Education

Storytelling and the Brain

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“Stories are told in the body,” says a recent article at the site for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center:

It doesn’t seem that way. We tend to think of stories as emerging from consciousness—from dreams or fantasies—and traveling through words or images to other minds. We see them outside of us, on paper or on screen, never under the skin.

But we do feel stories. We know in our gut when we’re hearing a good one—and science is starting to explain why.

Experiencing a story alters our neurochemical processes, and stories are a powerful force in shaping human behavior. In this way, stories are not just instruments of connection and entertainment but also of control.

The article continues to lead us down the path of how “stories unfold in our bodies,” from the release of oxytocin or dopamine to the increase of empathic skills to the triggering of “neurochemical processes that make certain kinds of resource-sharing possible.”

I’ve reported on the psychological benefits of fiction reading here before. This just goes to show how stories can change the brain.

The Long-Term Effects of Disruptive Peers

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Class disruptions are known to worsen educational achievement in the short run, but new research demonstrates that being exposed to disruptive peers can even lead to worse adult outcomes:

Results indicate that there are persistent effects on both test scores and educational attainment. We estimate that exposure to one disruptive peer in a class of 25 throughout elementary school is associated with a 0.02 standard deviation reduction in test scores during high school, and nearly a one percentage point reduction in the likelihood of receiving a college degree. This suggests that the impact of disruptive peers does persist with respect to educational outcomes years afterward.

…Figure 1 shows that while individuals who have idiosyncratically low exposure to disruptive peers (those on the left-hand side) tend to earn more than predicted, those with idiosyncratically high exposure tend to earn somewhat less than predicted. Specifically, we estimate that exposure to one disruptive peer in a class of 25 throughout elementary school reduces earnings by 3–4%, with effects being driven by exposure to disruptive boys.

The researchers conclude,

Our findings…speak to the extent to which differential exposure to disruptive students can lead to income inequality later in life. We calculate that the increased exposure to disruptive peers by students from low-income families can explain 5–6% of the earnings gap between adults who grew up in low versus high-income households. This is significant given that we have only one particular measure of disruptive peers in our sample, and it highlights the extent to which sorting into schools can lead to the persistence of long-term income inequality across households.

While the researchers look specifically at children in families exposed to domestic violence, their findings have broader implications about family breakdown, behavioral problems, and income inequality. As Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan and Harvard’s Christopher Jencks explain, family breakdown can lead to more behavioral problems in children:

[A] father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule breaking, delinquency, and illegal drug use. These antisocial behaviors affect high school completion independent of a child’s verbal and math scores. Thus it appears that a father’s absence lowers children’s educational attainment not by altering their scores on cognitive tests but by disrupting their social and emotional adjustment and reducing their ability or willingness to exercise self-control. The effects of growing up without both parents on aggression, rule breaking, and delinquency are also larger for boys than for girls. Since these traits predict both college attendance and graduation, the spread of single-parent families over the past few decades may have contributed to the growing gender gap in college attendance and graduation. The gender gap in college completion is much more pronounced among children raised by single mothers than among children raised in two-parent families.

This new research suggests that the retreat from marriage has a spill-over effect: the behavioral problems of children from broken families not only negatively affect their own educational and financial outcomes, but the outcomes of their peers. When we consider that marriage tends to decrease the chances of children being exposed to both domestic violence (the study’s selection of choice as mentioned above) and violent crimes within neighborhoods, the importance of healthy, stable marriages becomes all the more clear.

Intact families are necessary for the flourishing of children and the adults they will eventually become.

How Much Are You Willing to Pay For Free Stuff?

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I think that the word "free" is one of the most misused words. - Milton Friedman
I think that the word “free” is one of the most misused words. – Milton Friedman

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about some polling data on millennials and their (un)willingness to redistribute wealth. A recent poll by Vox and Morning Consult found that while most Sanders supporters (80%) are willing to pay more in taxes, how much more they are willing to pay paints an interesting picture. “When we polled voters, we found most Sanders supporters aren’t willing to pay more than an additional $1,000 in taxes for his biggest proposals [i.e. nationalized health care and free public college tuition]. That’s well short of how much more the average taxpayer would pay under his tax plan.”

Vox explains,

But Sanders’s plan to pay for universal health care coverage would increase taxes on most voters by more than $1,000. He wants to:

  • Add a 2.2 percentage point surcharge on individual incomes. This means marginal tax rates go up for everyone. (After a standard deduction, about a quarter of households won’t have to pay this surcharge.)
  • Add a new 6.2 percent tax on earnings, which employers pay — but will be passed on to workers over time in the form of lower wages, according to the Tax Policy Center’s Roberton Williams.

The kicker for all of this? Some analysts believe Sanders’s plan will cost twice as much as his campaign estimates.

Perhaps even more interesting, “[w]hen you break down the poll results by age, rather than by candidate, it appears older people don’t want to pay as much for universal health care. This is especially interesting because older people have higher premiums, use the health care system more often, and spend a larger portion of their money on health care.” Another finding fits with my previous post: “Older people generally make more money and are more likely to be employed, and our poll shows that people who earn more money would pay less for Sanders’s health care plan — both as a percentage of their income and in dollars.” When it comes to free tuition, 14% of Sanders supporters said they don’t want to pay additional taxes for it with nearly half saying they would only pay up to $1,000 a year.

As the article puts it, “most Sanders supporters don’t want to Feel the Bern in their wallets.” The author concludes,

This isn’t a question of whether Sanders’s ideas are valid. This is a question of how voters are thinking about Sanders’s revolution, which is a radical increase in the scope of what government is responsible for, versus the private sector.

To their credit, some Sanders supporters have done the math and figured out that even with big tax increases, they would end up saving more money from Sanders’s new programs. But many other people were surprised when they used our candidate tax calculator and found out how much additional taxes they would pay under Sanders’s plan.

Yet that’s the revolution — one that promises Medicare for all, public college tuition for all, massive investments in infrastructure, expanded Social Security, etc. Those services require higher taxes, but could also save people money in the long run.

It’s a shift in the way we think about how we pay for social services. But right now, it appears that even Sanders supporters haven’t gotten their heads around what that means for their finances.

College Is Not the Great Equalizer

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That’s one takeaway from a recent post by Brookings fellow Beth Akers:

Essentially, does higher education succeed in lowering intergenerational “stickiness” of socioeconomic status?

Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t paint as rosy of a picture as we’d like to see. New evidence shows that a college degree might be worth less if you’re raised poor. We can’t say for sure why this is the case, but it’s easy to imagine a number of reasonable explanations. For instance, it’s likely that students who grown up in poorer families attend lower quality institutions. The disparity in returns is so large that individuals who are born into poor families (the lowest quintile of the income distribution) and manage to graduate from college have the same chance of staying in the bottom income quintile as people who are born into rich families (higher income quintile) and don’t complete high school.

Another one is to ignore (or at least temper) the increasingly popular notion that a college education is about knowledge, not a path to higher income:

For a long time we’ve hesitated to talk about education as a financial investment, but that has a done a disservice to the students who can’t really afford the luxury of turning a blind eye to the economic consequences of their decisions. We need to empower students to make good decisions by publishing data on the labor market returns of each program of study covered by the federal student aid program. A large step on this front was taken last year when earnings data for each college was published on a government website. But program level information is also necessary so that students can choose courses of study that are likely to lead them to jobs that will make their college costs worth it.

She adds that we should seek ways to “reduce the risk of investing in higher education including a more robust income driven repayment system in the federal loan program, private market financial products that offer insurance to student borrowers and new business models that offer guarantees to students.”

Check it out.

The College “Experience” Cannot Be Free

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college-freshman-seniorOne of the reasons college costs so much is that American universities operate like elite private schools with extra administration. Since Germany became tuition free a couple of years ago (again), Americans have apparently been “flocking” there to take advantage of a free higher education. I have to wonder which Americans are benefiting from Germany’s generosity. How many lower-middle class and below 18 year olds do you know that would be able to get a passport, plane ticket, and housing in Germany to get one of these great free educations? According to one website, to get a German education VISA, “They will ask for proof of enrollment from the university, health insurance documentation, plus you will need to demonstrate you have access to at least 659 euro per month for the first year, or 7,908 euro total.” That’s not an enormous amount of money, compared to college education in the US, but if your parents don’t even make enough money to have Obamacare require health insurance (and you don’t either), chances are you are facing many obstructions to getting a free education in Germany. I guess if college was free in America, this wouldn’t be a problem anymore, right?

Beyond the problem of who would really benefit from free college (hint, mostly kids who could afford better early education, and thus college as well, and get into schools that will likely have lower acceptance rates), we also have to consider what free college looks like. Let’s go back to the idea that colleges behave like elite private schools. Do you attend (or does your child attend) a school with state-of-the-art facilities, recently built dorms, fantastic exercise facilities, sports teams, administrative personal for every imaginable problem, tutoring and expansive disability services, a plethora of majors, relatively small class sizes, and clubs, events, and frats galore? Did you read that list of think, “of course, that’s what real life looks like!”? No, college today is nothing like real life and that is why it is so darn expensive. You are not paying for an education, you are paying for an experience. (And considering the fact that universities are hiring more and more woefully underpaid adjuncts, you truly are not paying for an education). A free education in Germany, or most of Europe, will educate you and require you to live (or learn to live) like an adult because it strips out all of that bloat.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s horrible that schools offer these things. You have to be pretty heartless to say expansive disability services is a bad idea, and I would even say that most items on that list are good things. (I could do without frats and their unequal female counterparts, personally.) They may say the best things in life are free, the good things (or the goods) are not. So if we want affordable, or even free, higher education it needs to be significantly stripped down, just like it is in Germany. Say goodbye to dorms, food courts, many majors, any kind of small-liberal-arts experience, and even the opportunity for most to go to college. That’s right, in Germany only about 30% of students attend college, likely because the path to college is divvied out by the end of the American elementary school, and there is a quota system in each major. There is, however, excellent vocational training in Germany for those who don’t attend college. I love German reasonableness and American excess. But American excess cannot, and should not, be free. We should focus on how to provide low cost tertiary education, including vocational schools and apprenticeships, before we consider throwing taxes at it.

Free Introduction to Political Philosophy

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Libertarianism.org has a series of lectures on political philosophy featuring Georgetown University professor Jason Brennan. The lectures cover topics such as

  • What Makes Institutions Just or Unjust?
  • What Are Rights?
  • Why Property Rights?
  • Democracy and Voting
  • Market Failure vs. Government Failure

On top of this, you get a free copy of Brennan’s book Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Check it out. A small taste of the lecture series can be found below.

Education & Inequality: Roland Fryer Lecture

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Recent Clark medalist Roland Fryer gave a fascinating lecture for the inaugural Buchanan Speaker Series event at George Mason University towards the end of last year. The topic was “Education, Inequality, and Incentives.” Fryer has done impressive work on education, heading the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University. The need for education reform is real. In the conclusion of his lecture, after pointing out the long-term effects for children who got into the Harlem Children’s Zone (i.e. 5x reduction in pregnancy for girls and 3x reduction in incarceration for boys), he movingly says,

Do know how frustrating that is for a guy like me who grow up in these [low-income] neighborhoods? It’s almost maddening. It’s the lottery. We’re by random coin flip deciding who is going to have a 5x lower probability. And no, we don’t do it directly because that’d be mean. We do it indirectly by not doing what we know works. We talk about “no-excuses” schools. It’s time to have a no-excuses society. What other excuses do we have? We’ve seen the stuff from charters, we’ve seen the stuff from meta-analysis, you put it into the traditional public schools, the test scores go up. When the test scores go up using similar interventions, we get better social outcomes! What else!

…These are our children. It’s not a philosophical debate anymore…I got lucky. People look at me a lot and say, “Well, see! It can happen.” Well, shit, you can also drive a car with your feet, but it doesn’t make it a good idea…We know what works…The question is do we really have the courage and will to do it. Or deep down do we really not think this is possible.

See the lecture below to see what works.

Subsidies Increase Tuition: Exhibit B

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“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I offer you Exhibit B…”

In July of last year, I wrote about a study that found subsidized loans to be the culprit behind rising tuition. Now, a newer study comes to similar conclusions:

With all factors present, net tuition increases from $6,100 to $12,559. As column 4 demonstrates, the demand shocks— which consist mostly of changes in financial aid—account for the lion’s share of the higher tuition. Specifically, with demand shocks alone, equilibrium tuition rises by 102%, almost fully matching the 106% from the benchmark. By contrast, with all factors present except the demand shocks (column 7), net tuition only rises by 16%.

These results accord strongly with the Bennett hypothesis, which asserts that colleges respond to expansions of financial aid by increasing tuition (pg. 36).

“Remarkably,” writes economist Alex Tabarrok, “so much of the subsidy is translated into higher tuition that enrollment doesn’t increase! What does happen is that students take on more debt, which many of them can’t pay.” This just provides further evidence that “the Econ 101 insight that subsidies increase prices (even net for those who are not fully subsidized) holds true.”

Education, IQ, and Mating

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I’ve written about assortative mating and income inequality before, pointing out that the more educated tend to marry each other and therefore increase their economic earnings. Ronald Bailey at Reason weighs in on the discussion, adding to the mix evidence that shows assortative mating isn’t just about education, but intelligence. Quoting a 2015 study, he writes,

For example, if spouses mated randomly in relation to intelligence, highly intelligent women would be just as likely to mate with men of low as high intelligence. Offspring of the matings of women of high intelligence and men of low intelligence would generally be of average intelligence. However, because there is strong positive assortative mating, children with highly intelligent mothers are also likely to have highly intelligent fathers, and the offspring themselves are likely to be more intelligent than average. The same thing happens for less intelligent parents. In this way, assortative mating increases additive genetic variance in that the offspring differ more from the average than they would if mating were random. The increase in additive genetic variance can be substantial because its effects accumulate generation after generation until an equilibrium is reached. 

He concludes, “To the extent that intelligence is correlated with socioeconomic status, assortative mating will further exacerbate trends to greater income inequality.”

University of Washington professor Tony Gill once shared a thought experiment he employs in his classes during a Facebook discussion:

Most students are for higher marginal taxation on the rich (defined as the dollar amount of people who have a wee bit more than them).

I propose centrally planned sorting by either IQ or socio-economic status (noting some studies that show how IQ might have a hereditary component and how IQ might be related to long-term income potential). I also note that we tend to marry people who are educationally and socially close to us (e.g., people meet at Harvard or in the same upscale neighborhood bars). Some of us use mail order catalogues, but we usually get a box on education to check.

Students freak out. First, they say that this has never been done. Then I note how arranged marriages are not an uncommon fixture in history. Then they say it isn’t possible because of data concerns, and I remind them about all those tests they took in 3rd, 7th and 11th grade and their “permanent record,” not to mention all the income data the IRS has on their parents.

Then they squeal that this isn’t right because it limits their freedom to do what they want. And then I say, “Oh, so now you’re worried about centrally-planned limits on freedom, eh?”

So, next time you get the social justice itch to redistribute wealth, ask yourself the following:

  • Are the adjectives smart or intelligent used to describe your spouse? Are they some of the reasons given as to why you love them?
  • Did you meet your spouse at college?
  • Would it have a negative influence on your choice to date an individual if they were a waiter/waitress, barista, fast food employee, Walmart cashier? (And not one who is working there part-time while they go to school.)
  • Would you date someone you thought was uneducated?

If you answered “yes” to the first three and “no” to the last, congrats: you’ve officially contributed to income inequality.

Play, Parenting, and the Fragility of Young Adults — The “Helicopter Society”

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college-stressAn article  in Psychology Today by Peter Gray, a leading researcher in educational psychology, spends a lot of time lamenting the fragile state of college kids, which I am happy to say does not seem to be happening among my students (crosses fingers that this is not as much of a problem in the sciences, sorry humanities). But I believe it may be a general trend, and I think anyone concerned about the amount of play kids get and the policing of American parents will be interested in the final takeaways:

In previous posts … I have described the dramatic decline, over the past few decades, in children’s opportunities to play, explore, and pursue their own interests away from adults. Among the consequences, I have argued, are well-documented increases in anxiety and depression, and decreases in the sense of control of their own lives. We have raised a generation of young people who have not been given the opportunity to learn how to solve their own problems. They have not been given the opportunity to get into trouble and find their own way out, to experience failure and realize they can survive it, to be called bad names by others and learn how to respond without adult intervention. So now, here’s what we have: Young people,18 years and older, going to college still unable or unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, still feeling that if a problem arises they need an adult to solve it…

In my next post I’ll examine the research evidence suggesting that so-called “helicopter parenting” really is at the core of the problem. But I don’t blame parents, or certainly not just parents. Parents are in some ways victims of larger forces in society—victims of the continuous exhortations from “experts” about the dangers of letting kids be, victims of the increased power of the school system and the schooling mentality that says kids develop best when carefully guided and supervised by adults, and victims of increased legal and social sanctions for allowing kids into public spaces without adult accompaniment. We have become, unfortunately, a “helicopter society.”

The only other thing I’ll add is that letting kids not only play, but also experience hard work (sometimes we have to do things that are not fun but are necessary, like the dishes) will help them get through those (not rare) times in life that require hard work.