Lanny on Learning Technology

Can incentives lead to lower costs in higher ed?

2012-01-30T14:17:00.000-06:00

Below is an excerpt from a piece in Inside Higher Ed on Obama Administration efforts to encourage colleges to contain cost and admit more low income students. Good luck to them.

These efforts might work at colleges where most instructors and high level administrators have little job mobility. Then, if there are productivity gains to be had, tuition might sensibly be held in check. But at a place like the U of I, I believe such efforts will do little or nothing. The revenue amounts in these programs won't be sufficient to make people change what they're doing. More to the point, the real drivers of cost increase are not linked closely to these grant programs. I believe what is necessary is to take take on those drivers more directly.

Eighteen months ago I wrote a post about salary caps in Higher Ed. It's the competition for star faculty that is largely responsible for the hyperinflation. We need to weaken that competition. An individual institution can't do it on its own. The entire system needs to get together on this.

Obama higher education plan signals policy shift | Inside Higher Ed via kwout

Is reason taking a beating?

2012-01-27T12:27:00.002-06:00

Last night I watched the latest episode of Real Sports on HBO. They had a segment in the spirit of Moneyball called Between the Numbers. It was about a high school football coach in Arkansas at a private school, Pulaski Academy, who based on looking at data has abandoned punting the ball on fourth down. Further after his team scores a touchdown, they always go for an onside kick. In a recent playoff game they scored 29 points before the other team got possession of the ball!

During this segment they also had a bit with a University of Chicago economist doing Freakonomics work (it wasn't Steven Levitt). He said that in the pros, going for it on fourth down made sense when the ball was between the two forty yard line markers, even if it was fourth and eight. Coaches almost always punt in this case unless it is very late in the game or if they only have a yard to go. Punting is sub-optimal in this case.

They had a different segment, this one with Sean Payton, who is famous for going for the onside kick when the Saints were in the Super Bowl. Payton said, the pros were a lot different than high school. Agreed. But surely, Payton goes by the numbers, doesn't he? Not according to this segment. Payton goes with his gut. And the gut is too cautious in most cases.

Back to high school. One idea that seems to make sense for the opposing teams that Pulaski Academy plays, is that the player are sufficiently immature and inexperienced that they will wilt under pressure. So Pulaski's strategy seems geared at putting pressure on the other team and taking pressure off its team. They don't field punts, because a muff or a fumble appear too likely.

Given the recent success of Pulaski Academy, you might think that coaches at other schools would also embrace the approach. Know how many have done so? None.

* * * * *

On the NewsHour yesterday the concluding segment was an interview with Thomas Edsall, who had been a journalist and is now on the faculty at Columbia University. He has a new book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics. The thesis is that at present and in the future politics will be about playing a zero-sum game (possibly a negative-sum game). Republicans/Conservatives are disposed to play this game better than Democrats/Liberals. The former don't care so much about the overall, in particular whether there are losers, so long as they are winners. The latter do care about the overall and about fairness.

In an economy that is growing, the Democrat/Liberal approach can work. But in a zero sum world, there will be losers. If they proceed as if it is otherwise, it will be they who are the losers. President Obama seems to have learned this lesson, but only painfully and after several attempts at bipartisan solutions that went nowhere.

Once it is acknowledged that it is perfectly acceptable to fight rather than negotiate, then demagoguery becomes an acceptable tactic and paying attention to facts more a burden than an obligation. Among the current candidates for President, Newt Gingrich is the master of demagoguery. He appears to be in a dead heat with Romney and his supporters are far more exuberant.

* * * * *

I don't know what the politics of Phil Knight are. Knight is the CEO and co-founder of Nike. He is also a Penn State alumnus and he spoke at the Memorial Service for Joe Paterno, getting a standing ovation from the crowd for saying that Paterno had done the right thing in the Sandusky matter and that the blame lay elsewhere. What Knight shares with Gingrich is not politics, but rather knowing how to rouse an angry audience.

* * * * *

In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view. Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence. The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it. The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under. With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position. It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed. Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter. When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view. A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural. There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective. There is leadership in helping students make the transition.

One might hope that having had such a lesson in college adults would then be open to the possibility that their perspective needs to change when the evidence implies a contradiction with a prior held view. Instead, it seems, for many of us our beliefs harden and evidence to the contrary gets ignored. Leadership has taken a holiday. Pandering becomes the order of the day.

Some markets perhaps shouldn't exist

2012-01-25T14:03:00.000-06:00

I'm uncomfortable putting the term "market maker" to what bookies do, but I suppose that is their function. I'm also not too happy that fans express their team loyalty by betting on the team. I've got no problem with a neighborly office pool as more social activity than anything else. But in this piece they're talking about big payouts because of very high odds and a high volume of transactions. I don't quite understand why the bookies are exposed this way, but it seems to me other possible shenanigans can readily result as a consequence of such a market.

Google Apps For Education And Blogger

2012-01-23T07:55:00.001-06:00

Some technology is hard to test in advance, especially when it is "outside" what the Campus supports. Going into this semester, I "thought" that while Blogger wasn't part of the Google Apps set of applications, students could access Blogger using their Campus Gmail address. I thought I read that somewhere a couple of years ago. (Who knows if I read it or not? Memory and wishing it were so have merged so much for me at this point.) But in a quick search for this today, I found this from Helen Barrett of ePortfolio fame, which conveys to me that the same login and password for Google Apps should work for Blogger.

I'm requiring that my students blog this semester. And I suggested that they use Blogger, though I did offer the alternative that the students use the class Moodle site so only class members get to see the posts. One student opted for that. A different student said that Blogger would not accept their Campus login and password, though the student can access Gmail that way. I will have to verify that. If it is really true, it is a limitation in using Google Apps for instruction.

I've been told that the contract with Google allows for faculty access of Google Apps, but given the big push here on Unified Communications, the Campus has not yet rolled out the service, so I can't test this myself. However, even if it did I wonder if it still would be better to use my own Gmail account. I don't know, for example, whether the Campus account remains active even when I'm not teaching for them. And while I've got not intentions at present to teach elsewhere, the possibility exists. My prof.arvan account has YouTube and Google Docs content that could readily be used for instruction elsewhere. People around the globe access that content now.

On Campus media specialists want instructors to use Campus supported applications for branding reasons. There is some point to that view. But lots of instructors are adjuncts and there are also faculty without tenure who might end up at another university in the not too distant future. How would they best be served? If they used a Campus Google Apps account, can they readily port the content if necessary to do so?

Blogger does integrate completely with regular Gmail accounts. So from the instructor's point of view it is unclear to me what the advantage is in teaching using the Campus account. I do see the advantage in student's using this account - particularly so that instructors know who they are. The Campus provides students with a NetID that is unique at the Campus level. It need not be unique globally, however. A personal Gmail address that does not relate to the Campus NetID makes it harder for the instructor to identify the students. Many students have figured this out and have personal Gmail that clearly identifies them. It's a discretionary matter to them. In small classes, that's fine. In very large classes, however, where there can be a handful of outliers, that would create a nightmare.

I should also note that at the Campus level we never embraced ePortfolio applications, not because we were opposed to them at an intellectual level, but rather because it would have been an additional resource commitment, one we could ill afford. I don't know what the specialists in this area think now about blogs as ePortfolios, but students might come to this on their own if they were exposed to blogging in classes early on. It's something to ponder.

The Finance Guys Chasing the New Millionaires

2012-01-16T15:09:00.003-06:00

When I was in my late twenties I used Fidelity. I did have a financial adviser and didn't want one. Do these new techno-millionaires actually want the help? How will they determine whether it is worth it. I would guess that one or two folks who are both geek and financial wiz would write some apps and corner this market.

Wall Street Jostles to Help Silicon Valley Manage Newfound Wealth - NYTimes.com via kwout

Hail Mary

2012-01-15T19:22:00.000-06:00

This Giants fan is very happy. The way the first half ended, I was incredibly pumped. It's as if the Packers gave the Giants that touchdown, with their timeout call. I'm not sure what was up with that. The earlier onside kick was also more than a bit strange. But Eli to Hakeem Nicks at the end of the half was magical. The Giants still needed to score in the second half to secure the victory, but they were clearly in control.

The Pack had a large number of dropped balls and turned the ball over more times than one should have expected. For about 50 minutes, Rodgers played well enough to win, but the rest of the Packers did not. Then everything imploded on them.

I thought the Giants would play well in this game, but really didn't know if they'd win it. I have no read on next week's game with the 49ers. Somewhere during the third quarter when it started to look like the Giants would win, I had the premonition that it would again be the Giants and Patriots in the Super Bowl, but this time the Pats would win because the Giants won the regular season game. That's a weird way of thinking about causality and like most fans, getting too far ahead of events.

I just hope it's a good game next week.

A Conservative columnist writing for Liberal readers and spewing bunk

2012-01-15T13:55:00.000-06:00

I read Ross Douthat's column in the New York Times pretty regularly. He's usually thoughtful, which I appreciate, although I frequently find myself in disagreement with him, such as here. In this post I'm going to take him to task because in his most recent column, a snippet of which is below as is a link to the full piece, most of what he says is utter nonsense.

Devotees of Adam Smith might have a hard time seeing the conceptual problem. They equate the generation of private profit with the creation of social benefit. Most Conservatives revere Smith, and therein lies a big part of the problem, because this all seems tautological to them. One needs a different way to think about the issues, one where making private profit may lead to social good, but that is not a logical necessity. For that one needs to admit the possibility that private profit and social harm can co-exist.

In neoclassical economics, that is possible in the presence of negative externalities: pollution, global warming, that sort of thing. More recently Robert Frank has been writing about a Darwinian rather than Smithian approach to economic competition. The Darwinian approach admits the possibility of a mutation creating advantage for the individual and hence it is likely to propagate, while that same mutation is deleterious for the species.

One advantage of what Frank says is that when looking at individual actors we can focus on their own advantage as providing the motivation. In other words, private equity firms were motivated by the ability to make a buck. That was the goal. The goal wasn't to save American industry from increased global competition. Perhaps that was the consequence, but it certainly wasn't the goal. I hope Conservatives and Liberals alike can agree that the individual motive in Capitalism is profit.

Having separated the individual motive from the good of the system, one must look for systemic reasons as to why the behavior is beneficial (or pernicious). I'll advance several of those here.

Leveraged buyouts, which is what Private Equity firms such as Bain engage in, entail the embrace of certain risks. One argument for why they may be systematically beneficial is that the economy may not be taking sufficient risk. Risk averse individual players, even comparatively large firms, may go for the sure thing rather than take on additional risk. Because of limited liability, the leveraged buyout affords the possibility of greater embrace of opportunities that have a big potential upside. If each individual risk has a high expected return then in aggregate the taking on of more of such risk can lead to a big benefit socially.

However, the argument can also be made in reverse. This is done, for example, in John Cassidy's book How Markets Fail. Individual risks may have negative expected return, but via leverage the individuals taking the risk may be shielded from the downside. Investors who are shielded from the downside risk may indeed have a preference for highly risky investments. When this is the case it will be deleterious in aggregate, even when the risks are independent. If those risk are highly correlated, this can be the source of bubbles, the result of which can be catastrophic.

Let's turn to a different, but related argument, attributed to Clayton Christensen. In this argument, highly successful firms become too wedded to their existing product lines. Those products generate profit in the near term, but the products have limited shelf-life. Upstarts, that provide offerings which are considerably poorer in quality at present, compete by selling to a certain fringe of the market that wants cheap stuff. Over time the upstarts move down the learning curve and ultimately have product that is better in quality than the what the big guys provide, at which time they overtake the incumbents and become the dominant firms. Then the cycle repeats. There are some obvious examples that fit the bill. In 1980 IBM was clearly the dominant computer firm and Microsoft was an upstart. Before 1990, Microsoft had overtaken IBM. IBM was primarily in the mainframe business. Microsoft concentrated on software for the PC. In 1980 the PC was exotic. In 1990, it was ubiquitous.

The Christensen story is Darwinian in that many in 1980 couldn't predict the dominance of the PC ten years hence. The Christensen story is also about product market competition. That's where Schumpeterian "creative destruction" happens. If Douthat and other Conservatives, want to argue that leveraged buyouts were necessary (and remain necessary) into the future, they have to argue that somehow the product market type of creative destruction wasn't working well. A charitable reading of the Douthat column is that the product market version worked fine but the incumbents were all American firms while the upstarts were all foreign firms. So we needed a different version of upstart to keep the success domestically. That different version is via the financial capital market.

This is a very troublesome story. Note that in the Christensen story the upstarts can fail, and quite often they do fail. New small businesses exit at a very high rate. The upstarts succeed only when they get a toehold and then when they subsequently innovate faster than the incumbents. Nobody knows ahead of time that the upstarts will do this. And, near as I can tell, the private equity firms don't know either. What they do know, via the acquired firm's balance sheet, is that the incumbent is profitable, so there is money that can be taken out of the venture.

Let me turn to a third systematic issue, one I discussed in my critique of the movie Inside Job. That is to look at the indirect consequence of leveraged buyouts, which are to be found by looking at firms that are candidates to be acquired but that take defensive measures ahead of time to ward off acquisition. A priori, those defensive measures could be socially beneficial or they could be socially pernicious. It can go either way. In that other piece I argued that the consequences were mainly pernicious. The point is that hardly anybody can read a firm's balance sheet to understand its position in the medium term, let alone the long term. This puts enormous pressure on the near term, generating good current earnings and ensuring that extends for the the next few quarters. But that sort of myopia is deleterious to the long run health of the economy. Further, it encourages bubble-like thinking by making it appear that high growth rates are achievable.

Still a different way to consider the systematic impacts is from the vantage of the Engineer versus the MBA in determining the direction for corporate America. This tension clearly existed before LBOs came into existence. A very good read on this point is David Halberstam's book, The Reckoning. In his framing, company success can be measured (a) by how innovative it is or (b) by how healthy it's balance sheet looks. Viewed this way, the LBO can be conceived as a power shift from the internal Engineers to external MBAs. Again, this can be good or bad a priori. The good part is easy conceptually. Increasing the bottom line on the balance sheet makes things better. The bad part is harder conceptually. If the pernicious consequence is to be enabled as a possibility in our thinking, it must mean there are important aspects of what the firm does that either are not captured at all on the balance sheet or are horribly mismeasured on the balance sheet. The issues are illustrated nicely in Malcolm Gladwell's piece, Overdrive: Who Really Rescued General Motors.

Let me close by noting that David Brooks on the News Hour last Friday also concluded that private equity firms such as Bain have been good for the economy overall, even if in some instances the acquired firm has gone belly up. Here I wish thoughtful Conservatives would recognize that first, they have a tendency to reach this conclusion and second, they are likely doing this with Smith or Schumpeter arguments that don't prove anything. They have an opportunity now to make this debate much more informative because surely the attacks on Romney regarding Bain will persist and just as surely Conservatives want to defend Capitalism. Neither of these are sufficient in themselves to make the case. A more direct look at consequences is needed.

The Benefits of Bain Capitalism - NYTimes.com via kwout

Delivering an outlier great performance

2012-01-12T07:24:00.000-06:00

One thing that strikes you in seeing Brandon Paul do post-game interviews - he has his head screwed on right. Having the game of his career, he starts out talking about his early turnovers. They were dreadful. He had four in the first few minutes. That he could play in a truly divine state thereafter is a lesson. You have to take the bad with the good. Suppose you do that. What should you expect moving forward about future performance?

If the outlier great performance sets the norm for future play, Brandon Paul is the next incarnation of Michael Jordan. Supposedly, there were many NBA scouts in the stands for Tuesday's Illini-OSU game. They were there to look at other players. If Paul can replicate his performance yesterday, and do so with some regularity, he is a lottery pick, perhaps the number one choice in the draft. The scouts have to be thinking that too.

In one of the interviews I watched, Paul talked about forgetting entirely the last play, or the last game. It will have no direct impact on what's immediately ahead. To always be in the moment, and perform admirably on a consistent basis is something well beyond ordinary human capacity. Most of us can't do it. To always be in the moment and perform admirably on occasion is still remarkably high quality stuff. Staying in the moment instead of getting ahead of ourselves or waxing nostalgic is very had to do.

There is a question on a team of how much the individual should just blend in and how much he should assert himself. This question has been vexing for Paul. He clearly has the most athletic ability, evidenced by his vertical leaping. But he has been rather inconsistent. DJ Richardson has been the more consistent shooter. Sam Maniscalco is the only senior starter and the point guard. So both of them should be leaders on the team. Recently, Joseph Bertrand has produced outlier excellence. On that basis he too should be a leader. These are reasons for Paul to blend in. But Maniscalco and Richardson have been hurt and Bertrand started to look over matched in the game. On paper, Ohio State was the better team. It definitely was Paul's time to shine.

Were you to forecast what's next for Paul, you'd be right to include his entire performance this season as the basis, not just the Ohio State game. On offense he's been erratic. His defense, however, has been more consistently good. His defense keys his offense. Excellence on one end of the court allows him to relax at the other end. The good offensive performance comes after some defensive excellence, seemingly allowing him to no longer feel he has to prove himself so he can just play. It would be great if he could do that at the start of the game. Alas he's human and thus too self-conscious at the outset. He's apt to make bonehead plays that way and one bad turn leads to another.

A sensible forecast predicts regression to mean. Paul must intuit that. And yet he's also witnessed the full upside of his own potential. It will be fascinating to watch how he deals with this the rest of the season. There are probably basketball skill things he can improve on to increase his consistency on offense. But I suspect for him most of this will be a mental battle, the outcome of which will be determined by what he really wants and how he learns to live with himself when he is unsatisfied with his own performance.

What to make of the New Hampshire Primary results

2012-01-11T09:58:00.000-06:00

Dana Milbank had an interesting column today about ordinary people not showing up much at the campaign events in New Hampshire, but there were droves of reporters following the candidates. His conclusion was that the voters are simply less engaged this time around.

From here I counted about 4000 more voters than in 2008, approximately a 1.7% increase. (The total participation is not very large, in a national context.) Last night on the News Hour they talked about how Democrats/Independent voters were participating in the Republican Primary this time around. Huntsman was doing well with these people. But I don't see any way to determine the magnitude of this effect, given the information we are provided. Maybe exit polling data will shed some light on this. Some of that is on the CNN site. There they report that Democrats were 4% of the Republican Primary this time around.

Ross Douthat also had an interesting blog post about the candidates competing for second place, imitating like strategies from 2008, which weren't successful. Of course that was Romney in second place four years ago, and today he is the frontrunner. But Douthat dismissed any of the others in the current field as potential front runners for years from now, if President Obama wins reelection. I wonder if any of them are competing for the Vice President slot. Would a Romney/Santorum ticket, for example, energize the base, or simply repel independent voters?

The weather has been remarkably mild. Huntsman seems to appear outside without a coat. Presumably, the impact of that would be to increase participation.

On can envision the primary process as hardening the eventual winner, better preparing him for the Presidential campaign. But the presence of Super PACs makes it look like there will be much venom and vitriol among the candidates, turning off many potential voters.

Huffington Post did report that Obama won on the Democrats side, but I couldn't find the vote totals. It would be interesting to looks at overall participation and compare that with 2008. I haven't seed that reported.

Philosophe

2012-01-11T06:55:00.000-06:00

Aujourd'hui j'ai soixante moins trois ans.Sometimes, subtraction is better than addition.

Eli versus Discount Double Check

2012-01-10T15:57:00.003-06:00

I wanted to write something about the game next Sunday, without actually writing something about the game. Wary of The Jinx I was looking for a different angle. So I thought to compare the quarterbacks as they do commercials and otherwise appear on TV. Eli is particularly bland in a post game interview. After the lopsided win over the Falcons, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid saying anything controversial. On the other side of the field, they've shown that State Farm commercial so much around here that it seems rather obnoxious. I know they've got a sequel now, and I saw that some Packer fans love it. But it didn't do anything for me. Presumably State Farm wants customers who are not Packer fans.

I did my "research" on this by going to YouTube and watching more spots than I had originally intended. What I learned was this. The Manning family is a franchise. They market each other really well and are quite professional about it. For example, there is an interview that Archie is doing on some early morning show, and Eli is calling in before he goes to football practice. There are at least two ESPN spots with Eli and Peyton, that plays on the sibling rivalry. That gives Eli a big advantage. I watched Eli on Letterman the week after the Super Bowl win in 2008. The audience was really pumped up for him, so he was surprisingly good, comparing the victory to the Miracle On Ice.

Then I watched Aaron Rodgers, first on the Jimmy Kimmel show, then with Ellen Degeneres. He too was pretty good. Apparently he's quite a prankster, at least in part to keep his teammates loose. He seemed to enjoy himself in this setting.

So, on this, I'd say it's a tie. They'll have to find some other way to seek advantage.

Possibility and Optimism

2012-01-09T08:23:00.002-06:00

My economics training has me thinking about decision making under uncertainty as determined by subjective probability. But as an old dog I think that's the wrong trick so I'm going to suggest something else here. I don't really care about likelihood, at least if it is above a certain threshold. What I care about, is that there is a chance, a decent chance. Then I can get pumped up about that and focused on it. Here are some examples.

* * * * *

The Illini Men's Basketball team has been playing mediocre, with one exception, the offense of Joseph Bertrand. In the last game, a squeaker home win over Nebraska, Bertrand was 11 for 12 from the field. None of those were three point shots. They were all runners/floaters. Mark Jackson, when he was point guard of the Knicks way back when, used to shoot this sort of shot and then I really didn't like it, it seemed somewhat out of control. Bertrand, in contrast, is an artist with this shot. It looks like it can't miss. The part that is really hard to figure is that Bertrand has only started 3 games, and wasn't even the sixth man earlier in the season. But he has come on like gangbusters since the Mizzou game, where he kept us in that one.

Tomorrow night we play Ohio State. On paper, they should trample us. But I'm thinking upset. Yesterday I read somewhere that the reason Bertrand has been so successful is that the opponents have been double teaming Meyers Leonard and it allows Bertrand to get open. Leonard has actually not looked too good the last few games, except on a handful of plays. One wonders if Ohio State will pay more attention to Bertrand and therefore that Leonard will be freer to perform up to snuff. And one also wonders if Bertrand can keep up with the high level of play in spite of the attention he will garner. He moves and that makes him harder to defend.

We'll see tomorrow night.

* * * * *

Politics has seemed increasingly dreary as of late. Yet Bill Keller has a column today that perked me right up. It's about Hillary Clinton becoming the Vice Presidential candidate in a scenario that has Joe Biden ultimately becoming Secretary of State. I hadn't given it any consideration previously, but it sounds to me like a really good idea, not just making it much more likely that President Obama would win reelection, but also generating substantial coattails for Congressional elections. Keller points out that Joe Biden is 5 years older than Hillary Clinton and for this reason, if no other, he is not a likely Presidential candidate in 2016. Clinton would be the front runner. And right now she would put a lot of spark into an otherwise dispirited electorate.

* * * * *

I'm in the middle of reading Creative Experience by Mary Parker Follett. I am enjoying it a lot. It may very well be that the Progressive movement of the early part of the twentieth century provides the political philosophy with which I'm most comfortable. Follett is a contemporary of Herbert Croly. I read his book, The Promise of American Life, for a course on American Political Thought that I took when I was an undergraduate. She acknowledges him in the introduction to Creative Experience.

Follett argues for a focus on the whole, which she claims is different (not better, just different) from its constituent parts. This requires an understanding of the underlying dynamic. Things are always in a state of flux. Static conception are pernicious because they masks this. She also views subject and object as co-participants in shaping the whole. Creative experience flows out of that.

I'm wondering whether Follett's work might be teachable to undergrads, in a course on leadership, and if I would be able to teach it. I'm not sure, but it seems possible. Likewise, I wonder if peers would enjoy reading it. Is it my peculiar disposition that makes this book appealing, or perhaps the times in which we live? I "found" this book by reading On Not Being Able To Paint which, in turn, I found by reading Between the Devil and The Dragon. This seems to me an interesting trilogy for a leadership class.

* * * * *

I wonder if we can consciously allocate our time to the possible and reduce time spent on blockages or on procrastination. I'm going to try to allocate more of my time this way and see if I can stick to it.

Counting Your Chickens Too Early

2012-01-08T16:54:00.002-06:00

If the Giants are good enough and lucky enough to win next week, where they most certainly will be the underdog, there will then be ample time to make comparisons with the playoffs in January 2008. Today we should just enjoy the win. Folks have a tendency of getting ahead of themselves.

Giants Beat Falcons in N.F.C. Wild-Card Game - NYTimes.com via kwout

Fra-jeel-ee

2012-01-06T10:52:00.000-06:00

It's now thirty years since Sherwin Rosen published his piece on the Economics of Superstars, a theoretical argument that income rewards disproportionately the most talented or most charismatic in a field, with the ability to distribute services to customers the limitation in the generation of such rewards. At the time of writing that piece, Rosen probably didn't know of Bill Gates. Surely Rosen didn't anticipate the Internet era in 1981. Yet if you're looking for prescience among economists, there it is. Over time, as we've moved to the knowledge economy, an increasing amount of economic activity has become subject to a Rosen-style argument. And with that you have an economic theory of rising inequality, the huge wealth of the 0.1% a consequence of the communications and computing revolution.

Tyler Cowen jumps onto the Rosen bandwagon in his essay The Inequality that Matters. It is a piece that rubbed me the wrong way and here I will take issue with it. Cowen's conclusion is that indeed in the Financial Sector of the economy the huge wealth of the people at the top is troublesome, but elsewhere it is fine and what you'd like to see. And at the bottom of the income distribution, well, things aren't so bad really. It's a pretty picture, but I think he's wrong on both counts.

At the bottom of the distribution, there is this recent piece about the near poor, who together with the poor constitute one third of the entire population. Further, many of the near poor are in two-parent households and are white, full time workers. It's just that their jobs don't afford them much of an income. They live paycheck to paycheck, with essentially no margin for income disruption. Cowen uses a pejorative, "threshold earner," to characterize many low income people. Presumably, these people earn just up to a threshold and then choose to not work beyond that. If it were true, this would make low income a matter of choice and therefore not a source of public concern or public policy. The piece about the near poor, however, makes clear that the big issue is opportunities for such people to make a decent living. Many were middle class and have since slid into this more precarious state. Capitalism isn't doing well by these people, who are struggling to make it. In this sense capitalism is itself fragile. One can hope the problem is due to the business cycle and is not a long term structural issue. With the economy in the doldrums, it is hard to tell.

Cowen also misses the boat on income generation at the high end of the distribution. He points out first that pre-tax income under was far more unequal under Bush than it was thirty years earlier. So it can't be the Bush tax cuts that explain this inequality. He next points out next in comparing the incomes of J.K. Rowling and Tiger Woods in the recent past to the incomes of Charles Dickens and Arnold Palmer in their hedays, well it's really no comparison. The incomes of the former swamp the incomes of the latter. This is perfectly in accord with Rosen, so all is good in the world.

To determine health of the system, however, the point is not to look at the incomes of the superstars themselves, but rather look at the superstar wannabes. What is their condition? Rosen had a wry wit that showed up even in his published work. He points out one market characterized by superstars is the textbook market for Economic Principles. There are many competitor textbooks that vie for the few top slots, and several of those competitor books are nearly as good as the market leaders and perhaps even better. But they haven't gotten a broad adoption, which as things viral goes, begats further broad adoption. Some economists devote their scarce time and energy to write these alternative texts, on the off chance that theirs will break through into the top echelon. This marks a healthy ecosystem. There are some dominant leaders but lots of competition to replace them. Economists would call this a case where there are no or only very few entry barriers to entry.

Now think of stories about how Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg got started. Each was passionate about his enterprise from the get go. The very early work involved only a few compatriots, who had the same vision. These were essentially skunkwork projects. Great success emerging out of a skunkworks background is part of the American folklore. For example, see the movie Tucker for a Hollywood rendition of the Horatio Alger story. It means the opportunity is available to anyone. All that is needed is the core idea, the will to succeed, and some luck.

The notion that luck plays a role in determining the winner is part and parcel of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Stephen Jay Gould tells us that most of us were taught the wrong metaphor about evolution, thinking of it as a tree trunk. Instead, evolution looks like a bush with many branches, each viable. Then natural selection comes along and picks one of the branches in a way we couldn't have foreseen in advance. Recently, Robert Frank has been touting Darwin over Adam Smith as the rightful father of economics, because Darwin's approach to competition is more robust and seems a better predictor of actuality. The key difference is that Darwin's approach allows for successful mutations that provide individual advantage but that are threatening to the species (and perhaps to the entire ecosystem). Frank provides us with an example from nature. Of the species elk, the males have horns that are too large, the burden in carrying them greater than the advantage they afford against other predators. But in head to head competition with other male elk, they are a benefit and hence it is a trait selected for in Darwinian competition.

Cowen does find elk-horn-like competition in financial markets. But he doesn't even deign to consider that possibility elsewhere in the economy. Are there other sectors of the economy where the big guys, winners in earlier competitions, beat up on the little guys? For example, do the big guys aim to to rig the next game to played so they reap the spoils from victory while letting others get to hold the bag when the approach doesn't pan out? This is the thesis of Winner Takes All Politics, yet Cowen will have none of Hacker and Pierson's work. Nor does Cowen discuss that with bigger prizes for the superstars, winners in previous competitions aim to win the next competition not by a skunkworks approach or a diversity of various skunkworks projects, but rather by making a big splash, one blockbuster after another. The Right hates when government does this, because government doesn't know how to pick winners. But they are quite content to pick winners themselves, in essence ignoring the essential role luck plays.

Yet the argument for what drives inequality is not sufficient to make Frank's point about species threatening but successful mutations. One needs to make a further argument that what we're seeing is a negative sum game. Such an argument would be of the form that the big guys are crowding out the little guys, raising the costs of getting into the game for them. Is there evidence of that sort too? Yes, there is. There is credit rationing now, especially for small business loans. It means many new ventures can't get to first base. This too makes the economy more fragile. Again one hopes that it is only business cycle problem and that credit will become more readily available to small business when the economy rebounds. But one wonders if this will be a lingering problem. The irony is that there is a lot of cash in the system. Who holds the cash? The big guys do.

My view is that capitalism has gotten much more brittle and short sighted over the last thirty years. Many people who are very good capitalists don't see the harm to the system they have caused by their own success. (Mitt Romney comes to mind here with his work for Bain Capital.) Many people have become very good at playing the game. There are fewer who seem to be able to think through whether it is the right game to be playing. That's the question to be asking.

Pluralities and Choosing Candidates

2012-01-04T06:46:00.000-06:00

Romney "wins" the Iowa Caucuses, but only by a hair. More than 3/4 of those voting opted for somebody else. With so many candidates, this is a case where it might be nice to see what the voters' second and third choices were. As the field narrows, those preferences will matter, as will whether the voters continue to participate if their first choice is eliminated.

This is also a reminder that when there are multiple candidates and none is a clear-cut winner, there may be no right way to determine the winner. There can be "cycles" in the voting preference, as illustrated by the Condorcet Paradox. Weighted voting, known as a Borda Count, is thought of as a way to determine a choice in this instance, though in the textbook example given in the previous link, weighted voting would produce a tie between all three candidates. More generally, with weighted voting it is possible to change the winner by altering the weights. That is not a very satisfying result. Alas, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says we can't do better than that.

Romney Wins Iowa Caucus by 8 Votes - NYTimes.com via kwout

Getting a read on the G-Men

2012-01-02T05:48:00.001-06:00

Next week we'll learn if the Giants are for real or if they've simply lucked through playing some mediocre teams the last couple of weeks. The Defense did look good last night, especially in the first half when the game was determined.

Jason Pierre-Paul getting to Romo

After wearing an Illinois T-shirt on Saturday and seeing the Basketball team get clobbered by Purdue, I chose to wear a plain T-shirt yesterday. Not wanting to mess with the Jinx, I'll be similarly adorned when the Giants play Atlanta.

Then and now - are we better off because of innovation?

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000-06:00

In our household each person has gravitated to certain chores. One of mine is making the coffee in the morning. I'm usually the first one up, so it's natural that way. I'm also responsible for buying the coffee beans. We're Peetniks, two pounds of French Roast every other week. I used to buy the beans at Espresso Royale, but a few years ago I thought that started to taste not as good as it used to, so I explored alternatives. Way back when, while I was still single and living in a condo in town, I had a Toshiba coffee maker with a timer. You put in the water and the beans the night before. At the preset time the thing would grind the beans. You could wake up to freshly brewed coffee, a bachelors delight. Some friends of mine who went to college at Berkeley were fans of Peets back then. They'd order a lot of coffee and I'd sometimes get my beans through them. I remember those beans as extremely oily. That coffee maker broke down after not too long. I think the grinder got over worked with the Peets beans.

At that time I thought plain French Roast was a bit metallic in taste so I bought both French Roast and Mocha Java beans (from the Art Mart or the Walnut Street Tea Company) and mixed the two. That was before pre-bagged coffee. The stores had a large plastic bin of each coffee variety and would make a bag for you then and there on the spot. The result was more pleasing. When I originally subscribed directly to Peets, I ordered that same mix. But it seemed to me the Mocha Java was just as oily as the French Roast, so I tried a pot with just French Roast beans and enjoyed that a lot. We've stuck with the French Roast ever since, getting other coffee beans only when we run short because of hosting guests or over a long weekend where we might make a second pot in the late morning.

When I was growing up I didn't drink coffee at all. My parents did, however. They bought coffee in a can, pre-ground. Remember the coffee commercials from back then? Savarin featured El Exiente. Yuban's tag line was - have a cup of Yuban for dessert. Chock full o'Nuts was the heavenly coffee. My parents mainly had Maxwell House, where their jingle emulated the sound of coffee being made. This was in a percolator. We didn't know about drip brewing coffee back then. If somebody would have mentioned a glass carafe, that would have conjured up an image of a container for inexpensive wine. For coffee, the percolator was it. But it was a messy process and almost surely burnt the coffee. In cleaning up the kitchen, getting rid of the coffee grinds was the least pleasant activity.

My parents put milk in their coffee (or cream when that was available). It cut the taste and made the coffee more palatable. When I started to drink coffee, I did likewise. Nowadays though, I drink it black. I want the coffee to taste (and smell) great by itself. I don't want dairy products to adulterate the taste. With freshly brewed Peets, I get just what I want.

I started to think of other examples in a similar vein, of how things have changed in ordinary consumption experiences since I was growing up, where then it was just something part of the landscape and now it is a more intensive experience. One of those is cooking outside. We had a built in outside fireplace in the southwest corner of the backyard when I was a kid. We'd have wood fires in it. Unlike how it is now, where we get a rick of wood delivered in the fall for our inside fireplace, at my parent's house we simply gathered fallen branches and twigs to use outside. And the fireplace was for cooking, not for decoration. We'd have a cookout on a Saturday afternoon when it wasn't too cold outside. My dad would do the cooking, putting hamburgers and hotdogs into a hand grill, and potatoes directly into the fire. There was no aluminum foil. Since the fire would flame up now and then, some hotdogs might get burnt. The potatoes definitely did. That added to the charm.

Contrast this to now, where we have a Weber with a gas starter for the coals and a built in thermometer to see how hot it is under the lid and we cook by a timer, turning the food over by the clock. The procedure is much more controlled, the flavor more uniformly guaranteed, and we grill now mostly for dinner, doing that many evening each week in the summer, with a much greater variety of foods cooked this way. I especially like bell peppers and asparagus cooked on the grill.

Still another example is taking public transportation. I worked one summer during college (and then the subsequent winter break) near the Battery and took a bus and then two different trains to get to work. Really, it was the only way to get there. When I was in grad school I lived about four miles from campus to get an affordable apartment. I had a car so drove to school most of the time. When the weather was real bad, however, I rode the 'L' from Howard to Dempster and walked the rest. The same was true when I first came down to Champaign. I lived in an apartment complex that had outdoor parking only. I had an old car, the same one from grad school, which we called the ruster-duster. (It was a Plymouth Duster and the exterior was pretty rusted out.) When it got too cold, it wouldn't start. So I took the bus into school. When I moved to the condo, it had an indoor and heated garage, and by then I was driving a Honda Accord. I never took the bus after that.

Standard neoclassical economics makes welfare comparisons across regimes by assuming preferences are invariant and then compares the available consumption choices. On this basis, we're better off now. One needs to be a little careful making this judgment, because one should account for wealth accumulation in the calculation. My parents, one an immigrant, the other the child of an immigrant and coming of age during The Great Depression, were prodigious savers. Without a doubt my wife and I are much more willing to spend on ourselves than my parents did and hence our saving rate is lower. Nevertheless, we have a comfortable amount of savings. So, I believe, the neoclassical economics conclusion still holds.

Yet I want to challenge that result, because it doesn't feel right, the economics logic notwithstanding. I will do so by taking to task the assumption on invariant preferences. Through habituation and also by subtle social pressures, consumption impacts preference. And since preference also clearly impacts consumption there is the possibility of a loop in causality. The cycle can be virtuous, or it can be neutral, or it can be vicious. If we are not better off then the reason, presumably, would be because of some vicious cycle.

Focusing on information and communications technology as the innovation and the social adaptations to those, there's been a bit of a cottage industry in identifying the vicious cycles. Perhaps the most well known of these is the Nicholas Carr piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid? More recently is this Timothy Egan essay about the socializing of the mundane details of our lives, Please Stop Sharing. And here is a piece I read just yesterday, The Joy of Quiet, which argues that we should carve out certain times for ourselves, the weekends perhaps, where we should return to a Thoreau-like existence to escape the vicious cycle from being always connected by technology.

In my examples, however, I deliberately avoided considering information technology, because I wanted to point out that the possibility for vicious cycles is much larger and also that the pernicious consequences may be of multiple sorts. So on the one hand there is a tendency toward fetishism or addiction, which seems fairly obvious. Less obvious, however, is that the more of these sort of behaviors we have, the less resilient we are when the environment doesn't provide the exact fix we're looking for. One reason I'm note a good traveler is that the coffee in the hotel room doesn't quite do it for me, but I need a cup or two before my shower. Even at the start of the day, I'm a little off kilter. If you asked my contemporaries whether we are more or less resilient than our parents (this would be an interesting thing to survey on and I'm not aware of anyone having done this particular inquiry) I'd hazard a guess that most would say their parents were more resilient. In that sense we're a bit spoiled. We've had too many opportunities. attained too easily.

Then, on the other hand, there is a tendency for our choices to move from democratic to cliquish or even elitist, especially if the latter comes with trying the new. Taking the bus is democratic. It is a shared experience by all the riders. Driving to work, in contrast, one doesn't have to deal with the riffraff, one gets to listen to one's preferred sounds.

Innovation can afford a choice to accept the shared experience or stray away from it. One of my unanswered questions of childhood is why my parents chose to stay in our house in Bayside instead of moving to the suburbs on Long Island. We had a corner house. The neighbors who lived diagonally across the street from us did move, to Manhasset, a ritzier neighborhood and a larger house. They clearly treated the Bayside place as a starter house. Since the father was a young doctor when they first moved there, it makes sense that as he climbed his career ladder they'd find a different place. I think a few of my classmates in Junior High had their families move, either for that reason or because they no longer wanted the kids to attend NYC schools. But my parents didn't make a like choice. Having managed my mom's finances since my father died, it's less obvious to me that we didn't move because we couldn't afford it, though I really have no idea of what real estate prices were like in the late 1960s - early 1970s, during the time period I'm thinking of, nor do I have any sense of of what their financial portfolio was like then. Maybe we couldn't have afforded it then. But maybe it was more that my parents thought of themselves as middle class, not rich or even upper middle class, so they were more comfortable living in a middle class neighborhood, irrespective of how large their savings were at the time.

I've written a fair amount about the ethical failings of those in the mortgage loan business, making those subprime loans with teaser interest rates at the start but that would balloon upwards thereafter. But I've not written nearly as much about the people who got those mortgages and purchased the homes that should have been unaffordable to them. Have such people always existed, but never had opportunities like that before that could give expression in this manner? Or have we innovated our way into this ludicrousness, too much Lake Wobegon thinking the cause, coupled with a keeping up with the Joneses mentality?

Based more on feelings rather than on reasoning it through, I believe we live more comfortably than my parents did then, but that they were better off because they had a decent existence and their future and the future of their family was more secure. In considering the security of existence for my offspring, innovation seems more a wrecking ball than paving a pathway to a new land of plenty.

Now it's time to make the coffee.

The Clever Tippler

2011-12-26T13:14:00.000-06:00

Myrna ___ (3 letters)
Nick and Nora's dog (4 letters)

It's now many years since I would do the crossword puzzle on a regular basis. Yet I've still got recollections from when I did them. One is about learning words that were puzzle regulars; they had no other use in the vocabulary, as far as I could tell. Asta was one of those words. I had never seen the movie starring William Powell and Myrna Loy nor had I read the novel by Dashiell Hammett. But I did know Asta. Some years later my wife and I watched one or two of The Thin Man movies on TV, though I don't recall which ones. I remember it more for the gay repartee than for the story, a pleasing alternative to all those movies with big special effects that the kids seemed to like. This month Turner Classic Movies has been featuring William Powell and a few nights ago they aired all six of The Thin Man movies. I recorded the first four, on the theory that eventually I would saturate watching those. I've now watched two of the four and realize I made a mistake not recording the other two.

Robert Osborne's introductions to the films are very helpful. The first film, The Thin Man, is from 1934. Incidentally, the title does not refer to the William Powell character but rather to the first murder victim. The film was intended as a minor work, something to show folks who went to the movies before the feature was shown. But it was extremely popular in its own right and thereby became a franchise. As Nick and Nora Charles were members of the leisure class and the film debuted at the height of The Great Depression, one might reasonably ask what caused the film's great popularity. Indeed, the question seems quite relevant today, as the super rich increasing appear as victimizers rather than heroes. How did the super rich appear to the ordinary Joe during the Great Depression?

The story is first and foremost a whodunnit. Nick Charles, a former gumshoe, has married Nora, a wealthy heiress. So while Nick Charles is in a class with Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, then later Perry Mason and after that Adrian Monk, destined to solve the mystery, there is the unique aspect in how his relationship to Nora interplays with the rest of the story. According to Wikipedia Dashiell Hammett's fiction is hard boiled. Certainly, one would have that impression from viewing The Maltese Falcon. Yet Powell and Loy play Nick and Nora as light farce, with the occasional quip and more frequent childish facial expression.

When we first confront Powell on the screen he seems a bit tipsy, apparently slurring his words, drink in hand, it's not clear whether he can make out what's going on. The drinking is a kind of virtuous vice, a fitting activity for one of his station. His playful devotion to Nora more than makes up for it. She is his equal in loyalty and disposition.

Nick seemingly knows everyone - the police and many former or current hoodlums. Among that latter group, he has sent many of them or their friends or relatives up the river. They don't begrudge Nick for this. He was a professional doing his work. He treated them squarely and they got what they deserved. Nick will drink with anyone, including the hoodlums. Nora, by association, will do likewise. She is interested in all things Nick. Since detective work was so much of his past, she is fascinated by that. She seems oblivious to the potential danger.

At various times when there is real investigating to be done, he gives her the slip, whether for her own protection or because as an amateur she'll get in the way. He then appears to be serious minded and all business, in search of essential clues. Before that, when they are in a social setting, he seems first and foremost to be after a good time. Yet he is able to take in evidence even then. In order to make sense of what is really going on, he needs to know everyone's story. A good chunk of that story he learns en passant while socializing.

The actual police seem if not entirely witless then nevertheless none to bright. They welcome having Nick as a partner because he is much better than they are at deciphering what the clues actually mean. That intelligence earns Nick respect. Further, he does not put on airs about the case when he has figure out an important point but says what he means. Yet there is an easy grace about his demeanor.

Robert Osborne says that Powell's style of acting went out at the beginning of the 1950s, to be replaced by the realism of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Undoubtedly, he is correct in that assertion. The time is ripe, however, for the Nick Charles approach to make a comeback, and not just in the movies.

Taxing Inequality

2011-12-19T08:12:00.002-06:00

Of inequality laid bare,
Due to "Occupy" we're aware.

Conservatives don't seem to care.
The system works, they do declare.

The rest of us think it's unfair.
The job market needs big repair.

Our politics makes one despair.
The little guy's voice heard nowhere.

Don’t Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself. - NYTimes.com via kwout

Moms of Baby Boomers

2011-12-18T08:06:00.000-06:00

The essay linked to below is moving and timely. Like the author, my dad was born in 1913 and passed away quite a while ago. My mom is still alive, at 91, a Holocaust survivor, a breast cancer survivor, a tough old bird - as my wife once called her , a line used in this piece to describe a still alive mom of a baby boomer, a fitting classification. The piece tells much of the story very well, so here I'll only write about the bits it didn't focus on. I base this not just on my own parents but on my wife's too.

When both parents were still alive, the rhythms of routine life became such that both father and mother were highly dependent on the other. I don't mean this only or even primarily on an emotional level. I mean this functionally, getting the necessary tasks of existence done - the shopping, the cooking, the balancing the checkbook, the driving to a social activity, having a coherent conversation, and so many other ordinary things. Together the oarents formed a whole. After the dad passed away, lots of pieces were missing. Of course there was a huge emotional void in the mom's life. But there was also a need to fill in with the functions the dad used to provide. Perhaps some moms who are spry enough can cope and reorient themselves to what comes next. Neither of our moms could do that.

The other big deal is dementia, which is perhaps partly caused by these demands to cope when the capacity to do so is no longer there, though that's only a guess. The piece talks about one of the benefits of this extension of life is that the adult children can become closer to their moms. I can't recall whether that happened or not in the early years immediately following my father's passing. But nothing like that happens now. When I visit her, my mom doesn't know who I am or, at least, she can't say my name. Once in a while I do put the back of my hand on her cheek and she smiles. I hope this is communication of a sort, but maybe she would smile just the same if a stranger did that. I don't know.

My hope is that 35+ years from now when my children are in this situation, with respect to my wife (and maybe with respect to me), they will feel less empty about this than I feel now. And by then maybe society as a whole will have a more sensible approach on the financial piece of this. Outliving your seemingly ample retirement savings is not a good thing.

Old Age - Life Goes On, and On - NYTimes.com via kwout

Do we still need commercial publishers?

2011-12-13T11:35:00.003-06:00

You have to love disruptive technology (and the humans who create disruption by exploiting the technology). It really forces you to consider what things need to be maintained, the threat of the technology notwithstanding, and the reasons why that is necessary. Others might not agree with those reasons, pointing out there may be different ways to achieve the same results. Who knows how it will really play out?

In an Op-Ed in today's NY Times Richard Russo, an author, has an extended rag against Amazon.com, which is squeezing out independent booksellers, using nefarious business practices to hasten the process. And with that Amazon is supposedly destroying a literary culture that accompanies the world of the independent bookseller. Russo wants to hold onto this culture. So he has cast Amazon as the villain.

I want to respond to that piece, both as occasional consumer of books and as an author of sort of economics content as well as an author wannabe of other content.

* * * * *

After my first year in grad school at Northwestern, I started to watch "serious" films on a somewhat regular basis. Northwestern had a series in the Norris Center Union. Facets Multimedia provided many excellent alternative films. There were other outlets as well to indulge this interest once in a while (The Art Institute, The Biograph). Given this interest, I became a regular reader of Dave Kehr's column in The Reader. It seemed to me that my tastes in film were remarkably similar to his (and not that similar to Siskel and Ebert, plus I didn't get a TV till my third year in grad school). Given that, I used Kerr's column to suggest what films I'd see.

It is different for me with book reviews now, where I mainly read them as things unto themselves, make a little penetration into the subject matter and then move on, and I have less loyalty to any particular reviewer. And even the reviewers I revere, I read for their writing of the review, not for their recommendation of the book. My path into books is more eclectic. For fiction it is sometimes the gift of a friend that determines it. Likewise for non-fiction that might be work related, it is sometimes the recommendation of a colleague that triggers the reading. Or, based on something I read previously, and then some serendipitous incident connecting that with a new work, I begin to read that.

For me these pathways suffice. I'm someone who likes to discover things by puttering with them on my own. Even when we had an independent bookseller in Champaign, Pages for All Ages, a store I frequented with some regularity, I didn't use their expertise to identify titles I (or my children) might want to read. I only asked for help to locate titles I already knew about in their store.

What about somebody else who would like more hand holding? Do peer networks solve the problem? I don't know, but just last week a friend from high school asked for book recommendations on her Facebook wall. So it seems possible, though it could be simply the blind leading the blind, and therefore ultimately not satisfying.

The University Library here as an online chat function called, Ask A Librarian. I believe that recent budget cuts have forced reduction in the staffing of this service, but it is still up and running. The Champaign Public Library has a similar functionality. In neither case do I believe there has been any analysis of whether the service is being run at the right scale. For example, perhaps all the CIC member universities could offer a single pooled Ask A Librarian service. Likewise, perhaps local public libraries from around the state could offered such a pooled service for their readers. Maybe in this manner an effective service that matches the volume of use could be found.

There is a different matter apart from whether such services can be economical. In the current conception, those who staff the services remain anonymous to the user and therefore the services are not customized to the user's tastes. Each transaction is treated as novel, a thing unto itself. There is no reliance on the history of previous such transactions, so no room for the Librarian to offer up recommendations in advance of the solicited request nor any way to tailor the responses to the particular user. Russo envisions a bookseller who knows his customers. This bookseller provides a Yente function between the customers and books yet unread by them. Teachers, perhaps more than Librarians, might perform this Yente function for their students. (As universities seek to find ways to be of more value to students and alumni perhaps this role will increase.) Might there be somebody else to perform the Yente function for those who are no longer students nor alumni heavily tied to their Alma Mater? If there is does the function need to be tied to selling books?

Let me use those questions as a way to segue into this arena from the author perspective. I have essentially two different sites for my economics content, even though they have much the same stuff. One is The Economics Metaphor. People find this site mainly by regular Google searches. (For example, do a search on economics production table.) The other is the ProfArvan channel in YouTube. People find those videos (and links to related Excel files) mainly from within YouTube, either by referral or search. I've gotten the occasional question from viewers there (invariably these are students currently taking microeconomics and not from me). I've been pretty dutiful in responding. So far I've not gotten multiple comments from the same person on different videos. But that certainly seems possible. The queries I do get refer to content I've created. But it certainly seems possible that if my videos were reviews of other content that I could get queries of the sort meant for a Yente.

Can the author or the Yente make a living by direct marketing their work in this manner? Note, I'm not asking if authors like Mr. Russo can make as much as they currently make from their book contracts. I'm asking whether they can make enough to sustain themselves, and thus whether there is a viable model to do this without Amazon and without a commercial publisher as well.

There seem to me three potential models where this might be possible.

Ad supported content.
A "shareware" approach where users are asked for contributions, perhaps with some additional ways of limiting access to IP addresses after a certain number of page views.
A "serialization" of free content (certain chapters of the book) where the remaining content is sold in the traditional way.

It also seems possible to mix and match these approaches. The first two of these assume Web delivery of the content. The third allows for the preferred format of the reader. All three would seem to require some middle player between author and audience and thus a potential for the middle player to monopolize, in the manner that Russo takes Amazon to task. But, for example, if Google is the provider of ads in alternative (1) and if book publishing in this way represents only a sliver of Google's market for ads in Web content more generally, then the fear of them specifically monopolizing book publishing is less. In other words, this would be a kind of judo approach and thus might be comparatively immune from the monopolization issue.

I should mention a fourth possible model - which you might call the faculty model. The content is given away for free, in toto. The author is hired by an academic institution, as a writer in residence. The writer earns a salary stream, but doesn't get royalties. The author does other functions, like giving talks or teaching classes. The author's reputation presumably is related to the volume of traffic that is generated, as well as by how the work is perceived by certain critical reviewers and Yentes. I note that at places like Illinois the creation of those YouTube videos would not count as scholarly work for promotion and tenure or for salary review, at present. So there needs to be some thought of whether it should so count.

I do not bring up the fourth model to make the case that academia should go this route. (Under the "textbook model" authors of textbooks don't get to count the work for P&T and salary review but do get the royalties from sales of the textbook. Personally, I believe the academic institution should be flexible enough to reward this type of content creation, but I do recognize there are decades of tradition steeped in the textbook model to overcome in order to reach that outcome.) Rather I do it because part of the contractual relationship between author and commercial publisher has to do with risk redistribution. Typically, the publisher bears much if not all of the downside risk. For doing this, the publisher receives the bulk of the upside risk. It might seem that in a salary model the institution bears all the risk. This is not quite right, however. Faculty who are "hot" commodities can get hired away by other institutions, which puts pressure on the home institution to match the outside offer. Either way, the faculty member who generates a strong reputation gets to share in the upside. Those without tenure are all too well aware of the downside. And even among the tenured faculty, salaries tend to vary directly with productivity. This to say that the salary model conceivably offers an alternative approach to the traditional publishing model in the way it handles the risk shifting. The salary model also *may* take money out of the equation for the author on a more consistent basis and thus allow the author to better focus on the creative aspects of the work.

Traditional publishing provides two other functions that I'm aware of that are not directly related to distribution. The editing function is probably still indispensable, for any work that is apt to get a sufficiently high volume of readers. If authors became employees, what would happen to editors? I really don't know. But I conjecture that function would be maintained in the way that scholarly journals and societies are currently maintained, with an emphasis on institutional membership. In other words, the editors would be salaried employees, not of individual academic institutions but rather of consortia in which these institutions are members.

The other function is marketing. The publishers promote their new releases in a variety of ways. It seems to me that for established authors, much of this cost is pure dissipation. The word can easily get around anyway. This is an argument that if there is ever a move to these direct distribution forms of publishing, it should be the established authors who do it first.

Do up and coming authors need the commercial marketing to get over the hump? Perhaps they do, but that doesn't mean the publishers will be able to identify an up and coming author. Last year when I attended the Iowa Summer Writing Festival I had a lengthy but preliminary discussion about this with one of my teachers, Carol. She said it was virtually impossible for somebody like me with no track record of a successful commercial work to get the attention of a real publisher. I had to market myself first, in so doing prove some viability by demonstrating an audience, and only then might I get a publisher to take a look. So there is definitely a chicken and egg problem here. The publishers won't invest at all in the complete unknown. That's like throwing money down a whole. And if I'm right that they really don't need to invest in the very well known, that leaves only that gray area in the middle - the somewhat known but still not a household name. But there's likely not too much marketing going into that slice either, because the big bucks are in the very well known. So do the big marketing there, though unnecessary because word of mouth via social networks are sufficient, as a way to justify getting a big cut of the revenues.

* * * * *

The textbook market also has the peculiarity that while it is college students who purchase the textbooks, in the main they don't have a choice of which textbook to buy. They are constrained by which textbook the instructor requires. The choice left to the students is the outlet from which to buy the required book. In contrast, students who do come to view my videos are treating then as ancillary content that is not tied to their textbook. It's for this sort of content where direct marketing makes the most sense. Further if there were revenues to be made by authors for such content, it would demonstrate a type of failure of textbooks or of the instructors that use them. Or it would show that some topics are just plain hard and implicitly students want more coverage of those particular topics. (Supporting this view, my number one watched video is on Income and Substitution effects, a topic students traditionally find quite difficult. In the top top 10 watched videos only the video on Isoquants has more than 50% of the views that the Income and Substitution Effects video has.)

So the demand for ancillary material is for very modular content. Both iTunes and Amazon market modular content - if it's music. Perhaps one or both of them will preempt the do-it-yourself market in other media. Until then, however, maybe some do-it-yourself-ers will succeed at making some bucks off of their own created content, making enough to keep them at it for a while. I'd like to see that happen. It would make the entire process much more democratic.

Would fans have been better off if they hadn't got rid of the Reserve Clause?

2011-12-11T08:47:00.001-06:00

The immediate thought that triggered this post come from some of my Facebook friends, who are Cardinals fans. They've been lamenting the Albert Pujols signing with the Angels. Without explicitly saying it, they've spent much of their lifetimes being loyal to the team, so why doesn't a player like Pujols reciprocate? By way of comparison, the Yankees resigned Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera just a year ago. Those two will retire in pinstripes, no doubt. So I can empathize, though I view rooting for a National league team a kind of character flaw.

Of course, one thing leads to another in our thinking. Star professional athletes are in the top 0.1% in the income distribution. I don't begrudge what these athletes make, at least not directly. It's the indirect effects that makes me wonder. One related thought is that free agency in the player market caused professional sports franchises to me aggressive about generating revenue, and part of that came through raising ticket prices. When I was a grad student in the late 1970s and as a young faculty member in the early 1980s, I seem to recall that bleacher ticket prices at Wrigley Field were $3.00, sold on a first come first serve basis, and generally available for weekday games. Take a look at what the pricing is like today. (Click on the Bleacher Pricing tab.) For General Admission tickets there is now priority seating. The lowest priority seats are $17, slightly more, in my estimation, than the inflation adjusted price from 30 years ago. The highest tier pricing is more than four times that.

I really don't know whether at the ballpark revenues count for a significant chunk of team earnings or if it is TV commercials that do that. But I've got the feeling that pro sports ticket pricing created a kind of aura that has spilled over to the College game. Check out Illini Men's Basketball pricing of tickets for single games. Tomorrow night's game against Coppin State, which definitely will not sell out, has C level ticket prices at $22. (C level is the basketball analog of the bleachers in baseball.) For Big Ten games, that might very well sell out, the C level price is $40.

Would ticket prices have been much more modest today had the reserve clause persisted? The argument for is that without the pressure from paying for high profile free agents, teams wouldn't have squeezed the fans so much. The argument against is that income inequality in the larger society and/or Baumol's Cost Disease, would have driven up the ticket prices anyway. Look at the price of tickets for Broadway shows or for going to the symphony as away to see the argument against. My guess is that both factors matter and the effects are about equal.

Then think of some of the madness in sports and ask whether getting rid of the reserve clause had any impact on these behaviors. Would weight training have become as omnipresent? Would performance enhancing drugs have so infiltrated the big times sports culture? Today the Ryan Braun story is the lead article on the espn.com site. Given all that has come before, one has to ask: how can such behavior persist? The answer, assuming rational economic actors, is that there is such a huge upside for the player if he doesn't get caught. It's that upside which justifies taking the risk. Would there be such an upside if we still had the Reserve Clause?

The syllogism is: money is power; power corrupts, so.... We are seeing some of this at root now with the absurd realignment of college sports conferences. Would maintaining the Reserve Clause had weakened the force of this corruption by substantially lessening the money flow?

At best one can only guess at an alternative history of sport. So I intend this piece as enlightened speculation, nothing more. It is an argument that fettered markets may very well be better than the alternative. I wonder how many other fans would agree.

Blame it on Women's Lib

2011-12-09T06:55:00.001-06:00

America spends more per child on schooling yet gets nowhere near the results of its main competitors. One of the big reasons why is that in the U.S. teaching is a low status profession with comparatively low wages.

I believe that my generation was the last to have gotten really excellent teachers on a consistent basis in primary and secondary education. I went to P.S. 203, a new school at the time, starting in second grade. I can't recall my second grade teacher (thought maybe it was Mrs. Jacobs). From third to sixth grade my teachers were Mrs. Minsley, Miss Siepe, Mrs. Stone, and Mr. Sachar. I recall in third grade Mrs. Minsley having to absorb additional students - our class swelled to something like 42. While my memory (and student perspective) on this is failing me now, I believe the unusual step was taken to have those students who were skipping 3rd grade to be in that classroom for part of the year. That year my mom (who is still alive) was recovering from breast cancer. Somehow, that made me star in the class play as the Sheriff of Hokum County in Bandit Ben Rides Again. Mrs. Minsley managed it all. Mrs. Stone was a family friend. I recall it strange when she and her husband came over to the house, being in her class. At school she drilled us hard in the multiplication table. I am grateful for that, even now, though I might not have been too happy about it at the time. In case the point isn't obvious, most of the teachers were women. It was unusual to have a male teacher in grade school. Further, with the exception of Miss Siepe who got married sometime around then, most of them were very experienced. Teaching was their profession, not just a stopover till they started a family.

I haven't kept track of my contemporaries in any significant way, but I don't know anyone who became a teacher in grade school. Several became college professors. So it's not teaching per se that was taboo. Many of my contemporaries were encouraged to be either doctors or lawyers - enter a profession that offered a good and stable income.

So people my age who went to public school have a form of cognitive dissonance. Their education served them well, but they made careers for themselves elsewhere. They can't understand. If the system worked then, why doesn't it work now?

When I taught an honors seminar in fall 2009 I had one student, male, who wanted to become a math teacher. He grew up in Chicago, not the suburbs. That was unusual in itself. I think his dad was a policeman, but on that I'm not sure. He was a very balanced kid, with high aspirations like the rest of them, but also quite easy going. One or two other kids were thinking of teaching for a while a la Teach for America, but that was as a stopover, not a career.

If we are really to mend the system the way this article suggests, there are a lot of cultural changes that would need to take place. I'm skeptical that we can do this. But we should try.

Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms - Marc Tucker - National - The Atlantic via kwout

Innovations and Snake Oil

2011-12-07T18:00:00.000-06:00

The passing of Steve Jobs has occasioned a lot of reflection about innovation in America and around the globe, what it looks like when it works well, and those aspects of the environment that have made society fertile for such development. To see where we are as part of an ongoing trajectory, it is useful to reconsider innovations from the past.

Getting on the bandwagon, I've got a bit of this in this PowerPoint Presentation uploaded to Google Docs. (Either download the PowerPoint file at the link or go to the Actions menu at the bottom of the screen and create a copy. Then go the View menu and click Show Speaker Notes.) It starts on slide 15: The Music Industry - A Selected History. Actually, the title is something of a misomer, since the focus is not on the music itself but rather on how recorded audio content gets distributed and how people listen to that. There is also the issue of how people become aware of new content to purchase. There was much technical innovation in the 50 years that the mini presentation covers (starting at the time of Elvis with record players and 45 rpm discs and ending with the iPod and the iTunes Music Store). The upshot of the presentation is to show that what came next was dependent on many predecessors in conception as it improved on that legacy, enhancing the user experience, and with the iPod in particular, saving an industry that many thought was permanently disrupted.

One might hope that all sectors of the economy proceed over time in this manner, where successive innovation leads to triumph of one sort or another, even if there is disruption and substantial stress from time to time as social issues seem to swamp technical progress or entirely retard it, on the one hand, or when drastic innovation creates a new set of social issues, on the other. The crises notwithstanding, we have faith that well thought through innovation will triumph. For example, read Dr. Berwick's Pink Slip, a tribute about the recent head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a recess appointment by President Obama. Berwick just stepped down because his 18 months were up. He accomplished a lot in that short period, applying W. Edwards Deming techniques of continuous quality improvement and cost reduction to the delivery of health care.

Health insurers and hospitals, who had generally thought of Medicare as little more than a stodgy, bureaucratic insurer, began to see it in a different light as well, as Medicare staffers, trained as “improvement coaches,” began to share ideas and push for simple, sensible steps that would, for instance, keep people with chronic medical problems from having to be constantly readmitted to the hospital.

It makes you want to believe in the art of the possible. One wonders whether it is only a matter of the will to do so.

And yet such belief may be our undoing. Read this moving, full of disillusionment piece, Why School Choice Fails, written by someone from a majority-black community in Washington DC. The piece personalizes the arguments that Diane Ravitch made in The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Then consider much of for-profit education. It is growing rapidly, much of it online. There appear to be the makings of a bubble. Read this piece, Virtually Educated, about for-profit education in K12, or this longer piece on the same subject, How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools. It has the feel of the subprime loan market of the early 2000s. It seems to be a way to make a quick buck off of public funds. Innovation here is used as a cover, while underfoot is the old shell game, peddling snake oil.

Capitalism seems capable of producing both. There are examples of of successive innovation in a sector, seemingly as reliable as Moore's Law. Yet there are other examples of markets that are apt to implode in the near future, as a result of all the chicanery that has occurred heretofore. I would argue, however, that we're seeing a lot more of the snake oil selling than we used to. Let's say for the moment that's true. The question is why. Is real innovation that much harder to achieve now? Are opportunities to rip off other people increasingly present? Have our social mores weakened?

I am particularly interested in what seems all to common to me - selling snake oil to ourselves. In this well worthwhile video (it is long, 90 minutes), Joe Nocera reports that he talks regularly with Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and other leaders of the major investment houses, and based on those conversations they are in complete denial about their culpability for the financial crisis. Students who want good grades, irrespective of whether they've learned the subject matter, are eerily similar in their denial. I too do something likewise - the diet will start tomorrow.

Was it always such or have things changed of late? Perhaps we need to talk more about attempts at innovation that end up stuck in the mud, or about alpha tests that produce less than promising results. You can't sell snake oil unless somebody else wants to buy it.

After further review...

2011-12-05T09:44:00.000-06:00

...the play on the field stands.

This is a sour grapes post about the Giants-Packers game. It was entertaining and the outcome was in doubt till the end, so it was good viewing. And this is the third week in a row where I got to watch the Giants on TV. Before that I was complaining that they are never on in, here in the Midwest. So I should count my lucky stars. Of those games, this is the first one I watched in full, except for the first touchdown by the Giants. Fox thought it necessary to show the end of the Denver game. I suppose Tim Tebow is an interesting story line, but the schedule had the Giants game starting at 3:15. They did show that first score on replay, somewhere during the first half.

After watching for a while, I had the feeling the refs were in the Packers pocket. It seemed as if all the calls went their way. Tom Coughlin threw the flag twice. Both times, the refs ruled the play stands. Actually, on those I think Coughlin was wrong, but it set the tone for later. It turns out that they review all scoring plays, without the coaches having to ask for that. On one of the Packers' scores, the receiver juggled the ball the entire way through the endzone and then dropped it, without ever having possession. That wasn't just my opinion. The announcers said the same thing. Then they went to commercial. When they came back, they were saying the receiver had control of the ball for a moment with his left hand. The play on the field stands. But the receiver never had control.

The Giants pass rush was pretty effective. They sacked Rodgers three times. It really should have been four times. The Giants got to Rodgers for a big loss on third down. The Packers has something like 70% efficiency on third down, so this was a bid deal play. But a penalty was called on the Giants - contact with the receiver beyond 5 yards of the scrimmage line. This was an incredibly ticky-tack penalty, just a light bump, and entirely unrelated to the play. The announcers noted that on the next play there was more contact, but nothing called.

The Packers are the better team. They dropped several passes on perfectly thrown balls. That helped keep it close. But you change the two plays I discussed and the Giants win this game.

The Giants play Dallas next week. That game will probably determine which team makes the playoffs. I wonder if they'll show it here.

Observations on PowerPoint Compatible Online Presentation Software...

2011-12-03T07:34:00.001-06:00

...and some work arounds.

I am teaching a new course this spring - the economics of organizations. It is intended as an upper level undergraduate class. In trying to think through what I'd do for the class and how to approach it pedagogically, I thought of the debrief I had with students at the conclusion of a behavioral economics class I taught last spring. One comment that stuck with me, several students echoed the thought, was that they wanted me to lecture more. In the second half of the course I had students do team presentations and that took a good chunk of time. They wanted me to present instead.

There is a related idea that we didn't discuss in that debrief. The issue is whether to attempt Socratic dialog with the students, with a lively audience it is a style I prefer, or if instead do straight presentation, with only a few minutes for questions at the end. When I tried Socratic dialog in the behavioral class, I would get the following. After I posed a question several students would raise their hand. I'd call on one of those, then another, and another, etc. Each student would venture their own opinion, but no student seemed to react to what other students had said previously. The effect was not so much Socratic dialog as it was a type of on the spot polling. While once in a while I did want that, mostly I didn't. Yet my instinct is to call on a student if their hand is raised. But I really do want flow to the discussion and this practice wasn't promoting flow. So this time around I'm considering straight presentation. And if one does that, there has to be something on the screen to complement the talk, doesn't there?

I've not done a straight presentation like this for a while, and I got to thinking what I'd like to do. It also occurred to me that last year I had a lot of churn in the class enrollment during the first two weeks of the semester. It would be good for those who add the class in the second week to be able to catch by going through the presentation materials on their own. So I finally settled on an approach that does PowerPoint slides in the spirit of the Lessig Method, and then uses the speaker notes part of the PowerPoint for longish text descriptions of what is going on.

In the slide area itself there would be a title - I think that is useful in navigation - but then mostly images. Once in a while I'd write a sentence or two as summary of what was done on previous slides. I'd take the images from the Internet and link back to the source. This is a way to show attribution and also allows those who are curious to learn more about the particular subject with which the image is concerned.

I wanted delivery for the face to face class session that I will lead as well as for asynchronous access by students, both those at the live session and those who missed it. And then it occurred to me that perhaps this is not a bad way to have students make a presentation as an alternative to a term paper. I still haven't decided whether I'll do that or not, but I do like the general idea that the instructor models for the students activities that the students ultimately perform. So in considering tools that might be employed I opted for ones students would have ready access to as well, meaning they are freely available, other than PowerPoint itself.

Regarding logistics, I used to have a good feel for that and had ready answers for the time. I no longer do. But I do have the questions I believe should be addressed. So I will list those below.

Does it matter if the presentation is only available for download? Does online delivery of the document afford advantages in and of itself?
Do the students have PowerPoint or compatible software on their own computers?
If students are taking notes on the presentation, do they care whether the notes are bundled with the presentation itself?
Do the students use a Tablet as their primary mode of accessing this type of content?

Depending upon how you answer these questions, there are either several solutions that work well or none whatsoever. I should also note that I have an original iPad but I don't have Keynote on it. I'm a cheapskate now so I probably won't get it. But I'd like to know how it works as a possible solution. Even if Tablet delivery is an issue now, we should be forward thinking about what will be possible in the near future.

With that I tried the following:

SCRIBD,
Converting the PowerPoint with speaker notes to Word (and then to PDF),
Slideshare.net, and
Google Presentation.

I will try to briefly describe the experience with each, making judgments along the way based entirely on my goals with the presentation. Where I'm negative, it is because my goals can't be met with the tool. That doesn't mean the tool is not very functional in other respects.

SCRIBD - the slides come in fine and look good. The speaker notes don't seem to come in at all or, at the least, I couldn't figure out how to do that. It does allow download of the original PowerPoint file. So this tool wasn't suitable for online viewing, but might be used as an archive of the file for download.

Converting PowerPoint with speaker notes to Word - The conversion makes the slide into an image, with text below the image. The links that were in the slide are lost this way. As a last resort a pdf version might be needed if students are to view on a Tablet, but otherwise this is not the way to go.

Slideshare.net - Slideshare.net accepts both .ppt and .pptx formats for upload. That's a plus. It maintains links in images. That's another plus. And there is a tab for the speaker notes that are below the presentation. That's also good. There are ads. That's a minus. And though comments are allowed, those are meant for the entire presentation. So they can't be used the way students would want, for note taking.   A peculiarity I experienced with slideshare is that while the presentation would work fine in Chrome, the navigation buttons were missing in Firefox. A work around to this is to convert the presentation to slidecast, as is done for this presentation. In a slidecast, an audio file is synced with the presentation. This can be done with either voice or music files in mp3. The former are accepted for upload into slideshare. That latter must come from elsewhere on the Internet. In this case I used a Chopin Mazurka in C# Minor available at pianosociety.com When in slidecast mode there is a play button for the entire presentation in the center and there are buttons for advancing the slide or going back. Those buttons do show up in Firefox. Alas, the speaker notes don't advance with the slides in slidecast mode. The speaker notes do advance when using the slide advance button. Slideshare.net is a flash based product. It doesn't work on the iPad.

Google Presentation - Google didn't like the .pptx file I uploaded but it would take a .ppt version fine. Here I'm speaking about converting the file to Google presentation. One can upload any format and leave it that way without converting, using Google simply as an archive. Google presentation doesn't allow links for images (why not?) so if you want those links you need to put a text box below the image and then link the text. I found this mildly annoying but if you know you are going to use this it's not a terrible work around. One feature of Google Docs that I really like is the ability to make the url available to all but otherwise not listed, so people won't stumble on it. In this particular case the issue is making a Fair Use argument for utilizing the images that are in the presentation. The case is stronger if the presentation isn't generally available.   The presentation mode that users access is not good enough, in my view. However, using the Actions menu at the bottom of the screen, users with a Google docs account of their own can create a copy of the presentation for themselves. You can try that with this presentation. With a presentation of their own, users can access the speaker notes, via the View menu. Speaker notes show up on the right, instead of below the presentation. I prefer below, but what Google does is adequate, though the user cannot adjust the width of the notes window. Users can also download the original .ppt file. Google Presentation doesn't appear to have a comment function (though Documents and Spreadsheets do). I don't understand this as regular PowerPoint has a comment function under the Review tab. But students can take notes by marking up the slides themselves in the copy of the presentation, say by using a different font color. They can also do this in the speaker notes area.

It is hard to tell the future trajectory of these products, but if I were guessing I'd expect slideshare.net to expire in a few years, the issue with the controls in Firefox an indicator that it is not keeping up with new versions of the browser. I don't really understand whether Flash itself now has a limited lifetime but if so slideshare.net probably won't survive. I would like to see competitors with Google, simply because I don't like the thought of being too dependent on any one company. (This is quite distinct from the privacy concern that some have articulated about using Google products.) So I'd like to see SCRIBD become more fully functional, closer in nature to the original PowerPoint itself. And if there isn't the copyright concern, then I'd like to see us make content publicly available and discoverable. The latter means search engines do need to find the content. They clearly won't if the content is a file. Web delivery is certainly a plus there.

Regarding this latter functionality, it would be nice if the tools gave each slide it's own url (anchor) built off the url for the entire presentation.   Then referrals could point to a particular slide. That would be much more powerful.

A view from the ten percent but not the one percent

2011-11-28T18:04:00.000-06:00

I liked Bill Keller's column today, a snip of which is below. There is a sort of Gresham's Law for economists in the Internet era. The bad drives out the good. It's definitely true and an important point.

Yet paying attention only to the good economists is not enough. There are questions about the economic morass that economists normally don't dwell on too much. One is about fairness. Another is about obligation. Should we take Thoreau as a model? When we consult our consciences they may suggest that is the right path. But truthfully, if I can use myself as a case in point, I don't want to live in the woods and I don't think I'm capable of that.

Even with that admission, however, there's probably a lot more my family can do without, some of which we pay for directly out of our pockets. So I, for one, wouldn't mind if the Bush tax cuts expire for people in my tax bracket. Our marginal rate is 28%. If it were the year 2000 regarding tax brackets for everyone, but our income was as it is in 2011, our marginal rate would be 36%. We would need to adjust to that, but we could. (I did a quick calculation of the difference in tax owed under this scenario assuming an AGI of $180,000. I don't know what our AGI is, but I'm guessing we're in that ballpark. In that calculation the taxes increase by almost $7,000.)

I had thought that if there were enough like-minded people at around the same level of income that making that known would shame those at higher income levels to also be willing to contribute that much more. I still wish that to be true. It is why there is this Facebook group, For a More Compassionate and Saner America. But that group didn't grow like weeds, as I originally hoped. Occupy Wall Street has been infinitely better at capturing people's attention and raising the issues of unfairness and income inequality in our society.

So in this post I would like to show solidarity with that movement. And beyond that I'd like to suggest resolution of the big economic issues, as they make sense to me, where the economic issues are tied to the ethical issues, the increase in the income tax for people who can afford it an example of what I have in mind.

Debt Forgiveness

The Right is captivated by the magnitude of the National Debt and the fear that it will bury us, or bury our children, or bury our children's children. There is some basis for that fear, but not in the way it is depicted by the Right. However, there is another problem that has been well aired over the last several months, which we in the ten percent can do something about more immediately. This regards privately held debt, particularly with respect to housing and in student loans. Some fraction of the principal needs to be absorbed by the taxpayer, as long as the loan satisfies certain criteria. The economist Ken Rogoff has recommended a general inflation to address the problem (inflation reduces the value of the debt in real terms), because he doesn't believe a more direct solution is politically feasible. We should go for that direct solution and recognize that those who can fund it will shoulder a good chunk of the burden.

In the case of housing, the criteria should include: fraction that the house is under water, number of periods that the mortgage has been delinquent, past and current income of the debtor. The most troubled loans, those nearest to foreclosure, should be targeted first, provided the occupants do have a decent source of income. The aim of the program is that after forgiveness and a refinancing of the mortgage to current low rates, the occupants should be able to stay in the home and make future payments. It makes no sense to forgive debt only to then have subsequent default, as I wrote here.

In many cases the income requirement won't be met. What then? There has been a fair amount of discussion that many of these current borrowers should in the future become renters and leave the issue of paying off the mortgage to the landlord. I would like to see the arithmetic on this regarding how the likely rents compare to current mortgage payments. And I would like to know: what will keep the rents modest over time? So I have my doubts that a move to a rental model alone solves the problem. Maybe it does, but I'd like to see the analysis. At the link I provided there is an analysis from the perspective of investors who purchase underwater mortgages and convert those units to rental properties. We need an analysis from the perspective of the current occupants.

I should point out here that this is why a jobs program is so important. The jobs issue and the housing debt issue are tied at the hip. It's why I can't understand not attempting a latter day version of the WPA. In turn, there seems to be some consensus for a Federal Investment Bank, which would oversee and provide financing for such projects.   Sure, making private sector jobs would be a good thing. But, clearly, that's not happening fast enough. Let's make public sector jobs in the meantime, as many as we can, and keep doing so till until the economy recovers.

It also needs to be admitted, up front, that a debt forgiveness program will not preclude foreclosures entirely. That shouldn't be the aim of such a program. Rather the aim should be twofold. First, the goal is to keep as many current occupants in their home as is possible. Second, troubled assets on bank balance sheets need to be resolved. In some cases the resolution will be by some forgiveness financed by taxpayers and new smaller loans replacing the trouble loans that should be healthy. In other cases there will be foreclosure and mortgage holders will have to write down the value of those assets. Clearing up the bank balance sheets should loosen credit for small business and those seeking mortgages in the future. The tightness of the credit market for such borrowers has been a major impediment to economic growth.

Turning to students loans, for those covering tuition and fees at accredited not-for-profit institutions, a partial forgiveness program is in order. The program should be targeted at students of modest income and, if below age 26, those whose parents are also of modest income. This would be a near term solution to the hyperinflation in tuition issue that as a result means high quality education is no longer accessible by students of modest means. It would serve as a prelude to a longer term solution, that needs to keep costs in check while keeping quality of education high, at least for qualified students of modest income. As health care reform was the target of the first Obama administration, higher education reform surely will be the target of future administrations. There is not a quick and dirty solution to this. Elsewhere I suggested that a salary cap system might be in order. But nobody else seems to be talking about that so it is not in the offing.

Loans should not be forgiven at all for people who could have self-financed their education but took the loans simply because payments could be deferred till after graduation. So the means testing on such a program is important.

A different but related issue regards predatory practices of some for-profit higher education institutions that admit unqualified students who are eligible for federally sponsored student loans and grants. There is a piece in Wednesday's Chronicle of Higher Education on the issue. That piece refers to this GAO report. Even if the students are the victims of these predatory practices, having their hopes raised only to eventually drop out or get a diploma mill degree that has no value on the job market, loan forgiveness is not the right solution here. That would be like pouring fuel on a fire. Better to go after these institutions hard, force them to pay heavy fines and/or rebate tuition they have already received. The predation needs to come to an end. As much as we might feel sympathy for the victims, our remedies should not prolong the problem.

Entitlement Reform

There are two distinct issues at root that need to be addressed. The first is the increase in life expectancy, especially for those who've done white collar work. This means that current beneficiaries receive their benefits over a longer period of time than beneficiaries 70 years ago. The system needs to be recalibrated as a consequence. The second is that there is confusion on whether the primary purpose of these programs is as insurance against low income when people retire or if it is meant as a payback for contributions made while working, irrespective of the person's income. There is a third concern that is more of an accounting matter, but I raise it here because it has influenced discussion of the programs in the political arena. The issue is whether each program must balance receipts and expenditures or if balance needs to happen only overall, i.e., a balanced federal budget but where individual programs may run surplus or be in deficit.

Social Security and Medicare are actually quite different on these fronts. Social Security is near to in balance and does act like an income insurance program. Depending on when the individual retires, there is an income limit where if income exceeds the limit social security benefits are reduced on a fractional basis for each additional dollar earned. This is precisely how an income insurance program should work.

There are three possible controls to adjust in the recalibration process on Social Security. (I'm assuming no adjustments are made to benefits.) First is the tax rate; second is the maximum income subject to taxation; and third is the retirement age. Because of the income insurance aspect of Social Security, if you work sufficiently while above the retirement age, you will receive no Social Security benefit. For this reason I favor leaving the retirement age as is, with the following caveat. The applicable income limit currently applies to wage income. Dividends and capital gains are not included in the calculation. They should be.

The Social Security tax is a flat tax - up to the limit. The rate applies to employees and then again to employers. Self-employed individuals pay both the employee and employer shares. Raising the rates would put a hardship on lower income earners. That is a bad idea.

A better adjustment, in my view, would be to raise the income limit rather substantially. If high income earners do live longer, they should contribute more. This type of adjustment would do that. It also is in accord with the idea that those who can afford it do pay more in taxes to help out those who are less well to do. So this is also a matter of fairness.

Medicare is a different animal, in large part because while working most people get their health insurance through their employer. Not discussed very often, but something that is frightening about Republican proposals on Medicare reform, particularly the Ryan proposal, is that both employer provided health care and Medicare as it is currently constituted is not experience rated according to the health history of the insured. Premiums that are collected from employers as well as the employee contribution are tied only to the average health risk of all those insured. Likewise, this is true for Medicare. Contributions depend on income, but not on health history.

A private market, however, will price health insurance based on perceived risk, and the individual's health history clearly matters for this. This makes health insurance unaffordable for those who've been in bad health. It is why single payer, something we should have but don't, is preferred. One of the unfortunate aspects about the political rhetoric in the time immediately before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, is this Market for Lemons aspect of health insurance was not brought to light. Alas, we won't have single payer and in what I write in the next few paragraphs, I assume single payer is not possible to address the issues.

Medicare is much more out of balance than Social Security. With Medicare, the hyperinflation of health care costs exacerbates the issues created by longer life expectancy. So much of the solution will rest on controlling health care expenditure, particularly near end of life. It will also be about controlling income of health care service providers. Both of those issues have been discussed elsewhere, so I won't repeat that discussion here. Instead I will discuss something that hasn't gotten any attention but should. The revenues needed to support Medicare are inadequate. Those revenues need to be enhanced.

Unlike Social Security, there is no income limit on the Medicare component of FICA. But the Medicare tax rate is less than one quarter of the Social Security tax rate. Either Medicare rates must go up or additional taxes must be raised for Medicare from a different source. The question is how to do this without over burdening people with modest incomes.

I favor two different ideas to address the the revenue shortfall issue. First, working people who do get employer provided health insurance, even if they make a direct contribution to that heath insurance, should be required to treat the employer contribution as income for tax purposes and pay income taxes on it that are returned to the Medicare trust fund. There are several reasons for this. Employees may be less than fully aware even of their own contribution to health insurance because that is something that is withheld from their paycheck at first. They never receive the income and don't explicitly write a check to cover their own contribution. Employees have no obvious way of learning the magnitude of the employer contribution. One clear way to do this would be to have that amount reported on W-2 forms. Further, employees would become sensitized to the full cost of their health insurance, by paying income taxes on the employer contribution. Then there is the fact that currently the Medicare tax is a flat tax, but this way the employer contribution would be taxed differently depending on the individual's marginal tax bracket. This idea will raise eyebrows. It may seem like a step back from the social contract. But given the imbalance, it is necessary.

Second, historically there has been a separation between payroll taxes and income taxes, with only the former used to finance Medicare. The first idea is beginning to eliminate that separation. It is not sufficient in itself. The second idea is to further use the income tax to help finance Medicare, perhaps raising marginal tax rates beyond the Clinton rates, if necessary. In this way adequate revenue can be raised to pay for Medicare. It also means, in particular, that senior citizens who generate sizable income will continue to pay for Medicare, well after they have "retired." It may mean that we stop using the word "entitlement," which I believe has taken on a pernicious connotation, as if there is a right to health care without having to pay for it. In our society as a whole, we have to own up to the fact that the benefits need to be paid for.

Means Testing

There are three points I'd like to make here. First, the extended family needs to provide some self-insurance for family members. An example, currently being discussed, is that many college grads who have been unable to find a job have gone back home to live with mom and dad. As a partial explanation for why the economy is not growing faster, this is of course bad news. The demand for housing, in particular, is less as a consequence. But from a social insurance perspective, this is very good news. When things are bad family members should take care of each other, if they can. This means that when government benefits are means tested it is really income of the extended family that should be measured. When one generation is well to do while another is not, the source of social insurance should be from within the extended family, not from the government.

Second, there needs to be self-insurance by individuals done over time. The traditional vehicle for doing this is via personal savings. The low saving rate in our society makes people particularly vulnerable to hard luck.   A higher saving rate should be encouraged. One way to do this would be to instead of using current income only as a measure of means, use a 5-year moving average of income as a preferred measure, as I suggested here. When incomes are rising, this means the person's taxes rise less quickly than income, so there is an ability to save the residual. It also means, however, when incomes are falling the person is on the hook for obligations and can anticipate that, even as income falls. This provides a motive for the precautionary savings.

Third, means testing may very well become a two-sided concept in the future, where if income inequality persists to the extent it does now, then those above a certain income threshold find themselves facing an imposed obligation that the rest of us don't face. This obligation would be something like a charitable contribution, but with the difference that the giver doesn't get to specify the use.   Here I'm thinking in particular of funding public schools, where the property tax mechanism almost guarantees there won't be decent schools for all, so that too many low income students are denied a decent education. This fact itself is eroding the notion we call the American Dream. Why have this sort of means testing rather than make the income tax system more progressive? The answer is that the current arrangement has tax collection severed from how tax revenues are spent, with Congress responsible for the latter. There are very few of us who believe Congress has acted responsibility with respect to its spending authority. And the current process is fraught with problems due to lobbying, so the rich get to manipulate how tax revenues are spent for their own benefit. The proposed solution then is to carve out some areas of spending, public education is a very good place to start, and obligate those who are above the income threshold to help make the system better and more equal.

Conclusion

I would like to see more mainstream economists make their policy recommendation based on a mixture of economics orthodoxy and ethical considerations. Whether left or right, I believe this would bring us closer to consensus on what we should be doing. There is a tendency for economists to eschew the ethical issues - that's not their department. The biggest lesson we can learn from Occupy Wall Street is that we must deal with the ethical issues squarely, as we look for economic solutions.

The Politics of EconomicsThe Politics of Economics - NYTimes.com via kwout

Math as a gateway to creativity

2011-11-19T07:16:00.001-06:00

The operative questions in this post are two. First, can we teach all students math in the way we teach elite students math? Second, if we can, why don't we?

Math can be about intuition and the spark from an idea that has potential. Math can also be drudge, slugging through a lot of notation that is not enlightening, perhaps learning algorithmic procedures with no other motivation to do so other than that it will be on the test. One might think there is a clear division between the two, though I believe otherwise. While on occasion results may appear immediately to the bright student, verification is a staged procedure and one needs to work through the steps. More often, even the bright student discovers the result only after working through several preliminary results. The intuition is at hand at the beginning, to suggest this is a good path to try. Or the intuition may appear only after some faulty alternatives have been attempted. Elite students learn this linking between spark and process and develop intellectual confidence this way. If it is well learned it becomes enjoyable to do and the student wants to continue to employ the approach even in non-math pursuits. One reason I like to write blog posts is that the exploration of ideas that appear as I compose, Donald Murray calls it writing to learn, feels like working a math problem, as does the pre-writing I do before getting to the keyboard.

In the nature/nurture debate about what drives individual performance, I don't want to rule out the nature component entirely, but here I do want to focus on the nurture bits. I was an elite math student and I will use my recollections to illustrate, both how that came about and the advantages that education conferred. Much of this happened outside of regular math classes, either in entirely social situations or in academic situations that were available only to elite students.

The earliest memories are from grade school and I have two distinct ones that come to mind. Students who bought the hot lunch ate in the cafeteria. Students who brought their lunch ate in the auditorium. I don't recall which grade this was but I sat together with a few classmates in the auditorium and one of them would quiz the rest of us as follows. x plus y equals some number. x minus y equals some other (smaller) number. What are x and y? We did these for the fun of it only, at least as far as I could tell. And I was definitely a follower here. I don't remember what got me to sit with these boys, nor what drove the leader to ask these questions. But what is obvious to me now is that this social interaction was early preparation for algebra, which I take makes for a stumbling block for many kids. For me it was a breeze.

The other memory is of my sister getting tutoring at home. She is five years older than I am and so was many grades ahead of me. The way our house was set up, the logical place for the tutoring session was in the dining room, which we otherwise didn't use too often. Sometimes I would sit in the living room and listen to the tutoring. For a while this was science tutoring. Later it was math tutoring done by a different tutor. I don't remember specific math I picked up this way, but it was again early exposure to things I would see later.

Perhaps the bigger deal is that the math tutor was Mrs. Joffe, who would become my eighth grade math teacher. When I was in her class she remembered me from earlier and was insightful enough and kind enough to suggest I join the math team. I wouldn't have done this on my own. At the time I thought of myself as a social studies guy. (My dad was a lawyer.) The school had some current events magazine that I did join myself as an extracurricular activity. Some of the other kids on the math team had done it in seventh grade too (and I recall them eventually going to Bronx High School of Science, even though it was a schlep from where we lived in Bayside).

The math team was a world unto itself, with a culture of its own and a linkage to people who were a year ahead of me in school. (My school was converting from a junior high school to an intermediate school. So I graduated from there after eighth grade. The other school we had our math meets with was still a junior high school at the time.) This exposure to bright kids a year ahead indirectly is like getting a big gold star. It really conveys a sense that you belong there and creates an expectation that you should follow a similar path to what these people were doing. Also, the math team established for me a connection between doing math and playing chess, which would become important in high school.

I next did math team in eleventh grade, with the coach my ninth grade math teacher, Mr. Conrad. Ultimately, I took two other classes from him, analytic geometry and trig, which most college bound students take, and math team workshop, a specialty class aimed at preparing us for the competitions and for working exotic problems. Near the end of one marking period, I recall playing him a game of Twixt for my course grade in the math team workshop. I'd get a 90 if I won but only a 75 if I lost. Not that long ago I found this Math League Web site. My teacher was one of the co-founders of Math League. So I contacted him via that site and asked if he recalled the Twixt game. He did and said he didn't pull any punches in playing me. He was a tournament bridge player and quite competitive about these sort of games. By the way, I did get a 90 in the class.

Prior to and during math team there was another activity that was similar, but not done in a timed way, called the Problem of the Week. A non-typical algebra or geometry problem was posted on the bulletin board outside the Math Department office. Students were invited to submit their proposed solution. This was done for the fun of it, not for the credential. Doing these, in my view, is similar to working a very hard Sudoku. The procedure to solve the problem is not automatic. One has to discover it. My favorite one of these that I recall is the modified donkey theorem. Two triangles are congruent if angle, side, side, equals angle, side, side as long as angle is the largest angle of the triangle.

How does one go about proving such a result? There is a trick, of sorts. Someone on the math team is apt to figure this out on his own but many other students would not, because it simply wouldn't occur to them to do this. The trick is to draw the triangles adjacent and sharing a common side (one of the sides that are equal). It turns out that using the side that is opposite that largest angle is what you want. That's not a full construction, but it is enough that a bright student should be able to figure out the rest. I've written a chapter of my book Guessing Games entitled Guessing in Math that argues students should be taught to work such problems. Many people should be able to do so. Alas, those who see math only as a drudge would view such a goal as outside their capabilities or as a painful thing to do, rather than a reward in itself, which it rightfully is.

I suppose many people hit a wall with math. They find themselves in a class that seems over their head and don't feel comfortable about working through their difficulties, with no confidence that they can put in sufficient effort to overcome their lack of understanding. I first experienced this sort of thing at the HCCSIM, the Hampshire College summer program in math. I was a member of their very first cohort, forty years ago. I took a class in number theory/abstract algebra done in an intuitive way sans textbook. The program was for six weeks. For the first two weeks or so I was doing fine in this class and keeping up with the daily homework. But by week three I started to find it difficult and didn't know what to do about it, so floundered thereafter. I don't believe I was alone in this. There were three or 4 geniuses in the class and a few others who were keeping up even at the end, but the rest of us were not treading water. During the last two weeks of the program I took a class on probability, which was more do-able.

Looking back at the time I think there were two things going on that explain the trouble. First, abstract algebra for me was not as much fun as geometry, because with the algebra I didn't yet have the mental equivalent of drawing pictures, so we were taught some structure without much intuition. There was some intuition - doing arithmetic modulo a prime number gives an example of a non-ordered field - but in other cases there wasn't. I don't know if I first heard this at Hampshire or only later in college taking abstract algebra, but there was encouragement to not rely on the examples because they might include features that don't generalize. That proved hard for me. I wanted the examples. Previously I had found most math fairly immediate. This was the first instance where I didn't.

The other thing was how the day was scheduled and not putting in enough time to make up for my shortcomings. Mornings were filled with class. In the afternoon you could do your homework. But it was good to get some physical activity and I often played tennis in the afternoon and there was a very popular volleyball game after dinner. Later in college I learned that figuring things out takes as long as it takes. Sometimes that can be quite a while. Hitting a wall may make you less inclined to put in the time, though I think in my case then I simply didn't understand it was necessary.

Nonetheless there were some very large positives from the Hampshire experience. It gave a much better sense of what would be next academically, much more so than high school ever could. One of my college roommates at MIT, Neil, also was in the Hampshire program. (Our other roommate was from Jamaica High School, where my mother taught; she introduced us.) It's much easier going away to college already knowing some people there before you start.

Each of us had some math inclination. We took a few classes together. MIT at the time offered some special topics courses for freshmen that were for half the credit of a regular course. We took one on Calculus Theory, taught by A.P. Mattuck, which developed our intuitions about infinite series. At the start of this class Neil was ahead of me in figuring out things. I believe that by the end of the course I had caught up. It was the first time taking a class where I was aware of my own growth in understanding things at a deeper level, the first class where my intuition noticeably improved. We took another course from Mattuck the next semester - linear differential equations. This is Mattuck 33 years later giving the first lecture in the regular differential equations class. He was a wonderful and dedicated teacher.

I started to have some emotional problems sophomore year and in the math classes I took then - abstract algebra and analysis - I found myself in a situation similar to what I had experienced in Hampshire. I had a strong feeling of needing to get into a different environment, one where there was more diversity of interest. At MIT I was too much like everyone else. I ended up transferring to Cornell for the second semester. I still was a math major there, but math occupied a smaller part of my life.

I did eventually did learn how to break through the wall in a topology class taught by George Cooke. One factor in this breakthrough clearly was his teaching and the high motivation he provided. I found his problem sets very intriguing. He didn't use a textbook at all and in class he encouraged us to talk our way through the abstract concepts, our imprecision with language a demonstration that we did not yet fully understand what we were being taught. Another factor was that I did this course entirely on my own, not knowing the other students in the class ahead of time and doing the problem sets in isolation. A third factor was that I was not overwhelmed by other school work so over the weekend I could put in a full day of thinking through the homework and doing only that. And a fourth factor was the prior experience. I believe the earlier failure was fully necessary for this later success.

When I went to graduate school at Northwestern in economics, after having very little economics at Cornell, I felt an enormous deficiency in background relative to my classmates. I was determined to make that up and worked harder than I had ever done previously during that first quarter at NU. Spending most evenings in the reserve room of the Library till at least 9 pm, I did learn I was capable of making such an intensive commitment. Yet I soon became aware that I was better prepared than most of my classmates. I could think about the economics deeply, because that's how I had been trained to think about the math.

Indeed it is because math thinking is such good preparation for other thinking that I believe we should make effective math thinking a primary goal in our education system. I'm not talking about how well students do on the math SAT or other standardized tests they take earlier in their school careers. I'm talking about whether students can creatively find the right path to solve a complex math problem. Because the SAT is essentially a speed test it can't possibly measure the ability to find a path that will only be uncovered after hours of thought. At best it can test whether a path can be found in under a minute. Certainly that is better than not finding the path at all, but this notion that path finding is always a quick hitter activity is pernicious. It is much better to know whether the student will persist till the path is found. The SAT doesn't measure persistence at all.

In teaching the student we should be encouraging that sort of effort. Elite students receive that encouragement, in a variety of different ways. Can't we find at least some ways to offer it to the rest?

Myths and their propogation

2011-11-17T08:29:00.001-06:00

The following is from a piece in September when a Republican, Bob Turner, won the Congressional seat vacated by Anthony Weiner. Since the seat is in a heavily Democratic district, it was viewed as a stunner. One of the issues that mattered was Israel.

Bob Turner Wins Anthony Weiner’s House Seat - NYTimes.com via kwout

Ehud Barak was on Charlie Rose a couple of nights ago. Barak currently is the Israeli Defense Minister. He had previously been Prime Minister. After the beginning of the conversation which dealt with Iran, eventually (at around the 13:00 minute mark) the discussion turns to Israeli-Palestinian issues. Barak makes a point of offering very strong support for the Obama administration on security issues. How can that be, given the perception that Obama is soft on Israel? A couple of weeks after that Congressional election Ed Koch changes his mind and supports Obama. But the myth of Obama being soft on Israel persists. Gossip travels fast. Presidential candidates from the other party benefit from the myth being believed. Here's a comment about this from Mitt Romney and one from Rick Perry.

* * * * *

I suppose because Penn State has been in the news so much it occurred to me to watch That Championship Season, a Pulitzer Prize winning play that I saw in New York in the 1970s, but where much of the specifics of the story I had forgotten. I downloaded the 1999 made for TV version. Paul Sorvino plays the retired coach who is dying from cancer. He also directed the movie. Apparently, he has quite a connection to the play, having been in the original stage version as well as an earlier movie version where Robert Mitchum played the coach. The other main characters are four out of the starting five that won the Pennsylvania High School Basketball Championship twenty years earlier. The fifth starter, who is mentioned in name only, has made none of the reunions since. The viewer finds out why only near the end of the movie.

The movie is not uplifting but it makes a powerful point. Clinging to myth when one knows it to be untrue is destructive. Each of the main characters lives in a world of denial, misperceiveing reality, filled with emotional pain, trying to pretend things are better than they actually are. They are strangely dependent on each other, the basketball championship supposedly form a deep and everlasting bond. But they are also antagonistic to each other. Scranton is a small enough town that three of the four former players continue to have ongoing business and social relationships that are a source of tension. Much of the truth comes out as they betray each other during the reunion at the coaches house. The fourth player is a brother of one of the other three and a lush, presumably drink the only refuge he could take given the truth of the past. It his cynicism and demand that myth not triumph by which we ultimately learn that they won the Championship over the much favored team by deliberately injuring their best player. Unlike in the Karate Kid, where Daniel Larusso ultimately wins the tournament even after he has been severely injured because one of his nemeses has "swept his leg," in a deliberate attempt to hurt Daniel, in That Championship Season the cheaters prosper insofar as they win the championship. They suffer, however, for the rest of their lives.

I wonder if it would be helpful for the Penn State faithful to watch this movie. When one believes in myth very strongly and for a long period of time and then one is confronted with facts that put the lie to those beliefs, there is a tendency to ignore the facts. It is painful to have to change one's world view to accommodate the truth. But it is more painful to live a lie, particularly when it is not possible to bury the issue. Today the Times has a long piece about a possible coverup and CNN also has long piece, this one focusing on the mother of one of the alleged victims, who fears that Sandusky may get off. This story won't go away for quite a while.

* * * * *

There is a huge myth about big government and high taxes being a block to economic growth. Tom Friedman's column earlier this week, which is mainly about the situation in India, and the insufficient degree of public works and infrastructure, is meant as an object lesson for our own economy. Yet the Tea Party types live in their own universe and choose to cling to their myth. In today's Washington Post, there is a tragic-comic piece about millionaires lobbying Congress to raise the taxes of anyone making over $1 million, finding it difficult to get an audience for this message but ultimately having several such conversations, including one with Grover Norquist.

As a result of this myth we can't get to a sensible place by negotiating our way there. E.J. Dionne argues today that the best we can hope for now is to do nothing - have the automatic spending cuts triggered by the August agreement and then next year let the Bush Tax Cuts expire on their. His analysis may be correct. But it is disheartening how we are blocked from doing better than that by so many who cling to their myth.

Missed The Boat

2011-11-14T06:04:00.001-06:00

In the Sunday book review Henry Kissinger wrote the lead piece - a belated eulogy to George Kennan on the occasion of a new biography about him by John Lewis Gaddis. Kennan was a strategic policy genius, the originator of "Containment," which though it saw blunders on our side, particularly Vietnam, ultimately did lead to the demise of the Soviet Union. In other words, Containment did what it was supposed to do.

This leads to the following question about history and driving forces. How much of America's military presence globally is simply a consequence that we filled a void left by the demise of Europe and Japan after World War II and how much of it was a necessary piece of the puzzle that Kennan had us solve? (Kissinger's piece talks about treaty organizations, NATO and SEATO in particular, as a different piece of the puzzle, and other forms of soft competition as also very important.) I don't know and I consider myself a reasonably well educated American. How many fellow citizens actually have a decent understanding of the role the American military presence has played since 1991? What about the role it should play in the future? Our political rhetoric seems so low level as to be incapable of taking on this question. But the question needs to be asked.

America has been the World's policeman for the past 65 years, but there is nothing written in stone that it should continue in the role. Perhaps some will argue that an updated Containment is still necessary, with the primary object of the policy now China and the secondary object rogue states like North Korea. But I could see a different argument made as well, that the police function must shift from a unilateral to a shared governance approach with China a strategic partner in that. This same debate existed at the end of World War II, with some viewing the Soviet intentions as benign at the time.

My own view on the issue is that while China is still authoritarian to a larger degree than we'd like to admit, none of the Chinese leaders are near as brutal as Stalin and further that trade, which has meant enormous progress for China, acts as a liberalizing force. If, as Kennan insisted, slow and steady wins the race, then it seems to me we should make a deliberate if gradual switchover to a shared governance approach in this police function. Our politics might not like that conclusion. But is there really a tenable alternative long term solution?

At present, military spending seems broadly tied to fiscal policy. In Europe, with austerity the buzzword for the time being, it is hard to imagine an immediate increase in the Euro contribution to the police function. When the global economy does return to a normalcy that feels healthy, that Euro contribution should increase. In the meantime, where does the slack get made up? Does the U.S. maintain the status quo or invite other partners while beginning to reduce its presence?

This gets me to the piece linked below, about the size of our Navy and how to manage the budget issues entailed in supporting it. The piece takes for granted that the legacy remains a future obligation and then makes the case for innovation as the way to address the issues. As someone who normally doesn't focus on military matters, reading the paragraph below it sure seemed to me we have a lot of big hardware.

Is all that hardware necessary? And if it is, would it matter if some of it sailed under different flags? How would Kennan answer these questions?

A Frugal Fleet to the Rescue - NYTimes.com via kwout

Lira Kill

2011-11-10T08:12:00.000-06:00

Capital flow
Needs to slow.

Sovereign debt
The worst not yet,

The Euro structure,
About to rupture,

It's the creditors,
Who are the predators.

Euro Fears Spread to Italy In a Widening Debt Crisis - NYTimes.com via kwout

Living Up To (Or Down To) One's Own Image

2011-11-09T09:22:00.001-06:00

Some odd coincidences led up to this post. I subscribe to the ESPN Classic Network on TV because I like the show Sports Century, which features biographies of many of our sports heroes from the previous century. In 1999 ESPN did a countdown of the top 100 athletes of the twentieth century, with a show on each of them. As a result of the popularity of the series they made other shows of great athletes who hadn't made the original list, as well as shows about coaches, and celebrated sports events. I have the DVR set to record the show - all new episodes. And I watch them with some regularity. I like to watch biography on TV. In addition to the excellence the athlete has achieved, invariably the person went through a struggle on some sort. This duality of struggle and excellence makes for good viewing.

On Halloween there was supposed to be a show about Carl Yastrzemski. A couple of nights ago I got set to watch it, but the show wasn't there. In its place was a Dick Schaap One On One Interview with Joe Paterno, for a half hour, followed by another show, this one a special with Paterno and Coach K from Duke. I watched these shows instead, having an eerie feeling throughout the viewing. It didn't occur to me till afterward that these shows were on because Paterno had just broken the career wins record by beating the team I root for, Illinois. In that game I thought the refs did a bit of a homer job on us and that we'd have won the game otherwise. But it didn't feel it was a conspiracy, just the usual home team advantage.

With all the press now about the situation at Penn State, one could not watch this programming (I believe the Dick Schaap interview was from 2003) wondering whether the particular coverup of Jerry Sandusky's sexual predation was part of a larger pattern. In her column this morning, Maureen Dowd in her column this morning wrote:

Like the Roman Catholic Church, Penn State is an arrogant institution hiding behind its mystique. And sports, as my former fellow sports columnist at The Washington Star, David Israel says, is “an insular world that protects its own, and operates outside of societal norms as long as victories and cash continue to flow bountifully.” Penn State rakes in $70 million a year from its football program.

Dowd has written many previous columns about the Catholic Church's coverup of abuse committed by Priests, so I suppose she felt obligated to write a similar piece on Penn State. But I'd want to know if this is part of a larger pattern before arriving at this conclusion. If I had a very close friend do a heinous thing, I don't know how I'd resolve that. I'm not saying that Dowd is wrong in her conclusion. I am saying that this "insular world" comment requires additional evidence for support. I wonder if now there will be a search for this additional evidence, looking for other sorts of indiscretion if not overt wrong doing.

In the Schaap interview Paterno talked about visiting Green Bay after the Hula Bowl, to have a chat about the head coaching job there. Paterno said he didn't really want the job and so was cagey and not forthcoming about his own preferences. It's a completely different context, for sure, and may sound innocent for the situation that he described. But that Paterno by self admission can be cagey and not forthcoming suggests to me there should be a further look at his broader record. It was also clear in the Schaap interview, where they discussed the Paterno Library, that Paterno was very prideful and concerned about his image. That itself is not a sin. The vast majority of us are egotistical, perhaps to a fault. But if other sins were committed it might explain why. It is now being reported that support for Paterno on Penn State's Board of Trustees is drying up. Yet many students appear to be extremely loyal to Paterno. It may be too early to ask how the Penn State community heals itself. From where I sit, that can only happen by having a rather full picture of what was going on.

The Board has presumably also lost confidence in Penn State's President, Graham Spanier. For most of us he is far less visible than the football coach, so have even less of a basis on which to offer a judgment. I have one experience, most of you will think it is comparatively minor, on which to make a surmisal. Penn State was one of the campuses RIAA went after about illegal file sharing. An agreement was reached to resolve the issue. Part of that agreement was a promotional video to warn students about the evils of downloading copyrighted music without paying for it. Graham Spanier appears in that video. That upset me at the time and I wrote a long post about it. In that post there is a link to the Web site RIAA sponsored. (I'm unsure whether the video that is there now is the same one that I railed about five years ago. I watched it this morning and it seemed milder than what I remembered.)

My conclusion is this. We want people with substantial authority to act ethically, but for their own survival and the survival of the institutions where they work, rather than ethical behavior the operational rule is to respond to political pressure when it is potent but to not respond otherwise. Penn State will get its comeuppance because it put on a veneer that it was above those survival behaviors. The rest of us might learn to not lionize important people, in the sports world or elsewhere. That intense admiration sews the seeds of betrayal and coverup.

Where Are Plato's Children?

2011-11-08T11:49:00.001-06:00

In some respects this is a sequel to an earlier post, Some regrets about learning management systems. When you have a bug of an idea in your head it is hard to let go. So I'm writing another one. But unlike that post my focus here will be all technology where "presentation content" is rendered. For example, there is now something of a craze about eReaders and the possibilities they engender. Many other learning technologists see with that technology the class currently half full, with a possibility of a full glass in the not too distant future. In contrast, I see it as less than half full, with little chance of that changing. Here's why.

For narrative content eReaders are great. I've greatly enjoyed the ones I've used - the original Kindle and the first iPad. This is for reading done in a comfortable lounge chair, where the reading becomes a totality into itself. I know a year or two ago I read a review somewhere about eReaders used for instruction but sorry, I don't have the reference at the ready, so the gist of that piece will be given by recall only. In that review the students wanted to provide annotations for what they read, and the input capabilities of the eReaders were quite limited, so the students gave the eReaders low marks as a result. I thought at the time that the students really wanted a laptop and do their reading on that. To modify that conjecture a bit, perhaps what they want is laptop functionality but with a wireless keyboard and touchscreen capability, so they can use it in "slate" form while in the lounge chair and then use it in usual laptop mode when inputting the annotations.

I have a wireless keyboard for the iPad. I rarely use it however. Mostly, I use the built in keyboard and do hunt and peck input with that. I never use it to make annotations. I use it to send email. I have on occasion written a draft of a blog post in it and then emailed that to Blogger. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to put in hyperlinks to other online content that way. So it is limited for this function.

Perhaps the eReaders will improve for how they process the narrative content. I said there is little chance for improvement, but there is some, and this is what I was referring to. Here there is a question of how much the larger eReader market, which I take will continue to grow, wants this sort of functionality. It is hard for academic use to generate functionality it wants if the larger market doesn't care. We should learn from prior experiences that there are substantial benefits in using technology that appeals much more broadly, even if it means the technology must be taken "as is."

* * * * *

I want to make a distinction between the narrative content I've described above and the analytic content, which is my focus here and was the focus of my previous post. The correct way to read analytic content is quite different. Prior to the personal computer, the place to read analytic content required a table or other flat surface as well as a chair. A pencil and a pad of ruled paper were needed to accompany the readings. At regular junctures, the student would draw diagrams on the paper or write down and solve equations. This written work would come out of the readings. The activity with pencil and paper was there as a way for the student to gain understanding of what they were reading. In this sense it was different than writing notes about the reading, which were intended to be looked at later, perhaps when preparing for an exam. The diagrams and the equations were for the present, then and there.   You don't learn analytic results simply by reading them as you would read a narrative. You learn them by reproducing the results from first principles. If you can reproduce the results, then you know them. The pencil and paper are there for reproducing the results.

Over the years as students would come to me in office hours not understanding the economics, I came to learn that many also didn't understand this about processing analytic content. They would try to process it as if it were narrative content. Their tool of choice was the yellow highlighter. Their textbooks would be highly marked up and they seemed to approach the subject by trying to memorize it. They didn't know how, or didn't think to try, to process the results by reproducing them. So they couldn't work problems that required such processing. For analytic content, I believe the eReaders are somewhat pernicious in that they have a built in highlighter tool and that encourages the students to treat the content as narrative, whether doing so is appropriate or not.

For the learning technologist, then, there is this question with analytic content: Should the student still rely on pencil and paper and develop learning to learn habits from that sort of processing or, instead, should the experience be done totally within the communications and computing device? I can see arguments for this both ways, but to make the point simply I will distinguish work done in the major from work done to satisfy general education or distribution requirements. In the major, I believe some pencil and paper skills are necessary, even if there is sophisticated computing software that professionals in the field use to solve the problems. Sometimes it is still important for deep understanding to draw diagrams or write down equations. Professionals need to have that ability. Non-professionals, in my view, don't require those skills and if their major field doesn't emphasize them then they needn't develop that set of skills at all. But they still need to be able to process the content in those required courses. And since their pencil and paper skills are not so well honed, it really would be better for them to experience the processing part of the subject while working at their computers.

This notion that computers should aid students by helping them with the processing of the content has a long and honored tradition. It goes by the name - computer assisted instruction. The people who work in this field are called computer assisted instruction specialists. When I ran the campus Center for Educational Technologies, many of my staff held the title CAIS. Yet it now is a title that seems dated, with a preferred alternative title, eLearning specialist. Instead of incorporating computer assisted instruction into our bag of tricks, relying on it where appropriate, we seem to be ignoring our history entirely, except in a few dark outposts.

That history may have been strongest at Illinois, where the Plato system was initially developed. I never used Plato myself. In the 1980s there were some bargaining experiments that relied on Plato. While I was quite friendly with the authors, I never got involved directly with those. I learned the little I know about Plato via a different route.

When I succeeded Burks Oakley in running the SCALE project, there were then some programmers working for the central campus computing organization who had previously worked on Plato. From them I heard complaints about using the Internet for instruction - it wasn't nearly as good as Plato. The interactions were too slow. On the World Wide Web full screen refreshes were necessary and that took a while, especially given the bandwidth and processing limitations of the time. Plato could refresh only small parts of the screen leaving the rest intact. It was built with interaction in mind.

I learned much more about Plato from conversations with Stan Smith, a Professor of Chemistry, and an early leader on campus in the effective use of computer assisted instruction. At the time I met him Stan was engaged in a multiyear project do deliver via the Web what he was previously able to deliver in Plato. He eventually achieved a tolerable integration of his own created content with WebCT. In my earlier post on learning management systems, I discussed random number generators in assessment questions. It was Stan who got Murray Goldberg to put a random number generator into an early version of WebCT. But Stan wasn't just about technical functionality of the software. He had very strong ideas regarding pedagogic practice. I picked up many of those and have since written about them in a piece praising some of my forerunners with learning technology, entitled Homage to Jerry Uhl.   (See pages 12 - 16 for the bit about Stan.)

At various conferences I've had several old time learning technology folks not at Illinois, but who knew about the Plato system and had some experience with it, tell me what a wonderful system it was. So the knowledge of Plato was diffuse and perhaps still is diffuse. Yet Plato's influence on the present seems very weak, at best. It may be that the teaching of analytic content in the way I'm discussing here is more a job for K-12 than it is for Higher Ed, though there are college courses such as intermediate microeconomics, where the subject still has a substantial analytic component.   If this is right, then what we seem to be experiencing is a problem that's fallen through the cracks. Effective use of technology to help students process analytic content would first develop at the college level and then filter down to the high schools, and maybe further down than that. But I don't think that's happening and if it is happening, it's invisible to me. My second son is a high school senior. For math and science homework he's been assigned throughout high school, it's all been out of a textbook or a xerox copy of and assignment from another source. Ditto for my older son, who graduated a couple of years ago.

The students themselves seem to understand that technology should be used this way and are disappointed that it isn't happening. Not quite five years ago, in January 2007, I wrote a blog post that reviewed the ELI conference. The segment quoted below is from that post. It confirms the need.

Let me switch gears. I attended two presentations where students were the presenters and a third presentation, the opening plenary, where the technology behavior of students was the object of study. The opening plenary was given by Julie Evans who presented evidence about K-12 student technology use and needs. It was a very good talk and I’m sure others will comment about it more extensively. So here I want to pick on only one point that came out of the presentation. Students want to see their course content use more technology --- particularly in math. I agree with the students. This should be done.

As I mentioned, there are outposts where Plato's legacy can be seen even if the users are not aware of the connection. A partial list includes the Online Learning Initiative from Carnegie Mellon, LON-CAPA, and some publisher run systems also blend interactive simulation, presentation, and assessment. Some of these, however, are too cookbook. Plato provided a framework where the student had substantial freedom in exploring, while have a clear goal to attain. There is a huge design difference between the Plato approach and a cookbook approach, although much of that difference must also be attributed to the authors of the lessons, which brings me to my conclusion.

Authors who learn about their audience tend to write differently from those authors who write only for themselves. Invariably when online instructional content is created and its deployment is evaluated, the evaluators will ask about stumbling blocks for the students in using the content to learn. The evaluation will reveal whether the students process the content effectively and if not will unearth the impediments that block doing so. The conscientious content author who participates in the evaluation will then become sensitized to the question: what makes students process effectively? Answering that question becomes the driver in further content creation. With much of the analytic content we use there is only narrow authorship. Most instructors divorce themselves from online content creation. And what they do create, still mainly PowerPoint presentations, don't really facilitate student processing at all. All of us who teach analytic subject matter should be an offspring of the Plato system.

I wish I knew how to get there from here.

The Blue Screen of Death

2011-11-07T07:42:00.000-06:00

Death by the blue screen,
Far worse than obscene,
What does it all mean?
Tricked by Halloween?
Hard disk, time to clean?
No virus yet seen.
My face turning green,
Need to vent my spleen,
Or find another scene.

Some regrets about learning management systems

2011-11-06T10:37:00.003-06:00

A traditional approach to education has learning preceding assessment, with the assessment activity itself distinct from the learning and typically where the assessment doesn't produce additional learning. Here I'm not referring to the incentive effects the assessment might generate - students do study for an exam. What I'm talking about is that while taking the exam, might the students learn something new then and there? If my experience as a teacher is any indicator of that, the expectation of the students is that this shouldn't happen. They want to be tested on what they already know.

As a reaction to the stress that high stakes assessment generates, the student reaction is sensible. They'd like to reduce uncertainty and have confidence of the grade they will earn, based on the preparations they've already made. This, however, doesn't mean students feel the same way when in a low stakes environment, such as doing homework online. And if you focus on that environment, it is much more natural to have an iterative approach between learning and assessment.   Put a different way, learning is mainly by doing and in the doing there is assessment at each step, a check on whether that which just preceded makes sense and if the learner is ready to proceed to the next step.

Those with strong learning-to-learn skills develop methods of self-assessment entirely on their own and use those methods to master new material and internalize that material into their own world view. One big goal of college is to help students develop their learning-to-learn skills when those skills are no so well developed, as is the case for many students. Homework should be part and parcel of that. Unfortunately, the mechanism by which students develop the learning-to-learn skills remains opaque. When homework was done on paper, the assessment had to occur subsequently to when the student turned in the assignment. The technology of the time enforced the notion that assessment follows learning. Textbook chapters had problems at the end for students to work. Within a chapter there might be illustrative examples, but they are fully worked through. Throughout my years of teaching I've had many students say, "I understand it when you it explain it, but I can't work a problem on my own." They don't realize that they don't understand it. They don't receive any helpful feedback after getting the example that tests their own understanding.

With online technology and automated assessment there is the possibility of doing things differently. Some years ago at the behest of my friend Steve Acker, I wrote this piece on Dialogic Learning Objects for Campus Technology Magazine. As example, I talked about "content surveys" that asked questions at various junctures of the presentation. The students were expected to provide a written response to each question, after which a suggested response was provided. The students could back up and rewrite their responses after having seen the suggested response. The iterative aspect was definitely in the content surveys, but the automated assessment at each juncture was not. I downloaded the student responses, put them into a spreadsheet, and discussed some of the more interesting and revealing ones in class.

I don't know how many other disciplines can be described this way, but economics certainly can be divided into models and their understanding, on the one hand, and story telling about real world economic applications, on the other. It's the story telling part that I was getting at with the content surveys. The model part perhaps can be done with automated assessment, in whole or part.

Here are two examples of model-type dialogic objects done in Excel. The first is on the elements of supply and demand, developed in a particular way to tie individual behavior to what happens in the market overall.   (You have to download the Excel file to do this. You can't do it in Google Docs, which here is used simply as an open repository for the content.) The second develops the buyer side notion of reservation price, the analogous seller side notion of opportunity cost, and talks about substitutes and complements in the market. These examples do the dialogic part quite well and do have automated assessment. I have recently rewritten them taking out all macros and activex controls so they should work on Mac as well as on PC, as long as you have a recent version of Excel.

You can't do in the LMS what I've done with Excel. Indeed you can't even come close. The question is why. Let me give two different reasons. One is that browsers are more limited than applications. The second is that there's been a lack of imagination in developing the LMS, so the limits with what can be done in that environment result because the assessment engines remain unsophisticated. I'll illustrate some instances of each. My further remarks are meant for all LMS, but I don't know all the systems well. So I will make reference explicitly only to the ones I know a little.

The old WebCT Vista and the current Blackboard Learn has a self-test function. When writing a self-test the designer has the option of providing feedback either immediately, as soon as the student has answered the particular question, or deferring all feedback till the student finishes the self test. (Moodle 1.9, I believe, doesn't have that function. You can give practice quizzes worth zero points, but you can't provide immediate feedback in those.) Feedback immediately after a question is answered is consistent with the dialogic approach. However, there was no way for the instructor to track whether the students did the the self test. Such tracking (a participation credit, if you will) is a necessary component of an effective system. Many students will do the work if they get credit for it, but not otherwise. Why isn't there a self test with tracking option?   I attribute this to lack of imagination, since all the component functionality exists in other forms of assessment in these systems.

The WebCT and Blackboard systems have a random number question type. It allows a single answer only. What I want, however, is to have random numbers for a problem, with a graph, where there are multiple questions pertaining to the same problem and where the realization of the random numbers stay fixed from one question to the next. The LMS does allow randomized questions within an assessment, but you can't correlate the realizations of those across questions. The upshot is that if you want to have a bunch of questions in the LMS that refer to the same scenario, you then have to give up on having randomization in parameter values. I should note here that Moodle does offer a Cloze question type that does allow for multiple questions within a question. Presumably, you could write multiple versions of the same Cloze question, with each version representing a particular realization of the random values. It is possible but clunky. And it doesn't address the immediate feedback issue. Here too I attribute the limitation to a lack of imagination.

The LMS allows for third party hosted assessment done as a SCORM module, so you might have thought the issue could be outsourced to other content tools, such as Adobe Presenter, which does allow quiz questions with immediate feedback to be interspersed in a presentation. My experience with that is the questions must be simple (multiple choice or matching) and the responses can't be tied to any random variables. Scorm modules may be good and useful for other things. But I don't believe they solve this set of issues.

There is a further issue with Economics in particular, but perhaps exists in other disciplines as well. Since the subject is so graphical in nature, when random numbers are used it would be good for those numbers to appear in the graphs as well. By 1997, if I recall correctly, Mallard could do that. The designer had to specify not just the random number but the (x,y) coordinates of where that random number should appear in the graph. I believe this was done with Javascript that produced an overlay on the original image. The random number was in the overlay. Generating the right (x,y) coordinates was a pain, but it was possible.   It is a snap to do this in Excel. Much of it is done automatically. This one I attribute to limitations with browser functionality.

With these limitations, the assessment engines in the LMS are kind of dull. As a result, the content that is written for them also tends to be dull. The real issue here is not any one particular functionality but rather that we've not seen a broad culture develop to produce rich content with interesting assessment. And we've certainly not seen the hope I articulated in that Campus Technology piece, that we'd begin to see students producing these sort of learning modules as part of their coursework, to be redeployed in future offerings of the course, so that having produced some rich content, a suitable volume of content would be produced.

As I've been writing this piece, I read Why Science Majors Change Their Minds. My son, who is a sophomore in Industrial Engineering here, sent it to my wife. She forwarded the link to me. There is a big argument in this piece that we need project oriented STEM education.   I agree. But I suspect there still will be basic courses taught more traditionally. In those basic courses, one might have hoped 15 years ago that the LMS would improve the instruction in them. Alas, the LMS has not lived up to that potential.

Meritocracy is good but requires humility

2011-11-06T07:27:00.000-06:00

I found myself agreeing with this Ross Douthat column. I would add the following, however. Some people are taken with themselves pretty early on. For them there is probably no hope. Others who are quite talented are nonetheless modest, simply out of disposition, or because of a humble background, or that although prodigious in some areas, struggle mightily in others. I believe there is a tendency for these people to either entirely lose this modesty or let it submerge under an external veneer that develops as a defense mechanism, by the time the person has become a senior executive. So maintaining humility is a stern requirement, one that may be near impossible to fill if it is accompanied by a history of genuine accomplishment.

By the way, Corzine was an alum of the Economics Department here. He was the featured speaker at the 100th anniversary of the department, when Corzine was still at Goldman-Sachs. I was told the fund raisers were all over him to make a big gift. I don't believe he gave one at the time. I wonder if they'll invite him back now.

Our Reckless Meritocracy - NYTimes.com via kwout

Chinese Undergraduate Students - Issues and Opportunities

2011-11-03T14:46:00.000-05:00

In the Behavioral Econ course I taught last spring I confronted some of the issues discussed in this article. There was a high turnover at the beginning of the semester, I believe because the course was writing intensive and some of the international students found that intimidating, so they dropped. Another issue emerged regarding in class discussion. I've always tried to promote a form of Socratic dialog. I think it is the natural way to teach economics. Sometimes it doesn't work because students won't participate and I don't like calling on students who do not raise their hands. But last spring I had a different issue. Some students were eager to participate but when I called on them I could not understand what they were saying. It wasn't the economic content of what they were saying. It was their spoken English. I didn't resolve that issue well.

The snip below is from the end of this quite interesting article, a collaboration between The Chronicle of Higher Ed and The New York Times. Of course, the money is a big part of this. At Illinois out-of-state tuition is three times the in-state level. But even with those low-to-the-ground reasons for enrolling so many Chinese students, there are some more elevated reasons as well. Higher Education is an export product and in this case should ultimately reduce the friction between China and the U.S.

So I think we should be talking about the low to the ground issues more and developing coping strategies. I've only heard this discussed in one context - the Writer's Workshop on campus has been overrun by international students. The issue is broader than that and it deserves a broader set of responses.

The China Conundrum - NYTimes.com via kwout

Extremely Interesting Interview

2011-11-01T11:23:00.000-05:00

This is the first of 11 video segments of an interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs from 2007. They are interviewed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. The interview is fascinating in many respects, not the least because we now know the future to which they are speculating about in the conversation. It is also great to hear them talk about their personal motivations and what they regard as the strength in the other. And both of them refer to changes in business models to support technical innovation. Without saying it this way, Apple had a huge win with the iPod and iTunes because the music companies screwed up when Napster appeared and because Sony didn't know how to write software for the Walkman, either of which would have preempted the iPod/iTunes bundle.

BTW, to find segment 9 I had to go to segment 10 first. Then segment 9 appeared in the right sidebar.

Open Educational Video Content Viewing

2011-10-29T11:40:00.001-05:00

I taught an intermediate microeconomics course last spring for which I developed (and am continuing to develop) online content. All of the content, with the exception of assessments delivered in Moodle quizzes, can be found on the Economics Metaphor blog. Much of that content are videos done in short modules. These are screen captures of Excel simulations with my voice over and then that is captioned. The YouTube channel for those videos shows snips of each video with title and link, a modest number of subscribers, and the the number of views per video. Since I don't typically track this stuff I don't know if any past subscribers have since unsubscribed, or if subscribers come to the content they watch via their subscription or other ways. In any event, the info shown on the channel page is for the entire history and therefore doesn't tell you that much.

I'm not sure what possessed me to do the following, but this morning I started to look at the stats YouTube generates for content creators, where there is some control of time interval for which data is being reported. A creator can look at such data on a video by video basis or for all videos together. Below I will report about data from the second week in August till yesterday, for all videos.   My students from the spring have little to no reason for watching the videos during this period. So I'm pretty confident that this represents other viewing.

There were not quite 21,000 views in total since I started posting and about 7,500 views in the two and a half months that we're focusing on. None of the videos have gone viral. But there is enough information to draw some conclusions. There are 53 videos in the channel. Of those, 5 are not economics content related and thus unlikely to generate traffic. (A couple give instructions on how to navigate the Excel simulations. One is an example of voodoo in the technology - the Jing screen capture distorted the image terribly.) So there are 48 videos that might have generated the views.

Here are some screen shots of the reports YouTube generates. This first one shows very low traffic prior to my course last spring, then a drop off in the summer after the course had concluded, then an upswing this fall with a usage rate seeming higher than in the spring. It also shows how the viewers are finding the videos - mainly via search. I found it interesting that the general Google search didn't generate that much traffic. The bulk of the views come from within YouTube, either via YouTube search or from related videos.

This second one shows the geographic distribution of the viewers. About 45% come from the U.S. and then no other country has even 10%. Though the captions in the videos can be translated, my guess is that very few of the viewers can't understand English, based on this geographical pattern. The second also shows the top 10 traffic producers from among the videos in the channel.   The top 5 videos generate a bit more than 50% of the traffic. From this I conclude that the viewers are mainly students. They are looking for videos on specific topics. They are not looking to this content as a full course offering. These videos must be complementing or substituting for specific content from the intermediate micro course they are taking, perhaps because they find the topic particularly hard to understand.

I'm not sure what to make of this third one, which shows the age distribution and gender of those viewing the content.   Where does that info come from? The profiles in YouTube of these viewers? If so, we should ask whether people enter correct profile information. So, with a skeptical eye, I will say these results are quite surprising. The viewers are overwhelmingly male and the bulk are middle aged. There are comparatively few who are traditional students as measured by age. If these data are accurate, then I have to reconsider my conclusion that most viewers are students. This info is more consistent with the viewers being economics instructors. But I would have thought that instructor wouldn't want to see individual modules but rather a cluster of modules that build to an understanding of a topic, which is how videos were put together for the spring class.

Let me wrap up. We are talking about video content that people are actively looking for. Most don't stumble on this completely out of the blue. Some "tests" of how much they value what they find potentially could be available from looking at how their subsequent search behavior for video content is impacted by having found a particular video. A very rough test is whether they make subsequent searches at all at later dates. In other words, having done this in this past, are they more likely to do a similar sort of looking in the future? A more refined test is what search terms are used in the subsequent searches. Do they start to search by creator or creator concatenated with a specific topic? Since related videos (many by other creators) provide a significant referral function, the way YouTube offers up those related videos in the right sidebar must impact which videos get watched.

Is this type of demand for content something that should engage creators or others on the campuses where the creators work?   I don't know, but possibly the answer is a strong affirmative. With online learning, so much of the thinking has been about entire courses and quite frequently with those the content resides in an LMS or campus hosted content server, which may entirely preclude this sort of external discovery or, if not that, then not actively encourage it. Particularly for those campuses that have a strong outreach mission, perhaps there is a big opportunity loss in taking that approach.

Trauma Drama

2011-10-28T08:06:00.000-05:00

The last few days I've learned that several of my Facebook friends are diehard Cardinals fans. As a firm believer in "the jinx" I don't quite understand posting about the game while it is still being played. It's not something I would do if the Yankees were in the World Series. Afterward, sure, but during you're tempting fate. Perhaps one lure of sports fandom is that you can blaspheme horribly without the guilty feeling. Surely another lure is that there is a possibility of witnessing a seeming miracle. Last night's game provides a case in point.

I'm really posting here, because of the comparison in the piece linked below between the game yesterday and the Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, which though my Yankees weren't in it was the best World Series I've seen as a fan. People tend to remember the wrong things. The way the game ended is forever in our consciousness, so we get to see replay after replay of the Pudge Fisk home run. The drama is created, however, by what leads up to the ending.

In 1975 the Big Red Machine was clearly the best team in baseball. Their lineup was loaded with talent. Measured by the position players only, they were much better than the Red Sox. But the Red Sox had El Tiante, the dragonslayer. He pitched with bravado. He pitched with guile. In games one and four he was able to slay the dragon, with complete game victories. Because of bad weather game six was delayed enough so that Tiant started that game too. He pitched into the eighth inning, keeping it close. The drama of Fisk's home run was created because the Red Sox hung in there without Tiant in the game.

Nothing comparable is going on this time around. From my vantage, the teams are pretty even. There is no David and Goliath story here. Some of the play was sloppy last night. My impression is that result is because both teams are worn down, The post season is too long (or the regular season is too long). While we've seen the players rise to the occasion in some instances, we've also seen them not perform adequately in other cases. The biggest question is whether the pitching will hold up. In last night's game, it didn't.

The back and forth last night made the game a thriller. And I will watch tonight before drawing a firm conclusion about this series. I hope to see a well played game, the stakes motivating the players to produce their top-level performance. But I won't be surprised if it looks more like keystone cops, because both teams have run out of bullets.

Texas Rangers vs. St. Louis Cardinals - Recap - October 27, 2011 - ESPN via kwout

Affinities

2011-10-27T17:19:00.001-05:00

I have a station on Pandora Internet Radio entitled "Gershwin." I've been listening to it for the last few days. Apart from enjoying the music very much, which I do, it offered up a puzzle to me. I wonder if anyone else has asked this, listening to their favorites on Pandora.

This particular station is only instrumental music, mostly symphonic, some piano only. There's nobody singing Gershwin popular tunes - I've Got Rhythm, Somebody To Watch Over Me, Summertime, the ones we're all familiar with and that have been recorded by many different artists. The more interesting question though, at least for me, is this. What determines which music does get included, the bulk of which is not Gershwin?

Lacking a better name, I'd call this, "popular classical music," the sort I learned about when I was a kid through Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, which I watched on TV along with the rest of the family. My sister, older than I am, may have attended one of these in person. I don't believe I did, but I did attend several concerts at Queens College's Colden Auditorium, which were done in the same spirit. It must have left a strong impression on me. Some time later I got a present from a great aunt who visited us from Australia - a 10 record set of many of these selections (though not recorded at a young people's concert). I don't remember all of the music, but a partial list included Mussorsgky's Night on Bald Mountain, Dvorak's New World Symphony, Prokofiev's March from the Love of the Three Oranges, a couple of Beethoven Symphonies, Debussy's La Mer, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, and a bunch of others in that vein. As I'm writing this, I recall that at a summer program at Hampshire College we did a trip to the Tanglewood Music Festival and heard the Tchaikovsky performed with canon. These pieces became familiar to me - an entry into a broader class of music.

I did expand the repertoire, but not very far. For the most part I stopped pushing myself to experience classical music after graduate school, with only occasional experiences otherwise.

The Gershwin channel has a bunch of pieces by Aaron Copeland, some conducted by Leonard Bernstein. These I knew. Copeland became familiar, but probably that happened after college. Before long as the Gershwin channel winds through its playlist, it gets to a very haunting piece, one I should have known but didn't, the Dance of the Knights from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. How I missed this growing up, I don't know. It does seem to fit right in with the other pieces, which have a sense of the experimental and exploratory, yet are not threatening to the sensibilities. A couple of nights ago I did wake up from a dream with the Prokofiev going on in my head, so the music did touch my spirit, which is part of the music's power. Yet with that piece and certainly with the familiar pieces on the channel I don't feel assaulted when making a personal connection to the music, as I sometimes do when my son plays rap, which I react to much like my parents reacted to rock and roll.

I started to get enchanted with the idea of channels of favorites yet with new pieces too, using the familiar as a way to expand the personal knowledge base. And then I started to ask myself whether this could be done not just with music, but with written work as well. Could our Library do something like this? What I have in mind is that if you take all the reading lists for undergraduate courses in social science, let's say, over the past 10 years and you cull articles from these lists can you find pieces that are (a) commonly read, and (b) are connected in some way. For example, with Daniel Kahneman's new book out, Thinking Fast and Slow, there have been essay's about Kahneman (and Tversky) in popular outlets, such as this Op-Ed by David Brooks, and this Book Bench blog post by Jonah Lehrer. Suppose on seeing one of those a student wanted to make a Kahneman channel, with both scholarly pieces and pieces from well written but popular periodicals, accessible intellectually to a bright undergraduate with not a huge background in the subject, and connected to each other in some way, though perhaps not totally transparently. One of my favorite pieces by Stephen Jay Gould, The Streak of Streaks, on the question whether in sports a player gets "hot" or if this is merely a rationalization we fans make, would fit right in. The channel might include video material as well as print. For example, George Akerlof's Nobel Prize lecture, which was video recorded, might be perfectly suitable material as part of a Kahneman channel.

I don't know if this is possible. For the Gershwin channel the affinities are somewhat intuitive to me and with Kahneman I can see the connections. Could there be an automated way to generate them? If there were such a way, students would be be able to learn about a subject without relying on a textbook or a professor to provide a reading list for a course. Sometimes we want to learn something without taking a course on it. And sometimes I, as instructor, wish that students would explore beyond the readings I assign. A novel concept, isn't it? When I queried students about that as we did a debrief for my class last spring, I asked them whether any of them did read largely in this way. Many of them looked at me like I was from the moon.

Maybe I am. I've got this odd belief that if you can enjoy music this way, you should be able to enjoy reading in this manner as well. Even if the kids didn't use it, I would.

Misguided Fiscal Policies?

2011-10-26T07:26:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting and provocative piece, with the core thesis that our economy is fundamentally (personal) consumption driven rather than led by (business) investment. It's kind of a dynamic version of the "paradox of thrift." If we save more in aggregate, the economy will be smaller because there aren't the investment opportunities to suck up those savings. I agree with the suggestion that we should be shifting incomes policy toward labor income and away from capital income. So our tax system has that backwards. This is the argument the left needs to change the policy direction.

I would like to see a life-cycle version of this argument, however. I don't fully get at the individual level how one saves less over the life cycle and yet still has a tolerable wealth during the retirement years.

I should also note that the argument is subject to a "Moore's Law" critique, since everything is measured in value (dollar) units as opposed to physical output units, e.g., my home computer now is more powerful than the super computers of the 1980s. So we've endowed most people know with super computer capabilities, if seen from a 1980s perspective, which seems like Herculean investment. But in dollar terms it's not that big a deal. To the extent that information technology pervades our lives, this is a significant measurement error. But not all capital follows Moore's Law and the the non-IT capital investment in the economy hasn't grown proportionally with GDP is a big deal issue. It's as if IT is substituting for non-IT wherever possible and the consequence is perhaps productivity growth in some sense but not GDP growth.

It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid - NYTimes.com via kwout

Confusing Correlation and Causation

2011-10-25T07:57:00.001-05:00

David Brooks has been on a kick lately about where the country mindset is and based on what he "knows" he is very much against the Occupy Wall Street protests, since in his view they are so far out of the mainstream. But, I believe, he is using the wrong sort of evidence to support his conclusions, as I will try to illustrate below.

If you asked dyed-in-the-wool Democrats whether they trust their government and did so after certain junctures in recent history (I'll list some immediately following this question) how would they respond?
a) During the height of the Vietnam War.
b) After Watergate came to light.
c) When it was learned there were no WMD.
d) After Hurricane Katrina.
e) After the Gulf oil spill.
f) After the Debt Ceiling debacle.

I don't know the general answer to this. I know my own answer. That answer is no, in each instance. In providing this answer, I'm rendering a verdict on past events. In each of these instances, government responded poorly. Some people, I assume most of them are anti-government types, take evidence of this sort and conclude government necessarily acts poorly. Several of the students I taught last spring were in this category.

But it is quite possible to render quite a different verdict. Government can be viewed as fundamentally a good thing but is capable of behaving quite poorly, when the President exercises poor judgment and therefore poor leadership (Johnson regarding the escalation of the War in Vietnam), is fundamentally paranoid (Nixon regarding Watergate), or is so anti-government in philosophy that the government agencies acting in his charge don't do their jobs effectively (Reagan and Bush II). In this case the view is that government needs to be reformed to be effective. One can not trust government because of past misdeeds and yet be quite hopeful that government can perform admirably in the not too distant future, if there is suitable leadership put in place.

It is, of course, not only the President who exercises leadership. Congress has a role to play too. Recently the view has become almost universal that they are obstructionist, which is why their approval rating is so low. But it doesn't have to be this way. Read Evan Bayh's Op-Ed about why he is leaving the Senate, written in February 2010. He describes all the problems. But then he proposes potential solutions that seem sensible to this reader. If you asked him, do you trust Congress, he'd be forced to say no. But if you also asked, do you want to trust Congress, you'd get a resounding yes.

This distinction is particularly important when it comes to thinking about regulation, for example, the relationship between the SEC and the financial services industry or perhaps even more evidently, the role of Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In my view she exemplified what effective government looks like and her leadership of the Bureau was blocked by Senate Republicans specifically for that reason. So I maintain that effective government is possible but that it didn't emerge in this instance.

There is a further question here that needs to be asked. If government was effective and most voters did trust government, does that imply government would have an adversarial relationship with business? And, if so, is that sustainable? These, I think, rather than the issue of effective government per se, are the questions Democrats need to work through.

I don't have a fully worked through answer on this, but my partial way of thinking about it is that some business operates with a seeming P.T. Barnum philosophy (there's a sucker born every minute) and for such business an adversarial approach is fitting and proper. For other businesses, however, they are trying hard to produce a decent product, one that consumers like and want. Environmental and safety regulation do impose costs on these business, some of which should be borne for the greater good but some of which should be discarded because they are too onerous. We need an ongoing dialog to find out which is which and where the happy middle is. We currently don't seem to have a way to get that dialog. I'm hopeful it will be possible in the future.

The Fighter Fallacy - NYTimes.com via kwout

Vendor Bender

2011-10-24T18:17:00.000-05:00

The lead article in today's Inside Higher Ed is about the Educause national conference held last week in Philadelphia. The piece focused on the tension between campus CIOs and the IT industry that services Higher Ed. I will comment on that in a bit, by doing a stylized economic analysis. First, let me say a little about the event itself.

I haven't attended for a couple of years and having retired last year I don't see myself attending in the near future unless new work makes it practical to do so. I can't say that I miss going to the conference. I've never been a good traveler, so there's that. The venue for the conference is usually a large convention center. Many of the rooms have no external lighting, so if you're meeting in one of them, after a while you feel as if you're in a cave. I would usually wear down in the afternoon as a result. I do enjoy meeting folks from other campuses that I haven't met before. That's a plus. But then there is the weirdness that the tone is collegial yet in many cases much of the business would be with vendors, who indirectly would either be trying to sell you something or, if you were already buying from them, then to do things to keep you as a happy customer. It meant the experience was different and not as much fun if there were only colleagues from other campuses present. I do miss seeing friends and colleagues.

Let's push on to the analysis. As an economist who has written a bit and taught in the area of Industrial Organization (a long time ago) I'm going to state some economic "facts" that in themselves should not be controversial at all. It's in their application that the fun begins.

1) Horizontal merger typically happens when an industry has reached a mature phase where demand growth is modest. In the case where demand is actually declining, you then have a "war of attrition," in which case the merger or acquisition is a way for the acquired entity to exit the industry. Industry behavior therefore is quite different when the industry is young, demand is growing briskly, and new entrants may appear on the scene.

2) In bargaining, the power a party has in striking a good deal depends first and foremost on their ability to walk away from the deal. Add to that how patient the party is to wait for a good deal and how risk averse the party is to negotiations breaking down. If you know the payoff to the parties from walking away (called the threat point in game theory) you can then predict that the gains in the bargain will be split relative to that.

3) Markets for a broad constituency tend to have several competitors. Markets for a more narrow constituency tend to have fewer competitors. The real test is how large a seller must be to fully exhaust economies of scale and scope and the relationship between that size and the size of the market.

Applying the above to Higher Ed and the enterprise systems that are the object of the Inside Higher Ed story, most campuses have been in these markets for 10 to 15 years. ERP systems got a big boost in demand because of Y2K fears and the LMS as an environment took off in the late 1990s. I think it fair to saw we're in a mature phase now, with the market fairly saturated. Further budget issues that the campuses face because of the economic downturn mean that an increased intensity of demand on a particular campus is unlikely to manifest. So there shouldn't be much demand growth from that source. Merger or acquisition in the industry, then, should not be surprising.

I suspect most campuses feel locked into these systems. Even in the presence of multiple vendors, switching costs are high. In choosing an enterprise system, most campuses do so for the long haul (in my estimation at least 5 years and perhaps upward of 10 years). The threat of switching may have some impact on the bargaining power, but in game theory the question would immediately come up - is the threat credible? Incredible threats don't have impact. The threat is credible when a campus is in a system that is reaching end of life. Then switching must occur.

The article talks a lot about information sharing regarding price (really the full package) across campuses. Absent that information sharing, there can be idiosyncratic variation in the packages campuses get. But ask yourself whether information sharing has any impact on bargaining power. I don't see why it should. If you're locked in without information sharing, getting the additional information about what other campuses have done doesn't change your degree of lock in. I can understand why CIOs want the information sharing - they bear that idiosyncratic price risk and they'd like to shed it. But doing so should not lower the average transaction price. Indeed, information sharing might have the same effect as "retail price maintenance" where the customers end up being the police to enforce the cartel price.

Here are some observations based on this analysis.

a) Where Higher Ed might go with systems that are used in other verticals as an alternative to having the systems customized for Higher Ed, some rethinking should be done regarding the costs of the latter. Those costs shouldn't be measured when the market for that system is immature. That doesn't measure full cost. Put another way, demanding customized solutions is like asking to be held up by the vendor(s), not immediately, but down the road. This needs to be understood.

b) If Higher Ed IT have become data custodians for their institutions then the cost and quality of protection depends on the extent that information is regulated by the government. More stringent regulations translate into higher IT costs. If you think of it this way, then from the student perspective (or the perspective of their families) they may face the choice of higher tuition and higher privacy guarantees or lower tuition but then less privacy guarantees. The government makes these regulations with a desirable end in mind - guaranteeing student privacy - but without a firm notion of the cost to enforce the regulation. If as in a particular service area, the sense of what that costs becomes clearer, then the tradeoff perhaps can be articulated with some degree of precision. At that point, it should make sense to bring the discussion back into the public policy arena. Can a sensible middle be found? That might lesson the feeling of lock in that many CIOs seem to be feeling now.

c) The article also discussed forming some buyer consortium across campuses, to match the size (and therefore the power) of the vendor. Thinking this way, one might consider what is happening now with the NBA, where the current season looks to be in jeopardy. If bargaining power is exercised, it can lead to no transaction for a considerable period of time. Ask, whether that, even as a veiled threat, is a possibility in this instance. If not, it is unclear how such a consortium improves the bargaining power. It is possible that the campuses god get better deals anyway, because dealing with the consortium lowers the vendor costs in an appreciable way - less of a sales force, easier to keep track of contracts, etc. But, of course, there are real costs in coordinating across campuses to determine something like a consortial preference. The potential cost saving may not be worth the real pain of coordinating.

It may not make anyone feel better that what we are observing with the provision of these enterprise IT systems is fairly predictable, given the relevant economic theory. But perhaps, if the CIOs together thought more about the economics, they'd get a better sense of what their alternatives really are over time. A while ago I wrote a piece on Dis-Integrating the LMS, where the main argument for disintegration was given along pedagogical lines. Perhaps disintegration is an approach that should be tried with other other enterprise systems, simply as defense against vendor expropriation. It's worth thinking that through.

College CIOs want more power in negotiations with vendors | Inside Higher Ed via kwout

Rooting for the American League

2011-10-21T08:22:00.000-05:00

Hats off to the Rangers keystone combo,
On hard hit ground balls they dance the mambo,
Down to licks that are last,
On the basepath running fast,
Shooting at the Redbirds sans arrow and bow.

2011 World Series -- Texas Rangers' ninth inning changes the Series - ESPN via kwout

Technology and its Discontents

2011-10-20T06:11:00.000-05:00

Last night I wanted to watch the World Series. We get our TV via satellite dish. Between the wind and the rain, however, the signal kept on getting dropped, to the point where it wasn't any fun to watch. I wonder how many other viewers were in the same boat.

* * * * *

One of my favorite features of the New York Times online is the word look up function. Select the word by dragging across it with the mouse and a question mark pops up that you can click to get a dictionary definition. Well done! Alas, the technology is not enabled for the Times blogs, such as this Linda Greenhouse Opinionator column. She challenges my feeble vocabulary with words like "protean." I duly go through the routine, but then nada.

So my request for the Times is first, enable the look up technology for the entire Web site, or if that is not possible then second, make Greenhouse an Op-Ed columnist. She deserves it and what she is writing about is incredibly important.

* * * * *

It's hard for me to tell sometimes what is a virus, spyware, or simply an annoying program. Over the last two or three weeks, with some regularity, a dialog screen pops up that looks like some sort of music playing software, and it wants me to select a language to install. It doesn't say the name of the software or why I should do this. It is as if this is step two or step three in an install process, but I don't recall it ever going through step one. I click cancel and get a temporary fix, but it is not a solution. I don't know how to go about finding a real solution.

* * * * *

I have a Sony Vaio flatscreen with the processor in the monitor as my home computer. Mostly it works reasonably well, but on occasion it temporarily loses association with the wireless mouse. The first couple of times this happened I panicked. But now I've gotten used to it and if you wait a bit, the association is restored. I've gone through the routine of replacing the batteries more than once, finally concluding the problem isn't with the mouse, but either some hardware or software issue with the Vaio itself. Live by the sword...

* * * * *

The campus VPN software is very important. For example, when I'm surfing and find a published article I'm interesting in looking at, if I'm logged into the VPN and the campus Library has a subscription to the database where the Library is located, I automatically get access. That is wunderbar! However, sometimes even when I'm connected to the Internet but not yet using the VPN, when I try to establish a VPN connection there is a little red X and a message that says you need an active connection to the Internet. This is discouraging. You can access the Library content via a different form of authentication, but then you have to go find the article through their online catalog/interface. Sometimes that's only a couple of more steps and then is not a big deal. Other times it takes longer and when that happens sometimes I give up before getting the article I want to access.

* * * * *

For certain programming on TV, like baseball, I like to have my iPad with me while I'm watching. Sometimes I do Web surfing that is related to the game. Other times, I'm doing my digital immigrant version of multi-processing. I recently changed my ATT subscription for the iPad. I had the unlimited and reduced that to a quota, cutting the monthly fee in half. It seemed to me mostly I was using it on Wifi, so why pay in addition? When I'm in our sitting area/living room reading on the iPad, the wireless network in the house works great. The TV room is adjacent and the house isn't that big to where this is a long distance from the router. But in the TV room sometimes the wireless signal gets dropped.   Other times it works fine.

* * * * *

Every one in the family now uses the exercise room we have in the basement to do the treadmill and lift light weights. We've got a TV in there hooked to the satellite dish and also connected to a DVD player. Mostly, I watch DVDs, the distraction keeps me at the activity for a while. The treadmill, however, makes a fair amount of noise. So my son has taken to having the caption play on the DVD. I didn't really want that, but I couldn't figure out how to turn them off.   He's not around when I exercise. So I watch with them on.

* * * * *

We think of technology as empowering. And it is. But it also presents a variety of little obstacles that each of us must deal with in our own way. For me, it's a lesson in humility, accepting what is doled out.   Having not that long ago held the title, CIO, it should be that I am the captain of my fate. Alas, it's more like I'm a buck private, awaiting new marching orders.

Comments on Inside Job

2011-10-19T10:58:00.002-05:00

The film is a documentary, narrated by Matt Damon, about the cause of the financial crisis, which it puts squarely at the hands of the financial services industry and its cozy ties with the Federal government. On the question, What happened?, including what temporally preceded the actual meltdown, I think the film is quite good.

Most of that is a matter of record. I didn't know about some of the personal indiscretions of players on Wall Street. That was new to me. As I'm writing this during the week of the Educause national conference in Philadelphia, I should point out that most of the folks I knew professionally in Information Technology, though milder than the "type A" personalities depicted in the film, behave differently when at the conference, where the vendors want to wine and dine them, than they do when they are back on their campuses, when everything is paid for with their own nickel. That dealing-with-vendors environment is omnipresent for folks who work on Wall Street. So I found that less surprising. That the behavior is financed by the investments of folks like you and me, surely that is infuriating, the entire film is meant to stroke our ire. I used to rationalize some of the wining and dining as a way for the vendors and us to better understand each other, and there was some truth to that. I suspect that if you did more investigation of the Wall Street types and asked them to defend some of these practices, they'd defend the practices similarly, even if some of the behavior is morally reprehensible. In any event, that is symptom not cause, so I will push on.

On the question, Why did this happen?, I think the film is less good. In a couple of places there were factual errors presented. The film clearly had an agenda and therefore didn't spend nearly as much time as it might on presenting alternative views. But mostly, I believe the problem is that it omitted events and practices that were relevant, in my view, and so the context for considering what happened is not set properly. More on all of this below.

Deregulation (of natural monopoly) actually started under Carter, not Reagan, as it is stated in the film. The first industry to be deregulated was the airlines, with the effort led by Alfred Kahn. Had Carter won the election in 1980, surely telecommunications would have been next. ATT eventually was split up, in 1984. Given the state of air travel now, it is hard to offer a definitive conclusion that deregulation was a good thing. But on telecommunications, that seems to me a no-brainer, in spite of issues that have emerged.

When Reagan became President the fervor for deregulation swept across the board. It wasn't just natural monopoly to be deregulated. Environmental and safety regulations (regulation of externalties) were also taken to task. Anyone who remembers Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, will understand the point implicitly. An unfortunate rhetorical problem, in my view, is that the word "regulation" applies both to the natural monopoly case and the externality case. That they might be different, both in kind and in degree, doesn't typically get discussed in typical media or political outlets. So one doesn't usually hear that you can be for some regulation and against others. That is too subtle for our discourse. Instead, only the straw man argument is made - for or against regulation, in toto. This puts the Democrats in the "for" camp and the Republicans in the "against" camp.

There is then the issue of regulation for financial services. Is it a question of natural monopoly or externalities, or is it neither? I note that with pollution, for example, you can measure the externality at the source. With systematic financial risk, however, you can only measure that by looking at all sources simultaneously. The exact same behavior can be of no consequence, in one instance, and of dreaded consequence, in another instance depending on what is going on elsewhere. This makes it difficult to think of financial regulation as entirely within the externality family. So I believe it should be its own separate category, in large part because Government will come to the rescue when there is a cataclysm. An obvious question to ask then is whether the industry can be self-regulating, as Alan Greenspan believed it was before the meltdown. It seems clear the industry was not. Less clear is why.

The film does go as far as pointing out that there weren't deductibles, for example with mortgage loan origination. Were there steep deductibles perhaps many of the excesses could have been avoided.

To me, much of the answer to that can be found in the leveraged buyout craze of the 1980s, which gets no mention in the movie whatsoever. I believe that is a mistake in setting context. As a defensive strategy against leveraged buyouts, CEOs and other high level executives got "golden parachutes." The practice lingers although the problem it was aimed to address may no longer be an issue. More important, however, is the following. The film makes the point that outsiders: SEC regulators, the ratings agencies, and the accounting firms, have a tough time interpreting information that is on the firm's balance sheet. (Sometimes this is fraud, but I believe much of this is simply not understanding the picture from the data they do observe, perhaps because the books are cooked to mask the problem, but also simply because of complexity.) The film doesn't point out, however, that corporate boards are in the same boat. Therefore it is extraordinarily difficult to measure how the firm is positioned for the long haul, whether its hand is strong or weak. Consequently, current earnings are king. This makes the firm myopic in its objectives. That has always been a problem. The corporate takeovers made it much worse. In case its not obvious, deductibles might have improved the balance sheet long term. But immediately, they make earnings worse.

The other thing, I believe, that the LBOs did was to create a hunger in the financial houses, to get more of the pie from financial transactions. Why leave the spoils for Michael Milken and Carl Icahn? So I don't see it as such a great leap to go from the Junk Bonds of 1980s to the subprime loans and the slicing and dicing of mortgages of the 2000s.

Another piece of history that is omitted in the film is the Asian Debt crisis of the late 1990s. It is tempting to view the U.S. meltdown as an it-happened-here-first phenomenon. But it may be more appropriate to consider it part of an ongoing cycle that started earlier. The fundamental issue then is that cheap credit leads to high leverage, which in turn can lead to default if circumstances change for the worse. Much of this is bubble driven. When asset values appreciate rapidly, why be cautious? Note that in the U.S. the personal saving rate declined precipitously in 1999 (and then stayed low). Ours certainly was a larger scale crisis. But that doesn't mean the root cause was of our making alone.

Let me turn next to the issue of creating securities to provide insurance - derivatives if you will. The word itself is toxic now. But the concept shouldn't be. This is a straight economies of scale argument. Insurance makes sense from the provider point of view if there are a large number of independent risks, so the provider can properly diversify. This makes natural disaster insurance somewhat problematic, because the risks are correlated. However, the risk correlation is local. Globally, a bunch of local risks starts to look independent. Global financial markets are the proper place to bring such risks. Local insurers, even with reinsurance markets, don't have enough scale to get the right diversification. This argument is made in a piece by Michael Lewis, written a year before the financial crisis, in Nature's Casino. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26neworleans-t.html?sq=natural%20disaster%20financial%20markets&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all It makes for an interesting read, one that provides an argument for securitization. That argument is not in the film.

Of course, insurance does create moral hazard for the insured regarding inadequate precaution. Where to site a home, when natural disaster risk is present, is from this point of view the same issue as how big a home to buy, in the presence of default risk. The moral hazard issue gets nary a mention in the film. The predatory lenders get all the blame, instead of sharing it. This is where I have issues with the Occupy Wall Street protests. They point the finger at the 1%, but don't talk about the responsibility of the 99%.

Finally, let me turn to the last part of the film, where some important economists are depicted either as clueless (like the regulators, Rick Mishkin is cast in a terrible light) or as having completely sold their souls to the devil, getting big-time fees for serving on Bank boards, etc. (so doing the bidding of the financial services industry). In considering this, let me set Larry Summers aside for a minute on that and talk about the others.

I believe the movie has cause and effect reversed here. Glenn Hubbard, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Bush II and current Dean of the Business School at Columbia, is a good case in point. His views about the relationship between taxation and economic growth, which I disagree with strongly, are what came first. He's a supply sider and one of the authors of the Bush Tax Cuts. This makes him kind of a superstar in some circles. His reputation followed from his academic beliefs. Here it needs to be pointed out that Economics at the macro level is not science - no controlled experiments are possible. Cause is imputed from the historical record. So economists can disagree about cause. But those disagreements are based on a prior intellectual orientation. Ditto for Martin Feldstein, also shown in the film, who chaired the Council in the Reagan era. I believe questioning their integrity was, hitting below the belt. It is enough to question their views about policy.

I do think Larry Summers is a different animal, in part because some of his academic writings are Keynesian in spirit and in part because quite recently he has been pro stimulus, particularly for relief on the payroll tax. In the 1990s, however, in his various government roles he was very much a free trader and for deregulation of financial services. So, how does one square that? Here is one conjecture and one observation. Not all economists are attracted by political power, but some are and I believe Summers was. He had conquered the world of academic publishing and was looking for a different game to play. In the new world, with Robert Rubin his mentor, both free trade (which most economists would ascribe to at first pass) and deregulation in financial services part of the mantra, and the U.S. in high growth mode, forebodings about the impact on future downturns were absent. These were policies for the present.

This gets me to the observation. Human nature being what it is, there is a tendency to want to regulate when the economy slumps, to rule out that past indiscretions will repeat, and to deregulate at the start of a boom, to get rid of impediments that might hamper growth. Alas, having an entirely time consistent view is difficult, particularly if at heart you are a pragmatist. Ideologues may have it easier on this score, but they have the issue that their ideology may seem out of sync with current reality. The problem is more severe in that there can be substantial lag between policy implementation and economic consequence. Further, when living in the present we may not understand the causes of current events. In the late 1990s there was genuine confusion about whether the Internet had changed the economy unalterably, or if it was a bubble. The evidence was provided with many companies that had huge growth in usage but had negative earnings. Would Summers have argued the way he did in the 1990s had he known how the 2000s would turn out? I don't know.

Let me wrap up. The film cast the Wall Street Insiders as perpetrators of a crime. That is probably a good thing. It implicitly makes us viewers victims of that crime. That is not a good thing because, apart from punishing the perpetrators, it doesn't tell us what we should want next. So it missed an opportunity for the audience to learn. It is still not too late to be asking that question.

Lack of CLASS...

2011-10-15T10:29:00.000-05:00

... or They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

I'm not sure what the social contract should say about long term health care. If it is an individual responsibility, surely it will lead to bankruptcy, for the individual or the insurance provider, or the person does without. Is there another alternative aside from Kevorkian?

Long-Term Care Program Cut From Health Law - NYTimes.com via kwout

Not a fan, but watching the contest

2011-10-14T08:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I did some unusual viewing for me. I had previously recorded The Best Man, a 1964 movie from the play by Gore Vidal, written in 1960. I watched it last night. I've always liked the political drama, and was happy to find on TCM a film I don't recall ever seeing before. It was also interesting to see for itself and for looking at it as a commentary on current politics.

It is about a race race for the Presidential nomination. Without a mention, this appears to be the Democratic Party, since there is a Southern state Governor who is a candidate, one who is opposed to integrated schools, nonetheless wanting the mantle of "Progressive." There are two front runners. One is an egghead, the current Secretary of State, played by Henry Fonda, whose political vice is that he is on occasion indecisive, or at least appears to be so to others not quite so intellectual, looking for the perfect solution, or at least a solution better than those that immediately present themselves. His marriage is in trouble. To insiders, that is not a political flaw, but it is a liability with the voters, so it needs to be concealed. The wife cooperates. She has her own aspirations to be First Lady. The actress who plays her is Margaret Leighton and she has a very distinctive, somewhat hoarse speaking voice. I thought I had heard that before and then I started to play my game, where? After being vexed for a while I thought I figured it out. Somehow I convinced myself that it was the same voice as the wife of the deceased President Lassiter from the West Wing Episode, The Stormy Present. This proved completely wrong. Margaret Leighton passed away in 1976, while that West Wing episode is from 2004.

The interesting part of the Fonda character is that there is a strong ethical streak and there is more spine to the character than one might initially expect. So it is not quite a stereotype, which I suppose is why Fonda played the character, since he always seemed to play that sort of individual. This character contrasts with the character of the other front runner, a Senator with a prosecutorial style in the manner of Joe McCarthy. This character is played, quite convincingly, by Cliff Robertson, a self-made man who claimed to understand the voice of the people because he was one of them. Yet with a tin ear, he couldn't read the nuance of a particular situation and of the true character of his political allies and enemies. That proved to be his political undoing.

Both of the front runners are vying for the endorsement of a former President, who it turns out is dying from cancer, though that is closely held information. This endorsement will presumably determine which candidate gets the nomination. The drama unfolds as the former President has private meetings with each candidate and where it unfolds that each candidate has some dirt on the rival that might be used as a lever to get the other to drop out. How the dirt is used (or not) is the way we learn about the candidate's true character.

The flavor or the story seems quite realistic. Looking at the Wikipedia entry for the film afterward, I learned that each character had been based on actual Presidents or Presidential candidates. In that way the author gets to leverage our own mental images of these characters and doesn't have to elaborate on their descriptions. One telling scene will do. Of course I'm watching the film almost 50 years after the fact (and more than 50 years for the original play). I know who Adlai Stevenson is but have no memory of him as a candidate and only a vague memory of him as a representative to the U.N. I didn't put two and two together that he was the model for the Fonda character. But the story seemed realistic to me anyway, even though some of the environs and the seeming lack of Secret Service personnel anywhere plus that the film is in black and white make it look dated. One particular realism, used to set the stage at a formal dinner for the candidates the night before the Convention started, was entertainment provided by Mahalia Jackson singing Down By The Riverside. They didn't show the whole song, but what they did show was quite moving.

Let met draw a couple of take aways as they relate to the present. I believe it has been under commented on how party elders used to influence current elections, but no longer appear to be doing so. In the current Republican race, the ghost of Ronald Reagan is clearly present, but the specter of the still living Bush Presidents is nowhere to be seen. I recall a column by Maureen Dowd written still early in the Bush II Presidency, that ultimately the father would be remembered as the true conservative. So far that doesn't seem to have happened, though outside the current campaign his reputation appears to be rising, precisely because he compromised and did raise taxes in a way that everyone is aware of that. (There has been much said recently about tax increases under Reagan, but his reputation doesn't appear to have been besmirched by these realities.) The absence of influence from former Presidents allows for greater instability and fewer ties with the past.

The other point, worth reflecting on further, is that as a culture we seem suspicious of high intelligence and are more trusting of the ordinary guy. One principal fallibility of Bush II, going with what his gut tells him, is something prized in the movie, even if it leads to undeniably flawed conclusions. The character associated with being "a fighter" is valued more than any possible conclusion derived from an in depth reasoning through on the issues. The seeming know-nothing-ism of today has deep roots, a point I became aware of from quite a different source. Super smart guys as counselors may be okay, but having such a smart guy as leader poses serious issues, because intelligence is perceived to conflict with pragmatic solutions, particularly if that intelligence has been accommodated with intense schooling. (Steve Jobs, for example, might be exempt from this particular prejudice because as a drop out his adult learning happened in the business world and his decisions were validated by the success of the products Apple produced.) As we look to reinvigorate our economy, perhaps we should look at cultural liabilities that hold us back from further progress.

* * * * *

Earlier in the day, I watched the baseball playoff game between the Rangers and the Tigers. It being a potential elimination game for the Tigers and their relief pitching deleted from prior over use, there was some extra drama in the game as the star pitcher, Justin Verlander, was asked to go a long way to secure a victory. Ultimately his pitch count got to 132, more pitches than he had made in any other game over his entire career. Apparently before the game the manager Jim Leyland had announced not just that he wasn't going to use his closer or setup man, but also that he'd limit Verlander to 125 pitches or so, unless circumstances dictated otherwise. As it turned out, Leyland got two out of three and on Verlander he perhaps should have stuck with his original decision, because while Verlander still seemed to be in command in the eighth inning, the last pitch he threw was a two-run homer by Nelson Cruz.

I have been thinking the last week or two how in baseball they are now so sensitive about overwork for a starting pitcher possibly ruining his career. Sandy Koufax is the pitcher everyone thinks about in regard to this hypothesis, though you have to rely in innings pitched as the over use measure, because they don't have pitch count statistics. Nolan Ryan had high innings pitched in his early years with the Angels, but the innings pitched came down after that. Back to my thought, there is no comparable idea of overwork for everyday players. But it sure seems like many of them are injured, and in ways that materially impact the outcome of the game. This is particularly true for the catchers, but also for several outfielders. I don't know what the solution is, but I do wonder why there isn't more precaution taken about the health of the everyday ball player.

The game itself seemed to have divine grace. The Tigers immediately feel behind and in a bunch of small ways they appeared to be wilting under the pressure. Then in the sixth inning with a runner on first base, there was a play I hadn't seen before. Cabrera, the best Tiger hitter, sends a ground ball with some bounce to it down the third base line. The ball hits the bag and then bounces over the third baseman's head. Earlier in the game the third baseman, Adrian Beltre, had made a beautiful back handed stop of a hard hit ball. So off the bat this looked like a repeat, one that would turn a double play. Instead it became a double. Following that the Tiger hit a triple, then a home run. It was the first time in the history of the playoffs that a team had "hit for the cycle" and in order. The tide had turned.

I don't know if I will watch the next game (tomorrow evening). I've got the feeling that they've used up all the good karma, the way Butler seemed to in the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament. The final game was an anticlimax. But maybe there will still be some left, because this will only be game six. If there is drama you can watch the game without being a fan. Without the drama, there are other distractions that are more compelling.

Absorbing Mortgage Debt

2011-10-13T08:44:00.000-05:00

Martin Feldstein puts forward a proposal to have the Government and the Banks absorb excess mortgage debt, so the economy can "get on with it." In principal, this seems like a good idea. In the details of the proposal, I don't get it, as I will illustrate. It seems to me an even more radical solution is necessary.

How many of us know the current "value" of our homes? Here, I would define value as what one could get in resale now if one put the house on the market. Most of us know what we paid for the house initially, and certainly we know the value of our mortgages, but the banks tell us that. I know that when we last refinanced, less than a year ago if I recall correctly, we did not require an appraisal. It was the first time I can remember getting a mortgage without one. My point here on this is nobody wants to know the value of the home, for fear it is lower than what we hope it is. Literally, no news is good news.

Let me abstract from that issue in what I say below, but I do want to note that there can be substantial moral hazard in the proposal given this uncertainty about home values. Borrowers who might be able to reduce the principal on their mortgage have incentive to understate the value. Banks, in contrast, have incentive to overstate home value, so they don't have to absorb debt.

In my lifetime I've purchased 3 homes - a condo I had when I was single, our renovated Victorian house on Old Church Road that we sold about seven years ago, and the one we live in now. Each time the mortgage was 80% of the purchase price. For the Old Church Road house, for a time we did have a home equity line, justified in my head by taking advantage of the mortgage interest deduction (and perhaps on the capital gain we took as we did put a fair amount of bucks into the house and when we resold it, there was a significant capital gain). But we really never leveraged ourselves beyond the 80%.

In Feldstein's proposal he wants to reduce the mortgage principal to 110% of value. I don't understand that. In the piece Feldstein distinguishes between a nonrecourse loan - if the borrower defaults the lender can repossess the house but is not entitled to other assets of the borrower, most mortgages are in this category - and a recourse loan which he suggests is what the converted mortgages should be. Perhaps this makes sense if you assume the borrowers will find a decent job soon thereafter and the value of the home will rise, both as a consequence of the program. But if the economy continues to tank for a while, Feldstein's program notwithstanding, you can have these borrowers now with recourse loans, therefore less incentive to look for work, and the loan even after it has adjusted, might still exceed 110% of value, if housing prices fall further because the program is perceived as inadequate and the market treats the program as the last straw.

It seems to me you need to keep the mortgages as nonrecourse and reduce principal on them to less than 100%, say 90%. This makes the pill to swallow much bigger for the banks and the tax payers. But it seems to me it also makes it much more likely that such a program would be effective.

How to Stop the Drop in Home Values - NYTimes.com via kwout

Nelson's Ghost

2011-10-12T09:46:00.002-05:00

Doesn't it seem ironic that Mitt Romney has returned to front runner status? The Tea Party seeming in ascendency, yet the Republican Presidential candidate appears far more moderate, and now aggressively so. Reading the first few paragraphs of the piece excerpted below, I thought of Rockefeller, who was Governor of NY when I was a kid. Of course no primaries or caucuses have yet to be run. Surely it is a mistake to pick the winner of the race before it has started. Nonetheless, it is interesting to speculate about it. Somebody should write a faux U.S. history, based on the counter factual that in 1964 Goldwater didn't get the Republican nomination. Perhaps that's in store for us next.

Republican Candidates in Debate Divide on Economy - NYTimes.com via kwout

Anger or Enlightenment?

2011-10-11T09:41:00.000-05:00

When I was in the tenth grade there was the National Moratorium Against the War in Vietnam. I had recalled it being in May 1970, but I looked it up and it was a day in November 1969. I mention this as an alert to anyone reading the piece who might have similar memories. Mine are very likely off, and not just a little. Now, back to the story.

By fall 1969, everyone I knew was against the War. Ending it was a no brainer, though it would take more than three years for that to really happen. But a few years earlier, when I first learned about the War in Junior High School, and seeing some of my classmates against it, I recall that being surprising. My initial reaction was to support my country and therefore to support the War. My feelings weren't America - Love It Or Leave It. I don't know that I was reading a newspaper yet when I learned about the War, or if I was reading a newspaper then I had only recently started, so it wasn't that. It was more that if you do the Pledge of Allegiance in class every day then when you hear about your country at war, your instinct is to be for your country. It would take a while to come to the point of view that you could be for your country but against the War.

On the day of the Moratorium when I got to school, like everyone else, I found that somehow school was closed for the day. I should add here that my school was on split session. My first class was at something like 11:40 AM. So school may very well have been open at 8 AM but closed down by the time I arrived. Whether school was open earlier I don't know. At the usual arrival time we were all hanging around outside the school and word spread that there was going to be a protest rally that afternoon in Bryant Park, behind the NYC Public Library Building. One or two of my friends decided to go. I believe that was James and possibly Henry. There's that memory thing again; I'm not sure. It was both a bus and a subway ride to get there, an hour or more in each direction, so going meant it would be for the rest of the day. But school was closed so why not?

When we got just outside the park it was jammed pack and hard to get it in. I recall a few of those that were already in pulling up others who wanted to get in over a concrete railing, because the regular entrance was just impossible at that point. I was a pretty big guy and unsure they could get me over the railing, but somehow they did and we were in. We found a place to sit and pretty much hung out there the rest of the afternoon. There were speeches from some luminaries - Mayor Lindsay, Representative Shirley Chisholm, and a few others I don't recall. They were inspirational. You felt as if you were part of something big and important and that being there mattered. I was told later that I made it onto the evening news. This wasn't for doing anything special. My leg fell asleep from sitting cross legged for a long time. I stood up to get some circulation in going. The camera panned the crowd then and there I was, the only one standing.

The point I want to draw from this recollection is that protest then was an act of solidarity, organized in a way where some of the political establishment were leaders of the protest. Yet with all the feel good that the protest engendered, the motive was nonetheless anger. The War was unjust. We as a country should never have escalated the conflict. Having done so, we should stop it ASAP. This was a simple message with a simple solution, both of those unifying. Nevertheless, it is hard to see looking backward that the protest had much consequence. given how events unfolded afterward.

It just occurred to me as I was writing this that May 1970 was when the shootings at Kent State occurred. I wonder why I conflated the two events.

* * * * *

I want to turn now to the Occupy Wall Street movement and a piece in Today's New York Times by David Brooks that bothered me, a lot. Brooks seems to be fed up with anger from the left, though I don't understand why. He is six and a half years younger than I am so he missed being a teenager during the anti Vietnam War period. He seems to only want wonkish solutions to America's problems. Simple expressions of anger will not do. He hasn't figured out that solidarity must precede any solution and the basis of solidarity, especially now, has to be anger with the system, which is totally screwed up and rigged to benefit those at the top. We've seen this from The Right already, though as many have pointed out that movement had rich financiers feeding it support. There hasn't been an organized expression of anger from The Left up to this point. Why not have such a grass roots expression?

Having myself written a variety of pieces that fall into the wonkish solution category and seeing them go nowhere, while now seeing a fair amount of attention in the mainstream media focused on Occupy Wall Street, I've got to admire their stick-to-it-ness and good sense (from a marketing point of view) of not going down the policy path too early. It is much easier to know what you are against - that's what drives the anger - than to know what you are for. Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker has a piece, A Walk in the Park, that seems much more descriptive of what Occupy Wall Street actually is. Near the end he writes (note OWES is Hertzberg's own acronym for the movement):

What OWES doesn’t have—and is under some pressure, internal and external, to formulate—is a traditional agenda: a list of “demands,” a set of legislative recommendations, a five-point program. For many of its participants, this lack is an essential part of the attraction. They’re making it up on the fly. They don’t really know where it will take them, and they like it that way. Occupy Wall Street is a political project, but it is equally a cri de coeur, an exercise in constructive group dynamics, a release from isolation, resignation, and futility. The process, not the platform, is the point. Anyway, OWES is not the Brookings Institution.

Following this Hertzberg concludes on a hopeful note because what OWES should be doing is not solving all the problems, but rather kindling a spirit of trying to solve them in a much larger sympathetic community, and that seems possible, though at this juncture still improbable.

This gets me back to Brooks. The question to ask is do we really not have a road map of what should be down to put America again on sound footing? Or is it that like peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, everyone knows the elements of what a solution looks like. That's not the problem. The problem is that there isn't the political will to get there. Last year, their was a longish piece in the New Yorker about Chuck Schumer and Wall Street. That piece illustrated the problem. Why doesn't Brooks write about it?

The Milquetoast Radicals - NYTimes.com via kwout

Noble Nobel

2011-10-10T14:41:00.000-05:00

I like the second paragraph in this blurb about economic analysis really being a careful reading of history. At this late juncture in my career I regret not having more training in that regard, so I spent a disproportionate time theorizing and not enough time on the available evidence. Sargent (in his early paper with Neil Wallace) vexed us in first year macro in grad school. It's good to see he's come around from the thinking in that paper. At a seminar he gave at Illinois some years back I flummoxed him unintentionally, by asking him whether he knew if the equilibrium of his model was unique. He had assumed that, but hadn't proved it. I was too shy to chat with him about it after the talk. It probably won't ever happen, but if the opportunity were to avail itself, I'd like to chat with him now. I particularly would want to know whether his political views have changed along with his economics.

American Economists Share Nobel Prize - NYTimes.com via kwout

No Joy in Mudville

2011-10-07T06:45:00.000-05:00

Alas, this wasn't a game of horseshoes.

ALDS 2011: Detroit Tigers survive ALDS Game 5, advance to ALCS - ESPN via kwout

Learning Technology in TV Sports Viewing

2011-10-05T11:58:00.001-05:00

Over the years I've written from time to time a critique, or a how to, or an illustrative use post about learning technology. All of these posts come from my own explorations with the technology, what I've uncovered based on that, and a reflection about potential future use. A handful of the posts still get a fair amount of hits for which I'm grateful, since it shows others do get some use value out of what I've written and that provides some sort of validation for the activity in the first place. Of course I realize that many of the hits are driven by how Google prioritizes its searches and where my post fits in on the topic in question. I view Google as a de facto dictator in this respect, but largely of the benevolent kind.

I'm going to try to make the same sort of posting based on my experience as a sports fan watching on TV. I will focus on golf, tennis, football, and baseball, simply because that's what I've watched the most as of late. It's pretty obvious that other than reviewing a particular segment of an event via the DVR, as a fan there aren't experiments to be performed this way, so my learning about the technology is not quite the same as the learning I've had with ed tech. Also let me note at the something else pretty obvious. The technology in sports viewing can be used in two different ways. First, it can be there merely to help the fan visualize what is going on. In this respect the technology has no impact on the play itself. Second, the technology can be brought in as an additional referee, presumably an entirely objective one, to help in making close calls or in reviewing calls made by human referees that are contentious.

One example of the first use come from football, where it is now standard to have virtual markers on the screen for the line of scrimmage and the first down marker. The camera angle is not perpendicular to the field, so it helps the viewer to keep those yardage markers fixed on the screen. Further the announcers are not particularly reliable in determining whether on a close play a first down has been achieved or not. The announcers suffer from the same issue of parallax as does every other viewer of the game. The virtual lines help the viewers make their own judgments about the success of a particular play and they also make it clear what the immediate goals are for the offense. The humans who referee the game retain discretion regarding where to "spot" the ball, but given the spot whether a first down has been achieved or not is immediately evident to the viewer. So this particular technology is very helpful and I give it high marks for improving the fan experience.

Another example of this type of technology use comes from golf, where Protracer now seems ubiquitous (although maybe that is because I watch the major tournaments but not much other golf). The camera has a tough time picking up the flight of the ball and/or while in flight the ball is only slightly bigger than a speck on the screen, which makes it very hard to view. (In contrast, the camera is excellent at showing the player's swing, which is in full.) The new technology, by illustrating the entire path of the ball, gives much more sense of the flight of the ball, the spin that was put on the ball, and whether the player hit a good shot or made a miscue. Like the football example, this technology enhances the viewing experience and I appreciate it as part of what is shown.

Now let me turn to an example from baseball, where I believe the technology use is less beneficial, possibly even pernicious. The technology use reminds me of when I used to play stickball at then JHS 74, in the school yard there. We would draw a rectangle on the concrete wall behind our imagined home plate. The rectangle would serve as the strike zone. We'd color the rectangle in with chalk, with the thought that if the ball hit the rectangle some chalk would get on the ball and that way we could tell if it were a strike or not, should we dispute the call. The technology today seems to do something similar. A rectangle is shown on the screen to represent the strike zone and an image of the ball is positioned on the screen. Balls in the rectangle are supposed to be strikes. Those outside the rectangle are balls.

There are two different problems with this sort of rendering. The first issue is that the method is inconsistent with the rules of the game. While the width of the strikes zone is given by the width of home plate and that is invariant, according to the rules the height of the strike zone is from the knees to the letters (armpits) when the player is in his usual stance. That height is therefore idiosyncratic from player to player. The strike zone is not a fixed entity but rather something that varies with the batter. A pitch that is high for one player can properly be a strike for another player, and likewise for low pitches. The technology, however, treats the strike zone as fixed, not flexible.

The second issue is that the strike zone should be conceived of as a three dimensional object, with the third dimension the depth of plate. At issue then is whether the trajectory of the ball crosses through that three dimensional object or instead remains entirely outside it. For a pitch with a substantial curve or sink, this can be a big deal. The right answer depends not on where the catcher ends up catching the ball, but rather where the ball crossed the plate. A two-dimensional representation entirely obscures this distinction.

These points would seem theoretical only except that with a fair degree of regularity the fan sees both what should be strikes as they are represented on the screen be called balls by the umpire and what should be balls as represented on the screen be called strikes by the umpire. The consequence is for the fans to consider each umpire as highly idiosyncratic himself and possibly unfair to one team or the other. Fans may very well have that impression anyway, but here the technology makes things worse, in my view.

Given the progress with the technology in the other sports and how much money is tied up into baseball viewing, I've got to wonder whether this situation can be improved. The view of the pitch is from centerfield looking toward the plate. Imagine a different view (one that is not shown on TV at present) perpendicular to the standard view that shows the player standing at the plate and in ultra slow motion shows the pitch as it crosses the plate, in particular it's vertical trajectory. I don't know whether such a view is really possible to obtain. The time lapse is a very small fraction of a second only. But if we had that view, it would really help inform whether the ball is in the strike zone or not. Absent that view, however, I'm wondering whether what is shown is helpful or misleading.

Let me turn to the case where technology is used as referee. The best example, I believe, comes from tennis where the Hawk-Eye ball tracker is now used to determine whether a shot is in or not. As in other instances of using technology as an objective referee, this is done only when review of the play is requested. It isn't performed otherwise, because it is time consuming to review. One player challenges the call and there is a quota on the number of challenges per set, so a player simply can't slow things down with bad challenges. The incentives are there to use challenges to get the calls right. But the technology is different in Tennis than it is in Football, because the evidence that is reviewed in tennis is a snapshot of the ball hitting the ground. The question of camera angle doesn't come up with that. (Though I'm not sure why not and nor am I sure why the technology seems so accurate.) In contrast, with Football review the video is watched by the human referees and whether the video provides a good view of the play can be hit or miss. In part this difference emerges because in football there are many potential variables to be determined - fumble, movement on the line, the position of the ball when the knees touched down, time on the clock, etc. In tennis, the review is used only for in or out calls. With this more limited scope the review can be good at providing that particular determination.

I would like to see something similar used in baseball, but not for balls and strikes. Checked swings are a better candidate, one where regularly the home plate umpire surrenders judgement either to the first base or third base umpire (depending on whether the batter is left handed or right handed). There is a parallax problem in determining whether the bat crosses the vertical plane defined by the front of the plate. Wouldn't technology devoted to just that question be used as Hawk-Eye is used in tennis be an improvement on what we have now? (My impression is that the vast majority of the time the player does "go around" but it is called less frequently than that.)

I wonder if other sports fans would agree with my assessment. I also wonder if baseball broadcasters, in particular, might experiment with alternative technologies for judging balls and strikes. The announcing has gotten better in the way it discusses the mindset of the players from one situation to the next (and with pitchers in the booth then suggesting what the next pitch selection should be). The technology is supposed to provide the fan with more objective information. It would be good for there to be some critique done (other than my post) on whether the technology actually achieves that end.

The Birth of Wide Views

2011-10-02T10:43:00.002-05:00

Of Governor Christie's girth,

Rather than punditry, mirth,

Alas, of sharp humor dearth,

Wit on the waistline to unearth.

The Round and the Oval - The New York Times

It's going to be Mitt

2011-10-01T09:37:00.000-05:00

One by one they crash and burn,
Pawlenty,
Then Bachmann,
Now it's Rick Perry's turn.

Looking for another choice,
Having verve,
Yet sober,
Letting fervent hopes find voice.

Christie, the latest flavor,
To the point,
While thoughtful,
His week of fame to savor.

Big money wants to make the rules,
The Default
Fiasco,
Caused fear of Tea Party fools.

Near to the time of panic,
Searching for
Another,
Desperate, with effort manic.

Romney is not their fashion,
Tight control,
Long term plan,
Seemingly lacking passion.

Also, does he have a soul,
Flip flopper,
Chameleon,
The White House his only goal?

So the exalted do chafe,
Not seeing
Evidence,
Mitt's the candidate who's safe.

The Curse of the Mitt - NY Times

When what you see is not what you get

2011-09-30T11:40:00.000-05:00

It's interesting how technology issues that you discovered long ago crop up again in the present, though in a somewhat altered form. In this case the issue is creating an MS Office document with highly stylized content and then viewing it in a different version of Office, perhaps also on a different platform.

Back in 1995 when I started to use FirstClass for teaching intermediate microeconomics, I posted lecture notes as a way to lure the students into the online conferencing system. I knew the students wanted the lecture notes, because they had asked me for those in the past. So I accommodated that desire with the hope they'd discuss the economics online, once they got there. At the time I was a Mac guy. My lecture notes were in Word. They had graphs made with a drawing program (MacDraw???) and then pasted into Word. A majority of the students were using a PC. So I converted my version of Word to a PC version, with a built in utility for that. And I also converted to a WordPerfect version, because that was still popular at the time. The text largely came through. But some of the graphs did not. I recall in particular a u-shaped average cost curve, where a portion of the graph got rotated 90 degrees upon conversion. It was amusing enough that I can remember it all these years later.

I'm have the same sort of issues now with Excel. Since I spent a fair amount of effort in taking out the macros and activex controls, finding suitable alternatives by other means, it occurred to me to test on a Mac to see if the rest of it worked okay. Mike Williams from the College of Ed was kind enough to help me with that. Alas, the results were a bit discouraging.

There were a few I discovered. I make extensive use of the combo box tool, which is supposed to work cross platform. Regarding functionality, that is true. However, regarding the size of the combo box, that is not true. The screen shots below illustrate. On the Mac, some of the combo boxes got too narrow to be useful.

Mac - Part of Login Worksheet

Combo boxes are too narrow to be useful

PC - Part of Login Worksheet

Original combo boxes that are fully functional

Also, if you are not colorblind, it should be obvious from the screen shots that the Mac changes the background color, from a pale blue on the PC to a green on the Mac. This is not just a cosmetic issue for me (though it is cosmetic in this particular instance). Because I'm hiding content in cells by having the font color the same as the background color, to be made visible at a later point via conditional formatting which alters the font color in a way to contrast with the background, it is crucial that if there is to be color substitution that the background color and font color substitute in the same way. Alas, we had an instance where that wasn't true. A different issue cropped up as well, a comment that appears with mouse over that works perfectly fine on the PC gets chopped off on the Mac.

I found this all a little unnerving at the time of discovery. Based on the experience, it occurred to me that I should also check how things compare with Excel 2007 on a PC. I've been creating my stuff with Excel 2010. So here platform isn't involved, just the version of Excel. Different issues emerged, around the spin button, which I also rely on a great deal. That too seems to re-size at times and in some cases to simply not appear as the following screen shots illustrate.

Excel 2007 - Very narrow spin buttons

No spin button after Evaluate???

Excel 2010 - Spin Buttons as created

I should add here that I originally made the workbook in 2004, so it was in xls format. I updated it a few years ago, keeping it in xls format. When I taught with it last spring, I converted it to xlsm format. It worked fine for me, but some students reported issues with it that way. This is why I took out the macros and activex controls. Also, I was all over the place in these earlier versions, regarding column width and where the combo boxes and spin buttons appeared relative to a cell that contained it (spin button) or a set of cells that spanned it (combo box). And some of my conditional formatting dates back to the earlier versions, though much of it now uses the Excel 2010 conditional formatting. I am not sure which of the factors, or which combination of factors caused these irregularities. But I've experimented some with finding remedies and this is what I've concluded so far.

For the Mac issues - The sizing issues can all be addressed by simply making things bigger than are necessary on the PC. The combo boxes should be wider than necessary. The comments should have more space than is required by the comment text. Also, students using a Mac should be told to view the file at something like 150% zoom. The color substitution will happen, but if conditional formatting is done exclusively using the Excel 2010 tool, then the substitution should be the same for font and background, with no real problem created. Some of the color substitution can result in "loud" colors on the Mac. The color on the PC that generated that should then be avoided. I'm no longer going to use the very pale blue as background.

For the Excel 2007 Issues - Moving forward I will keep columns a uniform width and when placing a spin button within a cell make sure there is no other content in that cell. I will also make my spin buttons a little wider than I otherwise wood, so even if they are narrower in Excel 2007, they are still of usable width.

There will be some effort entailed in getting the content into shape, but for now I think that effort is worthwhile and if I am to make more content in the future, this effort will help inform how to do that better.

Dialogic Learning Objects as Interactive Excel Modules

2011-09-28T09:48:00.000-05:00

The last several days I've been revising an Excel module on Supply and Demand, an introduction to the topic, that I like a lot for how the underlying economics is presented, with an emphasis on intuition by developing an extremely simple approach to buyer and seller choice (unit demands and unit supplies) and then aggregating up from that. The presentation is integrated with student response, at each juncture the student must answer a question before proceeding further. Each of these questions has a right answer. The student gets feedback for any response but only can go further after a correct response. Many of the graphs have controls that the students can manipulate to get a feel for what is going on. The student can do this just for practice or, if the instructor wants to assure that the student has done the work, a "tear sheet" of all the student responses can be readily generated for electronic submission. The approach is meant to integrate presentation and assessment rather than have one follow the other. I'll get back to that in a bit.

The main reason for my revision was to find alternatives to the Macros and Activex controls that were in the previous version. When I taught with this last spring, some students had trouble with this, even on a PC, and even more so on a Mac. So the revision was aimed at eliminating those issues and making the module cross platform. In the process of doing this I learned how do use the Conditional Formatting tools in Excel 2010. It was daunting at first, knowing how to do this in Excel 2003, but not understanding what was going on in the more recent version of Excel.

There is no "programming" by me to achieve these results. It is all done with the built-in Excel functions - heavy use of the IF command - and then a strong reliance on Conditional Formatting - to make the feedback distinctive when it appears and to hide it before it is needed. The hiding trick is done by making the font color the same as the background color, so the content of a cell can't be read by eyeballing the spreadsheet, and by Protecting the spreadsheet and most of the cells in it, so that the entries in those cells can't be read from the Formula Bar.

Let me make a comment about this regarding accessibility, because I know that is a proper concern. I did a little bit of research on Excel and Accessibility and without elaborating on what I found there, it became clear to me that there was no anticipation of this sort of use of Excel in the documents I found. The issues are with use by visually impaired students, ones who use a screen reader to navigate. Rather than finagle with the Excel itself, I believe a satisfactory solution would be to record an aloud working through of the entire workbook, and then making a transcript of that. Other students might like to have that because surely it would include some of thinking in working things through and when they did it themselves they may have made progress but without producing that thinking. I haven't made such a movie or transcript yet but I could see doing so if there were demand for more such objects, with the movies and transcripts becoming part of the package.

The issue with making these dialogic objects is the time it takes in their production. Much of the effort is conceptual. The theory needs to be re-thought in a way to make it more transparent to the students, and then a dialog must be produced to explicate the alternative approach. With the Supply and Demand module, the novel conceptualizations begin to come in on the third worksheet, Trade, by introducing an ad hoc matching process to pair a buyer with a seller and then using split-the-difference exchange to predict the price that will emerge from the pairing. This produces a range of transaction prices that are not stable. This is then contrasted with efficient matching, that delivers competitive pricing. Students then get to see some of the benefits of competitive pricing, by first looking at the consequences of the ad hoc matching. You won't find this in a textbook. So this is not just a matter of taking the standard approach and converting it to Excel, though I should add that even after the conceptual work is done, there is substantial work in building the modules in Excel so it all functions smoothly.

It is much easier to make presentation content. Last spring I did a fair amount of that, making Excelets (interactive graphs) and then YouTube videos of me exploring those, but without the dialogic content. Because I was making some of these in real time, much of this content is far less a departure from the traditional approach than the Supply and Demand module. There are, therefore, two different questions to consider with regard to the dialogic approach.

(1) If you are going to use the traditional approach to the subject matter, does recasting the presentation content into a dialogic frame help students nonetheless?

(2) If you do come up with an alternative approach can you explicate it with straight presentation a la micro-lecture and then assess what students have learned from the presentation?

I don't have evidence on which to answer these questions. So I'm simply going to guess at the answers. A diligent student can benefit from the dialogic approach over straight presentation because the former emphasizes the the chain of reasoning, while the latter encourages focus on the "results" only. Much of the subject matter students find non-intuitive and thus hard to learn. Helping to make the content intuitive should also aid the diligent student.

I have some more old stuff to revise. After doing that I will try to produce some new dialogic stuff. If anyone else wants to give it a try, please let me know and I can help you get started.

I love this logic

2011-09-23T06:36:00.000-05:00

My thoughts exactly.

New York Yankees' Russell Martin -- I hate Boston Red Sox - ESPN New York via kwout

Surprises and Confirmations

2011-09-20T13:32:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I was working on a post, composing it in the new Blogger editor. I got distracted as I'm prone to do and clicked away from the post to do a search, without thinking what I as doing. A few moments later, it occurred to me what I had done and I went to look for it. Alas, it was not to be found. Just now I did a few tests on the auto-save function. It looks like you aren't supposed to lose posts like that if you use their editor. The post should be retained as a draft and appear in your list of posts. The one I made yesterday, however, did not. Surprise! Scientist that I am, I took it as an omen so I'm changing my topic somewhat from what I had planned to write yesterday, a critique of an E.D. Hirsch Op-Ed piece. I'll get to that here, but my sweep will be broader.

Before I do however, and in case anyone at Google reads my stuff, I want to note that apart from pressing the Save button every so often, lest lightning strike twice in the same place, I'm writing in the HTML pane rather than in the Compose pane. This is not because of the more Spartan editing functions, but rather because the font is sans serif, which I prefer on screen. I don't understand the relationship between changing the font in the editor away from the default, and which font will appear in the blog. I am using Arial font to display the blog. A thought occurred to me that if I use Arial in the Compose pane, then it will display as Arial. So I try this and then go back to the HTML pane. It puts div tags around each paragraph and selects Helvetica, which I take it to be the default sans-serif font. (My version of Word doesn't even have Helvetica. They are cousins but they are not identical.) When I revert back to the default font, the div tags remain, though they no longer specify which font it is to use. And now there are some span tags as well. Anyway, I wonder if it would be possible to be able to choose, a font for the editor without that impacting the font for display. I often write long posts and sometimes stare at the screen for quite a while. It would be nice to have a look that pleases me while composing the posts.

* * * * *

Last night was Open House at the High School. Parents get to attend their child's classes for about 10 minutes and in that time the teacher gives an overview of what they are doing and answers any questions the parents might have. This is our fifth year doing this, as our older son also went through the process. Last night I was more mouthy than I usually am, I suppose because my son is taking 4 AP classes and I felt I could ask some questions from a knowing perspective (not about AP classes, abut about college classes and what those should be accomplishing). And over the weekend, I had read this piece featured in the NY Times Magazine, What if the Secret to Success is Failure? The piece is about developing character, force of will, or sitzfleisch, the term I used in my essay on The Purpose of General Education, though the term is not used in the NY Times piece. And the thesis, one I largely concur with, is that this is not a lesson one can learn by thinking it through. One has to have the requisite experience. One must struggle. In the NY Times Magazine piece there is discussion of an elite high school in Riverdale, in the Bronx, where they have abandoned AP courses because they seemingly taught the opposite lesson. So I was mindful of of that during the Open House. I also recalled a discussion I had many years ago with one of the math teachers at Uni High who had been using some educational technology my shop supported. In that conversation he asserted that bright kids benefit more from enrichment of the curriculum than from speeding it up. AP courses are mainly not enrichment. They are mostly acceleration. So I had that thought in my head too.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the evening and it left me with a good feeling afterward. Some of the teachers seemed very young to me. My wife commented on it too, so it's not entirely my imagination getting the better of me. They were very energetic and full of enthusiasm. This has to be a benefit for the students; the instructor temperament sets the tone for the entire class. A couple of them gave a little self-confession that they weren't very good students when in college. Were I not a Professor myself, I'd have found those remarks daunting. But given my own history, as a student and as a teacher, in the main I viewed it as a good thing. There's more empathy for the students that way. These teachers have an implicit understanding of motivation, where it comes from and what works.

On the substance of what I heard, I liked what the AP English teacher had to say the most. In her course students were to read many prescribed readings for the entire class, but the students also were asked to read books of their own choosing. In discussing the AP exam (all of the AP classes are focused on the exams that will be administered next May) at my prompt she described the test as requiring students to apply the methodology they've learned during the school year.. The test requires them to do analysis of the reading (in my The Purpose of General Education piece I call it Reading Comprehension). None of the other teachers specifically talked about teaching methodology. And in the one non-AP class we went to, the instructor gave us (the parents) a quiz which after a couple of minutes we went through aloud. This quick introduction to the course clearly supported the idea that learning at this level is about mastering facts, rather than developing appreciation for a methodology. I'm guessing that most students have bought into the mastering facts view, perhaps the only troubling thing that came across during the evening, though we should all remember, myself included, that these are not yet college students.

And now let me segue to Hirsch, though in his piece he is mainly focused on primary school and here we're talking about the senior year in high school. Hirsch argues that early on instructors must ensure that students get the gist of whatever is being taught, which requires lingering on the subject until each student obtains it. Hirsch claims that if students have the gist, they can then learn new words as they are used in context. This is how they will read better. Since I had seen Salman Khan on Charlie Rose not that long ago and one of the interesting points I recall him making is that in typical education students may not get "it" and that might very well be foundational material, but the course proceeds as if they have. For the students who didn't get it, the next stuff is built on a very shaky foundation, if there is any foundation at all. So on this I found Hirsch interesting and believable.

But Hirsch didn't write at all about individual approaches and letting each student proceed according to their own current capacities and inclinations. So after reading his piece I did a search on Individualized Reading and read a few pieces (a how to, it's effectiveness, and something of a hybrid, for which you need access to JSTOR to read the full piece). The conclusion I draw from these pieces is that "part" of what a student learn has to come from the student inserting himself into the activity, individualized reading being such a form of insertion. This was my conclusion, as well, from reading On Not Being Able to Paint, by Marion Milner, and thus the insertion of self into the subject a way becomes a way to bring in art to what otherwise might seem an arms length discipline.

This seems to me possible in social science classes, where a student's point of view can clearly matter, both on what and on how the student learns. My son is taking AP Econ, and the instructor is going pretty much by the textbook, in doing that the student's job is to master what is presented. There is no room for the student to insert himself. But they do have class discussion on the issues and there it is possible. My son seems to do this almost instinctively. That seems a good balance.

I'm less sure about the student inserting himself into math or physics at this level, especially if the student is taking those for "rounding" their education. When I was in high school, doing the odd math problem was a form of self-expression, but doing the ordinary homework was not, but I was a Math Team guy an so atypical in that respect. What does seem possible more broadly, though I don't know if it is happening here, is to tie what is being taught to student prior experiences. Emphasizing the textbook may block bringing in the student's own experience. Certainly that prior experience is not relevant for the AP tests themselves. But for the back and forth that happens in the classroom and elsewhere at school, it probably does.

We also attended the Physical Education (PE) class and there I was pleasantly surprised by the greeting we got when we walked into the auditorium. (There was some competition going on in the Gym so PE was done in the auditorium.) My son came along for the evening. He's much more into school now than he was a couple of years ago and expressed an interest in coming. He seemed very keyed up during much of the evening, which was also rewarding to see. One of the PE teachers, who turned out to be the Head Football Coach, said my son was his hero and when he grew up he wanted to become my son. I replied, I do too. I learned that this sort of banter is a regular occurrence and that once in a while my son leads the PE class in their warm up exercises. I never would have guessed that.

The final period of the day was for ECP, which I think stands for Employment Coordination Program. Each student must declare a preferred field of work and the program aims to both provide general job seeking skills and to give the student a bit of mentoring from a professional in the field, so the student can get a better sense of what the profession is like. This class was smaller than the rest - only 10 students - and because it was the last period or for some other reason, we were the only family in attendance, so we had a private and very good conversation with the teacher. Though it's obviously broader in scope since the kids can choose any profession, this ECP class seemed similar in spirit to Business 101, an introduction to professional responsibility. I hadn't realized that this sort of thing had now reached down into the high schools.

The overall impression is that while school makes strong demands on the kids and does provide a fair amount of stress with the emphasis on grades and the fairly frequent testing, it also provides a welcoming environment, one where a bright kid can thrive. The balance seemed good to me.

* * * * *

I'm guessing that most kids do struggle quite a bit in their teen years, if not in school then with other aspects of their lives. I know I did. One of the big deal issues for a teen is whether to respect adult authority, especially when there doesn't seem to be wisdom in what the adult is saying. It's all the more difficult when it's a parent, but it could still be a challenge with a teacher or a boss at work who seems arbitrary, uncaring, on lacking perception. I don't know if this sort of struggle builds character or if it simply represents a phase in life that most kids transit through.

There is perhaps also a struggle with the meaning of life questions. Envision school as one big game. The kid asks himself, "Why should I play?" I'd guess that the trigger for asking the question is that the ego is taking a beating because the kid is under performing relative to his own expectations determined by past performance or by comparison with other kids he considers as peers. This may be the first time the kid seriously looks at his own motivation. If all his behavior seems a reaction to extrinsic motivation qua grades, the house of cards may crumble. Perhaps this is a necessary intermediate step before discovering some intrinsic motivation. I do think there is character building in that, but perhaps not enough.

Some good students nonetheless find high school hard. They learn coping mechanisms to deal with the difficulty. Those coping mechanisms, if they are allowed to mature as the student matures, may be precisely the character building that is needed. Diligence is clearly requisite for the student who finds school hard but who wants to do well. Learning to be diligent at an early age converts a minus into a plus. This is where slow and steady wins the race. Students who find high school easy may hit a wall in college without adequate coping skills to get them through. Many of them don't learn diligence, if the all nighters and cramming sessions are any indication.

I maintain that much of this is "habit formation" rather than "choice." Much of character development is the forming of good habits. On this score one might look at AP courses in two different ways. They are acceleration, sure, and perhaps that precluded a stop to smell the roses view of learning. But they are harder too, and may encourage the kids to embrace more mature habits about their studies.

Understanding that duality, I came out of last night with a better appreciation of that second prong. I hope what my son is getting out of the experience will stay with him later, quite apart from the subject matter he is learning.

A dialectic about learning character

2011-09-18T13:24:00.000-05:00

When my kids were very young I (vaguely) remember some discussions about the health benefits for them of putting things in their mouth, particularly dirt. Attempts at over-sanitizing were counter productive, because the right sort of antibodies wouldn't be built up that way. This piece from the NY Times Magazine is on the same sort of idea, but with regard to kids' characters. This quote is from the very end of the piece.

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com via kwout

Tra La La

2011-09-16T07:22:00.000-05:00

This one is real French.

This one is not even close.

I do like the mug for how it feels in my hand.

Open Modular Content and OERs

2011-09-15T09:53:00.000-05:00

Around 11:30 last night, I had already gone to bed, my Economics Metaphor site got a hit from somebody at a sister Big Ten School, via a regular Google search. The search words were "production table economics" without the quotes. If you go do that search yourself, a post from that site is prominently displayed, right under the Wikipedia entry. Yesterday my site got roughly three times the number of hits as it usually gets (the norm is a rather low flow of under 10 hits per day) and many of those who came to the site yesterday got there by doing a similar search.

My inference is that these hits are from students in microeconomics classes and this is the time of the school year where production functions are being taught. For some reason, perhaps a homework problem that appears intractable, or a pending quiz where the student doesn't have confidence on the material, or the student finding the textbook unclear so looking for an alternative explanation, surely students are motivated to do this the Google search for some such reason. My further guess is that they are looking for a quick and dirty way out of their dilemma.

On the page they will find an embedded Jing-created screen-capture movie that was posted to YouTube. This particular movie is very brief (under two minutes) and the captions for the voice narration appear under the movie, unlike if you go directly to YouTube to watch it, where the captions overlay the video. I believe the little demo given here is fairly clear, even for students that don't have English as their native language. (Some of the other hits yesterday were from the Philippines.) Though it is not on my immediate agenda to revise this material, it would be gratifying to learn from the student whether the movie was useful. I doubt, however, that at the time of night where the student is doing this that the student would be willing to answer a survey question or two on the matter.

When I posted this content, I didn't consider this sort of student demand at all. I made modular content because I believe that online you have to vary presentation with other activities for the student - an hour of lecture straight through would be devastating and students would turn to Facebook or other diversions after only a few minutes. In this case I embedded the videos in Moodle quizzes, one video per question, with the thought that the full quiz would be considered dialogic - a little presentation followed by a question and a student response, then another little presentation with the cycle repeating. I did this in lieu of a textbook and then in class I'd spend time going over the spreadsheet from which the movie was made but not delivering a full lecture on it. The students in the class itself were not enamored with the approach, but some of that was that my exams were hard and the students didn't have a way to go from what they were getting doing the online work to having a successful strategy for feeling confident about the tests. The external students who find the particular module, consider it from a different perspective - my exams are irrelevant to them

My thought in making The Economics Metaphor site was as something for instructors elsewhere, who might use some of the content and teaching ideas there, either directly or to inform what they might produce themselves for online or to do in class. I didn't expect them to use the videos. Those have my voice. But there are Excel workbooks that are depersonalized and could be utilized readily if another instructor saw it fit to do so. In this case, the videos are simply guides to the content in the workbooks and how that might be used. And there are essays that again could also be used this way. Those are different than textbook content in two ways - they are longer than those one page insets that many textbooks feature, with the thought that the essays should be interesting in themselves, not merely a means to illustrate the theory, and hence a bit more depth is useful to motivate why these ideas are important - and they are written in a way to enable students to bring their own experiences to bear in thinking through the issues of the essay. Textbooks, in contrast, are very arms length in how they go about explaining things.

Both the Excel workbooks and essays are novel relative to what other materials instructors might find out there. So there is potential use value to them. And maybe I've had some instructors look at this content, but maybe not. I have no way of knowing short of having them contact me directly and asking me about it. So far, direct contact hasn't happened at all. If instructors are indeed looking at this content, they prefer to maintain their anonymity. The students are a little bit more obvious about this, by virtue of the search terms they enter into Google.

Let me make another point about the students. Some of them come to this stuff directly from YouTube. I know that because once in a while I've gotten a request from them via a comment to a particular video to get access to the workbooks - all are publicly available. And I have a few dozen who subscribe to my channel. I have no idea what benefits there are to being a subscriber, but if they want to do that more power to them. I hadn't paid any attention to the channel page till I started getting some subscribers. Having done so recently, I'm more aware about the variation in hits across my videos. Some videos are relatively popular, others less so. That variation is probably explained by external demand. There are videos by other instructors on the same topic. So perhaps on some topics students prefer to go to videos created by other instructors, while on other topics students might find what they are getting at their own institution sufficient that they don't need to get additional material about the subject online.

It is an open question in my mind whether students would like to have mixed and matched modular content as the primary materials in their courses or if even more they'd prefer courses where only assessments were prescribed by the instructor and for presentation material they'd do inquiry on the Web to find suitable content. I'd guess we are quite a ways from that as the norm, and maybe it never will be the norm. But as supplementary material, we seem to already be there with online modular content and I'd expect this use to grow substantially, without any organized cultivation.

* * * * *

Yesterday I sat in with some folks at the Office of Continuing Education here for part of an ELI Focus Session on Open Educational Repositories (OERs). Open and Educational I like. Repositories I'm much less sanguine about, as I will elaborate below. Further, on the motivation for doing this, I think we collectively need to scratch our heads more. I'll elaborate about that too.

First, on motivation, the driver seems to be to find free (to the students) or inexpensive alternatives to textbooks. In other words, to the extent that the textbook market is the victim of publisher monopoly power, the push for OERs is to develop a counter force to that market power. The approach is novel on the market side of the equation but it is quite conservative on the pedagogic side, the textbook itself a nineteenth century conception. Having written a post about a year ago entitled Excise The Textbook, one of the few things I've written lately that attracted a fair number of eyeballs, I've got to ask why we want to affirm this particular approach instead of trying to find a modern day alternative that is more suitable. The argument I made in that piece is that textbooks encapsulate received wisdom and by basing courses on them students come to the point of view that it is their job to absorb the received wisdom and be able to regurgitate it. On Newtonian Physics, perhaps that makes sense. On macroeconomics, to offer one example, the students must take a more critical view, as on a daily basis one can read views from eminent economists that directly contradict one another. If the student is to take a side in this argument or reasonably decide to avoid taking side, how might it be that the student comes to that conclusion? Textbooks simply aren't helpful that way.

Second, as a discipline (learning technology) we seem not to learn for our own prior experience, the obvious one in this case the emergence of Institutional Repositories to promote scholarly communication. IRs like OERs were motivated by an agenda to offer alternatives to commercial publication - Journal pricing was (and still is) hyperinflationary and it seemed that commercial publishers were capturing economic profit for providing little value add, with most of the work being done by faculty authors, paid for by universities, often with the additional sponsorship of Federal research grants. There was a secondary agenda for IRs - to make the research (and the data the research generated) more broadly available, particularly for archival purpose after the authors/researchers are no longer actively manipulating the data. Truthfully, I don't know where IRs are on this second goal, but this New Yorker piece from last December on The Decline Effect, suggests that more scholarly work needs to be devoted to replication of initial findings, so the secondary goal would seem to have large potential value, even if not much is happening in that area at present.

Third, on faculty development, the OER approach of trying to encourage textbook alternatives seems to ignore a moving down the learning curve approach to producing the content that would seem kind of obvious to me. In a learning curve approach an instructor might produce one module online and see how students react to that, while leave the rest of the course intact. The next time around the instructor might produce another module or two and, with any luck, feel more competent than with the first module. This would imply a multi-year approach to getting the equivalent of a full textbook and if there are discouraging results somewhere along the way it would further imply that some instructors will dropout from the activity before getting all the way there.

Fourth, there seems to be a separation between those who contribute to OERs (the equivalent of textbook authors) and those who might use the materials (the equivalent of textbook adopters). In the paper based world that separation is warranted and this seems to me is an intellectual holdover from that. A more current alternative would be a community development and use model. Instructors would develop some content and adopt other content created elsewhere. As I understand it, this alternative is embedded into LON-CAPA,which has as its focus the development of assessment materials. Although LON-CAPA is open source, the community model there hasn't spread to the OER discussion, as far as I can tell.

There are, for sure, serious issues with the community model, mainly around building overall coherence from materials developed at a modular level when there was no prior planning for how those materials might be later integrated. But here too, I'd guess that a slow moving down the learning curve would be much more robust than doing a whole course this way right off the bat. Really it would be good to see experiments both of that and of the alternative with a planned approach.

When the CIC Learning Technology Group was receiving funding from the Provosts (that ended about 10 years ago), there were grants for faculty from multiple Campuses across systems, such as at Illinois and Purdue, to do a joint course online, in whole or in parts. The emphasis then was to do this for small, upper level classes, a toe in the water and entirely non-threatening approach. I think we need something like this now but with a focus on the large classes. If we did, I don't believe OERs would help, at least not an OER that had an institutional brand. There are other places where open content can reside that would be more neutral regarding institutional affiliation. Those other places would be preferred for that reason.

The publishers are revamping their approach to these issues. We in Higher Ed need to be smarter about them too. We have a tendency to envision the endpoint of the journey we want to take and then direct our efforts to building the entire path to that endpoint, only to find that path is not well traveled. Better, I believe, would be to encourage lots of experimentation and see what emerges from that, without making the outcome a foregone conclusion. We're scared of bottom up because we can't control quality that way. It's the same mindset that dismissed Wikipedia.

I believe we'd be better served now by broadly encouraging small sojourns into the making and re-use of modular material than by promoting OERs. I know I can be a voice in the wilderness, one who has totally lost his direction. But on this topic, in particular, this alternative view makes sense to me.

Eight stuck at the gate

2011-09-08T06:58:00.001-05:00

I watched the debate for the first 75 minutes or so. The format, where there is a question from the moderator and then either 30 seconds or a minute of response, encouraged the candidates to offer up pat solutions with little or no analysis of the issues. Herman Cain, who doesn't get a mention in Gail Collins column, was the most entertaining with his 999 plan. But collectively they are rather frightening, Ron Paul especially so. After a while, it seemed like it had become a rerun of itself, even as the moderators changed the topics. That's why I turned it off.

Debating With the Stars - NYTimes.com via kwout

I also thought it strange that this was only on MSNBC, And the commercials were weird. There was an attack ad by Ron Paul saying that he had supported Reagan back in 1976, but that Rick Perry had supported Al Gore for President in 2000. And there was a different ad about limiting legal immigration till the unemployment problem in California gets resolved. These were as frightening as the debate itself.

Grisham and Tevye

2011-09-03T10:23:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere I developed a habit of reading junk novels - Thomas Harris, Dan Brown, John Grisham. Before I was married while I didn't read fiction that often, when I did it was apt to be more serious stuff - A Bend in the River, A Flag for Sunrise, the Smiley trilogy and a lot of other le Carré. For a while I was a member of the Book of the Month Club and through that I believe I read a lot of Nadine Gordimer; it's sad to say but I can't remember. Some titles arrived by accident, if I recall. I read Ordinary People that way. Over some summer vacations I even read "classics," a promise to self begun in college. I know I read Invisible Man one summer and The Tin Drum in another. It's not that I completely lost doing this after I got married. Having seen the movie I read A Passage to India and before and during a trip to Taiwan I read a lot of Faulkner. I also read a fair amount of non-fiction as pleasure reading. Two books from then that come to mind now are David Halberstam's The Reckoning and Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. And I used to subscribe to the The New Republic and The New York Review of Books and read each pretty much from cover to cover.

The junk novels went along with family trips, particularly going to Florida to see my parents when the kids were very young. It was a schlepp. On trips you ate "comfort food," an expression I picked up from my wife, and you had "treats," something to break up the monotony (and on the planes also as a way to deal with the discomfort of being jammed into the seats). The junk novels as pure escape provided a mental equivalent. When I was in sleep away camp as a kid we read comic books during "rest hour' after lunch. The junk novels provided the same sort of feel and you could stay with them for more than an hour.

For a while I only read the junk novels while on the road. At home during holiday I found escape through computer games. I loved Zork (and not that long ago downloaded it for play under the command prompt, though I haven't gotten into again). The last one I can recall playing was Myst. I don't believe it was a conscious choice, the way it was with playing video games with the kids, but I went cold turkey after that. This was around the same time that my dad passed away. My wife's dad passed away less than a year later. We made fewer family trips after that. The junk novels became part and parcel of the R&R while at home.

I'm not yet ready to abandon the activity entirely, though because my time is more abundant now there is less of a need to renew oneself with escapism. But I have been doing a fair amount of heavy reading recently and I knew I'd have to read a good deal of economics in the near future to prepare for a new course I'm teaching in the spring. So I decided I "needed" a treat before doing that.

The book I chose was The Testament, which I had downloaded earlier on my iPad. The iPad is now my favorite way to read things, for a few different reasons. First and foremost, I get to choose the size of the font. Second, I tend to brutalize paper books - the binding and I are sworn enemies and I also bend the cover. There's none of that problem with the iPad. And there's no need for a bookmark. Of course, my Kindle did all of that too. But I fairly often need a fix to check my email or something on the Web.and I do listen to music while I read. All of that is integrated with the iPad. Before I used to need 3 devices to do that, which is ridiculous.

I started The Testament earlier, but I couldn't get into it at all. The opening is brutal - an affront to the sensibilities. It didn't create the flow that other Grisham novels had done for me. This time around I told myself to get through the beginning and see if the flow returns after that. It did. But I began to ask myself - does Grisham have a template and does he simply vary the story line a bit but otherwise stick with the template? I was getting less pleasure with this book than I had with others I've read. The characters seemed too flat. The lawyers, Grisham's emblem is to produce stories about lawyers, are either entirely venal and then not very bright or extremely shrewd and with some backbone, with the exception of the protagonist who has some ethical conflict and has both aspects to his personality. The other characters are equally without nuance. There are numerous bad guys, all despicable. The protagonist has a few friends, who remain true. The story proceeds as if the bad guys will win out, but of course at the end they do not. They may not get their just desserts, but they only get enough that our protagonist can achieve the outcome he is after, finding some inner peace with himself for doing so. This general outline is just as accurate for The Firm, I watched the movie on TV not that long ago, as it is forThe Testament.

One first in The Testament is Grisham's use of religion as a way to designate the non-lawyer good guys. This struck a chord with me, I suppose because having recently read Ryan Lizza's piece on Michell Bachmann and thereby becoming aware of how important faith is to Tea Party Representatives, it was striking how different a picture Grisham painted. There are two Christian characters in The Testament. One is the sole beneficiary of the huge estate, but as it turns out she doesn't want the money. She is a missionary and a doctor working in the Pantanal in Brazil with the indigenous Indians, tending to their health and teaching them to read, especially the Gospel. She is the sole white person in the community, middle aged, entirely committed to her missionary work, which is her life purpose. The other is a minister, extraordinarily friendly, willing to give seemingly all of his time to a stranger (the protagonist) to help him find his way. The first finds Christianity at odds with Capitalism. I don't know too may present commentators who make that point, though Nicholas Kristof has on occasion, such as in this piece. The second doesn't emphasize the tension between Christianity and Capitalism but lives outside Capitalism's rhythms in the way he is able to fully immerse himself in the troubles of others.

The same day I finished reading The Testament, while channel surfing I stumbled onto Fiddler on the Roof and started to watch it in the middle, turning it off after the song, To life, To life, L'chaim, when Tevye learns from the local constable that there will be a pogrom in the village. Because I was already in the frame of mind to do so, I thought about how religion enters into this story. It is different from how Grisham depicts it. There is a very large cultural aspect. Tevye leads his life according to the "Good Book" though he constantly interprets it to match his own way of doing things. It affects the clothes he wears and how he goes about his work. Much of this is behavioral than rather than ethical. Tevye's ethics stem from being "a mensch." He treats everyone with respect, including the constable, and if he learns of someone else's need he tries to help, but does so in a way to find a quid pro quo, because that is the way to maintain balance. Self-pride prevents people from taking charity or encourages an unhealthy dependency.

Tevye struggles, in a certain sense it is a very modern struggle, between maintaining the Jewish traditions and his daughters finding happiness by choosing whom they are to marry. Match making had been the tradition. An important feature of the husband-to-be is his ability to earn a good living, so the family will live well and not know hunger. The tradition is sensible. Marriage for love is not. The elder three daughters each choose that. Tevye is challenged to promote their happiness yet abide by the traditions. With the first two daughters he comes to some accommodation but with the third he does not. She elopes with a non-Jew, forbidden behavior for which there can be no compromise. There is no such struggle in The Testament. Because the characters are flat, they can be pure in their purpose. The religious ones are good, in an entirely pure way.

The Sholom Aleichem stories on which Fiddler was based were written more than 100 years ago. The first copyright on The Testament is from 1999. Neither is of our time. The values that religion represents are different in them, but both treat religion from an individualistic perspective and neither turns religion into a crusade. I don't know if 9/11 has made it harder for either of these approaches to prevail or if the continued poor performance of the economy has proved the correctness of Marx's insight about religion being the opiate of the masses.

For several years as a kid I went to Yiddische Schule on Saturdays and was taught Yiddish (of which I know very little now but I have a copy of Leo Rosten's book in my reading pile), folk songs, and Jewish history. Some of this was simply to make the kids aware of their culture but some of it was deliberately there to contradict the history we were taught in the public schools. I still remember a chapter title from our history book called The Horrible Crusades. It was a lesson learned then, one that has stuck.

A bunch of new videos on the Economics Metaphor site

2011-08-30T11:56:00.002-05:00

The videos on Risk and Uncertainty are now posted. They were actually made last spring when I taught intermediate micro, but because time was scarce then I didn't caption them at the time. They are captioned now. You can see them here.

A Practical Approach To High School Math

2011-08-26T14:14:00.003-05:00

Following the suggestion from the article linked below, here is my contribution, some simulations in Excel on saving for retirement. Summing a geometric series is taught in high school algebra. Compound interest is taught in college. Why not put them together?

How to Fix Our Math Education - NYTimes.com via kwout