Cheating

Plagarism and cheating in general are surely big problems at universities these days. The fact that there is a cottage industry of essay-writing companies is also disconcerting.

Lawrence Hinmann, a philosopher, wrote a surprisingly good op-ed on the topic a few years ago.

I think he overemphasizes the importance of investing time in students and creating unique problems. In many fields it's hard to make up good problems because of complexity (math, engineering, etc.) and in others new topics are often just rehashed forms of old topics: philosophy students rarely have anything interesting to say, except when they rediscover an age-old argument.

By the same token he probably underemphasizes the good that technology can do, at least to fight plagiarism. If students were asked to a little bit more work, and had more and more of their writing digitized, perhaps starting in high school, then there would probably be enough data to identify each student's "writing signature." Essay-writing companies would try to adjust to that but I think it'd be difficult, and fear must cut down on their business in the short run.

The real solution is cultivating norms, as he notes in passing, though no one knows quite how. Fortunately, with so many colleges and departments, there is plenty of room for experimentation.

Diversity inspires Creativity?

Today I'm going to combine commentary on two very, very bad op-eds that espouse conventional wisdom.

A few days ago Thomas Friedman explained why he "do[esn't] object to a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site." In short, he claims that Americans' "competitive advantage" is a product of the "creative energy that comes when you mix all our diverse people and cultures together." First, the phrase "competitive advantage" draws him perilously close to an old-age trade myth that economic growth is a zero-sum game: if China produces all the toys and Japan makes all the cars, Americans will have nothing to do. They wouldn't, except for the fact that people are thinking up new things to produce all the time--computers, football games, and convoluted gambling schemes.

So assume Friedman is just talking about growth. His claims are (1) growth is a product of creativity and (2) that creativity is (in-part) a product of cultural and ethnic diversity. (1) is conventional wisdom in economics. Technological progress, captured by the Solow residual, accounts for the vast majority of growth, esp. in developed countries.

(2) is also conventional wisdom, but not among economists. I think it makes no sense. Here's why: Friedman notes, correctly I think, that creativity comes from first thinking divergently and then thinking convergently. You generate a lot of news ideas, usually by making analogies with concepts in different fields, and then refine the best of those ideas into something workable. (Newsweek had a great story on this.)

Then he implies that "great books, iPads [and] new cancer drugs" are borne from mixing cultures since mixing cultures helps think divergently. I don't buy it. All the revolutions in the iPad had nothing to do with culture. Multi-touch is the best implementation of technology that has been in the works for a while. Everything that led to it had to do with computer science and learning engineering concepts. iOS is the first mass-market implementation of a ZUI or Zooming User Inference, a concept Jeff Raskin thought up and popularized before he died. I'm sure the creativity energy at Apple (his employer) in the 80s sparked some of those ideas, but the creative energy at Apple back then surely wasn't a product of ethnic diversity (nearly everyone was white and male). New cancer drugs are, likewise, products of careful research in chemistry and biology, and no one in those fields thinks that familiarity with African music is going to give you much of a leg up in understanding pathways and designing experiments.

I just wish someone would produce a little empirical evidence for the ethnical diversity = technological progress thesis. Is there cross-sectional evidence that the most diverse countries are the richest? Is there cross-sectional evidence that the most innovative companies have the most diverse workforces? I don't think either would be compelling--that innovative companies have diverse workforces is just a by-product of needing to tap all sources of talent to recruit the best of the best and rich nations become rich then draw immigrants from around the world: diversity is a product of wealth.* But at least it'd be a start in thinking scientifically about a suspect claim.

In an old, related op-ed, Jay Mathews, an excellent education writer, writes about the importance and difficulty of learning Chinese. He says seems obvious that more Americans should be studying Chinese:

China is our biggest trading partner, after Canada and Mexico. The country reminds me in some ways of America in the 1870s. It is recovering from horrid domestic events, getting stronger, with the potential to be the most important nation in the world.

He goes on to note that "Chinese culture -- its philosophy, its art, its code of conduct, its food, its literature -- is one of the wonders of human civilization." I'm not sure if he means that as a fact or his opinion. If the former, he needs to open his eyes to the diversity of tastes in art and food. If the later, why (to be blunt) does he think anyone cares? One piece of evidence he fails to cite is that, if surveys can be trusted, Asian people are surprisingly miserable given their wealth. Hong Kong is, by eyeballing, the largest negative outlier and China, South Korea, and Japan all have negative residuals. That makes me hesitantly question how wonderful Chinese culture is.

He does note a different drawbacks of the Chinese language: "it is also true that having to learn thousands of ideographic characters . . . has forced Chinese education into a deep, narrow groove . . . relying on memorization. . . . There is less creative thinking in the schools as a result . . ." (Note the irony there vis a vis Friedman.) I'm a little skeptical of that claim given what I know (very little) of the linguistics literature on the subject. They also say Chinese people have a hard time thinking of counterfactuals because of the structure of the language, but given the importance of thinking up counterfactuals to science and the plethora of good Chinese scientists, I'm skeptical.

Mathews gets to the crux of the issue later in his essay, though he never asks the key question. He cites a source that says learning Chinese fluently takes 1,300 hours but notes that a more realistic estimate is probably 2,200 hours. That is a massive investment of time: the average top-tier (UC, Duke) college student spends about 2,250 hours to earn their degree, and at MIT students at expected to spend about 12 hours per class a week (on average they spend about 9) and it takes about 14 classes in computer science to get a B.S. from MIT. In other words, if you spend 2,352 hours studying computers you've probably learned about as much as an MIT grad (well, not quite since MIT-people learn fast).

So here is the trade-off for policy-makers and students: what is a better use of time, learning Chinese or leaning computer science. Friedman think the next iPad will come from throwing different colored people in a room and practicing vodoo engineering. I think it will come from teams of techno-wizards hammering out code and designing circuits. You decide which path is better for our growth prospects.

* - This is my guess for the source of the confusion. Being open to immigrants and tolerant of different religions is probably correlated with institutions that promote new ideas in art (e.g. movies) and technology (e.g. computers).

Useless Research

There's a new book out on the Lord's Resistance Army (HT: Chris Blattman, who authored a chapter).

The book is meant to set the record straight about the Lord's Resistance Army (hence the subtitle), and based on the quote from Chris they're particularly taking aim at the coverage Invisible Children and CNN have done. (I've never seen anyone else do a story or documentary on the Acholi's plight.)

Personally, I find the tone kind of smug. Invisible Children does a lot to help people. It's possible their account is very misleading and I'd like to read the book to get the facts. But I don't think reading the book is going to give me or anyone else much insight into how to end the war. I've never seen any academic research on foreign policy (non-military strategy) that is in any way useful.

For that reason the tone is offputting. Invisible Children, even if its just a propaganda documentary, inspired thousands of (mostly) high schoolers to raise money to help thousands of (mostly) kids get a better education. It also entertained a lot of people (8.0 average rating on IMDb). From a utilitarian perspective it was an "ethical" movie, however misleading. This book on the other hand, has little ethical value if it can't help end the war, and probably won't even entertain many readers.

You can file this post under the theme "unimportance of fact/reality" which I consider a central theme on this blog.

For-profit Colleges

The big puzzle is why . . . the for-profit college market is not self-regulating . . .

The solution of the puzzle may be . . . that the private-college industry . . . has targeted a class of people who cannot gain admission to [public] colleges because they do not meet their entrance standards. There is evidence that just as in the case of the marketing of mortgage loans during the housing bubble of the early 2000s, the for-profit colleges use aggressive advertising to attract students from low-income families that lack financial sophistication and the ability to evaluate the benefits of attending a for-profit college. These people . . have little information about higher education and are therefore prey to skillful marketing that even if literally truthful may create a misleading impression of the benefits of attendance at a for-profit college. For-profit colleges often pay recruiters by the number of enrollments that a recruiter generates.

from Richard Posner on his blog. It could be more concise but it's worth reading.

Two things (Posner mentions #1):

1. Public colleges also prey on misinformation and youth. No one warns you that majoring in English is not going to lead to the same career satisfaction or pay as a degree in Computer Engineering.

2. All the evidence suggests that the average effect of college education makes college a great value. But the effect could be highly heterogenous. Why isn't there more public, easily accessible and understandable information on the payoff to this and that degree? And (this is a common refrain for me) why isn't "work satisfation" reported side-by-side?

Obvious things that I can't see

Everyone takes for granted these days that the future belongs to cloud computing and China. Google will dominate cloud computing, the PC will die, and everything will be stored and processed by big server farms. China will . . . I don't know what people think China will do but it will become the world's "superpower."

The thing is, the cloud is far from certainty. A lot of people are uncomfortable with trusting companies with all of their personal data, without an on-site backup. (Google admitting to spying on people didn't help their case.) More importantly, our wireless networks aren't even close to fast or reliable enough to do anything other than back up data on the cloud. Amazon just launched a new data service to utilize their server farms, but, as anyone in the know would expect, they are asking users to send large chunks of data through ... FedEx.

China, meanwhile, has a GDP (PPP) per capita of about $6,000. Hong Kong is rich, and a few mainland cities (e.g. Shanghai and Beijing) are comparable to Mississippi in development, but the fact is that China is a very poor, technologically backward, uneducated country. Even if China manages to grow 8% a year and the U.S. has anemic growth at 2%, it will take China 35 years to catch up with the U.S. But that seems unlikely as, right now, China is playing catch-up, utilizing cheap labor and old technology to manufacture products developed countries used to make for themselves. Korea, Taiwan, and Japan did the same in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and as all growth models predicted, their rapid growth tapered off before they caught up with the U.S.

Does David Brooks believe what he writes?

David Brooks is at it again. It used to be that you studied the humanities to enlighten your self or some shit like that. Now its because it'll help your career, even though engineers make about twice as much as humanities majors.

I wonder if he believes what he writes. He implies the subprime mortgage crisis and the BP oil disaster and if more bankers and businessmen read Gibbon. Social skills are important, but can you really build them by reading books? Maybe. But wouldn't it be better to read books by psychologists--or talk to people?

Grade inflation

I posted a while back about grade inflation. I was inspired by a short article on the Economix blog and offered a question in the comments.

Lo and behold, my question was answered (toward the bottom). I think it was a fair answer, but I wish he had more to say. I agree that its very difficult to compare apples and oranges (Harvard GPA to UMass GPA)--in this case because we don't have any good data for estimating the variance in GPAs at each college.

Also, this is funny. I found a treasure trove of law school admissions data that I'm going to mine for insights. One day they will appear on this blog (vis a vis medical school admissions).