I think we also need to page Mark Palko

Today's new patent is from Apple, US patent #8,082,523.  It is best described as:

In other words, anything you’d recognize as a smartphone seems to be covered.

Matthew Yglesias asks the smart question:

The issue is that there's just no sound public interest case for granting monopolies over certain features to the first-to-market firms in this industry. Apple has already gained a very large competitive advantage from the fact that they were the first people to deploy a working touchscreen smartphone and even without patents clearly has a strong financial need to continue investing in improving its product lest lower-margin Android-powered phones eat away at its profits.

But the general trend seems worrisome.  Not only does it vastly increase business complexity (searching the patent office for thousands of potentially applicable patents), but it stifles innovation by making new entry into the smartphone field more difficult.

Mark?  

Randomized Social Experiments

In a really fascinating post, Alex Tabarrok discusses controversy about a random clinical trial set within a housing program. It's a very interesting example (and his quote from E. E. Peacock, Jr. was priceless). But it does bring up a serious question: in many areas of social policy there is no realistic way to blind experiments and, similarly, the idea of informed consent is hard to implement in practice.

Consider this point as well: the only way you will be able to get rational actors to consent to an experiment on housing is if all of the options in the intervention are equal or better than the status quo. That means you can never experiment to see if the current plans are working, insofar as informed consent is required. Nor can one really argue that coercion is not present given that people enter these programs out of desperation.

I think the real difference is that we have two different sources of utility: the user of the program and the agency (via the taxpayer) who is implementing the program. So it becomes a complex problem because the status quo might benefit the user (marginally) and harm the taxpayer/state/agency (greatly) but you will never get users to consent to testing how they will do with fewer benefits (or at least the incentives are wrong). Compare this with drug trials: only the patient’s ability to benefit is typically considered (although cost effectiveness may matter later in the approval process).

But the alternative is simply to not know what the right answer is and to risk getting stuck at a very suboptimal policy point. And that seems to be the wrong answer as well.

Education Reform

I want to very quickly return to first principles. When Mark and I began discussing tenure reform, it was in the context of a "crisis" in education. This terminology continues to this day.

However, the real impact of recent news is that proposed reforms don’t have the potential to make immediate and dramatic improvements in education outcomes. Why does this matter?

Because if there is an incipient crisis and known strategies can directly address them then it would be grossly unethical not to try and address this in the fastest way possible. However, if there is not an immediate crisis the correct way forward is one that addresses all of the stakeholders and not radical top-down driven reform. In other words, Baltimore and not Washington, DC.

In the long run educational reform may be inevitable and positive. One of our well versed commentators (Stuart Buck) opined about the evidence:

It's consistent with any number of stories, including increased quality of teaching, better curriculum, finding a better fit for each individual students (some do better in a smaller school, for example), and the factors that you mention.

In my view, this suggests that we are going to experiment with news modes of education. After all, many people who I respect are strongly advocating for experimenting further with education reform (Jon Chait, Megan McArdle, Matt Yglesias, Alex Tabarrok come immediately to mind).

So why are there concerns about the process by which educational reform is occurring? Because, the discussion began with a question of where to allocate resources. Seyward Darby was arguing that we needed to accept teacher layoffs as part of the price if educational reform:

The president's beef is with a provision to prevent teacher layoffs, which Democrats tacked onto the bill along with several other domestic priorities. To pay for the measure, the House agreed to cut money from some of the president's key education reform initiatives. Obama isn't happy about it. Nor should he be.

Now, if there is a real and immediate crisis in education than, of course, dramatic measures can make sense. But is this really the time to spark a round of teacher layoffs in order to make slow improvements in who decides to apply for teaching jobs? Maybe, but it seems naive to think that we should fuel the testing of educational reform with layoffs at this precise moment. Readers of Felix Salmon may remember this week's jobs report:

Meanwhile, as the school year begins, we have this:

Employment in local government decreased by 76,000 in September with job losses in both education and noneducation.

As states and municipalities around the nation start running out of money, they’re going to fire people; this is only the beginning. And if October is any indication, the job losses in the local government sector are going to be at least as big as the job gains in the private sector.

So the real issue is whether this is the time for radical teacher employment restructuring -- should we lay off teachers to test educational reform? We do have a duty to the future but we also have a duty to the current students as well. The conversation would be different if the net resources for education were increasing but claiming that education is a priority in the midst of layoffs due to lack of funding seems disingenuous.

My interest in this subject grew from two arguments in the blogosphere. One, that the crisis in educational was so bad that the state should massively break contracts without cause. Notice that in cases like AIG and TARP, we were willing to spend a lot of money as a society to preserve financial contracts. Two, that reform has likely to be so important that teacher lay-offs in the midst of a recession were an acceptable sacrifice as the students would be better off.

If we don't accept that there is an immediate crisis then we can still move forward. But then it becomes an American-style bottom-up reform and not a Soviet-style top down reform. I like the Baltimore example -- specific communities negotiating ways to respond to the crisis and continuing to try ways to create a better future for their children. The result of a thousand experiments with engaged communities could very well result in a far better educational system in the long run.

And I think that is a good outcome.

Alex Tabarrok's literary leverage

There's a very good discussion about superstars and the winner-take-all economy over at Economist's View. Alex Tabarrok argues that the winner-take-all effect in literature can be explained by factors like technology and venue size:

J.K. Rowling is the first author in the history of the world to earn a billion dollars. I do not disparage Rowling when I say that talent is not the explanation for her monetary success. Homer, Shakespeare and Tolkien all earned much less. Why? Consider Homer, he told great stories but he could earn no more in a night than say 50 people might pay for an evening's entertainment. Shakespeare did a little better. The Globe theater could hold 3000 and unlike Homer, Shakespeare didn't have to be at the theater to earn. Shakespeare's words were leveraged.

Tolkien's words were leveraged further. By selling books Tolkien could sell to hundreds of thousands, even millions of buyers in a year - more than have ever seen a Shakespeare play in 400 years. And books were cheaper to produce than actors which meant that Tolkien could earn a greater share of the revenues than did Shakespeare (Shakespeare incidentally also owned shares in the Globe.)

Rowling has the leverage of the book but also the movie, the video game, and the toy. And globalization, both economic and cultural, means that Rowling's words, images, and products are translated, transmitted and transported everywhere - this is the real magic of Ha-li Bo-te.

But it's possible to look at these examples in an entirely different way.

There's no question that technology and the ability to leverage creative works has a tremendous effect on the economics (and therefore the content) of popular culture, but how well does this particular account support that conclusion?

Homer is a bad example partially because he probably never existed, but mainly because the model Prof. Tabarrok describes, traveling performers working small venues, didn't really apply to writers at all. These minstrels were simply repeating stories that they had accumulated. The closest analogy today would be a cover band working bars and small clubs. (Hesiod throws in a bit of a monkey wrench here, but that's a topic for another day.)

If you skip ahead two or three hundred years you do have successful writers like Sophocles having their works performed in large venues. Though it's difficult to draw an analogy between forms of compensation then and now, they were certainly well rewarded for their work. Go on to the Roman era you have successful writers producing book length poems and even novels despite the lack of printing presses.

As for Shakespeare sticking to the stage, this had little to do with the relative cost of books and actors. There were the equivalent of cheap paperback versions of Shakespeare's plays published during his lifetime. There were also productions of his plays away from the Globe. Shakespeare's words were widely leveraged. The problem wasn't technology or venue; it was the lack of modern copyright laws. The revenue went to other people.

Tolkien is a bad example for other reasons. His body of work is small. His books were difficult to translate into other media. Significant sales didn't start until years after the books were written (prompted, in part, by the mistaken belief that the copyright was limited to Britain).

A better example would be Erle Stanley Gardner who had a large body of work, sold more books than Tolkien and was, during his lifetime, adapted into movies, TV, radio, comic books and probably a few other media. Was Rowling better leveraged than Gardner? Sure, but not by as much as you might think.

There is obviously more behind the rise of the superstar author than technology and the ability to leverage words, more than I have time to address now, but if I were to pursue it, I think I'd make the case for this being a story of lobbying and government regulation of the market in the form of copyrights. Technology has changed, but so has the law.




And now, just in case any of the above might be read as a slight against Rowling, I'll let Stephen King have the last word with his comparison of Harry Potter and the Twilight books:

Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games

You've probably heard about the Harlem Children's Zone, an impressive, even inspiring initiative to improve the lives of poor inner-city children through charter schools and community programs. Having taught in Watts and the Mississippi Delta in my pre-statistician days, this is an area of long-standing interest to me and I like a lot of the things I'm hearing about HCZ. What I don't like nearly as much is the reaction I'm seeing to the research study by Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer, Jr. of Harvard. Here's Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution with a representative sample, "I don't know why anyone interested in the welfare of children would want to discourage this kind of experimentation."

Maybe I can provide some reasons.

First off, this is an observational study, not a randomized experiment. I think we may be reaching the limits of what analysis of observational data can do in the education debate and, given the importance and complexity of the questions, I don't understand why we aren't employing randomized trials to answer some of these questions once and for all.

More significantly I'm also troubled by the aliasing of data on the Promise Academies and by the fact that the authors draw a conclusion ("HCZ is enormously successful at boosting achievement in math and ELA in elementary school and math in middle school. The impact of being offered admission into the HCZ middle school on ELA achievement is positive, but less dramatic. High-quality schools or community investments coupled with high-quality schools drive these results, but community investments alone cannot.") that the data can't support.

In statistics, aliasing means combining treatments in such a way that you can't tell which treatment or combination of treatments caused the effect you observed. In this case the first treatment is the educational environment of the Promise Academies. The second is something called social norming.

When you isolate a group of students, they will quickly arrive at a consensus of what constitutes normal behavior. It is a complex and somewhat unpredictable process driven by personalities and random connections and any number of outside factors. You can however, exercise a great deal of control over the outcome by restricting the make-up of the group.

If we restricted students via an application process, how would we expect that group to differ from the general population and how would that affect the norms the group would settle on? For starters, all the parents would have taken a direct interest in their children's schooling.

Compared to the general population, the applicants will be much more likely to see working hard, making good grades, not getting into trouble as normal behaviors. The applicants (particularly older applicants) would be more likely to be interested in school and to see academic and professional success as a reasonable possibility because they would have made an active choice to move to a new and more demanding school. Having the older students committed to the program is particularly important because older children play a disproportionate role in the setting of social norms.

Dobbie and Fryer address the question of self-selection, "[R]esults from any lottery sample may lack external validity. The counterfactual we identify is for students who are already interested in charter schools. The effect of being offered admission to HCZ for these students may be different than for other types of students." In other words, they can't conclude from the data how well students would do at the Promise Academies if, for instance, their parents weren't engaged and supportive (a group effective eliminated by the application process).

But there's another question, one with tremendous policy implications, that the paper does not address: how well would the students who were accepted to HCZ have done if they were given the same amount of instruction * as they would have received from HCZ using public school teachers while being isolated from the general population? (There was a control group of lottery losers but there is no evidence that they were kept together as a group.)

Why is this question so important? Because we are thinking about spending an enormous amount of time, effort and money on a major overhaul of the education system when we don't have the data to tell us if what we'll spend will wasted or, worse yet, if we are to some extent playing a zero sum game.

Social norming can work both ways. If you remove all of the students whose parents are willing and able to go through the application process, the norms of acceptable behavior for those left behind will move in an ugly direction and the kids who started out with the greatest disadvantages would be left to bear the burden.

But we can answer these questions and make decisions based on solid, statistically sound data. Educational reform is not like climate change where observational data is our only reasonable option. Randomized trials are an option in most cases; they are not that difficult or expensive.

Until we get good data, how can we expect to make good decisions?

* Correction: There should have been a link here to this post by Andrew Gelman.