Can We Overcome Our Own Selfishness?

I was thinking of writing a post with a different title - Why Is It So Hard For Us To Get Along? - but as I pushed the ideas a little bit I kept coming back to the issues represented by the current title. So let me give a quick sketch of how I got here in my thinking and then get to those issues in one particular, but very important case.

I went to Junior High School 74 in Bayside, Queens New York.  I started 7th grade in 1966, two years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There was busing to achieve integration in school. But, as I've written several times, there was tracking via SP classes at 74 and later via Honors classes at Cardozo, the local high school I attended after graduating from 74.  The tracking created a school-within-a-school effect and the so-called academically elite kids were not really exposed to integration in their academic classes, with only a small number of exceptions. Ironically, one of the exceptions was economics, which I took in the fall semester of my senior year.  My vague recollection is that it was a nondescript course, more macro than micro, with some attempt to give students familiarity with variables that economists care about, e.g., unemployment rate, GDP, and inflation.  It had no impact on me whatsoever and was not a factor in why I eventually chose to go to graduate school in economics. But as it was my only experience with a truly integrated academic class (this class included many non-honors students who weren't bused to Cardozo) it's just too small a sample for me to make sweeping judgments about what a full curriculum of this sort would have been like.  The takeaway point for what I want to argue here is that when I was in Junior High and High School there was plenty of room for the implementation of integration to improve over time.

And this perspective is only my own as a student.  What about the perspective of those students who were bused in?  Did they or their families see benefits from integration regarding the quality of the schooling?  I don't know.  But I do know that at the time in high school there were three different types of diplomas offered: academic, general, and commercial.   The tracking I referred to earlier was within the academic category.  In principle, for those students who expected high school to be the culmination of their formal education, such categories might make sense to better prepare students for the world of work. But if a school is perceived by its academic achievements then it might "strategically" shortchange students in the non-academic categories.  And I believe that some years later NYC got rid of the other types of diplomas because they were perceived as discriminatory.  But I have no information about how bused-in students were distributed over the diploma categories nor any information about what non-integrated NYC schools were like prior to 1966, other than my own elementary school experience.  So I will just make a theoretical statement.  If average quality of schooling was notably higher for bused-in students, then integration of the schools might be socially preferred even if quality of education dropped a bit for those students who weren't bused to school.*

But there were other reasons why the integration was less than perfect and these may have mattered more.  Many kids went to parochial school rather than to public school.  I never fully understood this.  Among the kids I knew who went to public school, many also went to Hebrew school, which had meeting times that did not overlap with public school.  I recall that when I was in elementary school a few Christian kids would leave early on Wednesday afternoons to attend religious training. So there was some overlap in this case, but it was modest.  And I have no clue about the respective tuition rates then at those parochial schools that were full substitutes for public school and those other parochial schools that operated outside of public school times.  Clearly that matters in drawing any inferences here.  My prior would have been that the parochial schools that operated outside of public school hours would have the majority of kids.  I believe that to be the case of the Jewish students, but not for the Catholic students. (In NYC at the time, those two groups together constituted a majority of the population, though I'm asserting this from memory.  I did a quick search online for this information but didn't find it.)  This is the part I'm referring to when I said above that I never fully understood this.  And I believe this division between Jews and Catholics about the religious training of the children preceded busing in the NYC public schools.

There were also ritzy prep schools, where I know even less than I know about the parochial schools.  I will use the tennis player John McEnroe to illustrate.  According to Wikipedia he grew up in Douglaston, not too far from where I grew up in Bayside, and graduated from high school in 1977, five years after I graduated.  I'm not 100% sure that he would have gone to Cardozo had he attended public school, but it seems from that Wikipedia entry that he went to Trinity School instead, an elite private K-12 school. 

The conclusion I'd like the reader to draw is that regarding school in New York City at the time I was growing up (50+ years ago) there was stratification of students by race, religion, and parental income/wealth.  (One surely could also discus stratification by gender, but not with the very broad strokes of evidence that I'm utilizing here.) There were efforts to reduce the stratification by race via busing to achieve integration of the schools.  But there were no efforts to reduce the other sources of stratification at that time, as far as I know.  One might argue that New York was already such a "melting pot" that there was no need for the schools to play this role.  I think that argument is wrong.  In an American Politics class in college we read parts of Beyond the Melting Pot, which spoke about persistent cultural difference well after assimilation should have occurred.  And this word assimilation begs the question, assimilation into what?  Was there a distinctive American culture that we all learned?  If so, how did we learn it?

Much later, sometime in the early 1990s, when I had been a faculty member for over a decade, I read Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind, a book whose title suggests a refutation of Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.  In a nutshell Levine argues that we can readily maintain two identities and there is no problem doing so.  I can be American and I can be Jewish.  Both identities co-exist without difficulty.   But then, there is the question of how the American part gets educated.  I would argue that public schools play an indispensable role here.  

In any event, this provides the initial conditions I want to consider.  In the intervening 50 years or so, has there been progress?  Do we get along better now than we did back then in ways that are obvious to all?  If not, why not?  

Now I will put on my economics hat.  There is an elegant explanation for why we don't always make progress, innovation notwithstanding, and instead remain locked into the status quo.  The quintessential example is the QWERTY keyboard, which was invented to slow people down in typing when the mechanical keys would jam if you typed too quickly.  (The linked paper by Paul David is quite interesting and readable by the non-economist.)  We no longer have any issues with the keys jamming, but the layout of keys on the keyboard persists.  The explanation is about interdependencies.  Too many other things would break if the layout were changed.  (Not the least of which is that old fogies like me would balk at learning a new system, compared to now when typing is more or less an automatic process.)  Interdependencies can sustain the status quo, even in the presence of substantial innovation.  (The academic calendar is another example.  The summer break is a vestige of an agrarian economy that no longer exists yet we still have the summer break.)  

Particularly with regard to race and the persistence of racism, we don't normally talk about identifying the sources of interdependency.  Maybe we should do that to inquire whether these are so fixed that realistically nothing can be done about it.  Alternatively, maybe our focus should be on changing these linkages in a way that they no longer block the more fundamental change we'd like to see, although doing so will be arduous.  Yet doing difficult things for the greater good may be the right antidote for our social ills at present.

Evidently, our national politics provides one big source of this interdependency. I thought this piece by Michelle Goldberg quite insightful on how those who preach "family values" are using that lens as a way to attack "critical race theory" and thereby generate high voter participation rates. Is there a way to espouse a strong anti-racist message that folks who put great stock in family values would find palatable and non-threatening?  It seems to me an interesting question to ask, but one beyond my own competence to answer.  So I will merely pose it here and push on.

A different source is based on economic dislocation.  This isn't about losing a particular job.  It is about an entire sector of work drying up.  For a long time the culprit was manufacturing and the blame was on offshoring and automation.  It was blue collar workers who experienced this dislocation. Many of them are white and without a college degree.  When they lost their good manufacturing jobs they didn't want to switch to lower paying service sector work, which they viewed as namby pamby.  Indeed, an important factor to consider with this economic dislocation is that it engenders a sense of emasculation.  The image of the man as the provider for the family was defeated by the facts on the ground and there was no alternative positive image that they could embrace.  Among the social consequences to note, the opioid crisis took firm hold within this sub-population. 

It's my understanding that this is the core of Trump's base. MAGA as well as the anti-immigration and the implied racism that goes with it serves an emotional compensation for this sub-population, who are frustrated by their poor employment prospects.  They blame the Democrats who abandoned them, recalling that when private-sector unions were a strong force in this country they were aligned with the Democratic party.  In this story, they were thrown under the bus to make room for the new identity politics.  

My knowledge of labor history in the U.S. is a little rusty, but I believe some of this story is revisionist and perhaps outright wrong.  Those who recall the TV show All In The Family might remember that Archie Bunker worked on the loading dock, was a union guy, but was a very strong Nixon supporter. This was at a time when unions were still strong.  How can this be explained?  It's easy enough if you include the Vietnam War in the picture.  That war created a different divide within the country, the hardhats versus the hippies.  Being a union guy, but already in the Republican fold followed from being for the war.  And this was the early 1970s.  In the next decade, Reagan busted PATCO, and thereby signaled to the private sector that his administration would accommodate a hard-line response to unions.  Yet somehow Reagan remains a hero to these Trump supporters. 

It may be that Biden's aggressive economic policies can fundamentally change this ethos by raising the economic well being of blue collar types of all races and ethnicity.  But it will take time for that to happen, to experience this economic improvement and modify expectations that this change is permanent.  I really don't know how long that will take. But I'd guess that if the Democrats don't maintain control of both Congress and the White House for at least the next couple of election cycles, there won't be enough time for this change to happen.  

Further, we need to consider the messaging that voters are exposed to.  Trump's base is passionate about supporting their guy.  The messaging aims to stoke anger in the base and it has done a remarkable job of doing that.  The constant exposure to the messaging is addicting and one can embrace the message regardless of the economic circumstances of the individual. From my point of view it has been this way since Nixon invoked his Southern Strategy and came more firmly into the spiel under Reagan, which is when the so-called culture wars surfaced..  Making low taxes and deregulation the focus of the economic policy, coupled with the union busting I already mentioned, made the economic policy favor the rich and well to do.  The symbolic wins, particularly the not so veiled racism, kept the base in line.  Since I view the economic issues as paramount, particularly in times when otherwise life seems ordinary, meaning neither pandemic nor war, that the base settled for these symbolic rewards only makes it seem to me that they've been played. At present, that's just my thinking. It's not in the messaging of the Biden Administration, as far as I can tell, probably because they don't want to inflame Trump supporters now given how tense the situation already is.  However, it may become part of the messaging over time, particularly if the economic policies are perceived as a success and blue collar voters increasingly come to accept that the government has a significant role to play in simultaneously providing needed public goods (infrastructure) and the good jobs that go along with that provision. 

Would the reality and future prospect of a middle class lifestyle reduce the racism of White blue-collar workers?  One hopes so, even if that happened only gradually.  If the primary source of emasculation was removed, what emotional need would continued racism provide?  I'm not a sociologist, so don't really want to get into the status needs of individuals and groups. Those may very well persist, in which case some racism will endure, though I'd predict it would be much milder than what we currently have.   So, possibly, this is an example of interdependencies that can actually be changed, both the reality and the perception of that, via a sustained economic policy aimed at doing so. 

Were it only so easy.  Unfortunately, economic displacement will continue unabated with the new culprit Artificial Intelligence and with the old reasons for displacement still present.  This will impact white collar workers whose jobs may no longer be necessary.  Will they be able to reeducate sufficiently to find new work in a different sector of the economy?  Or will they languish and go through a life cycle similar to what displaced blue collar workers have previously experienced?  I wish I knew the answer to that question.  I don't even have a good feel on this to let the free market sort things out or to have government play a big role in the solution.  Is a guaranteed minimum income a possibility?  Who knows? Might the retirement age become lower, with 55 the new 65 for that purpose?  Again, who knows?  All I will speculate on here is that Trump's base might expand significantly in the future if this happens more rapidly than expected and good solutions for this new type of displacement are not readily found. 

Now I want to make a brief aside before making a segue to the next idea.  This piece has taken me a very long time to write.  I started it well before the violence in Israel erupted and at the outset I expected it to take only a day or two to write.  That it has taken so much longer is evidence of my personal struggle with the ideas I'm presenting here.  I certainly haven't resolved those to my satisfaction, but I have made enough progress with them that I think I can finish writing this piece now.  

It turns out that selfishness as a concept is not sufficient to consider. Consider the hypothetical world that economists refer to as complete information, where all decision makers have all the information at their fingertips.  Further, economists assume individuals are rational.  In this setting, selfishness is the issue.  But that hypothetical world is not the world in which we live. In reality there is incomplete information.  Sometimes what people don't know is a matter of happenstance.  Other times it is that the information is too complex for them to process in a meaningful way, so they ignore it even if the information is available. Still a third possibility is that people deliberately choose to be ignorant, meaning they could acquire the information, perhaps by reading about it, but choose not to do so.  I want to consider all three taken together as insularity, though in the mind of the individual it is deliberate ignorance which most people consider insularity.  

The reason for considering all three together is that to a third party it may be difficult or indeed impossible to understand which is the true explanation for the person not understanding what is going on. It may then be that for highly complex information there is a need for simplified versions that are available to the layman.  In this way everyone becomes somewhat aware and experts learn to communicate with the rest of the population in terms they can understand.  For the case where the person deliberately opts for ignorance, undoubtedly this choice is driven by the perception that knowledge might create an undue burden that the person would like to avoid. Education might counter that perception, either by demonstrating that the burden is not so large or by making the point that mature adults would accept the responsibility of the burden because it is the right thing to do. If that's correct, then willful ignorance is itself a kind of selfishness.

The particular case I want to apply this idea to is upscale voters who typically vote for Democratic candidates.   Elsewhere I've referred to people in this income category as the professional class - households in the top 10% of the income distribution but below the top 1%.  These are people who are comfortable financially, borderline rich perhaps, but not the uber rich.  I'm in this category.  And I'm guessing that many of them are, like me, horrified by what has happened since Trump has appeared on the national stage and terribly frightened of the possibility that there will be an encore performance.  These people would be willing to do a lot to prevent that from happening, especially if they could be convinced that their collective efforts really would matter in preventing a Trump Act II.  This is the backdrop for the following. 

Suppose the big project that most Democrats can agree upon is to remake America as a middle class society.  This means many things.  It means good educational opportunities are available to all.  Likewise, it means decent healthcare is available to all.  And it also means readily available childcare so the parents can earn a decent living while working.   Further, it means median household income makes one feel middle class, part of the mainstream, and a citizen proud of the country who wants to contribute to keep the country's well being.  Moreover, the household income distribution is not too skewed, meaning those households with income below the median are still within shouting distance of the median and likewise for those households with income about the median.   The big picture question, then, is how do we get from where we are now to this remake of America as a middle class society?

In my way of thinking Biden's current economic plans are focused around raising the incomes of low income households, dealing with the child care issue, and addressing other areas of concern (global warming) that we don't normally think of as an income distribution matter.  There remains the issue of compression of household incomes for households above the median.  Can that be a voluntary matter, with household members stepping up and willingly accepting the income reduction?  Or must it be coerced, for well off households will resist compression in their part of the income distribution?  For the last six or seven years I've argued in a variety of posts that we should be trying very hard to make this a voluntary matter.  But nothing I've read elsewhere seems to give support to my view.  Instead, it is implicitly assumed that we're all selfish, so such compression in the income distribution would require an involuntary taking. 

Under normal political circumstances, the Democratic party would never make an educational appeal to upscale voters, hoping they will willingly accept compression of the income distribution as a consequence, for fear of driving such voters out of the party and into the hands of the Republicans, where selfishness in matters of income and taxation is part of their core ethos.  But we are not in normal political circumstances now and likely won't be for some time to come.  If there ever was a time to make such an educational appeal, it's now.  

Such an education won't happen in a few brief moments by a viral video that captures the issues for all.  Rather, it will take a sustained effort that treats the learners as intelligent adults, yet they are perhaps baffled by many economics issues, as indeed I find myself baffled even though I have a PhD in economics.  Below I list some questions and my tentative answers to them, which others are free to challenge on the analysis.  Any such education of upscale voters will need answers that are understandable and in accord with the economic analysis of administration economists. 

On Taxation at the Federal Level

• The U.S. Government has the ability to issue new debt (government bonds) to finance additional spending.  This is an alternative to raising taxes to finance additional spending.  When should it use one method and when the other?
  
  Old Answer: When the economy is operating well below capacity, a high unemployment rate an indicator of this, then deficit financing to boost aggregate demand is appropriate.  In addition to the direct benefit the spending provides, there is a multiplier effect that helps to bring the economy back to operating near full capacity.  When the economy is already at full capacity, then the new spending should be financed by increased taxes.  Depending on how those taxes are raised they will either reduce private consumption or private saving and that is what is really paying for the new government spending.
  New Answer:  Krugman had an interesting column on this recently and I'm basing what I say on that.  In the past we've worried about the Debt to GDP ratio.  But interest rates have been very low for quite some time.  Krugman argues that this is likely to be continue to be true in the long run, due to low population growth, which we can expect will persist. So we should worry more about debt service - the interest payments on the debt.  Partial deficit financing may then make sense, even when the economy is at full capacity. But there will still be a need for some of the new spending to be financed out of tax increases.  The right balance between the two still needs to be worked out.
  
  
• If taxes are to be raised is there a right balance between raising rates and capping deductions?
  
  My Answer:  Deductions are sometimes referred to as tax expenditures - government policy to encourage a certain type of spending initiated either by individual citizens or by localities.  So, for example, the mortgage interest deduction encourages home ownership over renting.  Likewise, the deduction for charitable giving encourages donations to charity.  As there is a standard deduction, which most taxpayers will use, the tax benefit for itemized deductions accrues to wealthier taxpayers.  In that sense, itemized deductions are the opposite of progressive taxation (where marginal tax rates rise with income).  So, in my view these deductions should be capped, in aggregate, not with a hard cap that is the same for everyone but with a percentage cap that is hard so the actual cap varies with income.  Undoubtedly non-profits that rely on donations will object to this.  That is a separate issue and needs to be worked out elsewhere.  If there were such a percentage cap imposed on deductions, raising additional taxes would require raising rates.  In my view this should be done based on a principle of progressive taxation - the higher income taxpayers would face higher rates.
  
  
• Is there a socially desirable set of tax rates that we should stick with? Or should rates continue to vary with economic circumstance?
  
  My Answer:  Some will point to the tax rates that were in place right before Reagan became President as offering the ideal.  However, if one looks at the history of tax rates since then one will note that they have changed with some frequency.  This suggests strongly that which party is in power matters as to what the tax rates will be.  Let me wave my hands here and assume that isn't an issue.  Instead imagine rates are set by a benevolent social planner.  (This is a convenient dodge that economics professors use to discuss optimal taxation.)  In this case one might imagine the planner determines that long term ideal set of rates and then announces that we'll get there in a series of steps rather than in one fell swoop, so taxpayers who will see their rates rise can make adjustments to that.  How many steps there would be and how frequently a new step would be take still needs to be determined.  Once the long term structure has been set, it would be good to stick with it, though temporary tax increases remain a possibility if dire circumstances suggest they are needed.
  

On State and Local Taxes and Spending

• Given that some states (or localities) are high tax while others are low tax and K-12 public schools are financed at this level, how can we guarantee a decent education for all students?
  
  My Answer: This is truly a disaster, in my opinion. Plessy v. Ferguson is no longer the law.  But as Jonathan Kozol documents, for example in The Shame of the Nation, it is still the practice in Apartheid schools.  The short term answer, and this will be quite a heavy lift politically, is to extend the Biden economic initiative by providing substantial funding to schools in low income areas.  This money must go directly to the municipality or even to the individual schools.  It should not be filtered through the states, which will likely redirect the funds to wealthier districts.  In the longer term, either the Federal government takes over the funding of public schools, or the states and localities figure out a way to equalize funding for schools across districts.  This won't be easy.  We should not kid ourselves that it will be otherwise.  But it is necessary.
  
  
• If adjacent states have quite different tax rates, how does one prevent wealthy people from migrating to the lower tax state so they can lower their tax burden?
  
  My Answer: The logic of state government goes back to the colonial period.  If we were to design government jurisdictions anew, we might find that local government is still necessary but state government is not.  For example, that each state has its own public university system instead of one national public university system is very hard if not impossible to justify on efficiency grounds. I view this as another example of lock in that was discussed above.  One possible solution to this is to have some of what is currently state expenditure to evolve into federal expenditure, so that what remains at the state level is small and those tax differentials become smaller as well.  Another possibility is to incentivize states to equalize their tax rates with their neighboring states, via Federal grants.   A third possibility is to make the tax deduction for state and local taxes depend on the tax rates in neighboring states. 

On the Free Rider Problem and How to Avoid It Derailing Upscale Voters from Paying Higher Taxes

•  The reality is that what any individual contributes in increased taxes is a drop in the bucket compared to the aggregate contribution.  If others were indeed unselfish and did pay more in taxes, wouldn't it still be rational for an individual taxpayer to remain selfish and look for ways to avoid paying any tax increase?  But if this is true in general, wouldn't it defeat the underlying idea entirely?
  
  My Answer: A group of peers needs to monitor each other.  The group as a whole needs to agree to the increased tax burden and then with some frequency the group needs for each member to account for how the member is meeting that burden.  Making this an individual matter will encourage the selfishness to stick. Instead, letting this become a social matter has a chance for such a change to take hold.
  

In the above I've stuck with taxes and haven't considered the question of consumption of local public goods as a choice.  It too is a big deal issue.  For example, will parents send their kids to the local public school even after changes in zoning restrictions mean kids in that school will come from families with varying incomes?  Or will the wealthier parents opt for a stratified solution, like what I described was happening in NYC when I was a student?  I don't have a full answer for this, but I do want to note the following.  If somehow we were able to return to a middle class society with much less income variation about median household income, there would be far less incentive for parents to game the system to get their kids into elite schools as the financial return from doing so would be far less. So I think it is possible to imagine a world where most every kid went to the local public school and each of these schools was of decent quality.  Getting there from where we are now, however, will be an enormous undertaking. 

I want to close.  I meant my bulleted list of questions and answers merely as suggestions of what is needed to consider educating the populace on the desirability of flattening the income distribution and how that might be done. Surely these issues would need to be debated and fleshed out a lot further.  And it may be that other relevant issues I haven't considered at all need to be brought to the fore. So be it.  

And I want to make a bow to my own selfishness.  I have a tendency to write quite long posts.  Partly this is to allow my own formative thinking to give a full exploration of the subject matter.  And partly it is because I think the reader needs context for considering what is said, so I want to provide that context.  But I'm fully aware that this cuts against the trend where shorter pieces are apt to gather more readers, while longer pieces are ignored.  It's true that I'd like to have more readers.  Yet in this choice I opt to first and foremost please myself.  Maybe some selfishness can never be overcome.

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*I have felt for some time that in our social thinking too much burden for a child's education has been placed on school and not enough thought has been given to education opportunities outside of school, which can be substantial.  The most obvious of these is having the student develop a strong reading habit, which would promote self-education and help the student develop a very important life skill.  Unfortunately, it cuts against current trends.  It is also true that reading itself is asocial and without some subsequent way for the student to talk about what was read with others the reading may be seen as a path toward loneliness.  

Nevertheless, if the criticism of classes that are not tracked is that is that very bright students might get bored, giving such students more opportunity to learn on their own may be a reasonable answer.  Further, there might be some social interaction found in such students helping other students who are more challenged by the course content.  If this is done in a non-threatening way it can benefit both students and seem a natural thing to do.  

Let me conclude this aside with the observation that even within the SP and the Honors classes there was far from full equality regarding how bright students were, imperfectly measured by their GPA.  I was one of those very bright students.  I don't remember ever being bored, but I do remember goofing off with friends quite a bit.  Was this purely wasting time in an otherwise unproductive way?  Or was some of this developing both valuable social skills and outside-of-school ideas that wouldn't happen with only the formal education.  It is not good social science to generalize completely from one's own experience, but I'm prone to think that since it was more the latter for me, it could be the latter for other students too.  And, perhaps equally important, none of it was the sort of thing you'd put on a resume, so you did it because you wanted to.  Nowadays, with so many kids entirely instrumental about their education, some of this learning as play with friends surely would be a step in the right direction.

Tilting At Windmills - So Compelling Yet Maybe I Should Stop

Now that I'm not teaching, I can admit that every once in a while I had a favorite student.  In fall 2017, my penultimate teaching experience, the student came to my attention in a most delightful but very unusual way.  Each week she turned in her work well before the deadline.  I had never experienced this before. After a while, we had an email thread that served as a critique and commentary on the class.   I had an approach with "soft deadlines" where a due date and time was given for each assignment but students could still get credit if they submitted their work not too far beyond that. For the blogging they did, I would read and comment on those over the weekend.  If some other posts came in while I was still working on that, it was no big deal on my part to allow the submissions into the queue for my reading and commenting.  She had never experienced soft deadlines in a course before and referred to it as - treating the students as adults - which she greatly appreciated, although for her it seemed this rule didn't matter.  Instead, it was all about the tone it set for the class.  The bulk of the students took advantage of the soft deadlines, but in the other direction - they got their work done after the official deadline had past.  Indeed, they may have only started on the blogging over the weekend, while the official deadline was the Friday before. 

More than once during our exchanges she asked me why I simply didn't enjoy my retirement.  Why teach at all?  And then, why put greater effort into the teaching than other instructors did?  It was clear that the reading and commenting on student blogs was time consuming, and no other instructor in the Economics Department taught that way.  Further, it was evident to her that I spent considerable time worrying about students who didn't seem to be trying very hard.  Why would I do that?  I didn't have a very good answer for her.  So I relied on something I first wrote more than 20 years earlier. Teaching good students was always a joy and easy for me to do.  The challenge, however, was teaching ordinary students to see if they could be transformed into good students.  All these years later, I must confess that it rarely, if ever, happened, though I did try to make it happen.  Indeed, it was one of the compelling reasons for me to keep teaching. 

There is much irony in this.  When I first came to Illinois, I dreaded teaching intermediate microeconomics, which many faculty did as part of their undergraduate service teaching for the department.  While I had been a good and popular TA at Northwestern, mainly for principles of microeconomics, there is something different about being the main teacher - for example choice of textbook, setting the difficulty level and tone of the course, as well as selecting topic coverage.  Then there was my age.  I was 25 when I started, not much older than the students I was teaching.  At first they would ask - are you the TA?  So  I felt that I needed to establish my authority.  Many years later I learned the expression - best graduate course a freshman every had.  Intermediate micro is a sophomore-junior course, but the roots of that expression were at play in my class, no doubt.  Then there was that the first time around the class was taught in the dreaded room DKH 19 (which no longer exists) where I would be sweating while at the blackboard while some kids sitting in the back of the room wore winter coats because they were freezing.  There was still another factor that I didn't understand till many years later.  Intermediate micro was required for all Business majors.  Most of them hated the requirement.  It was akin to the requirement of organic chemistry for pre-med students.  So I was apt to confront student resistance, especially from those students majoring in Accounting.

Yet all of this was really secondary.  What truly mattered was my own ignorance.  I had been a math major as an undergraduate and never took intermediate micro.  So I had no sense of what it should be like.  And I grew up in New York, not Illinois. Were the kids different just because of that?  I had wondered the same thing as a TA at Northwestern.  Somehow it wasn't a big obstacle then, perhaps because the Northwestern kids seemed like Ivy League wannabes.  The Illinois students weren't trying for that and I didn't have a different category available to me which I could put them in. So I didn't have a good mental model for how to teach in a way that would be appropriate for them.  I had no such problem when I taught graduate level courses or the undergraduate math econ course. I had confidence in my teaching those courses.  In contrast, I was frightened of teaching intermediate micro and was greatly relieved that in my third year I started to teach graduate level micro, so didn't have to teach intermediate micro at all, much preferring to avoid what I was fearful of rather than confront the fear head on.

About a decade after I started at Illinois I was back teaching intermediate micro, but by then the fear was gone.  There were many factors that explain this.  Here I want to focus on only one.  When I first started I was heavily into the models as things in themselves.  For a math type like me, that's where the interest in the subject matter could be found.  But there were very few math types in my intermediate micro classes.  Over that decade I learned a very important skill, to explain a social situation via a microeconomics analysis. In other words, I learned to tell stories about real-world things where the stories had an economics basis that provided coherence to them.  The students would be much more interested in the stories than in the pure theory, but they could then tolerate the theory as a means to an end.  

With that, I introduced a new part to my intermediate microeconomics class called Econ in the News.  I would take an article from the New York Times, have the class read it, and then we'd do an economic analysis in class via the Socratic Method, where I would ask questions to uncover the underlying economic issues that were at the heart of the piece and hope there were students who would raise their hands to respond to those questions.  I made a rather painful discovery this way.  Many of the students couldn't give good meaning to the New York Times article, which was intended for a general audience.  Of course, I couldn't fully identify the cause.  Perhaps the students had shirked and hadn't looked at the article, then were winging it in class.  But why do that?  It wasn't a very onerous requirement, or so I thought.  Somewhere in that time frame I had a discussion about this with an economist in NRES (Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences) who had drawn the same conclusion.  Every time I saw him we'd bring up the student literacy issue, with inability to read a piece from the New York Times our quintessential example.  This view about the reading ability of typical students hardened over time for me and I still subscribe to it now.

Nevertheless, in the mid to late 1990s, when I embraced online learning (we called it ALN back then), my focus was on something else in my teaching - getting students to be able to do the end of chapter problems from their textbook and providing online office hours with undergraduate TAs to encourage that understanding.  Since my SCALE project was to teach intermediate micro in a large class setting (with 3 times the enrollment of a typical intermediate micro section) I didn't trouble myself on the student literacy issue then. 

The following decade was different.  I became a full time administrator, so I taught less frequently and when I did it was as an overload.  Then I taught smaller classes, the last three of which were for students in the Campus Honors Program.  And during this time I was self-educating on how people learn.  Simultaneously, I got involved with the edublog community where I had many interesting sojourns about promoting learning, and became increasingly comfortable with my own voice in speaking about learning issues, in my blog or on a listserv, of which there were a few that were quite prominent. And I received a lot of positive feedback from colleagues nationally an internationally too that I was on the mark with my analysis and commentary.   

The experiment with my SCALE project was done to please the Sloan Foundation.  Now I was experimenting with the teaching to please myself.  Many of those experiments seemed to work, though definitely not all of them. The successes were more than sufficient for me to keep at it.  (Two caveats are of note here.  One is that CHP classes tend to be smaller than regular classes.  Successful experiments in a small class setting may not work with larger classes.  The other is that CHP students differ from other students, perhaps more in motivation than in aptitude.  As an instructor you're apt to find intrinsic motivation with at least some of the CHP students.  Regular students are typically far more instrumental and want to know whether putting in effort will matter for their course grade.)

The last time I taught a CHP class the campus was in budget crisis, a consequence of the Great Recession. I began to have ethical qualms about CHP classes.  Indirectly, they took teaching resources and allocated them to some of the best students on campus, although every student paid tuition that depended on family income but did not depend on whether the student was in CHP or not.  I thought a compelling case could be made to allocate more teaching resource to ordinary students, provided there was some evident benefit to those students.  So when I retired I vowed my occasional teaching would be regular classes for the Economics department, with my more intensive effort than usual aimed at showing there was such a benefit.  (I also learned, reasonably recently, that the campus discouraged though did not forbid retirees from teaching altogether, which made teaching for the CHP program near impossible.)  If and when retirees teach, it needs to be contrasted with hiring visitors to do the same teaching and/or paying regular faculty for overload teaching.  The efficient outcome needs to be analyzed on a case to case basis. A priori, there is no one right answer.  It depends on the subject matter of the course to be staffed which, in turn, determines the pool of potentially available instructors.  But retirees teaching, so double dipping (they are collecting retirement pay as well), can cause bad press for the university.  The university does not need that at all.

After trying a variety of things the first few times I taught post retirement, I settled on teaching one class in the fall on The Economics of Organizations, where I could combine my prior experience as an administrator along with the economic theory.  (One of the things I learned from those early attempts was that for classes with a significant number of seniors enrolled, teach it in the fall rather than in the spring.  Students who are less than a semester away from graduating are apt to have a serious case of senioritis.  That can be quite discouraging for the instructor who wants to see students fully engaged.  There are some students who graduate after the fall semester, but there are comparatively few of them.)  For fall 2012, fall 2013, and fall 2014 I made reasonably good connection with the students.  The student blogging was reasonably effective in getting students to learn the story telling side of the economics, with my comments and their responses to those giving a coaching approach to instruction that makes sense to me, though it is labor intensive.  Getting students to comment on the posts of other students was less successful.  So building a community out of the class was a goal I didn't achieve, but one that still does seem reachable to me. 

After that it seemed as if the wheels fell off the vehicle.  One clear indicator was class attendance.  It was fine in 2012-14, indeed it was fine back in 1980 when on my course evaluations some students wrote I was the worst teacher on campus.  And it was fine in the 1990s, before I started to teach intermediate micro in large sections.  But it wasn't fine starting in fall 2015, in a class that was intended for Econ majors, with an instructor who was putting in a lot of effort into the teaching.  

To be fair to the students, my method was different from other classes.  Homework was meant as preparation for in class discussion, which is more like how things are in the world of work.  Staff members are supposed to come prepared to meetings.  But it differs from most other classes, especially those that are lecture based.  Then homework is meant as a test of understanding of the lecture material.  In that more traditional approach, there is some incentive to attend the lecture even when attendance is not taken, as attendance may be necessary to do the homework.  In contrast, in my class with the homework already completed and the class discussion meant to push the ideas beyond that, but where the class discussion itself was not graded, a purely instrumental student would see no reason to come to class.  My approach would appeal to those students who wanted a deeper understanding of the material.  And there is another category of students who matters here.  Some students feel obligated to their parents to attend class because their parents are paying tuition.  These students develop the habit of always going to class, regardless of what happens in the classroom.  As I said, through fall 2014 the latter two groups of students constituted the bulk of the class.  In fall 2015, the majority were those students who care only about the grade.

And it has remained that way since.  Indeed in my 2019 class, several students remarked in their ultimate blog post that unless there was some explicit incentive for coming to class they wouldn't attend. (Apparently many other classes do have such an incentive, perhaps via student use of clickers.  When evaluating the benefits of technology, we rarely, if ever, consider the impact in other classes than those where the technology is deployed.)  While I marked this change in the ethos of undergraduates, I never understood fully what caused it.  Yet I was able to conclude that there wasn't much I could do about it in my upper level class.  If I was to counteract it in a serious way, I needed to get to the students earlier in their college trajectory.  

Much of my tilting at windmills, as in the title of this post, is about purely hypothetical experiments that are aimed at addressing the issues with undergraduate education that I see in my own teaching and/or read about in popular outlets.  When I was a campus administrator I had additional sources of information to inform this penchant for theorizing about solutions - conversations with other faculty and with peers in educational technology.  Since I retired, those additional sources have largely dried up for me.  Perhaps it has made me more radical in my thinking as a consequence.  For example, soon after that fall 2015 semester course had concluded I wrote this post, The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution, and a few years later wrote about a different possible experiment, A Summer Camp for Teaching College Level Reading and Learning to Learn. These were meant as theoretical explorations only. Yet I had a hunger for actually trying experiments of this sort.  

So, on two separate occasions I volunteered to teach a first-year class and take no salary for doing so.  One of these was to be a freshman seminar in Economics.  The other was the freshman composition course, Rhet 105, which is taught in many individual sections.  I volunteered to teach one of these, as I thought my blogging approach might be a good way for students to learn to write.  In both cases I was turned down.  There were probably sensible reasons for that, sensible here meaning that there was a current way of going about things and this would upset the apple cart.   From the perspective of then, this makes sense.  However, from the perspective of now, in the midst of the pandemic where institutions we had previously trusted, notably nursing homes, have failed quite miserably, maybe our trust in the current way of doing things and not wanting to upset the apple cart should itself be questioned.  I will return to that later in this piece. 

Now I want to take a step backward chronologically, after the fall 2014 semester had concluded but before the fall 2015 semester had begun.  It's important to understand that sometime my tilting at windmills is not an outgrowth of my direct experience, but rather is driven by my reaction to things happening elsewhere on my campus or elsewhere in the profession.  In this case it seemed to me that my campus was going MOOC crazy and while I was quite okay with experimenting in that arena, I thought putting all our teaching innovation eggs in that basket was a mistake.  MOOCs are known for having thousands of student in one class.  So I focused on the opposite extreme, small classes at approximately the same size of the CHP classes I described earlier.  Then I gave a marketing name to this - high touch teaching.  It's the type of instruction where the students and instructor(s) get to know each other and learn about each other.  I wrote a series of blog posts under the label Everybody Teaches, that argued the campus should innovate in high touch teaching in a variety of different ways.  I had a particular audience in mind when I wrote these posts.  Deanna Raineri, my good friend and then Associate Provost for Innovation in Learning was leading the campus MOOC effort.  These posts were meant for her. 

There was an economics basis for what I argued in these posts.  Economists distinguish between the extensive margin and the intensive margin.  For instruction, the extensive margin is measured by enrollments and credit hours.  (At Illinois, we refer to the product of the two as measured in IUs, which stands for Instructional Units.)  It is very easy to count on the extensive margin and, given tuition rates and the number of courses taken by students on average, to translate IUs into tuition revenue generated. In contrast, the intensive margin is about the quality of the offering.  Within a particular class, the students and the instructor may have a reasonable sense of course quality and the quality of performance of the various actors. But communicating that outside the class to others on campus, to potential employers or graduate programs, or to parents and other interested stakeholders outside the university is quite challenging.  There isn't good data we can all agree upon that measures the intensive margin on a course by course basis.  Course evaluations may be the best information we have, but they definitely don't cut it. So there may be bias in the decision making toward favoring the extensive margin, simply because of these measurement issues.

There is the additional issue that tenure track faculty tend to teach at the graduate level, while adjuncts are more likely to teach undergraduates.  (At Illinois we refer to faculty whose sole job is to teach as specialized faculty.)  Further, at least at Illinois, if you look at the institutional data on this, the share of undergraduate teaching by specialized faculty has been going up (at least that was true before the pandemic).  Some of this was replacement of graduate teaching assistants.  The rest was replacement of tenure track faculty. From this perspective, Everybody Teaches was aimed to reverse this trend, so more tenure track faculty would have recent undergraduate teaching experience.  Given my comments in the previous paragraph about the difficulty of measuring on the intensive margin, I think it a reasonable metaphor to envision undergraduate instruction as an elephant, and each of us who teach undergraduates is blind and touching our little part of the elephant.  Without such experience, we tend to be guided by our confirmation bias and then trust in our (good) press clippings.  In that sense, Everybody Teaches is arguing that we need a greater share of tenure track faculty, and high level administrators too, to have such a touch. That would make discussions about the quality of undergraduate instruction more grounded.  

There is always the instinctive response - how can we afford to do that? (This question is posed as a first step in an argument that we won't be doing that, as it is outside our model of the public research university. What follows is something of a counterargument to that.)  A more subtle response might be that if we did do that, but much of it was by coercion - increasing teaching loads, for example - then it might very well not produce the desired results, as many instructors would go through the motions only.  So, a still more subtle response includes two parts.  Part one is that this would be done in phases and the first phase would include only early adopters who willingly would let their high touch classes be open to examination of the benefits that might ensue, so others could learn from that experience.  We know about Hawthorne effects and that early good results don't guarantee subsequent broad success.  But they are a needed start.  Part two of the response is about relying on the students themselves as peer mentors, where some of the compensation for being a peer mentor would be in the form of course credit, including credit for certain Gen. Ed. requirements and possibly credit for requirements in the major.  This would reduce the demand for instruction and make the approach affordable.   Some of part two is argued in the last of the Everybody Teaches posts.  Nonetheless, it may seem to be coming out of left field.  I hope to bring it more down to earth in what follows. 

I did not teach in fall 2018.  The Economics Department had enough upper level courses to offer a good variety to students.  So they didn't need my Economics of Organizations class.  Under other circumstances I might have been disappointed by this, but I was experiencing some health issues then so it really was for the best.  I did teach in fall 2019.  There had been faculty turnover in the Economics Department, so they asked me to teach, and my health issues were behind me by then.

The experience was unsettling for me.  Where the fall 2015 offering had issues that the fall 2014 did not, in the fall 2019 offering those issues were further exacerbated and a new issue arose that I want to discuss below.  The linked piece here is explicit about (lack of) academic competency as a broader issue than the literacy issue I described above. In particular, many students were not competent in high school math.  You can't do economic modeling without such competence.  It's always been an issue for me in teaching, but my sense is that it is much worse now than it was years ago.   Let me move on.

The new issue was about student mental health.  Many students in the class openly (in writing) discussed with me that they were having problems of depression and anxiety.  I don't know whether my approach to student blogging encouraged this openness or if they would have done likewise with their other instructors.  Simultaneously to this happening, apparently there were discussions within the campus administration about student mental health, and there was a wealth of articles about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, mainly focused on the excess demand for mental health professionals on campus.  Students need counseling, no doubt.  But I think of counseling as being in the cure category.  What would sensible prevention look like?  I don't recall reading anything on that score. It seems to me it should be the main question that we're asking, yet I haven't seen it discussed.

Let's note that the pure financial issues are obviously important and have gotten quite a bit of attention. Carrying a large burden of student loan debt with uncertain prospects about finding a good job after graduation is no doubt quite stressful.  Yet it is my opinion that other issues are equally or more important.  Those issues might be divided between student life issues, on the one hand, and academic issues, on the other.  Recently in the New Yorker there was a very depressing piece to read about a suicide cluster at Truman State University.  It detailed on the student life side of things how events might go terribly wrong. I can report that one of my students from the fall 2019 class who was struggling with her mental health reported that she had a bad friend group from which she needed to separate, so moving back home during the pandemic had that as a positive aspect.  I am out my element on student life issues to make recommendations there.  I will content myself to note that I experienced depression both in high school and in college and ended up transferring from MIT to Cornell, because I recognized what I was feeling at MIT was like what I had felt in high school and I needed to be in a different environment that wouldn't trigger those feelings.  

But beyond that I couldn't identify in advance what environment would provide good mental health for students in a way that they'd both enjoy it and find it nurtured their own development.  From a different perspective, it is not that long ago that Illinois was named the #1 Party School by Princeton Review and that many students, certainly once they've turned 21 but perhaps even when they are younger, view college as their last hurrah before entering the world of work.  Their mindset is to have as much fun as possible while they still can.  I don't begrudge anyone having a good time once in a while.  But as the main avocation it is apt to produce a very hedonistic and possibly nihilistic outlook, which I don't think is healthy.  In other words, some balance is called for.  How to achieve that balance, however, I will leave for others to determine. 

Let's now turn to the academic issues, regarding which I have more expertise.  The instrumental approach to classes coupled with only surface learning in every class can be a source of alienation, which in turn can lead to anxiety and depression.  I will add here that many students at big public universities get the sense that nobody cares about them.  That too can foster these negative feelings.  

My most recent "project" is the Non-Course, based on the idea that students must take control over their own learning.  They would do this to please themselves, not to please others.  And they would do this by developing the reading habit and learning to think critically about what they have read.  They would do this on their own or, if they prefer, with the coaching of instructors like me, who will react to their formative ideas with suggestions about how to think more deeply about what they are reading.   The Non-Course especially makes sense to me now, when so much formal instruction is online and good jobs post graduation are still quite uncertain.  Taking time off from school makes sense to me for those reasons.  But even if a student doesn't take a gap year or gap semester, they may have much idle time if they are conforming to all the social distancing guidelines.  The Non-Course would make sense for those students as well. 

Yet so far the Non-Course is a concept only.  I've gotten no students to try it.  I did try to recruit students from that fall 2019 class, but they weren't responsive to my query on this.  It occurred to me that I need assistance from friends and colleagues to make this a reality.  I've initiated conversations of this sort but it has been very awkward.  And there is a basic factor that may make it impossible to elicit such help.  I've conceived of the Non-Course as happening outside the auspices of any university, particularly because I felt it essential that students shouldn't pay tuition nor get course credit for the work they do in the Non-Course.  Without the usual trappings, there is no reason to be instrumental about the learning. But any colleague who might offer help to me will be at a university and will need somehow to internalize the ideas here, to make them a realistic possibility.   Perhaps other retirees would be able to provide assistance.  But why should they?  As my former student asked, wouldn't they just be enjoying life?

As long as the pandemic is impacting how undergraduate education occurs, it will be the driver, with other factors playing at most a secondary role.  My powers at prognostication are weak, at best.  But my guess now is that fall 2022 will mark a return to normal, with fall 2021 a hybrid between full pandemic mode and normal mode of instruction. Assuming that's right for the sake of argument, the question is how prominent will student mental health be as an issue on campus?  Let's say it is even more prominent than it was in fall 2019.   Now there is a reason for other faculty on campus to explore both high touch teaching and Non-Course ideas, the former to get some insight into the academic causes of the student anxiety and depression, while the latter as a possible way to address those issues.  

I feel like a runner in a long relay race.  I'm ready to pass the baton now.  My mind will always want to theorize about some social issue.  That's the way I'm designed.  But translating the theory into practice is much harder and I'm afraid it is beyond me now.  So I hope I can find someone to take up the baton.  And if not that, then I hope my theorizing serves as a catalyst for others in their own theorizing and implementation to address these issues.

The Burst of a Bubble

This has been a very odd season to be a sports fan.  Investing oneself in your favorite team is something normal to do.  But this time around it seemed so much more urgent.  Everything else, especially Covid and our national politics, but then all those other activities that have been influenced by those two, has made people either want to crawl into a hole or work themselves into a furious rage. Watching sports and rooting for your favorite team then took on an added burden for many fans.  It was more than just a source of entertainment.  It was salvation from everything else that seemed so dismal.  And it could be done safely, watching TV from your living room, then perhaps going on the Internet and gobbling up all the post game information and gossip. 

You have to wonder whether those who promote pro and college sports understood this enough to deliberately hype things, as a way of intensifying the fans emotions about their favorite team. Since I'm an economist by training as well as a long time Illinois fan, it occurred to me during the shellacking that Loyola gave to Illinois yesterday, which followed Ohio State and Purdue each losing in the round of 64, other Big Ten teams that were favored in their respective games, that the moniker - best conference in the country - which the Big Ten claimed and repeated over and over again, was just like an overinflated asset, which happens when there is a bubble.  Eventually the bubble bursts and the asset price falls dramatically thereafter. The NCAA Tournament games seemingly put the lie to the assertion that the Big Ten was the best conference.  This was especially true for Illinois, which many who filled out brackets had reaching the Championship game, and quite a few of them thought Illinois would win it all.  In retrospect, how could that be?

Ironically, in my previous post I wrote that once the conference season starts we no longer get performance comparisons of teams across conferences.  Those teams that improve a lot may then go under the radar. But I was mistakenly arrogant in writing that post.  I thought Illinois was such a team and I was making an argument for why it might be better than Gonzaga, the overall #1 seed. I didn't consider less hyped teams that might have improved in this way, or teams in a major conference that played their conference season like major league baseball teams play spring training, but then turn up the heat during the NCAA Tournament.  That too is possible.  Indeed, seeing the outcomes from yesterday, it appears more likely that is what happened.  But I should caution about something I learned from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.  In small samples, outlier outcomes are not all that unlikely.  Since the NCAA Tournament is one and done, we don't see the repeat experiment of the same teams matched up, the way they are in the NBA playoffs.  I don't want to critique the one and done aspect.  It adds to the excitement for everyone.  But it does make for less confidence in the outcome as a determinant of the better team.  Everyone can have a bad day, even the best of teams. Best out of five does a better job in reducing the role of luck.  Best out of seven is even better that way.  

My previous post also talked about the issue of match ups.  Loyola plays Oregon State in the Sweet Sixteen.  It might be that Illinois is more likely to beat Oregon State than Loyola is, yet Loyola is more likely to beat Illinois.  I don't know this for a fact, but it is possible.  I'll have more to say about this particular issue below.  

For the rest of this post, I want to focus specifically on Illinois, partly because that's the team I've watched and so have a bunch of questions about them, and partly to illustrate how a bubble might form in evaluating a team (or a conference) well above its true ability.  

1.  Was Illinois exceedingly nervous before the game with Loyola began?

There was a camera shot of Kofi Cockburn during the warm up.  He looked grim.  He normally is smiling then and joking with his teammates.  This time around that wasn't happening.  I didn't see other players in the warmup regarding their facial expressions and/or I don't have a firm impression about how they normally would look.  But I did take note of Kofi.  Was it just him or the whole team?  And, if it was the whole time, why was that?  I read some newspaper pieces that suggested it was the whole team - Illinois had lost the game before it started and that was confirmed in the first 3 minutes.  

It may be difficult to learn about this soon.  I can imagine Brad Underwood and the rest of the coaching staff having a rule (for the entire season, not just this game) that what's said in the locker room stays in the locker room.  Yet for having a long term relationship with the fans that doesn't turn sour, something about this needs true comments from the coaches and maybe also from the players.  This doesn't have to happen immediately, but should not be too long in the offing after the Final Four. 

2.  Illinois is strictly a man to man team these days.  Why is that?

In particular, why not a 1-3-1 zone, so Kofi can stay near the basket always, even with a big man who is a good passer (Krutwig of Loyola) and/or a big man who can shoot the three (Garza of Iowa, Hunter Dickinson of Michigan, and perhaps others in the Big Ten).  Further, a zone makes it easier for there to be weak side help on a play in the paint.  Loyola repeatedly ran a curl around Krutwig.  The Illinois defender would be lagging on the play, giving an easy lane to the basket for what looked like a backdoor play.   Then too, for teams that space the floor offensively, a zone allows more opportunity to trap and double team.   There is the old idea that goes back to Vince Lombardi and maybe is even older than that, which is to have a basic mode of operation and then do that very very well through repeated practice.  It's one approach.  The team doesn't adjust to the situation.  The team imposes their will on the other team.  If you're the Green Bay Packers in the glory days, fine.  But if you're good yet not truly great, why not make situational adjustments, which require more than one defensive approach in the arsenal?

I know there are some arguments against a zone.  If the opponent has several good three-point shooters, the zone will likely give them better looks.  And it may be that the type of man to man that Brad Underwood teaches his players makes them more aggressive defensively, yet without fouling (so much).  But I felt in the Loyola game we should have played it, or at least have the weak side defenders help out on the curl so that the back door play wasn't there.  We never did that and as a viewer I found that disappointing.  

3. I'm a big fan of Ayo as all Illini fans are, yet he does have some weaknesses.  Those are never talked about.  Why is that?

Ayo is loosey-goosey on the dribble and sometimes turns it over as a consequence.  He has a well known predilection for going right.  When he's double teamed and one of the defenders block his path to the right, he is more vulnerable to turnovers.  We saw this earlier in the season when we lost to Ohio State.  Ayo made some adjustments after that, to dribble left before going right or to dribble left down the lane.  It seemed that Loyola modified the defensive approach by having the double team start closer to mid court.  This gets to the next point.

Ayo is sometimes loosey-goosey on the pass as well. When he passes to the wing so a teammate can shoot a three-pointer, the passes are strong and hard.  But when he is setting up an alley-oop play, he floats the ball very softly and is sometimes off the mark.  I didn't chart this precisely, but when Loyola trapped Ayo, he tried to get out of it with the dribble, not with a pass.  That Loyola trapped Ayo meant that some other Illinois player was open.  But Ayo didn't find the open man.  I conjecture that he is very good at passing to wing players when he is driving the lane, familiar territory for him, but he is much less comfortable making such a long pass from elsewhere on the court, or so it seemed. 

Ayo has taken the team on his back and won ballgames for Illinois by doing that.  His level of play would rise near the end of the game.  Then he'd go into superhero mode.  In the Loyola game, it seemed he was trying to take the team on his back after only a few minutes, when Illinois had fallen behind by a score of 9 to 2.  It may have been better for him to share this burden with some of his teammates rather than assume it all himself.  Did he understand that himself?

I thought Adam Miller seemed comfortable and relaxed, especially after he made a couple of three pointers.  He was the only Illinois guard who seemed that way. Maybe he should have gotten more responsibility with the ball, rather than always setting up on the wing.  As it was, Ayo would walk the ball up the court - Illinois couldn't fast break - and that looked grim.  Sometimes grim determination is needed to get beyond an obstacle.  In this case, however, I'd have liked Illinois to try something else.  Punching Adam Miller's ticket in this game made sense to me, either by him bringing up the ball or by Ayo passing to him after Ayo could see the trap coming.  I believe this even if in previous games in the Big Ten Tournament Adam Miller seemed somewhat out of control at times. 

Let me speculate a moment about Ayo's future. There has been a lot of hype about him being ready for the NBA.  Does a player's stock in the draft drop based on one poor performance?  If it turned out that the injury he suffered was still bothering him more than anyone outside of the team knew, that all the hype about the mask would have been a useful diversion, and that given some rest Ayo can return to full health, then I think Ayo's performance against Loyola can be disregarded.   But if Ayo was in near full health in that game, the mask notwithstanding, then the NBA teams might be wary of drafting him, for fear that his weaknesses would get even more exploited in the NBA.   

On the other hand, since I'm a big adherent of learning via deliberate practice, can Ayo get the right sort of practice that he needs to improve on these weaknesses by staying in college?  I doubt it.  There aren't enough other teams that can trap effectively and/or pick up the Illini at mid court.  There is something called the NBA G League, which is the NBA's minor league for player development.  I would think that might be where Ayo ends up next.   An alternative is to play overseas.  But he'd be away from his family then and with Covid, that might seem too much of discontinuity now.  I'll add one last thing here.  ESPN had a column where several commentators wrote about the Big Ten's poor performance in the Tournament, after the fact.  One of them explained that the talent level overall is really not that high.  Big Ten schools don't recruit players for just one year of play and then off to the NBA.  Many of the very top players want to go that route.   If the conference overall has been overrated, that factor may be missed.  It's something to consider.

4. The role of the media.  Do they simply report the sports news or are they "experts" whose opinion tends to be spot on?  If they are experts, how did they miss this one?

Before getting to TV, let me make a quick mention about the News-Gazette, the local newspaper in Champaign-Urbana. Simply measured by number of pages devoted to the Illini basketball team and featuring individual player pages with huge photos of them, the News-Gazette has really hyped the team, well beyond their normal coverage.  And, since the team itself set its goal to win the NCAA Championship, the paper plugged that as well.  

As to TV, last week before the tournament started, MSNBC had a segment of their Morning Joe show where the guest was Jay Bilas, the college basketball guru.  He appeared along with their regular news commentators.  In talking about Illinois, while there had already been a lot of hype about Ayo's mask, and what it should be called, Bilas pulled a new one (at least for me). He referred to Ayo as Batman (DC Comics), others had also done that, and to Kofi as the Incredible Hulk (Marvel Comics), I hadn't heard that one before.  With both Batman and the Incredible Hulk, how could Illinois lose?

Ditto all the commentators who along with the play by play guy call the games.  Everyone I've listened to all season long (please retire Dick Vitale, you too Dan Dakich, since both of you give more parenthetic remarks than provide insights into what is happening in the game) have been extremely high on Illinois.  There has not been an inkling from them about weaknesses the Illini have, until yesterday.  Does this sort of thing expose them as mouth pieces only, not real experts?  

A more cynical view would take account of sports betting, which has been in the news a lot recently in regard to college basketball.  Do those who bet seriously listen to the commentators?  Do the commentators themselves bet on games, including games they call.  The ultimate cynicism would be about the possibility where the commentator bets one way and yet on TV influences the fans to take the opposite position, so the commentator can get better odds.  I hope that's not happening.  I prefer them being somewhat clueless to being very savvy while highly manipulative. 

Wrap Up

Was Illinois a really good team that just had a bad day yesterday? Or did all the Illini fans get caught up in the confirmation bias about how great the team was, so simply weren't prepared that they were good but not great and might lose to other teams aside from the #1 seeds?  I don't know.  I hope at some point in the not too distant future we learn which of those is right.

In the meantime, I've now got to decide whether I'll watch more of the Tournament.  There are still 3 Big Ten teams left.  Let's see if any of them can stick around for a while longer.

College Basketball - Rankings, Brackets, Subjective Probabilities and Not Enough Data

Like many fans of Illinois, including some non-true ones like me who haven't watched for many years, I've become taken with this year's team.  Not only would I watch the game, but during the Big Ten Tournament I'd go online and look for what is made available about the game once it was over.  I discovered after game press conferences held in Zoom, with coaches and players from each team.  I actually found that listening to the opposing coach was more informative - I already knew a lot about the Illini without hearing it from the players and coaches, though that was entertaining too.  The bit from the coaches of the other team that caught my attention was how much they talked about the players learning, even at this late stage of the season, so that their performance would improve and their team would get better.  The expectation of such learning seemed paramount.  And this was from coaches of teams that would make the NCAA tournament.  Indeed, Iowa and Ohio State were each given a 2 seed in their respective brackets.  How much better can they get?

Unlike just about every other fan, I engage in math modeling of social/political/economic situations.  It's what I learned to do in graduate school and later as a faculty member, when my research was in economic theory. Somewhat surprising to me at the time, I continued to do this when I switched careers and became an administrator in educational technology.  There were some obvious changes with the career switch.  I no longer tried to publish these models.  And for the most part they were remarkably simple, much more so than the models I did try to publish earlier in my career.  The simplicity helped in communicating the ideas to others who weren't versed in modeling of this sort.  And they helped me enormously in supporting my thinking.  Indeed, often I would generate such a model with no apparent effort whatsoever.  

I'm going to do something similar here - no math, just a talkie discussion of the modeling issues.  I hope that anybody else who reads this gets the gist of what I'm saying, which is based on listening to those coaches talking about player and team learning.

Let's talk a little about inference via chains of connection. A plays B (and some outcome is determined).  Then B plays C (another outcome).   And C plays D (still another outcome).  At this point some inference can be made between A and D, which of them is better or are they approximately equal.  This happens even though A never played D.   Chain inferences of this sort underlie the ratings. 

The regular season is broken up into two main components.  The first is the preseason, with about 1/3 of the total number of regular season games.  Preseason games form chains among all the teams within Division 1. (With Google I learned that there are 350 teams in Division 1 and 7 more that are transitioning from Division 2.)  The remaining 2/3 of the games are played within a Conference in which the school is a member.  (There are 7 Independents.  I believe there used to be many more, but it then became difficult to schedule games with other schools in a Conference during the Conference season.)  There are roughly 30 games in the entire season and then the postseason begins with the Conference Tournament.  Once the Conference Season starts, we get a lot of information about how Conference teams compare with one another, but we no longer get fresh information about how they compare with out of Conference teams, until the NCAA Tournament is played. 

Regarding the outcome of any particular game, apart from which team wins, I would break the outcomes into three categories: 1) nail-biter,  2) convincing win, and 3) blowout.   I'm not going to try to come up with formal ways to differentiate these but among the things I look at instinctively are: a) score at the 2:00 minute mark compared with final score, b) when the subs who otherwise don't play much get put into the game, and c) body language of the opposing team late in the game.  My view is that these categories serve as a useful summary of the outcome. 

With this background, let's get to the model.  Every team is characterized by its quality, q, a vertical parameter.  When two teams play, the one with the higher value of q is more likely to win.  It's the difference in the quality parameters across the teams that determines the distribution over outcomes.  This is an abstract characterization.  Let's consider what it rules out.  For one, home team advantage is not considered.  In a non-Covid season, home team advantage clearly matters, the fans spur the players on and the refs sometimes get caught up in that. I don't disagree but it's not in the model, because if it were that would complicate things and we want to keep things simple.  Another factor that is sometimes mentioned is matchup - a team plays well against man-to-man defense but struggles against the zone, then the type of defense the opponent plays matters for the outcome. That too is not included, again to keep things simple.  

One other point to consider is to translate the rankings into the quality of teams.   The rankings are ordinal.  Number 1 is the best, but might number 2 be very close or not?  The rankings would be the same either way.  So these quality parameters have more information in them than the rankings do.  The quality parameters give a cardinal ranking in that differences in quality do matter. 

Returning to the model, the quality parameter evolves over the course of the season.  Teams get better via the learning the coaches describe.  There may be reasons for quality to drop, which we should consider as well. One obvious reason is for there to be a significant injury to a key player on the team.  Another might be attitudinal.  If a team is on a losing streak because of the luck of a the draw in the scheduling as well as other random factors, it might lose some if its competitive edge.  (I'm writing this after reading about Indiana and Minnesota in the Big Ten firing their coaches.  For players who are not graduating this year, the prospect of a new coach may be daunting.  While the firings happened after the end of the season for those teams, if the players anticipate that possibility earlier it could impact their play.)

Now the key point.  The learning effect which says that quality will grow may be different from team to team.  To make progress here, let's focus on the conference season.  Then we might might break the overall learning effect for a team into a conference growth component, common to all teams in the same conference and a team idiosyncratic effect.  The latter average out to zero so that in aggregate the learning of the teams in the conference happens at the conference rate.  Those rates may differ from one conference to another. 

Now we'll take another step back.  If one team has very high quality and it is playing another team of mediocre quality,  the first team might learn a lot from a loss or a nail-biter win, the proverbial wake up call, but there is little to no learning from a convincing win or a blowout of the other team.  So at the team level, growth will be higher on average when even the weaker teams in the conference have a decent chance at winning and where most games are reasonably close.  

Now let's consider individual player growth.  Much of this happens from one season to the next, where the player works on his game during the off season.  This sort of thing happens at any level.  But for a freshman who gets a fair amount of playing time, the adjustment from high school basketball to college basketball is huge.  Such players might grow the most during their first season, although not all of them will rise to the occasion.  Transfer students might be next on the list.  They played under one system at their old school and then have to adjust to the new system and their role on it.  Then there is the situation where a key player goes down with a severe injury and the roles of others on the team must change as a consequence. This can produce a lot of learning, both by the players and by the coaching staff, which hasn't seen the players perform in their new roles.  This gives some reason why the rate of team learning may depart from the average for the conference. 

Of course there is another reason this year.  Covid has knocked many teams off their ordinary rhythms.  With some players testing positive and teams having to quarantine, so unable to practice and engage in ordinary team camaraderie outside of practice, that surely made for a setback for those teams who have gone through it.  Afterwards, could they eventually return to the level of play they had achieved before?  Who knows?

I'm going to try to wrap up now with two observations about this year's tournament.  What quality does Gonzaga have? It is undefeated and the number 1 seed overall.  That is agreed upon.  But does it have the highest quality? Or might Illinois, which was good but not great last December, have passed Gonzaga in quality because the Big Ten Conference produced a lot more team learning, and Illinois had the right mix of freshman, transfers and upperclassman to have a very high learning rate.  In particular, the blowout loss to Michigan State, where Ayo Dosunmu had a concussion and his nose was broken, might have jump started team learning for all the other Illini players regarding all in effort on defense and a raised efficacy on offense.  As an enthusiastic fan, I watched this performance.  I want it to be true that Illinois now has the highest q, no doubt. But on what evidence could I make that determination?  Indeed, I just looked through Gonzaga's season record.  While they had some good early wins, many of their preseason games were cancelled due to Covid, including a game against Baylor.  They did have a close win against West Virginia in December, where in the first half they fell behind. And West Virginia played Baylor in the the Big 12, losing a hear breaker.  The Illini lost to Baylor in a game that was close in the first half but then Baylor took control.  On this chain connection, one might infer that Gonzaga is the best team, so has the highest q.  But the Illini in early December are nowhere near as good as the Illini who just won the Big Ten Tournament.  What about a chain connection now to make a proper comparison?  Alas, there isn't one. 

Now let me turn to the brackets.  The NCAA Committee that determines each bracket and the seedings within doesn't go full seedings of all the teams in the tournament.  When there was a real pod system, particularly for the round of 64 and round of 32 games, with those sites distributed geographically around the country, it made sense for teams to play within driving distance of their home campus, if at all possible.  This would encourage fans of the team to attend the Tournament.  That is but one factor where the brackets would be jiggled to accommodate fan interest.  It also seems that the committee would encourage possible matchups that the fans seem to want but the schools are reluctant to schedule.  In the Tournament that starts this week, it is possible for Illinois to meet Loyola of Chicago in the round of 32.  That's one such example of such a fan interest game.  

A different one is in the top seeds.  The Big Ten has four teams in the top eight.  Illinois and Michigan are #1 seeds in their respective brackets.  Iowa and Ohio State are #2 in their brackets.  None of these teams are in the same bracket.  So it is possible, if incredibly unlikely, for all of them to make the Elite Eight and, if each of them wins there, for the Final Four to be an all Big Ten affair. As I said, this took some jiggling of the overall seeds.  The Big Ten already has an advantage with the location of the Tournament this year.  Indianapolis is approximately at the geographic center of the entire Big Ten.  More broadly the state of Indiana plays that role. And the Big Ten Tournament was played in the same venue where they'll host the Final Four.  Why do this other thing as well?  I can only guess that the Committee wanted to give fans something else to think about.  If all the top seeds make it through to the Sweet Sixteen, I'm sure it will get more than a mention. 

I do not bet on the games.  I think if I did it would detract from my own interest as a fan.  But it's clear that many other people do bet.  Based on the betting, Gonzaga is the overwhelming favorite.  Do those people who are betting on Gonzaga know something about what's going on that I don't?  Or are they caught up in the undefeated season narrative, which might not have in itself much to bear as to how the Tournament turns out.  I do recall back in 2005 that the Illinois team was undefeated till the last game of the regular season, where it lost to Ohio State.  As a fan, that was disheartening.  But it might very well have been a blessing in disguise, with the unbeaten streak something of a burden to maintain.  That team did make it to the NCAA Championship game.  I surely don't know how Gonzaga is handling things now.  After the Tournament is over I'd be interested in reading stories about that, but until then it's just another thing to speculate about.

That's why they play the games.  I'm chomping at the bit for the tournament to start.

Hearing The Other Side - A Pre-Proposal

I have been thinking back to the days in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before cable TV, when there were a limited number of stations we got over the air. The TV news was also more limited then, regarding time of day.  There was a half hour for national news with either Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, or Howard K. Smith. And there was a half hour of local news.  That was it.  These offerings were pretty homogeneous.  Newspapers did differ some by their political outlook.  The Daily News was more Conservative than the New York Times, yet by today's standards there was a substantial overlap in their news coverage. 

The biggest issue of the day was the Vietnam War, and it is this source to which I first associate the charge - Liberal bias in the press.  Recall Spiro Agnew's famous line - nattering nabobs of negativism.  (This piece says the line refers to other politicians, not to the press.) With hindsight being 20-20, it seems evident that those in power supporting America's involvement in Vietnam would cast aspersions against those who were against the war, so as to detract from the question whether the war itself made any sense and was une cause juste (it wasn't).  During my time in graduate school, which overlapped substantially with the Carter Presidency, I hardly watched any TV news (for the first two years I didn't have a TV) and mainly just read the New York Times.  But when I came to Illinois, near the start of the Reagan Years, it became clear that the Liberal bias in the press charge had returned, more due to the culture wars than to foreign policy, and the charge escalated until the time, first, of Conservative talk radio, particularly Rush Limbaugh, and then later, the advent of Fox News.  By then, the liberal bias charge no longer had currency, because Conservatives had their own outlets to get the news.

As a consumer of the news, for many years I was a regular viewer of the PBS NewsHour.  I watched it, in part, because it did strive to have balance in its coverage. Then, around the time that Jim Lehrer retired, I became frustrated with the show.  This coincided, more or less with the rise of the Tea Party.  To attempt balance in the show, there would always be an interview with both a Democrat and a Republican. While the person on the Democrat side was usually forthcoming, the Republican stonewalled.  That was typical.  It was usually Judy Woodruff doing the interviewing and even she seemed frustrated by it.  As a viewer, I wanted her to be more aggressive in the questioning.  But it seemed fairness prevented her from doing that.  After a while, I stopped watching and more or less gave up on TV News (the Internet had eliminated the need to watch the local News).  

I must not have been the only person in this situation, as the Aaron Sorkin vehicle, The NewsRoom, came out soon thereafter.  I don't want to comment on the show other than to note that one of the main characters, Will McAvoy, the anchor for the prime time news broadcast, was previously a prosecutor.  This seems to be the "solution" to the recalcitrant guest on the news show who wants to stonewall, but doesn't want to be embarrassed by the interviewer.  Of course, for commercial news, where the obligation for fairness in coverage may not be so strong, one can bias the selection of guests to those who are likely to be forthcoming and can be questioned without being interrogated.  

The upshot of this, I'm afraid, is that the division between News and Opinion, which newspapers still try to observe, seems to vanish on the current TV News shows.  Further, and this is getting to the reason for writing the current post, the expression of opinion as if it were news mainly is preaching to the choir.  There rarely, if ever, is contrary opinion expressed to give the viewer a fundamentally different perspective.  We've become a society where confirmation bias inhibits our ability to learn tough truths and see things they way others who disagree with us see them. 

Is there anything that can be done about that? 

* * * * * 

The following pre-proposal may be wishful thinking, but I hope you will read it through before rendering your own verdict.  The core idea is that Fox News and MSNBC do a joint venture, televised debates between their commentators (if you recall Shana Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick debating on 60 Minutes, that's in the ballpark of what's intended here) to be aired once a week at a mutually agreed time.  Why would they agree to do this?   I'm going to answer this question with another.  Is there a way to do this in such a way that the total number of viewers would rise as a consequence?

In reflecting on this second question for a while, I convinced myself that it would be pretty easy to attract those who currently watch neither Fox News nor MSNBC.  The novelty of programming of this sort should do that, at least at first.  But I had a harder time convincing myself that loyal viewers of one of these channels would watch such a debate.  I spent some time scratching my head about this and then came up with the following structure, which I hope the reader will find novel. 

Each session would be broken into three segments.  The second segment is closed mike - while one side is speaking the other side has their microphone turned off.  They take turns with this in some fixed time chunk (one minute, 90 seconds, two minutes, etc.) which needs to be determined.  The third segment is open mike and, I would hope, produces good back and forth between the participants.  In both of these segments, there are rules of decorum agreed upon, e.g., no ad hominem attacks, and there is a moderator who monitors adherence to the rules.  Violations need some form of punishment (probably in the form of shutting down the person's mike for a certain amount of time).  In any event, the second and third segments are meant to be like debates that people have watched in the past. 

It is what happens before the show and during the first segment where there is novelty to the approach.  About a week before the show one of the networks chooses the topic for that week's debate.  The other network then gets to produce a video that will be replayed in segment one of the show.  The video will be the prior perception of the highlights of the debate argument from the network that proposed the topic.  To make this concrete.  Suppose Fox News proposes the topic, they choose Tucker Carlson as their debater, while MSNBC chooses Rachel Maddow. Then the video that will be made features Rachel Maddow making the arguments that she (and her team) think Tucker Carlson will make during the debate.   If you are prepping for a debate you surely go through dress rehearsals of what the other side will argue.  This is making that dress rehearsal seemingly open to the public.  

Now, this first stage video changes the game.  It's no longer simply about the topic to be debated.  Now it's also about what one side believes the other thinks on this topic.  Does the subsequent debate show those beliefs are well grounded?  Or are there elements of delusion?  The audience now has a compelling interest to watch the show to find out which it is.  

I asked myself, could leaks of the video before the show aired be prevented? I assumed that wasn't possible, but I want to note the following.  If the other side hasn't seen the video till the show airs, then there is an added pressure on the debater.  It's not just to make the usual debating points.  It's also to show that the other side doesn't get it as to why we hold our views.  If Rachel Maddow's video is released a few days early, Tucker Carlson and his team have a better chance of finding the holes in the argument.  Knowing this, and assuming that each station wants to win the debate, which seems a reasonable assumption, there is reason to keep the video recording under wraps. 

Depending on the choice of topic and how the video is made, in any one show it may seem one station has the advantage over the other.  Fairness within a show may then be a tough nut to crack.  Fairness across shows, however, should happen by having the roles rotate from one week to the next.  

I want to note that if this works it will help Liberals understand how Conservatives think and vice versa, not just on an issue by issue basis, but on a worldview that informs consideration of the individual issues.  

The two networks could do this as an experiment, say for 3 months, with penalties for pulling out early written into the contract but with no obligation to extend the experiment beyond that.  Presumably contract renewal would indicate success, as would expansion of the format to other time slots, as well as other news organizations trying something similar.