Saturday, August 31, 2019
An Interesting Piece on How Paying for College Creates Stress on Middle Class Life
If you do read this piece I'd be curious to know whether your family is in this situation and/or whether you know others at the U of I who are in this situation.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Where we are
This morning we had 39 students registered and that still is the number as I write this post. Maybe the adds and drops have settled down. I hope so.
Of the 39, 28 have completed the first concept quiz. I would like every students who is registered to complete that. There is also another concept quiz due next Tuesday on the next PowerPoint presentation.
We are roughly a half lecture behind from what I had scheduled for the first week, meaning I had jammed in too much stuff to cover. I'm guessing that by the end of next Tuesday we will be a full lecture behind and then we'll push things back a day. I said in the first class session that the pace will be determined by us. We are under no obligation to cover topics in a specific time frame.
For those of you who started in Engineering and then transferred to Economics, I encourage you to read the blog post by my former student who is writing under the alias Susan Athey Econ 490 fall 2017. She wrote quite a poignant piece that might speak to you.
More generally, we might talk some about depression and school and about depression and work. It's not the most pleasant topic, but it is a reality that you should be aware of. We all will hit a wall sometime in our careers. We should consider what might be learned from the experience, how you likely can bounce back, and some ways to keep it from repeating over and over again.
So I'd like to discuss that at some depth. I am expecting us to get to the University as an organization, on Tuesday, but how far we go on that we'll have to play by ear.
Of the 39, 28 have completed the first concept quiz. I would like every students who is registered to complete that. There is also another concept quiz due next Tuesday on the next PowerPoint presentation.
We are roughly a half lecture behind from what I had scheduled for the first week, meaning I had jammed in too much stuff to cover. I'm guessing that by the end of next Tuesday we will be a full lecture behind and then we'll push things back a day. I said in the first class session that the pace will be determined by us. We are under no obligation to cover topics in a specific time frame.
For those of you who started in Engineering and then transferred to Economics, I encourage you to read the blog post by my former student who is writing under the alias Susan Athey Econ 490 fall 2017. She wrote quite a poignant piece that might speak to you.
More generally, we might talk some about depression and school and about depression and work. It's not the most pleasant topic, but it is a reality that you should be aware of. We all will hit a wall sometime in our careers. We should consider what might be learned from the experience, how you likely can bounce back, and some ways to keep it from repeating over and over again.
So I'd like to discuss that at some depth. I am expecting us to get to the University as an organization, on Tuesday, but how far we go on that we'll have to play by ear.
Gift Exchange and Collegiality as the Basis for a High Productivity Work Environment
There is a rather large literature on "efficiency wages," where workers earn job rents (they are paid more than their opportunity cost) and this is done for productivity reasons. There are a variety of explanations for this. The gift exchange story gives one of those and is attractive, in part, because it is more sociology than economics. (We clearly care about the welfare of others, but that conern is usually absent in the economics approach.) The efficiency wage approach, in turn, followed a similar approach called "implicit contracts" where, in effect, the employer and the workers have a mutual agreement of the sort, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. When it's time for your own back to scratched, you earn a (quasi) rent. The hero of the implicit contracts story is Arthur Okun. He referred to the back scratching arrangement as "the invisible handshake." Incidentally, implicit contracts can exist elsewhere than the labor market. For example, a shop owner might very well have an implicit contract with her loyal customers.
The gift exchange model is the brainchild of George Akerlof. Given that Janet Yellen was the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Akerlof may have come to be widely known as her significant other. But he is a first-rate economist in his own right. Indeed, he is a Nobel Prize winner.
The vision for why gift exchange produces superior performance was supplied by Dumas père in The Three Musketeers. It is embedded in the relationship between Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (the workers doing the same job) and D'Artagnan (their manager) and is captured in the phrase, "All for one and one for all." Akerlof crafts that vision and related ideas from sociology to make an economic model of it. For the non-economist, it might be framed as collegiality-driven productivity. Here are the model's basic elements.
There is a minimal performance standard below which the employee will get fired. There is a performance norm, substantially above the minimal standard, that typifies what workers produce. The difference between the minimal standard and the higher norm constitutes a gift that workers give to the firm. Likewise, there is a minimal wage below which workers would quit and find work elsewhere and there is an actual wage above that minimum that the firm pays to workers. The difference is a gift that the firm gives to its employees. Gift giving demands reciprocation for it to be sustained. When that happens all involved feel good about the place of work and productivity is high as a consequence.
There is one more piece to the puzzle. This regards how productivity is observed and what explains variation in productivity from one worker to the next and for one worker over time. From the worker's own perspective, this is mainly due to random factors - circumstances beyond the employee's control. Or, in the case where there is clearly a drop off in a particular employee's performance, it can be attributed to outside of work stresses (e.g., a sick child at home) that are apt to be temporary in nature. The correct response in this case is not to punish the employee but rather for co-workers to chip in and pick up the slack. Sometime in the future, the employee who received such help will lend a hand when another co-worker has a similar problem.
Someone who favors pay for performance but comes to the issue of appropriate compensation with an open mind might grant that collegiality-driven productivity can be a good thing, as long as the fire burns within all the workers, but will argue that eventually a worker burns out and turns into dead wood. That is not temporary. It is a permanent change. Then he will argue that the gift exchange approach sustains the dead wood, who act as a drag on the entire system. One needs, instead, a time-consistent way to purge the system of the dead wood. Performance based pay does that. (This issue has been discussed quite a bit with regard to teacher pay and teacher tenure.)
Akerlof's model does not address that critique. Before I provide my own answer, let me take a slight detour. The Akerlof gift exchange model is essentially social in nature. There is a different reason to depart from performance based pay that is intellectual in nature and is particular to knowledge work. This other view is articulated by Daniel Pink in this RSA Animiate video and focuses on psychological explanations for productivity. There can be performance anxiety or, if you prefer, writer's block. High performance is achieved when intrinsic motivation is strong and the individual becomes so involved in the work as to entirely lose a sense of self. Making extrinsic rewards overt moves the individual's focus away from the intrinsic motivation and thereby lessons productivity. Better to have the economic rewards provided up front so that one can put them out of mind when the real work commences. While I have critiqued this video on how it represents the economics, I concur with its representation of the importance of intrinsic motivation.
Burnout then can be thought of as the disappearance of intrinsic motivation. The response to the critique is to look at the causes for why intrinsic motivation should disappear. One possible cause is a sense of plateauing in the work. There is little left to learn, no inherently new challenges. For the most part it is a rehash of what's come before - been there, done that. When it happens, it would seem to make sense that the worker should move onto a new challenge; do something else. There is, however, a different cause that is also possible. It is that the individual confronts organizational barriers that seem arbitrary and anti-productive and those barriers repeatedly thwart the individual's creative efforts. Eventually, the individual wears down from not seeming able to accomplish sensible change. Gallows humor becomes part of the routine as the individual loses the desire to fight the system. This second cause might reasonably dictate that more fundamental organizational change is necessary. The burden shouldn't be placed on the individual to accommodate organizational inertia.
It is this second cause that forms the basis of the response to the critique. The Akerlof gift exchange approach must happen within a dynamic organization that makes organizational learning paramount. (See Senge's The Fifth Discipline.) Employee burnout might still happen in such organizations, but it would be far rarer. When it does happen the appropriate organizational response should be job reassignment rather than immediate severance, this in accord with the gift exchange view. Collegiality, in tone and actual practice, then characterizes good jobs and is at the heart of how the organization remains productive.
In my years working in learning technology, everyone I've encountered knows this implicitly, though I expect that the vast majority of them were not acquainted with Akerlof's gift exchange model. I wonder if people reading this post with a prior disposition toward pay for performance might consider collegiality based alternatives instead.
The gift exchange model is the brainchild of George Akerlof. Given that Janet Yellen was the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Akerlof may have come to be widely known as her significant other. But he is a first-rate economist in his own right. Indeed, he is a Nobel Prize winner.
Akerlof's theory is rather simple to articulate, as is the debate over the right way to provide incentives in the workplace. The quintessential issue is whether pay should be performance based and hence vary from individual to individual who hold the same job or if instead pay should be position based and not feature such idiosyncratic variation, except perhaps on a seniority basis Of course, even with fixed pay per job, performance matters. But it is rewarded differently than when there is pay for performance. The argument is that promotion should be the primary reward for exceptional performance. Within a job classification, the workers need to be managed fairly, which provides the basis for equal treatment. Fairness is more of a sociology concept than an economics one.
The vision for why gift exchange produces superior performance was supplied by Dumas père in The Three Musketeers. It is embedded in the relationship between Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (the workers doing the same job) and D'Artagnan (their manager) and is captured in the phrase, "All for one and one for all." Akerlof crafts that vision and related ideas from sociology to make an economic model of it. For the non-economist, it might be framed as collegiality-driven productivity. Here are the model's basic elements.
There is a minimal performance standard below which the employee will get fired. There is a performance norm, substantially above the minimal standard, that typifies what workers produce. The difference between the minimal standard and the higher norm constitutes a gift that workers give to the firm. Likewise, there is a minimal wage below which workers would quit and find work elsewhere and there is an actual wage above that minimum that the firm pays to workers. The difference is a gift that the firm gives to its employees. Gift giving demands reciprocation for it to be sustained. When that happens all involved feel good about the place of work and productivity is high as a consequence.
There is one more piece to the puzzle. This regards how productivity is observed and what explains variation in productivity from one worker to the next and for one worker over time. From the worker's own perspective, this is mainly due to random factors - circumstances beyond the employee's control. Or, in the case where there is clearly a drop off in a particular employee's performance, it can be attributed to outside of work stresses (e.g., a sick child at home) that are apt to be temporary in nature. The correct response in this case is not to punish the employee but rather for co-workers to chip in and pick up the slack. Sometime in the future, the employee who received such help will lend a hand when another co-worker has a similar problem.
Someone who favors pay for performance but comes to the issue of appropriate compensation with an open mind might grant that collegiality-driven productivity can be a good thing, as long as the fire burns within all the workers, but will argue that eventually a worker burns out and turns into dead wood. That is not temporary. It is a permanent change. Then he will argue that the gift exchange approach sustains the dead wood, who act as a drag on the entire system. One needs, instead, a time-consistent way to purge the system of the dead wood. Performance based pay does that. (This issue has been discussed quite a bit with regard to teacher pay and teacher tenure.)
Akerlof's model does not address that critique. Before I provide my own answer, let me take a slight detour. The Akerlof gift exchange model is essentially social in nature. There is a different reason to depart from performance based pay that is intellectual in nature and is particular to knowledge work. This other view is articulated by Daniel Pink in this RSA Animiate video and focuses on psychological explanations for productivity. There can be performance anxiety or, if you prefer, writer's block. High performance is achieved when intrinsic motivation is strong and the individual becomes so involved in the work as to entirely lose a sense of self. Making extrinsic rewards overt moves the individual's focus away from the intrinsic motivation and thereby lessons productivity. Better to have the economic rewards provided up front so that one can put them out of mind when the real work commences. While I have critiqued this video on how it represents the economics, I concur with its representation of the importance of intrinsic motivation.
Burnout then can be thought of as the disappearance of intrinsic motivation. The response to the critique is to look at the causes for why intrinsic motivation should disappear. One possible cause is a sense of plateauing in the work. There is little left to learn, no inherently new challenges. For the most part it is a rehash of what's come before - been there, done that. When it happens, it would seem to make sense that the worker should move onto a new challenge; do something else. There is, however, a different cause that is also possible. It is that the individual confronts organizational barriers that seem arbitrary and anti-productive and those barriers repeatedly thwart the individual's creative efforts. Eventually, the individual wears down from not seeming able to accomplish sensible change. Gallows humor becomes part of the routine as the individual loses the desire to fight the system. This second cause might reasonably dictate that more fundamental organizational change is necessary. The burden shouldn't be placed on the individual to accommodate organizational inertia.
It is this second cause that forms the basis of the response to the critique. The Akerlof gift exchange approach must happen within a dynamic organization that makes organizational learning paramount. (See Senge's The Fifth Discipline.) Employee burnout might still happen in such organizations, but it would be far rarer. When it does happen the appropriate organizational response should be job reassignment rather than immediate severance, this in accord with the gift exchange view. Collegiality, in tone and actual practice, then characterizes good jobs and is at the heart of how the organization remains productive.
In my years working in learning technology, everyone I've encountered knows this implicitly, though I expect that the vast majority of them were not acquainted with Akerlof's gift exchange model. I wonder if people reading this post with a prior disposition toward pay for performance might consider collegiality based alternatives instead.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Observations from the Class Session Today
Several things threw me off my game a bit, one I hadn't anticipated, another I had but didn't make a suitable accommodation. Then a couple were just that I expected one thing and something else happened.
Students to my right sat closer to the front of the room than students to my left. On the left the first two rows of seats were empty and there were students in the last row. On my right I believe each row had some students. The effect was to create a stagger in the seating from right to left. Coupling that with some difficulty hearing people in the back and we will make some adjustments on Thursday in the seating so this is less of an issue moving forward.
I am very nearsighted and on my home computer the computer resolution is set low so text looks large. The computer resolution on the classroom computer was much higher and I was put off by that some. I think I had too many windows open for navigation purposes. I either need to figure this out or bring in my own laptop. We'll see.
I was so concerned with keeping the audio down when playing the PowerPoint before the class session started, because I didn't want to disturb other classes, that I think it didn't catch your attention as it otherwise might. We might spend a few minutes next week on what an effective presentation does and how one makes one.
Checking the concept quiz results, it appears that quite a few students did the concept quiz during our class. If anyone did it but wasn't present in the classroom, that is a definite no-no. Even for those who were present, it's bad form to multiprocess in this way. It is an indicator that you aren't paying full attention in class. This is one reason I will ask you put to away electronic devices after the first few minutes in class from here on out.
I have a photo roster of the class. I believe the photos are from your I-Card, though I'm not 100% sure of that. I certainly didn't memorize that roster, but I thought I'd recognize more students than I did. I wonder if you feel you now look like your I-Card photo. Either this Thursday or next Tuesday, I will take attendance, not to track whether you are there but so I can learn who you are and match names with faces.
Students to my right sat closer to the front of the room than students to my left. On the left the first two rows of seats were empty and there were students in the last row. On my right I believe each row had some students. The effect was to create a stagger in the seating from right to left. Coupling that with some difficulty hearing people in the back and we will make some adjustments on Thursday in the seating so this is less of an issue moving forward.
I am very nearsighted and on my home computer the computer resolution is set low so text looks large. The computer resolution on the classroom computer was much higher and I was put off by that some. I think I had too many windows open for navigation purposes. I either need to figure this out or bring in my own laptop. We'll see.
I was so concerned with keeping the audio down when playing the PowerPoint before the class session started, because I didn't want to disturb other classes, that I think it didn't catch your attention as it otherwise might. We might spend a few minutes next week on what an effective presentation does and how one makes one.
Checking the concept quiz results, it appears that quite a few students did the concept quiz during our class. If anyone did it but wasn't present in the classroom, that is a definite no-no. Even for those who were present, it's bad form to multiprocess in this way. It is an indicator that you aren't paying full attention in class. This is one reason I will ask you put to away electronic devices after the first few minutes in class from here on out.
I have a photo roster of the class. I believe the photos are from your I-Card, though I'm not 100% sure of that. I certainly didn't memorize that roster, but I thought I'd recognize more students than I did. I wonder if you feel you now look like your I-Card photo. Either this Thursday or next Tuesday, I will take attendance, not to track whether you are there but so I can learn who you are and match names with faces.
Getting Deeper Into Some Items From the First Class Session
Is School Work or Play?
Silliness and Learning - Can They Happen Simultaneously?
A view of school as work. (I believe this is the prevalent view, even today.) The Little Rascals were on TV when I as a kid.
In spite of the prevalent view, might school actually be play some of the time?
The Fun Theory - How hard would it be to design school in this mode?
Your professor when he was in high school, a true math nerd. Play and work were jumbled together.
Good Technique for Learning - Mindfulness
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
Warren Beatty
Silliness and Learning - Can They Happen Simultaneously?
What do cows in Greece say?
A view of school as work. (I believe this is the prevalent view, even today.) The Little Rascals were on TV when I as a kid.
In spite of the prevalent view, might school actually be play some of the time?
The Fun Theory - How hard would it be to design school in this mode?
Your professor when he was in high school, a true math nerd. Play and work were jumbled together.
Down and to the right, the coach of the Math Team and my favorite teacher, Mr. Conrad. With bright kids, really good teachers make the learning a kind of play.
Good Technique for Learning - Mindfulness
There was a slide about optimal technique for learning. Here I want to drop the jargon word - optimal - and simply contrast good technique, which we will call taking a mindful approach, from poor technique, which we we will call taking a mindless approach. A mindful approach does help to build human capital. A mindless approach skims the surface of the subject matter only and produces little real learning.
If it is your habit to be reading regularly non-course books during the semester, I encourage you to make this book one of your choices to read. If not that, consider reading it over the winter break. It's a fairly quick read and will help you reflect about your own approach to learning and what you might do to make your own learning more mindful. In the meantime, you can read this short essay now. It too is by Ellen Langer and gives the highlights of points made in more depth in the book.
Examples:
I teach without lecture notes. I've done that for most of my career. When I did use notes I found I had my head in the paper I was holding so I didn't spend enough time looking at students. It turns out that the the faces of students are pretty revealing about how engaged they are with the discussion and whether they are getting it or not. I also would go way too quickly with the content. To a large extent, students should set the pace of the discussion, and do so with their questions or comments. This is especially true if the subject matter is difficult. But what's difficult for the student might not be difficult for the professor. So more often than most instructors would care to admit, the student gets left in the dust as the professor pushes onward - to no real benefit for anyone. Without the notes I have to reproduce in my head the topic for that class session and there is an element of improvisation in doing so, even when I have a pretty good idea of what we'll be discussing. The improvisation is being mindful, as it is like thinking through the matter anew.
As I've gotten older, I do occasionally forget things and will have a senior moment, now and then. One reason for having the Tag on the class site, Extending the class session online, is to cover things I had forgotten to mention in class. And if it does look like I'm having a senior moment, please be kind. That can be disconcerting and the consequences can linger as a result, even after the senior moment has passed.
Here's a different example, one that students who took an earlier offering of this course told me about, perhaps 7 or 8 years ago. They reported that in many of their classes they didn't need to attend, if they could get the lecture notes from a friend. (So, if I understand this correctly, the friends could divide up who would attend and then share the lecture notes after that.) They said their job was to memorize those notes and then at the exam spit back what was in the notes to answer the questions. The way they described the practice it sounded pretty mindless. Is it something common in courses now?
Is Creativity The Same As Mindful Learning?
Here is Maslow on The Creative Attitude. (You have to be on the campus network for the link to work.) You should be aware that Lincoln, one of our examples in the first class session, was considered a consummate self-actualizer by Maslow. As Maslow argues that self-actualization and creativity are pretty much the same thing, this is an indirect argument that how Lincoln taught himself, reading by the light of the fire, was both a path to self-actualization and to creativity.
And here is a more recent piece by Csikszentmihalyi on The Creative Personality. You might read this to see if it fits you in some respects. Also, you might ask whether you find these descriptions attractive or unattractive. Many of them express the dualism of yin and yang.
We should also reckon with the question of whether creativity is about the process of doing things or if it is about product. Some people are reluctant to consider themselves creative because on the product front they've yet to produce things that others would find creative. There are some quotes from Thomas Edison that are helpful here:
If we think of creativity as the initial spark, typically there must be a lot of follow through to get to an interesting product. The self-actualizer is one who maintains concentration through the entire process. If you can generate the spark, but you have trouble on the persistence that's needed afterwards, note that there is now much discussion of Grit and that it is something that can be acquired, though doing so itself is effortful.
Is Creativity The Same As Mindful Learning?
Here is Maslow on The Creative Attitude. (You have to be on the campus network for the link to work.) You should be aware that Lincoln, one of our examples in the first class session, was considered a consummate self-actualizer by Maslow. As Maslow argues that self-actualization and creativity are pretty much the same thing, this is an indirect argument that how Lincoln taught himself, reading by the light of the fire, was both a path to self-actualization and to creativity.
And here is a more recent piece by Csikszentmihalyi on The Creative Personality. You might read this to see if it fits you in some respects. Also, you might ask whether you find these descriptions attractive or unattractive. Many of them express the dualism of yin and yang.
We should also reckon with the question of whether creativity is about the process of doing things or if it is about product. Some people are reluctant to consider themselves creative because on the product front they've yet to produce things that others would find creative. There are some quotes from Thomas Edison that are helpful here:
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that will not work.
If we think of creativity as the initial spark, typically there must be a lot of follow through to get to an interesting product. The self-actualizer is one who maintains concentration through the entire process. If you can generate the spark, but you have trouble on the persistence that's needed afterwards, note that there is now much discussion of Grit and that it is something that can be acquired, though doing so itself is effortful.
Puzzles for the Economics of Organizations
Your textbook, when we get to it, will articulate something called The Efficiency Principle. Organizations tend to produce the efficient outcome and that is indeed part of their purpose. When we see what evidently looks inefficient, we should wonder whether there is an economics explanation for the inefficiency. In particular, if a big part of the University's job is to encourage deep learning in its students, then how can the practice described above with the lecture notes persist? That is evidently a puzzle.
It turns out that economists have a range of possible explanations for inefficiency. Some we'll cover later in the course. Here I will mention a particular explanation that relies on a notion called "lock-in." The best known paper that discusses the phenomenon is by the Economic Historian Paul David. It is called Clio and the Economics of QWERTY. Although this paper was written for professional economists, it is readable by the lay person and it's actually quite fascinating, in its analysis and in its conclusion. QWERTY was originally efficient. It was designed to slow typists down so the keys wouldn't jam so often. As long as we had manual typewriters, QWERTY probably remained efficient, even with improvements in the mechanisms. Electric typewriters got introduced in the mid to late 1960s. Word processors and personal computers came 10 to 15 years later. There was then no reason to slow down typists. Yet QWERTY persists to this day. Here's a little bit to explain why that is.
People learned touch typing, a skill needed so they could look at their document while they typed, rather than look at the keyboard. The ability to touch type is a kind of specific human capital. It has value in the keyboard layout it was learned and no value whatsoever with a different keyboard layout. So those already knowledgeable about QWERTY wanted their PCs to use it. Likewise, the schools that taught touch typing wanted QWERTY to persist as their training approach was built around the assumption that QWERTY would be the keyboard design.
In other words, lock-in is about interdependencies that end up supporting the status quo, whether it remains efficient or not. The status quo was not always that and when it was new it was designed to solve a then current issue. So it was efficient at gestation and in the aftermath. But if it is persists for a while, because of lock-in, it likely will no longer be efficient. Yet what is better can't be implemented because the lock-in prevents that from happening.
Note that lock-in is quite important in current information technology and all the big IT companies, Facebook and Google are two notable examples, have as their goal to lock users into their online environments. Also note that this is tied to the revenue models that these companies use. Consider two alternatives - (1) users get access to content via subscription to the service or (2) users get access to the content which is ad supported. Alas, the subscription model lost in this competition. The ad-supported model won, giving the providers incentive to cull personal use information, so the ads could be customized. This has led to all sorts of abuse of the information. I'm sure you know of many such examples of this that I won't get into here. The point is that even with all of the bad practices, where the users personal information is at risk, use persists, because the users are locked in.
We might next consider the lecture itself is illustrating a kind of lock-in. Lecture emerged as an adjunct of Gutenberg's printing press (which meant that books need not be hand written). Books, however, were still scarce. So the lecture arose as a way to disseminate information that was in a book to those who didn't have the book. Then those who were taught by lecture and who themselves became teachers would also lecture, because that's the approach they knew. This persists to this day, even though now information is clearly abundant. Indeed, everyone is on information overload. Yet in many disciplines, lecture is the main form of instruction. I do want to note that a lecture format can seem quite similar to a seminar format, if Q&A is allowed throughout and the audience aggressively asks questions. That's the way it is when the audience is itself full of professors and the person presenting is giving a talk on current research. With undergraduates in the audience in a course setting, however, the audience tends to be more passive unless the instructor actively does things to get the students to talk up.
Getting back to our example about the lecture notes as the be all and end all in some courses, others have written about the lock-in in ways that make it seem like a pervasive phenomenon. The paragraphs below are from a paper called What We're Learning About Student Engagement From NSSE: Benchmarks for Effective Educational Practices by George Kuh. (You can access this paper if you are on the campus network.)
People learned touch typing, a skill needed so they could look at their document while they typed, rather than look at the keyboard. The ability to touch type is a kind of specific human capital. It has value in the keyboard layout it was learned and no value whatsoever with a different keyboard layout. So those already knowledgeable about QWERTY wanted their PCs to use it. Likewise, the schools that taught touch typing wanted QWERTY to persist as their training approach was built around the assumption that QWERTY would be the keyboard design.
In other words, lock-in is about interdependencies that end up supporting the status quo, whether it remains efficient or not. The status quo was not always that and when it was new it was designed to solve a then current issue. So it was efficient at gestation and in the aftermath. But if it is persists for a while, because of lock-in, it likely will no longer be efficient. Yet what is better can't be implemented because the lock-in prevents that from happening.
Note that lock-in is quite important in current information technology and all the big IT companies, Facebook and Google are two notable examples, have as their goal to lock users into their online environments. Also note that this is tied to the revenue models that these companies use. Consider two alternatives - (1) users get access to content via subscription to the service or (2) users get access to the content which is ad supported. Alas, the subscription model lost in this competition. The ad-supported model won, giving the providers incentive to cull personal use information, so the ads could be customized. This has led to all sorts of abuse of the information. I'm sure you know of many such examples of this that I won't get into here. The point is that even with all of the bad practices, where the users personal information is at risk, use persists, because the users are locked in.
We might next consider the lecture itself is illustrating a kind of lock-in. Lecture emerged as an adjunct of Gutenberg's printing press (which meant that books need not be hand written). Books, however, were still scarce. So the lecture arose as a way to disseminate information that was in a book to those who didn't have the book. Then those who were taught by lecture and who themselves became teachers would also lecture, because that's the approach they knew. This persists to this day, even though now information is clearly abundant. Indeed, everyone is on information overload. Yet in many disciplines, lecture is the main form of instruction. I do want to note that a lecture format can seem quite similar to a seminar format, if Q&A is allowed throughout and the audience aggressively asks questions. That's the way it is when the audience is itself full of professors and the person presenting is giving a talk on current research. With undergraduates in the audience in a course setting, however, the audience tends to be more passive unless the instructor actively does things to get the students to talk up.
Getting back to our example about the lecture notes as the be all and end all in some courses, others have written about the lock-in in ways that make it seem like a pervasive phenomenon. The paragraphs below are from a paper called What We're Learning About Student Engagement From NSSE: Benchmarks for Effective Educational Practices by George Kuh. (You can access this paper if you are on the campus network.)
The more pages students write, the more pages faculty members have to read and give feedback about. And the more of that we do, the more likely it is that students will make appointments during office hours to talk with us about that feedback. In terms of student engagement, all this is generally positive. But it becomes problematic in terms of allocating time across multiple faculty priorities.
And this brings us to the unseemly bargain, what I call the “disengagement compact”: “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.” That is, I won’t make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won’t have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades-B’s and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning-on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.
To this, I'd add two additional effects that support the lock-in. In the early 2000s, when you were very young, the then President George W. Bush pushed through No Child Left Behind, and "the accountability movement" had its moment in the sun. Standardized testing took on greater importance, as a way to measure whether improvement in the schools was happening, the intended consequence, and students became far more grade conscious as a result, the unintended consequence. The other effect, on the instructor side, is that more and more undergraduate education has the teaching done by non-tenure-track faculty. (We'll talk about why this is in the next class session.) These faculty don't have the job security that those with tenure have and they need the students they teach to give them decent teaching evaluations, so they can keep their jobs. Each of these factors reinforces the disengagement compact.
Before getting to the next item, here are a couple of other ways that lock-in manifests at the university. The first is with regard to the academic calendar. Summer is treated differently than fall or spring. This is because 100+ years ago, when the economy as a whole was largely agrarian, students had to go home to help their families with the planting and with the harvest. Very few, if any, students do that today. Yet we treat the summer session differently and practices have grown around it, such as the internship during the summer, that keeps the summer session as it is, even though it would be more efficient to have three equal terms a year - fall, winter, and summer, and to get students to graduate earlier as a result. The other example is given by a rhyme I wrote some years ago called, The first ten days blues. It's about the add-drop period at the start of the semester, which made sense when we did registration on paper, but doesn't make sense anymore with registration online, yet it persists. I'm also including it to show your professor is a bit over the deep end, but does have a sense of humor. So if you find this one is silly but liked it anyway, then I've hit my mark.
Signaling and GPA
Old TV commercial about Abe Lincoln needing a college degree to get a job.
Michael Spence's article called Job Market Signaling, August 1973, which was a foundational piece in the then new information economics. Spence eventually became a Nobel Prize winner. This paper is one reason why. My guess is that the model itself is too difficult for most students in the class, but reading the introduction of the paper is probably do-able and you might find it interesting.
I will describe the model briefly, but before doing that, what is signaling about? It is helpful to begin with a notion of private information. In a transaction between a buyer and a seller, the seller might have information that that the buyer cares about regarding the quality of what is being sold. If higher quality fetches a higher price, then the seller has incentive to represent the quality as high, regardless of the true quality. But talk is cheap and both the buyer and seller should understand that. So such representations should rightfully be ignored, as with them it is impossible to separate the chaff from the wheat.
Signaling is about taking a costly action that is meant to communicate the private information. The uninformed party (in this case the buyer) makes an inference about the quality based on observing the signal. This works when high quality sellers are willing to incur the cost of the signal, but low quality sellers are not. The signal then serves to separate the types and enable the buyer's inference.
In Spence's model, the students ability is the private information and the signal is getting a college degree (not the GPA, just the degree). At the time the paper was written, the big cost in attending college was the opportunity cost of time for students, who might otherwise work. Nowadays, tuition is probably larger than that opportunity cost, but tuition doesn't differentiate between high ability and low ability students. Getting back to Spence, in his model the high ability students were willing to accept the cost of college if employers would then infer they were high ability, so hire them at a good wage. The low ability students would not. So the college degree worked as a credible way to communicate about the student's ability.
For us, we need to come up with some interpretation of what ability means in this context. And we need to ask whether high ability in school translates to high performance on the job. Ability can mean either something truly innate, for example, some people can separate their middle and fourth fingers in the Vulcan salute (from Star Trek) while others cannot (I'm one of those), and if there are such innate attributes that matter for productivity those are candidates. But ability here could also mean human capital that is acquired prior to attending college. As I write this I'm trying to resist using the word intelligence, though it might be the first thing that pops into your mind reading this. Most measures of intelligence confound innate ability with previously acquired human capital. There is also a school of thought, see Mindset by Carol Dweck, that intelligence can grow as long as the person pursues their own learning to foster such growth. What I want to avoid is any discussion of eugenics, which is out of bounds for our class. Sometimes the mere mention of the word intelligence will do that. So I'm trying to exercise caution here.
Let's turn to the issue of whether high ability in school translates to high ability on the job. If the job is being a professor, then the answer is yes and ditto for being a research scientist at a major corporation. What about other jobs, does the translation work then? The answer is less so, if at all. Here's only one dimension of this to consider. People who are introverts may thrive in a school setting but then not fare well at all in a work setting and vice versa for people who are extroverts. Note that being an introvert and being shy are not the same things, but there is a positive correlation between the two. If oral communication skills are important in the workplace, then shy people will perform less well in that context, at least until they overcome their shyness. Depending on one's major, oral communication skills may not matter much in school.
Now we want to go from the college degree as a signal, meaning the signal is binary, yes or no, to a continuous variable as signal, GPA. Waving our hands, we might now imagine the ability parameter in Spence is continuous, so a higher GPA means high ability. Does that make sense? Let me give a few different examples where it does not. One is the idea of a late bloomer. For a while the student's performance is mediocre. Then the students experiences some life changing event and thereafter performs at a very high level. The GPA, however, reflects an average of both. The flip of this can also happen. A student can have a very high GPA but be going through burnout, at or around the time of graduation. The burnout may be important for how the student will do in the workplace, but it is not captured well in the GPA. Then there is the issue of students experimenting with subjects they have not been exposed to earlier. Curiosity should be rewarded, in general, but taking a course outside of one's field, and lacking the background that others who take the course already have, the grades are apt to be poor in this setting. So high GPA students tend not to experiment in this way. Is that caution something that should be valued in the workplace?
Given these caveats, what is it that GPA signals and why is it that students these days care about it so much? Members of the class might be interested in this Website published by journalism students at the UofI Education On The Line. Because I haven't seen the data they've amassed and am not quite sure of the methodology they've employed in analyzing the data, I don't want to totally embrace their results. Yet what they argue is plausible to me. Grade inflation, measured by the fraction of A grades awarded has been rising and the GPA has become less important for getting a job, though it remains a factor.
When I was a freshman at MIT back in 1972, they had pass-fail grading only, no letter grades for the first year. In one class I took, I had earned enough points that they told me not to take the final. How many of you would prefer that sort of system? MIT went to pass-fail grading for first-year students, I believe, to take some of the stress off. Depression at MIT at that time was a serious issue. They had a high suicide rate. I mention this alternative so you have something else to consider. A quite current piece argues that sort of system will actually encourage more learning.
Wrap Up
Here I want to ask whether the lock-in to a memorizing the lecture notes approach and the GPA as a signal on the job market are two different things or essentially one and the same. Let's pose this question by considering the student's time allocation problem. If time were spent in mindful learning for a class, would that help with getting a good grade in the class or not? Does it matter how much time is put into the mindful learning activity? Might it be that the lock-in is a consequence of students over programming themselves, so in addition to their courses they have a part-time job and xyz extracurricular activities? And, if so, is this itself a consequence of students wanting to pad their resumes? (The economics jargon for this is tyranny of the extensive margin over the intensive margin. If quality of the experience is harder for an outsiders to measure, then make the list of experiences longer, because that can be measured.)
My intent in posing these questions is raise the awareness about the issues with students in the class. Ultimately, students should be in control of their own learning - whether in their courses or in other activities. How does one exercise such control? Trying to answer that question is worth the inquiry.
Before getting to the next item, here are a couple of other ways that lock-in manifests at the university. The first is with regard to the academic calendar. Summer is treated differently than fall or spring. This is because 100+ years ago, when the economy as a whole was largely agrarian, students had to go home to help their families with the planting and with the harvest. Very few, if any, students do that today. Yet we treat the summer session differently and practices have grown around it, such as the internship during the summer, that keeps the summer session as it is, even though it would be more efficient to have three equal terms a year - fall, winter, and summer, and to get students to graduate earlier as a result. The other example is given by a rhyme I wrote some years ago called, The first ten days blues. It's about the add-drop period at the start of the semester, which made sense when we did registration on paper, but doesn't make sense anymore with registration online, yet it persists. I'm also including it to show your professor is a bit over the deep end, but does have a sense of humor. So if you find this one is silly but liked it anyway, then I've hit my mark.
Signaling and GPA
Old TV commercial about Abe Lincoln needing a college degree to get a job.
Michael Spence's article called Job Market Signaling, August 1973, which was a foundational piece in the then new information economics. Spence eventually became a Nobel Prize winner. This paper is one reason why. My guess is that the model itself is too difficult for most students in the class, but reading the introduction of the paper is probably do-able and you might find it interesting.
I will describe the model briefly, but before doing that, what is signaling about? It is helpful to begin with a notion of private information. In a transaction between a buyer and a seller, the seller might have information that that the buyer cares about regarding the quality of what is being sold. If higher quality fetches a higher price, then the seller has incentive to represent the quality as high, regardless of the true quality. But talk is cheap and both the buyer and seller should understand that. So such representations should rightfully be ignored, as with them it is impossible to separate the chaff from the wheat.
Signaling is about taking a costly action that is meant to communicate the private information. The uninformed party (in this case the buyer) makes an inference about the quality based on observing the signal. This works when high quality sellers are willing to incur the cost of the signal, but low quality sellers are not. The signal then serves to separate the types and enable the buyer's inference.
In Spence's model, the students ability is the private information and the signal is getting a college degree (not the GPA, just the degree). At the time the paper was written, the big cost in attending college was the opportunity cost of time for students, who might otherwise work. Nowadays, tuition is probably larger than that opportunity cost, but tuition doesn't differentiate between high ability and low ability students. Getting back to Spence, in his model the high ability students were willing to accept the cost of college if employers would then infer they were high ability, so hire them at a good wage. The low ability students would not. So the college degree worked as a credible way to communicate about the student's ability.
For us, we need to come up with some interpretation of what ability means in this context. And we need to ask whether high ability in school translates to high performance on the job. Ability can mean either something truly innate, for example, some people can separate their middle and fourth fingers in the Vulcan salute (from Star Trek) while others cannot (I'm one of those), and if there are such innate attributes that matter for productivity those are candidates. But ability here could also mean human capital that is acquired prior to attending college. As I write this I'm trying to resist using the word intelligence, though it might be the first thing that pops into your mind reading this. Most measures of intelligence confound innate ability with previously acquired human capital. There is also a school of thought, see Mindset by Carol Dweck, that intelligence can grow as long as the person pursues their own learning to foster such growth. What I want to avoid is any discussion of eugenics, which is out of bounds for our class. Sometimes the mere mention of the word intelligence will do that. So I'm trying to exercise caution here.
Let's turn to the issue of whether high ability in school translates to high ability on the job. If the job is being a professor, then the answer is yes and ditto for being a research scientist at a major corporation. What about other jobs, does the translation work then? The answer is less so, if at all. Here's only one dimension of this to consider. People who are introverts may thrive in a school setting but then not fare well at all in a work setting and vice versa for people who are extroverts. Note that being an introvert and being shy are not the same things, but there is a positive correlation between the two. If oral communication skills are important in the workplace, then shy people will perform less well in that context, at least until they overcome their shyness. Depending on one's major, oral communication skills may not matter much in school.
Now we want to go from the college degree as a signal, meaning the signal is binary, yes or no, to a continuous variable as signal, GPA. Waving our hands, we might now imagine the ability parameter in Spence is continuous, so a higher GPA means high ability. Does that make sense? Let me give a few different examples where it does not. One is the idea of a late bloomer. For a while the student's performance is mediocre. Then the students experiences some life changing event and thereafter performs at a very high level. The GPA, however, reflects an average of both. The flip of this can also happen. A student can have a very high GPA but be going through burnout, at or around the time of graduation. The burnout may be important for how the student will do in the workplace, but it is not captured well in the GPA. Then there is the issue of students experimenting with subjects they have not been exposed to earlier. Curiosity should be rewarded, in general, but taking a course outside of one's field, and lacking the background that others who take the course already have, the grades are apt to be poor in this setting. So high GPA students tend not to experiment in this way. Is that caution something that should be valued in the workplace?
Given these caveats, what is it that GPA signals and why is it that students these days care about it so much? Members of the class might be interested in this Website published by journalism students at the UofI Education On The Line. Because I haven't seen the data they've amassed and am not quite sure of the methodology they've employed in analyzing the data, I don't want to totally embrace their results. Yet what they argue is plausible to me. Grade inflation, measured by the fraction of A grades awarded has been rising and the GPA has become less important for getting a job, though it remains a factor.
When I was a freshman at MIT back in 1972, they had pass-fail grading only, no letter grades for the first year. In one class I took, I had earned enough points that they told me not to take the final. How many of you would prefer that sort of system? MIT went to pass-fail grading for first-year students, I believe, to take some of the stress off. Depression at MIT at that time was a serious issue. They had a high suicide rate. I mention this alternative so you have something else to consider. A quite current piece argues that sort of system will actually encourage more learning.
Wrap Up
Here I want to ask whether the lock-in to a memorizing the lecture notes approach and the GPA as a signal on the job market are two different things or essentially one and the same. Let's pose this question by considering the student's time allocation problem. If time were spent in mindful learning for a class, would that help with getting a good grade in the class or not? Does it matter how much time is put into the mindful learning activity? Might it be that the lock-in is a consequence of students over programming themselves, so in addition to their courses they have a part-time job and xyz extracurricular activities? And, if so, is this itself a consequence of students wanting to pad their resumes? (The economics jargon for this is tyranny of the extensive margin over the intensive margin. If quality of the experience is harder for an outsiders to measure, then make the list of experiences longer, because that can be measured.)
My intent in posing these questions is raise the awareness about the issues with students in the class. Ultimately, students should be in control of their own learning - whether in their courses or in other activities. How does one exercise such control? Trying to answer that question is worth the inquiry.
Monday, August 26, 2019
Please Complete the Start of the Semester Survey
It's quite brief and should be easy for you to do. You can find it here.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Are Economists Good For The Economy?
This piece says they aren't. I want to note that not all economists should be included here. But the majority of the profession should be.
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
A Little Nostalgia About Me
This post might be most interesting for what's in the sidebar on the lower right, which gives how I described myself to people who came to my blog back then (August 2006). At the time the blog was hosted on a campus site, a server meant for other functions. I had to move the blog when that server shut down.
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Some Blogging Factoids
Photo of your alias
If you find a photo image of the economist who gives the first part of your alias, you can download that and then re-upload it to your Blogger profile. There is a section for profile image. If you include that image, then all your most current post listed on the class site will have a thumbnail of the image, as will any comments you make.
This is not necessary, but it is a nice touch that will personalize our site more.
Hyperlinks in posts
Unlike what you may be used to in other online environments, if you simply paste a link into your blog editor it will publish the text of the link, but the link itself will not be live. To make a live link, you need to select the link tool from the toolbar. Also, the custom is to highlight some text and link that rather than to insert the url into your text.
Hyperlinks in comments
There is no toolbar for making comments. Comments do accept basic html commands. So if you are comfortable with that you can use those commands to put in a link or to format your text. If you are not comfortable with that, ignore this. It is not necessary. I really don't know if it is a skill that people need to have after they graduate. Ten years ago I would have said it was. Now, I'm not sure.
If you find a photo image of the economist who gives the first part of your alias, you can download that and then re-upload it to your Blogger profile. There is a section for profile image. If you include that image, then all your most current post listed on the class site will have a thumbnail of the image, as will any comments you make.
This is not necessary, but it is a nice touch that will personalize our site more.
Hyperlinks in posts
Unlike what you may be used to in other online environments, if you simply paste a link into your blog editor it will publish the text of the link, but the link itself will not be live. To make a live link, you need to select the link tool from the toolbar. Also, the custom is to highlight some text and link that rather than to insert the url into your text.
Hyperlinks in comments
There is no toolbar for making comments. Comments do accept basic html commands. So if you are comfortable with that you can use those commands to put in a link or to format your text. If you are not comfortable with that, ignore this. It is not necessary. I really don't know if it is a skill that people need to have after they graduate. Ten years ago I would have said it was. Now, I'm not sure.
Setting Up A Blog For Class - Part 2
This is the rest of the tutorial. Once you've made a test post, please email me the link to it. I will then subscribe to your blog and list it on the class site. Having subscribed to it, I will automatically see updates to your blog.
Setting Up A Blog For Class - Part 1
The instructions below are based on the assumption that you will use Blogger to set up your blog. To do that you can't use your university email as a login and indeed you must be sure to have logged out of your university email to proceed (or use a different browser than you use normally).
As an alternative to the instructions below, you can use the campus blogging service (based on WordPress) at publish@illinois. Then you log in with your NetID and password. You can adjust your screen name to your alias, to protect your privacy. But I don't know whether you can access the site after you graduate. Further, it seems that blogs at publish@illinois require a U of I login to make a comment. That reduces the attractiveness of this alternative. Also, for commenting on the class site you will either do that anonymously or use your real name. If you use Blogger and make your alias your screen name, then your comments to posts will also be given by your screen name. (That assumes you are logged into your blog.) This is a big plus.
As still one other alternative, you can have a blog in Moodle, which is then not publicly available. Truthfully, this is much less convenient than the other alternatives. But it protects your privacy the most because the the rest of the world doesn't have access to the Moodle class site. If you want to pursue this alternative you must contact me about it. I have to set it up for you. Truthfully, I've found that students blogging under an alias is sufficient to protect their privacy that this added step is not necessary.
- - - - -
The instructions below and in the next post are aimed at setting up your blog so that you post under your alias - nobody outside the class will know who you are - and make sure that everybody understands this is a blog of a student, not of the person from whom the alias was constructed.
The video below was made for the class from a few years ago. It is applicable still, though Blogger has changed a bit since. In particular, there is no longer Google Plus, so you don't have to worry about that alternative any longer. Also note, that it assumes you are making a new Gmail account just for this use. As an alternative, you can use your non-university Gmail account equally well, if you are not already using Blogger with it. Do not use your campus email. That will not work.
Note that in the video where it says My Econ 490 Alias, your alias is of the form Famous Economist Econ 490 fall 2019. Also that that for the url of the blog, you should take the spaces out, but for the name of the blog and your screen name, you should leave the spaces in. (And for the screen name, the name of the famous economist suffices. The rest is redundant.)
The main thing is to use the Blogger Profile, not the Google Plus profile. The Blogger Profile is what allows you to post under an alias. See the image below. You can find this on your blog dashboard under Settings, then User Settings.
As an alternative to the instructions below, you can use the campus blogging service (based on WordPress) at publish@illinois. Then you log in with your NetID and password. You can adjust your screen name to your alias, to protect your privacy. But I don't know whether you can access the site after you graduate. Further, it seems that blogs at publish@illinois require a U of I login to make a comment. That reduces the attractiveness of this alternative. Also, for commenting on the class site you will either do that anonymously or use your real name. If you use Blogger and make your alias your screen name, then your comments to posts will also be given by your screen name. (That assumes you are logged into your blog.) This is a big plus.
As still one other alternative, you can have a blog in Moodle, which is then not publicly available. Truthfully, this is much less convenient than the other alternatives. But it protects your privacy the most because the the rest of the world doesn't have access to the Moodle class site. If you want to pursue this alternative you must contact me about it. I have to set it up for you. Truthfully, I've found that students blogging under an alias is sufficient to protect their privacy that this added step is not necessary.
- - - - -
The instructions below and in the next post are aimed at setting up your blog so that you post under your alias - nobody outside the class will know who you are - and make sure that everybody understands this is a blog of a student, not of the person from whom the alias was constructed.
The video below was made for the class from a few years ago. It is applicable still, though Blogger has changed a bit since. In particular, there is no longer Google Plus, so you don't have to worry about that alternative any longer. Also note, that it assumes you are making a new Gmail account just for this use. As an alternative, you can use your non-university Gmail account equally well, if you are not already using Blogger with it. Do not use your campus email. That will not work.
Note that in the video where it says My Econ 490 Alias, your alias is of the form Famous Economist Econ 490 fall 2019. Also that that for the url of the blog, you should take the spaces out, but for the name of the blog and your screen name, you should leave the spaces in. (And for the screen name, the name of the famous economist suffices. The rest is redundant.)
The main thing is to use the Blogger Profile, not the Google Plus profile. The Blogger Profile is what allows you to post under an alias. See the image below. You can find this on your blog dashboard under Settings, then User Settings.
Friday, August 9, 2019
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)