Kind and literate OE readers

Can someone out there help me find the name of a story. It's from the late Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century. In it a banker tells of a colleague who was ruined because he became obsessed with chess. I won't spoil the payoff but it's very funny and incredibly timely.

Thanks in advance,
Mark

Note to Gelman -- first fill its mouth with salt, then light candles, then decapitate

Andrew Gelman is once again going after the voting-is-irrational zombie (disinterred this time by the Freakonomics team). Gelman shows, using estimates that if anything err on the conservative side, that the possibility of influencing an election, though small, can still easily be associated with a reasonable expected value.

This particular zombie has been shambling through the dark corridors of pop econ books and columns for years now (Gelman himself has been monster hunting since at least 2005), but every time the creature seems truly dead and buried, along comes someone like Landsburg or Levitt, someone who's smart enough and mathematically literate enough to know better, but who just can't resist digging up the grave.

Weekend Gaming -- Agon

I don't know exactly what happened to Agon, but I'm pretty sure those damned orthogonalists had something to do with it. The game was all the rage in Victorian England where it was appreciated for its simple rules but surprisingly complex strategies. (the Victorians were also big fans of Lewis Carroll's Doublets, thus showing remarkably good taste in diversions.) The game was and is remarkably challenging and enjoyable but early in the Twentieth Century it faded away, perhaps due to the hegemony of orthogonal game boards.

You can find a complete set of rules on my game site. You can also buy boards there but obviously waiting for delivery would undercut the whole 'here's a game for this weekend' concept so I've included two JPEGs that you can print off if you can't find a suitable substitute (lots of games use a 6x6x6 hexboard so locating one shouldn't be that difficult).


The game is extraordinarily easy to learn. Each player starts out with six pawns and a queen spread out around the edge out the board.

A piece can either move around a concentric hexagon or go toward the center. The object is to get your pieces arranged like this (black wins):

'Capturing' is done in the style of many older games by placing two of your pieces on either side of the opponent's piece. I put the word in quotes because a captured piece is not removed from the board. Instead, it is moved back to the outer ring. Agon is therefore entirely a game of position. Novice chess players have a tendency to play for points and measure how well they're doing by how many of their opponent's pieces are lined up by the side of the board. Learning Agon can help break them of some bad habits.

I first came across Agon in David Parlett's Oxford History of Board Games -- an excellent resource if you're thinking about teaching a math class and not a bad read if you just enjoy games. Parlett is also a game designer of some note so he brings a lot of insight to the discussion.

Credit where credit is due

Seyward Darby has a thoughtful and balanced piece on education in today's New Republic. Here's the conclusion:

But, even when better evaluation methods exist, is it really a good idea to publish, en masse, the ratings of every public school teacher? I’m not convinced. Yes, the information should be available to those in the public who want it—namely parents. But schools or school districts, not newspapers, should share it with parents in a constructive manner, so that they are able to ask questions and understand fully what the information means. Teachers’ unions and districts should also use it to remove underperforming instructors from their jobs, and to ensure that no school has a high concentration of ineffective teachers, such that its student are getting the short end of the stick. And teachers should use it either to ask for additional training resources—or to gain recognition of the good, hard work that they’ve done.

I’m all for transparency. But a wide-open view of incomplete information isn’t what we need to improve education. What’s more, broadly publicizing even the most thorough of information isn’t always productive; complexities and nuances are often best conveyed in smaller settings, with the stakeholders who matter most.

The media shouldn’t focus on shaming individual teachers, because there are bigger fish to fry. Indeed, across the country, they should focus on shaming the entrenched bodies, structures, and policies that allow poor teaching to continue unchecked, fail to reward good teaching, and don’t provide enough support for teachers who want to improve their skills.

I don't agree with everything Darby says here and there are omissions that bother me (relying on Kyle Spencer's reporting probably didn't help). On the whole, though, this is an entirely reasonable piece of analysis. I complained earlier that there wasn't really an education debate in this country. Perhaps we're about to start one.

Alignment of Incentives

Professor in Training has a post on selfishness in Academia:

I’m at the point where I’m jumping up and down in frustration because I can’t get what I want when I want it (which is always yesterday or last week or last year). My resources are limited and dwindling at an alarming rate. My students are swamped with classes and assistantship responsibilities. And yet I’m expected to push out papers. I’m expecting them to push out the papers. And data. Let’s not forget the new data.

I think that the incentives are more aligned here than it appears on first glance. Students will benefit from having a successful professor as a mentor. They benefit from being involved in a lot of successful research projects.

What I suspect the core problem is that academia is set up to make a lot of things urgent (the class you need to teach today, the faculty meeting, the memo you need to write) but they are not especially important. In the long run, success in a biomedical tenure track role requires research output. Other things matter, but this one is key. Students are just as susceptible as professors to getting caught up in things that do have the potential to consume all of ones time. Participating in student goverence, for example, rarely is worth the time that is removes from the student. As a result, everybody feels overwhlemed and tempers fray.

I think the secret here is to realize what are the things that will matter in the long run and what needs to be done adequetely but is not worth a lot of time.

Hoisted from comments -- still more on Mankiw's assumptions

Following this and this, here's the latest in my ongoing debate with David over Mankiw's use of assumptions.

Drawn from a longer comment, here's David:

Assumptions may be very sensitive in a model such that if they deviate even slightly, then the results change substantially. And, of course, some assumptions are robust to substantial changes. It would seem that this is the language that Mankiw is speaking in, according to the few short quotes in the past post.

This seems to me to be a different question when evaluating the policy conclusion. For example, I don't believe that all workers earn their Marginal Product (and in some sense there's no way that we could ever tell). In this sense, Mankiw is mostly likely wrong. However, I do strongly believe that there is an important relationship between productivity and wages. The more productive a worker is, the more he or she will likely be paid. This latter formation is much less precise than the former, but I would submit that they carry very similar policy conclusions. Importantly, the assumptions necessary to make the latter statement are much more robust than the former.

Here's my reply (adapted from a previous comment):

David,

Everything you've said is correct but here's the problem: at the level of generality you're talking about, everyone from Mankiw to Paul Krugman to Dan Ariely is in agreement, but many of Mankiw's arguments seem to require much more specific definitions. Rather than being robust, they are so sensitive that making small, common-sense changes can do great damage.

Keep in mind I'm a statistician, not an economist, so I may be getting some of this wrong but let's assume (except for workers on commission -- I'll grant you linearity for that one) the relationship between a worker's productivity and wages is generally monotonic but with plateaus and possibly even the occasional local optimum. I'm not saying this is the case but I suspect it's a pretty good description of what's going on. More importantly, I wouldn't be comfortable assuming this isn't the case.

I'm pretty sure some of Mankiw's arguments break down if you make this assumption. There's a luck factor now as to whether a change in productivity will result in an increase in wages. You also have an asymmetry problem -- the employer has a better idea where the plateaus are.

Or look at his statements about the inheritance tax. He assumes that one component of money's value to a worker is the pleasure of leaving money to an heir (so far, so good) and that the value of that component holds its value even as the inheritance gets well into the millions. If parents start to worry progressively less about each dollar after, say, the first million then the other value components (such as spending, bragging, charitable giving) will swamp the inheritance component long before the inheritance taxes kick in. If this is true, Mankiw's policy arguments simply collapse.

In other words, if pundits' arguments are sufficiently robust or their assumptions are obviously true, they can do what Mankiw does. Unfortunately, neither case applies here.

Contractually obligated to mention Canada again

I'm as tired of it as you are, but as long reform movement advocates* keep bringing up Singapore, I feel someone has to point out that Canada is neck-and-neck with countries like Singapore (except in post-secondary education where it pretty much blows them away) and that Canada, which is a far better match for the U.S. culturally, historically and demographically, has achieved this by taking most of the steps the movement suggests and doing the exact opposite.

If we had a properly functioning debate on education reform in this country, movement advocates would expect to be presented with counter-arguments; they would even anticipate them. New examples would be sought out, positions would be refined and the intellectual framework of the reform movement would be stronger for it.

But we don't have a properly functioning debate. Hell, we don't really have a debate at all. Instead, we have a situation where advocates can talk about Singapore without anyone bringing up Canada, or about PISA without anyone bringing up TIMSS, or about lottery-based analyses without anyone bringing up peer effects (or placebo effects or volunteer effects or treatment/selection interaction or...). Instead of being challenged and having to prove themselves, these claims go directly into the conventional wisdom pile where they are accepted by smart, otherwise well-informed people like Seyward Darby, Ray Fisman and Jonathan Chait.

This is not likely to end well.

* For the distinction between advocating for reform and advocating for the reform movement, see here.

In good company

Joseph,

Have you ever been called 'fascinating' before? It sort of turns a fellow's head.

Mark

p.s. This would still be a cool list even if we weren't on it.

Achilles and the Tortoise, the CBO and the GOP

Perhaps it's just the lateness of the hour but this post by Brad DeLong on the Republicans' refusal to accept CBO numbers reminded me just a bit of the Tortoise's refusal to accept a simple argument in Lewis Carroll's follow-up to Zeno's best-known paradox.

I really need to get to bed.

The Self-esteem gap

Michelle Rhee was on Marketplace yesterday. She's worried about all the coddling and empty praise we've been heaping on our children.

We've lost our competitive spirit. We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.

I can see it in my own household. I have two girls, 8 and 12, and they play soccer. And I can tell you that they suck at soccer! They take after their mother in athletic ability. But if you were to see their rooms, they're adorned with ribbons, medals and trophies. You'd think I was raising the next Mia Hamm.

I routinely try to tell my kids that their soccer skills are lacking and that if they want to be better, they have to practice hard. I also communicate to them that all the practice in the world won't guarantee that they'll ever be great at soccer. It's tough to square this though, with the trophies. And that's part of the issue. We've managed to build a sense of complacency with our children.

Take as a counterpoint South Korea, where my family is originally from. In Korea, they have this culture that focuses on always becoming better. Students are ranked one through 40 in their class and everyone knows where they stand. The adults are honest with kids about what they're not good at and how far they have to go until they are number one. Can you imagine if we suggested anything close to that here? There would be anarchy.

This is an old and much loved refrain in the reform movement, but when you look closely and take the time to disaggregate the data the argument completely collapses. The problem is that the culture of esteem-building Rhee describes is essentially a suburban phenomena. In poor neighborhoods, the situation is exactly the opposite:

Hart and Risley also found that, in the first four years after birth, the average child from a professional family receives 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback; a working- class child receives merely 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements; a welfare child receives 125,000 more discouragements than encouragements.

Other words, our best performing schools are filled with kids who, according to Rhee, should be complacent and lacking competitive spirit while most of the kids in our worst performing schools have received little of the empty praise that so concerns her.

Perhaps we should worry less about the exaggerated self opinions of students and more about that of our pundits and commentators.

Department of better late than never

I just came across this excellent piece on President Obama's education speech at FactCheck.org. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to keep up with the education debate, but if you just want the punchline, here it is:

Most of the major claims in the president's speech were either based on highly selective reading of the data or were simply wrong.

This brings us to one of the strangest aspects of the education debate: the way it makes smart, conscientious people act grossly out of character. Consider this representative example from FactCheck:

But the claim that "our high school dropout rate has tripled in the past thirty years"? That’s not even in the ballpark. According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, the "status dropout rate" – defined as the percentage of people between ages 16 and 24 who are not in school and do not have high school diplomas or GEDs – was 9.3 percent in 2006. In 1976, 30 years before that, it was 14.1. That’s actually a 34 percent decrease in the high school dropout rate.

Of course, dropout rates are notoriously hard to measure and compare. For instance, while NCES shows a status dropout rate of 9.3 in 2006, the high school completion rate for that year was only 74.8 percent. Why the discrepancy? Instead of counting people of a certain age with a diploma or equivalency certificate, this figure compares the number of high school freshman in a certain year to the number receiving a high school diploma four years later. Those who take more than four years to finish aren’t counted, nor are students who get GEDs instead of diplomas. But using this calculation still doesn’t back up Obama’s claim. The dropout rate – that is, the discrepancy between incoming freshmen and graduates – would have been 25.2 percent in the 2006-2007 school year. The rate in 1976-1977 was 25.6 percent.

Even pessimistic accounts don’t show a tripled dropout rate. According to a report by the Educational Testing Service, titled "One Third of a Nation" after the number of students they say are high school dropouts, high school completion rates peaked at 77.1 percent in 1969 and dropped to 69.9 percent in 2000. (NCES shows higher numbers in both years.);That would put dropout rates at 22.9 and 30.1 percent respectively – a 30 percent increase over 31 years. As many sixth-graders could tell you, tripling would mean a 200 percent increase.

So where did Obama’s figure come from? A White House spokesman pointed us to a report by the College Board, which said: "The rate at which American students disappear from school between grades nine and 12 has tripled in the last 30 years." But the College Board’s report included a mistake, which it later corrected: The rate really refers to what happened between grades nine and 10. More important, however, it is not really a "dropout rate." The College Board report in turn cites a 2004 study by the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy, which actually shows a tripling of the attrition rate between grades nine and 10, not the dropout rate. In other words, the difference between the number of students enrolled in grade nine in one year and the number enrolled in grade 10 the next year has increased threefold. At the same time, there has been a corresponding threefold increase in grade nine enrollments relative to grade eight. The report shows more ninth-graders failing that grade, not dropping out.

Given that the reform movement has been railing against social promotion for years, it's hard to argue that an increase in students held back is a cause for alarm.

The spam filter on Blogger... what's the word?...

Oh, I remember, sucks.

It seems to have a problem with long comments so if you write a comment and it doesn't appear, please follow up with a short note and Joseph or I will check the filter.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Jonathan Chait disapproves of a liberal journalist's flip-flop on unions

In today's TNR:

New York has a mordantly funny piece about the effort by staffers at Harper's to unionize. The saga begins with gross mismanagement by owner Rick MacArthur, spurring the staff to organize. Then the left-wing MacArthur started to act a lot like a union-crushing boss.

I have a bit more sympathy for MacArthur. He's in a difficult situation trying to save a tremendously worthwhile institution. I tend to be very union-friendly but the situation can get murky when the business in question really is struggling to survive, not just making a play for sympathy. Given that my only source of information is the gossipy and badly written New York piece, it's difficult to assign much blame.

Besides, it's not like he attacked a fundamental role of unions like the right to protect their employees from unfair termination.

Mortgage Questions

This post had a very perceptive take on a question from Megan McArdle:

McArdle: “Let’s turn it around,” I asked. “What if the bank decided that it wanted to exercise the same sort of option?…What if the bank foreclosed on your house, even though you made the payments, because it figured it could make more money taking the house and selling it?” (Not a likely scenario, I know, but a useful thought experiment.).

Response:

Banks exercise the same sort of option all the time when they resell mortgages (and hopefully notes!) from one entity to another entity. That’s the problem we have right now, that this reselling option banks use was so sloppy it’s tearing up the economy.

This is why if you are the type of person who thinks markets self-regulate through consumer demand and reputation there’s a major problem, as consumers have no choice over their mortgage servicer. If you don’t like your servicer, and refinance your mortgage with another bank, that bank can still sell off your mortgage and you can still end up serviced by the same institution.

I never quite thought of the decision to resell mortgages in this light, but this is a remarkably good point. It's not quite the same scenario as "seize the house" (which I think was the actual tactic that McArdle had in mind) but it certainly does put the decision to resell mortgages in perspective.

In a more pragmatic light, the decision to try and do regulation by reputation (long a bad idea) has even less relevance in the modern world. First of all, job tenures at banks may be quite short so the people making decisions that undermine a firms reputation may be elsewhere at the end of this period. Second, firms themselves often vanish or are absorbed by other firms (consider Washington Mutual as an example). These features of the modern corporate environment make it difficult to use a reputation based system as the primary check on the system.

This is not to say that homeowners who are in default should be given free houses (I'd think that was obviously an incorrect conclusion) but rather that we should give the regulatory structure of banks some serious thought.

The Golden Globes as a collective action problem

Even by the standards of Hollywood awards, the Golden Globes was a largely pointless exercise, selected by small and lightly credentialed group of no particular standing. For awhile, it represented a small net positive for the industry -- it did generate publicity and the large number of categories meant that a lot of shows could add "winner of..." to their promotional material -- but eventually the meaninglessness, the poor choices and the suspicion that nominations were made based on who might attend the ceremony all pushed the Golden Globes into the liability category. This came to a head this year with multiple nominations for the Tourist, one of the worst-reviewed pictures of the season, and with a payola scandal.

I suspect that most of the industry would like to see the Golden Globes go away but here's where the collective action problem comes in. If everyone who disapproved would stop covering or attending the event, they could probably kill it in a year or two (I'm counting being bumped to E! as virtual death), but even the Globes' harshest critics haven't been able to go cold turkey. As long as the show is there, all the incentives on the individual level are lined up to keep the show going. The journalist who refuses to write about the nominations or the ceremony loses ground to competitors. The nominated star who boycotts the awards passes up publicity and may be seen as difficult to work with (a label that can devastate an actor's career).

There's something refreshingly trivial about Hollywood versus the Golden Globes, but it does raise an interesting point: just how embarrassing does a situation have to be for an industry to find a solution to a collective action problem? Apparently it need to be worse than having the host of a prime-time network awards show opening with jokes about the fact that the nominations are fixed.