Things that tempt you to write posts you don't have time for

Ludwig von Mises:

The age in which the radical anticapitalistic movement acquired seemingly irresistible power brought about a new literary genre, the detective story. The same generation of Englishmen whose votes swept the Labour Party into office were enraptured by such authors as Edgar Wallace. One of the outstanding British socialist authors, G. D. H. Cole, is no less remarkable as an author of detective stories.

The Passing Tramp admirably handles the rebuttal, complete with a reference to that sterling Tory, Lord Wimsey.

Another solution

Paul Krugman has a good point:

Still, isn’t it bizarre that governors who protest bitterly about the cost of Obamacare, and in general about wasting taxpayers’ money, are willing to throw away lots of money via corporate welfare? Actually, no; it’s only puzzling if you think they believe anything they say.

The context is the decision to allow Arkansas to expand the Affordable Care Act exchanges instead of Medicaid.  Aaron Carroll:

Many claimed that the ACA cost too much. They said it would raise the deficit. They opposed the expansion not only because it raised the federal price tag, but also because it was “fiscally unsustainable” for states in the long run. I took them at their word.

I’m now surprised that they prefer a solution that costs more.

Maybe what we really need to do is randomize?  After all, the secondary benefits of high health care spending are definitely unclear.  The United States isn't exceptional relative to Canada or France in terms of medical outcomes.  The benefits to medical innovation could be attempted via a stronger NIH with a broader mandate.  So the only real question is whether private insurance can result in innovations that reduce overall costs and/or improve outcomes.

Surely randomization of states could provide some really useful information and solve this question more directly?  After all, don't we think of it as the gold standard for a causal inference?  And it would be easy to randomize states to several possible versions of the ACA (no expansion, exchanges, Medicaid expansion, public option to allow the uninsured to purchase Medicaid). 

Is there a good reason not to do this?

P.S. Here is a good example of randomization giving us information in an area that is equally difficult for inference.

Extremes in student feedback

After I'd been teaching at a school in Watts for a while, I learned that my predecessor had once been overpowered and left tied to his chair by an angry class. This struck me as notable because

A. Despite its location, this was not a rough school

B. My predecessor had been tied to a chair.

When I pressed other faculty members for more details, they explained (rather nonchalantly for my taste), "he was a really bad teacher."

Obviously, most jobs are easier and more pleasant if you're good at them, but this is particularly true in education. Teachers face constant, immediate and often intense feedback from students, something that is greatly intensified when you go to disadvantaged schools in the inner-city or poor rural areas like the Mississippi Delta (where I also taught).

Students get angry at bad instruction and they take advantage of bad classroom management. When you add the amplification that comes with the complex social dynamics of kids and adolescents, teaching can be a truly miserable job if you can't get the hang of doing it right.

This is a large part of the reason why so many new teachers leave the profession. Even after having invested years of study and tens of thousands of dollars, they walk away with a degree that's good for little else because, for them, the job actually is that terrible. By contrast, for those who are good at it, who can explain ideas clearly and establish a rapport with kids and keep a class focused and on task, teaching can be a most enjoyable and satisfying job.

You don't have to be a statistician to see the potential selection effect here. It should certainly be addressed when discussing the impact of bad teachers or proposing incentive pay/dismissal plans for improving education.

It should be addressed but it usually isn't.

Like judging an archery contest after they took down the target...

This is a really small part part of a bigger story (and probably the subject of more posts) but having been on both sides of video evaluations I had a personal problem with this statement from Thomas Kane (which comes to us via Andrew Gelman),

While the mean score was higher on the days that the teachers chose to submit, once you corrected for measurement error, a teacher’s score on their chosen videos and on their unchosen videos were correlated at 1.

Just to be clear, I don't have any problem with this kind of evaluation and I really like Kane's point about using 360s for teachers, but the claim of perfect correlation has raised a red flag for almost every statistically literate person who saw it. You can see an excellent discussion of this at Gelman's site, both in the original post and in the comments. All the points made there are valid but based on my experience I have one more stick for the fire.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the extraordinary idea that rank is preserved, that the nth teacher on his or her best day is still worse than the (n+1)th teacher on his or her worst day, is true. For anything more than a trivially small n that would suggest an amazing lack of variability in the quality of lessons from teachers across the spectrum (particularly strange since we would expect weaker and less experienced teachers to be more variable).

But there's a source of noise no one's mentioned and in this case it's actually a good thing.

Except for special cases, teachers walk through the door with a great deal of information about their classes; they've graded tests and homework papers; they've seen the reaction to previous lessons, they've talked with students one-on-one. You would expect (and hope) that these teachers would use that information to adjust their approach on a day to day basis.

The trouble is that if you're evaluating teachers based on an observation (particularly a video observation), you don't have any of that information. You can't say how appropriate a given pace or level of explanation is for that class that day. You can only rely on general guidelines.

Which is not to say that good evaluators can't form a valuable assessment based on a video of a lesson. I'm a big believer in these tools both for staff development and (within reason) evaluation, but it's a inexact and often subjective process. You can get a good picture and diagnose big problems but you will never get the resolution that Kane claimed.

There are other problems with this interview, but the correlation of one should have been an easy catch for the reporter. You should never let an interview subject go unchallenged when claiming perfect results.

More on Yahoo! and flex time

A lot of the framing of the Yahoo! decision to ban work at home has been painting it as anti-family or anti-feminism.  Dana Goldstein has a very good refutation of this idea.  A couple of good points:

No one is forcing me to take sole responsibility for these tasks. If I don't do them when I'm "working from home," they will still get done. My boyfriend and I will split them up, or do them together. But here's the thing: It's really hard for me to be at home and ignore my domestic to-do list. I have a voice in my head telling me that until my apartment is neat, clean, and stocked with fresh food, it's perfectly okay to procrastinate on my real jobs, the ones for which I get paid: reporting, writing, and editing. After nearly three years of freelancing, I've learned that I shouldn't work from home more than one or two days per week. I now commute from Brooklyn into "the city" almost every morning, to work at the New York Pubic Library on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. Yes: I voluntarily spend my days in midtown Manhattan, eat lunch at the ubiquitous Hale & Hearty Soups, and dodge tourists in the subway.

So here's my tentative conclusion. Flex-time is a feminist issue. Working from home full time? Maybe not so much. And here are some very definite feminist issues: Access to high-quality, affordable childcare. Paid sick leave, maternity leave, and paternity leave. Male partners who pull their weight at home.

I also think that there is an issue of priviledge involved in these discussions.  Nobody has any trouble with the idea that an employee of McDonald's is unlikely to be able to effectively work from home.  In fact, there is evidence that employers in these sectors are trying to schedule time very flexibly in order to improve efficiency (at the cost of being able to offer a predictable schedule to employees). 

It is true that the best way to manage knoweldge based workers is via performance based metrics.  But these can be very difficult to implement if the office also has a very flexible reporting structure.  It is true that counting cars in the parking lot is a bad plan at the individual level.  But that is an issue of flex time and not the ability to work from home.  In the face of managers with growth opportunities, managing remote workers is harder than local workers (I have done both and the former requires a lot more finesse). 

So I think that Dana is on to something pretty important here. 

Yahoo! is getting bad press

But maybe it shouldn't be.  There has been a lot of discussion about the end of the work from home program at Yahoo! but I was pretty convinced that there was a business case for it by these two points:

"A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo."

Mayer is happy to give Yahoo employees standard Silicon Valley benefits like free food and free smartphones. But our source says the kinds of work-from-home arrangements popular at Yahoo were not common to other Valley companies like Google or Facebook. "This is a collaborative businesses."

The first sounds like a very tough HR problem to solve without bringing everyone in so that they can be integrated into the business.  The second is an excellent business case for doing so as a way of enhancing productivity.  The piece that is always hard about working from home arrangements is that people are very defensive about them.  And they should be -- it is a very nice benefit.  But it also makes it a lot harder to collaborate with others and to manage reports. 

The framing of it as a blow to working parents seems to be a bit odd to me.  I would be much more concerned about parents who are working in low wage employment situations without the resources to access things like daycare. 

Health care costs: a never-ending saga

There is a fascinating piece on health care costs in America that has been getting a lot of attention. There have been a lot of responses but I want to discuss one of the unhelpful ones.   In it, the argument is:

Writ large, this is how health care billing works.  Insurers won't let them charge for one thing--nursing care, say--so instead they bill you for the Tylenol at $20 per.  Or they bill someone else, someone who pays more.  Or they double what they charge uninsured patients in the expectation that the bill will, for most people, eventually be written down by some large percentage.

The web of cross-subsidies, underpayments, overpayments, and upcoding is opaque to everyone except the adminstrators.  And they are not, as Brill observes, eager to make any of it clearer.  In part because they genuinely feel, as does the middle manager in our story, that they are forced into these little subterfuges to recover legitimate costs that short-sighted bean-counters are refusing to cover.

I think this is a completely unhelpful perspective.  It basically argues that the issue in health care costs is over regulation, ironically by other private sector actors.  However, it ignores the general issues of lack of bargaining power in an emergency room and opaque information.  Generally, we do not see a ton of hidden costs and a high pressure sales environment to be idea in other industries.

This is even more clear when the alternative is rate setting, by some sort of regulatory agency.  This is the normal approach in high income countries and it seems to lack a massive downside.  Sure, it reduces spending on medicine which can reduce the incentive for innovation in some cases.  But it can also increase the incentives in others -- when you can't just shift the costs for poor process control to customers then you might improve the process. 

So price transparency would seem to be the minimum level of reform . . . 

Value added testing

This article is worth reading throughout.  However, the most relevant passage is:

Because student performance on the state ELA and math tests is used to calculate scores on the Teacher Data Reports, the tests are high-stakes for teachers; and because New York City uses a similar statistical strategy to rank schools, they are high-stakes for schools as well. But the tests are not high-stakes for the eighth-graders at Anderson. By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences.

Seriously, can no student of incentives not see how this could go terribly, terribly wrong?  The students could, for example, decide to blow the test because the teacher was overly rigorous. 

This is why I am less skeptical about metrics like the SAT.  It is still flawed as all observational research is tricky to derived unbalanced estimates from.  But in this case, the students, the teacher and the school all have something at stake in their performance on the exam. 

They're just not paying Gelman's preferred currency -- the odd economics of access

This post from Andrew Gelman on a truly bad graph and this story from NPR had a common element that caught my eye, partly because I've been thinking about the role connections play in careers and economic mobility.

Here's the relevant passage from Gelman:

All ugliness aside, this reminds me of a story that I haven’t had a chance to share . . . until now. The bit on the above infographic about “C-level execs” reminds me of something that happened a couple years ago, when I was invited to speak at an event, “called “The 2012 Election: Predicted Outcomes and Implications for Your Business,” for “an association of C-suite executives.” I responded that I was interested and told them my fee, to which they responded:

"I am glad to hear that you are interested in this opportunity. However, we don’t compensate speakers as we find that most are interested in the opportunity to be in front of a room full of high quality C-suite executives."

Is that for real? I speak to all sorts of people for free (for example, I just spoke last month at a datatviz meetup), but I was surprised to hear that an association of business executives weren’t planning to pay. So I declined. I say this not to imply that I’m some sort of anti-corporate crusader (after all, I would’ve been happy to talk for pay!) but to express my bafflement at the whole “C-level executive” thing. What’s going on with that?

And here's the opening of the NPR story:

CNBC is far and away the television ratings leader in the financial cable news business. Now, evidence arrives that its executives, producers and reporters are going to great lengths to maintain its status.

The channel has adopted a policy that prohibits guests from appearing on rival channels amid breaking news if they want to be seen by CNBC's larger audience.

In both cases, it seems that the party providing the service is, in a sense, paying the party receiving it. The Chief ____ Officers would receive actionable business intelligence; CNBC would receive valuable on-air talent. You would expect the recipients to try to compensate for these services either directly on indirectly. Instead the company in the first anecdote insists on getting for free what would normally be a well compensated service while CNBC actually puts additional demands and restrictions on the people providing the free service.

Of course, that's not what's going on, at least not most of the time. While Gelman really was a researcher who was offering to present findings of potential value to a company, most similar presentations are actually sales pitches. I'm going to be a bit vague here because I'm currently working in the corporate world, but without naming names, tremendous amounts of capital is drained from American businesses every year by researchers with a slick HBR paper, an inspirational story and a new set of buzz-words.

If you can get a C-level executive interested in your product you can charge obscene amounts of money for years. Better yet, the metrics for success are ill-defined to nonexistent. The only real barrier to becoming the next Tom Peters is access to someone at or near the top of a company. It's easy to understand why companies think they can get research presented for free.*

Something similar is going on in the CNBC example. The majority of the people interviewed on CNBC are either selling something -- a book, some stocks, themselves -- or are building and maintaining a brand. Doing these things requires getting access to large numbers of people. You could manage this by buying advertising (most effectively on a targeted platform like CNBC) but ads are expensive and, even before TiVo they were often avoided either through channel surfing or, before the remote, simply leaving the room for a snack or a bathroom break.

Getting your access as part of regular programming and having it labeled as news is a far better way of doing things. You can why the interviewees would put up with restrictions.

This does, of course, raise questions about conflict of interest and journalistic integrity, but that's a topic for another post.



* This still leaves unexplained why executives would want to, as Gelman points out in this comment, waste their time with inferior speakers to avoid paying a relatively trivial amount of money. Thoughts on that will have to wait for an upcoming post.

UPDATE: This comment from Felix Salmon throws some amusing light on an event similar to the one in Gelman's anecdote.

Education Research

A strong opinion:

I don’t have an informed opinion on the standard of observational research in education, but if the standard is high, there can’t still be lots of low-hanging fruit in the form of cost-neutral interventions whose benefit is obvious without comparative evaluation.

I think that this position is on the strong side given the long lags between exposure (i.e. education) and outcomes (i.e. adult competencies).  But it does point out that easy and cheap interventions that are massively easy to measure are unlikely if there has been any sort of careful research.  So perhaps the randomization idea isn't all bad?

"More colleges stop giving credit for AP exams"

I have to admit mixed feelings about this (from Marketplace):

Yet despite all the hard work, students like Brown may not be able to place out of required college courses or even skip freshman year if they score well on the AP tests. Some prestigious colleges have stopped giving academic credit for AP tests scores.

Brown doesn’t. Columbia doesn’t, and most recently, Dartmouth said it won’t let AP students skip ahead.

“We want a Dartmouth education to take place at Dartmouth,” says school spokesman Justin Anderson.
...

Conley says prestigious schools can afford to be picky about what credits to accept. But there are “more general admissions schools where they want students to bring AP credits and they do want to reward them for doing that.” In other words, AP credit is like bait for the best students.

For various reason, I've always preferred CLEP to AP as a method of testing out and as for advanced classes, I tend to favor plans that actually allow students to attend college classes while in high school, but of the choices we normally see, AP is certainly better than many and I very much support the idea of testing out of lower level courses.

I'm sure there are some exceptionally good freshman level courses at Brown, Columbia and company but that section of Cal I would have to be pretty impressive to justify the expense, the time and the opportunity costs (I sure there's an even better course the student could use to fill that time).

"Cosma Shalizi - Why Economics Needs Data Mining"

As part of a comment thread to this post on big data, Mark Thoma sends us here:



UPDATE:

I should have mentioned this before, but, while the entire segment is worthwhile, I was particularly glad to hear the interviewer address the strange discrepancy between the way economists use "data mining"  and the way statisticians, computer scientists and most people in business use term.

Interesting stats blog

From New Zealand. 

Education blogging of note

David Warsh has posted another entry in a thoughtful series about early childhood development. He also includes useful links including one to this interesting interview with James Heckman,

Yeah, I'm getting tired of these too

Once again I made the mistake of listening to On the Media. It started out reasonably benign with a standard but harmless piece on cyber-security, then went downhill with a smug piece on fact-checking before going off a cliff with this ddulite puff piece. Here's the blurb:

Late last month, The Washington Post debuted "The Truthteller," an application that it hopes will soon be able to fact-check politicians' speeches in real time using speech-to-text technology and a vast database of facts. Brooke talks to Cory Haik, The Washington Post's executive producer for digital news, about the app.

Of course, the speech-to-text and database problems are trivial next to the issues with processing natural language. To work at anywhere near the level discussed by Haik, the system would have to be considerably more advanced than IBM's Watson. Watson was designed to address short, free-standing questions following similar linguistic conventions and having clear, unambiguous answers.

This isn't meant to denigrate the team that developed Watson. Just the opposite. Interpreting natural language is extraordinarily difficult and solving even highly constrained problems is an impressive and important accomplishment. IBM has a lot to brag about.

The Washington Post currently has a beta up that apparently can sometimes spot strings that look like simple factual statements that lend themselves to automated comparison to a database. There's no reason to believe the app will ever move much beyond that, but the interviewer did believe...

without sign of suspicion...

immediately after a segment boasting about how carefully On the Media checks its facts.

To quote Snoopy, "the mind reels with sarcastic replies."