An experiment in blogging -- the conclusion [reposted]

[I'm about finished with a longer post that refers to this topic so I decided to do a repost. I apologize to long time readers.]

When assessing a statement, sometimes it's useful to rephrase it in a more general way and see how well it holds up. I tried that with a passage I found in a popular blog (one of the very few I read every day). Where the author had referred to members of a specific profession I substituted in the word 'employees' except when talking about unions ('employees unions' seemed redundant). I also changed a couple of words for consistency, but other than that the passage was exactly the same.

The resulting paragraph (seen below) was much more extreme than I had expected and it got me to thinking, how would people react to this passage if they encountered it without all the baggage? I decided to post the generalized version with a brief explanatory note then give people a couple of days to think about it before filing in the details.

Here's the generalized passage:

If you concede that employers need to be able to fire bad employees, then you can't fully defend the role of the unions. You can defend the concept of unions, and you can believe that some of the things unions do, like bargain for higher aggregate wages, help society. But most unions demonstrably make it very difficult to fire bad employees. That is currently a core function of unions, and something that must change. You're also going to need higher salaries to attract a better caliber employee into the workforce, and that's something unions could potentially help. But being "treated like professionals" has to mean both the opportunity to earn a good living if you do well and the potential to be fired if you fail.

And here is the passage Jonathan Chait (that's right, Jonathan Chait) originally posted in his blog:

If you concede that principals need to be able to fire bad teachers, then you can't fully defend the role of the unions. You can defend the concept of unions, and you can believe that some of the things unions do, like bargain for higher aggregate wages, help education. But most teachers unions demonstrably make it very difficult to fire bad teachers. That is currently a core function of teachers unions, and something that must change. You're also going to need higher salaries to attract a better caliber teacher into the profession, and that's something unions could potentially help. But being "treated like professionals" has to mean both the opportunity to earn a good living if you do well and the potential to be fired if you fail.

There are obviously two possible responses Chait could make here (three if you count ignoring it entirely). He could say he agrees with the general statement or he could argue that teachers are a special case and should be granted less union protection than, say, policemen.*

Ironically, the more defensible position Chait can take here is the extreme one, namely that unions should not do anything to discourage employers from firing their members. It's not a position that most readers of the New Republic would embrace but, as a statement of personal belief, it is extraordinarily difficult to rebut.

If he tries to explain why teachers constitute a special case, he will have to deal with the data and in this particular debate, the numbers are not his friends. (It's worth remembering that Diane Ravitch started out on Chait's side. Her road to Damascus came when she realized she could no longer reconcile those views with what she was seeing in the research findings.)

Jonathan Chait can be a formidable debater but he has shown himself to be largely ignorant of the research behind these issues (no one at TNR even knew enough about PISA to catch the bait and switch in the intro to Waiting for Superman and in the education debate that's about as slow as the pitches get).

He'll be trying to punch holes in the findings of institutions like EPI and Rand and big guns in the field like Donald Rubin. He'll have to show precipitous educational decline without resorting to the aforementioned PISA (good test but absolutely meaningless in this context). He'll have to explain why schools that use his policies are more likely to underperform than to outperform unionized schools. He'll have to justify firing people based on metrics so volatile that a third of teachers in the top 20% could find themselves in firing range the next year, metrics based on data so confounded that "students’ fifth grade teachers were good predictors of their fourth grade test scores."

This is one time the smart money is on the other guys.



* Yes, we fire policemen. What we don't do is is fire policemen based on unreliable metrics that are largely outside of the officers' control and are easily manipulated by their superiors

An experiment in blogging -- reposted

[I'm about finished with a longer post that refers to this topic so I decided to do a repost. I apologize to long time readers.]

This will just take a minute of your time.

What follows is a passage from a popular blog, rewritten slightly to make it more general but otherwise unchanged. I'll post the original quote with some comments Monday or Tuesday. [later today for the repost -- Mark]

I'd appreciate it if you would take a look at this and give some thought both to the arguments proposed and to the larger belief system they suggest, then come back in a few days and see what effect learning the context has had on your initial impressions.

Thanks.

If you concede that employers need to be able to fire bad employees, then you can't fully defend the role of the unions. You can defend the concept of unions, and you can believe that some of the things unions do, like bargain for higher aggregate wages, help society. But most unions demonstrably make it very difficult to fire bad employees. That is currently a core function of unions, and something that must change. You're also going to need higher salaries to attract a better caliber employee into the workforce, and that's something unions could potentially help. But being "treated like professionals" has to mean both the opportunity to earn a good living if you do well and the potential to be fired if you fail.

I welcome comments but please don't include the source of the passage. Obviously that would undercut the point of the experiment.

Catching up with Dana Goldstein

I'm going to try to comment on each of these individually later. Feel free to beat me to the punch.

How Politically Astute is Michelle Rhee?

The Revival of the Private School Voucher Movement

Wisconsin Teachers' Union Prepares for Battle with GOP Gov

If I'm going to compare H-1Bs and serfdom, I should at least find a British guy for the video

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"If you don't do well in school, your descendants could grow up to be Morlocks"

OK, maybe it's not that bad, but Berkeley professor Claude Fischer still paints a grim picture. (via Thoma, of course.)

Degree inequality

It is now generally understood that economic inequality has expanded greatly since about 1970. (Well, there are exceptions. For a couple of decades, some commentators denied that economic inequality was growing, claiming that it was all a statistical illusion. A few holdouts against reality may remain.) Now the debate has shifted to what – if anything at all – should be done about inequality.

Most of that discussion has been about income inequality. Between 1979 and 2007, the one-fifth of American households with the highest income experienced a roughly 100% increase in their annual, inflation-adjusted, after-tax income (280% [!] for the highest one percent of households); the middle one-fifth got about 25% more income; and the poorest one-fifth got about 15% more (see pdf). For wealth – property, stocks, and the like – the gap is enormously greater and has also widened over the last few decades.

Less discussed is the widening college degree gap. Yet its implications go considerably beyond money, to widening differences in life experiences and ways of life. (I draw in particular on the work of my colleague, Michael Hout, notably here [pdf], and on two books we wrote together, here and here.)

Fischer follows this with a number of troubling statistics. I found this part particularly striking:

Even is more happening along the education gap: Increasingly, college graduates marry college graduates and live among college graduates. Increasingly, Americans group by education and their ways of life diverge by education.

Although the trends are complex (see here), Americans today are likelier to marry people of the same educational level as themselves than was true decades ago. Some of this development results from educated men increasingly marrying educated women; for example, the lawyer who married his secretary is now a lawyer who marries another lawyer. And some of this change is due to poorly-educated men becoming ineligible as spouses; drop-outs can no longer support families on brawn alone.

Then there is residential separation: A study by Thurston Domina (pdf) shows that college graduates are concentrating in some metropolitan areas (San Francisco and Raleigh-Durham, for example) and seem to be avoiding others (Indianapolis and Las Vegas, for example) and also that neighborhood segregation by college education grew substantially between 1970 and 2000. It grew faster than segregation by income, even as segregation by race declined. Another study documents how the highly-educated are concentrating in the downtowns of the most booming cities. And a recent story reported that these degree-holders are starting to raise their children in center cities — even in Manhattan. Thus, enclaves of the highly-educated are growing in chic, gentrified, non-smoking neighborhoods, while the less educated move to the scraggly, sprawling suburbs of stagnating cities.

What is less clear, although certainly plausible, is that this widening separation carries along with its economic and social divisions, a widening gap in values and ways of life: two different Americas, divided educational attainment.

I would find the use of just desserts as a justification for policy more palatable if we weren't seeing an alarming decline in social mobility.

Krugman does stat 101

Nothing fancy, no big insights, just a couple of bell curves, but this post by Paul Krugman does a nice job presenting weather trends and extreme events in terms of probability. He makes it simple but not overly simplified. We need more of this.

Krugman also deserves bonus points for describing economist's practice of putting the independent variable on the wrong axis as a QWERTY problem.

Semi-serfdom

What are going to do with Paul Krugman? He writes clear and insightful articles on complex economic issues, then he gives them titles like "Serf's Up" (circa 2003):

Here's the puzzle. In Europe circa 1100, with population scarce, serfdom was useful to the ruling class. By 1300 it wasn't, and had been allowed to drift away. But after 1348 it should have been worthwhile again. Yet it wasn't effectively reimposed. There were attempts to restrain wages and limit labor mobility, as well as attempts to tax the peasants (Wat Tyler's rebellion fits into all this.) But all-out feudalism didn't return. Why?

And an even bigger question: why hasn't indentured servitude made a comeback in the modern era? Yes, I know, human rights and all that - but if it was profitable to have indentured servants in the modern world, I'm sure that Richard Scaife's think tanks would have no trouble finding justifications, and assorted Christian groups would explain why it's God's will.

Though the analogy's not perfect, we do have an institution that restrains wages and limits labor mobility. It's called an H-1B visa and though I know of no Christian groups trying to explain why it's God's will, it certainly has plenty of think tanks finding justifications for it.

It has reached the point where not only do sitcoms portray Ponzi schemes...

They also use the term without explanation in their blurbs.

There might just be a lesson here somewhere.

Felix Salmon has an insightful and amusingly written take on AOL's acquisition of Huffington Post:

As for HuffPo, it gets lots of money, great tech content from Engadget and TechCrunch, hugely valuable video-production abilities, a local infrastructure in Patch, lots of money, a public stock-market listing with which to make fill-in acquisitions and incentivize employees with options, a massive leg up in terms of reaching the older and more conservative Web 1.0 audience and did I mention the lots of money?

I used to work for Earthlink. It was a great company, customer-centered, innovative, but it was trapped between AOL and Microsoft's Online, two companies with immeasurably deep pockets and no apparent concern about turning a profit.

AOL in particular was a mystery to us. It went from one bad business plan to another, all while maintaining spectacularly bad customer service. None of it mattered in the face of hundreds of millions of promotional disks.*







* According to former Chief Marketing Officer at AOL, Jan Brandt, "At one point, 50% of the CD's produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it."

Well-mannered spam

A few days ago I noticed a brief comment to one of my posts. It was from someone named Lily and all it said was "Thanks." I spent a minute wondering if the comment was meant to be sincere or sarcastic but, other than that, I didn't give it much thought.

Then yesterday Lily was back with another comment, or, more accurately, the same comment, this time on another post. There was no obvious common thread to the two posts, no apparent reason that anyone would single them out. All of this made me, in equal parts, suspicious and curious, so I clicked on the profile where I found a picture of a very attractive young Asian woman and a long list of blogs that, according to Google translate, offer a wide range of questionable services.

Profile-based spam is a new one on me and I wonder how the filters are going to handle it. On the bright side, though, at least it's polite.

More on poverty and education

From Aleks Jakulin:

"I do know that I get anxious whenever a correlation analysis tries to look like a causal analysis. A frequent scenario introduces an outcome (test performance) with a highly correlated predictor (say poverty), and suggests that reducing poverty will improve the outcome. The problem is that poverty is correlated with a number of other predictors."

I think that the dense correlation is precisely the point that makes inference challenging here. I like to point out California as being a good example of a puzzling outlier in the original study. There is no a priori reason to expect that California would do as poorly as it does relative to other states. But different groups have different explanations.

One hypothesis is that "teacher tenure" leaves weak performers in the classroom for decades. This seems to be the position of people like Michelle Rhee.

Another hypothesis is low educational spending in the state. According to wikipedia, "In teaching staff expenditure per pupil, California ranked 49th of 51".

A third hypothesis is the composition of people in California just leads to lower educational performance (due to innate differences with, for example, the population of New York state).

I kind of suspect the second hypothesis as most likely, but, given how inter-related things are it is unclear how you would do inference here. And some forms of the first hypothesis would lead to policies that could make things worse if the second were true. The third would suggest no policy is likely to make an important difference.

Coming up with clever ways to distinguish between these hypotheses is not trivial.

Speaking of epicycles...

James Kwak has a beautiful stone-by-stone dismantling of this paper by Bryan Caplan and Scott Beaulier.

The paper argues that welfare programs expand the set of choices available to people; while that is all good according to traditional economics, if we think that people are inclined to make bad choices (“behavioral economics”), then welfare programs give people more opportunity to make bad choices and hurt themselves. This is particularly a problem because, they claim, “there are good empirical reasons to think that behavioral economics better describes the poor than it does the rest of the population” (p. 4). In other words, if poor people are more irrational, then giving them more choices will hurt them more than other people.

Kwak takes it all apart, from the odd and strangely uninformed take on behavioral economics to the lack of supporting data to the ready supply of superior alternative hypotheses to the generally poor quality of the authors' reasoning. If this zombie claws its way out of the grave after Kwak is through with it then there's just no killing the damned thing.

One thing that is obvious from this paper is that Caplan and Beaulier have reached the epicycle stage.* They are no longer focused on finding the best model to fit the data; instead they are trying to salvage an intellectual framework that is based on elegant principles and appealing ideas like just desserts and efficient markets.

The shift from serving the data to serving the theory is easy to make and difficult to catch. Every new theory occasionally runs into a phenomena it has trouble explaining. Explaining them can be a good thing. The process of taking a theory into the counter-intuitive is an important, even necessary step in its evolution.

There is, however, one condition: the explanation you finally come up has got to be as good or better than any of the alternative hypotheses. Otherwise, the theory isn't evolving; it's decaying.



* The Wikipedia article on the subject suggests I'm being unfair to Ptolemy. I hope not -- I'd hate to have to come up with a new analogy.

Damn you, Paul Krugman!

I'd been planning a post drawing an analogy between the way certain academics forced the data to fit their models and the efforts made in the dying days of the Ptolemaic system. I guess the bloom is off that one.

Nobel Prize winners who work on Saturday are just showing off.

You can, if you’re desperate, try to explain this away by saying that there was some fundamental structural change in the early 1970s, but at that point you’re deep into epicycle territory. And there’s more — for example, Ireland went abruptly from having a stable real exchange rate against the UK to having a stable rate against Germany when it joined the European exchange rate mechanism, etc..

[Emphasis added.]

Employment in the US

Speaking of interesting graphs, the one posted by Matt Yglesias is rather interesting. January 2010 to January 2011 seems to have resulted in the creation of approximately 1 million private sector jobs coupled with the loss of 250 thousand public sector jobs. We can discuss whether this was an appropriate response to the budget realities of 2010 (it's an open question) but it is pretty clear that we are not trying any sort of classic Keynesian response to our current economic woes.

Education and Poverty

One of the most difficult things in looking at education is that it is very hard to establish causal directions. Are bad teachers creating poor educational outcomes or are places with poor educational outcomes so difficult to teach in that the good teachers leave. It's an important question when you consider possible interventions.

This was very clear in these posts by Andrew Gelman and Jonathan Livengood on education and poverty. There is an impressive inverse association between poverty and educational test scores. It's pretty clear that there could be a common cause (i.e. a confounder) or that the direction of the causal association could go in either direction.

However, the policy decisions are very different depending on the causal relations involved. If poor schooling is a cause of poverty then it makes sense to focus massive efforts on educational reform. But if poor educational outcomes are caused by poverty then this suggests a completely different approach. And, of course, finding a confounder is also a key point.

Now, this assumes that all parties are acting in good faith. If there was an interest in keeping outcomes poor in MS and CA (to pick two low performing states) then educational reforms that worsened outcomes might make sense. This would be a good strategy if one wanted to continue to use "poor educational outcomes" as a talking point as reforms take decades to really take effect.

Finally, one has to worry that real issues (poor educational outcomes) might be used to implement ideological views (i.e. a dislike of unions) when such reforms might be orthogonal to the issues at hand. This wastes the effort of reform without addressing the underlying issues.

Now, none of this is to accuse any group of bad faith. But it is important to realize that there are multiple viable hypotheses as to the causes of poor educational outcomes. The state that I am the most interested in is California; they seem to have very poor outcomes for a large state with a diverse (and often knowledge-based) economy. If that is a reflection of resources expended then maybe we need to focus on counter-intuitive approaches (like raising taxes to improve educational funding) if we really want to make a difference.