Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 389
March 6, 2013
Department of spurious correlations?
Here is the abstract of a forthcoming AER piece, written by M. Keith Chen:
Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice.
Here is from a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Geoffrey Pullum:
Chen’s data on languages comes from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), and his evidence on prudence from the World Values Survey (WVS). Both are fully Web-accessible. Sean Roberts, who studies language evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, decided to investigate the other linguistic factors treated in WALS to see how they related to prudence. He compared the goodness of fit for linear regressions on each of a long list of properties of languages (the independent variables), using as the dependent variable the answers that speakers gave to the WVS question “Did you save money last year?”
The results (see this blog post for an informal account) were jaw-dropping. He found that dozens of linguistic variables were better predictors of prudence than future marking: whether the language has uvular consonants; verbal agreement of particular types; relative clauses following nouns; double-accusative constructions; preposed interrogative phrases; and so on—a motley collection of factors that no one could plausibly connect to 401(k) contributions or junk-food consumption.
There is a bit more here.
For the pointer I thank Mike T. And I would gladly run a response from Chen, if he has interest in drafting one.
Addendum: Here is an important update from the critic, after improving the specification of his alternative fits:
The results showed that there was only one other linguistic variable that improved the fit of the model more than future tense. That is, future tense was a better predictor than 99% of the linguistic variables. For comparison, Dediu & Ladd’s test of the link between linguistic tone and Microcephalin/ASPM found that the hypothesised link was stronger than 98.5% of many thousands of links between genetic and linguistic factors.
Very good sentences
People punish other people when they don’t know what else to do with them.
That is from the excellent Adam Phillips, from the latest issue of the LRB (my favorite periodical these days), gated link here.
Assorted links
1. A non-English-speaker imitating an American accent (badly).
2. Can peer grading work for MOOCs? And troubled students in MOOCs, including MOOC murder as a concept.
3. Paul Krugman drives the deeply innocent Miles Kimball into a flurry of response. Here are some EU interchanges and reactions with Krugman, the last tweet cited is classic mood affiliation.
4. Does Chinese have a word for “nerd”? Here is a new book on the economics of baseball.
Online Education and Jazz
A common responses to my article, Why Online Education Works, is that there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. The time I saw Otis Clay in a small Toronto bar, my first Springsteen concert, the Teenage Head riot at Ontario Place these are some of my favorite and most memorable cultural experiences and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.
Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.
Edmundson also says this about online courses:
You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will.
Edmundson reminds me of composer John Philip Sousa who in 1906 wrote The Menace of Mechanical Music, an attack on the phonograph that sounds very similar to the attack on online education today.
It is the living, breathing example alone that is valuable to the student and can set into motion his creative and performing abilities. The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art.
Sousa could not imagine it, but needless to say recorded music has inspired many inventive geniuses. Edmundson’s failure of imagination is even worse than Sousa’s, online courses are already creating intellectual joy (scroll down).
(Sousa was right about a few things. Recorded music has reduced the number of musical amateurs and the playing of music in the home. Far fewer pianos are sold today, for example, than in 1906 when Sousa wrote and that is true even before adjusting for today’s much larger population. Online education will similarly change teaching and I don’t claim that every change will be beneficial even if the net is good.)
Sousa and Edmundson also underestimate how much recording can add to the pursuit of artistic excellence. Many musical works, for example, cannot be well understood or fully appreciated with just a few listens. Recording allows for repeated listening and study. Indeed, one might say that only with recording, can one truly hear.
Recording also let musicians truly hear and thus compare, contrast and improve. Most teachers will also benefit from hearing and seeing themselves teach. With recording, teaching will become more like writing and less like improv. How many people write perfect first drafts? Good writing is editing, editing, editing. Live teaching suffers from too much improv and not enough editing. Sometimes I improv in class–also called winging it–but like most people I am usually better when I am better prepared. (Tyler, in contrast, is the Charlie Parker of live teaching.)
Sousa and the modern critics of online education also miss how new technologies bring new possibilities. For Sousa then, as for Edmundson today, the new technologies are simply about recording the live experience. But recorded music brought the creation of new kinds of music. Indeed, a lot of today’s music can’t be played live.
In his excellent 1966 disquisition, The Prospects for Recording (highly recommended, fyi), pianist Glenn Gould said that using the technology of the studio “one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination.” The same will be true for online education.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments.
I never knew there were turmeric futures (MIE)
Turmeric futures prices on Wednesday shot up by 3.23 per cent to Rs 6,330 per quintal as speculators created fresh positions, driven by an improvement in demand in the spot market amid lower output expectations.
Turmeric is perhaps my favorite spice and I sprinkle plenty of it on the Indian rice I cook. The article is here, via James Crabtree.
March 5, 2013
Words of wisdom
Austerity is the result of countries’ democratic decisions to wait until the last minute before acting, under the pressure of the markets, mainly by raising taxes rather than implementing long-waited reforms. Denying this, by claiming that austerity has been imposed on countries – rather than self-inflicted – and looking for scapegoats, is the biggest threat to democracies going forward.
That is from Lorenzo Bini Smaghi. I would put it this way: the higher the “multiplier,” the more we should be asking: why doesn’t the private sector want to reemploy these people?
Bill Gates reviews Acemoglu and Robinson
He doesn’t like the book so much. Here is his bottom line:
This points to the most obvious theory about growth, which is that it is strongly correlated with embracing capitalistic economics—independent of the political system. When a country focuses on getting infrastructure built and education improved, and it uses market pricing to determine how resources should be allocated, then it moves towards growth. This test has a lot more clarity than the one proposed by the authors, and seems to me fits the facts of what has happened over time far better.
He also objects to the critique of foreign and, and the review closes with this:
As an endnote, I should mention that the book refers to me in a positive light, comparing how I made money to how Carlos Slim made his fortune in Mexico. Although I appreciate the nice thoughts, I think the book is quite unfair to Slim. Almost certainly, the competition laws in Mexico need strengthening, but I am sure that Mexico is much better off with Slim’s contribution in running businesses well than it would be without him.
The pointer is from Jeffrey Sachs.
Sydney Bleg
I will be in Australia next week talking about Launching the Innovation Renaissance. Most of the time I am tied up speaking in Melbourne and then to PM&C, Treasury, and the Innovation departments in Canberra. I will, however, have a bit of free time in Sydney. Recommendations welcome.
Assorted links
1. Vending machine markets in everything, seedbombs.
2. Why a United States of slow growth is so problematic.
3. Ezra Klein makes the case for U.S. economic optimism. The case for pessimism, I would say, is that the case for optimism is drawing on true facts, and yet growth still is relatively slow.
4. Does Twitter have a negative and also liberal bias?
6. Colin McGinn on Ray Kurzweil, and what is wrong with the Brain Activity Map proposal?
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