"Teaching. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Excellent post from proflikesubstance:

Like many in my position, I have about as much formal teaching training as I do formal gardening or cooking training. That's not to say that I can't cook a mean meal from stuff I've grown myself, but I've learned through seeing what works for others and trial and error. Teaching is no different, but I've been doing it formally (as in, full control over an entire course) for a shorter period of time. And whereas I see teaching as important, there also remains the fact that it can't be a priority for me at this stage of my career.

That said, for a variety of reasons (most notably, Broader Impacts, yo) I have gotten involved in a program aimed at producing teaching modules for grade 6-12 science classes. For each module there is a team of one person who teaches at a university and one person who teaches at either the middle or high school level. Nearly everyone involved has a formal background in education and is well-versed in the jargon that goes along with that training. In addition, the 6-12 teachers have an array of state requirements and testing that they have to conform with, creating a new layer of complexity.

The meetings we have as a group often make me feel a bit like I do when traveling in a country where I have a semi-decent grasp on the language - I know enough to follow the conversation and can clumsily contribute, but spend much of the time just trying to keep up. It's a fascinating experience for me seeing the approach to teaching that is taken at the 6-12 level and there's no shortage of elements that I could see employing in my own teaching. For that reason, I really think that I'm going to be taking as much or more out of this experience than I will be contributing, which is not necessarily what I thought when I agreed to join in.

I started out as a high school teacher, then went to grad school (in part to escape the worst principal I've ever run across), then did a four year stint as an instructor at a large university (making around 18K -- and yes, that's full time), then went back to high school teaching (and a 10K raise) then took advantage of the late Nineties economic boom and jumped to industry.

My experiences at the university (lecturing to 150 students at a time, covering more advanced material, helping to supervise TAs) definitely made me a better high school teacher but I'd still have to say that teaching high school is better preparation for teaching college than teaching college is for teaching high school. In high school, you have to deal with students of widely varying abilities, most of whom have short attention spans and many of whom don't want to be in school at all.

This experience would be valuable to any teacher (even on a graduate level), as would the teacher training classes I took. There was, of course, an element of bullshit to some of those courses (though apparently not that different from what you get in Teach for America and far less pungent than much of what you encounter in the corporate world), but there were also a number of useful ideas, techniques and resources.

As Andrew Gelman observed, most people who teach college courses have never been formally introduced to any of these concepts. With luck they pick them up from other teachers or figure it out on their own.

You could make a case requiring some kind of teacher training for professors and TAs. Instead many in the reform movement seem determined to move in the other direction, dismissing the value of professional training for teachers and instead promoting a model of mass firings and high turnover in the search of 'natural teachers.'

You can probably guess what side of that debate I'm on.

A kindness by omission

I was doing some preliminary research for a post on the business of movies prompted by this piece (which I found via Salmon) and I noticed something interesting about Mike Myers' IMDB page (hint: look at 2008). I can think of an innocent explanation for the anomaly, but I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that some hacker out there is a Myers fan.

Actor (38 titles)

2012 Untitled Keith Moon Project (in production)
Keith Moon

1989-2011 Saturday Night Live (TV series)
Various / Wayne Campbell / Dieter / …

– Dana Carvey/Linkin Park (2011) … Wayne Campbell / Himself

– John Goodman/Jewel (1997) … Ron Wood

– David Hyde Pierce/Live (1995) … Various

– Jeff Daniels/Luscious Jackson (1995) … Various

– George Foreman/Hole (1994) … Various

See all 124 episodes »

2010 Scared Shrekless (TV short)
Shrek (voice)

2010 Shrek Forever After
Shrek (voice)

2010 Donkey's Caroling Christmas-tacular (short)
Shrek

2009 Inglourious Basterds
General Ed Fenech

2007 Shrek the Halls (TV short)
Shrek (voice)

2007 Shrek the Third
Shrek (voice)

2006 Shrek: Smash n' Crash Racing (Video Game)
Shrek (voice)

2006 Night of Too Many Stars: An Overbooked Event for Autism Education (TV movie)
Donald Q. Cashington

2004 Britney Spears: Greatest Hits - My Prerogative (video)
Austin Powers (segment "Boys")

2004 Far Far Away Idol (video short)
Shrek (voice)

2004 Shrek 2
Shrek (voice)

2003 The Cat in the Hat
The Cat

2003 Nobody Knows Anything!
'Eye' Witness

2003 Shrek 4-D (short)
Shrek (voice)

2003 View from the Top
John Witney

2002 Austin Powers in Goldmember
Austin Powers / Dr. Evil / Goldmember / …

2001 Shrek
Shrek (voice)

2001 Shrek in the Swamp Karaoke Dance Party (video short)
Shrek (voice) (singing voice) / Blind Mouse (voice) (singing voice)

2000 The Thin Pink Line
Tim Broderick

1999 Mystery, Alaska
Donnie Shulzhoffer

1999 Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Austin Powers / Dr. Evil / Fat Bastard

1998 Pete's Meteor
Pete

1998 54
Steve Rubell

1997 Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Austin Powers / Dr. Evil

1997 Austin Powers' Electric Pussycat Swingers Club (TV movie)
Austin Powers

1993 Wayne's World 2
Wayne Campbell

1993 So I Married an Axe Murderer
Charlie Mackenzie / Stuart Mackenzie

1992 Wayne's World
Wayne Campbell

1989 Elvis Stories (short)
Cockney Man

1987 It's Only Rock and Roll (TV series)
Wayne Campbell

1987 Meet Julie (TV movie) (voice / as Mike Meyers)

1985 John and Yoko: A Love Story (TV movie)
Delivery Boy (uncredited)

1980 Bizarre (TV series)
John Byner's nephew/Timmy Byner/Various Characters

1979 The Littlest Hobo (TV series)
Tommy

– Boy on Wheels (1979) … Tommy

1977 Range Ryder and the Calgary Kid (TV series)

1975 King of Kensington (TV series)
Ari

– Scout's Honour (1975) … Ari (as Michael Meyers)

Professor DeLong's history lesson for the day

And a damned useful one:

Thank you. I remember, back when I was working for the Treasury, after one White House meeting Joseph Stiglitz—then one of the members of the President's Council of Economic Advisors—turned to me and said:

Brad, not every question is best answered with a 10 minute economic history lecture.

But most are.

So let us start in the 1860s with the industrialization of America and the rise of the large scale business enterprise. There is then a law of bankruptcy: when a company does not pay you, and when you cannot work out terms, you go to a judge. The judge bangs his gave. The sheriff then auctions off the company's assets on the sidewalk and the company shuts down.

By the 1890s the judges in New York are saying: "Wait a minute! This makes no sense. Even though it is bankrupt, the New York Central Railroad is much more valuable as a going concern than if we simply pulled the individual rail segments off the roadbed and sold them off as ornamental ironwork. Moreover, there are lots of other stakeholders who rely on the operations of the New York Central--and even though they are not parties, there is a public interest in not having them suffer economic harm." So the judges change the law: they decide that when a large business enterprise goes bankrupt, we the judges will freeze its finances but let its operations continue while people negotiate and design and we approve a plan to restructure its debt and equity so that it can continue to operate. After judges took the lead legislators followed, and so we developed our current law of bankruptcy: when a company declares bankruptcy; we minimize the economic disruption by freezing and then sorting out its finances but letting its operations continue.

This system works pretty well in dealing with the bankruptcies of operating companies. Finances are frozen, debtor-in-possession financing is arranged, operations continue, the lawyers maneuver, and eventually a new financial superstructure is negotiated and plopped down on top of the operating company.

The problem is financial companies. They have no operations. They are all finance. When you freeze the finances the thing dies instantly.

Come the 1930s we face the waves of bank bankruptcies which make the Depression Great. The unemployment rate spikes to a peak non-farm level of 28%. We get the New Deal. The New Deal establishes the FDIC—which exists, among other things, to handle bank failures. When a bank fails the FDIC will go in, pay off its insured deposits, take over its assets and other liabilities, hopefully find a solvent and sound bank to take over the good-bank parts, and eat the remaining losses. This serves as an financial-sector analogue of Chapter 11. The hope was that with the FDIC we will never get into another situation like 1931 in which applying bankruptcy law to failing financial institutions produces general economic disaster.

Apparently, the lot of some economists is to be painfully condescending

Particularly freshwater economists who seem determined to make a leitmotif out of boastful complaints about the burdens of being smarter and more logical than the rest of us. Here's Will Wilkinson with a recent example:

The most curious thing about Mr Krugman's quasi-religious squeamishness about the "commercial transaction" is that it is normally the economist's lot to explain to the superstitious public the humanitarian benefits of bringing human life ever more within the cash nexus.

Wilkinson's entire post is (unintentionally) interesting and you should definitely take a look at it (though you should also take a look at the rebuttals here and here), but for a distillation of the freshwater mindset, you really can't beat the line about 'the economist's lot.' (I suspect Wilkinson may have been going for humorous wording here but I doubt very much he was joking.)

For a less pithy though perhaps more instructive example, consider these comments Steve Levitt made on Marketplace:

One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society is to test them with repugnant ideas. Because economists, either by birth or by training, have their mind open, or skewed in just such a way that instead of thinking about whether something is right or wrong, they think about it in terms of whether it's efficient, whether it makes sense. And many of the things that are most repugnant are the things which are indeed quite efficient, but for other reasons -- subtle reasons, sometimes, reasons that are hard for people to understand -- are completely and utterly unacceptable.

As I said at the time:

There are few thoughts more comforting than the idea that the people who disagree with you are overly emotional and are not thinking things through. We've all told ourselves something along these lines from time to time.

But can economists really make special claim to "whether [ideas] makes sense"? Particularly a Chicago School economist who has shown a strong inclination toward the kind of idealized models that have great aesthetic appeal but mixed track records? (This is the same intellectual movement that gave us rational addiction.)

When I disagree with Dr. Levitt, it's for one of the following reasons:

I question his analyses;

I question his assumptions;

I question the validity of his models.

Steve Levitt is a smart guy who has interesting ideas, but a number of intelligent, clear-headed individuals often disagree with him. Some of them are even economists.

Another quick one on broadcast TV

At the risk of flogging a long dead horse, this passage from a Yahoo Finance post struck nerve:

Living in Oregon, we have a lot of rainy days, and without the television for the kids to watch on occasion, it could get ugly. I must admit, I am also a primetime junkie, and that is my relaxation time, as well as the time when we all get to sit down and enjoy family time together. So despite how much this service costs, it is one that will always be a part of our budget.

As I've mentioned before (a few times), not only is it still possible to watch TV for free, the technology has improved tremendously. The signal is digital and stations can carry multiple channels. I get over a hundred here in LA. In other words, my rabbit ears give me something about one or two steps up from basic cable.

For free.

Of course, a smaller urban center like, say, Portland, Oregon, will have fewer channels but as you can see here, the selection is still pretty good, particularly when compared to the thread-bare line-up from "Comcast Portland Regional - Standard" which not only offers fewer total channels, but also includes just two satellite stations, Discovery and WGN.

Unless you're a Cubs fan or you really like cable access, you'll probably get better programs through an antenna (for example, right now Portland broadcast TV is showing a Sundance winner that's not available on basic cable). You'll also have less image compression, you won't have to deal with the cable company and, just in case this point isn't plain enough, it's FREE!

I'm sure the author wasn't trying to give bad advice here. I'm certain she just didn't know about the other options, but of course that's the problem.

Between cable TV and the internet, consumers are feed an unprecedented stream of advice, but most of it is really bad, an ugly mix of lazy writing, inadequate-to-non-existent research and, worst of all, dependence on the very companies that provide the products and services being purchased.

One consequence of this is that consumers hear almost nothing about options that don't have the backing of a major industry. Another is that narratives are shaped to suit business interests. Check out almost any CNBC clip from say 2007 for excruciating examples.

One of Krugman's talents

...is the ability to dig up or create a simple picture that effectively rebuts a popular but flawed narrative.

For example, take the profligate PIGS story -- the EU is in trouble mainly because four countries (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) were reckless spendthrifts. It's a widespread explanation. Edward Glaeser even used a Spain specific variant of it to argue against high-speed rail.

In response to this, Krugman shows us the debt levels and deficits of these four countries (plus Germany as a reference point) on the eve of crisis:




As Krugman summarizes:

Yes, Greece had big debts and deficit. Portugal had a significant deficit, but debt no higher than Germany. And Ireland and Spain, which were actually in surplus just before the crisis, appeared to be paragons of fiscal responsibility — the former, said George Osborne, was

a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.

We know now that the apparent fiscal health of Ireland and Spain rested largely on housing bubbles — but that was by no means the official view at the time. And nothing I’ve seen explains how new fiscal rules would prevent a similar crisis from happening again.

The human spirograph

Perhaps the perfect topic for a weekend post. (thanks to John D. Cook for this one)

Weekend Gaming -- perfecting the imperfect

[disclaimer -- I've only field tested the first of these, so I can't guarantee that all of the variations will play smoothly. On the bright side, there ought to be plenty of room for improvement. As with all discussions of game variants, you should probably assume that countless people have already come up with any idea presented here.]

When the subject of perfect information games comes up, you probably think of chess, checkers, go, possibly Othello/Reversi and, if you're really into board games, something obscure like Agon. When you think of games of imperfect information, the first things that come to mind are probably probably card games like poker or a board game with dice-determined moves like backgammon and, if you're of a nostalgic bent, dominoes.

We can always make a perfect game imperfect by adding a random element or some other form of hidden information. In the chess variant Kriegspiel, you don't know where your opponent's pieces are until you bump into them. The game was originally played with three boards and a referee but the advent of personal computing has greatly simplified the process.

For a less elaborate version of imperfect chess, try adding a die-roll condition to certain moves. For example, if you attempt to capture and roll a four or better, the capture is allowed, if you roll a two or a three, you return the pieces to were they were before the capture (in essence losing a turn) and if you roll a one, you lose the attacking piece. Even a fairly simple variant such as this can raise interesting strategic questions.

But what about going the other way? Can we modify the rules of familiar games of chance so that they become games of perfect information? As far as I can tell the answer is yes, usually by making them games of resource allocation.

I first tried playing around with perfecting games because I'd started playing dominoes with a bluesman friend of mine (which is a bit like playing cards with a man named Doc). In an attempt to level the odds, I suggested playing the game with all the dominoes face up. We would take turns picking the dominoes we wanted until all were selected then would play the game using the regular rules. (We didn't bother with scoring -- whoever went out first won -- but if you want a more traditional system of scoring, you'd probably want to base it on the number of dominoes left in the loser's hand)

I learned two things from this experiment: first, a bluesman can beat you at dominoes no matter how you jigger the rules; and second, dominoes with perfect information plays a great deal like the standard version.

Sadly dominoes is not played as widely as it once was but you can try something similar with dice games like backgammon. Here's one version.

Print the following repeatedly on a sheet of paper:

Each player gets as many sheets as needed. When it's your turn you choose a number, cross it out of the inverted pyramid then move your piece that many spaces. Once you've crossed out a number you can't use it again until you've crossed out all of the other numbers in the pyramid. Obviously this means you'll want to avoid situations like having a large number of pieces two or three spaces from home.

If and when you cross off all of the numbers in one pyramid you start on the next. There's no limit to the number of pyramids you can go through. Other than that the rules are basically the same as those of regular backgammon except for a couple of modifications:

You can't land on the penultimate triangle (you'd need a one to get home and there are no ones in this variant);

If all your possible moves are blocked, you get to cross off two numbers instead of one (this discourages overly defensive play).

I haven't had a chance to field test this one, but it should be playable and serve as at least a starting point (let me know if you come up with something better). The same inverted pyramid sheet should be suitable for other dice based board games like parcheesi and maybe even Monopoly (though I'd have to give that one some thought).

I had meant to close with a perfected variant of poker but working out the rules is taking a bit longer than I expected. Maybe next week.

In the meantime, any ideas, improvement, additions?

A physicist in econ-land

Noah Smith has some fascinating things to about making the transition to economics as a grad student (via Thoma, of course):

At the time I took the course, I didn't yet know enough to have any of these objections. But coming as I did from a physics background, I found several things that annoyed me about the course (besides the fact that I got a B). One was that, in spite of all the mathematical precision of these theories, very few of them offered any way to calculate any economic quantity. In physics, theories are tools for turning quantitative observations into quantitative predictions. In macroeconomics, there was plenty of math, but it seemed to be used primarily as a descriptive tool for explicating ideas about how the world might work. At the end of the course, I realized that if someone asked me to tell them what unemployment would be next month, I would have no idea how to answer them.

As Richard Feynman once said about a theory he didn't like: "I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation - a fix-up to say, 'Well, it might be true.'"

That was the second problem I had with the course: it didn't discuss how we knew if these theories were right or wrong. We did learn Bob Hall's test of the PIH. That was good. But when it came to all the other theories, empirics were only briefly mentioned, if at all, and never explained in detail. When we learned RBC, we were told that the measure of its success in explaining the data was - get this - that if you tweaked the parameters just right, you could get the theory to produce economic fluctuations of about the same size as the ones we see in real life. When I heard this, I thought "You have got to be kidding me!" Actually, what I thought was a bit more...um...colorful.

Update: Krugman chimes in with some relevant comments here.

"Premature Ecalculation"

Over the past quarter century or so, journalists, particularly television journalists, have gotten very good at finding excuses for covering sensationalistic non-news stories. Thirty or forty years ago Donald Trump's campaign would have merited about as much coverage as Pat Paulsen's. Now the reporters (eyes bleary with crocodile tears) insist that they don't want to provide a national platform for someone who is probably just in it for the publicity to make provably false claims with racist overtones. It's true that freak shows like Trump bring in the ratings and the consequently the ad revenue, but reporters like Meredith Vieira assure us that they're only giving this airtime because the polls show that he's a 'serious candidate.'

As is usually the case with journalistic hypocrisy, the best rebuttal comes from the Daily Show.

Inessential Yglesias -- understanding the elasticity of oil demand

I'm afraid I'm going to have to differ with Joseph on this one. This piece from Matthew Yglesias manages to leave out most of the good stuff from this excellent post by Adam Ozimek.

For example:

However there are important caveats to these estimates that suggest the real current elasticity is higher. First, the evidence has indicated that the response of demand to price changes is asymmetric: price increases cause a larger response to demand than price decreases. This is because price increases are more likely to cause shifts to newer, more energy efficient technologies than price decreases are to undo such shifts. Any estimate of the average price elasicity then will be a downward biased estimate for the likely response to a price increase.

A recent paper by Davis and Killian The Journal of Applied Economics covers some other econometric issues in the literature. For instance, we know price and quantity demanded are jointly determined, which means that there will be a correlation between the price variable and the errors such that single equation or panel data methods, like those used in the reported IMF estimates, will bias estimates towards zero. Some studies attempt to use exogeneous oil shocks as instrumental variables. This approach is used in the appendix to the IMF study. But this requires the assumption that consumers will respond the same to these shocks as to normal real price appreciation. If consumers expect shocks to be more temporary than a demand led increase in price, this is a questionable assumption.

To understand why this is such an important point, we need to step back and discuss why we choose certain analytic approaches in certain situations, specifically why we shouldn't think about elasticity of demand for gasoline the same way we think about it for fruit juice.

[brief warning: I'm a statistician, not an economist, so the terminology here might not be what you'd hear in INTRO TO ECON, but I suspect the underlying concepts will be basically the same.]

Let's discuss demand in terms of decisions. If I go into the grocery store thinking I'd like some orange juice I almost certainly have some threshold price X in mind. If a carton of juice costs more than X, I won't buy orange juice that day.

Assuming I don't have some sort of weird Minute Maid fixation, doing without juice is probably not a big deal. My consumption is determined by a single simple (rather than complex) decision.

[brief warning II: I'm assuming, for the sake of simplicity, that all the grocery stores and gas stations available to me charge roughly the same prices for comparable items.]

By comparison, my consumption of gasoline is determined by a complex set of decisions spread out over a long time and based on anticipated gas prices. Of these decisions, the impact of the one that's analogous to the OJ decision (go to the store and check the price) is trivial next to choosing where do I live, where do I work and what kind of vehicle do I drive.

Even if there is a there happens to be a hurricane or a revolution at the exact time I'm making one of those decisions and gas is at five dollars a gallon, I probably won't bother factoring that in. Trying to estimate the impact of temporary and unpredictable events is a game best left to the specialists.

But let's say that the five dollar price is the result of a recent buck and a half increase in the gas tax and I only see it going north from here. Now five dollars a gallon is starting to look like a floor instead of a ceiling and I am much more more likely to look at MPG and commuting distance when I make my decisions.

Or, in other words, pretty much what Ozimek said.

Essential Yglesias

Matt Yglesias on taxing oil and gas:

One is that while low elasticity implies that a tax is unlikely to be very effective at reducing demand, by the exact same token a low elasticity implies that taxing whatever it is you’re proposing to tax will be a very efficient way of raising revenue. So if you’re the kind of person who believes the government should raise revenue, then there’s really no possible result in the elasticity literature that should make you hesitate to tax gasoline and/or oil.

The other thing is that these elasticity estimates generally imply that the relationship between price and demand is going to be linear, which is almost certainly false. Which is to say that the estimate is only reliable when you’re considering a relatively small policy shift. Nothing wrong with that, there’s just no way to get an empirical estimate about some crazy shift outside the realm of ordinary experience. But it is a real limitation to what this kind of work can tell us.

The second point, that relationships like these are unlikely to be linear is a theme that Mark has been trying to communicate for years and it is nice to see the idea beginning to get traction.

But the first point is a really good one. I like government (not unlimited government, but unlimited ice cream is bad for me too) and I recognize that we need to raise revenue somehow. If the tax on fuel consumption is a way to raise revenue that is a major benefit.

Now it is true that this could adversely impact the transportation options of the less well off. But there are a number of options including means tested fuel tax credits and improved public transportation infrastructure that could be tried. But I think the bottom line is that this tax is like alcohol and cigarette taxes -- we want to discourage an activity and raise revenue for basic services at the same time; while it isn't optimal tax policy (which might address issues like the capital gains tax) it is a major improvement.

Around a quarter of a million reasons to want to keep your job

I started my teaching career in Arkansas, a state known at the time for many ludicrously small school districts. This caused an exceptionally high administrator to teacher ratio. Supporting all these administrators consequently put an additional strain on an already underfunded system.

I had always thought of this as a Southern problem, but this excellent piece by Dana Goldstein has me questioning that assumption:

One of Governor Andrew Cuomo's contentious budget cutting ideas is to consolidate very small school districts. I'm generally a tax-and-spend liberal, but this is a good idea, especially in relatively densely-populated parts of the state. I was reminded why today by the New York Times, which reported on a controversy engulfing the tiny Westchester village of Katonah, NY, not far from where I grew up. Katonah's school board would like to hire a superintendent named Paul Kreutzer, who happens to be the only superintendent in Wisconsin to have publicly supported Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to ban teacher collective bargaining.

Unsurprisingly, hundreds of Katonah teachers, parents, and students are loudly protesting Kreutzer's appointment.

But what really caught my eye was that if he does get the job, the 39-year old Kreutzer is set to earn $245,000 annually to oversee a district of just six schools and 3,800 students. Ninety-three percent of these kids are white, and just 1 percent are non-native English speakers. Approximately 0 percent of Katonah public school children participate in the federal free-and-reduced-price lunch program.

This reminds me of an anecdote I've mentioned here before.

When I first decided to go into teaching I asked a retired superintendent I knew for advice. The first thing he told me was, "Never trust a superintendent; they'll lie to your face." I think he was being just a bit harsh but I understand his position. Administrators live in an intensely political world where the right move can double their incomes and the wrong one can get them demoted or fired. It tends to test character.

Just to be clear, like teachers, most administrators (particularly most principals) are dedicated educators who genuinely care about their students, but they are also, by necessity, expert game-players who know how to work a system. This is simply part of the skill set. An administrator who's bad at politics will probably be a bad administrator.

But if we can't blame administrators for being good at politics, we can certainly blame many education reporters for being bad at journalism. To the extent that this is a story of labor and management, most journalists have unquestioningly swallowed the line of certain managers* that the blame for any problems in the system rested entirely with labor. Every standard of good journalism should have told them to look at both sides of the issue. Every reporter's instinct should have told them to take with a block of salt potentially self-serving claims of a group of media savvy, politically adept people who are trying to protect high but vulnerable salaries and, in some cases, impressive potential careers in politics and the private sector.

* And to be ABSOLUTELY clear, let me make this point explicitly: I am not talking about most administrators. The majority of superintendents and the vast majority of principals are hard-working and intensely focused professionals whose first priority is the interests of their kids. Just like the vast majority of teachers.

Preblog -- Businessmen seldom believe in efficient markets and rational actors

I've got to head off for lunch in a minute, but I wanted to at least throw this out now and address it in more detail later (hence the term 'preblog'). The impetus was this post* which seemed to assume that the market-based approach was more likely to provide real vs. perceived benefits (my wording, not his).

Back in my marketing days when I was building consumer response models and working with the BAs, we would talk about maximizing the perceived to real value ratio -- find a cheap product that looked expensive. Like many, if not most, of our strategies and business plans, this idea was based on assumptions that violated some of the axioms of freshwater economics.

Efficiency and rationality are useful for businesses for lobbying and PR purposes but most people in the private sector don't believe in them. They think can beat the system. That's why they're there.


* nicely rebutted here and here.

Two quotes

No particular connection here, just a couple of passages that seemed worth passing on.

On top of that, Wall Street does have a habit of boiling everything down to a right/wrong duality: if you say that a stock will go down, you’re right if it does, and wrong if it doesn’t. The intelligence of your analysis, or the idea that all these things are probabilistic rather than certain, rarely even gets lip service. This is why you see so much technical analysis on Wall Street: it makes no intellectual sense at all, but it works just as well as — or even better than — fundamentals-based analysis. (Which, admittedly, isn’t saying very much.) And that’s all that matters.

Felix Salmon

All in all I’d rather have been a judge than a miner. And what is more, being a miner, as soon as you are too old and tired and sick and stupid to do the job properly, you have to go. Well, the very opposite applies with the judges.

Peter Cook via Krugman