Bruce Greenwald: The Death of Manufacturing & the Global Deflation

This is a fascinating discussion by Bruce Greenwald of

1. the difficulties of shifting people from working in sectors like agriculture and manufacturing where employment is declining because productivity is going up faster than demand,

2. the efforts of some countries to export this problem to other countries, and

3. the effect of these forces on interest rates, and therefore, implicitly, their interaction with the zero lower bound.

It is very interesting to think about how these issues could play out if there had been no zero lower bound and their had been aggressive negative interest rate policy. Regardless of the low interest rates, it still doesn’t work to have more manufacturing output that people want to buy any more than it makes sense to have more food grown than people can possibly eat. So at the end of the day, manufacturing capacity would get high enough to put a brake on further investment in manufacturing despite very low interest rates. Either people will start consuming a lot more because of the low interest rates, or more likely there would end up being extra investment in something else. A good possibility is education. Education is a form of investment that can easily absorb a huge amount of resources simply in student time, even if in the future it doesn’t need much in the way of buildings or professors because it has gone electronic. Standard human capital theory suggests that a low enough long-run real interest rate can have a big effect on the amount of education chosen.

21 GIFs That Explain Mathematical Concepts | IFLScience →

Thanks to Laura Overdeck for pointing me to these gifs. 

Jonathan Zimmermann: Making College Rankings More Useful

Source of the image: http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2015/04/29-beyond-college-rankings-rothwell-kulkarni

One way in which my own industry of higher education is corrupt is in resisting the data collection and sharing that would allow full evaluation of how well each college or university is doing its teaching job. A special report by the March 28-April 3 2015 issue of the Economist emphasizes the importance of better data for evaluating colleges and universities in order to put the higher education system on a path for significant improvement in performance. Within the special report, the article “A flagging model” is especially worth reading. Here are three of my favorite passages:

1. In most markets, the combination of technological progress and competition pushes price down and quality up. But the technological revolution that has upended other parts of the information industry (see article) has left most of the higher-education business unmoved. Why?

For one thing, while research impact is easy to gauge, educational impact is not. There are no reliable national measures of what different universities’ graduates have learned, nor data on what they earn, so there is no way of assessing which universities are doing the educational side of their job well.

2. The peculiar way in which universities are managed contributes to their failure to respond to market pressures. “Shared governance”, which gives power to faculty, limits managers’ ability to manage. “It was thought an affront to academic freedom when I suggested all departments should have the same computer vendor,” says Larry Summers, a former Harvard president. Universities “have the characteristics of a workers’ co-op. They expand slowly, they are not especially focused on those they serve, and they are run for the comfort of the faculty.”

3. Better information about the returns to education would make heavy-handed regulation unnecessary. There is a bit more around, these days, but it is patchy. The CLA has been used by around 700 colleges to test what students have learned; some institutions are taking it up because, at a time of grade inflation, it offers employers an externally verified assessment of students’ brainpower. Payscale publishes data on graduates’ average income levels, but they are based on self-reporting and limited samples. Several states have applied to the IRS to get data on earnings, but have been turned down. The government is developing a “scorecard” of universities, but it seems unlikely to include earnings data. “A combined effort by the White House, the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget is needed,” says Mark Schneider, a former commissioner of the National Centre for Education Statistics. It is unlikely to be forthcoming. Republicans object on privacy grounds (even though no personal information would be published); Democrats, who rely on the educational establishment for support, resist publication of the data because the universities do.

Jonathan Zimmermann, from my “Monetary and Financial Theory” class this past Winter 2015 semester discusses very well the need for different college rankings for different purposes. This is the 20th student guest post from this past semester. You can see the rest here, including two by Jonathan himself. Here is Jonathan’s latest:

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For every student who has been through the process of college admission, university rankings is something that should look familiar. But university rankings are not only used by prospective students, they are also consulted by employers to screen job candidates.

Increasingly, it becomes a trend for every well recognized newspaper to publish its own ranking. Currently, universities and colleges are mostly ranked with some positive weight on how good the students are at the end of college and some weight on how good the students are at the beginning of college before they have started any classes. This is not what students need to know. What students need to know is how much they will learn – that is how good they will be at the end of college minus how good they are at the beginning. And if students really learn a lot, i.e. if they are much better at the end of college than they were at the beginning, they really need the college or university to document how good they are at the end in a way that is persuasive to employers.

This is very different from the way things are done now. The cost of the program, for example, is only relevant to the prospective student: the potential employer should not care about how much the student paid but only about the quality of the formation, even if the costs were totally disproportionate (which would, in the other hand, reduce the ranking of the university in a ranking designed for students). In the contrary, a university that is well known to only accept already very clever and experienced students (students with already a good GPA, a previous degree in another top ranked college, etc.) should have a lower ranking on student-oriented rankings since they don’t bring much to the students they admit, but should have a good ranking on employer-oriented rankings because they tend to do a pretty good job at screening candidates. Of course, graduating from a program well ranked in employer-oriented rankings is also an advantage for students since it will ease their job search (like purchasing a “certificate of competence” would), but it is far from as valuable to them as it is to employers, and represents only a small fraction of the advantages of college education, compared notably to the “learning component”.

Rankings such as those of the Financial Times tend to generate that kind of negative incentives for the universities by giving a lot of weight to the salary and the employment rate after graduation: if you know that this is how your program is going to be ranked, as the admission director you might decide to only take students who already have a job secured, or at least strong connections in the professional world, instead of a bit more risky profiles who could really use the knowledge and experience your program would bring them.

In general, everything that increases the predictive value of the degree is important to the recruiters. And this doesn’t only include the binary fact of having the degree or not having the degree, but also the predictive value of the GPA associated with the degree. And this is an extremely important element that is neglected by almost every ranking, but that also hurts some countries much more than others.

The United States for example are very well known for having a very rigorous admission process. But once you made your way into an Ivy League, the GPA you get is of secondary importance (a problem aggravated by the severe trend of grade inflation). This should factor in the employer-oriented rankings, since they cannot efficiently use elements such as the GPA to screen their candidates. On the other hand, countries like Switzerland which are much more generous in admitting students (even the best universities of the country, such as ETH Zurich which is consistently ranked among the top 20 universities in the world, accept almost 100% of their candidates, sometimes even without a high-school degree) and giving degrees (even though the failure rate during the first year is extremely high to compensate for the eased admission) rely much more on the grades that they attribute to indicate to the market who are the good students and who aren’t. This should indeed be reflected negatively in the rankings designed to help students decide where to go once admitted (since being admitted in that kind of university is not even one tenth of the way), but very positively into employer-oriented rankings since they can easily identify good students by looking at their grades.

The problem with current rankings is that they are used indifferently. Some are more prospective students oriented, some are more employers oriented, many are research oriented (which creates other forms of negative incentives), but the distinction is generally not made and, frequently, both criteria are mixed. Each ranking should not only be designed with a clear purpose in mind, but should also clearly communicate that purpose to its readers. Clearly, simply stating the methodology used is insufficient: not only it generally uses complex math that most readers don’t have the time (or the ability) to understand, but it also doesn’t indicate when it is appropriate to use it. Instead, the rankings should be accompanied with qualitative advices to interpret the results as well as a list of contexts in which the ranking is considered relevant or not, their strengths and its limitations, and especially who the target audience is.

The college ranking currently designed by the Obama administration, for example, does an exemplary job in clearly stating the objectives of its methodology from the very beginning: helping prospective students with medium to low income to identify colleges with the best quality-to-price ratio. Nothing more, nothing less; it doesn’t have the ambition to become the next universal university ranking, and therefore doesn’t mix its primary goal with other contradictory considerations.

In general, most rankings designed for students should switch to a “value-added” approach, which measures the causal impact of college on students given their pre-education characteristics. One of the most up-to-date and accurate study using this method is the recently published “Beyond College Rankings” report; the methodology they use could serve as a model for further rankings. However, the problem with “value-added” rankings is that they are of limited use when they are not “dynamic”. Traditional rankings are “static” in the sense that every university in the same ranking will always have the same rank independently from the person reading it. A “static value-added” ranking is useful to governments and charities seeking to allocate their funds to the most efficient institution, but generally not adequate for individuals since the essence of a “value-added” ranking is to provide a list of best colleges given a specific student’s characteristics. A clever value-added ranking designed for students would allow them to input their personal characteristics before providing them with a personalized result; the best choice of college might not be the same for two distinct students with a different profile.

Laura Overdeck: Street Math

This is a wonderful TEDx talk by Laura Overdeck, who appeared here previously in her guest post “Math for Pleasure.”

Warren Henning: A Software Engineer’s Adventures In Learning Mathematics →

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence. — Samuel Johnson

Laura Overdeck Syndicated from supplysideliberal.com to Quartz: Don't Just Read to Your Kids at Night, Do Math with Them, Too. They'll Thank You Later

link to syndicated version on Quartz

I am proud that, for one of the first times I am aware of, something first published on supplysideliberal.com, that I didn’t write myself, has been syndicated to an online magazine. Laura Overdeck’s post appeared first as “Math for Pleasure” on this blog. Now it has been syndicated to Quartz. If you haven’t read it, here is a second chance.

Nina Easton: Class Reimagined

Link to the article in Fortune

For those who think about education, as I do, it is important to have a thumbnail description of what kinds of things work. As Nina Easton writes in Fortune, 

[Eva] Moskowitz’s 32 Success Academy Charter Schools rank in the top 1% of all the state’s programs in math—and in the top 3% for English. … On a tour of Success Academy’s flagship school in Harlem, Moskowitz shared her philosophy on disrupting education.

Here are the basics, which I have quoted with elisions at the end of each point. See the article itself for more details: 

Kids should struggle. “There’s this sense in public education that kids are fragile, that their self-esteem will be hurt,” she says. “We believe self-esteem comes from mastery.” 

Chess is key to building agile minds.

Assume all your students are going to college.

Extend the same college expectations to special-ed students.

No coddling for teachers either. They are expected to work long days and longer school years and attend far more training sessions than regular city teachers. 

Principals, not just teachers, have to know their students.

What this Teaches about Teachers as Coaches: Several elements of this approach illustrate what I mean when I write about a teacher as “coach.” By “coach” I mean someone who motivates extraordinary effort on the part of students, as I see athletic coaches routinely doing in motivating extraordinary effort by those on a sports team. It doesn’t count as “coaching” in this sense if a teacher just gives the student a few helpful hints and recommendations. 

My sports coaches and my debate coach talked a lot about the glory of winning–so that we could almost taste it. Similarly, an effective strategy for academic coaching is to talk about winning in life, in part by going to college and having a great career. 

Also, notice that sports coaches are themselves typically quite enamored of the idea of winning. Someone is likely to be a much better teacher-as-coach if they are excited about the idea of helping their students win in life, and thirst for succeeding at this more than the run-of-the-mill teacher. With enough of a positive competitive spirit like this, with each trying to do better than average, average won’t be the same anymore.

Chris Rockwell: Has a Master’s Degree Become a Negative Job Market Signal?

Chris Rockwell’s LinkedIn Homepage

I wrote positively about Master’s degrees in economics in “On Master’s Programs in Economics.” In the 7th student guest post this semester, Chris Rockwell effectively expresses skepticism about the value of most master’s degrees. There is some resonance with what I say in my column “The Coming Transformation of Education: Degrees Won’t Matter Anymore, Skills Will.” Here is Chris:

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Why a masters degree can make candidates less desirable to employers

Traditionally further education was associated with higher intelligence, increased income and higher social status. However, these correlations have changed drastically and now many of the most talented, qualified undergrads actually do not immediately enter graduate school. Because of this, I believe having a masters degree can actually make candidates appear less valuable to employers.

To estimate the average talent of those who get a masters degree, I will consider the option of obtaining this degree from a few different perspectives. As stated earlier, I believe some groups may choose not to get one, even if they could. This is due to graduate school being very expensive and requiring key time out of the work force. Additionally, getting a masters degree can be risky given upon graduation given there is no guarantee of a high quality job. I think masters candidates break nicely into three pools; all of them having different costs and benefits. Note I will examine the effect of a masters degree from a purely financial perspective, but I assert this is reasonable given people who are less interested in money would be more likely to get a PHD anyway.

First, I will consider an undergrad from the US with some competence, relatively good grades and solid test scores (for example, Michigan grad from random major with 3.5, little work experience, and a 80th percentile GRE). I assume this student might get some job offers, but they will probably not be stellar and might be closer to the $40-50k / year range. This student is basically faced with two options: school or work. Suppose if this student were to attain a masters degree it would be in business — the best performing grad school financially. In this case, after 2 years of missing work and $200k more debt, they would probably be looking at a salary closer to $80,000. All in all, Forbes calculated this is better than the alternative for this student. (A 10 year back-of-the-envelope calculation supports this: $80k * 10 – $200k = $600k > $50k * 10 = $500k).

The next group of students are international and talented — good enough to get into a comparable graduate university. However, these candidates often do not have the opportunity to pursue a job out of undergrad because of work visa restrictions or lack of English fluency. Hence, for them graduate school can be a must.

The final group of students I am considering are those who are excellent undergraduates and have the ability to land top offers. These offers can pay very well, often including base salaries ranging from $60,000 – $120,000. For students with such strong job offers, attending graduate school will generally not raise wage in any meaningful way in the near future. For example, at many top firms employees fresh out of graduate school with no work experience are paid the same wage or only a slightly higher wage than their undergraduate peers. Hence, for these top undergraduates, attending grad school right away makes no sense: doing so could in fact put them in a worse job market than the one they face upon graduation (not to mention cost and lost time).

So, under the assumption students maximize income, undergrads who attend grad school are often less talented than those who go straight into the work force. It follows that for recruiters at top firms, who only consider these three pools of people anyway (nobody with below a 3.5 for example), candidates who have received a graduate degree actually appear less attractive than those who have not. The clear exception to this is jobs requiring a masters degree, however many employers hiring for technical roles will teach undergrads on the job anyway.

Considering having a masters degree could be a negative job market signal, it might be surprising to note grad school attendance continues to climb. However, this actually makes sense because for most employees having a masters degree is still probably a positive signal. The group of less talented undergrads who get a masters are in general more desirable than their peers who do not. Hence it seems reasonable to conclude students with masters degrees are likely to be somewhat talented but probably not the best hires possible for employers.

In conclusion, modern graduate schools attract talented workers, but often not the best. The opportunity and monetary cost associated make these schools obsolete for the most talented individuals. In 2015, top firms should focus on undergrads when recruiting.

Quartz #60—>The Coming Transformation of Education: Degrees Won’t Matter Anymore, Skills Will

Link to the Column on Quartz

Here is the full text of my 60th Quartz column, “Degrees don’t matter anymore: skills do,” now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on February 9, 2015. Links to all my other columns can be found here.

Although I think the provocative title on Quartz helped get people to notice the column, I have what I think is a more accurate title above. This is my 2d most popular column ever. You can see the full list in order of popularity here.

If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:

© February 9, 2015: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2017. All rights reserved.

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If I were to make a nomination for the most destructive belief in our culture, it would be the belief that some people are born smart and others are born dumb. This belief is not only badly off target as a shorthand description of reality, it is the source of many social pathologies and lost opportunities. For example:

• Those who get low test scores think they are just not as smart and avoid tough majors that lead to some of the best jobs.
• A strong belief within an academic field that talent is innate goes along with that field having fewer women and African-Americans.
• Many people utter the black magic spell “I’m bad at math” and it becomes so. A lucky few have that spell broken, and find they can become good at math after all.
• People misunderstand the past and imagine a dystopian future, not realizing that each generation is smarter than the last.

Too much of our educational system, both at the K-12 level and in higher education, is built around the idea that some students are smart and others are dumb. One shining exception are the “Knowledge is Power Program” or KIPP schools. In my blog post “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School” I gave this simple description of the main strategy behind KIPP schools, which do a brilliant job, even for kids from very poor backgrounds:

1. They motivate students by convincing them they can succeed and have a better life through working hard in school.
2. They keep order, so the students are not distracted from learning.
3. They have the students study hard for many long hours, with a long school day, a long school week (some school on Saturdays), and a long school year (school during the summer).

A famous experiment by Harvard psychology professor Robert Rosenthal back in 1964 told teachers that certain students, chosen at random, were about to have a growth spurt—in their IQ. These kids did wind up having their IQ grow faster than the other kids. If we had an educational system that expected all kids to succeed, and gave them the kind of extra encouragement that those teachers unconsciously gave the kids they expected to do well, then kids in general would learn more.

Kids whose teachers had low expectations can expect more typecasting in college. Too many majors fall into one of two categories: (a) majors in which there is no easy way to tell whether a student has mastered any skills that will help get a job or make life richer, or (b) majors designed to weed out all the slow learners and only try to teach the students who catch on quickly. Behind the practice of weeding out slow learners is the misconception that a slow learner is a bad learner, when in fact a slow learner who puts in the time necessary to learn often ends up with a deeper understanding than the fast learner.

The good news is that a total transformation of education is coming, whether the educational establishment likes it or not. I draw my account of this transformation of education from two prophetic books by Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen and his co-authors:

• Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clay Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn
• The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out by Clay Christensen and Henry J. Eyring.

The road ahead is clear: the potential in each student can be unlocked by combining the power of computers, software, and the internet with the human touch of a teacher-as-coach to motivate that student to work hard at learning. Technology brings several elements to the equation:

• customized lessons adapted to each student’s individual learning style at a cost that won’t break the bank
• lectures from some of the most talented instructors in the world (such as this course in financial asset pricing by the impressive John Cochrane and many other economics classes by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok)
• the kind of software motivational tricks that make it so hard for kids to pull away from video games
• flexibility for students to learn at their own pace.

But since motivation—the desire to learn—is so important, a human teacher to act as coach is also crucial. In particular, without a coach, the flexibility for students to learn at their own pace can be a two-edged sword, because it makes it easy to procrastinate.

In the end, none of this will be hard. The technology and content for that technology are already good and rapidly improving. And although it is a bit much to expect someone to be both a great and inspirational coach and to be at the cutting edge of an academic field, the number of great athletic coaches and trainers at all levels indicates that, on its own, being an inspirational coach is not that rare. Being an inspirational coach in an academic setting is not quite the same thing, but I am willing to bet that it, too, is blessedly common. By having the cutting-edge knowledge from the best scientists and savants in the world built into software and delivered in online lectures, all a community college has to do to deliver a world-class education is to hire teachers who know how to motivate students.

Similarly, at the K-12 level, it is easier to find teachers who will be inspirational if those teachers can connect each student with expertly designed software customized for each student’s learning style. And teachers will be able to encourage each student to dig deeper into some particular interest that student has—well beyond the teacher’s own knowledge. Yet the teachers themselves will end up knowing a lot—much more than they learned in college themselves, simply from working alongside the students.

But what about all the forces arrayed against educational reform? Though they have won over and over in the past, those reactionary forces will be overwhelmed by these new possibilities. They will be like the corporate information technology department trying to stop workers from downloading unapproved, but inexpensive software on their own to get the job done.

The day is not far off (some would argue it is already here), when any parent who has the inclination to be a learning coach can team up with inexpensive online tools to give his or her child an education that is 20% better (say as measured by standardized test scores achieved) than what that child would get in the regular schools. It is hard to start a new charter school, and harder still to change a whole school district. But when an individual family can opt out, it is no longer David vs. Goliath in a duel to the death, but David leaving Goliath behind in the dust in a foot race. In the end, I think organized institutions can do a better job at teaching than parents on their own—but only if those institutions do things right. The ability of individual families to opt out will force most schools to get with the program, or lose a large share of their students.

None of this will happen instantly. In K-12, some states already have a strong tradition of educational reform, and will jump-start these changes. In other states, the forces arrayed against reform will be able to hold back progress for quite some time, by fighting tooth and nail against it. Rich, educated parents may help their kids tap into the new educational possibilities more quickly than poor parents who aren’t as attuned to education. But when performance gaps open wide enough, education in the laggard states will come around, by popular demand. And the scandal of ever more substandard education for the poor will encourage efforts by concerned citizens toward solutions empowered by the new learning technologies.

In higher education, students voting with their feet will make schools at the bottom of the heap change or die. Many of the most prestigious colleges and universities will resist change much longer, but some will embrace the “flipped classroom” model of doing everything online that can effectively be done online, and doing in the classroom only those things for which face-to-face interaction is crucial. And when some of the prestigious colleges and universities embrace the new methods, those colleges and universities will move ahead in the rankings as a result. The rest will ultimately follow.

There is one other force that will propel the transformation of education: a shift from credentials to certification. In most of the current system, the emphasis is diplomas and degrees—credentials saying a student has been sitting in class so many hours, while paying enough attention and cramming enough not to do too much worse than the other students on the exams. More and more, employers are going to want to see some proof that a potential employee has actually gained particular skills. So certificates that can credibly attest to someone’s ability to write computer code, write a decent essay, use a spreadsheet, or give a persuasive speech are going to be worth more and more. And any training program that takes the need to maintain its own credibility seriously can help students gain those skills and certify them for employers in a way that bypasses the existing educational establishment. Just witness the current popularity of “coding bootcamps.” That model can work for many other skills as well. For many students, that kind of certification of specific skills is a very attractive alternative to a two-year degree.

When this transformation of education is complete, K-12 education will cost about the same as it does now, but will be two or three times as effective. College education will not only be much more effective than it is now, it will also be much cheaper. There will still be a few expensive elite colleges and universities–these schools are not just providing an education, they are selling social status, and the opportunity to rub shoulders with celebrity professors. But less elite colleges and universities will find it hard to compete with the cheaper alternative of community college professor as coach for computerized learning. So the problem of college costs will be a thing of the past for anyone focused on learning, as opposed to social status.  (Of course, if lower college costs are one side of the coin, lower college revenue is the other side. College professors as a whole are likely to have a lower position in the income distribution in the future than in the recent past, with premium salaries limited to a shrinking group of well-paid academic stars.)

Florida State University Psychology Professor K. Anders Ericsson studies expert performance, whether in sports, art, or academic pursuits. His research shows that ordinary people with extraordinary motivation can achieve remarkable performance through a pattern of arduous work and study called deliberate practice. By bringing computers and computer networks in to help with the other aspects of teaching, our society will be able to afford to focus on instilling in students that kind of extraordinary motivation. When that happens, the world will never be the same again.

On Having a Thesis

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My main strategy for helping the students in my Monetary and Financial Theory class is to have them write a lot. They write 3 blog posts a week on an internal class blog. I have showcased some of the best of these blog posts on this blog, “Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal.” You can see links to all these student guest posts here. The magic of having students write many, many short pieces is something that can be implemented easily by any instructor anywhere who has the good fortune to have a teaching assistant to make brief comments on them all, as I have.* And there is a bit of magic to the blog post format, which tends to disinhibit students. (I know with some degree of confidence, because there was a point at which I switched from having students do short essays that were printed out in one semester of a Principles of Macro class to doing blog posts the next semester. The blog posts were better.) 

In this post, I wanted to give a few other tips for writing blog posts in addition to pointing to the magic of writing a lot. The first is that the wind-up in the introduction shouldn’t be too long. Indeed, the most common request from my editors at Quartz when I send them a first draft of a column is that I should shorten the introduction. I often need the lengthy introduction as I write in order to get into the topic, but once the rest of the piece is written, the introduction can be slashed to something much shorter.  

The second tip is that it is important to have a thesis: something that you want to say and are willing to try to back up. If you want some examples of thesis statements, about half the time the titles my editors choose for my Quartz columns are their take on what a thesis statement would be. (You can see a list of titles of my Quartz columns here.) Lisa Simpson above gives some excellent guidance on what a thesis statement should be like; I am afraid the other half of my titles don’t obey these rules for thesis statements.

How can you come up with a thesis statement, and arguments to back it up? There may be other harder ways to come up with a thesis statement, but the easiest way is to think of something you want to say that you actually believe. For most people this is definitely the way to go if you are allowed to choose from a broad range of topics. 

To come up with the thesis statement itself, read the newspaper, read other people’s blogs, read books, talk to people, and constantly keep a look-out for any reaction you have that makes you want to say something to the world or at least to some other people. Figure out how to say the gist quickly, so that it can fit in one sentence. It might have to be only an approximation to what you really want to say to fit into one sentence, but that is OK. If that kind of brevity is hard for you, get a Twitter account and practice saying things in 140 characters or less on Twitter. (You can see my tweets here. I think they provide many examples of thesis statements, though not always the supporting arguments!) 

The thesis statement does not always have to actually appear in your post or essay, but it needs to exist and you need to know what it is. And I recommend that beginning writers actually put the thesis statement into the post or essay. 

In addition to the question “What am I trying to say here?” the question “What am I trying to accomplish in this piece?” is also helpful in identifying a thesis statement. But once you answer “What am I trying to accomplish in this piece?” you need to go back to the question “What am I trying to say here?” in order to come up with the thesis statement itself.   

Trying to support your thesis statement can seem daunting. But anything that would make someone a little more likely to agree with your thesis statement counts as supporting it. Even “preaching to the choir”—that is, making someone who already agreed with you more energized to spread the word or to do something about it—counts.

To come up with arguments to back up your thesis statement, ask yourself why you believe it. (Remember, I am only telling you the easy way to come up with thesis statements and back them up. Learning how to argue for something you don’t believe is an advanced writing skill for folks like lawyers.) If you ask yourself why you believe it and can’t come up with anything, maybe you should choose another topic. If you can answer that question, write down the answer, and you are on your way. 

There are different levels of arguments you can have for a thesis statement. The upper level is when you have arguments that might convince someone else even if they start out a bit skeptical. In other words, if you can take on the burden of proof and meet that with your arguments, that is impressive. 

The lower level of supporting a thesis statement is to explain why you believe it and to lay out what someone else would have to do to convince you otherwise. That is, if you can defend your thesis statement against an attack when the attacker has the burden of proof, that definitely counts for something.  

The point is to have a clear thesis statement, and support it as well as you can. Admitting where you might be wrong and where there are weaknesses in your line of argument can be nice, too, although it doesn’t work as the substance of the whole post! If you actually think you might be wrong, that itself can make a good thesis statement: “I used to think X, but now I realize that I just might be wrong, because ….”  

That leads into my last tip. An essay is more memorable if there is a bit of conflict or drama in it. For example, “So and so says X, but they are wrong”; or “The conventional wisdom is X, but …”; or “Here is an issue that is extremely important that needs to be addressed; here is what needs to be done”; or “Here is something that will change the world in a big way.” To get that drama you need to have an opposition between two things: for example, two different ways of looking at things; how things are and how they should be; the way things are now and the way things used to be; how things are now and how they will be in the future. 

Everything that I am suggesting gets a lot easier with practice. If you keep writing many, many short pieces and keep these tips in mind, you will find your writing getting better and better. Have confidence and just keep going. Being a good writer will give you a huge advantage in your career. And there is a decent chance that, say, around the 25th short piece you write, writing will start to become fun for you.   

image source

* To keep the grading burden down, we have a simple check, check+, check- grading system in which there is a strong default toward students getting a check; of the 1/8 of all posts that are revised and sent on to me, I only give a check+ to posts that are at a level worthy of being guest posts on my blog, and we only give check-’s to blog posts that exhibit either obvious low effort or a disregard of instructions.    

In addition to making the grading effort reasonable for a teaching assistant (in a 40 student class) despite the large number of blog post writing assignments, giving most posts a check helps to avoid premature perfectionism, which is one of the biggest dangers in learning to write. The blog post format also helps to reduce the danger of premature perfectionism, since the traditions for the blogosphere allow for a certain rate of typos, grammatical errors and awkward phrasing. This makes gaining fluency in writing blog posts in English quite doable even for students for whom English is a second language. 

It is easy to continue to polish blog posts after their initial posting. But even if initial posting is delayed until after polishing, it is possible to keep the polishing from creating writers block if the polishing is separated from writing the first draft of a post. 

It is hard enough getting ideas down in any form. Don’t burden your writing by requiring too much polish on a first draft. With experience, your first drafts will start looking more polished, but if you want to be a fluent writer, difficult polishing must always be delayed until after getting the first draft down.

Update: Since I wrote this, I have instituted in my class a requirement that students put an explicit thesis statement at the top of their posts. (I do not require that the thesis statement be made part of body of the post itself, in accordance with what I said above: “The thesis statement does not always have to actually appear in your post or essay, but it needs to exist and you need to know what it is.”) I think this is helping a lot in making the posts more focused.

An Audio Narration of "The Coming Transformation of Education: Degrees Don’t Matter Anymore, Skills Do"

I was surprised to stumble across (via a tweet)  an audio narration of my Quartz column “Degrees don’t matter anymore, skills do.” I think this narration is quite well done. (It isn’t me talking, but Larry Rice, who definitely sounds like a professional narrator.) The column sounded better and smarter to me in this narration than it sounded in my head as I was writing it and proofreading it. Of course, however good or bad the article is, it is definitely no smarter or less smart in the narration than in the reading–so that is an illusion! Anyway, you might like it. 

By the way, I am unclear on the copyright issues here, and interested in what you think about that. As far as I know, Umano did this without any permission, and let me say that I am not giving them permission, despite the fact that I am linking to this. At this point, I don’t think this hurts either me or Quartz, but I reserve the right to protest at any later time if I come to the view that circumstances have changed so that the posting of this narration does hurt my interests.  

Update April 15, 2015: My editor now tells me this is with the permission of Quartz.

Public School Indoctrination: A Facebook Convo →

When I posted this quotation 

Why, indeed, do we have public schools at all? There are advantages to having an educated public, and there are at least arguments to the effect that the private sector will undersupply education. But that’s an argument for government subsidies or vouchers; it’s not an argument for the government to actually run the schools. The reason the government wants to run schools is so that it can control what is taught. I hope that makes people uncomfortable.

– Steven E. Landsburg, Fair Play, p. 31

I hoped to spark an interesting debate. I did! The link at the top is to what I think is a very interesting Facebook discussion about this.

How Stephen King Teaches Writing →

I love Jessica Lahey’s interview here with Stephen King about his experience as a teacher. Because of Stephen’s focus on teaching students how to write nonfiction as well as fiction, it is relevant to economists whose classes involve writing. 

Jethra Spector: Using Miles and Noah's Math Column in the Classroom

This is a picture of Jethra Spector at the elementary school where she used to teach. She is now in her 5th year of teaching GED math for Minneapolis Public Schools adult education and her 1st year of teaching developmental math at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Before that she was an elementary school teacher for 23 years.

I was delighted to get the following email from Jethra Spector to Noah Smith and me about our Quartz column “There’s One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don’t,” which was later syndicated to the Atlantic as “The Myth of I’m Bad at Math.” She graciously gave me permission to share it with you. 

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I want to thank you again for permission to share your article “The Myth of ‘I’m Bad at Math’” with the students in my remedial math classes at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Classes started last week, and I assigned the article for homework on the first night of class. 

Here is a link to the student response sheet I made for my students to complete when they were done reading the article. And here is a link to the PowerPoint I made to facilitate a follow-up discussion the next time the class met. 

I thought you might be interested in what I learned from my students’ response sheets and class discussion.

• Nearly every single one of my students has at some point said that he/she was bad at math, one as early as first grade when other kids laughed at her answers in class. The only students who didn’t say something like that were students who were worse at other subjects like reading, so that made them think math was their strong suit.
• Almost none of my students had parents who drilled them on math. The few who did were all from other countries.
• Every single student agreed most with an incremental orientation to intelligence. This was perfect for me because it set them up to realize that they could be successful in my class if they were willing to make the effort and work hard.
• Most of my students identified with the statement, “I’m not a math person.” But one student wrote that the article changed his perception and he’s not going to say that about himself anymore because now he realizes that with hard work and determination he can master the material. Another student wrote that math is part of our lives, and knowing it could help improve our futures. Many students said that they like math when they get it but feel frustrated when they don’t get it. That just reinforced my belief that as their math teacher one of my goals must be to present the concepts in such as way that they get it. However, I now feel empowered to remind my students that not everyone will get it at the same time, and for some it will take more practice.
• Everyone agreed that many things can be accomplished through personal perseverance and effort.
• Only a few wrote about a famous person as a hero or role model (Oprah, Barack Obama, and Nelson Mandela). The rest wrote mostly about family members.
• I enjoyed reading their responses regarding how much effort they are willing to make to ensure their success in my class. One student wrote 110%. Many wrote, “whatever it takes.” It was a great opportunity for me to remind them that they don’t have to do it alone; the school has many tutors available to help them succeed.
• Other thoughts about the article included:
• “It really puts motivation in students to say practice makes perfect. With effort and persistence you can get through anything.”
• “I think that this was a great article…it has opened up my mind and helped me understand some things that I did not know about being good or bad at math.”
• “I’m intrigued by the study habits and how many days they go to school in Japan. Even though it seems a lot, one can never have too much education and knowledge.”
• “It is an eye-opening article. It made me change the way I think about math.”
• “I knew it! I used to think I was unintelligent, but that was only because I never really tried. Deep down inside I knew I wasn’t putting forth any effort. When I did, I got great results back.”
• “I learned that I’m not dumb at math. I just have to make the extra effort to succeed at it.”

When I asked my current students if I should have my classes in the future read this article, the overwhelming response was “yes!”

As I collected the student response sheets, some students asked what they should do with the article. I told them to give it to someone else they know who thinks they’re bad at math!

Update–A Note from Jethra: I saw the guest post up last night and already sent the link to a few people. My dad already wrote back and said it brought tears to his eyes. He’s got a PhD in math and taught math at UW-Milwaukee once upon a time.

I hope other people will feel free to use the student response sheet and powerpoint for discussion if they like. As for me, I couldn’t be happier with the results. It was a great learning experience for me because it helped me get to know my students better. It also established the common understanding that students may have to work hard in my class, but that they can and will be successful if they do. One student made a connection to the bible: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

Best to you and Noah, Jethra

Laura Overdeck: Math for Pleasure

A guest post by Laura Overdeck, whose theme is that kids might embrace and excel at math if we made it a part of playtime. The picture above is from one of Bedtime Math’s Crazy 8s club sessions called Glow-in-the-Dark Geometry. You can see Miles’s evaluation of statistical evidence for the efficacy of the Bedtime Math app here. Below are Laura’s words.

College-educated people aren’t afraid to read. When they open a newspaper article or blog post, they assume they’ll be able to read it. That’s because the content is written at roughly the 9th-grade reading level. But do we all feel just as solid on 9th grade math?  Clearly not, as restaurants now calculate the tip for customers – a task that requires only 5th-grade math skills. Americans are afraid to divide by 5. 

Our country bemoans its weakness in math on two levels. On the macro level, our students are regularly trounced by other countries on international tests. On the individual level, kids and adults alike get nervous about math and even despise it, making these test outcomes not all that surprising. As we collectively fret over curricula and lurch from one solution to another, we ignore a much larger piece of the puzzle: our sharp double standard in how we present reading vs. math to our kids. In launching the nonprofit Bedtime Math and navigating the world of early math, I’ve been stunned to discover how our society relentlessly stokes math anxiety – and often from birth.

Let’s quickly run some numbers. Kids live about 8,800 hours a year. Of that, they spend 1,200 hours in school, or fewer if it’s a typical 180-day year. Even if you chop out 3,000 hours or so for sleep, that still leaves far more waking hours spent outside school than in it. As we pound on our schools to perform better, what matters just as much is kids’ exposure to learning outside school. That includes playtime, mealtime, and regular family routines. And the fact is, math is not a big part of that equation.

It begins with our radically different approaches to numeracy and literacy. As Miles Kimball noted in his column “How to Turn Every Child into a “Math Person," if a child is struggling with reading, we don’t give up on him or her. Parents and kids do give up on math, however, eventually decaying to “I’m just not a math person.”  In fact, the more positive thinking about reading takes hold even before a child tries to read himself: most parents know to read bedtime stories at night, creating cozy rituals that lead kids to associate books with loving parental attention. Hence many of us read for pleasure as adults. Sadly, “math for pleasure” just isn’t a phrase we throw around.

That’s because most parents don’t do math for fun with their kids. My husband and I did do this, and frankly on a whim: when our first child turned two, we started giving her a little “bedtime math problem” alongside her bedtime story, simply because we both enjoy math. Together we’d count the ears and noses on her stuffed animals; as she grew, we advanced to a wild range of topics, from flamingos to ninja stunts to the chips in chocolate chip cookies. We rolled in addition, then subtraction, then a second child. Years later when our third child turned two, he ran in one night yelling that he wanted a math problem, alerting us that we’d unwittingly created a very unusual household. Math for pleasure is possible.

Friends urged me to share these enticing math problems, and so I launched Bedtime Math, plying porcupines and pillow fights as vehicles for numbers. The wake-up call came when I told people about the blog and get the reaction, “Ewww…math for little kids? How could you do that?” Would we ever say ewww about reading a book to a 6-month old? Is counting so different from learning the alphabet? And yet the time-honored way to fall asleep is to count sheep! But somehow, some parents had come to view counting as a borderline dangerous endeavor for kids.

Even when ambitious parents introduce math through books, they tack hard towards the serious. Among Amazon’s 100 top-selling educational books for children, not only are there three times as many reading/writing books as math books, but their difference in tone is night and day. The ABC books sport Bob, Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry characters, and Mad Libs. By contrast, the math books are almost entirely workbooks, and “work” sure doesn’t sound like play. Note that parents see the list of top sellers before anything else, so they’re more likely to click on these workbooks and buy them, thus perpetuating the imbalance. What message does this send to kids about math? I’m proud to say that Bedtime Math has lived among Amazon’s top 20 kids’ math books since it was published, perhaps because it’s often the only playful option on the list. 

On the toy front, we again miss an opportunity to spark a love of math early in life. In Amazon’s current 100 bestsellers for babies and toddlers, which were admittedly wholesome, I counted exactly four even vaguely math-related toys: two shape sorters, a cash register, and the eternally fabulous Spirograph. Everything else was oriented towards music, arts and crafts, and bath splash. Again, we signal that math isn’t part of the fun. 

Thus, a lot of kids meet math for the first time in kindergarten, as they enter the world of homework, quizzes and tests. That’s probably not the most fun way to meet a subject for the first time. Not coincidentally, studies have shown that math anxiety can surface as early as age 5, right when kids start school. What’s worse is that this fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: MRIs of people tackling math problems reveal that anxiety causes blockages that slow one’s working memory, making it harder to perform well. The resulting struggles propagate more math anxiety, and the cycle reinforces itself. 

The final nail in the coffin is our after-school infrastructure. Again, let’s run the numbers: Tens of millions of kids – about 60% of them – play organized sports. Nearly as many embark on music or art activities. I haven’t found hard data on book clubs, but such clubs are plentiful, with offerings from Scholastic, Disney and other nationwide players. There are a couple million Boy Scouts and nearly as many Girl Scouts. By contrast, each year only about 180,000 kids participate in arguably the top organized STEM recreational activity, FIRST Robotics. When you slice down to math itself, the fractions ratchet down even faster: only about 70,000 high schoolers compete in the American Mathematics Competitions (AMC), and about 40,000 in MATHCOUNTS. For elementary school kids, there’s no truly widespread or culturally popular offering, as confirmed by a search on Change the Equation’s database; only engineering initiatives pop up for nationwide K-5 activities. By offering only hardcore competitive options in the pure math space, we again signal that math is work intended only for hard-driving achievers, not a fun subject for everyone to enjoy.

In the face of this, we decided that Bedtime Math should create a truly “recreational” after-school club. Less than a year ago we launched our experimental Crazy 8s Club – deliberately without “math club” in the name, lest we send people screaming for cover. Unlike the competitive-worksheet, Olympiad-style clubs, kids in Crazy 8s explore math by building with glowsticks, competing in “Toilet Paper Olympics,” and playing bingo on a life-size board across the floor, all while engaging in fairly real math. The lively (and sneaky) branding seems to have worked: within just a few months we’ve received orders for over 2,000 kits, serving over 30,000 kids in grades K-5. No matter how hostile our culture around the subject, kids are clearly still hungry for fun math, and open to giving it a chance.

This gives me hope that broader change is possible. True, the challenge is enormous: more than one-third of Americans report that they’d rather clean the bathroom than answer a math question. Parents who didn’t like math during their childhood will be hard to convince to buy math toys for their own kids. They’re the same grown-ups sliding the check towards someone else, pleading, “Could you calculate the tip?” – and in front of their ever-observant children. But at Bedtime Math I’ve received some encouraging emails from such parents. They unload about how they hated math as kids, how they grew up to hate it as adults…but how in doing Bedtime Math with their own kids, they’re starting to enjoy math themselves for the first time ever. By returning adults to simple counting and single-digit addition, we can remind them that they are able to do math and should give it another try – not as work, but as play.

Photo of Laura Overdeck by Kathryn Huang

My Advice to Qatar: Make Math Education a Research Grand Challenge

I was invited to be on a social science panel for the Qatar Foundation’s 2014 Annual Research Conference in Doha. While there, I took the opportunity to give a talk on “Breaking Through the Zero Lower Bound” at Texas A&M’s Doha campus, moderated by Dr Khalid Rashid Alkhater, director of research and monetary policy and member of the Monetary Policy Committee and the Investment Committee at the Qatar Central Bank. And I had a chance to see Doha. (You can see the best of the photos I took here and here.) 

The Annual Research Conference itself was quite interesting. Except for the Social Sciences, it was organized around four “Research Grand Challenges”: Water Security, Energy Security, Cyber Security and Integrated Health Care. In addition, there is an overarching goal of making Qatar into a “Knowledge Economy.” The panel I was on (see the picture of me and the other panelists above) was on the second day of the conference. On the first day of the conference, I sent an email to several of the other panelists and others I met suggesting that the Qatar Foundation make Math Education its fifth Research Grand Challenge. Here is a lightly edited version of that email:

I promised each of you to send links to the two articles I wrote for Quartz (a relatively new online international business magazine started by the Atlantic Company) about math education:

There’s One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don’t

How to Turn Every Child into a “Math Person”

These articles had a large number of pageviews, indicating a great deal of concern about math education.I think it would be both attainable and extremely valuable for the Qatar Foundation to make it a key goal to be the number one center for research and knowledge about math education in the world. Gathering that knowledge, and then implementing it in Qatar’s schools would have a bigger bang for the buck than anything else in achieving the broader goal of fostering a knowledge economy in Qatar. And having such a center would be a great benefit to the rest of the world as well.  Because schools of education in the US and likely many other prestigious countries are often quite politicized, it is crucial to bring into the effort of figuring out the best way to do math education experts whose home is in other fields besides education, as well as some of the best education scholars.   Along these interdisciplinary lines, one of the best education thinkers is actually a renowned professor at Harvard Business School: Clay Christensen. (He has many times won the top award in the world for a business strategist.) With his coauthors, he has written a pair of excellent books on the transformation ofeducation that is now underway because of high-powered computing–#4 and #5 in this list:

• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
• The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
• The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
• Disrupting Class, Expanded Edition: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
• The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out
• The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

I think all of the other stakeholders in the Qatar Foundation in the natural sciences will easily see the value of an emphasis on figuring out how to do math education well–something most advanced countries do not do.   In terms of tracking the achievement of the goal of math education, the single most important measure would be to ask representative samples of kids “Do you love math.” Success would be 90% of students honestly saying “Yes.”  If almost all of Qatar’s children loved math, the knowledge economy would follow as day follows night. 

The question for the panel discussion was particularly about survey data collection for Qatar. In my initial statement, I began by mentioning the importance of measuring national well being, but said that for the goal of becoming a knowledge economy, measuring some other intermediate goals made sense. I laid out for those attending the panel discussion the idea of making Math Education a fifth Research Grand Challenge, identifying and implementing best practice for math education, including the use of new technologies. I urged that Qatar should set a goal of making math education in Qatar better than math education in any other nation, saying that was unfortunately easy because the standards for math education are low. As in my email, I said that if I could choose one survey question to monitor the progress of this effort, it would be to ask kids “How do you feel about math.” If 90% of kids said that they loved math that would be success: in particular, it would augur good things for Qatar’s hopes of becoming a knowledge economy.   

In the discussion that followed, I had to defend the choice of math education as a focus. Of course there are many other issues in education, but I maintain that because doing math education right is the hardest, solving that would put Qatar in a great position to improve education more generally. For example, coding (what we called “computer programming” when I was young) uses much of the same type of thinking as mathematics, but it is probably easier to motivate kids to be excited about computer programming than it is to motivate them to be excited about math.  (Improving foreign language education–which in much of the world is first and foremost learning English–is a fascinating issue, and one that I studied in the course of getting my MA in Linguistics. Like math education, I think foreign language education can be dramatically improved. But I should save my thoughts on that for another post.)   There were other things I didn’t have time to say in the panel discussion, but said in conversations beforehand and afterwards. In line with the thinking of Clay Christensen and his coauthors, I argued that the potential of technology is in making it possible to have a division of labor between

• teachers who have a deep knowledge of the subject matter of economics, who record online lectures and help design computer programs that teach mathematics (the teacher-at-a-distance) and
• teachers who are expert at motivating students (the coach-on-the-spot).  

It is wonderful but rare to find a single teacher who combines deep mathematical knowledge and brilliance at motivating students; it is much easier to find someone who has one of these skills. I actually think coaching talent–the ability to motivate–is relatively abundant. But the ability to instill enthusiasm needs to be teamed up with a good teacher-at-a-distance with the deep subject matter knowledge.

In any case, this line of thought gives me some confidence that dramatically better programs of math education are possible. A research center in Qatar focusing on math education that brought in the top experts from around the world to debate one another and generate new ideas could dramatically improve the world’s knowledge of how to do math education. I don’t claim to know all the answers about math education. But I know enough to be confident that what is possible for math education is far beyond what is currently done. In particular, any system of math education that leads to half of all kids hating math at the end, is far, far below the possibility frontier.  

The goal of being the best in the world at something has a powerful motivating force. There is honor to be had for any nation that takes seriously the challenge of fulfilling the potential of math education. And for Qatar to do so might transform not only Qatar, but the whole Arab world, allowing the Arab world to reclaim the preeminence in mathematics that was one of the hallmarks of the Arab world’s golden age. (There is a reason so many key words in math, such as “algebra,” “algorithm,” “cipher,” and perhaps even “average” come from Arabic.)