Planet Harvard

Harvard: we get it. You hate Harvard. But, at this point, it feels a tad bit old when professional illusionist Mitt Romney complains about Harvard’s “faculty lounge”, or aggrieved alumna Kaya Williams bleats about having to discuss Plato, or Canadian performance artist Misha Glouberman whines about living in a dorm. Because, come on.

Can we move on? Maybe let others complain about Harvard, or other things? (Like Yale professors, about not being able to talk to plumbers?)

We ask because the latest barrel of Harvard haterade, supplied this time by Nation intern and Harvard sophomore Sandra Y.L. Korn (pictured), isn’t another screed against Harvard’s elitism or intellectualism or insularity. It’s complaining about Harvard being Harvard, or something:

Why do so many Harvard graduates work in finance? Most students contend that they need the assured income of a finance job to justify their expensive Ivy League degrees or support their families. For some, this may be true. However, in reality, finance may often simply be an easy career choice for undecided students. Ivy League universities have institutionalized the culture that makes finance jobs so ubiquitous among graduates.

In a nut shell: Korn’s beef with Harvard is that she goes to college with future inhabitants of Greenwich, Connecticut. 

Harvard, tell us: Isn’t that why people go to Harvard? To be among your swath of humanity? Korn isn’t some kind of . . . she couldn’t . . . OHHHH. Oh no. “Sandra Korn is a sophomore at Harvard College studying History of Science and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.”

That’s your problem right there. Unless you’re pre-law, Harvard really ain’t the place for the humanities undergrad. Think of Harvard President Drew Faust, who went to Bryn Mawr—wherever that is!

After protesting a recruiting event for Goldman Sachs, the international baby-panda rescue society, Korn tells Harvard to see the light:

This sparked an informative and important discussion on campus about the ethics of Wall Street jobs and also encouraged Harvard’s Center for Public Interest Careers to host a conference for students interested in pursuing public service careers. While these steps are important, destroying the well-paved road between the Ivy League schools and Wall Street will take a more dramatic cultural change on the part of students and administrators. Until we come to our senses, finance firms will continue to hire Ivy League students in disproportionate numbers.

Alright. Not to get too preachy, but the reason Goldman Sachs recruits Ivy League students is because (deep breath) the Ivy League heavily selects for students who excel at following rules and obeying authority. You don’t get into Harvard unless you enthusiastically heed the instructions of others, for years. That’s what makes the Ivy League so awesome: it’s filled with successful people! (As IvyGate’s Eve Binder once said: “Skip the kumbaya and go straight for the bonus!”)

And duh: Such unthinking obedience, much more so than intelligence, is the secret sauce of high finance. (There is really no other explanation for the apparently real Conde Elevator rip-off set at Goldman Sachs.) That being said, Harvard still needs scholars of feminist theory for the same reason Goldman still hires compliance officers: to burnish its image. We suspect, however, that it’s the Harvardian on his sleigh ride to the financial district, not Korn, who knows this best of all.

by J.K. Trotter at January 27, 2012 07:30 PM

Last fall the national press fell in love with Patrick Witt, a Yale quarterback, and NFL hopeful, who gave up his finalist interview for a Rhodes scholarship so he could play in the Harvard-Yale game.

Now the New York Times reports that, in fact, Witt didn’t turn down the interview of his own accord: the Rhodes committee suspended his candidacy and cancelled his interview after someone (who was not a Yale official) informed it that Witt had been accused of sexual assault in September.

It’s not clear whether the Yale official who initially approved Witt to apply for the Rhodes knew about the sexual assault incident, for which Witt went through an informal disciplinary process (and seemingly faced no consequences?) — but it’s likely he did. Interesting factoid: Witt was a member of DKE, the Yale frat that made really horrible headlines for sexual harrassment a few years ago. So this is very ugly for Yale.

Witt is reportedly no longer enrolled at Yale (?) but is still finishing his thesis? Unclear.

But, wait. That the story was broken by the Times probably strikes you as odd; the Yale Daily News — second best collegiate paper in the land – is normally all over these types of scandals like white on rice. In fact, that might be the most amazing angle of this sorry story: Former YDN opinion editor (and IG editor emeritus) Alex Klein reports that the News had known about Witt’s Rhodes woes since as early as November, but the paper’s editor in chief, Max de La Bruyere, elected to sit on the story. We reached out to the News — asking “WTF???” — but haven’t yet heard back.

And, one last quick and relevant reminder: Witt’s football coach resigned in December after it was exposed that he lied about having been a Rhodes scholar finalist.

by Patience Haggin at January 27, 2012 05:42 PM

Sorry, sunshynie2 has chosen not to publish an RSS feed. Please visit their Xanga site here: http://www.xanga.com/sunshynie2

January 27, 2012 03:13 PM

I don't know who this blogger is, but his or her first post is called "Mankiw is right. Buffett is wrong."  And he or she puts the argument well (although I may not be objective here).

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 27, 2012 08:58 AM

The Harvard Pre-Collegiate Economics Challenge is a competition for high school students studying AP economics.   It is run by Harvard undergraduates and features one of my favorite economists as a guest speaker.  This year it will be held on Saturday, March 31, 2012 from 9 am to 5 pm.

If you are interested in more information about this event, click here.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 25, 2012 09:51 PM

1. Last night President Obama continued his misleading claims about Warren Buffett's tax rate.  David Leonhardt recalls that I rebutted those claims several years ago. 

David usefully asks for a response to my rebuttal from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research group in Washington. Chuck Marr, the center’s director of federal tax policy, emailed David back.  Click through the link above, and read carefully what Mr Marr has to say.  Does it respond to my arguments?  No, not at all.  Mr Marr just changes the subject.  He follows the age-old advice for politicians: Don't answer the question they asked, answer the question you wish they had asked.  This might work for some voters, but I am sure it won't for the careful analysts who read this blog.  One might reasonably take Mr Marr's non-response as an admission that President Obama's claims about the taxes of Mr Buffett and his secretary don't hold up under closer examination.

2. I was disappointed, and even a bit surprised, that the President adopted the xenophobic approach to outsourcing and international trade.  Usually, on issues of international trade, the President plays the role of grown-up and leaves it up to Congress to gin up populist ire.  That is true of both parties.  Recall that President Clinton pushed NAFTA through.

When President Obama bragged that his administration had substantially increased trade cases against China compared with his predecessor, it made me proud to be one of President Bush's advisers.  (Not that the Bush administration was perfect on trade issues.  It is just good to know we were better.)  These trade cases include such things as anti-dumping claims, which in many cases are just the modern face of protectionism.  Phill Swagel and I wrote about anti-dumping laws here.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 25, 2012 09:47 AM

Here is the memo that Larry Summers sent to President Obama when the 2009 stimulus package was being debated. It was originally confidential, but somehow it has recently been made public and is now going viral.

I make a brief cameo appearance on page 11: "Greg Mankiw is the only economist we have consulted with who refused to name a number and was generally skeptical about stimulus." I explained my skepticism here. Of course, the fact that I was "the only economist" expressing skepticism reflects the range of economists that Team Obama chose to consult.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 24, 2012 11:06 AM

So, Mitt Romney, huh? While Mittens continues to alienate pretty much everyone with his proletarian LARPing and overall blasé demeanor, elements of the GOP are still holding out hope that there could be a late-entry candidate to replace him. (We’re going to assume that Newt bursts like an overripe pumpkin before the Florida vote.)  Who, though? Right now—indeed, at this very moment—those mysterious Establishment Republicans are probably wheedling Princeton alumnus, Governor of Indiana, and total stoner Mitch Daniels ’71.

Tonight, Daniels will deliver the GOP response to Obama’s State of the Union address. The occasion raises vital questions. Like: who is Mitch Daniels? What eating club did he eat at? Which and how many drugs was he on? Here’s your IvyGate Cheat Sheet Thing©, The Mitch Daniels Edition:

Princeton

• Woodrow Wilson ‘71, then Georgetown Law ’79 (campaign website)
• Member of Charter Club, which uses sign-in (Daily Prince)
• “Active in the campus antiwar movement” (Ibid.)
• Member of Princeton’s College Republicans (Ibid.)
• Vietnam: Daniels “legally deferred his eligibility while in college and after graduation his draft number, 147, was high enough that he was not called.” (Republic Candidates)

Drugs

• “Daniels was arrested, indicted and convicted on charges of drug use as an undergraduate in May 1970”. (Daily Prince)
• Which drugs? Weed, LSD, and unidentified pharmaceuticals. (Ibid.)
• How much weed? Two shoeboxes full of weed. (Ibid.)
• Drugs were an “unfortunate confluence of my wild oats period and America’s libertine apogee.” (Ibid, Washington Post)
• What did Daniels get? A night in jail and a $350 fine. (Ibid.)
• Was that normal? Ha, no.“Six months after [Daniels’s] arrest, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided a case involving an 18-year-old who was caught with a tiny amount of pot (clearly just for personal use) and got a sentence of two to three years in prison. (Reason.com.)

Miscellaneous

• Favorite color: blue (VoteSmart profile)
• Governor of Indiana since 2004
• Senior advisor to Ronald Reagan
• Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush
• His marriage is a Jonathan Franzen novel (Republican Candidates)
• Has a personal cheerleading section led by William Kristol, Harvardian and Weekly Standard editor/founder (The Weekly Standard)
• Slight resemblance to William F. Buckley, Jr., he of God and Man at Yale fame, maybe? Yes? No? Come on, it’s obvious.

But will he run for President?

• “For a Republican hero to ride in on a white horse, it would take a scenario that verges on political science fiction.” (TPM)

by J.K. Trotter at January 24, 2012 09:31 AM

Sebastian Thrun recently announced that he was leaving Stanford to found a free, online university called Udacity. This is based on his experiences teaching the famous intro to AI class, for free, to 160,000 students online.

Is this just Education for the Twitter Generation? Or truly a revolution in how we deliver higher education? Will this ultimately render universities obsolete?

I want to ponder the failings of the conventional higher education model for a minute and see where this leads us, and consider whether something like Udacity is really the solution.

Failure #1: Exclusivity.

In Sebatian's brilliant talk at DLD, he talks about being embarrassed that he was only able to teach a few tens of students at a time, and only to those who can afford $30,000 to attend Stanford. I estimate that I taught fewer than 500 students in total during my eight years on the faculty at Harvard. That's a pretty poor track record by any stretch.

It gets worse. I know plenty of faculty who love to give tough courses, in which they would teach really hard material at the beginning of the semester to "weed out" the weaker students, sometimes being left with only 2 or 3 really committed and really good students in the class. This is so much more satisfying as a professor, since you don't need to worry about tutoring the weaker students, and the fewer students you have, the less work you have to do grading and so on. There is no penalty for doing this - and rarely any incentive given for teaching a larger, more popular course.

Exclusivity is necessary when you only have so much classroom space, or so many dorms, or so many dining halls, so you have to be selective about who enters the hallowed gates of the university. It's also a way of maintaining a brand: even schools, like Harvard, with a "distance education" component go to great lengths to differentiate the "true" Harvard education from a "distance learning certificate," lest they raise the ire of the Old Boys' Network by watering down what it means to get a Harvard degree (not unlike the reaction they got when they started admitting women, way way back in 1977).

Failure #2: Grades.


Can someone remind me why we still have grades? I like what Sebastian says (quoting Salman Khan) about learning to ride a bicycle: It's not as if you get a D learning to ride a bike, then you stop and move onto learning the unicycle. Shouldn't the goal of every course be to get every student to the point of making an A+?

Apparently not. The common argument is that we need grades in order to differentiate the "good" from the "bad" students. Presumably the idea is that if you can't get through a course in the 12-to-13 week semester then you deserve to fail, regardless of whatever is going on in your life and whether you could have learned everything over a longer time span, or with more help, or whatever. And the really smart students, the ones who nail it the first time, and make A's in every class, need to float to the top so they get the first dibs on good jobs or law school or medical school or whatever rewards they have been working all of their young lives to achieve. It would not be fair if everyone made an A+ -- how would the privileged and smart kids gain any advantage over the less privileged, less intelligent kids?

It seems to me that this is completely at odds with the idea of education.

Failure #3: Lectures.


As Sebastian says, universities have been using the lecture format for more than a thousand years. I used to tell students that they were required to come to my lectures, and never provided my lectures by video, lest the students skipped class and watched it on YouTube from their dorms instead. Mostly this was to ensure that everybody in the class got the benefit of my dynamic and entertaining lecture style, which I worked so hard to perfect over the years (complete with a choreographed interpretive dance demonstrating the movement of the disk heads during a Log-Structured Filesystem cleaning operation.) But mostly it was to boost my ego and get some gratification for working so hard on the lectures, by having the students physically there in class as an audience.

Implications


I'm not sure whether Udacity and Khan Academy and iTunes University are really the solution to these problems. Clearly they are not a replacement for the conventional university experience -- you can't go to a frat party, or join a Finals Club, or make out in the library stacks while getting your degree from Online U. (At least not yet.)

But I think there are two important things that online universities bring to the table: (1) Broadening access to higher education, and (2) Leveraging technology to explore new approaches to learning.

The real question is whether broadening access ends up reinforcing the educational caste system: if you're not smart or rich enough to go to a "real university," you become one of those poor, second-class students with a certificate Online U. Would employers or graduate schools ever consider such a certificate, where everyone makes an A+, equivalent to an artium baccalaureus from the Ivy League school of your choice?

If not, is that because we truly believe that students are getting a better education sitting in a dusty classroom and having paid the proverbial $30,000 a year rather than doing the work online? This reminds me of my friends who have been through medical school, where the conventional wisdom is that doctors need to be trained using the classical methods (unbelievable amounts of rote memorization, soul-destroying clinical rotations and countless overnight shifts) because that's how it's been done for hundreds of years -- not because anybody thinks it yields better-trained doctors.

And I think universities have a long way to go towards embracing new technologies and new ways of teaching students. Sebastian makes a great point about the online AI class feeling more "intimate" to some students, in part because it really is a feeling of a one-on-one experience watching a video: you're not sitting in a big lecture hall surrounded by a bunch of other students, you're at home, in your PJs, drinking a beer and watching the video on your own laptop. A lot of this also has to do with Sebastian's teaching style, using a series of short quizzes that are auto-graded by the system. It is not just a lecture. For this reason I think that replacing live courses with videotaped lectures is not going far enough (and may in fact be detrimental).

Another benefit of the video delivery model is that you can replay it infinitely many times. Missed a point? Confused? Rewind and watch it again. What about questions? In large courses almost nobody asks questions, apart from the really smart students who should shut the hell up and not ask questions anyway. There are plenty of ways to deal with questions in an online course format, just not live, during a (limited time) lecture in which your question is likely going to annoy the rest of the class who almost certainly gets it already.

Risks


I'm going to close this little rant with a few caveats. It's fashionable to talk about "University 2.0" and How the Internet Changes Everything and disruptive technologies and all that. But a shallow, 18-minute video on the first 200 years of American History can't replace conventional coursework, deep reading, and essays. You can't tweet your way through college. Learning and teaching are hard work, and need to be taken seriously by both the student and educator.

Although expanding access to education is a great thing, it's simply not the case that everyone is smart enough to do well in any subject. For example, I'm terrible at math (which is why I'm a systems person, natch), and damn near failed to complete my CS theory course requirement at Berkeley as a result. Education should give everyone the opportunity to succeed, but the ultimate responsibility (and raw ability) comes down to the student.

Finally, it goes without saying that the most important experiences I ever had in college were outside of the classroom. I'm not just talking about staying up late and watching "Wayne's World" for the millionth time while drinking Zima, I'm talking about doing research, building things, learning from and being inspired by my fellow students. Making lectures obsolete is one thing; but I'm not sure there can ever be an online replacement for The College Experience writ large. Though 4Chan seems to be a pretty close approximation.

by Matt Welsh (noreply@blogger.com) at January 23, 2012 10:55 PM

I need some help from the growth empiricists out there.  If you aren't one of them, stop reading.  Continuing will be a waste of your time.

For researchers studying economic growth, one of the standard resources for cross-country data has been the Penn World Table.  My 1992 paper with David Romer and David Weil (my most cited paper by a large margin) used this resource, as have numerous other papers in this literature.  In my intermediate macro book, I present a couple of figures presenting some of these data.

Here's the problem: It seems that the data have changed substantially in the most recent revision, and I cannot figure out why.

My intermediate macro text shows a scatterplot of per capita income and the investment share of GDP.  These two variables are strongly positively correlated.  When revising this figure with the newest data, I found that the correlation declines substantially (though is still positive).  When I looked into the source of the change, I found that the historical estimates of the investment share of GDP have changed, in some some cases by a lot.

Let me give you an example.  Take the investment share for Ghana in the year 2000.  According to version 6.2 of the data, the investment share was about 5 percent.  In version 7.0, it was about 21 percent.  This is one of the larger changes I have found, but it is not the only country for which there are sizable changes in the reported investment share of GDP.

I understand that the changes may be related to new information about the relative price of investment goods.  But the changes seem too large to be explained so easily, although perhaps I am wrong about this.  If anyone can shed light on the matter, I would be greatly appreciative.  Send me an email if you can help.
-----

Update: I have not yet fully figured this out, but readers have sent me some useful links.  If you are interested, click here, here, and here.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 22, 2012 04:02 PM

Click here to read my column in Sunday's NY Times.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 21, 2012 06:53 PM

An article in the National Journal.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 21, 2012 08:00 AM

In international economics.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 20, 2012 03:02 PM

There has been a lot of discussion recently about tax progressivity.  A few observations on the topic:

1. The U.S. personal income tax is generally progressive, and substantially so.  Click here to see the numbers.  The average tax rate for tax returns with over $1 million in income is 25 percent.  The average tax rate for returns with income between $50,000 and $75,000 is 7 percent.

2. It is arguably better to use an average tax rate that is all-inclusive.  That is, we should include not only personal income taxes but also payroll and corporate income taxes.  CBO analysts regularly do that.  They find a substantially progressive tax system, as I have pointed out before.

3. If we added transfer payments (which are essentially negative taxes), we would find an even more progressive fiscal system.  Those data are harder to come by, as data on transfers are rarely integrated with data on taxes.

4. It make little sense to aggregate payroll taxes with personal income taxes and ignore corporate income taxes.  A corollary: Paul Krugman should be more careful when reproducing graphs from partisan think tanks.

5. All of these calculations are static.  They ignore the general-equilibrium effects that arise as the true burden of taxation is shifted by behavioral responses.  In essence, these calculations are made under the implicit assumption that factors of production are supplied inelastically, so the tax stays where legislators put it.  Of course, that assumption is implausible, especially in the long run.  True general-equilibrium tax incidence is very hard, and as far as I know, reliable estimates on it are not readily available.

----
Update: Oddly, rather than admitting an oversight, Paul Krugman continues with the same misleading claims in his column in Friday's paper.  Even more oddly, at his blog, he uses the tax-shift argument (my point 5 above) to justify the exclusion of the corporate tax.  Of course, tax shifting because of behavioral responses applies to all taxes, not just corporate taxes.  The implication of tax-shifting is not that one should just ignore corporate taxes, as Paul chooses to do, but rather that all static analyses of the distribution of the tax burden should be taken with a grain or two of salt.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 20, 2012 10:15 AM

Several readers have asked me my opinion of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  I fear that in this case, the devil is in the details, so I find it hard to reach a strong view.  But I have been disturbed by the relatively knee-jerk reaction of the anti-SOPA crowd.  This is a hard issue, and when someone makes it sound easy, I feel like they haven't thought it through very thoroughly.

The anti-SOPA crowd argues that this is a matter of basic liberty.  But it's not.  In a free society, you don't have the freedom to steal your neighbor's property.  And that should include intellectual property.  Moreover, it is the function of the state to enforce those rights.  We don't leave it up to civil litigation to protect property rights (although that is part of the solution).  We give the state substantial powers to stop theft.  Just as owners of tangible personal property have good cause to call for a police force and a system of criminal courts, owners of intellectual property have good cause to ask the state to stop those who would infringe on their rights.

This is an important economic issue for the United States.  We are large producers of intellectual property: movies, novels, software, video games, TV shows, and even economics textbooks.  If offshore websites find a way to distribute this intellectual property without paying for it, it is as if organized crime were stealing merchandise from a manufacturing firm at the loading dock.  It is neither efficient nor equitable. 

Maybe SOPA goes too far.  As I said, I am not knowledgeable enough about the details to judge.  But we need something along these lines.  Believers in free enterprise, property rights, and economic liberty should be among the most vocal advocates of laws to stop intellectual piracy.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 19, 2012 11:25 PM

Peter Wirzbicki reports:

The protesters gave out “alternative” awards for Most Conflict of Interests (Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard), Intellectual Narrowness (Harvard’s Greg Mankiw), and top prize, the “Toxic Waste of Space Award” (Harvard/Obama administration’s Larry Summers). Other than a brief yelling match that one protester got in with a professor, the tone was light and fun. Protesters “accepted” awards acting as Mankiw, Hubbard, and Summers (who reminded us how much smarter he was than us) and served “Rahmon” noodles, in honor of the Chicagoans impoverished by Rahm Emmanuel’s neoliberal policies. Overall a lot of fun, albeit fun that might have gone over the heads of the random shoppers on Michigan Ave.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 18, 2012 05:58 PM

There is an important difference between domestic economic policies that create benefits by imposing costs on other nations ("beggar-thy-neighbor policies") and those whose economic costs are borne primarily at home though they might affect others as well ("beggar-thyself policies").

Beggar-thy-neighbor policies need to be regulated at the international level because a nation, left to its own devices, has the incentive to pursue zero-sum policies at the expense of others. This is the strongest argument for subjecting China’s currency policies or large macroeconomic imbalances like Germany’s trade surplus to greater global discipline than currently exists.

However, “beggar thyself” policies are not the consequence of a failure of international cooperation.  They reflect either a deliberate domestic decision to sacrifice economic efficiency to a competing social value, or, in the worst case, a failure of domestic politics.

Consider, for example, agricultural subsidies, bans on genetically modified organisms, or lax financial regulation. While these policies might impose costs on other countries, they are deployed not to extract advantages from them, but because other domestic-policy motives – such as distributional, administrative, or public-health concerns – prevail over the objective of economic efficiency.

The case for global discipline is in fact quite weak with beggar-thyself policies. After all, it should not be up to the “global community” to tell individual countries how they ought to weight competing goals. Imposing costs on other countries is not, by itself, a cause for global regulation. (Indeed, economists hardly complain when a country’s trade liberalization harms competitors.) Democracies, in particular, ought to be allowed to make their own “mistakes.”

For more, see here.

by Dani Rodrik at January 18, 2012 03:22 PM

From a University of Minnesota graduate student:

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 18, 2012 01:00 PM

Michael Mussa has passed away. 

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 17, 2012 09:43 AM

A user of my intermediate macro text writes to me:

I always teach the strategic bequest motive in intermediate macro, mostly because it gets the students to think more deeply about why people save. While I have never really thought that strategic bequests are an important determinant of savings behavior, this story in today's NY Times moved my priors somewhat.

If you don't recall what the strategic bequest motive is, you can look it up in my text, or read the original research at this link.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 16, 2012 05:03 PM

As seen by economist Kevin Hassett.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 15, 2012 01:37 PM

A letter from econ prof Art Carden to students everywhere.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 13, 2012 12:02 PM

Context: The Maplewood-South Orange School District, which I attended my entire public school career, is in the process of de-leveling the middle school. The district belongs to a community with many wonderful and unique characteristics: suburban, easy public access to NYC, artistically vibrant, and both racially and economically diverse. But the leveling system reveals an uglier side, as the school is blatantly segregated along racial (and socio-economic) lines.

You can read the district’s proposal here. A paper profiling three case studies of successful elimination of “curricular stratification” can be found here. Its focus is on how to de-level, but the endnotes contain an overview of the literature on why, with two decades of papers discussing the benefits of heterogeneous grouping. Our district is in communication with one of the district’s profiled, and seems to be following the steps outlined in the paper.

Finally, I was inspired to prepare these remarks after attending a discussion of alumni last week. It was a powerful post-mortem on our public school experiences. Hearing first-hand the vastly different experience some of my peers had in the very same schools has motivated me to get involved in this issue (again). The discussion was hosted by a filmmaker and fellow district alumnus Cris Thorne, who is working on a documentary called Deleveling the System. Excerpts of the discussion are online here and here. Additionally, I highly recommend Cris’s earlier documentary (produced as a high school student!), One School, for more background.

Finally, I should note that I was unable to read the complete transcript, because I had prepared for the standard 3 minutes of public comment and found out upon arrival that we were restricted to two minutes.

My name is Rebecca Rojer, CHS class of 2005.

As a k-12 alumnus of this district, it is clear to me that the leveling system is not colorblind. In both the classrooms and the hallways, white students are consistently given the benefit of the doubt, while black students are assumed to be trouble-makers and low achievers. Students enter school with different degrees of preparedness, but the leveling system calcifies these differences into inequalities.

Worse, the leveling system turns prejudice into self-fulfilling prophecy. Low expectations correlate to low performance. For example, women perform worse on math exams after being told there is a genetic difference in math ability between the sexes.

There is clearly a place for grouping students by skill-level and motivation. But it is not always beneficial, even for “top” students. This is especially true of the turbulent and vicious middle-school years, where academic success is better predicted by behavior and obedience than by aptitude.

There are many styles of learning – fast, slow, deep, shallow, literal, abstract, disciplined, intuitive – yet we conceive of “high” and “low” achievers through standardized tests that are valued precisely because they simplify everyone onto a single metric. When testing becomes the end game of education, we all suffer. Excessive reliance on testing dehumanizes students and ultimately sabotages their education. Students who feel valued and respected are more apt to learn. The infuriating paradox in our district is that top-level classes are discussion based, encouraging of critical thinking and debate, while lower-level classes too often focus exclusively on test prep.

Education is about empathy, respect, creativity, and citizenship as much as it is about literacy and arithmetic. These values reenforce each other. Knowledge is power, and schools should empower students. Let’s teach compound interest alongside the history of redlining and predatory lending. Education is about life, not the GEPA.

There is much to be gained by heterogenous classes. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to a peer. And one of the best ways to be challenged, is to be confronted by someone who’s experiences and values are different from your own. That is what I most cherish from my education in this district. And for that, I really have to thank a group of my classmates, some of whom who are here tonight, for literally stopping classes my senior year to create a conversation among students in different levels.

Lets not forget, we’re all in this together. Today’s students are tomorrow’s voters, workers, mortgage-signers, taxpayers, parents, neighbors. Your children’s lives are affected not just by their own education, but by the education of everyone who participates in this society. To fret about the rigor of your special snowflake’s 6th grade social studies curriculum in light of massive, structural inequality is short-sighted and just plain wrong.

There is a wide-spread assumption that integrating classes will destroy our education system and wipe out our property values. Students can feel this very early on, and it is exactly this kind of attitude that perpetuates inequality. The best way to lift your property values is to do what’s right: work towards a system that benefits all students instead of only half. Lets reject the politics of fear, and instead move forward with empathy, creativity, and determination.

by rebecca at January 13, 2012 01:59 AM

The people who cut me out are leftists who have nothing to do with economics. There’s no allegation that in my class I said anything offensive. There’s no allegation that it has affected my research. It’s almost like the Spanish Inquisition – they didn’t give me a chance.’’

For his part, Swamy has moved on. He has no plans to sue Harvard. Actually, he said, he loves the school, where he has studied and taught on and off since 1962. He will not be seeking an academic position elsewhere: ‘It’s Harvard or nothing.’

by J.K. Trotter at January 12, 2012 09:19 PM

Ezra Klein polls CEA chairs.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 12, 2012 07:34 PM

On Feburary 4^th, the Scotland Rugby Team will stand on the pitch of Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium and listen to “God Save the Queen.” The 60,000 tartan supporters, UK citizens, will remain largely silent throughout. A boo or two may even make its way through the stands.  Then with saltires waving and bagpipes playing, the Scots will proudly sing:

                        O Flower of Scotland,

                        When will we see your like again

                        That fought and died for

                        Your wee bit hill and glen.

                        And stood proud against him,

                        Proud Edward’s army,

                        And sent him homeward

                        To think again.

On this day, just as at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the opponent is England. The auld enemy. This ancient rivalry, once fought with pikes and guns, entered the sporting world long ago and now wages within Westminster and Holyrood.

First Minister Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party is pushing for a referendum on independence for the home nation. Ironically, David Cameron and his Tories, the bastions of unionist politics are also pushing for a referendum on Scottish independence. As with so many things in life, it all comes down to timing. The SNP want the vote to occur in the fall of 2014; whereas Westminster prefers a vote within the next 18 months. Cameron’s call for an early referendum turns national self-determination—the very foundation of independence movements—against the SNP. It may just pay off.

It’s all-too tempting to say that this vote is a boon for Scottish nationalists. But in reality this vote offers the UK government the chance to put the national question to bed for the foreseeable future. According to UK law, a national assembly cannot simply hold a referendum on independence. Westminster must vote to give it that right temporarily, something which the standing government is willing to do. And soon.

David Cameron is no fool. At least not in this instance, he isn’t. Sure, he’s betting that the Scots will opt for the economic and military security of the UK over the allure of complete autonomy. But any betting shop from Aberdeen to Edinburgh will tell you Cameron has good odds. Only a third or so of Scots support full independence and that figure has stagnated over the 4 years the SNP’s held power in Scotland. The SNP is no doubt aware of these troubling figures, which partly explains its preference for a later vote. The party must rally supporters not just to the nationalist cause, but to the cause of independence—two ends that aren’t necessarily the same thing.

A vote for the SNP does not inevitably make one a champion of a future Scottish state. Scots might vote for the SNP because the party is deemed better than Labour or the Conservatives. Or because they are in favor, not of independence per se, but of more independence. Simply put, SNP voters want the increased devolution of powers from Westminster, including taxation policy and welfare programs. The Scots aren’t willing to sever historical ties just yet. It is quite possible that greater devolution will eventually beget the desire for full independence, though the aforementioned polling data states otherwise.

Some three hundred years have passed since Scotland last stood as an independent state. Though still part of the UK, Scots now control their own national destiny. That destiny appears to remain a home nation of the UK, barring any more Thatcher biopics or discoveries of oil in the North Sea. While it’s too soon to call Cameron’s move a masterstroke, it looks likely that he was able to use the very principles and instruments of the nationalist movement—namely self-determination and devolution, to preserve the union. When the referendum does come and the votes are tallied, Cameron will be left smiling. And Salmond?

He’ll be sent homeward.

 To think again.

 

by Pat Lane at January 11, 2012 08:28 PM

Columbia University recently bested its chief rival in everything, NYU, by coming up with a slightly more complicated version of the Occupy Wall Street “course” NYU now offers. But NYU has won the much more entertaining prize of which is more pointlessly dramatic, after a senior there compared herself to Harvard’s former president, Lawrence Summers, for some reason.

Sara Ackerman (pictured), a student in NYU professor Caitlin Zaloom’s senior research seminar, recently turned the class into a strange theatrical production involving a 3,000-word script of craaaaazy emails to her professor and NYU administrators, in which she refuses, against Zaloom’s instructions, to visit Zuccotti Park, in the day time, because people there are rude and gross. Oh, and the drama. Bribery! Danger! Nepotism! Drama drama drama. To quote:

I have no history of mental health issues, I have never been written up by an NYU security guard, I have no criminal record, I have an above average GPA, impressive extracurricular activities, an amazing resume with great recommendations/references, 3 post-graduation job offers, and I have sustained wonderful relationships with many of my previous employers, and NYU professors, over the years.

And:

On a side-note have you ever heard of that mega-university in Cambridge, Mass. called Harvard?Long story short, they had a few disputes between a tenured professor, and a big man on campus, and look what happened in the end:

They swapped him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

For him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornel_West

And got a PR nightmare—does anyone see the parallels? Or do I have to continue tospell it out for you, as I have been for over 2 months?

Look, neither Summers nor West is perfect, but why don’t you do a little research to see who was more deserving of a prominent position at Harvard?

by J.K. Trotter at January 11, 2012 02:14 PM

About a decade ago, I wrote a paper on monetary policy in the 1990s (published in this book). I estimated the following simple formula for setting the federal funds rate:

Federal funds rate = 8.5 + 1.4 (Core inflation - Unemployment).

Here "core inflation" is the CPI inflation rate over the previous 12 months excluding food and energy, and "unemployment" is the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate. The parameters in this formula were chosen to offer the best fit for data from the 1990s.  You can think of this equation as a version of a Taylor rule.

Eddy Elfenbein has recently replotted this equation.  Here it is:


The interest rate recommended by the equation is the blue line, and the actual rate from the Fed is the red line.

Not surprisingly, the rule recommended a deeply negative federal funds rate during the recent severe recession.  Of course, that is impossible, which is why the Fed took various extraordinary steps to get the economy going.  But note that the rule is now moving back toward zero.  As Eddy points out, "At the current inflation rate, the unemployment rate needs to drop to 8.3% from the current 8.5% for the model to signal positive rates. We’re getting close."

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 11, 2012 07:59 AM

A Handy Guide For The Easily Distracted by Miranda July

by rebecca at January 11, 2012 04:50 AM

The price system, of course.  New evidence from Seattle:

New tolls on the Highway 520 bridge have reduced traffic so much that drivers are commonly traveling at 65 mph, maybe three times as fast as they're used to.

by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at January 10, 2012 07:45 PM