Because apparently many people don't believe economics is a science. Raj Chetty defends the field in the face of disagreement here in the NYT. First of all, economics is a social science. Secondly, as with most scientific research, testing theory through hypotheses and empirical analysis makes the field scientifically and policy relevant. Thus, the macroeconomists are maybe a little jealous of the development economists' RCTs:

As is the case with epidemiologists, the fundamental challenge faced by economists — and a root cause of many disagreements in the field — is our limited ability to run experiments. If we could randomize policy decisions and then observe what happens to the economy and people’s lives, we would be able to get a precise understanding of how the economy works and how to improve policy. But the practical and ethical costs of such experiments preclude this sort of approach. (Surely we don’t want to create more financial crises just to understand how they work.)

Hat tip: COCO (a real scientist)

Marc Bellemare, a fantastic new faculty addition to my department at the university wrote a couple of weeks ago about the things you can't get out of a MOOC (sidebar: it is awesome to have a professor in my department who doesn't think blogging is a waste of time).

He first discusses Pritchett's approach to education as a means of enforcing social norms, values and behaviors for its citizens. To me (as a daughter of an educator), this sounded wacko. But I think Pritchett explains it best in this Cambridge Nights interview. Right around minute 5:20.

As nation states strove to legitimate the rule... one of the ways [they did this] was through control of the socialization of the youth. Governments said: "Ok, kids are going to get educated, if we don't control the education, who knows what they're gonna learn vis-a-vis affiliation of the nation state, affiliation to particular ideologies. So it was really the ideology of affiliation of nation states combined with parental demand around their children's economic futures that led to more schooling and that schooling being controlled by the state.

This perspective doesn't solve the problem that Massive Open Online Courses might leave me unemployed in the future, but its something to keep in mind when we talk about education policy.

Meanwhile, my parents, in concern for their daughters possible future unemployment (economists read: parental demand around their children's economic future), brought a New Yorker Magazine all the way to Tanzania. In the May issue was an elaborate, New Yorker style, ten-page article about MOOCs.  Good thing they haven't seen this visual about my low prospects on the job market (until now: hi M&D!).

Bellemare discusses the social capital students earn in college, learning to work together with young people from various backgrounds, especially in American college students where students tend to live on campus all together. While I completely agree with this assessment of social benefits, I'm skewed with privilege because I attended a small liberal arts college that prided itself with academic community, cultural diversity and intimate brochure-photo gatherings over a shared text book on the pristine lawn. But, according to the New Yorker, my experience is not the reality:

When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you’ll find a Byronic young man reading “Cartesian Meditations” on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder.... Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind. But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills.... This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.

For these students, at the eighty percent of colleges in the states, higher education is about simple cost-benefit analysis. It's about finding short-term child care and rounding up enough cash so you can finish that certificate in dental assistance or officially learn to operate the infrared spectrometer.

From a (hopefully) future faculty perspective, the impending imposition of MOOCs is ominous.  I can only hope that I will be lucky enough to become employed at an institution like Amherst, where the faculty voted against joining a MOOC program, and the administration and endowment were privileged enough to support that decision.

Hat tips: Mom and Dad.

Remember my grumbling post about the major lack of participation among women in my economics courses? And how I brought this up in the context of women's leadership and Sandberg's Lean In?

It turns out I'm not the only one who sees this association (i.e. told ya so). Harvard Business School underwent a self-imposed gender makeover, adjusting curriculum, social rules and rituals and trying to change institutional norms. Part of this: hand-raising lessons.

Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 2011, Neda Navab sat in a class participation workshop, incredulous. The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Ms. Navab had been the president of her class at Columbia, advised chief executives as a McKinsey & Company consultant and trained women as entrepreneurs in Rwanda. Yet now that she had arrived at the business school at age 25, she was being taught how to raise her hand.

A second-year student, a former member of the military, stood in the front of the classroom issuing commands: Reach up assertively! No apologetic little half-waves! Ms. Navab exchanged amused glances with new friends.

There is certainly a persistent difference in how men and women participate in class (a friend of mine said that in his male-dominated department, men do not actually raise their hand- they simply start talking).  The fact that this difference exists for ambitious twenty-something professional and graduate students is indicative of a larger socialization training on appropriate behavior for boys and girls. It might be hard to overturn by the time these students reach grad school, but I admire Harvard for taking on the challenge.

Also notable from the in-depth article: there was a fair amount of push-back from the students who did not particularly appreciate being subject to the incessant gender lens.  If you're happy to believe that there aren't any problems to fix, consider this:

At an extracurricular presentation the year before, a female student asked William Boyce, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, for advice for women who wanted to go into his field. “Don’t,” he laughed, according to several students present.  Male partners did not want them there, he continued, and he was doing them a favor by warning them.

Woah, exciting things happening in the world of conditional cash transfers.

A fascinating This American Life/ Planet Money dream team podcast on the effectiveness and absurdity of of dropping all pretense of developing education, institutions or capabilities in poor countries and just giving out straight cash.  The follow-up response has been awesome, with posts in the NYT, NYT Magazine and of course, a clever summary with provocative highlights from Chris Blattman.

According to David Kestenbaum of Planet Money, these cash hand-outs are sponsored by nerds:

Until pretty recently, the charity world has been about doing stuff that helps, without thinking really about how much does it help exactly and how much does it cost? But there does seem to be this shift that's happening. Philanthropy is getting nerdier and more data driven.

Is this because economists are trying to take over the world? Maybe. GiveDirectly is an organization, not surprisingly run by two Harvard-trained J-PAL affiliated economists. Of course, GiveDirectly is doing Randomized Control Trials (RCT) to evaluate the impact of these cash handouts on all sorts of outcomes (family dynamics, height, nutrition, housing, asset ownership and education). Kestenbaum again:

This study is not just about how well giving money works. Its also a challenge to other charities....Providing training, flying in experts, paying staff- all that costs money. If you think all your doing is better than just giving money, prove it.

As a friend said, this seems a lot like when academic economists jump into a very complicated real-life situation and claim to know how to do everything better (perhaps unsurprisingly, she dates an economist). But when you think about the impact of development in terms of dollar spent on organization websites, a states-side office and director salaries versus a dollar spent in Meatu by Joe the Tanzanian Plumber, it is hard to make a strong case for all that costly stuff without data.  It's no surprise that the economists at GiveDirectly despise glossy aid brochures and are rigorously and empirically evaluating their own program. So what do other aid organizations think about this challenge to prove effectiveness? From Heifer International:

As an African woman, that sounds to me like a terrible idea... We're not about experiments. These are lives of real people... Data cannot capture everything. I am a proud woman and I have a voice. You can't measure that.

Denial of experimentation? CBlatts nails it on the head:

This is the way the Heifers of the world fool themselves. When you give stuff to some people and not to others, you are still experimenting in the world. You are still flipping a coin to decide who you help and who you don’t, it’s just an imaginary one.

For the amount of money that goes into aid organizations, yes, they should absolutely be evaluated with rigor and data. But it also seems likely that Heifer does bring more than a cow. They bring business and agriculture training, share milk production and technology knowledge, heighten business curiosity and even possibly, include this elusive idea of empowerment. Or, they like to think they do anyway. Do we, as economists, think we can measure all that?

Hat tips: COCO & DW

The next two weeks will be my first couple of weeks staying under the same roof since January. Apparently, all this staying in one location has slipped blogging to the back of the priorities list. That's my pathetic excuse. 

Anyway, I attended AAEA in DC back in early August, presenting a poster about the factors that predict independent financial decisions by women in rural Tanzania (more to come). Sendhil Mullainathan was an excellent keynote speaker and proposed some creative answers to tough questions.

Why do the poor so often miss deadlines for public benefits? Why do dieters struggle so much with temptation? Why does socioeconomic status play such a huge role on education test scores?

Mullainathan relates all these things to brain bandwidth, proposing the (not so ground-breaking, actually) idea that in the face of scarcity, our processing is distracted and slower. The provocative examples in his talk makes his upcoming book enticing. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

Couldn't get a video of his dynamic presentation at the conference, but since TED talks have made presentations cool again, here's a good one from 2010.

In a previous post, I responded to an article in Econometrica that had been highlighted in Freakonomics about the externalities of experimental research in developing countries. One of the authors of the paper, Ken Leonard, responds:

In Tanzania, there has been a strong ethic to participate in research for the benefit of the country and that implies a reciprocal responsibility for researchers. Therefore, in the research we did with the Maasai, we explicitly avoided the use of the word research (utafiti) so as not to give the impression that we did not respect that implicit arrangement. The two villages where we did research were rural villages populated with Maasai people, but they were not unaccustomed to outside research. In one of the villages, the chief had taken to visiting women the day before a research team arrived to prime them as to what they were to say when the research team arrived. In our case, the women had all been primed to say that water was the most important issue. Many of the respondents to the exit surveys were concerned at the end that we had not given them the opportunity to say water (since of course our research was not about their development needs).

I was and continue to be very concerned about the impact of research on the villages I work in, but I can safely say that these villages were not in some sort of pristine pre-research state. That said, our research was so different from what anyone expected, that I am very confident that our results were not tainted by expectations.

Some people earned significant sums of money and many of these were the poorer and older members of the village. I cannot say with assurance that the money was put to good use, but I can testify that, as I handed people the money, the looks on their faces were very satisfying. People were genuinely surprised that I kept my word and gave them money and they were very pleased with the amounts they earned. Their surprise at seeing a promise fulfilled is a testament to the dishonesty of the average researcher in this area.

In a fun and puzzling Freakonomics radio podcast, Dubner and Levitt explore the ways in which women participate differently in society, or in other words, women are not men. One of the main studies they cite is an interesting piece from Econometrica by Uri Gneezy, Kenneth Leonard, and John List which examines how culture effects competition between men and women. They attempt to understand if its nature or nurture that effects the stark difference between men and women opting to compete.

To do this, they immerse the competition studies in two different tribes: the Khasi in India (a matrilineal tribe) and the Masai in Tanzania (very patriarchal). They set up a simple game where participants were paid to throw balls into a bucket, and were paid up to $3 (4500 TSH) to compete. The game certainly gave insight into the long arm effect of patriarchal culture on reducing women's appetite for competition, but I can't read this paper without thinking about the externalities of participation. The authors admit that they weren't exactly perceived as participating in a partnership for local development:

Gneezy says it wasn’t long before word got around that these “ridiculous Americans” were paying villagers to throw tennis balls into buckets. People came from all over the village to play. 

Because I struggled with whether or not to pay people in my own Tanzanian research study, the consequences of participation in this study, without any noted explanation of the fuller purpose of the gender research, seem inappropriate and detrimental. Most Masai villages that I saw were a thunderstorm of land rights debacles, domestic violence, sexually transmitted disease, poor education and dangerous wildlife conflicts. These areas are certainly worth examination and understanding, but what will happen to future researchers in these Masai villages?

It seems to me that these sorts of externalities of paid participation are much more severe when the participants do not see any benefit or meaning in the purpose of the study. Did this article in Econometrica effect gender equity in the Masai study villages? Seems unlikely.

I wouldn't go so far as to pretend that I am not perceived as a white walking pile of money ("white person! give me gift!"), but gaining IRB approval is not a replacement for critical judgement about the consequences of human subject research.

Hat tip: DR

A great article from Slate on charter schools and a thought-provoking response from an English teacher at a  Chicago charter school:

The way we have to teach in charters, for the most part, is skill based...This means that in a "writing" class, I am basically teaching basic grammar and how to approach the English section of a standardized test. With all of the "skills" that I have to teach and assess in a year there is barely time to teach things that I think would actually help get kids interested in writing, things like figurative language and creative writing.

Some people, and I think I mostly agree with them, think that this inherently shows the inequality of the education system. For instance, you would never hear an argument that students at New Trier need more "skill based" instruction because it is assumed that students who attend New Trier already have those skills when they enter the school.

We have also noticed with our students that we shelter them so much, and make them adhere to such rigorous standards, that they often struggle once they leave the charter model (even on full ride scholarships to four-year colleges). They have a hard time developing ideas on their own and being self-disciplined without all of the structures we have in place to try to teach them to be self-disciplined. My school is now trying to incorporate teaching (and assessing, naturally) character strengths to students to try to combat this problem. Sigh. I don't know what the answer is...

Hat tips: JMM & NAJ

1. For the 3% of the population that gets these jokes (though slightly higher in this community), this is hysterical.

2. The fascinating realism of academic fraud:

“There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman."

3. On GDP metric improvements:

But the head of a statistics agency would choose to invest in different things if his outside financial incentives tilted towards getting external donors and academics the GDP and MDG measures they want for their big reports. That’s not necessarily the information governments need to govern well.

4. Does saving the Isle Royale wolves undermine the nonintervention principle of wilderness?

5. Threats of politicians involved in academic peer-review? Not cool.

Hat tips: CB, NAJ, LCN, CP

It’s true; all the children [in Minnesota] are above average.

Courtesy of my adviser's presentation on the education Millennium Development Goals during the CSAE conference at Oxford last month.

I'm pretty sure I was the only one in that got the joke.