Category: Teaching

Why study social sciences?

Monkey Cage Blog has a great post up in response to criticism of his exhortations to study social sciences. He makes a broad argument about the validity of social science research because it has effects on the way that people live their lives. To be selfish for a moment, he highlights some important questions that I examine every day:

Families.  What makes families more or less successful?   What makes marriages more successful?  What makes them fail?  What are the effects of divorce?  Does it hurt the children of divorce?  How much, in what ways, and for how long?  A medical doctor can treat the effects of family dysfunction and divorce—say, with anti-depressants or therapy and so on—but we can learn and know more about how to prevent some of this dysfunction from doing social science.

The post is really about funding for social science research rather that defending my everyday work. It’s also not really about teaching undergrads social sciences, but clearly, we have train undergrads in social sciences if we eventually want some of them to do research in the social sciences. I think there’s a point to be made about how learning about these wide-reaching social phenomena—families, schools, economies, politics, attitudes, networks and norms—forces students to think about cause and effect in a nuanced way. When it’s not clear how X might affect Y or how Z has effects on X that in turn effect Y, it takes creativity and imagination and critical thinking to sort it out. It’s not that social sciences can do this exclusively, but the nature of the topics student lends itself to varied analysis and the development of skills that are useful in many careers.

The Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop. Or, why we should all commit to reading various news sources

Last week, I was surprised by my students’ apparent belief that debt and deficit spending was high during the first Obama administration and that it was the first thing they thought of when asked about the effects of government spending.

By way of explanation, Greg Sargent of The Plum Line takes on the current Joe Scarborough vs. Krugman (and the world of economists) debate via the Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop.

The relentless bipartisan focus on the deficit convinces voters to be worried about it, which in turn leads lawmakers to spend still more time talking about it and less time talking about the economy, a phenomenon that is self-reinforcing. This is exacerbated by some commentators and news orgs, who continue to treat the deficit scolds with a great deal of deference, while marginalizing the opinion that we should prioritize boosting the economy and job creation as a means of getting the country’s fiscal problems under control over time without savage spending cuts that will hurt a lot of people. Back in 2011 one study actually confirmed that newspapers were spending far more time talking about the deficit than the economy — at a time when the recovery was in serious peril.

h/t @EJDionne

Dramatic changes (or not) in government spending

I’m teaching Methods again this semester, this time two sections with a total of 24 students. They’ll all be blogging again, so if you’re curious, I do recommend you check out their blogs. Links are forthcoming in the sidebar.

We started class this week with a little data work and a statistics refresher using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It’s probably the only macro example I use all semester in great depth, but it serves to help students link their past work to what they are going to do in this class as well as give me the opportunity to show off impart some Excel shortcuts and basic data analysis skills and tips while reviewing statistics.

Since we use the entire set of GDP data from the NIPA tables, I like to take a bit of the class to talk about a few major events in economic history and highlight the idea that an action such as increasing government spending can both increase GDP and decrease it, according to economic theory. Which effect is bigger determines the outcome we see, even when both are happening.

Most students know that federal spending went up as a result of wartime production in the early 1940s and as a result of the New Deal in the mid-1930s, but I was surprised at how students answered my question of what effects does government spending have. Several students in both classes answered “debt” before anything else, and no one came up with “crowding out” (where government spending replaces private consumption and investment or drives up interest rates such that firms don’t invest but save) without significant prompting.

Once I said it, of course, they all recognized what I had been getting at, but I think it’s so indicative of the current political and news climate that students would default to an answer that’s not particularly true as a result of having heard it over and over again. Government spending, as anyone who was alive in the 90s knows, doesn’t have to result in more debt. A balanced budget is not outside the realm of possibility, and while crowding out is not necessarily a foregone conclusion either, it should fit much more nicely into students’ understanding of theory and a review of national income accounting. I know that Prof. Weise or Prof. Hu taught them about crowding out. It’s amazing how hammering on a subject can replace an outcome of an action in one’s mind. I was surely told over and over again that government spending caused crowding out, so it’s always first. These students have clearly been told that government spending causes debt. Weird. (As a side note, the Chronicle has a great article on how students struggle to transfer skills learned in one class to others.)

I’m getting away from the initial trajectory of this post, though. In addition to forgetting about crowding out, my students wanted to tell me that government spending had accelerated over the past few years. I immediately shot down the idea, saying how spending growth had slowed dramatically since we had officially left the recession, even if there had been an initial spike.

I was a little nervous when I said it that I had misspoken, but was grateful to come back to my office to this Krugman post: “the narrative that says that spending has surged under Obama is just wrong – what we’ve actually seen is a slowdown at exactly the time when, for macroeconomic reasons, we should have been spending more.” Ah, sweet vindication and relief.

How to email your professor

It’s day one of my fourth semester at Gettysburg. It’s also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I hope you all are enjoying a day of remembrance. If you’re looking for something different to read, might I suggest former NC state attorney general Hampton Dellinger in the Atlantic on the MLK memorial? I’ll be reading syllabi and teaching my new students how to blog.

For all the students out there, a little primer on how to email your professors.

Happy first day!

The advent of conversations I thought I’d never have

Even teaching at a place like the University of Colorado, marijuana use was never something I discussed with my students or professors. It didn’t really come up among my fellow graduate students (except the ones who played Ultimate, let’s be honest). Outside of one friend who owned a medical marijuana dispensary and a few pothead friends (mostly my guitar teacher, who taught me some Bob Marley before anything else), it just wasn’t something I talked about that much.

The passage of Amendment 64, however, has suddenly turned the conversation on its head in ways I never thought possible. More than once this semester, I have had my principles of micro students ask about marijuana legalization and how we tax it. (The answer was I didn’t know, turns out that in Colorado it’s taxed at a higher rate (regular sales tax) than other pharmaceuticals (exempt from sales and use taxes), which, from an elasticity and deadweight loss perspective in a simple supply and demand model, is certainly the way to go).

Another student asked me this afternoon about moving to Denver after graduation, where he might have a job opportunity. I, of course, lauded Denver’s many highlights and, to my surprise, added, “well, and you can smoke pot legally if you want.” He responded it was not his thing, but we then delved into a conversation on the relative economic merits and costs of legalization. I know that people have been having conversations like this forever, it just seems like they’ve suddenly become much more mainstream.

Finally, on Saturday, I got together with some friends and one friend’s very conservative, elderly, immigrant parents, perhaps the last people on Earth I thought I would have a conversation with about marijuana. But, they grow orchids, and according to the new law, her dad told the group, he can grow six plants and so can his wife, so why not get started? He didn’t want to smoke it, he said. I’m still not sure what he planned to do with it, sell it, keep it just because he could, give it away? But both of my friend’s parents were extremely excited about the possibility. We went back and forth on the specifics of the law all while laughing uproariously at the insistence of two elderly Chinese that they wanted to grow pot and were looking for a consultant to help them, while their daughter tried to convince them not to because she didn’t want to take care of the plants while they’re not in town.

Not your run-of-the-mill cocktail chatter, for sure, but suddenly, it is. Brave New World.

Back to School

It’s the first day of classes here at Gettysburg College and I am working hard (as I’m sure are many) to get back into the swing of things, to readjust to the humid Pennsylvania weather, and to find my rain jacket and galoshes only to have the sun come out while I’m in class.

I’m done with my first day and I’m happy to report that my students will be blogging again. This time, there will be two different classes, Quantitative Methods and Labor Economics. I’m really excited to have my Labor students reading BLS jobs reports every month and getting them as addicted to on-the-spot analysis as I am…I mean, well, moving on. Hopefully, we’ll get some good conversations going this semester.

For my part, I’ll be back up and running soon. I owe you all an explanation of what I was doing in Venezuela. It’s forthcoming and will be cross-posted at Caracas Chronicles, so might have a slightly different feel to it than what I usually write here. After that, I should be back to a normal posting schedule. My apologies for a slow August. Good luck to all going back to school with the new semester and talk to you soon!

Reflections on a semester of blogging

There are many important issues in the news right now that I’d love to write about. There are policy decisions and campaign statements and housing woes and education debates that are all demanding my attention. Unfortunately, so is grading, and a trip to SF, and so I thought I would take a few minutes to reflect on the semester and particularly the inclusion of student blogging in my quantitative methods class this semester.

First, the positives. I really like that my students were writing every week. I think it’s important for their development as thinkers and economists to find ways to express themselves in various ways. Looking over their posts from the semester, I see significant growth in their thinking about econometrics and economic issues in their blogging and am excited to read their final thoughts this week on Donohue and Levitt’s (in)famous abortion and crime paper. I have pretty strong feelings about Freakonomics, but I hope that by reading the Freakonomics chapter, other chapters from the book, the actual paper that prompted the main thesis of the chapter and one of the primary critiques, they can reasonably evaluate the merits and failings of all sides of the argument.

Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of teaching this course has been how to help students to understand that statistical significance is not necessarily the end goal in itself. I’m not grading their papers on whether they found a significant result, but rather their ability to explain it. In reading several chapter of two books, the news, and working through their own research process, I hope that they begin to understand the distinction. I tried to design writing assignments to reflect an understanding of numbers, or coefficients, and will be looking to make that more explicit in upcoming semesters.

All of my students had some great insights throughout the semester. Whether in reading an article in the news and relating that to their research, or finding a connection between a chapter in Poor Economics and some aspect of their own research, it’s been exciting to see them grow and incorporate their lives into their writing and academic work. I’m not sure I made any bloggers for life, but I do hope they all continue writing and finding ways to share their work.

On the not-so-good side, I need to find a better way to track their posts and comments and a better way to ask them to read what each other is writing. Requiring commenting appeared not to be sufficient. I would like to have larger conversations on the blogging platform about the posts themselves. Perhaps requiring everyone read a particular student’s post in a given week and comment there is a better solution. Asking students to read different pieces of books or different articles might solve this as well. Although I think it’s useful for students to read different analyses of a topic they themselves have analyzed, I would like to split the kind of commenting they do a little more in order to expose them to more topics. In addition, much of the commenting was within small groups I only realized existed later in the semester. Students from one fraternity tended to read mostly each others’ posts, for instance. I would have liked to see more integration, but that was my shortsightedness, and it will be remedied.

Related to the issue of topics is the issue of books, reading different books, or more books, or articles may be in order. I chose Poor Economics and Freakonomics for their accessibility and ready discussion of statistics, but surely there are others. I have ruled out More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel, for reasons I might explicate here some other day, but surely there are others. Perhaps some Dan Ariely, or parts of Hamermesh’s Beauty Pays.

Another significant problem was length. I found it difficult to keep up 25 students worth of writing every week. In the future, I will be stricter and more explicit about length requirements. In order to stay on top of it, and help students develop the skill of writing concisely, maximum word counts are definitely in order.

I’m still exploring ways to better incorporate twitter into the classroom. I know that many of my students read this blog and thus see many of my tweets on the sidebar, but they are still mostly passive readers. Perhaps it’s too much to try to incorporate social media in a class that’s already jam-packed with mountains of new information, but I did like the few opportunities I had to bring it up.

All in all, I think it’s a great way to do writing exercises. Even the limited exposure my students had to outside commentary was useful and a good reminder of how they can use their ideas to shape opinions and contribute to wider conversations. Next time, I’ll do some things differently, but we will keep blogging. You can follow a whole new group of students in the Fall, and even more of them in the Spring! Look for us later on, and of course, you’ll hear plenty from me in the next few months. Thanks for a great semester, for all your thoughts and tweets and emails, and if anyone has thoughts about how to make the student blogging process smoother or more integrative or more useful to students, I’d be very happy to hear your ideas in an email or the comments section.

Testing, incentives, and low-achieving students, redux

Last week, a few kind words from a friend turned into an extended conversation about testing structures and incentives for teachers to help low-achieving students. Mark’s organization is unique and very cool because it targets the lowest achievers, students Mark posited are the least likely to benefit from the incentives provided by standardized testing to maximize the pass rate. Brett Keller responded with a link to a discussion of an article from the Review of Economics and Statistics that basically confirmed Mark’s thinking.

Below is a quick summary of a long, dense paper and lessons learned. In short, Mark, yes, research backs up your intuition. From “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-based Accountability” by Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach:

The use of proficiency counts as performance measures provides strong incentives for schools to focus on students who are near the proficiency standard but weak incentives to devote extra attention to students who are already proficient or have little chance of becoming proficient in the near term.

Students who might just need a little extra push to get to the passing mark are going to get any extra teaching effort that is encouraged by the testing system itself, and even may draw effort that might have gone to students at the ends of the distribution. It seems that this problem at least would unite parents of the highest and lowest achievers in protest. Low achieving students are left behind and high-ability students make no gains either. This system is clearly not beneficial to anyone except the marginal passers and ensures that low-achieving students never have an opportunity to catch up.

The continual process of raising the standards only makes worse the distribution problem. In their model, an increase in the proficiency standard necessarily increases the number of high-ability students receiving extra attention, thus decreasing the number of low-achieving students receiving extra attention.

The study was also repeated with low-stakes testing, where the individual student may have had something to gain by passing (not going to summer school), but the school had little to gain. The lopsided distribution of effort didn’t appear in these cases.

Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. 2010 “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-based Accountability.” Review of Economics and Statistics 92(2); 263-283.

Student thoughts on recent Gettysburg economics events

As the semester goes on, my Methods students have more and more tools with which to analyze current events in economics, and ideas they encounter in their classes. A few students put together some thoughts on their blogs about recent visitors including Nate on George DeMartino and Andy on Hanushek.

I’m happy to see my students talking about what they’re seeing, but it’s also a reminder that I may need to talk a little bit more about dummy variables before the semester is up.

My post on Hanushek and Reschovsky is here. Sadly, I didn’t make it to DeMartino.

Public Education Finance

Last week, my department hosted two prominent economists who do research on public education finance to speak to students, faculty, and local teachers regarding how we’re going to finance public schools and improves US student outcomes in the coming decades. By international standards, school performance in the US lags behind other countries in math and science, in particular, which is largely heralded as expected to bring about the eventual demise of out economic and geopolitical advantage.

This is certainly not my area of expertise, so I’m speaking a bit off the cuff here, but I thought I’d summarize a bit.

Andrew Reschovsky, who is a professor in the policy school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, asserts that we’re not paying teachers enough. His argument wasn’t entirely clear to students, it seemed, but his ultimate prescription is to bring more money to the problem.

Eric Hanushek, of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, presented an argument that many of my students found much more compelling. Firing the bottom 5-6% of teachers from each school and replacing them with an average teacher, he says, would raise math and reading scores dramatically. And, if we could only get to Canada’s level, it would add trillions to our GDP.

One teacher rightly asked, where do you expect to get these teachers, particularly when you’re cutting their salaries left and right? Hanushek replied that there are a lot of unemployed teachers, but mostly ignored the distributional problem. There are a lot of unemployed teachers in Michigan, where salaries are high and applicants far outnumber openings. There are lots of openings in places like Arizona, where salaries are low. It’s as much a problem of getting people to move to Arizona as it is replacing those teachers that get fired.

Neither side got too much into the question of how we measure student outcomes (for more on this, see Dana Goldstein, who is also moderating an event on the same at the New America Foundation tomorrow evening at NYC). Though Hanushek was fairly convinced that some measure of value-added by teacher seemed to be in order through rigorous testing, by his own admission, principals and colleagues all seem to know who the bad teachers are. In that sense, amending the system to allow teachers to evaluate each other might lead to more efficient outcomes than administering tests that hamper the ability of teachers to teach, and could be racist or biased in different cultural situations. We know testing is problematic, and yet, right now, it seems to be all we have.

As a teaching moment, I wanted to highlight how two people, coming from rather different sides of the aisle, could use the exact same information to come up with very different policy prescriptions. I’ve heard some students remark lately that econometrics seems like a science without answers. But I think the better description is that there are many answers, and we’re tasked with finding the best ones. I also had a long discussion with a colleague and my students about how teacher quality over the past fifty years has likely changed dramatically as more opportunities for women opened up in different fields.

I find it all really fascinating.

I was really hoping to outsource this post by linking to my students’ blogs, but none of them wrote about it (though many  have some interesting thoughts about Moneyball). Even for extra credit. Guess it’s going to be a required assignment next year. I will update here if I notice any posts about it in the next week.