Last week, I had a labral repair surgery in my hip. It was not hugely invasive: an hour and a half of arthroscopic repair under general anesthesia, three weeks of crutches and two months of physical therapy. Most importantly for me, it is nowhere near as painful as an ACL repair.

Check out those numbers above. Four hours of time at a surgery outpatient center, two of which were in recovery, cost $16,582. Seriously? This doesn't include pre or post-operative appointments or any physical therapy.

My insurance only paid 35% of that price tag. HealthPartners negotiated that price for "bringing" patients like me to the surgery center. So, what is the point of the 16k, then? I highly doubt any uninsured person would have this semi-elective surgery (not recommended for folks with arthritis and not totally necessary for folks aren't "active"). Also, my Mom brought me to the surgery.

Also take note of that relieving 0 next to member responsibility. I guess the university makes up for its meager graduate assistant stipend with a fairly generous health plan.

Hat tip: HVM

I'm not sure if you've noticed, Minneapolis, but there is an enormous swath of highways in the middle of the city. I've lived one mile from this highway knot for four years and it still blows my mind.

It separates awesome hippy hangouts like Seward from the thriving East African hotspots in Cedar-Riverside, trendy downtown from the University hipsters. The Vikings stadium, the Mississippi River, Little Earth Indian Reservation (one of the largest urban Indian reservations), the University of Minnesota, the best coop in the cities, Hennepin County Medical Center and the Mill City Museum are all within one mile of this highway maze. Did the city miss the memo about how mixing folks is good for growth?

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.

1. Three good reasons we still haven't gotten rid of malaria. 

I'll cut to the chase: although we've worked hard at scientific and economic reasons, the cultural reasons for the persistence of malaria are the real challenges. The awkward part is that in the most malaria-infected places of the world, malaria is perceived as nothing more than a common cold. Shah proposes that we attack the disease according to the priorities of people who live with it. It's a good approach, but when something as simple as a bed net can prevent so many deaths, though, I think behavior change is not an inappropriate goal.

2. American inequality is mind-blowing. I also missed the chance to join the Applied Economics department in seeing this.

The third link about MOOCs is actually becoming its own post... stay tuned.

Hat tip: PC & CSC

Are finally up. Here.

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.

To clarify, this graph shows frequency of previous contraceptives used for women who have hidden contraceptive use in the past across twelve villages in Meatu, Tanzania. So, while hiding a condom is obviously difficult, women who have hidden the pill from their partner have also used condoms in the past. Injections are extremely popular in this rural district, notably for their effective duration.

Easily the most interesting graph I've made in a while.

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

My fantastic field assistant and his wife had their first baby two months after the start of the (year-long) intervention. I'm proud that we both work for an organization that gave him paternity leave. Now, four months after the start of the intervention, he has a bad case of malaria.

I'm worried about the size of the detectable effect on outcome variables, but health and babies are more important. Too bad good health doesn't get you three stars on a regression output table.