The belle of the ball in the NCAA tournament has to be VCU, who have made it to the Elite Eight after needing to participate in a play-in game. By any measure, expanding the field to 68 teams has to be counted as a success. But what of other "lessons" people seem to be garnering from seeing the outcomes?
Illinois is part of the Big Ten and we did our part in the tournament by winning our first round game as a 9 seed by beating UNLV. We even gave Kansas a run for their money in the next game. But there are no Big Ten teams in the Elite Eight this year, the only "power conference" not to secure a slot in that esteemed grouping. The SEC leads the way with 2 teams (Florida and Kentucky). The ACC has North Carolina, the Big Twelve Kansas, the Big East Connecticut, and the Pac Ten Arizona. Along with VCU the other Cinderella team is Butler. (How can you be a Cinderella if you made it to the championship game the year before?) . Perhaps not having the school name be a state is sufficient for putting on the glass slipper.
What I want to ask here is whether we can infer from this that the Big Ten was overrated or that the best conference in fact was the SEC, using the number of teams in the Elite Eight as the criterion for the ranking. And on that, here are a few points. First, teams that are younger (mainly freshmen and sophomores as the starters) are apt to get better over the season as the players learn their roles and adjust to each other. However, all inter-league play happens early. So the results there, with a few exceptions, tend to be biased against the younger teams and favor the more experienced clubs. If a young but talented team comes on late that shouldn't be a surprise. But it often is because this learning over time isn't in the rating systems. North Carolina seems to be in this situation.
Second, teams that get to be number 1 in the country in the polls start to play defensively, to protect a title that they really haven't earned but to which they've been anointed. To the extent that such a team also has young players, the rating can block the learning. I'd put Ohio State in this category. It didn't seem to me they improved that much from mid season on. And if Diebler is missing from the outside they are not that amazing a club.
Third, if you just look at wins and losses, that would seem to leave a lot to chance, allowing a better team to be upset by a lesser team. But if you look at a basketball game as a series of possessions, with the winning team the one that wins the most possessions, you come to a different sort of conclusion. In my back of the envelope calculation, a possession is 20 seconds on average so a game without overtime has 120 possessions. When there is a decisive margin, it is pretty good evidence that the better team one. On that VCU was simply better than Georgetown and Purdue, but about even with Florida State. Since that game went to overtime, one can certainly imagine the final score going the other way and likewise for Kentucky against Ohio State. On the other hand, if you look at the graph of the game flow on Butler versus Wisconsin, you see that Butler had a commanding lead in the middle of the second half, and then Wisconsin "made the score more respectable" at the end. In this case the point spread at the 30 minute mark is probably a better indicator, meaning Butler was clearly the better team. On that metric, Illinois did better against Kansas. That game was close until about 5 minutes left.
Four of the Big Ten's losses in the tournament were to Elite Eight teams and only one of those was close (Kentucky over Ohio State). Transitivity has a way of failing in this sort of analysis (if A is better than B and B is better than C then A is better than C). But it is impossible to make inferences about quality of teams without assuming it. Given the evidence, it is hard not to conclude that the Big Ten was overrated, certainly at the top of league.
There is then the question not of inferring quality at the top, but rather quality at the middle, measuring conference quality by the number of teams it gets into the tournament or perhaps the number of teams normalized by size of conference. On that one maybe 10 years ago I'd have said that there are two many automatic qualifiers from mediocre conferences. Now my conclusion is the big name schools are displacing some decent and talented lesser name schools. The Big Ten got 7 this year. That was probably 2 too many. I'll let Charles Barkley be the one who whines about the Big East.
For the rest of this tournament, I will root for Cinderella. It would be great for College Basketball if Butler won it all. And it would be wonderful to see VCU upset Kansas. If you are not a fan of one of the other Elite Eight teams, why else watch?
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Lake gulls?
The family is in Chi-town for a little bit of R&R. Yesterday the boys were to meet some of their friends at Navy Pier. Kids that age like to hang out and do things in packs, a good thing in my view. We're over protective as parents. So after breakfast, we walk over from the hotel, five or six blocks. The arthritis in my hip has beef acting up; my pace is slow; there is a far amount of pain. There is mental effort in persisting for what should be an automatic process. Though it is pleasantly cool, I start to perspire.
After we hook up with the kids' buddies my wife and I make a tentative plan. We will find a Starbucks, hotel coffee doesn't cut it, and drink that while staring at the Lake. I tell her I spent many hours in graduate school doing that and it was one of the things I looked forward to, something we miss in Champaign. After searching a bit to find a bench that is not too wet, we drink our coffees looking out over the inlet. Across the way on a shorter pier the space is monopolized by whitish birds, hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them. We see one on our pier. The feathers are white or a light gray. But the claws are yellow, as are the eyes.
Vacation is there to get away from work pressures, but there is no total escape. The iPad delivers email, one of which is the daily update from Inside Higher Ed, with an item that in Ohio the Governor wants faculty to teach more courses. Why not want them to teach more intensively? We seem to be racing to the bottom and accelerating at it.
Sent from my iPad
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
On Sheepskins, Passports, and What College Is Good For
William D. Cohan had an interesting though disturbing "Opinionator" column on Wednesday.
Apart from arguing that if you have something on the ball then a college degree may be irrelevant to your future career, a point I'll return to in a bit, he also argues that the college educated may have destroyed investment banking, by moving it from privately held partnerships to publicly traded companies that no longer had financial stakes in the loans they were making and then by coming up with all these fancy derivatives that masked what is going on but encouraged a rush of cash to come into the business.
I've been puzzling on this second one for a while. First, while it is fairly easy to see the harm that was created from all of the financial houses going public, I'm not sure Cohan or most pundits on this matter have seen the good that was created. It may very well be that much of the good has been captured internationally rather than domestically or if domestically then only by high level executives in the large multinationals. But still, there has been phenomenal economic growth in many Asian countries and in Latin America too. Were the capital flows that Wall Street generated a significant force behind that growth? If so, it is a story that hasn't gotten a lot of press.
The other thing I don't get is why there isn't, in essence, a co-pay model in finance. In my way of thinking, when a local bank initiates a mortgage, it should sell a big piece of it but keep some fraction of the loan, say 20%, not out of its own good will but as a way to assure the market that the loan is reasonable. And if the loan is not reasonable, then the bank should have incentive to block it, which I believe is what you want for the system as a whole. The same thing should be true for the big Financial Houses. There needs to be a handful of big shareholders who put up some of their own cash on the loans. The exact same principle applies. The size of the loan is not the important thing here. The issue is whether the lender really believes the loan is a good loan and if he so believes, let him put his money where his mouth is. What I don't understand is why the market hasn't come up with this as part of the solution on its own, totally without government regulation pushing the matter. After all, with our health insurance we have to make a co-pay when seeing the doc or picking up a prescription. Surely the principle is understood. What keeps it from being realized? I don't know.
Let me get back to the value of College. Since I have had my students blog this semester I have inadvertently learned their views on a variety of life issues. One of those is the nature of the work they will be expecting to do once they graduate. Many of the students are remarkably instrumental in their views, with a good job a means only, seeing as their end goal to satisfy their recreational pursuits and hedonistic pleasures. In my Behavioral Econ class we read an essay by Joseph Persky about John Stuart Mill and his approach to homo economicus. That Mill put accumulation of wealth along with the pursuit of luxury and leisure front and center resonated with many of these students. What I've yet to hear from most of them is that either instead of in addition they want to do good work so that what they produce can benefit others or they want to work where they get direct enjoyment because it is a means of self-expression. Either they are too immature to yet have those views or because across both classes it is mainly Econ majors and Business students, perhaps this is a selection of students who are prone toward these attitudes. Given their view, however, it is not hard to work through the backward induction on the students' attitudes about their college education.
It is one thing to read Cohan reflect about the value of a college degree on the New York Times Web site. It is quite another to read current students blogging about the issue, much more brazenly than Cohan. In my behavioral class, the first topic I had students blog about was procrastination, based on a New Yorker piece by James Surowiecki. Much of the blogging and commenting on this topic was confessional in tone and substance. In trying to draw one team out in its thinking, where my sense is that we procrastinate about different things for different reasons and the term procrastination is a catchall that refers to multiple different behaviors, I wrote:
The student who made that comment doesn't come to class. I don't track attendance officially but I do become familiar with the faces that do show up. (And I learned what he looked like when his team made an in-class presentation.) It is their call. Interestingly for me, there are more absences in the behavioral class, which has mainly Econ majors, than in the intermediate micro class, which has mainly Business students. Those Business students have it in their heads to come to class and for many of them also have it drilled in to sit up front. Their diligence is perceptible and reliable even as their penetration into the economics is sometimes wanting. Witnessing that I wonder do they represent the norm in students we should be striving for?
I wish I knew.
Apart from arguing that if you have something on the ball then a college degree may be irrelevant to your future career, a point I'll return to in a bit, he also argues that the college educated may have destroyed investment banking, by moving it from privately held partnerships to publicly traded companies that no longer had financial stakes in the loans they were making and then by coming up with all these fancy derivatives that masked what is going on but encouraged a rush of cash to come into the business.
I've been puzzling on this second one for a while. First, while it is fairly easy to see the harm that was created from all of the financial houses going public, I'm not sure Cohan or most pundits on this matter have seen the good that was created. It may very well be that much of the good has been captured internationally rather than domestically or if domestically then only by high level executives in the large multinationals. But still, there has been phenomenal economic growth in many Asian countries and in Latin America too. Were the capital flows that Wall Street generated a significant force behind that growth? If so, it is a story that hasn't gotten a lot of press.
The other thing I don't get is why there isn't, in essence, a co-pay model in finance. In my way of thinking, when a local bank initiates a mortgage, it should sell a big piece of it but keep some fraction of the loan, say 20%, not out of its own good will but as a way to assure the market that the loan is reasonable. And if the loan is not reasonable, then the bank should have incentive to block it, which I believe is what you want for the system as a whole. The same thing should be true for the big Financial Houses. There needs to be a handful of big shareholders who put up some of their own cash on the loans. The exact same principle applies. The size of the loan is not the important thing here. The issue is whether the lender really believes the loan is a good loan and if he so believes, let him put his money where his mouth is. What I don't understand is why the market hasn't come up with this as part of the solution on its own, totally without government regulation pushing the matter. After all, with our health insurance we have to make a co-pay when seeing the doc or picking up a prescription. Surely the principle is understood. What keeps it from being realized? I don't know.
Let me get back to the value of College. Since I have had my students blog this semester I have inadvertently learned their views on a variety of life issues. One of those is the nature of the work they will be expecting to do once they graduate. Many of the students are remarkably instrumental in their views, with a good job a means only, seeing as their end goal to satisfy their recreational pursuits and hedonistic pleasures. In my Behavioral Econ class we read an essay by Joseph Persky about John Stuart Mill and his approach to homo economicus. That Mill put accumulation of wealth along with the pursuit of luxury and leisure front and center resonated with many of these students. What I've yet to hear from most of them is that either instead of in addition they want to do good work so that what they produce can benefit others or they want to work where they get direct enjoyment because it is a means of self-expression. Either they are too immature to yet have those views or because across both classes it is mainly Econ majors and Business students, perhaps this is a selection of students who are prone toward these attitudes. Given their view, however, it is not hard to work through the backward induction on the students' attitudes about their college education.
It is one thing to read Cohan reflect about the value of a college degree on the New York Times Web site. It is quite another to read current students blogging about the issue, much more brazenly than Cohan. In my behavioral class, the first topic I had students blog about was procrastination, based on a New Yorker piece by James Surowiecki. Much of the blogging and commenting on this topic was confessional in tone and substance. In trying to draw one team out in its thinking, where my sense is that we procrastinate about different things for different reasons and the term procrastination is a catchall that refers to multiple different behaviors, I wrote:
I share some of the issues with bill paying. I do the finances for my mom, who is 90 and with dementia. Though she owns her condo outright, there are two different monthly fees for different associations that care for the place, and other bills for her care. I haven't automated the bill payment because I want to "know" what is being spent, but I hate to write the checks even though once I do it is not that big a deal.One of the teammates replied:
The studying thing seems different to me because with students that's the main reason they are in college. It is not a trifling. I wonder if there isn't some deeper explanation going on with that. Perhaps we will peel some layers of the onion on that issue when we discuss in class.
Studying is such an arduous task that is many cases useless in the long run. This is due to the fact that business don’t really care that you did well in your Psychology or Economics class; they care more if you are able to help them in solving their problems . In response to Profarvan statement “”The studying thing seems different to me because with students that's the main reason they are in college.” Personally I don’t think the reason for being in college is to study but it is to receive a diploma with a fairly decent GPA no matter how it’s done. Hence, procrastination is an effective tool to put off studying until the day before the exam since cramming is effective to get a B/C letter grade most of the time.We are trapped in a nightmare made popular by Michael Spence. My visceral reaction to the type of behavior that stems from the above comment is to play tit for tat with such students. It's funny how they can get the better of you. Coming into the semester my goal was to inspire the students by having the class read about and discuss interesting stuff. Now I simply want to get even. And I wonder if it's just me or if this is how every instructor feels after a while from these sort of interactions.
In an article from Yahoo business it states that grades are not a predictor of success because if you can’t adapt or solve a company’s problems what good does a 4.0 GPA do. For example when I worked as a computer technician intern for a large corporation there were many full-time employees without a college degree or even a high-school degree. Not only were they better technicians than the college graduates they were smarter and more in tune what was going on in the emerging technologies. So I will keep procrastinating, I know the odds are stacked against me statistically but I will take the risk of procrastinating before an exam. I rather spend an extra 11 hours discovering and learning about new technologies than memorizing formulas and definitions that in the real world will be useless since a computer will do it for you the majority of the time. Hence I also agree with the statement of “ the present is more important to us than the future.”
To sum up, I think procrastination is highly useful in college due to the fact that “true learning comes with practical experience since there is greater depth.” So why waste time memorizing theory when you can procrastinate on Facebook talking to people and building connections that will probably give you a better chance at getting a job.
The student who made that comment doesn't come to class. I don't track attendance officially but I do become familiar with the faces that do show up. (And I learned what he looked like when his team made an in-class presentation.) It is their call. Interestingly for me, there are more absences in the behavioral class, which has mainly Econ majors, than in the intermediate micro class, which has mainly Business students. Those Business students have it in their heads to come to class and for many of them also have it drilled in to sit up front. Their diligence is perceptible and reliable even as their penetration into the economics is sometimes wanting. Witnessing that I wonder do they represent the norm in students we should be striving for?
I wish I knew.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Quickie update on captioning
My problem with Firefox was caused because my Flash player was not up to date. I don't understand why it would play the movie but not render the captions. However, updating the player fixed the problem.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Captioning as Therapy
Let's start with a bit of irony. As I write this Firefox seems to be choking on my captions. I'm not sure why. They do work in Chrome. I want to talk about how relaxing it is to make the captions. But surely it is not that relaxing to troubleshoot the technology when you don't know what's wrong with it, especially in a live setting with students who have become dependent on the technology working. I've been doing some of that lately, a part of the cause of the stress I'm feeling.
So far, most of that technology troubleshooting has proven to be my own error. I don't know Moodle well enough and thinking I've got something configured the way I want, in particular what students see after they've submitted a quiz for evaluation, I learn from their comments that they are not seeing what I want them to see. Then it's not immediately obvious that I flubbed it. So it takes a while and I make an accommodation for the students in the meantime that I really don't want to make, only to eventually learn that it was all unnecessary. If only I had known that when the problem first came to my attention.
I will talk about other, more important stresses in a bit, but let me get back to the captioning. For whatever reasons - either I'm better understanding what has to be done with it, or Dragon Naturally Speaking is producing a better quality transcript of my audio file, or when other things take a long time to do the time spent captioning just seems more manageable, I now have the feeling that captioning is a welcoming activity, one of the tasks I look forward to in the week. It kind of reminds me about my mother's knitting, only she could do that and something else that was cognitive as well, like playing a hand of bridge. With the captioning, you have to pay attention to that. But then it goes pretty well.
My process is this. I first record the video with Jing and I wear a headset so the microphone is pretty close to my mouth when I'm talking. The resulting audio quality is quite clear. I need two ancillary programs to make the captions. One is Dragon, which I already mentioned. The other is AOA audio extractor, which takes the Jing video and separates out an audio file in MP3 format. I have no idea why the following works, but it is a discovery that is useful to know. If you first run the AOA software and then launch Dragon, it will say the file is not in a format that it can transcribe. But if you launch Dragon first and then run AOA, Dragon transcribes the file fine.
By the time I'm ready to make a clean transcript I'd have uploaded the Jing video to YouTube already. When I'm actually doing the transcription, I have two Windows open, one above the other. The upper window has enough of the YouTube video that the playbar is visible. You need to start and pause the video and rewind a bit repeatedly as you make the transcript. In the lower window I've got Notepad open with Dragon's transcription of the video.
The Dragon file produces a text stream that has no punctuation in it. A significant aspect of producing a clean transcript is putting in punctuation, finding the start of new sentences and capitalizing there, putting in line spaces for a new paragraph to begin. Fortunately, I am captioning my own talking, so I have implicit knowledge of what I'm likely to say, especially when I'm doing intermediate micro topics like income and substitution effects, which I've taught a zillion times before. And I've learned that though sometimes my word choice is suspect, there is still sentence structure and a quite logical approach in the subject development. Over time, I've also become more familiar with the type of mistakes Dragon is likely to make regularly. For example, when I speak often instead of saying "is" I will append 's to the previous word. Dragon will frequently treat that as making a plural of the previous word, though sometimes it gets it right. When you know what to look for in making the corrections, it is not that hard. So you can read a few sentences ahead and punctuate that as best as you can. Sometimes that nails it with the audio and you can make rapid progress. Other times you do have to slow down to make corrections, but the frequency of doing that is not too great. So progress overall is made and that in itself feels quite rewarding.
When you've produced a clean transcript you can then upload to YouTube, which puts in the timings for you. That functionality is now quite good and YouTube processes the transcript fairly quickly. So you get to see your captioned video in short order. That too feels rewarding.
* * * * *
I want to turn now to my main teaching dilemma and to describe what is really stressing me out. I always go into something new I'm trying with high expectations. Those expectations are not founded on prior experience but rather on aspirations I have for the approach. When experience begins to confound the expectations, rather than modify the expectations and keep my mood on an even keel (probably a mature thing to do) I go through both disillusionment - how could I have been so wrong? - and stress as I put pressure on myself to try to preserve the original conception as best as possible by looking for new ways to salvage the approach.
In both of my classes I'm having students blog in a team structure. The idea was to connect the narrative that they are reading about to their own personal narrative in a way that should produce a novel synthesis. But this idea that a synthesis should emerge puts a lofty expectation on people who don't have a lot of experience doing this sort of thing. I try to do it regularly in this blog, but I've been doing it for some time and had a lot of writing experience even before the blogging. So maybe it is unfair to expect this but I've tricked myself into believing otherwise.
In the intermediate course I've written a bunch of essays for the students that are meant to explain the economics on terms students can relate to. This proved a success as many of the students were able to produce pieces tying their experiences to what was in an essay. But over several weeks this has turned into Frankenstein's monster. My intent for the class was that we'd read other things too, Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers and a bunch of journal articles that I believed were accessible to students at this level, the first of which was Paul David's famous paper on QWERTY. Most of the students haven't yet written about Heilbroner and among those who did write about QWERTY, they clearly didn't understand what they were reading. Rather than insert their experiences into Paul David's narrative, something I'm sure they hadn't seen before, they recast his paper to coincide with the narrative they were already familiar with. There is no learning in that. And it is rather frightening as an informed and interested party to witness.
Not all students did this. There are one or two groups who seem pretty much on top of things. But the entire reason for trying this approach was to produce more democratic outcomes. I was getting the handful of good students 16 years ago when I started to turn to technology to address the issue that most weren't getting it. If that's still going to be the outcome, it sure is a lot easier to just teach the theory as an applied math course and be done with it, which is what most everyone else who teaches this course does. I don't want to call it a day yet, but I'm unclear on how to get these students to a higher level in their reading and their writing. And it is evident as we approach mid semester that many of the students are no longer enamored with the approach - the novelty has worn off - and they are just trying to get through the course as it is required in their major.
In the other course on behavioral economics the challenge is a bit different, but the issue of producing a synthesis that goes beyond what they are reading remains. The students seem extraordinarily locked into their own view of the world and from my perspective are very repeated in talking about experiences to support their views. This creates the impression that they are very resistant to new ideas, some of which includes the style in which the course is given.
Part of the issue seems to be what we are reading. After about five weeks of reading individual pieces on a variety of topics, we are reading the book Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler. And I confess that on my first reading of the book I had trouble with it, because of the underlying philosophy - libertarian paternalism - which I don't believe they justified sufficiently. On the other hand, because I had this prior experience thinking about what software might promote learning and what software struggles to do so, a lot of their ideas simply carry over. So even if the underlying philosophy is a struggle, the suggestions are often quite reasonable. But this may be the wrong time to be teaching this stuff, given the politics we're experiencing now. Many of the students are anti big government. And I have the feeling that their view about politics is blocking them from getting positive things from this book that they might otherwise get.
Again the question is what do I do as a teacher to unblock their thinking, a question that's been stressing me out quite a bit lately. I really don't want to change their politics, and they are probably reasonable in being suspicious on that score. Yet they are also being very heads down about nudges in their own lives that actually are effective. I go back to the Orwell line that I find so true.
* * * * *
The blogging it seems has opened up Pandora's box. I've thought a bit about closing it again, returning to a more traditional approach which surely would be more manageable. The captioning is therapeutic on that score too because the transcripts I'm making are only for the math/technical material. There is no having the students weave their own narrative in there. That's the old I shovel it out and they dish it up approach. Implicitly the students are expressing that's what they want because because that's what they are used to. I can't say I blame them for that. Not knowing what to make of that, therapeutic comfort is welcoming.
So far, most of that technology troubleshooting has proven to be my own error. I don't know Moodle well enough and thinking I've got something configured the way I want, in particular what students see after they've submitted a quiz for evaluation, I learn from their comments that they are not seeing what I want them to see. Then it's not immediately obvious that I flubbed it. So it takes a while and I make an accommodation for the students in the meantime that I really don't want to make, only to eventually learn that it was all unnecessary. If only I had known that when the problem first came to my attention.
I will talk about other, more important stresses in a bit, but let me get back to the captioning. For whatever reasons - either I'm better understanding what has to be done with it, or Dragon Naturally Speaking is producing a better quality transcript of my audio file, or when other things take a long time to do the time spent captioning just seems more manageable, I now have the feeling that captioning is a welcoming activity, one of the tasks I look forward to in the week. It kind of reminds me about my mother's knitting, only she could do that and something else that was cognitive as well, like playing a hand of bridge. With the captioning, you have to pay attention to that. But then it goes pretty well.
My process is this. I first record the video with Jing and I wear a headset so the microphone is pretty close to my mouth when I'm talking. The resulting audio quality is quite clear. I need two ancillary programs to make the captions. One is Dragon, which I already mentioned. The other is AOA audio extractor, which takes the Jing video and separates out an audio file in MP3 format. I have no idea why the following works, but it is a discovery that is useful to know. If you first run the AOA software and then launch Dragon, it will say the file is not in a format that it can transcribe. But if you launch Dragon first and then run AOA, Dragon transcribes the file fine.
By the time I'm ready to make a clean transcript I'd have uploaded the Jing video to YouTube already. When I'm actually doing the transcription, I have two Windows open, one above the other. The upper window has enough of the YouTube video that the playbar is visible. You need to start and pause the video and rewind a bit repeatedly as you make the transcript. In the lower window I've got Notepad open with Dragon's transcription of the video.
The Dragon file produces a text stream that has no punctuation in it. A significant aspect of producing a clean transcript is putting in punctuation, finding the start of new sentences and capitalizing there, putting in line spaces for a new paragraph to begin. Fortunately, I am captioning my own talking, so I have implicit knowledge of what I'm likely to say, especially when I'm doing intermediate micro topics like income and substitution effects, which I've taught a zillion times before. And I've learned that though sometimes my word choice is suspect, there is still sentence structure and a quite logical approach in the subject development. Over time, I've also become more familiar with the type of mistakes Dragon is likely to make regularly. For example, when I speak often instead of saying "is" I will append 's to the previous word. Dragon will frequently treat that as making a plural of the previous word, though sometimes it gets it right. When you know what to look for in making the corrections, it is not that hard. So you can read a few sentences ahead and punctuate that as best as you can. Sometimes that nails it with the audio and you can make rapid progress. Other times you do have to slow down to make corrections, but the frequency of doing that is not too great. So progress overall is made and that in itself feels quite rewarding.
When you've produced a clean transcript you can then upload to YouTube, which puts in the timings for you. That functionality is now quite good and YouTube processes the transcript fairly quickly. So you get to see your captioned video in short order. That too feels rewarding.
* * * * *
I want to turn now to my main teaching dilemma and to describe what is really stressing me out. I always go into something new I'm trying with high expectations. Those expectations are not founded on prior experience but rather on aspirations I have for the approach. When experience begins to confound the expectations, rather than modify the expectations and keep my mood on an even keel (probably a mature thing to do) I go through both disillusionment - how could I have been so wrong? - and stress as I put pressure on myself to try to preserve the original conception as best as possible by looking for new ways to salvage the approach.
In both of my classes I'm having students blog in a team structure. The idea was to connect the narrative that they are reading about to their own personal narrative in a way that should produce a novel synthesis. But this idea that a synthesis should emerge puts a lofty expectation on people who don't have a lot of experience doing this sort of thing. I try to do it regularly in this blog, but I've been doing it for some time and had a lot of writing experience even before the blogging. So maybe it is unfair to expect this but I've tricked myself into believing otherwise.
In the intermediate course I've written a bunch of essays for the students that are meant to explain the economics on terms students can relate to. This proved a success as many of the students were able to produce pieces tying their experiences to what was in an essay. But over several weeks this has turned into Frankenstein's monster. My intent for the class was that we'd read other things too, Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers and a bunch of journal articles that I believed were accessible to students at this level, the first of which was Paul David's famous paper on QWERTY. Most of the students haven't yet written about Heilbroner and among those who did write about QWERTY, they clearly didn't understand what they were reading. Rather than insert their experiences into Paul David's narrative, something I'm sure they hadn't seen before, they recast his paper to coincide with the narrative they were already familiar with. There is no learning in that. And it is rather frightening as an informed and interested party to witness.
Not all students did this. There are one or two groups who seem pretty much on top of things. But the entire reason for trying this approach was to produce more democratic outcomes. I was getting the handful of good students 16 years ago when I started to turn to technology to address the issue that most weren't getting it. If that's still going to be the outcome, it sure is a lot easier to just teach the theory as an applied math course and be done with it, which is what most everyone else who teaches this course does. I don't want to call it a day yet, but I'm unclear on how to get these students to a higher level in their reading and their writing. And it is evident as we approach mid semester that many of the students are no longer enamored with the approach - the novelty has worn off - and they are just trying to get through the course as it is required in their major.
In the other course on behavioral economics the challenge is a bit different, but the issue of producing a synthesis that goes beyond what they are reading remains. The students seem extraordinarily locked into their own view of the world and from my perspective are very repeated in talking about experiences to support their views. This creates the impression that they are very resistant to new ideas, some of which includes the style in which the course is given.
Part of the issue seems to be what we are reading. After about five weeks of reading individual pieces on a variety of topics, we are reading the book Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler. And I confess that on my first reading of the book I had trouble with it, because of the underlying philosophy - libertarian paternalism - which I don't believe they justified sufficiently. On the other hand, because I had this prior experience thinking about what software might promote learning and what software struggles to do so, a lot of their ideas simply carry over. So even if the underlying philosophy is a struggle, the suggestions are often quite reasonable. But this may be the wrong time to be teaching this stuff, given the politics we're experiencing now. Many of the students are anti big government. And I have the feeling that their view about politics is blocking them from getting positive things from this book that they might otherwise get.
Again the question is what do I do as a teacher to unblock their thinking, a question that's been stressing me out quite a bit lately. I really don't want to change their politics, and they are probably reasonable in being suspicious on that score. Yet they are also being very heads down about nudges in their own lives that actually are effective. I go back to the Orwell line that I find so true.
" To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. "So I'd like to see the students struggle more. As it is, a good number of them have stopped coming to class. I suppose most undergraduates don't see it as their lot to struggle, particularly to struggle intellectually.
* * * * *
The blogging it seems has opened up Pandora's box. I've thought a bit about closing it again, returning to a more traditional approach which surely would be more manageable. The captioning is therapeutic on that score too because the transcripts I'm making are only for the math/technical material. There is no having the students weave their own narrative in there. That's the old I shovel it out and they dish it up approach. Implicitly the students are expressing that's what they want because because that's what they are used to. I can't say I blame them for that. Not knowing what to make of that, therapeutic comfort is welcoming.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
A change in view
I saw the sunrise this morning. Well, not really. There was cloud cover over the Atlantic and that blocked the sun. But I did see the sky lighten as I drove eastward on I-595, from Davie where my cousin lives to the Fort Lauderdale Airport. I'm headed home after a brief trip to see my mom in Boca and do her taxes, then dinner and an overnight stay with my cousin before arising early to get to the airport.
The last time I did this trip I missed the flight. Ninety minutes should be enough. But it wasn't if you check a bag. There was a line for that and another one, seemingly longer, through security. This time around I had my boarding pass already and I traveled light - an old WebCT Conference backpack for the few clothes I packed and my computer bag. It was a half hour through security, but I got here early, waking well before my alarm went off. The Fort Lauderdale airport has free wireless, so I'm taking advantage.
When I got to Florida Thursday evening my mind was on my behavioral econ class. Driving north on I-95 there was the HOV lane. The day before we had done Sam Peltzman's famous paper on auto safety, which showed that safety regulation didn't reduce fatalities due to car accidents. I retold a story Peltzman had told at a workshop on Campus I attended sometime back in the 1980s. When those HOV lanes first opened up on I-95 it created a market for inflatable dummies, so people could bypass the requirement of having multiple passengers in the car. Thursday evening I didn't get into the HOV lane, it was only me, though it was a little after 6 PM and the regulated time ended at 6. There was still a fair amount of traffic, and the HOV lane wasn't moving faster than the other lanes.
I no longer have a dial up connection and my mom's condo doesn't have Internet, so my plan was to go over to her place, see her for just a bit, pick up her various tax documents, and then head back to the hotel so I could do her taxes at the hotel the following morning before visiting with her. I did that. I didn't plan this trip too far in advance. Flying out of Champaign would have been quite pricey. So I traveled out of Indy and with that had to connect in Atlanta. The total trip was a bit over 10 hours. So I was very tired when I arrived and went to bed before 10 PM.
But the trip itself, especially after getting through security at the Indy airport, proved a way for me to unwind and refocus my thinking. I brought along a couple of older New Yorker issues for my reading in flight and on the way down went through most of the January 10th issue. It was delightful and a complete diversion from the thoughts that occupy my current routine. There was a piece about the banana blight in Australia and Asia and what is being done via cross breeding to prevent it from eventually ruining the banana crops in Latin America. There was another piece about the toppling of the Sadam statue in Iraq in 2003 and how the media created an event that wasn't. The Iraqis had not embraced the U.S invasion but TV made it seem otherwise. And there was a piece about psychoanalysis in China, much of it conducted by American psychiatrists online via Skype. None of these were things I had been thinking about before. Each was fascinating. And I found myself relaxing mentally, getting more enjoyment although I'm invariably physically cramped on a plane trip and don't like flying for that reason. As an escape to encourage reading, however, flying is ideal. What else is there to do?
I began to reflect on how much anger there seems to be in society today and start to wonder if that is because people don't get out of their own mental routines. Before taking this trip I had much anger about my teaching, some of which I articulated here. Adding to the list of issues there, much of the communications I'm having with students these days is their wanting extensions on deadlines, which they missed for xyz reasons. I had hoped my novel approach in each class would produce an environment where these traditional issues would melt away and the kids would engage and open up as learners. For example, I had hoped that students would comment on the blog posts of students on other teams. So far, that is not happening at all. It's the system that has been winning, not my method.
But if I cared to face facts, much of my anger is toward myself, a self-loathing that belies a lack of heartiness about the teaching. Last fall when I had no work obligations whatsoever, except for preparing for this spring, I could have done a lot more than I actually did. I pursued this preparation at a leisurely pace, lacking intensity in my efforts, waiting for the spirit to move me. So a lot of the construction of content is still undone and I'm making a substantial amount of content while I teach, something the pros warn shouldn't be done because the instructor will get overwhelmed. That's where I am now, somewhat overwhelmed by the task ahead, motivated more by guilt that I must complete things than a sense that what I'm doing will produce a bang in the learning. So I'm angry at my idealism based on an ignorant conception of what is happening with the students and with the fallacy of thinking that constructing the content can happen quickly and with little effort. I'm also angry that much of what I'm creating is too flat, lacking the depth and subtlety that I value. The rationalization is, who has time for that? But if you end up spending the bulk of your time on things you don't highly value, what do you have left but anger?
Then en route and later in the evening I get a couple of emails. One is from a student in the intermediate micro class, making an observation that tied into something we talked about regarding intellectual property. It was the type of extension on our discussion that I had hoped to see in their blogging. Here he was doing it not for credit but for the hell of it and because he saw something and he wanted me to share in his observation. It gave me a warm feeling reading it. The other was from a student in one of the former Soviet Republics who had seen one of my Excel videos on YouTube and wanted to get access to the Excel file. He too was just doing it for the learning and I appreciated his making the connection though he obviously wasn't one of my students.
And I came to think that out of angry and ignorant motivations one looks for the big bang in outcomes, setting ourselves up for an emotional fall, but out of a more gentle and patient touch we might begin to see some consequences from our own efforts as teachers, though what we will see will come in drips and drabs.
I'm writing the last bit of this post the next day, back at home. I don't know whether I can maintain intensity in my own effort coupled with a patient and gentle view of how the students learn. But it does seem the right sort of ideal to encourage from ourselves, even as we will fall short of it most of the time. And it is obvious to me, though again whether I follow through remains an issue, that leisurely diversions need to be rich enough to sustain us and not let us fall into ruts of our own making. Balance can be restored that way. We need balance, not big bangs.
The last time I did this trip I missed the flight. Ninety minutes should be enough. But it wasn't if you check a bag. There was a line for that and another one, seemingly longer, through security. This time around I had my boarding pass already and I traveled light - an old WebCT Conference backpack for the few clothes I packed and my computer bag. It was a half hour through security, but I got here early, waking well before my alarm went off. The Fort Lauderdale airport has free wireless, so I'm taking advantage.
When I got to Florida Thursday evening my mind was on my behavioral econ class. Driving north on I-95 there was the HOV lane. The day before we had done Sam Peltzman's famous paper on auto safety, which showed that safety regulation didn't reduce fatalities due to car accidents. I retold a story Peltzman had told at a workshop on Campus I attended sometime back in the 1980s. When those HOV lanes first opened up on I-95 it created a market for inflatable dummies, so people could bypass the requirement of having multiple passengers in the car. Thursday evening I didn't get into the HOV lane, it was only me, though it was a little after 6 PM and the regulated time ended at 6. There was still a fair amount of traffic, and the HOV lane wasn't moving faster than the other lanes.
I no longer have a dial up connection and my mom's condo doesn't have Internet, so my plan was to go over to her place, see her for just a bit, pick up her various tax documents, and then head back to the hotel so I could do her taxes at the hotel the following morning before visiting with her. I did that. I didn't plan this trip too far in advance. Flying out of Champaign would have been quite pricey. So I traveled out of Indy and with that had to connect in Atlanta. The total trip was a bit over 10 hours. So I was very tired when I arrived and went to bed before 10 PM.
But the trip itself, especially after getting through security at the Indy airport, proved a way for me to unwind and refocus my thinking. I brought along a couple of older New Yorker issues for my reading in flight and on the way down went through most of the January 10th issue. It was delightful and a complete diversion from the thoughts that occupy my current routine. There was a piece about the banana blight in Australia and Asia and what is being done via cross breeding to prevent it from eventually ruining the banana crops in Latin America. There was another piece about the toppling of the Sadam statue in Iraq in 2003 and how the media created an event that wasn't. The Iraqis had not embraced the U.S invasion but TV made it seem otherwise. And there was a piece about psychoanalysis in China, much of it conducted by American psychiatrists online via Skype. None of these were things I had been thinking about before. Each was fascinating. And I found myself relaxing mentally, getting more enjoyment although I'm invariably physically cramped on a plane trip and don't like flying for that reason. As an escape to encourage reading, however, flying is ideal. What else is there to do?
I began to reflect on how much anger there seems to be in society today and start to wonder if that is because people don't get out of their own mental routines. Before taking this trip I had much anger about my teaching, some of which I articulated here. Adding to the list of issues there, much of the communications I'm having with students these days is their wanting extensions on deadlines, which they missed for xyz reasons. I had hoped my novel approach in each class would produce an environment where these traditional issues would melt away and the kids would engage and open up as learners. For example, I had hoped that students would comment on the blog posts of students on other teams. So far, that is not happening at all. It's the system that has been winning, not my method.
But if I cared to face facts, much of my anger is toward myself, a self-loathing that belies a lack of heartiness about the teaching. Last fall when I had no work obligations whatsoever, except for preparing for this spring, I could have done a lot more than I actually did. I pursued this preparation at a leisurely pace, lacking intensity in my efforts, waiting for the spirit to move me. So a lot of the construction of content is still undone and I'm making a substantial amount of content while I teach, something the pros warn shouldn't be done because the instructor will get overwhelmed. That's where I am now, somewhat overwhelmed by the task ahead, motivated more by guilt that I must complete things than a sense that what I'm doing will produce a bang in the learning. So I'm angry at my idealism based on an ignorant conception of what is happening with the students and with the fallacy of thinking that constructing the content can happen quickly and with little effort. I'm also angry that much of what I'm creating is too flat, lacking the depth and subtlety that I value. The rationalization is, who has time for that? But if you end up spending the bulk of your time on things you don't highly value, what do you have left but anger?
Then en route and later in the evening I get a couple of emails. One is from a student in the intermediate micro class, making an observation that tied into something we talked about regarding intellectual property. It was the type of extension on our discussion that I had hoped to see in their blogging. Here he was doing it not for credit but for the hell of it and because he saw something and he wanted me to share in his observation. It gave me a warm feeling reading it. The other was from a student in one of the former Soviet Republics who had seen one of my Excel videos on YouTube and wanted to get access to the Excel file. He too was just doing it for the learning and I appreciated his making the connection though he obviously wasn't one of my students.
And I came to think that out of angry and ignorant motivations one looks for the big bang in outcomes, setting ourselves up for an emotional fall, but out of a more gentle and patient touch we might begin to see some consequences from our own efforts as teachers, though what we will see will come in drips and drabs.
I'm writing the last bit of this post the next day, back at home. I don't know whether I can maintain intensity in my own effort coupled with a patient and gentle view of how the students learn. But it does seem the right sort of ideal to encourage from ourselves, even as we will fall short of it most of the time. And it is obvious to me, though again whether I follow through remains an issue, that leisurely diversions need to be rich enough to sustain us and not let us fall into ruts of our own making. Balance can be restored that way. We need balance, not big bangs.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
A boon for U.S. agriculture?
We used to teach about "cobweb dynamics." I wonder if that is at root here, where the price jumps will trigger a substantial increase in supply, which will lower price, and then another demand spike, etc. Or will commodity prices trend upwards over the next several years? I'm not one to forecast these things, but if we are a net exporter in many of these areas should it be a trend we should be happy about that.
Monday, February 14, 2011
I found this quite surprising
That Seattle is experiencing a housing slump seems to imply that no place is immune.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Frank Rich says The Fix is still in
I hadn't been following the lawsuits to recover some of the funds Madoff appropriated, so I found this piece interesting.
When We Are Not Entitled Part 2
Sometimes an idea gets lodged in your head and try as you might you can't dislodge it. For the last day or two I've been toying with the thought that the Republicans in Congress are like the Romans at Masada, marching ever forward with certitude, unaware of the tragedy that awaits them, one of their own making. Cutting all the good government in the belief we can't afford it only to find the budget is still way out of wack, forcing the baby boomers who are certainly not known for their noble deeds to take the only desperate action available, a mass suicide that obliterates an enormous chunk of health care spending and in one fell swoop restores fiscal balance.
Isn't there a less dramatic way out of this mess?
Economists know that GDP is a very imperfect measure of welfare. It only measures market transactions and has nothing to say about work done where no money changes hands. Hire somebody to mow your lawn and (in theory at least) that activity becomes part of GDP. Mow your lawn yourself and it does not. And the same goes for childcare, housekeeping, and a host of other activities. There is also the issue that some market transactions are there not to improve welfare but rather to make sure bad things don't happen. If there was no such thing as a computer virus, we wouldn't need anti-virus software. GDP would be lower then, but we would be no worse off.
Where does health care spending on the elderly fit in?
If only that question had a ready answer. Atul Gawande is thoughtful on these issues. This piece about when the end is near serves as an example. But what about before that? Thinking that through is much harder.
Last night I watched Harry and Tonto, a movie from 1974 where Art Carney won the Academy Award for Best Actor. I had started watching it a couple of weeks earlier, but I realized it would get to me so I shut it off before getting too far into the story. Last night I was ready for the rest of the film. Carney was my age when he made that movie, but he is very convincing as somebody 20 years older, a widower who has lost his apartment because they tore down the building. He is having a second coming of age doing a drive trip cross country, rediscovering his memories, visiting his adult children whom he loves but can't tolerate for too long a period of time, unsure what's in store afterward. He has his marbles and is in reasonably good health. But he is outliving his friends and in a poignant scene dances with a girlfriend from before he was married, who is now in an old age home. She is on the way out with signs of dementia. He will not see her again. Tonto is his pet cat and constant companion. Near the end of the film Tonto dies. Can Harry start a new life a this point? The film doesn't tell us.
You feel the system should be for Harry. Several times in the film he asks about his checks, which must refer to his pension as a NYC teacher and Social Security. So that part works. But what of when his health starts to fail? On an emotional level, it is much harder to understand that obligation.
Isn't there a less dramatic way out of this mess?
Economists know that GDP is a very imperfect measure of welfare. It only measures market transactions and has nothing to say about work done where no money changes hands. Hire somebody to mow your lawn and (in theory at least) that activity becomes part of GDP. Mow your lawn yourself and it does not. And the same goes for childcare, housekeeping, and a host of other activities. There is also the issue that some market transactions are there not to improve welfare but rather to make sure bad things don't happen. If there was no such thing as a computer virus, we wouldn't need anti-virus software. GDP would be lower then, but we would be no worse off.
Where does health care spending on the elderly fit in?
If only that question had a ready answer. Atul Gawande is thoughtful on these issues. This piece about when the end is near serves as an example. But what about before that? Thinking that through is much harder.
Last night I watched Harry and Tonto, a movie from 1974 where Art Carney won the Academy Award for Best Actor. I had started watching it a couple of weeks earlier, but I realized it would get to me so I shut it off before getting too far into the story. Last night I was ready for the rest of the film. Carney was my age when he made that movie, but he is very convincing as somebody 20 years older, a widower who has lost his apartment because they tore down the building. He is having a second coming of age doing a drive trip cross country, rediscovering his memories, visiting his adult children whom he loves but can't tolerate for too long a period of time, unsure what's in store afterward. He has his marbles and is in reasonably good health. But he is outliving his friends and in a poignant scene dances with a girlfriend from before he was married, who is now in an old age home. She is on the way out with signs of dementia. He will not see her again. Tonto is his pet cat and constant companion. Near the end of the film Tonto dies. Can Harry start a new life a this point? The film doesn't tell us.
You feel the system should be for Harry. Several times in the film he asks about his checks, which must refer to his pension as a NYC teacher and Social Security. So that part works. But what of when his health starts to fail? On an emotional level, it is much harder to understand that obligation.
Friday, February 11, 2011
When We Are Not Entitled
David Brooks had what I regarded as a thoughtful column today. He writes convincingly about the Federal budget cutting where the Republicans in the House seem to be going after everything but Social Security and Medicare (and Defense too, though that is a different animal). This approach simply won't do the job of bringing the budget into balance as a long term proposition.
I did a Google search on "Third Rail of Politics" and found this piece from NPR. Apart from the remark that thinking FDR was a good President makes you left of center (it seems to me it makes you smack in the middle but that is not my point here) I thought it a good piece. People who have paid into the Social Security trust fund their entire lives feel they completely deserve the benefits that have been promised them, regardless of the fact that Social Security is a pay as you go system and the capacity of the system to deliver on those promises is diminishing rapidly as baby boomers near retirement, where overall there will be many more retires and many fewer workers paying into the system on a relative basis. There was a good West Wing Episode about this where it created the impression that if there were just a few Democratic and Republican members of Congress who were willing to fall on their collective swords, the issue could be resolved and afterward they'd become heroes for having done so. That episode aired well before the financial crisis. Now the situation is more dire, but it doesn't appear that the there will be anyone riding a white horse to come to the rescue.
I've been thinking about these issues a lot, as a new retiree with main source of income from the State University Retirement System, which is fiscally a lot sicker than Social Security. By law I'm entitled to my annuity. But by anybody's reckoning the system is bankrupt. Something's got to give.
And I've been doing some soul searching on what that is or should be. There is a fundamental national problem that is still not getting nearly enough discussion - the personal savings rate is way to low. We need as a society to be saving more. People who are envisioning alternatives need to think through how a system with a reasonable personal savings rate would work. Would people save mainly through where they work - via company pension plans? In the 1980s and 1990s, there were many examples of hostile takeovers where the raiders would gut these pension plans and then drive the company into bankruptcy. If you look at the the system as a whole rather than the individual opportunism of some players, that system doesn't work. More recently we've seen people lose as much as 50% of the value in their 401K plans, after the stock market tumbled, another huge disincentive. If people are going to save for their retirement they need assurance that the value will be there when they do retire. What type of arrangement can really provide this? The Republicans remind us fairly regularly that if the government bails out failure that creates a huge moral hazard for the investors. That is certainly true. But if you send people to the market for their savings and they get wiped out through no fault of their own, what then?
I am in a defined benefit pension plan where the benefits are tied to the salaries from the last four years of employment and where there was gaming of the system due in large part to a pratice that in my opinion should have ended a long time ago. Faculty are paid on a 9 month salary, which is the number that is quoted, but where they can earn up to two ninths more (and sometimes three ninths more) via getting paid in the summer from a research grant, summer teaching, or an administrative stipend. Some faculty do this sort of thing throughout their careers, but others only do it near retirement to boost their annuity. Though its all part of the State of Illinois, the University and Retirement System are separate entities. So that one would burden the other in a way that might not be healthy overall doesn't seem to have ever come to the fore to inhibit the gaming. Instead, they've phased out the defined benefit form of pensions, which given my comments in the previous paragraph doesn't seem optimal to me either.
My view is that there needs to be a two piece system - defined benefit up to a cap, what that should be I don't know but it probably needs to be reasonably modest, and defined contribution beyond that for those who choose to save more than required. Then money that is in pension funds needs to be immune from corporate raiding.
There is another aspect of this entirely, which is that more and more seniors were probably knowledge workers and are likely in reasonably good health even after they are retired. These people are potentially quite productive but the system doesn't know how to utilize them and hasn't found a way they can contribute. At present, with so much slack in the labor market, nobody really wants to think about finding interesting ways to employ seniors. But as a long term proposition simply having the human resource go idle is incredibly wasteful. So a way to tie pension payment to some form of useful service provision make sense to me. I don't see anyone talking about things this way, which means it probably is politically impossible. But that doesn't mean it isn't right. There is a tendency when talking about government programs to just focus on the program. We'll never get to a reasonable solution that way. We've got to see the whole picture and try to address the issues that way.
I did a Google search on "Third Rail of Politics" and found this piece from NPR. Apart from the remark that thinking FDR was a good President makes you left of center (it seems to me it makes you smack in the middle but that is not my point here) I thought it a good piece. People who have paid into the Social Security trust fund their entire lives feel they completely deserve the benefits that have been promised them, regardless of the fact that Social Security is a pay as you go system and the capacity of the system to deliver on those promises is diminishing rapidly as baby boomers near retirement, where overall there will be many more retires and many fewer workers paying into the system on a relative basis. There was a good West Wing Episode about this where it created the impression that if there were just a few Democratic and Republican members of Congress who were willing to fall on their collective swords, the issue could be resolved and afterward they'd become heroes for having done so. That episode aired well before the financial crisis. Now the situation is more dire, but it doesn't appear that the there will be anyone riding a white horse to come to the rescue.
I've been thinking about these issues a lot, as a new retiree with main source of income from the State University Retirement System, which is fiscally a lot sicker than Social Security. By law I'm entitled to my annuity. But by anybody's reckoning the system is bankrupt. Something's got to give.
And I've been doing some soul searching on what that is or should be. There is a fundamental national problem that is still not getting nearly enough discussion - the personal savings rate is way to low. We need as a society to be saving more. People who are envisioning alternatives need to think through how a system with a reasonable personal savings rate would work. Would people save mainly through where they work - via company pension plans? In the 1980s and 1990s, there were many examples of hostile takeovers where the raiders would gut these pension plans and then drive the company into bankruptcy. If you look at the the system as a whole rather than the individual opportunism of some players, that system doesn't work. More recently we've seen people lose as much as 50% of the value in their 401K plans, after the stock market tumbled, another huge disincentive. If people are going to save for their retirement they need assurance that the value will be there when they do retire. What type of arrangement can really provide this? The Republicans remind us fairly regularly that if the government bails out failure that creates a huge moral hazard for the investors. That is certainly true. But if you send people to the market for their savings and they get wiped out through no fault of their own, what then?
I am in a defined benefit pension plan where the benefits are tied to the salaries from the last four years of employment and where there was gaming of the system due in large part to a pratice that in my opinion should have ended a long time ago. Faculty are paid on a 9 month salary, which is the number that is quoted, but where they can earn up to two ninths more (and sometimes three ninths more) via getting paid in the summer from a research grant, summer teaching, or an administrative stipend. Some faculty do this sort of thing throughout their careers, but others only do it near retirement to boost their annuity. Though its all part of the State of Illinois, the University and Retirement System are separate entities. So that one would burden the other in a way that might not be healthy overall doesn't seem to have ever come to the fore to inhibit the gaming. Instead, they've phased out the defined benefit form of pensions, which given my comments in the previous paragraph doesn't seem optimal to me either.
My view is that there needs to be a two piece system - defined benefit up to a cap, what that should be I don't know but it probably needs to be reasonably modest, and defined contribution beyond that for those who choose to save more than required. Then money that is in pension funds needs to be immune from corporate raiding.
There is another aspect of this entirely, which is that more and more seniors were probably knowledge workers and are likely in reasonably good health even after they are retired. These people are potentially quite productive but the system doesn't know how to utilize them and hasn't found a way they can contribute. At present, with so much slack in the labor market, nobody really wants to think about finding interesting ways to employ seniors. But as a long term proposition simply having the human resource go idle is incredibly wasteful. So a way to tie pension payment to some form of useful service provision make sense to me. I don't see anyone talking about things this way, which means it probably is politically impossible. But that doesn't mean it isn't right. There is a tendency when talking about government programs to just focus on the program. We'll never get to a reasonable solution that way. We've got to see the whole picture and try to address the issues that way.
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Star-Centric Topology and Black Holes
We are now sufficiently far into the spring semester that the administrative setup details are "almost" behind me so I can begin to see where the classes are going and what the main issues are. I had thought that one of the main things I would be comparing is use of an LMS (Moodle) versus use of Blog for the course Web site. I'm doing the former in the intermediate microeconomics site and the latter in the behavioral economics site. It turns out that is less of a big deal than I thought, though there are some issues that I will comment about near the end.
My current biggest issue is this. I have the students blogging in teams in each class. I read the posts and write a response. The posts are due a few days before the class session where the topic is discussed. We have class on Monday and Wednesday in both courses and I teach them back to back. In the behavioral class they are blogging before each session. In the intermediate class they are blogging before the Wednesday session only. They have different homework due before the Monday session. In the ideal, I can extract from the student posts enough interesting commentary that it becomes the substance of the class discussion or at the least a way to initiate the class discussion. Last week with the bad weather when we did an online optional session, I did that for the intermediate class. Pedagogically it seems to me the right thing to do. But, given what we are reading, I'm leaving the blog topic somewhat open ended for the students. Some who are just keeping their heads above water are posting mainly summary, which leaves me very little to extract. Others are giving some interesting flavor but I'm not sure whether that should become the basis of discussion with the entire class.
The related point is that I need some time to reflect on this and make a judgment about it but I don't have the time. This morning I was still making comments on posts in the behavioral class a couple of hours before the class session and I hadn't had my shower yet to get ready for class. So now what enters into the equation is a need to plan the session with little incremental effort. I can do that if I think through the issues and then spend most of the time talking in class. Ergo...
... the title of this post. Star Centric Topology is terminology I learned from Jack Wilson around the time Carol Twigg was getting the Pew Program on Course Redesign underway. It was a disparaging description of communication in a class - mainly student to instructor and much less student to student. The instructor as the central node would inevitably clog which would end up reducing communication overall. Efficient redesign would promote more student-student communication placing less burden on the instructor channel encouraging both more communication overall and better quality communication so that more of the student formative thinking comes to the fore. Not everyone holds to this view. Some really do prefer straight lecture with not that much in the way of student generated messaging. The Econ department here may be a place where the traditional view holds sway. More on that below. Before getting to that, I'd like to note the reason for the rest of my title, the Black Holes part. There are a variety of other factors which are pulling me to take a star-centric approach. Some of these I anticipated before the semester started. Others caught me by surprise. I will list these below with some annotation on each.
The Physical Setup Of The Classrooms - I'm teaching in rooms that have auditorium-style seating meaning the seats are bolted down and in rows. If there is a vacant seat in the middle of a row a late arriving student will probably need students sitting near the end to stand up in order to get through. This is ok for lecture but it really inhibits having group work done in the classroom. A setup with tables and chairs a la a coffee house is much more conducive for group work. But it probably means getting fewer seats overall into the classroom. I think this is a big deal issue. One that should have some policy discussion behind it. In new buildings we seem to go for the table and chairs version. Why do we cling to the old approach with the seating in older building after we have renovated the classrooms there?
In any event, to get group meetings, at least so far, they have to do that outside the class meeting time at a different location. That time is not scheduled so while some teams are doing it others are not. It is also the case that when I attempt Socratic dialog in ensemble mode, most of the students can't see and possibly can't hear the student who is responding to my question so I'm getting no cascade where one student says something that follows from what another student has said. They are all responding to me. This is one I knew coming in and though I feared it, I thought we'd be able to work around it. But so far, we really haven't.
The Building I'm Teaching In Is Under Construction - Often during the class sessions there is quite loud noise that is being generated by work done very close to these classrooms. This building is where the Econ department faculty have their offices. Generally faculty prefer to teach close to where there office is. I also suppose that the size of classroom (capacity about 65 students) is scarce on campus, particularly at the times I'm teaching. So somebody must have decided it is better to hold class during the construction than to schedule the classes in a different building or at times when the construction work is not happening. The consequence is that when class is in session it is very disconcerting to hear the noise and it becomes harder to concentrate. Further, by the time the second class is in swing I feel my voice being stretched. This one is non-recurrent, at least for this specific building, but conceivably could happen elsewhere on campus as those buildings get renovated. This one I didn't anticipate and all I can say about it is that it lessens my enthusiasm for the teaching. I can only imagine what it does for the students.
There Seems To Be Quite a Large Number Of Asian Students - As a general rule I want to teach any and all students who are interested in the subject and who are willing to do the work. I also understand and agree with the campus strategy to expand undergraduate enrollments with students from out of state who are willing to pay the rather large tuition differential. The world economy being what it is now and the reputation of the University of Illinois mattering for this purpose, a big chunk of these students will come from Asia. But with that there are two caveats, one obvious, the other less so. The obvious one is language. I have students in class either responding to my queries or asking their own questions where I can't make good sense of what they are saying. I don't really know how to address this so rather than solve the problem I avoid it by monopolizing the session. The other issue is that in what I have the students read, either stuff I've written or selections I've chosen from popular outlets, some of the content was chosen because at least part of the ideas should be intellectually accessible and therefore welcoming. For example we read Stephen Jay Gould's essay The Streak of Streaks in the behavioral class. But for it to be accessible the person should know something about baseball and have some fondness for it. Without that background knowledge it is a much less obvious candidate as a choice for a reading. The consequence is that the material actually is hard to penetrate by some of the students. This one I didn't anticipate as well. If it remains an ongoing issue, I will have to reselect at least some of the readings accordingly.
There Is A Wide Variation In Student Prior Preparation - This is always the case and so it really shouldn't be on this list. Teachers need to adjust to it. It is here, however, because I haven't taught these sort of classes for 10 years or more so don't have a good sense of where the median is and that makes it quite hard for me to get a sense of whether the level and degree of rigor is appropriate or not. As with the language and culture issues part of the Black Hole effect is not wanting to find out that these things need to be reset in some ways, being unsure how that might be done on the fly. Dominating the conversation is a way to maintain my ignorance. I've got some odd inner dynamic in me that if I know what is going on and if things are working less than well, then I need to try and fix them. But if I don't know, then I'm not so obligated. I'm not sure I can explain it better than that other than to say that if I felt a little less pressed for time, I might be more open in this other dimension.
Now let me turn to the technology. In the intermediate class I've got homework designed in Excel. The first two problem sets have macros and are in one of those formats that are PC only. I made a big deal of this the first day of class. But I had students add after the first day so they didn't get that message as strongly. I also have the message in my syllabus, but we know there's no guarantee students will read those. So this created some issue. Then a handful of students working on a PC also had problems with one particular macro. I have no clue why. The macros really make the functionality of these exercises better, but maybe I need to rewrite them to get rid of the macros. I will have to think that through later.
The first two problem sets if students did them right I made a worksheet that had all the students responses that I could eyeball to see if they had got all the questions right (which was the expectation, the grade being for participation that they had done the whole workbook). They would save the submission worksheet as a CSV file and submit it in Moodle. I thought this worked remarkably well. There was an unanticipated benefit. Some students inadvertently skipped a worksheet and submitted the homework before they should have. This was quite easy to track. I would then email the students and ask them to resubmit. I believe it conveyed an unspoken message that I care they do the work and I don't want to punish them for mistakes that are inadvertent. It was also quite easy to do this given how Moodle is set up. So this part I liked.
For the blogging part, I like to have each team blog as an rss feed in Google Reader so I can readily see when new posts come in and by which team. Moodle does have an rss feed but as far as I could tell the way I have it set up there is only one feed for the entire class, so I can't track which team is posting that way. Posterous for the students blogs is ok, but I hadn't kept up with changes at Posterous and now they have a listserv function in addition to a blogging function. This post describes the issue. The listserv function doesn't allow comments from non-members. So we needed some teams to abandon that and make a new site. It slowed us down a bit but otherwise wasn't that big a deal. One other thing, I use Google Calendar for the behavioral class and have the upcoming items in the sidebar of the main class blog. This would work remarkably well except that Google calendar doesn't allow linking to other Web pages from calendar items. The links I'd like to have there would be to the readings. I've tagged the readings in Delicious, but they are arrayed chronologically by when I tagged them, not by when we will read them, so the students said that it is a little hard to find the readings that way. I'm therefore making posts in the main blog with those links. It's ok for upcoming stuff, but if they every want to go back to find things, it won't be that easy.
On the big issue deal of open or closed blogging - does it affect the quality of the posts and the sense of community in the class, we're still too early in the semester to tell. The demographics in the classes are otherwise different (Econ majors in the behavioral class and mainly Business students in the Intermediate class where) where even if I observe differences on quality or community I would not be able to properly identify the cause. Nonetheless I am interested in seeing what emerges in this vein and will post something just on that topic when I've got enough information to make some early conclusions.
My current biggest issue is this. I have the students blogging in teams in each class. I read the posts and write a response. The posts are due a few days before the class session where the topic is discussed. We have class on Monday and Wednesday in both courses and I teach them back to back. In the behavioral class they are blogging before each session. In the intermediate class they are blogging before the Wednesday session only. They have different homework due before the Monday session. In the ideal, I can extract from the student posts enough interesting commentary that it becomes the substance of the class discussion or at the least a way to initiate the class discussion. Last week with the bad weather when we did an online optional session, I did that for the intermediate class. Pedagogically it seems to me the right thing to do. But, given what we are reading, I'm leaving the blog topic somewhat open ended for the students. Some who are just keeping their heads above water are posting mainly summary, which leaves me very little to extract. Others are giving some interesting flavor but I'm not sure whether that should become the basis of discussion with the entire class.
The related point is that I need some time to reflect on this and make a judgment about it but I don't have the time. This morning I was still making comments on posts in the behavioral class a couple of hours before the class session and I hadn't had my shower yet to get ready for class. So now what enters into the equation is a need to plan the session with little incremental effort. I can do that if I think through the issues and then spend most of the time talking in class. Ergo...
... the title of this post. Star Centric Topology is terminology I learned from Jack Wilson around the time Carol Twigg was getting the Pew Program on Course Redesign underway. It was a disparaging description of communication in a class - mainly student to instructor and much less student to student. The instructor as the central node would inevitably clog which would end up reducing communication overall. Efficient redesign would promote more student-student communication placing less burden on the instructor channel encouraging both more communication overall and better quality communication so that more of the student formative thinking comes to the fore. Not everyone holds to this view. Some really do prefer straight lecture with not that much in the way of student generated messaging. The Econ department here may be a place where the traditional view holds sway. More on that below. Before getting to that, I'd like to note the reason for the rest of my title, the Black Holes part. There are a variety of other factors which are pulling me to take a star-centric approach. Some of these I anticipated before the semester started. Others caught me by surprise. I will list these below with some annotation on each.
The Physical Setup Of The Classrooms - I'm teaching in rooms that have auditorium-style seating meaning the seats are bolted down and in rows. If there is a vacant seat in the middle of a row a late arriving student will probably need students sitting near the end to stand up in order to get through. This is ok for lecture but it really inhibits having group work done in the classroom. A setup with tables and chairs a la a coffee house is much more conducive for group work. But it probably means getting fewer seats overall into the classroom. I think this is a big deal issue. One that should have some policy discussion behind it. In new buildings we seem to go for the table and chairs version. Why do we cling to the old approach with the seating in older building after we have renovated the classrooms there?
In any event, to get group meetings, at least so far, they have to do that outside the class meeting time at a different location. That time is not scheduled so while some teams are doing it others are not. It is also the case that when I attempt Socratic dialog in ensemble mode, most of the students can't see and possibly can't hear the student who is responding to my question so I'm getting no cascade where one student says something that follows from what another student has said. They are all responding to me. This is one I knew coming in and though I feared it, I thought we'd be able to work around it. But so far, we really haven't.
The Building I'm Teaching In Is Under Construction - Often during the class sessions there is quite loud noise that is being generated by work done very close to these classrooms. This building is where the Econ department faculty have their offices. Generally faculty prefer to teach close to where there office is. I also suppose that the size of classroom (capacity about 65 students) is scarce on campus, particularly at the times I'm teaching. So somebody must have decided it is better to hold class during the construction than to schedule the classes in a different building or at times when the construction work is not happening. The consequence is that when class is in session it is very disconcerting to hear the noise and it becomes harder to concentrate. Further, by the time the second class is in swing I feel my voice being stretched. This one is non-recurrent, at least for this specific building, but conceivably could happen elsewhere on campus as those buildings get renovated. This one I didn't anticipate and all I can say about it is that it lessens my enthusiasm for the teaching. I can only imagine what it does for the students.
There Seems To Be Quite a Large Number Of Asian Students - As a general rule I want to teach any and all students who are interested in the subject and who are willing to do the work. I also understand and agree with the campus strategy to expand undergraduate enrollments with students from out of state who are willing to pay the rather large tuition differential. The world economy being what it is now and the reputation of the University of Illinois mattering for this purpose, a big chunk of these students will come from Asia. But with that there are two caveats, one obvious, the other less so. The obvious one is language. I have students in class either responding to my queries or asking their own questions where I can't make good sense of what they are saying. I don't really know how to address this so rather than solve the problem I avoid it by monopolizing the session. The other issue is that in what I have the students read, either stuff I've written or selections I've chosen from popular outlets, some of the content was chosen because at least part of the ideas should be intellectually accessible and therefore welcoming. For example we read Stephen Jay Gould's essay The Streak of Streaks in the behavioral class. But for it to be accessible the person should know something about baseball and have some fondness for it. Without that background knowledge it is a much less obvious candidate as a choice for a reading. The consequence is that the material actually is hard to penetrate by some of the students. This one I didn't anticipate as well. If it remains an ongoing issue, I will have to reselect at least some of the readings accordingly.
There Is A Wide Variation In Student Prior Preparation - This is always the case and so it really shouldn't be on this list. Teachers need to adjust to it. It is here, however, because I haven't taught these sort of classes for 10 years or more so don't have a good sense of where the median is and that makes it quite hard for me to get a sense of whether the level and degree of rigor is appropriate or not. As with the language and culture issues part of the Black Hole effect is not wanting to find out that these things need to be reset in some ways, being unsure how that might be done on the fly. Dominating the conversation is a way to maintain my ignorance. I've got some odd inner dynamic in me that if I know what is going on and if things are working less than well, then I need to try and fix them. But if I don't know, then I'm not so obligated. I'm not sure I can explain it better than that other than to say that if I felt a little less pressed for time, I might be more open in this other dimension.
Now let me turn to the technology. In the intermediate class I've got homework designed in Excel. The first two problem sets have macros and are in one of those formats that are PC only. I made a big deal of this the first day of class. But I had students add after the first day so they didn't get that message as strongly. I also have the message in my syllabus, but we know there's no guarantee students will read those. So this created some issue. Then a handful of students working on a PC also had problems with one particular macro. I have no clue why. The macros really make the functionality of these exercises better, but maybe I need to rewrite them to get rid of the macros. I will have to think that through later.
The first two problem sets if students did them right I made a worksheet that had all the students responses that I could eyeball to see if they had got all the questions right (which was the expectation, the grade being for participation that they had done the whole workbook). They would save the submission worksheet as a CSV file and submit it in Moodle. I thought this worked remarkably well. There was an unanticipated benefit. Some students inadvertently skipped a worksheet and submitted the homework before they should have. This was quite easy to track. I would then email the students and ask them to resubmit. I believe it conveyed an unspoken message that I care they do the work and I don't want to punish them for mistakes that are inadvertent. It was also quite easy to do this given how Moodle is set up. So this part I liked.
For the blogging part, I like to have each team blog as an rss feed in Google Reader so I can readily see when new posts come in and by which team. Moodle does have an rss feed but as far as I could tell the way I have it set up there is only one feed for the entire class, so I can't track which team is posting that way. Posterous for the students blogs is ok, but I hadn't kept up with changes at Posterous and now they have a listserv function in addition to a blogging function. This post describes the issue. The listserv function doesn't allow comments from non-members. So we needed some teams to abandon that and make a new site. It slowed us down a bit but otherwise wasn't that big a deal. One other thing, I use Google Calendar for the behavioral class and have the upcoming items in the sidebar of the main class blog. This would work remarkably well except that Google calendar doesn't allow linking to other Web pages from calendar items. The links I'd like to have there would be to the readings. I've tagged the readings in Delicious, but they are arrayed chronologically by when I tagged them, not by when we will read them, so the students said that it is a little hard to find the readings that way. I'm therefore making posts in the main blog with those links. It's ok for upcoming stuff, but if they every want to go back to find things, it won't be that easy.
On the big issue deal of open or closed blogging - does it affect the quality of the posts and the sense of community in the class, we're still too early in the semester to tell. The demographics in the classes are otherwise different (Econ majors in the behavioral class and mainly Business students in the Intermediate class where) where even if I observe differences on quality or community I would not be able to properly identify the cause. Nonetheless I am interested in seeing what emerges in this vein and will post something just on that topic when I've got enough information to make some early conclusions.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Monetary Tightening in China
It is an interesting question why this is done as a series of small steps to happen over the next years or so, with some steps already taken, rather than a larger initial increase in rates followed by some smaller recalibration afterward.
I believe the inflation in certain metals and food will continue for the time being and I expect oil prices to rise, but do note I'm not paid to make predictions which is an indicator of what those predictions are worth.
I believe the inflation in certain metals and food will continue for the time being and I expect oil prices to rise, but do note I'm not paid to make predictions which is an indicator of what those predictions are worth.
Friday, February 04, 2011
Streaking
"What, never?"
"No, never!
"What, never?
"Well, hardly ever!
From Pinafore by Gilbert and Sullivan
This semester I'm teaching a Behavioral Economics course for undergrads. Last week we were to read one of my all time favorite essays, The Streak of Streaks, by Stephen Jay Gould. When I started to blog back in 2005, I used Gould as a role model for my writing, with this particular essay the pièce de résistance. It seemed a great mixture of the personal narrative with themes of scientific importance. In this case the latter are about rare and not so rare events and how we humans (mis)interpret the cause. The underlying science questions are these: Do players on occasion get on a "hot streak" in sports or do we fans attribute that to the players with no scientific basis to back up the attribution?
Given the average performance of players, it turns out the length of the streak matters a great deal in making this determination. Shorter streaks are perfectly well explained by pure chance. With flips of a coin, getting 10 heads in a row is certainly possible. The probability of it is a little less than one in a thousand or, turned around, with a 1000 flips it's not unreasonable to get a streak of 10 heads in a row. Now here's the thing about longer streaks. The probability of getting 20 heads in a row with coin flipping is not one in 2000, as some might believe based on the previous observation. It's more like one in a million (since a million is 1000 x 1000). Then 30 heads in a row happens one in a billion, 4o heads in a row one in a trillion, 50 heads in a row one in a quadrillion, and on and on way past our abilities to conceptualize the size of these numbers. Gorillas with typewriters might eventually reproduce Shakespeare, but in the time it is likely to take all intelligent life in the universe will have vanished.
On the science then, Gould's piece is about how for short streaks we seem to misperceive the cause and attribute the outcome not to chance but to the player getting hot while on long streaks, well most of us haven't observed them. So time and again we go back to the great DiMaggio and the summer of 1941, when America was not yet at war and baseball was sublime. (Ted Williams hit over .400 the same year, the last time it's been done.) DiMaggio's was a very long streak indeed. The odds are that he was hot.
In my teaching these days I'm trying something new - having the students write about what they read before we discuss it in class. Part of that is to give me a sense what they are thinking about the subject. In this class the students are mainly econ majors. Surely the vast majority of the students in the class have had at least one course in probability and another in statistics. But its not clear whether that training has penetrated their thinking when the subject isn't obviously about economics. Many of these kids are big baseball fans, as evidenced by their writing. Does knowing the one affect their views about the other?
One of Gould's salient points, borrowing from the research of Kahneman and Tversky, is that we humans tend to put things in categories and then reason about the categories rather than about the things themselves. With that, not never and hardly ever end up in the same box. Most of the time that's ok because for all intents and purposes it doesn't matter. Once in a while, however, it does matter and for this topic in particular an economist would view it an egregious error to combine the two. By way of their writing, some of the students are showing they are still more human than economist.
With rare events must come irony. We had a rare event here last Wednesday. The University canceled classes because of the severe weather. That was the day I was to teach the Gould paper. More afraid of the weather than most others on Campus because of a bad fall I took a few years ago, I had already decided not to hold a face to face class and made arrangements to teach the class online. By the time the Campus made its announcement I had already informed the students of my intentions. So I decided to go through with that, though make the session optional. It seemed a tactically sensible decision at the time, but what does an instructor do after the fact given that turnout for the optional session was low? Since I have high regard for the ideas in that essay, it didn't seem appropriate to just move on. But I also didn't want to simply redo what we had already done online. That wouldn't be fair to the students who did show up there.
Not being able to let go of this conundrum, I built this simulation in Excel which is explained in the video below. (It has macros which must be enabled and opened with Excel 2007 or 2010.) Several years ago I built a random walk simulation, to convince students that its very hard in looking at stock prices to parse out any deterministic pattern in the time series. This new simulation is more general than the old one in that it allows for a first order Markov process to determine the time path. The simple random walk is one case but there can be drift and there can be serial correlation. The other part which is new is that I built a way to count the length of the longest streaks in the series that results from a given simulation. So it is possible to consider the underlying Markov model and the streak it produced as a pair, which is pretty far down the path of doing the inference going from the streak to determine which model is likely to have generated it.
Some of this I will show in class on Monday. I hope also to get back on track with our original schedule. We'll see.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
The Financial Crisis Commission Report
Causality is a funny thing, especially in the social sciences. A may cause B, but what about the factors that cause A? Shouldn't they be included in the causes of B as well? I believe the answer is found by an appeal to art and to taste, not to science. The length of the majority report means not too many people will read it, I for one. I did look at the minority report, which is readable. I saw Douglas Holtz-Eakin on TV talking about the report, which intrigued me enough to have a look.
It is not bad, but in my opinion misses some things that really are important in the telling. There is a fundamental question that goes unanswered. If we are caught up in a bubble, do we know that while the bubble is happening? If we don't know, why not? With the stock market bubble of the late 1990s, there was something real happening in the economy - the move to much activity on the Internet and the adjustment in business processes as a consequence. This real change had a substantial impact on productivity growth. Knowing what is real and what is simply speculation feeding on itself is a hard thing to determine. When it is only speculation it should be easier.
There was also something real behind the housing bubble - the aging of the population and the southern migration of the population as seniors looked to warmer climate for their retirement. And there is also that most of the target states for this migration - Florida, Arizona, and Texas, are no income tax states. This fueled the rapid growth in housing and the concomitant rise in housing prices. I believe these factors should have been in the Minority report, but alas they weren't.
There is one further point, that I hope becomes more of a focus in future discussions about the economy - the decline in the personal savings rate. Individuals being highly leveraged became socially acceptable. There is a strong ethical issue with this. In the keeping up with Joneses world we live in it is that much harder to be responsible about your own personal finances when everyone else seems on a spending spree. But in reports like this there is a tendency to blame others, not ourselves. Unfortunately, it means we won't learn as much from the reflection on the experience.
It is not bad, but in my opinion misses some things that really are important in the telling. There is a fundamental question that goes unanswered. If we are caught up in a bubble, do we know that while the bubble is happening? If we don't know, why not? With the stock market bubble of the late 1990s, there was something real happening in the economy - the move to much activity on the Internet and the adjustment in business processes as a consequence. This real change had a substantial impact on productivity growth. Knowing what is real and what is simply speculation feeding on itself is a hard thing to determine. When it is only speculation it should be easier.
There was also something real behind the housing bubble - the aging of the population and the southern migration of the population as seniors looked to warmer climate for their retirement. And there is also that most of the target states for this migration - Florida, Arizona, and Texas, are no income tax states. This fueled the rapid growth in housing and the concomitant rise in housing prices. I believe these factors should have been in the Minority report, but alas they weren't.
There is one further point, that I hope becomes more of a focus in future discussions about the economy - the decline in the personal savings rate. Individuals being highly leveraged became socially acceptable. There is a strong ethical issue with this. In the keeping up with Joneses world we live in it is that much harder to be responsible about your own personal finances when everyone else seems on a spending spree. But in reports like this there is a tendency to blame others, not ourselves. Unfortunately, it means we won't learn as much from the reflection on the experience.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Spending Private Ryan
I would give President Obama about a C on the State of the Union address. That seems to be the general reaction if this tongue in cheek dialog between Gail Collins and David Brooks typifies the response. The President still presents issues in a laundry list, as I whined about in rhyme a few months ago. While I agreed with most of the items, what was missing was a narrative of how people of modest means can lift themselves up through their own efforts, as my parents' generation did, and what changes in the economic environment the government can foster to help make this happen. The brief discussion he had about competitiveness doesn't translate well into a personal narrative. His mention that parents should turn off the TV so kids do their homework was fine on personal responsibility, but it only focused on the educational issue, not on personal responsibility in other areas, especially in how each of us manages our own debt. There was a lot that might have been said but wasn't.
The Republicans seem to have fallen into a trap that Mencken identified a long time ago:
They have a single issue - substantially reducing the Federal deficit and doing so through spending cuts rather than tax increases. They ignore in this how much private saving is happening as well as the state of the economy - still very weak. They fear the deficit only, not the Paradox of Thrift. Their mental model has the Crowding Out Hypothesis relevant, although interest rates remain abnormally low. Before the State of the Union I watched the News Hour which had a segment with the Senators from Illinois,who were to sit together while listening with the speech. Mark Kirk, the new Republican Senator, was pleasant enough in demeanor but he towed the Party line completely.
I thought it my obligation to watch the Republican response given by Paul Ryan, but I shut it off pretty soon after he uttered these lines:
The Republicans seem to have fallen into a trap that Mencken identified a long time ago:
“Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.”
They have a single issue - substantially reducing the Federal deficit and doing so through spending cuts rather than tax increases. They ignore in this how much private saving is happening as well as the state of the economy - still very weak. They fear the deficit only, not the Paradox of Thrift. Their mental model has the Crowding Out Hypothesis relevant, although interest rates remain abnormally low. Before the State of the Union I watched the News Hour which had a segment with the Senators from Illinois,who were to sit together while listening with the speech. Mark Kirk, the new Republican Senator, was pleasant enough in demeanor but he towed the Party line completely. I thought it my obligation to watch the Republican response given by Paul Ryan, but I shut it off pretty soon after he uttered these lines:
Unfortunately, instead of restoring the fundamentals of economic growth, he engaged in a stimulus spending spree that not only failed to deliver on its promise to create jobs, but also plunged us even deeper into debt.
The facts are clear: Since taking office, President Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25 percent for domestic government agencies — an 84 percent increase when you include the failed stimulus.
I just couldn't take it. Nobody knows whether the the stimulus worked or not, because we can't run the experiment without the stimulus to see what would have happened. That there was a realistic chance of having another Great Depression seems to be ignored by the Republicans. Ryan is hailed as the economic brains in the Republican party. But to me he is just another mouthpiece. In doing some background checking before writing this post, I found testimony Peter Orzag gave before the House Budget Committee in September 2008, four months before Obama was inaugurated as President, where he argued that the recession would lag behind the freezing up of the credit markets. It is true that the new administration low balled the forecast of the severity of the recession. But that doesn't mean the stimulus failed.
The economy needs spending now. Where will it come from?
The first ten days blues
Of adds and drops I'm not entitled to rant
For under the rules and regulations it's not that students can't.
Though for the campus as a whole I'd like of the practice cessation
Generalizing from my own experience where there's lots of frustration.
As an instructor I do try to toe the line
While wondering what's the real goal behind this design.
Is it simply a holdover from when we did registration with paper
When getting into an oversubscribed class was like pulling off a caper?
But now that's not hard, instead what we have is excessive churn
Causing an instructor trying to enthuse students to do a slow burn.
I'd rather see all students start at the same time.
When a common bond takes hold in the classroom that is sublime.
Campus and instructors both need to vigorously interact
And then agree the main goal is to end the Disengagement Pact.
The way the technology is used now it's actually making matters worse.
It lowers instructor and student commitment and in that sense is a curse.
What if instead each class had a before semester open house?
Students would get an idea of the course and later not grouse.
Students would learn that taking a course is different from getting a Christmas present
Where it is okay to do an exchange or get a refund with that process rather pleasant.
It's an important lesson to learn to live with your choices,
When people have done that it turns out we respect their voices.
So with University technology it's not convenience we should be selling.
Especially when that undermines core principles - that's the message I'm telling.
What I'd like to see is a permanent fix
That got rid of all these student registration tricks.
And returned to the idea that on semester day one
That's was the day that learning had begun.
For under the rules and regulations it's not that students can't.
Though for the campus as a whole I'd like of the practice cessation
Generalizing from my own experience where there's lots of frustration.
As an instructor I do try to toe the line
While wondering what's the real goal behind this design.
Is it simply a holdover from when we did registration with paper
When getting into an oversubscribed class was like pulling off a caper?
But now that's not hard, instead what we have is excessive churn
Causing an instructor trying to enthuse students to do a slow burn.
I'd rather see all students start at the same time.
When a common bond takes hold in the classroom that is sublime.
Campus and instructors both need to vigorously interact
And then agree the main goal is to end the Disengagement Pact.
The way the technology is used now it's actually making matters worse.
It lowers instructor and student commitment and in that sense is a curse.
What if instead each class had a before semester open house?
Students would get an idea of the course and later not grouse.
Students would learn that taking a course is different from getting a Christmas present
Where it is okay to do an exchange or get a refund with that process rather pleasant.
It's an important lesson to learn to live with your choices,
When people have done that it turns out we respect their voices.
So with University technology it's not convenience we should be selling.
Especially when that undermines core principles - that's the message I'm telling.
What I'd like to see is a permanent fix
That got rid of all these student registration tricks.
And returned to the idea that on semester day one
That's was the day that learning had begun.
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