These posters are obviously good: Left-leaning student activists at Oberlin College hung posters at the Christina Hoff Sommers event earlier this week that identified the students involved in bringing the individualist-feminist and AEI scholar to campus. Each poster gave the name of a specific student-member of the Oberlin College Republicans and Libertarians and accused that person of...
Does Religion Affect Economic Growth and Happiness? Evidence from Ramadan
Interesting paper, especially the results. We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of daily fasting due to the interaction between the rotating Islamic calendar and a country’s latitude. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful...
Student loan problem is worse than we think
Nearly one in three Americans who are now having to pay down their student debt–or a staggering 31.5%–are at least a month behind on their payments, new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests. That figure is far higher than official delinquency measures reported by the Education Department and the New York Fed. And it’s also likely the most...
The null hypothesis in education
Depressing and probably true. In education, the null hypothesis is that nothing makes a long-term, scalable, replicable difference. That is: 1. Take any pedagogical innovation or educational intervention. 2. Subject it to a controlled experiment. 3. Evaluate the experiment’s outcome several years later. 4. If the experiment works, attempt to replicate the experiment in more situations. By...
Mathematics via mime
This article has inspired me to teach my entire causal inference class next fall via mime: Without saying a word, a man walks on stage carrying a case full of small plungers. Each time he reaches in the case to take some plungers out, he tries to array them in order on a table in front of him, but he always has one left over. Five, seven, 13: No matter what number, there is still that one left...
Why the feds should get out of the student loan business
As we move into the twenty-first century, the commodities we want to produce are becoming less “Smithian”. More education–and I do not think anyone in the U.S. is happy with the decisions twenty-year olds are currently making about how much education they should get and how to finance the debt incurred. Deciding to fund education via long-term loan-finance and to leave societal...
Making fun of social justice, Star Wars version
Godfrey Elfwick regularly mocks social justice, and the guy is hilarious. He managed to get invited onto the BBC and attack Star Wars for being racist and misogynist: Referring to C-3PO and Darth Vader by the wrong names, he went on: “The gold robot – C-25 or whatever he’s called – is a camp, neurotic coward. “The only main female ends up in a space bikini chained to a horny space slug. “The main...
Stop pretending to be offended by everything
“Anti-Semitism” is rooting for Hamas. Making fun of your nebbish boyfriend is lame, but it should not make any rational person think of Iran’s supreme leader. I’ve heard plenty of malicious and offensive anti-Semitic jokes in my life, but it would be tough to conjure up the indignation to believe that Dunham was flirting with anything resembling bigotry. Making fun of innocuous stereotypes — and...
IRBs gone wild
The trial was paid for by AstraZeneca, the maker of Seroquel XR, and was conducted by Dr. S. Charles Schulz, the head of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. Two of the study participants were living in a residential treatment facility for sex offenders and may have lied about their diagnosis to qualify for the trial. One of those men slipped the drugs to unwitting treatment center...
Should we be honest with students?
Other educators worried about a lack of candor when schools offered scholarships to students. A school might offer an attractive three-year scholarship to an applicant, with the seemingly easy condition that the student maintain a B average. The school knew that it tightly controlled curves in first-year courses, so that a predictable number of awardees would fail that condition, but the...