Off-topic: innovation, names, duplication

Only because it's a really cool article and I just discovered it, and not because it really has anything to do with anything, "In The Air" by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker is well worth a read. It's about a fascinating organization called Intellectual Ventures, but there are just a bunch of fun little snippets. A couple:

This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern.

In the nineteen-sixties, the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a famous essay on scientific discovery in which he raised the question of what the existence of multiples tells us about genius. No one is a partner to more multiples, he pointed out, than a genius, and he came to the conclusion that our romantic notion of the genius must be wrong. A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.

Surely it must be getting harder to have simultaneous discovery, in a world where research communities are global and transmission is very fast? Gladwell's article goes on to talk about something like the standing on the shoulders of giants concept of building on the existing body of knowledge, speculating that multiples are proof of inevitability of inventions or discoveries.

What about economics? Are economic researchers building on existing research? It can sometimes seem that the questions we ask are so specific and arcane that the chance of simultaneous "discovery" is low; so much so that's it's tempting to wonder if we should even be using the word "discovery". I wonder what, if anything, we could attach the word to in the history of economics? Obviously hindsight is 20/20, but it's difficult to see what really was new or difference-making in the field, going back as long as you care. What has the discipline of economics done for us?

And what will it do, then? Gladwell's article talks about a group of smart people who get together to try to invent stuff. What "economic" (however they choose to interpret the word) questions would such a group want to tackle, if any? Where is the innovation coming from in our field? I look at the list of Nobel prize topics, and, don't get me wrong, I like finding things out for their own sake, but what are these things really doing, either practically, for the world, or simply for the body of knowledge we call economics? Of course we're not supposed to be able to see where the next huge idea is coming from - that's the whole point - but if we haven't had a really important idea from, or even an important question for, academic economists for so long, if ever, isn't a little pessimism forgivable?

I'm often tempted to argue, not entirely facetiously, that the methodology of economics and its status as a grounds for "discovery" was pretty much done 70, 80 years ago, and the rest is just application, gravy and statistical analysis. Even if that were true, would it be such a bad thing?

Education, or, What do people do?

David Glenn in the Chronicle asks 'what explains the growing gap in wages?' The arguments covered run that the number of people going to college hasn't kept pace with the demand for skill by employers, and that the slowing of educational attainment has caused wage inequality to increase. I'm biased towards any argument for universal education, even up to the college level (whether this would really increase the level of 'skills' is another matter, but I think that's secondary), but I'm also a little skeptical that massively expanding higher education would bring down wage inequality in the way Glenn and his cited studies speculate.

First we have to worry about the usual signaling story - is college just an indicator that someone's smart rather than something that makes them smarter? - but more than that, what would people do? What do people do? The 2000 US census has this (pdf link):

Management, professional and related: 33.6%
Service: 14.9%
Sales and office: 26.7%
Farming, fishing and forestry: 0.7%
Construction, extraction and maintenance: 9.4%
Production, transportation and material moving: 14.6%

'Production occupations' on their own make up 8.5%. Now, a potted history of modern development might go something like this:

1) agriculture; we don't all have to be farmers anymore, let's start making stuff: industrial revolution
2) cheap global trade in stuff; we don't all have to make stuff anymore, let's do professional services
3) now what?

If you are even willing to entertain that kind of a story, you have to wonder what it would really mean in the labor market to hypothetically educate everyone to college level (again, I like it for its own sake; not trying to argue against education). Buying the skills angle from the Chronicle article probably means believing that if we educate everyone they can all get the kind of Wall Street/banking/consulting/legal jobs that are typical of the direction OECD economies are heading in, right? Perhaps some of the scientists can do tech research, but for a bunch of college graduates you're looking at a lot of things that don't exactly scream 'tangible production'.

That's not quite the same as the argument the Chronicle's citations are opposing, which is to say that wage inequality has gone up as demand for skilled labor has fallen; it's more to say that the whole production side of the US economy is just a whole lot different than it was when wages were more equal. We've got a chicken/egg problem: if we educated everyone, would
a) everyone, and thus the country, be more productive, and if so in what industry;
b) the wage gap close by bringing the bottom up and the top down;
c) a lot of college graduates work in unexpected places;
d) the breakdown of occupation change in some way, and if so in what way?
The last one would be very interesting, but which way would it go? Would we simply have yet more bankers and consultants, or would there be a more fundamental shift? Is it possible to get by on a smaller service sector, or would we end up with the same service sector populated by college grads?

Eternal students

Just in time to miss the question of economics as vocation versus learning for its own sake comes this article from BBC News. "French students shy of the real world", it says, and the message is that France is a mess because French students are intellectually curious. Perhaps I paraphrase slightly.

France may be a global leader in high technology, but employers complain that today there are far too few students studying science and technology and there are far too many studying "soft subjects" which leaves them ill-prepared to join the real world of work.

I asked a passing student what he wanted to do when he left university. "I want to be an eternal student, " he said. "Just learning for learning's sake."

Fair enough, that might not get a great deal done in the scheme of things, but what a great sentiment. We are, after all, talking about a rich country here. Some young people will surely become scientists and engineers, if that's what they want. Some other young people will find that a "soft subject" (?) will be the one that stimulates them to want to know and to learn. The luxury afforded to the people who do not struggle to find food to eat or a place to live is to indulge in pursuits like these. We can afford to foster excellence in knowledge and learning, whatever form it may take.

Or we could start a state-run forced labor program.

"But with such poor economic growth and such huge public debt, this country now needs its clever young students to leave the university campus and start ploughing their skills and enthusiasms into the profitable world of work."

Chills. Why not just set up labor camps and get it over with? Who said anything about "growth" or "profitable"? Didn't the student just tell you he wants to simply learn? Was it not once the case that universities and learning were valued on their own merits? Can the technical and vocational not coexist with the abstract? I know there exist some non-technical careers out there for which the key requirement is "intelligent". As an employer, maybe I need scientists, but maybe I need people who are bright and creative and literate.

As I argued yesterday, there are particular implications for a field like economics which is torn between feeling itself purely vocational and purely not. This French debate then mirrors the tension at the heart of the teaching of economics; can it not be OK to pursue this field because it's interesting?

Then it's bizarre that it feels like many students take economics courses not because they enjoy them or because they are vocational. Perhaps economics just looks good, perhaps even because it's confused with finance or business. Perhaps we, the educators, are complicit in the charade because it brings high enrollments and money. There is no incentive to change the program, even if the core is rotten. It's like an asset bubble - the value of economics as a major, the value of economics to a university, to economics departments, goes up and up and up, but at the bottom there is nothing.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there is something down there. But if it's not intellectual curiosity, a desire to know, then what is it?

Why don't we understand economics education?

Increasingly preoccupying my thoughts recently is the remarkable fact that the economics profession doesn't really know anything about how undergraduate courses are received by the students who take them.

Unquestionably, the most common type of research into undergraduate education is the type like this, this, or this (sorry to link to protected academic articles): teaching methods. The semi-famous series by William Becker and Michael Watts derides "chalk and talk" in favor of more creative methods of lecturing. In "Teaching Economics at the Start of the 21st Century: Still Chalk-and-Talk", those authors conclude:

"In contrast to the passive learning environment that characterizes the teaching of economics, class discussion and other forms of active learning, rather than extensive lecturing, are now the dominant forms of instruction in other fields of higher education."

I agree in principle that it's no fun to try to learn - really learn - any subject by sitting in a lecture, but goodness me, "active learning"? How about "devote some time to reading a variety of books and material on the subject you're learning"? How about "sit down with colleagues or experts and talk and listen"? In my life, those have been the most effective ways of getting information and understanding into my head. Am I alone? To me, that's active learning, and it doesn't require fancy technology or a three ring circus, just a good library and good educators with time to devote to small groups of students. Lectures, especially to large classes, must naturally be presented without a lot of nuance.

The cult of the classroom experiment, or demonstration, or performance art, or audience participation, is not, however, the real issue. By far the bigger problem is that we have no idea - repeat, no idea - what students want, expect or get from economics courses. Why do they enroll? Why don't they enroll? Why do they drop out? Why do they major in economics? What do they think economics is about, before, during, after they take economics course? What if they never do? Who do we lose?

Why don't we have the first idea about the answers to those questions? Have we ever asked? The mind boggles. We're try to patch up the wreckage of the lecture system, when all the while we might be sailing to entirely the wrong place in our leaky boat. Forget the method for a moment - what are we even actually teaching?

In a separate article to the one I quoted up above, William Becker's "Teaching Economics in the 21st Century" says:

"Media headlines scream the need to understand macroeconomics. At a minimum, courses in macroeconomics should enable students to have a greater understanding of the economic news as it appears in the Economist, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal than those without an education in economics."

I've covered this ground before. How about, at a minimum, we teach economics properly? How about, at a minimum, we kick civics into a course where it belongs and actually show students what economics can be, and what it is? Compromising the integrity of an entire field of hundreds of years of intellectual thought with political, philosophical and moral implications so that people can understand the Wall Street Journal? Who wants to understand the Wall Street Journal?! From the same article:

"Departments of economics have two powerful reasons to care about improving the quality of their teaching. First, the contest for resources within institutions of higher education implies that the number of majors and enrollments matter.... Whether students will take more courses in economics or choose to major in the field because of improved teaching is hard to say, but, at least, improved teaching is unlikely to hurt enrollments!"

Hilarious, I'm sure. I'm kidding: it's sickening. Can we entertain the notion that perhaps higher enrollments are not compatible with improved teaching? We are supposed to be running an institute of excellence in learning and thought. Whoring for enrollment is disgusting.