An MIT education, on-line

September 26, 2006

Occasionally we visit the use of technology in education. It seems to me that our technical acumen far outstrips our serious application of technology to learning, and we should be trying to close the gap.

MIT offers OpenCourseWare, which is a large catalog of offerings, on line. It is a step towards realizing the potential of on-line learning:

a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.

MIT OCW:

  • Is a publication of MIT course materials
  • Does not require any registration
  • Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting activity
  • Does not provide access to MIT faculty

Historians, especially teachers wishing to crib for great syllabi, will want to look at offerings like the courses from Pauline Maier. Economists should explore offerings in economics, too.

Leave a Comment » | Economics, History, On-line education, On-line learning, Teaching, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Two things: Economics

September 24, 2006

You can look up “meme” if you need to or want to. I won’t clutter your life with an explanation here.

I recently learned of the Two Things meme, again courtesy of WordPress’s tags tools. It appears to have been most developed by Glenn Whitman, at California State University – Northridge (also here).

Two Things about economics:

  • One: Incentives matter.
  • Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Arnold Kling at Liberty Fund’s Econ Library is uncomfortable with the claims. Tim Worstall at Tech Central less so.

Neither of the two things in economics will do a whit for a student on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). For TAKS, basic economics isn’t as important as the political end of the scale. For TAKS, Texas kids need to know what the Texas Education Agency thinks important about economics, which is:

1. Economic systems are classified as:

  • Traditional or subsistence agriculture;
  • Command or Demand (usually totalitarian government)
  • Free market or free enterprise (usually a democracy)
  • Mixed system

2. Countries with free enterprise economic systems have the highest per capita income, GNP, educational levels, and lowest infant mortality rates.

No kidding. The second point is very interesting to me, considering that Cuba has the highest literacy rate and lowest infant mortality rate in the Americas. Clearly these are not hard and fast rules — the exceptions should be very interesting.

5 Comments | Economics, TAKS, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Economics of globalization — will it work?

September 22, 2006

Economics sits on the back burner in the Bathtub these days.

Something interesting brews in international economics. South America had been a place of triumph for the Chicago school, with great success in turning a right-wing dictatorship into a free market system in Chile, for example, and free market inroads in Venezuela. But what happened in the past ten years? Elections in Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile did not run as some Chicago school advocates may have hoped.

So, recently I’ve been looking at some of the comments of Joseph Stiglitz, whose views are not always perfectly in accord with the line out of Washington. Stiglitz headed Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, spent time at the World Bank, and won a Nobel.

Maybe we should listen to him. From the University Channel at Princeton:

Lee C. Bollinger, Tina Rosenberg, Nancy Birdsall, George Soros, and Joseph E. Stiglitz discuss solutions for some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as debt, unfair trade, the “resource curse”, the need to curb harmful emissions and world poverty

Image Streaming video (length: 1:44:43)

Panelists:
– Lee C. Bollinger, President, Columbia University (Host)
– Tina Rosenberg, Editorial Writer, The New York Times (Moderator)
– Nancy Birdsall, President of the Center for Global Development
– George Soros, Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Institute; Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC
– Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist; University Professor at Columbia University; Chair of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought; Executive Director of Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University; former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton; former Chief Economist of the World Bank

(taped September 18, 2006, at Columbia University)

In particular, high school kids in Texas show skepticism towards the free-market economics pushed in many forums. Especially for kids with family and economic ties in Mexico, Central and South America, there can be serious cognitive dissonance with what they see in the textbook. I have found it very effective to discuss alternative views, and to find high quality sources of information. I’m considering adding Stiglitz to my list, which is a short one at the moment, populated chiefly by the modern Hernando DeSoto.

(I found this via shizaam.)

1 Comment | Current History, Economics, Freedom - Economic, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Revisionism of current history, 9/11/2001

September 17, 2006

There is a “carnival” of economics posts that I rarely link to because I find the topics often far out on the right wing end of the scale, offensively so to me, the Economics and Social Policy Carnival.

In the current issue of the Carnival there is this post from :textbook evaluator, discussing complaints about history texts and their treatment of the attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, and the aftermath. It is a serious, thought-provoking post. It raises deep questions about the purpose of a history text:

What dismays me most about the arguments over “what history should be covered” or “how it should be covered,” is that we never arrive at the thought that kids themselves should “do” history. We don’t trust our teachers or kids enough to give them many sides or perspectives on an issue, and let them try to make sense of it. We don’t teach them historical thinking skills: we instead argue over what “truths” to feed them.

Criticism of texts of such high quality is in short supply — and, considering the process for textbook approval in Texas, we need a lot more, high quality criticism of texts.

I may pay more attention to the Economics and Social Policy Carnival from now on.

3 Comments | Current History, Economics, Education, TAKS, TEKS, Textbook Selection, Textbooks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Recruiting a few good men, to teach

September 1, 2006

Our local paper has been full of interesting stuff the past week — as it should be.

On August 30 the Dallas Morning News editorialized in favor of more men in teaching — citing a study that found men in the classroom improve the academic performance of male students.  (The newspaper said it is a study by economist Thomas Dee at Swarthmore, but it provides a link to a Hoover Institution magazine that does not mention the study . . . [grumble].)

For anyone looking for new arguments to get more men into the classroom, it’s tempting to hold up the new study as a manifesto. Could more men teachers help stem the hemorrhaging dropout numbers for boys? Or reverse the dwindling percentage of boys headed to college? Are more single-sex schools the answer?

The study is certainly not the last word on the matter; the author hopes it could be a jumping-off point for fine-tuning how schools entice youngsters into absorbing information. We hope so.

We also hope the study could be an enticement for the next young man to hear that calling to the classroom. And the next. And the next …

There should be no mystery about how to attract qualified male teachers.  How about we start by paying a competitive wage?  Teaching is a profession where one can take time out, spend seven or ten years getting a Ph.D., and then get a job that pays roughly what a garbage collector would make had he started collecting garbage at the time the teacher starting the march to the graduate degrees.  A recent graduate of our local high school spent a few months’ training with the Army Reserve, and upon return has an administrative job with a local police department — at a salary equal to a degreed teacher with a few years’ experience.  Cops on the beat don’t make enough, either — but someone who spends a decade getting ready to teach should do better than a rookie cop not on the beat.

In contrast, MBAs at accounting firms start out around six figures.  They often have less education and less experience than the teachers — and they are expendable (look at how many are weeded out by the firm in the first three years).  But with that kind of salary offered, a kid might make a well-reasoned calculation that two years of graduate business school and a life in accounting would be better than a Ph.D. and a life teaching in public schools.  I think it patently unfair to say that teaching then gets the leftovers — but it makes one wonder, doesn’t it?

Public schools are the only enterprises where we demand higher standards for the employees, and then hold salaries down until the employees reach the standards.  In every other line of work, the market raises wages.  We might learn a lot by observing (was that Stengel or Berra?)

For those conservatives who ask that education be treated more like a free market — do they really anticipate what would happen were that to occur?  A good teacher is easily worth as much as a starting accountant.  Why not use market devices to improve education?  Raise the wages. 

More men, and more highly-qualified women, will pursue teaching when we let the salaries float to levels comparable to other industries with similar demands and education requirements.  I read Milton Friedman — vouchers or no vouchers, he makes the case that education will be mired in mediocrity until we spend the money to attract the best people possible to teaching, and to keep them there.

6 Comments | Business, Business Ethics, Economics, Education, Education spending, Public education, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Texas adds financial literacy standards

August 15, 2006

Teachers in Texas got notice in the past week of the financial literacy standards the State Board of Education approved over the summer. There is a push on nationally to add these standards in every state. The Department of the Treasury has been working to push such standards and create materials for teachers to use in classrooms.

Most Texas school districts were working on such a curriculum, I think — every one I checked was, if that’s any indication.

Odd side note: The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) provided meetings with the Department of the Treasury and guidance for state school boards doing what Texas did — but the Texas SBOE dropped out of that organization over an anti-bullying campaign also promulgated by NASBE. The problem was that NASBE’s program said homosexual kids should not be bullied, and the Texas board members disagreed. Yes, I know, there is no rational way to defend that decision, but there you go. Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Business Ethics, Economics, Education, State school boards, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Sutherland’s “Americana” cartoons

August 13, 2006

I stumbled across Bibi’s Box, a blog that appears to be devoted to finding videos available on the internet. Bibi wrote about John Sutherland, a producer for Walt Disney who struck out on his own in 1944. He became famous, or infamous, for doing cartoons for hire that capitalist enterprises wanted to make available for schools.

Some of us Baby Boomers will recognize almost every one of these films. Film distribution was always problematic back then, before Federal Express or UPS and overnight air delivery to almost anywhere in the world, and back when 16-mm film projectors were often old, cranky monsters that defied the most tech-savvy teachers to make a film dance on a screen. Consequently, to increase the circulation, many of these films also ended up in the afternoon cartoon fests that local television stations ran for “kiddies.”

The images are rich. There are time-bound charicatures of middle-class Americans, and full use of other American iconography. In a 1948 film, “Make Mine Freedom,” Sutherland’s film shows a Member of Congress dressed as a southern politician (though without an accent), the labor representative in denim overalls, the capitalist factory boss with a cigar and morning coat with striped pants, and the farmer in stereotypical straw hat. In a later scene, some of the characters parade in a “Spirit of ’76” fashion, with drum, fife and flag, across the Lincoln Memorial.

Some of the images are corny, but they are rich mines for classroom use, where the images form powerful mnemonic devices for kids who don’t know the history of that era. I have used chunks of “Schoolhouse Rock” for individual study on specific areas — last year I required high school history students to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution, and the “Schoolhouse Rock” version helped enormously. Sutherland’s films could be as useful, in certain topics.

In any case, Bibi has links to more than a dozen of Sutherland’s cartoon films.

If you find a good use for one, please let me know.

2 Comments | Cold War, Curricula, Economics, Education, History, History video sources, Lesson plans | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Berlin Wall’s 45th

August 13, 2006

August 13, 2006, is the 45th “anniversary” of the erection of the Berlin Wall, the totem of the Cold War that came down in 1989, pushing the end of the Cold War. Residents of Berlin awoke on this day in 1961 to find the communist government of East Germany erecting what would become a 96-mile wall around the “western quarters” of the city — not so much to lay siege to the westerners (that had been tried in 1948, frustrated by the Berlin Airlift) as to keep easterners from “defecting” to the West. The Brandenburg Gate was closed on August 14, and all crossing points were closed on August 26.

From 1961 through 1991 1989, teachers could use the Berlin wall as a simple and clear symbol for the differences between the communist Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union and her satellite states, and the free West, which included most of the land mass of Germany, England, France, Italy, the United States and other free-market nations — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. I suspect most high school kids today know very little about the Wall, why it was there, and what its destruction meant, politically.

This era of history is generally neglected in high school. Many courses fail to go past World War II; in many courses the Cold War is in the curriculum sequenced after the ACT, SAT and state graduation examinations, so students and teachers have tuned out.

But the Wall certain had a sense of drama to it that should make for good lessons. When I visited the wall, in early 1988, late at night, there were eight fresh wreaths honoring eight people who had died trying to cross the Wall in the previous few weeks (in some places it was really a series of walls with space in between to make it easier for the East German guards to shoot people trying to escape) — it’s an image I never forget. Within a year after that, East Germans could travel through Hungary to visit the West, and many “forgot” to return. Within 18 months the wall itself was breached.

The Wall was a great backdrop for speeches, too — President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin in June 1963, and expressed his solidarity with the walled-in people of both West and East Berlin, with the memorable phrase, “Ich bin ein Berliner,“ which produced astounding cheers from the tens of thousands who came to hear him. There are a few German-to-English translators who argue that some of the reaction was due to the fact that “Berliner” is also an idiomatic phrase in Berlin for a bakery confection like a jelly doughnut — so Kennedy’s words were a double entendre that could mean either “I am a citizen of Berlin,” or “I am a jelly doughnut.”  [Be sure to see the comments below, from Vince Treacy (9/28/2010).]  Ronald Reagan went to the same place Kennedy spoke to the Berlin Wall, too, to the Brandenburg Gate, in his famous June 1987 speech which included a plea to the Soviet Union’s Premier Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Construction of the Berlin Wall, photol collected by Corey S. Hatch

Construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 –photo from University of Utah, by Corey Hatch.

Update March 9, 2007: Berlin Airlift information and lesson plans are available from the Truman Library, here, here and here.

Update November 9, 2009: Notes on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall

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27 Comments | Cold War, Democracy, Economics, Famous quotes, Free market economics, Freedom - Political, Geography - Political, History | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

1984: History of technology

August 3, 2006

A nicely-written blog, “I Had an Idea This Morning,” had a piece by Anne from Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, New York in the past week about just how far off the mark was George Orwell’s novel 1984 in its portrayal of the use of information devices, “1984 vs. the Blog: Orwell’s Big Blooper.” Instead of the government having a monopoly on the publication of news to be used to suppress the people, the people have fractured such distribution especially with the use of the internet. I find especially thought-provoking the last two paragraphs of Anne’s piece:

Looking back, it almost seems like the totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union were the fruit of a never-to-be-repeated phase in the evolution of communications technology. For a brief, horrific period, governments had total control over powerful tools—television and radio—that they could use to communicate with their citizens. The internet, by design, makes such centralized control impossible.

But does that make us safe from groups of super evil mean crazy people? It’s been widely observed that new technologies—from gunpowder to nuclear fusion—have historically been harnessed to serve malevolent ends. Why should communications technology be any different? While mass communication technology helped enable the rise of totalitarian regimes that laid down the law, the internet is pretty good at empowering destructive entities that work outside the law—terrorists, for one. Just as the new technology has given us a billion little blogs and news sites and tv channels and video streams, it’s also giving us thousands of new, super organized hate-based groups to worry about.

The actual year 1984 is a generation gone, and we don’t see exactly the evils that Orwell wrote about. Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Economics, History, Lesson plans, TAKS, Technology, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Schelling’s Nobel lecture on game theory

July 25, 2006

I can’t improve on this post, so I’ll just plagiarize it wholesale from University of Illinois College of Law Prof. Thomas S. Ulen’s post at the Law and Econ Prof Blog:

I have been returning to the Nobel website periodically to see if Professor Thomas C. Schelling’s Nobel Prize Lecture (he and Robert Aumann won last October’s Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) had been posted. It has not yet been, but if you have a broadband connection and RealPlayer, you can listen to and watch Professor Schelling’s marvelous address on the practical significance of game theory in deterring nuclear war. The talk is about 42 minutes long. Click here.                       TSU

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only teacher of economics who is not a master of game theory. I’ve been waiting for the lecture, too. Eventually it will be posted at the Nobel Foundation’s site on the prizes.

Leave a Comment » | Economics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Einstein, compound interest: Does not compute

July 22, 2006

Earlier, in the thread about bad quotes, bad scholarship and Ann Coulter, a person asked about another quote that has dogged speech writers and investment seminars for years:

I am trying to discern the author of the quote “compound interest is the greatest invention of the 20th century.” Since you mention neither Twain nor Einstein remarked this, do you know who did?? I would be very grateful.

Comment by fact checker 07.11.06 [emphasis added]

Twain’s words are well enough cataloged that, had he said it, one would be able to track it down. Think for a few minutes about Twain’s finance issues, however, and you realize it is highly unlikely that he would have said it. Twain invested heavily in a machine to mechanically set type, to publish the memoirs of former-President Ulysses Grant; the machine did not work, and Twain lost his fortune. He undertook a grueling lecture tour to make money back. Later financial setbacks forced another long lecture tour. It is not probable that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) would ever have said anything about simple compound interest. It was not his style to invest passively, or for long-term returns.

The line about compound interest being the “best invention” of mathematics, or of the 20th century, or whatever, is more often attributed to Albert Einstein. Google “compound interest” and “Einstein” and you get tens of thousands of hits.

It’s a good line, a snappy introduction to the Rule of 72 for a presentation to potential investment clients or for the introduction to the rule in a high school classroom. I have a short PowerPoint presentation on the Rule of 72 for economics classes, and I would have used the quote — had it checked out. My experience as a journalist and speechwriter urged caution.

I wrote to the Albert Einstein Institute, to the American Institute of Physics, and to other places where people might know obscure sources of Einstein’s sayings and writings, to try to verify the quote. It surely did not turn up in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, nor in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Those specialists in Einstein data and history could not verify the quote (which is the careful way of phrasing it). One fellow I spoke with said if he had a nickel for every time he was asked to verify the compound interest quote, he would have no need for compound interest.

I can say with confidence that Albert Einstein never wrote or said anything about compound interest. While Einstein wrote about a wide variety of topics, compound interest is not among them.

Fatherflot at Daily Kos wrote about this quote in early 2005, after several advocates of privatizing Social Security had used the quote in one version or another to introduce their own remarks. A lot more people read that blog, but no one there could verify it, either. There are several variants on the quote illustrated there. I think that an alleged quote’s lack of veracity is often demonstrated by mutations. For real quotes from real people, generally someone knows the original work and starts writing about what it’s supposed to be — at many cocktail parties a line about “consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds” will be corrected (Emerson said it is “a foolish consistency,” and it is “little minds”), for one example.

Einstein didn't say what this poster claims he said, either.

Einstein didn’t say what this poster claims he said, either.

As I told fact checker, I think the line was invented 40 or 50 years ago. From my checking, I would bet it was a copywriter or speechwriter working for some investment house. We may hope to someday track down the origin of the quote, and if the originator is still alive, ask her or him why the line was attributed to Einstein.

Fillmore’s bathtub runneth over with bad quotes, hoaxes gone amok, and other errors. We just try to flush a few down the drain.

37 Comments | Albert Einstein, Bad Quotes, Economics, Misquotes | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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