the time but still the occasional stumble, how do I limit the damage of those episodes and then get right back on the horse?  I don't have an answer to that question as of yet.  For now it seems to me that if I do try to answer it I might encourage the initial stumble.  

I have an appointment with the nutritionist who ordered the FibroScan.  That appointment is 20 days from now, not quite a month after the scan was done.  It seems a good time to take a reckoning on these matters.  In the meantime, I've thought it through about as much as I can for now and I aim to take it one day at a time till then.

Must Income Still Be Attached To Work?

Before getting to the topic of this post, let me make this observation.  I write these pieces to try to pique the reader's interest, so readers will reframe my questions in their own terms and then consider the questions anew from their own perspective.  I am not trying to give a definitive answer and certainly don't claim to be doing otherwise.

I hope the motivation for this particular piece is obvious.  Recently there seems to be one article after another about how artificial intelligence, either coupled with robotics or as a stand alone, will displace workers from their current jobs.  These pieces cast the situation as a tragedy waiting to happen.  Surely that would be the case if many workers who were displaced from their current jobs then lost their wage income as a consequence, and then they couldn't find other employment so they couldn't find a way to make up that income loss.  This seems to be the narrative that most people have in mind.  

But what if the income loss was minimal or not at all?  The jobs would be gone but the income wouldn't be.  Surely, that is logically possible.  Given that, two questions come to mind.  First, what is to prevent it from happening?  Much of the rest of the post will be spent on considering that question.  Second, are there plausible ways to overcome these restraints?  I'll have a little to say about that too.

The companies that are producing AI have been making massive investments in their products.  The logic for doing so is that they expect there will be quite a large return on investment.  The companies that purchase AI services from these producers likewise expect to do so profitably, either by increasing productivity or by lowering cost.  The latter implies layoffs, which heretofore have not happened when companies are performing well.  But that will no longer be the case.

It is instructive to consider those sources of income which are available at present that recipients get when not working.  One of those is unemployment insurance.  UI is intended to provide bridge income until the recipient can find another job.  In the jargon of economics, there are market frictions.  Job search takes time, to assess available alternatives and find a good fit for the worker.  In the absence of UI, the person might very well take the first available job offer, because the income need has to be satisfied.  But the first offer might not really make for a good match.  Allowing the process to play out for a while will yield better results.  The bridge income that UI provides enables a better way to manage this market friction.  And with that UI is available only to those who have worked previously and paid the UI premiums via a tax on their paychecks.  Further, UI is of limited duration only, to encourage the recipient to meaningfully engage in job search.

Another source of income available to some of those who aren't working is retirement income.  Social Security and Medicare might be the first of these to come to mind.  There are other possible sources of retirement income, private pensions or pensions provided by state government.  Eligibility for retirement typically requires reaching a certain prespecified age and having been employed for some required number of years or becoming disabled while on the job, with the disability significant enough that the individual can no longer fulfill work obligations.  As there no longer is mandatory retirement, the decision to continue to work or to retire is left up to the employee, for those who are eligible.

It is important to observe that for both UI and retirement pay, earnings while previously working matter in setting the amount of the payment, with higher earnings leading to higher non-work pay.  At least part of this is that those with higher earnings contributed more while working, so they should be entitled to receive more on that basis.  But the prior pay-in and the subsequent pay-out need not balance.  So, I'd like to introduce an ethical notion here that I believe matters a lot. It is believed that those who earned more, either through their own hard work or because they were especially talented, deserve more.  In some sense, this is a parallel idea to that good students should get higher grades.  From core beliefs, such as in the Puritan Work Ethic, we have been socialized into these views, which can be regarded as part of the more general "meritocracy" that so many subscribe to.

What should happen then if a good chunk of the workforce will get laid off in the near future with no prospect whatsoever of finding other employment?  If some sort of payment were given to these folks as a source of income, should their prior earnings matter as to the amount of the payment, or are prior earnings irrelevant in this case?  And if prior earnings are irrelevant, are they deserving of some payment nonetheless, even if they are no longer productive?  If they are deserving, then doesn't this point to an egalitarian payment system, socialism if you will?

Before I argue for an answer to that last question, I want to note that there might very well be macroeconomic reasons of the Keynesian kind for making such a payment.  In the absence of such payments there could very well be massive aggregate demand failure, plummeting the economy into a depression.  In this circumstance we'd need something other than the unemployment rate to determine whether this is happening or not, a statistic of the sort:  (Actual GDP)/(Potential GDP).  If this depression were happening, the firms producing AI might not be making large returns and those companies that moved to utilize AI in their business may find their revenues inadequate to continue operation.  This nightmare is foreseeable, so payments to non-workers might then be justified simply to boost aggregate demand sufficiently.

Yet we tend to think of macroeconomic fixes as solutions to business cycle downturns.  Eventually there will be upturns again (or at least one can hope so).   Won't the payments to non-workers halt in this case?  However, the situation where much of the workforce is displaced by modern technology may not be part of the business cycle.  Instead, it might be the new normal.  What then?

This gets me back to ethical considerations.  Should non-workers receive no payment whatsoever, because they don't deserve it?  Or does the simple fact that they are human beings mean they should be entitled to such a payment, sufficiently large to live life decently?  My point here is that it is our ethical beliefs which are apt to provide the greatest barrier toward creating a system of payments to non-workers, which might possibly become a system of payments to all, where a few do work and receive income beyond this generally provided payment.

At this point I think it is worthwhile to consider a couple of references to help lay the foundation for the argument.  One of these is Paul David's well-known paper Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.  The paper is about the economics of lock-in, where we are stuck in a solution that may have been optimal in the past but no longer is, yet we are unable to move to something better.  The QWERTY keyboard provides such a great example of this.  It was designed initially to encourage typing at a slow pace, so the keys wouldn't jam.  Eventually, with improvement in typing technology, particularly the advent of the electric typewriter, and then the personal computer, typing speed was desired.  Yet the QWERTY keyboard persisted.  The explanation comes from the numerous interdependencies that arose, which relied on the QWERTY keyboard remaining in place.  Alternatives, such as the Dvorak layout, were at a huge disadvantage, even if they allowed faster typing for those who mastered that system.  So, the question arises, are we locked into a meritocracy belief system, even if that is soon to be superfluous or already is?  

The other paper is Bertrand Russell's essay from almost a century ago, In Praise of Idleness.  It offers an eloquent argument that an alternative belief system is needed.  I encourage readers of my post to have a go at Russell's piece and see if they find his arguments persuasive.  A question I've been scratching my head about for some time is this.  If you are convinced about the necessity of an alternative belief system, how do you go about convincing others of that as well?

Now I will give a wave-of-the-hands view of our national politics.  We are a plutocracy, where many of the plutocrats have disdain for paying taxes.  It is evident that raising taxes substantially would be necessary to finance a decent-sized payment to non-workers.  Hence, the plutocrats have incentive to maintain the meritocracy belief system intact, to block such payments and hence keep the tax burden on themselves in check.  Their strategy has been to create division among the broader populace and, to date, it has been effective along these lines.  Is there a way to break out of this box that we're in?

It is evident that those future non-workers who would receive payment would vote for such a system.  But, in my view, their support of the idea is not sufficient to make it a reality.  A good chunk of the winners in the meritocracy sweepstakes must also embrace this system, and willingly accept a larger tax burden for themselves to enable it.  They would do so out of a sense of a social obligation.  I wrote about this previously in a post called, Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?  If there are enough within the professional class who do make such an embrace, then I believe it can break the logjam.

But there I didn't consider the impact of AI on jobs.  The fear of that is now front and center making the urgency in doing something significant all the greater.  

Although I'm an idealist at heart, I hope my arguments here are nonetheless perceived as sensible.  If enough others start to ask these questions then maybe something important can be done to address the issues.

Cinderella Is A Fairy-Tale

March Madness will begin the Sweet Sixteen round next Thursday.  Now that yesterday's games have been completed, three quarters of the field has been sent home.  Below is a table of those teams that remain, along with their conference affiliations, and their seeds within the region to which they were assigned when there were 16 teams per region.  

Before getting to the lessons I'd like to draw from this information, let's look at a bit of recent Tournament history.  It was just three years ago, in 2023, when Florida Atlantic University made it to the Final Four, whereupon they faced San Diego State, which won that game.  Neither of those teams made it to the Tournament this year.  I know FAU because my parent's condo in Boca Raton was near Glades Road and I would sometimes drive by the entrance to the FAU campus.  But I'm guessing that most college basketball fans wouldn't have heard of FAU prior to that appearance in the Final Four, so for me they qualified as a legit Cinderella team then.  

In this year's Tournament, High Point, another school most fans hadn't heard of (including me), would have qualified as a Cinderella team had they made it to the Sweet Sixteen.  They were competitive in their game against Arkansas, so I surely don't want to pooh-pooh them.  But from my perspective, it was close but no cigar.  Miami of Ohio, which did win its play-in game, would have qualified as a Cinderella team if they had made it to the round of 32.  But they were soundly beaten by Tennessee.

I'm having trouble getting the image of the table to post

properly.  So, as an alternative, here is a link that should work.

All the remaining teams are from power conferences.  And while there are a few teams with unimpressive seeds, Texas in particular may be of interest because it had to with in the play-in game (First Four), which implies that those making the seedings weren't sure whether they deserved to be in or not.  But they are a big school with a rich sports history (though more in football than in basketball).  So, no way are they a Cinderella Team.  Likewise, Iowa doesn't qualify as a Cinderella team even though they have fewer resources than Texas.  They are a Big Ten team.   No team from a power conference can be considered a Cinderella team.  

Now, let me get to a conjecture.  Covid disrupted college basketball.  Indeed, the Tournament was cancelled in 2020.  There were strict protocols enforced in the subsequent years to allow play.  How it influenced outcomes, I can't say, but surely it had some impact.  NIL started somewhat before Covid, but it is my belief that it really took off when the Player Portal began, which was in July 2021.  And the consequence is that most of the better players who enter the portal, particularly those who have been around for a while, will end up on a good team in a power conference.  It makes it less likely that teams from other conferences will make it to the Sweet Sixteen.  The commentators were saying during the round of 64 that Mid-Major teams were holding up their end.  But all of those teams are gone from the Tournament now.  And my guess is that over the next few years we are unlikely to see them in a Sweet Sixteen game.  

Here is something else.  I'm nauseated by all the sports betting and really wonder whether either players, coaches, or refs could fix the outcomes of games without it being immediately obvious that they were doing so.  (For example, what counts as a foul versus what is incidental contact is one of those things that clearly is more art than science.  Limiting playing time for a player who is in foul trouble is another one of those.)  A team from a non-power conference which wins its first game may then attract some fans who want to bet on it in the next-round game.  If that happens some of the players on that team, who may not be getting big bucks from NIL, may want some way to cash in on their recent success, especially if they don't see themselves as candidates for the NBA draft.  This is a disaster waiting to happen.  

Fans want to root for the underdog.  Showing my Big Ten loyalty, last night I watched Florida play Iowas and there I rooted hard for the Hawkeyes.  This is so even though when Illinois plays Iowa I'm completely for Illinois and totally against Iowa.  But Iowa was a big underdog in that game with Florida and it was compelling viewing.    Some other schools that are blue bloods in college basketball had similar experiences to Florida.  North Carolina's loss to VCU is one example.  From a seeding viewpoint, neither Kentucky's loss to Iowa State nor Kansas' loss to St. Johns can be thought of as the underdog vanquishing the favorite.  But in terms of the history of the teams performances in the Tournaments, there still was a bit of David vs. Goliath in those games.  So, I'm not yet ready to argue that NIL coupled with the Transfer Portal will tend to make the blue blood schools reliable favorites in the NCAA Tournament.  The talent pool itself seems sufficiently diffuse that other things than the school brand should matter for which become the better teams.  And I'm guessing that this year fans will be satisfied with the Tournament, even if there is no team in the Sweet Sixteen that qualifies as a Cinderella.

But if the situation doest repeat itself, fans may become unhappy with the outcome.  What then?

Pur Did

Given my post from last month, Pur Didn't, I felt obligated to write this one, with Purdue winning the Big Ten Tournament.  Congratulations to them, and with that they are now a #2 Seed in the West Regional of the NCAA Tournament.  So, this win would seem to establish Purdue as a real contender.  

But that earlier post was mainly concerned with player injury and having teams try to avoid that before the NCAA Tournament.  Indeed, as the play was very physical in the championship game between Purdue and Michigan, both Trey Kaufman-Renn of Purdue and Yaxel Lendeborg of Michigan were injured, though how severe those injuries are is anyone's guess.  

In contrast, Illinois had another overtime loss, this one in its quarterfinals matchup against Wisconsin on Friday. And in that game they surrendered a large lead, similar to what happened in the regular season game against UCLA. It's hard to know if the player miscues, and there were more than a few of those, were somehow related to player injuries, the type that aren't officially reported.  Coach Underwood has said that Keaton Wagler has been nursing an injury to his back.  Will a few extra days of taking it easy help to improve his condition?  Again, who knows?  But it surely couldn't hurt.

Illinois will be a #3 Seed in the South Regional, in spite of that Friday loss.  The advantage of being well seeded is most pronounced in the first round game, though that does put on some added pressure because everyone expects the team to win.  And because of its recent losses, Illinois may be susceptible to that.  We'll see.

As I'm wrapping this up, we are under a tornado warning here.  We will likely get a severe thunderstorm in the next few minutes.  Later tonight it is supposed to snow.  I can imagine that bad weather might interfere with travel plans that teams have.  I mention this only because it is another random factor that could influence the outcomes in some of the Tournament games, yet nobody has that factored in at the moment.  I hope it ends up not mattering.  Again, we'll see.

Optical Delusion

In my head-in-the-sand approach to our national politics, a flawed attempt to keep my temperament on an even keel, I spend a lot of my time with diversions.  The best of that is reading fiction.  Last week I finished, Simply Poe's Best Short Stories, and this reflection is based on what I learned there.  Many of the story titles were familiar to me but either I hadn't read them or I had forgotten their plots.  Yet some of the titles were entirely new to me.  My favorite was The Spectacles and it, in particular, serves as my motivation here.

I find Poe interesting to read because many of his stories inhabit the world found between the psychological and the drug-induced supernatural.  The mind plays such a key role.  And Poe taps in very well to the sources of this interaction - our deepest aspirations, our fears, our partially forgotten memories, and our physical limitations.  

Poe's writing also appeals to me because it fits into my own biography, where I have spent much of my life devoted to a kind of seeing, the one done with the mind when the eyes are closed or with them staring at the ceiling or perhaps looking at pen and paper or a computer screen, contemplating some equations or a graphic that represents the math.  I wrote about this in a post called The Professor Mind. But in that post, I wanted to go back to childhood if that were possible, to identify when that way of thinking initially manifest in me.  I didn't concern myself with going in the opposite direction in time.  I'll do a bit of that now.  

For about fifteen years as an economics professor, my research was a kind of theoretical math modeling.  The math gave the work both a rigor and a way to identify when the results actually could be identified in the theory.  But then, in the mid 1990s, I had a career switch to Ed Tech, both as an instructor who explored effective uses of online technology in teaching, and as an administrator who supported other instructors in doing likewise.  

This career switch was a happy accident.  Only in retrospect did I realize that it was a good fit for me, matching my collegial interests and where I was in the life-cycle to a field in its infancy, which of necessity entailed much in the way of open-ended exploration and, in particular, a pathway for engaging conversations with colleagues around campus.  I felt horribly under-prepared in this at first.  But I found those I met were willing to attribute expertise to me because of the title I held and I did not try to dissuade them from their views on this point.   Eventually, via a lot of background reading and sufficient job experience, I began to feel comfortable in the new role.  I dare say, however, that I was never a very good manager and supervising the staff under me was not where my interests lay.   Since I didn't "come up through the ranks" I lacked common experiences with my staff.  That made it harder for me to manage them.  I enjoyed much more the ambassadorial function, interacting with other faculty and administrators around campus, as well as support providers in different units on campus.

My administrative appointment started at 50% time, with the other half of the appointment as a faculty member in the Economics Department.  That was soon bumped up to 75% time administrator and eventually to 100% time administrator.  When that happened I stopped teaching the large intermediate microeconomics class that had been the source of my experiments with ed tech.  I did teach once in a while after that, but as an overload and then only very small classes, once a Discovery course for first-year students and then three different times for the Campus Honors Program.

Three months into my initial administrator job, I took over running SCALE, a soft-money and quite small organization. It supported faculty in what we then referred to as ALN (Asynchronous Learning Networks).  There was an all-everything staff person who managed the office and the other staff.  We would go for coffee late in the afternoon to review the goings on of the day.  For me this made managing the staff just like the ambassadorial function and I enjoyed that.  A few years later, as the SCALE renewal grant was winding down an underfunded hard-money organization was formed to succeed SCALE.  It was called CET (Center for Educational Technologies).  

Initially CET included SCALE staff, some staff who migrated over from the campus teaching organization, and a couple of new hires.  After about a month or so I was feeling overwhelmed by the managerial issues.  I needed an Assistant Director who would assume many of these burdens, but at the time there wasn't money in the budget to do a search for such a position.  So, I half-assed it, informally creating the position of office manager from among the existing staff.  It created some internal issues, but it worked well enough that I could devote much of my time doing what I wanted to do.  A couple of years later, a real search for an Assistant Director was held as the CET budget had grown after the campus got a permanent CIO.

A year after that, CET merged with the campus IT organization (CCSO) to form a new organization called CITES and CET was renamed CITES EdTech.  CITES also absorbed the classrooms technology unit, which previously had been housed in the campus teaching organization.  I became the Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies and I had both CITES EdTech and CITES ClassTech in my portfolio.    Also, the mission changed, in a not so subtle way.  Where before the focus was on effective uses of the technology for teaching, subsequently the aim became finding a way to have a scalable solution to support instructional technology.  Initially, this was concentrated on finding a suitable enterprise Learning Management System (alternatively referred to as a Course Management System) for the campus, one that eventually became known as Illinois Compass.  

Let me give one more paragraph about this history and then move on.  In the language of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, I conceived of CET primarily as connectors.  The innovators were the handful of instructors around campus who made novel and effective use of the technology in their classes.  The best way to make other instructors aware of these innovations was via workshops, with multi-day summer workshops, combined with some incentive for the attendees to implement in their own classes based on what they learned at the workshops.  This was quite effective and further established a collegial relationships between the attendees and EdTech staff.  But it didn't scale very well.  Many instructors were adopting the technology without having attended the workshops.  Further, CET was underfunded.  So the CIO suggested that the workshop funding get reallocated to the CET base budget.  Now CET funding was more solid, but it had lost its lever to engage faculty on effective uses of the technology in teaching and began its move to simply being a support organization for learning technology.  Perhaps that was inevitable, but my heart wasn't in this alternative mission.

Now let me get to what I mean by the word delusion in the title of this post.  And in doing so, I will consider only my own delusions.  It has two pieces to it.  First, it is becoming so enamored with an idea that other related matters move to the background and then may very well be ignored entirely.  Second, it is based on an assumption about scaling - if it can work for me then it will work for everyone else who is like me. I will illustrate with some posts from this blog.  

I began this blog in spring 2005, partly intrigued by blogging as a release for me, but mainly because I had many work-related issues on my mind and not enough knowledgeable yet disinterested friends to have good discussions about those issues.  So, after a bit of experimentation to see if I could generate the requisite prose, I announced the blog to a few friends.  Then, a couple of months later, I got discovered by a well-connected blogger, Scott Leslie.  Soon after that, I had regular readers for my posts.  The first set of posts to consider came a couple of months later.

They are about using undergraduate students in the role of peer-mentors, course content creators, big brothers and sisters, and any other way they might genuinely assist other students who aren't quite as far along.  Further, it is about the campus as a whole embracing this at scale.  I called the overall idea Inward Looking Service Learning (INSL).  There are 7 posts in total under this label.  They all appeared in August 2005.  I had used undergrads in my teaching the large intermediate microeconomics class, where the feature was having online office hours during the evening, and where the course design was constructed to encourage the students to make use of those office hours.  While my course design was somewhat novel, the use of undergrad peer-mentors I got from seeing the practice in some undergrad engineering classes.  I did this starting in summer 1996 and continued in the spring semester each year until spring 2001, after which I no longer taught that class.  So in making the INSL posts, I was writing about an idea that I was no longer directly involved with, but the idea was a take away that stuck with me thereafter.  Note that it only has the technology play a support role, which has been my general view right along.  

In writing these INSL posts I had the right qualifiers - pie in the sky, going over the deep end - to convey that I was making a speculative argument.  But why do that unless there is some belief that others will embrace the argument and give it a try themselves?  To my knowledge, that didn't happen.  Might that have happened if the ideas were marketed a good deal more?  The delusion rests in ignoring that question, hoping that the posts themselves would suffice, and otherwise contenting myself with providing a description of how it might work.  One probably should ask whether there is some benefit to the posts apart from encouraging the embrace of the ideas necessary in attempting implementation.  It is conceivable that others might generate their own ideas, distinct from INSL but where INSL served as a stimulus in generating these alternatives.  Would that that then justify writing the INSL posts?  If so, isn't it delusion then not to verify that some other alternatives have been generated?  It's been quite a while since those INSL posts were written, so my recollection is not perfect on this.  Yet I'm not aware of anyone letting me know of their alternative that had my INSL posts as at least part of their basis.  So, I'm guessing there weren't any alternatives of this sort.

A different thought is that these posts are simply throwing ideas against the wall to see if anything sticks.  A small probability of success means that not sticking is the likely outcome.  Does past failure mean that the next idea shouldn't even be tried?  Perhaps the answer to that question depends on how to consider the cost of writing up the post.  Is the time engaging or burdensome?  I don't have a definitive answer on that one, but I can say that in drafting this post, I seem to have gone back and forth with the answer.  If it is recognized in advance that some of the time spent will be burdensome, then there is a need to be able to get through those periods, having the procrastination come to a close and getting down to brass tacks.  Delusion seems to be the answer there.

My other example comes from a recent post, offering up my "solution" for our national politics, where members of the professional class take the lead by signaling that they are willing to pay substantially more in income taxes so as to enable higher taxes on the uber rich as well, with the proceeds going mainly to people of ordinary means. and without that having negative political consequences.  The post is entitled,  Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?  In this case I enlisted a friend from grad school who is still a practicing economist to give it a read and offer her reactions to the piece.  That took quite a while to happen and then her reaction was less than enthusiastic.  I had hoped for a more uplifting response.  There is still a fair amount of work to tighten up the argument in the piece and assemble all the relevant recent data to be included.  For the time being, this is one where the procrastination is still ongoing.  

With regard to college teaching and learning, in the mid to late 2000s, given my position on campus I could claim some expertise as to the underlying issues and possible solutions.  I also had a reasonably strong reputation at the national level among others engaged with learning technology for higher education.  So the blog posts such as the INSL series may have served a purpose about informing the profession, even if implementation of the ideas wasn't in the cards.  Regarding our national politics, however, I cannot claim any such expertise and I am well behind the times as a practicing economist.  This itself doesn't stop me from noodling about the ideas.  But then writing up my tentative conclusions, I'm really not sure as to how I will proceed in the future.  The writing activity itself is therapy for me.  Perhaps I should content myself with writing without feeling a need to espouse that I alone have the answer. Not only would that be less delusional, but would be less egotistical as well.

Pur Didn't

With Michigan beating Purdue last night and doing so pretty soundly, Illinois' chances for sharing in the Big Ten title seem slim to none.  Illinois is currently in second place, but even if it wins tonight at USC Illinois will be two games behind Michigan.  There will be a head-to-head game when Michigan visits Illinois on February 27 and before that Michigan has a game against Duke, but I suspect the motivation for Michigan in those games will be entirely how they appear in the national rankings and the seedings in the NCAA Tournament.  Currently Michigan is number 1 in the former and I suspect if they beat Duke and beat Illinois they will be number 1 in the latter, regardless of how they do in the Big Ten Tournament.

But there is another factor that comes into play that motivates teams.  Injuries become a big deal, especially when those happen to star players. Quite recently, some of the top teams have just lost players due to injury.  Illinois is in that situation with Andrej Stojaković, who has a high-ankle sprain.  If a starter can't play due to injury, the rest of the team must adjust.  There is learning in that and now, given how close we are to March Madness, there is a lot of stress in that as well.  Illinois is on the other side of that cycle with the return of Kylan Boswell.  The sort of learning that's needed will happen over the next few games, and mainly during the practices to prepare for them.

It makes you wonder whether a team can play so as to avoid player injury.  One obvious way to do this is to play fewer games.  This gets me to consider the conference post-season tournaments and whether they continue to make sense.  For the Big Ten, in particular, there are 18 teams in the conference now and each team plays 20 conference games in the regular season.  With teams on both the East Coast and the West Coast, the travel to away games is onerous.  Illinois's last game of the regular season is at Maryland, while its previous game is a home game.  This, in itself, seems absurd to me.  Then there is that the finals of the Big Ten Tournament occur on Selection Sunday, indeed with the game ending right before the selection show begins.  This means that a team that makes it to the finals may have a first round game on Thursday, with not a lot of time in between to rest and prepare.  So there are reasons to sandbag in the post-season tournament, quite apart from avoiding player injury.  

Of course, these post-season conference tournaments attract a lot of viewers.  For many fans, it gives them a chance to watch teams from rival conferences as well as to keep watching their favorite team, as long as it is still alive in the conference tournament.  And the more the fans watch, the more money is made by the teams and their conferences.  But one has to wonder whether the players suffer as a consequence.  

Getting back to Purdue, which to open the season was ranked #1 nationally, I have to wonder why.  Are they underperforming now or were they overrated early on?  And for them, might the Big Ten Tournament be yet another opportunity for them to turn it around?

We'll see.

Progressive Taxation at the Local Level - My Take

I received my mail-in ballot for the primary here in Illinois, which includes some items that are specific to Champaign County.  The County has been operating under deficits for a while and needs a way to generate more revenue and/or to reduce its level of spending.  I'm going to focus on the former here.  Raising revenue for local government is done via taxation.  There seems to be two options for that.  Either increase the sales tax or increase the property tax.  

The sales tax is generally regarded as a regressive tax.  Even people of modest means have to buy groceries and other necessities.  They pay the sales tax when doing so.  The property tax is more progressive.  Its magnitude depends on the assessed value of the home.  Wealthier people tend to have higher valued homes.  So, increasing the property tax tends to put the incidence of the tax onto wealthier people. 

Now, here is an important sidebar.  Wealthier people are more prone to itemize on their Federal income tax returns.  The property tax is one of the itemized deductions one can take.  From 2018-2024 there was a cap of $10,000 imposed on that deduction.  In 2025, the cap was raised to $40,000.  For Champaign County, I would guess that most homes would have assessed value that keeps their property taxes well under the cap.  Readers of this post can find the Federal tax brackets here.  The point is that if Champaign County raises the property tax, the actual burden on homeowners will likely be only a fraction of that, with that fraction determined by what tax bracket the homeowner is in.

Here is another sidebar.  I came of age when Reagan was President and it was commonplace then for voters to be told to vote their pocketbooks.  Were that to happen now, wealthier voters would embrace the sales tax increase, while voters of more modest means would endorse the property tax increase.  What I want to argue here is that wealthier voters need to show some leadership and get beyond voting their pocketbooks.

Taking myself as an example, in my household we are financially comfortable.  A modest increase in the property tax would not impact our quality of life one iota.  Under the current circumstances, it would be best for folks like me to embrace paying more in property taxes.  If enough did that it would show that selfishness doesn't always win at the ballot box.

I truly wish we could send that message in a credible way at the national level.  But for now, we should make a start of it by doing so in Champaign County.