Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 446
October 2, 2012
*Mismatch*
The authors are Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and the subtitle is How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.
Here is the book’s website, and a summary:
… law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr. draw on extensive new research to prove that racial preferences put many students in educational settings where they have no hope of succeeding. Because they’re under-prepared, fewer than half of black affirmative action beneficiaries in American law schools pass their bar exams. Preferences for well-off minorities help shut out poorer students of all races. More troubling still, major universities, fearing a backlash, refuse to confront the clear evidence of affirmative action’s failure.
As you may know, the Supreme Court starts hearing oral arguments on affirmative action on October 9th. I have not much followed the empirical debate on affirmative action, but it seems to me this is likely the best recent book on the “anti” side. On the pro side, you can read The Shape of the River, by William Bowen and Derek Bok.
October 1, 2012
Crowdsourcing the lowest fare
Travelers with complex travel plans may have noticed, however, that the search results aren’t necessarily consistent. This has created a business opportunity for Flightfox, a start-up company based in Mountain View, Calif., which uses a contest format to come up with the best fare that the crowd — all Flightfox-approved users — can find.
A traveler goes to Flightfox.com and sets up a competition, supplying information about the desired itinerary and clarifying a few preferences, like a willingness to “fly on any airline to save money” or a tolerance of “long layovers to save money.” Once Flightfox posts the contest, the crowd is invited to go to work and submit fares.
The contest runs three days, and the winner, the person who finds the lowest fare, gets 75 percent of the finder’s fee that the traveler pays Flightfox when setting up the competition. Flightfox says fees depend on the complexity of the itinerary; many current contests have fees in the $34-to-$59 range.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank @ArikSharon.
Raj Chetty wins a MacArthur fellowship
The story and list of other winners is . Here is Chetty on scholar.google.com.
Assorted links
The New Republic covers MRU
I very much enjoyed this new article by Marc Tracy. (The site is now up! And if we haven’t processed your registration yet it is because we are swamped with numbers, our apologies, please bear with us.) Excerpt:
The videos, several of which were made available to me, are indeed more friendly than the stuff you typically find on Coursera, if not as viscerally captivating as, say, a TED talk. Manufactured with Microsoft PowerPoint and a $4 iPad app, they tend to last in the neighborhood of five to eight minutes—Cowen, who possesses a parody of an economist’s precision, noted on his blog, “The average video is five minutes, twenty-eight seconds long”—with segments frequently summarizing and highlighting the most interesting parts of academic papers (“Seasonal Food Prices and Policy Responses: A Narrative Account of Three Food Security Crises in Malawi”); these papers are duly credited and usually available online for free.
Narrated by Cowen or Tabarrok, the videos share the curiosity, eclectic interests, and tongue-in-cheek dryness of the blog. For example, Cowen riffs off a paper that showed that when cable television was introduced to several Indian villages, the fertility rate fell. He intones, in a studied deadpan reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s belabored enunciation: “We don’t know, however, whether this is because women or families have better information about birth control, or simply that they’re exposed to alternative visions of different lifestyles on TV, and maybe want to spend their time in ways other than just having more children.”
September 30, 2012
Maybe today you should go visit MRUniversity.com
The link is here, and we thank you for your interest. Read Alex’s opening statement for more information:
Welcome to MRU! At right you will find our first course, Development Economics. Click the + to see the videos in each section. New sections will be released at the beginning of every week and there will be bonus sections released during the middle of some weeks. Practice questions for each video provide some simple feedback.
Anyone can watch videos and take the practice questions but to truly participate by asking and answering questions, posting material, partcipating in chats and so forth you will need to register. Please do register as this will also help us to plan for future courses. There is no charge for registering.
In order to make our material as widely available as possible the videos default to low resolution, 380p, but if you have good bandwidth we recommend bumping them up to 480p which will increase video and audio resolution. You can do this on many platforms (not all) by clicking near the bottom right of the video and then clicking the settings button.
The course is designed for videos but every lecture also includes a downloadable MP3 in the section Related Materials.
The “How to Use” section (link in bar at top), includes ideas such as flipping the classroom and some basic directions for making your own videos.
In coming weeks, we will be releasing new features and announcing virtual and live chats!
Women economists see the world differently
The biggest disagreement: 76% of women say faculty opportunities in economics favor men. Male economists point the opposite way: 80% say women are favored or the process is neutral.
As for politics:
Female economists tend to favor a bigger role for government while male economists have greater faith in business and the marketplace. Is the U.S. economy excessively regulated? Sixty-five percent of female economists said ‘no’ — 24 percentage points higher than male economists.
The story is here. The article is “Are Disagreements Among Male and Female Economists Marginal at Best? A Survey of AEA Members and Their Views on Economics and Economic Policy,” Ann Mari May, Mary G. McGarvey and Robert Whaples, Contemporary Economic Policy (forthcoming), but I can’t seem to find a copy on-line.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
Fooled by satire
An Iranian news agency has reported as fact an entirely fictitious survey carried on The Onion website earlier this week which claimed that most rural white Americans would vote for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ahead of Barack Obama.
The English-language service of Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency republished the spoof story from the satirical website word-for-word.
It even went so far as to include a made-up quote from a fictional West Virginia resident it idendified as Dale Swidersk who claimed he would rather go to a baseball game with Mr Ahmadinejad because “he takes national defence seriously and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does”.
The story is here.
Assorted links
1. The reality vs. the rhetoric, multiple lessons in this one.
2. John Fahey documentary (trailer) on the way (Kickstarter funded), and on YouTube here is Fahey’s Poor Boy.
3. Stephanie Coontz tries to rebut claims of male decline (though I don’t think she quite confronts the “matching model” being used here).
4. The economics of video games.
5. The 2012 Gramophone Award winners.
Lottery Winners as Natural Experiments
The Detroit News: A Lincoln Park woman who won $1 million in the Michigan Lottery and was later convicted for still collecting state welfare died Saturday from an apparent drug overdose.
…Clayton isn’t the only Michigan Lottery winner to become notorious after making headlines.
In August, millionaire Freddie Young, of Detroit, was sentenced to 20 to 35 years in prison for fatally shooting his daughter’s landlord.
Young, 64, was convicted on second-degree murder and felony firearm charges in the May 2011 killing of Australian native Gregory McNicol.
Prosecutors said Young won an estimated $1.57 million share of a Michigan Lottery jackpot in February 2011. Three months later, he shot 45-year-old McNicol over $1,000 in back rent owed by his daughter.
Here is my previous post on this subject with more systematic data.
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