Educational Catchup Downunder.

A wonderfully ambitious paper just published in the new Journal of Human Capital combines school enrollment data and demographic tables to estimate educational attainment rates for 74 countries over the period 1870-2010. Here[not equal]Äôs the abstract.

The Century of Education (published version, working paper version)
Christian Morrisson & Fabrice Murtin
This paper presents a historical database on educational attainment in 74 countries for the period 1870[not equal]Äì2010, using perpetual inventory methods before 1960 and then the Cohen and Soto database. We use a measurement error framework to merge the two databases, while correcting for a systematic measurement bias in Cohen and Soto’s study linked to differential mortality across educational groups. Descriptive statistics show a continuous spread of education that has accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century. We find evidence of fast convergence in years of schooling for a subsample of advanced countries during the 1870[not equal]Äì1914 globalization period and of modest convergence since 1980. Less advanced countries have been excluded from the convergence club in both cases.

Being a tad parochial, I naturally turned to see how Australia compares. Here[not equal]Äôs our average years of schooling, plotted against the average for the UK and US, over 140 years.

11:08:02 AM    

Schools That Transform.

David Brooks reports on some surprisingly large impacts from a randomised trial of New York [base ']ÄúHarlem Children[base ']Äôs Zone[base ']Äù schools. The effects are so big that I find it hard to imagine they[base ']Äôre readily replicable, but it[base ']Äôs tantalizing stuff.

The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.

That[base ']Äôs why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: [base ']ÄúThe attached study has changed my life as a scientist.[base ']Äù

Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children[base ']Äôs Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children[base ']Äôs Zone schools, but weren[base ']Äôt selected.

They found that the Harlem Children[base ']Äôs Zone schools produced [base ']Äúenormous[base ']Äù gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas [base ']Äî reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start [base ']Äî produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That[base ']Äôs off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. [base ']ÄúThe results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,[base ']Äù Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children[base ']Äôs Zone[base ']Äôs founder and president, has done is [base ']Äúthe equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. [base ']Ķ

These results are powerful evidence in a long-running debate. Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue that schools alone can[base ']Äôt produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on broader issues like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued that school-based approaches can produce big results. The Harlem Children[base ']Äôs Zone results suggest the reformers are right. The Promise Academy does provide health and psychological services, but it helps kids who aren[base ']Äôt even involved in the other programs the organization offers.

[base ']Ķ Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.

For more wonkish readers, the abstract of the paper is over the fold.

Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Bold Social Experiment in Harlem
Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer, Jr.
Harlem Children[base ']Äôs Zone¬Æ (HCZ) is arguably the most ambitious social experiment to alleviate poverty of our time. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ on educational outcomes, with an eye toward informing the long-standing debate whether schools alone can eliminate the achievement gap or whether the issues that poor children bring to school are too much for educators to overcome. We implement two identification strategies. First, we exploit the fact that HCZ charter schools are required to select students by lottery when the demand for slots exceeds supply. Second, we use the interaction between a student[base ']Äôs home address and cohort year as an instrumental variable. Both approaches lead us to the same story: Harlem Children[base ']Äôs Zone is enormously effective at increasing the achievement of the poorest minority children. Taken at face value, the effects in middle school are enough to reverse the black-white achievement gap in mathematics and reduce it in English Language Arts. The effects in elementary school close the racial achievement gap in both subjects. Harlem Gems and The Baby College¬Æ, the only two community programs in HCZ that keep detailed administrative data, show mixed success. We conclude by presenting three pieces of evidence that high-quality schools or high-quality schools coupled with community investments generate the achievement gains. Community investments alone cannot explain the results.

[Andrew Leigh]
2:42:02 AM    

The Black-White Test Score Gap Downunder.

(xposted @ Core)

Discussing NT schools, the CIS[base ']Äôs Helen Hughes writes:

This week all Australian children in school years 3, 5, 7 and 9 sat numeracy and literacy tests for the second time. The tests are to give Australians an annual snapshot of basic educational progress. The first national [base ']ÄòNAPLAN[base ']Äô tests, held in May 2008, showed that 90% of children passed. Western Australia has made the tests available for government schools on the Internet, and Education Minister Julia Gillard has promised that all the 2009 test results will be posted by school.

An overview of the 2008 tests showed that there was no [base ']Äògap[base ']Äô between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Indigenous students in mainstream schools in Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT had the same results as non-Indigenous students.

I find this claim difficult to reconcile with the facts. Looking at the NAPLAN report (15mb), here[base ']Äôs year 7 numeracy:

To put this into more concrete terms, the average score by year 7 Indigenous students is about the level of year 5 non-Indigenous students. (This is true even if you restrict the comparison to metropolitan schools.)

It is certainly true that the black/white test score gap in the NT is bigger than in other states, and Hughes is right to discuss why it might be.* But let[base ']Äôs not pretend away a 2-year performance gap in other states at the same time.

* It[base ']Äôs possible that schools are the cause, but also notable that the NT black/white test score gap is very large in the grade 3 tests too [base ']Äì suggesting that there may also be differences before children arrive at school. Looking at grades 3, 5, 7 and 9, it doesn[base ']Äôt appear to me as though the racial test score gap widens faster in the NT than in other states, which is what a [base ']Äòlower school quality[base ']Äô argument would predict.

Update, 19/5 - Helen and Mark Hughes respond:

Thank you very much for your perceptive comment on Indigenous performance in the NAPLAN results. Yours is the first meaningful comment based on analysis of the data that we have received in two years work on remote Indigenous education.

Our concern has been with the egregious difference between Indigenous performance in remote schools that have sub-standard curriculums, facilities and administration, compared with mainstream schools.

We concur that according to NAPLAN Indigenous metropolitan students on average do not score as well as the non-Indigenous cohort, and that Indigenous students lag non-Indigenous by varying amounts [base ']Äì up to two years in the states/territories without remote / very remote schools.

Differences in average scores between Indigenous and non-Indigenous are not the same as differences in failure rates, although we acknowledge that Indigenous failure rates are also somewhat higher in metro areas. ¬[sgl dagger]We concentrated on failure rates as they tend to highlight the percentage of students not getting an education, while the average score tells more about the average quality of education most students receive.

Comparison of Indigenous scores in metro areas with scores for non-Indigenous from matched socio-economic groups would be necessary to give an indication if any difference can be attributed to [base ']Äòindigenousness[base ']Äô. For example, in Year 7 Numeracy in¬[sgl dagger]Victoria, there were 682 Indigenous students and over 60,000 non-Indigenous students [base ']Äì a meaningful comparison would be with like socio-economic non-Indigenous students within the latter cohort.

We thus do not think that your comments detract from our basic thesis that non-performing separate schools rather than [base ']Äòindigenousness[base ']Äô account for the principal failure of Indigenous education.

[Andrew Leigh]
2:40:43 AM    

Increasing Diversity.

The diversity of the universe has been increasing since the beginning of time. In its very first seconds the universe contained only quarks, which began to assemble into a variety of sub-atomic particles within minutes. By the end of the first hour, the universe contained dozens of  types of particles but only two elements, hydrogen and helium. Over the next 300 million years drifting hydrogen and helium atoms found each other and their micro-gravities bound them together into masses of growing nebula that eventually collapsed into fiery stars. Star fusion built up the hydrogen and helium with additional particles until they emerged as dozens of new heavier elements, and so the diversity of the chemical universe increased. Eventually some "metallic" stars exploded into supernova spewing their heavy elements into space, to be swept up again over millions of years into new stars. In a kind of pumping action, these second and third round star-furnaces added yet more neutrons to metallic elements to create more varieties of heavy metals until all 100 or so varieties of stable elements were created. The increasing diversity of elements and particles also created an increasing variety of star species, galaxies types, and varieties of orbiting planets. On planets with active tectonic crusts new kinds of minerals increased in time, as geologic forces reworked and rearranged the elements into new crystals and rocks.  The diversity of crystallized minerals on Earth, for instance, increased even further with advent of life.

Two different studies (1982 and 1992) reveal increasing diversity in evolution of life on Earth

The invention of life greatly accelerated the diversity in the universe many fold. From a very few species 3.8 billion years ago, the number and variety of living species on Earth has increased dramatically over geological time to the 30 to 100 million now present.  This rise has been uneven in several ways. At certain times in Earth's history large-scale cosmological disruptions (such as asteroid hits) have wiped out gains in diversity. And in specific branches of life diversity sometimes did not advance very much, or even retreated.  But overall, in life as a whole over geologic time, diversity has widened. In fact life's diversity has doubled since the dinosaurian era, only 200 million years ago. The growth of biological differences, as a whole, is expanding exponentially, as this rocketing increase can be seen in vertebrates, plants and insects.

Exponential increase in diversity  in (A) terrestrial plants (B) vertebrates, and (C) insects.

The trend toward diversity is further accelerated by the technium. The number of species of technology invented every year is increasing at an increasing rate. It's difficult to precisely count the varieties of technological invention since innovations don't have the defined borders of breeding that most living organisms do. We might count ideas, which underlie each invention. Each scientific article represents at least one new idea. The number of journal articles has exploded in the last 50 years. Each patent is also a species of idea. At last count there were 7 million patents issued in the US alone, and their total has been increasing exponentially as well. Considering that humans have named and identified only 1.6 million living species, as far as we know, the "made" now outnumber the "born" four to one.

Exponential increase of scientific articles

Exponential growth in US patents

We see increased diversity everywhere in the technium. Manufactured species of underwater organisms such as 70-foot submarine parallel living organisms like a blue whale. Airplanes ape birds, so to speak. Our houses are but better nests. But the technium explores niches that the born never ventured into. We know of no organisms using radio waves, yet the technium has produced hundreds of varieties of radio communicating species. While moles have been digging up earth for millions of years, two-story tunnel digging contraptions are so much larger, faster, and less daunted by solid rock than anything born that we can truly say they occupy a new niche on Earth. X-ray machines have a type of sight unknown among the living. And there is simply no biological analog to an Etch-a-Sketch, a digital watch, or a Space Shuttle, to name a few examples. Increasingly the diversity of the technium has no counterpart in biological evolution, and so the technium has truly increased diversity.

Diversity of spark catchers for train locomotive smokestacks, from The Evolution of Technology

The diversity of the technium has already surpassed our skills of recognition. There are so many varieties of things that one individual can't name them.  Cognitive researchers have discovered there are about 3,000 easily recognizable noun categories in modern life. This total includes manufactured objects and living organisms such as: elephant, airplane, palm, telephone, chair - things that are readily discernable in a flash without thinking. Researchers came up with the estimate of 3,000 based on the number of nouns listed in dictionaries, how many objects are found in the vocabulary of an average 6-year-old child, and the number of objects that a primitive expert system (20q) can recognize. They estimated there are, on average, ten named varieties for each noun category. Ten kinds of chairs, ten kinds of fish, ten kinds of phones, ten kinds of beds that ordinary people might be describe. That gives a rough estimate of 30,000 objects in most peoples lives, or at least 30,000 that they would recognize. Even when we name a form, most of the variety of life and the technium goes by us without a specific name. We may recognize a bird, but not which species of bird. We know a grass, but not which grass. We know it is a cell phone, but not what model. When pressed we can discern a chef's knife from a Swiss Army knife from a spear point, but we may or may not be able to discern a fuel pump from a water pump. 

Of course there are many more than 30,000 varieties of manufactured things in the technium, but it is fair to ask whether some of their variety is important. In biological terms the 30,000 varieties of common nouns represents a type of meta diversity called disparity. Disparity indicates a difference in basic design forms, or a basic body plan, or form type, such as "elephant" or "palm" or "chair." The actual variety of chair, or elephant can vary in details, and this local variation is what we call diversity. Disparity increases much more slowly than diversity, and is a more significant kind of variation. One is always more impressed with a brand new kind of invention (it's a light bulb!) rather than a variation of known invention (another spark catcher!). In biological evolution disparity can decrease (fewer new ways to make an animal) while diversity increases (more new kinds of already-invented elephants and horses).

There are branches of the technium where the diversity of technological species is dwindling; today there are fewer innovations in spark catchers, buggy whips, hand looms, and ox carts. I doubt anyone has invented a new manual butter churner in the last 50 years. (Although many people are still inventing "better" mousetraps.) Handlooms will always be around for art. Ox carts are not extinct and will probably never go extinct globally as long as oxen are born. But because oxcarts encounter no new demands, like all artifacts hovering near obsolescence, they are remarkably stable inventions, continuing over time unchanged, like horseshoe crabs. But technological backwaters like these are overwhelmed by the mind-numbing avalanche of innovation, ideas, and artifacts throughout the rest of the expanding technium.

One hardware wholesaler, McMaster-Carr, lists "over 480,000 products" in its catalog. There you can find 2,432 varieties of wood screws alone. Amazon carries 85,000 different cell phones and cell phone products. So far humans have created 500,000 different movies and about one million TV episodes. At least 10 million different songs have been recorded. The largest database of bar codes lists 2.7 million different products for sale in Europe and the US, which EAN, the issuing agency, says is "only a small fraction" of the product codes that have been issued. Multiplying that small fraction up gives a grand total of about 100 million different products in circulation.

All these quantities are rising as diversity of the technium increases over time. The number of new technological "species" in many branches of the technium - food products, media creations, consumer gadgets, tools, and material types -- seem to be growing by 10% annually.  That means that in 50 years, when the next generation is in middle age, there will be 12 billion different produced products for sale, including 10 million different types of cell phone-like thingies, and 1.1 billion (!) different songs to listen to. There will still be a top 40 hit song list, but the existence of 1 billion alternative songs will bend our culture.

The problem with this cornucopia of diversity and abundance is not the problem of how we can individually absorb it; even if you listened to a song only once, (or watched a movie, tried a tool) in a non-stop marathon during your waking hours for your entire life, you could not make a dent in the totality. The real problem with ultra-diversity is in not being able to grasp the whole of it, not being able to search through it, to track your navigation in this space of billions, and to (re)find the best when you summon it.

A billion songs by 2060 (how many a century later?), 12 billion products for sale in 50 years (how many in two centuries?) seem outrageously large, perhaps unlikely. Surely, compound growth doesn't keep going. It is true that growth of all species, both made and born, follow an "s" curve as they slowly rise in numbers, then increase rapidly, and eventually taper off in a plateau, to be replaced by another species. So cell phones are unlikely to ever reach 10 million varieties simply because long before 50 years hence they will be replaced by a different device. And perhaps the format of songs, too, might peak in popularity to be replaced by some unit of music unknown to us now, just as the 90-minute movie was unknown a century ago. Nonetheless, the total diversity of these new replacements plus the peak diversity of the old yields absolutely increasing numbers of new things in the technium.

Some researchers question the economic assumptions of technological ultra diversity. How many different phone designs can a market support, even a global market? Or shoes? (Zappos carries 90,000 different shoes today. In 50 years, at current rates of diversity growth, there should be 10 million choices in shoes. Talk about a long tail!) Who would design, finance and market this diversity? One answer: prosumers drive ultra diversity. The buyers are the makers of diversity. Right now major book publishers are fighting to remain economically viable. A big-time New York book publisher may produce 200 titles per year. But Lulu, a prosumer company that enables authors to publish their own paper books is releasing 5,000 titles per week. A slew of other companies are pioneering the expansion of diversity by enabling mass customization, in which items can be personalized and customized by manufacturing means (instead of customized by hand). A small industry of long-tail mass-customization exists at the margins of the economy. Blurb makes photo books; Café Press, hats and mugs; Threadless, t-shirts; Infectious, decals; CD Baby, music CDs. Within the next 50 years personal fabricators in local shops will begin to permit individuals to create personally diversity tangible artifacts, manufactured in units of one. The world of 1 billion species of tools, 100 billion unique varieties of products is plausible.

A few iconoclasts believe this ultra-diversity is toxic to humans. In the "The Paradox of Choice", sociologist Barry Schwartz argues that the 285 varieties of cookies, 171 kinds of salad dressing and 85 brands of crackers for sale in the typical supermarket today is paralyzing consumers. They enter the store looking for crackers, see a bewildering wall of cracker choices, become overwhelmed with trying to make an informed decision and finally walk out not purchasing any crackers at all. "Whether people are choosing jam in a grocery store or essay topics in a college class, the more options people have, the less likely they are to make a choice," says Schwartz. Similarly, in trying to choose a plan of medical benefits plan with hundreds of options, many consumers give up because of the complexity of choice is paralyzing and instead resign from the program, whereas programs that included a default choice of options (no decision necessary) had much higher enrollments. Schwartz concludes: "As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize."

It is true that too many choices may induce regret, but "no choice" is a far worst option. Civilization itself is a steady move away from "no choice." As ever, the solution to the problems that technology brings, such overwhelming diversity and choices is better technologies. The solution to ultra-diversity will be choice-assist technologies. These better tools will augment humans in making choices among bewildering options. Diversity, in fact, will produce tools to handle diversity. (Diversity-taming tools will be among the wildly diverse-making 821 million patents that current rates predict will be filed by 2060.). We are already discovering how to use computers to augment our choices with information and webpages (it's called Google), but it will take additional learning and technologies to do this with tangible tools, and idiosyncratic media. At the dawn of the web some very smart computer scientists declared that it would be impossible to select from a billion web pages using key word search, but we routinely do just that on 100 billion web pages today. No one is asking for fewer web pages.

Difference powers the world. It is the absolute difference in temperature between cold space and hot stars that powers not only life on earth, but syntropy anywhere. No delta, no life, no stars, no galaxy, no nothing. Maintaining a difference is what living systems and minds do.  When a difference can be maintained over time, it can begin to multiply and increase differences elsewhere. If it a diverse ecosystem is in good health it will, over time, increase its own diversity. Evolution increases differences.  Culture is about accentuating differences.  The technium runs on differences.

That may sound strange to many, because the stereotypical image of increasing technology is one of standard products, world-wide sameness, and unwavering uniformity. Yet, paradoxically, diversity can be unleashed by uniformity. The uniformity of a standard writing system (like an alphabet or script) unleashes the unexpected diversity of literature. Without uniform rules, every word has to be made-up, so communication is localized and inefficient. But with a uniform language sufficient communication transpires in large circles so that a novel word, phrase or idea can be appreciated, caught, and disseminated. The rigidity of an alphabet has done more to enable creativity than any brain-storming exercise ever invented.

The standard 26 letters in English have produced 28 million different books in English. Words and language will keep evolving of course, but their evolution rides on basic fundamentals that are conserved and shared; unvarying (over the short term) letters, spelling, grammar rules enable creativity in ideas.  Increasingly the technium will converge upon a few universal standards - perhaps English, and western musical notation, mathematical symbols, but also widely adopted technical protocols, from the metric system to ASCII and Unicode. The modern infrastructure of the world today is built upon a shared system woven from these kinds of standards. That is why you can order machine parts in China to be used in factories in South Africa, or have research done in India for drugs released in Brazil. This convergence of fundamental protocols is also why the youth of today can speak to each other directly in a way not possible even a decade ago. They use cell phones and netbooks running common operating systems, but they also employ standard abbreviations and increasingly share common cultural touchstones by watching the same movies, listening to the same music, studying the same subjects in school, and pocketing the same technology. In a curious way the homogenization of shared universals allows it to transmit the diversity of cultures.

In a world of converging global standards, a recurring fear among minority cultures is that their niche differences will be lost. They need not be. In fact, the increasingly common carrier of global communication can heighten the value of their differences. The distinctive foods, medicinal knowledge, and child rearing practices, say of the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon, or the San Bushman in Africa, were only esoteric, local knowledge before. Their diversity commanded a difference that did not make a difference outside the tribe because their knowledge was not connected to the rest of cultures. But once connected to standard roads, electricity, communications, their differences can potentially make a difference to others. Even if their knowledge could only be applied in their local environment, wider knowledge of their knowledge made a difference. Where do wealthy people travel to? Places that retain differences. What eateries attract customers? The ones with distinctive differences. What products sell in a global market? The ones that think different. If such local diversity can remain distinctively different while it is connected (and this is a very big IF) then that difference becomes steadily more valuable in a global matrix. Maintaining that balance of connected-but-different is a challenge of course, because much of this cultural difference and diversity originated via isolation, and in the new mix it no longer will be isolated. Cultural differences that thrive without isolation (even if they were born out of it) will compound  in value as the world becomes standardized. Of this stance I am reminded of Bali, Indonesia. The rich, distinguished Balinese culture seems to deepen even as it becomes interconnected to the modern world. Like other inhabitants of old and new, the Balinese may wield English as their universal second language while speaking their own tongue at home. They make their ritualistic offerings from flowers in the morning and study science at school in the afternoon. They do gamelan and google.

In this way the technium can both become more homogenized and more diverse at the same time. Take languages, mentioned earlier, as an example. In 100 years it is very likely there will be at least one common language spoken by at least half the people on the planet. But the same people will also retain their regional tongue as well, perhaps even more widely than is spoken today, since some fading languages such as Gaelic have revived. Yet we are currently loosing dozens of tribal languages every year, reducing diversity. On the other hand, millions of earthlings have learned newly created computer languages. These are entirely new types of languages. I would argue that the global diversity of languages has decrease but its global disparity has increased.

Costume is another. The most widely dispersed manufactured technology in the world today is not a steel blade nor a cell phone (although these are extremely prolific) but manufactured cotton cloth. In the most remote regions of the world, in the swamps of Papua New Guinea, or the desert plateau of Tibet, you'll find very few imported iron knives or metal pots, but you'll find people wearing generic machine-made t-shirts or pants. This is one technology that has penetrated every tribe on Earth. A lot of this is cast-off clothing from developed countries, but a lot is new clothing made in nearby capital cities. Machined cotton fabric is so cheap to make per piece, so easy to transport, and so much superior to labor intensive rough home-spun, that traditional clothing is often reserved for occasional celebrations in both poor and wealthy places. However, the very same qualities that make manufactured cloth so ubiquitous also makes it easy to modify or customize. Bolts of machine cloth are printed in local patterns, dyed in local colors, cut in local designs, and sewn into distinctive style. In the cities of the planet new kinds and types of machine-made clothing is increasing the disparity of cloth. Fancy fashion shops, sports catalogs and outdoor stores sell inventive new kinds of fabric and wholly new concepts in clothes. The degree of diversity that is lost by traditional hand-weaving is gained by new styles, even though particular designs may disappear - though they rarely do. On the whole, the variety of traditional clothing may have decreased in local regions but overall the disparity of clothing design has increased around the globe.

We can go down the list: cuisine, ceremonies, art, and music. In every case there may be a loss of diversity in some local regions over time (as there has always been) but a gain of globally disparity. Local losses hurt, but we are increasingly a global species. We seek maximum diversity because it is the source of innovation, evolution, and ultimately progress. And it is also the product of all those, too.

Diversity is the currency of progress. The things that we desire - freedom of choice, options and difference - are types of diversity, and in a loop of upcreation, more diversity produces more of the things that we desire.

Beginning from the white dawn of creation, diversity in the universe has been increasing. Its rate of increase has been ramped up by life, and is now being further accelerated by the technium. What technology wants is greater diversity.

[The Technium]
2:33:04 AM    

National Quality Council agrees on priorities. The National Quality Council has identified five Action Groups to work on achieving 5 priorities for 2009. They are: Vet Products for the 21st Century, Quality of Assessment Action Group, Skills for Sustainability Action Group, International VET Action Group, and National Consistency Action Group. [Vocational Education & Training Headlines]
2:08:19 AM    

New international documents available on VOCED. A collection of vocational education and training (VET) related research and policy documents from various regions of the world are now available online on VOCED, including many of the older print-based copies. VOCED is the international research database with over 35,000 documents available. [Vocational Education & Training Headlines]
2:04:05 AM    

As always, some very useful and timely links from Andrew Leigh. I would be interesting in pursuing randomised trials in our Education Sector.

Randomising in the UK.

In 2003, the UK government started a major randomised evaluation of the Employment Retention and Advancement project (ERA), to test the effectiveness of interventions to improve job retention and advancement prospects for low wage workers (background here). Like the US and Canada, British policymakers decided that randomised evaluation needed to be a key part of understanding what active labour market programs work best. They are now reaping the rewards of their foresight, as the results couldn't be arriving at a more useful time. Most of it is still under wraps, but a report on costs is now out.

10:19:42 AM    

Google Unveils New Tool To Dig for Public Data . Google launched a new search tool yesterday designed to help Web users find public data that is often buried in hard-to-navigate government Web sites.

[Wash Post Technology]
9:29:07 PM    

Do Smart Parents Raise Smart Kids?.

Not surprisingly, the answer is yes. But we might also be interested in magnitudes.

A new paper using German data finds a parent-child test score correlation of 0.45, which is bigger than the intergenerational earnings correlation in Germany (about 0.2, I think). So a 10% increase in parents[not equal]Äô income raises children[not equal]Äôs income by 2%, but a 10% increase in parents[not equal]Äô test scores raises children[not equal]Äôs test scores by 4.5%.

Do Smart Parents Raise Smart Children? The Intergenerational Transmission of Cognitive Abilities
Silke Anger & Guido Heineck
Complementing prior research on income mobility and educational transmission, we provide evidence on the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study. Our estimates suggest that individuals’ cognitive skills are positively related to the abilities of their parents, even when educational attainment and family background is controlled for. We differentiate between mothers’ and fathers’ IQ transmission and find different effects on the cognition of sons and daughters. We show that cognitive skills which are based on past learning are more strongly transmitted from parents to children than cognitive skills which are related to innate abilities. Our findings are not compatible with a pure genetic model, but rather point to the importance of parental investments for the cognitive outcomes of children.

(xposted @ CoreEconomics)

8:49:07 PM    

Australia’s $650 million Community Infrastructure Grants. This has come out of the blue - $650 million Jobs Fund announced by the Rudd Government to support local jobs, build skills and improve facilities in local communities. It is part of the Rudd Governmentâo[dot accent]s Jobs and Training Compact - includes three streams: $300m for Local Jobs to invest in community projects of up [...] [Investment & Innovation Forum]
5:48:01 PM    

Andrew Leigh points to some very interesting work on attitudes to redistribution.

Who wants more rungs on the ladder of opportunity?.

For anyone interested in understanding attitudes about redistribution, a new working paper from Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano titled Preferences for Redistribution is a must-read. Some snippets.

We start our analysis by examining the individual determinants of preferences for redistribution in the United States [not equal] Results of this type of regression are by now well known, but it is worth briefly reviewing some of the basic facts. First of all, the richer you are, the less you favor redistribution, which is, of course, not surprising. The second striking result from this regression is that, even after controlling for income, marital status, employment status, education and age, race has a very strong effect: blacks are much more favorable to redistribution than whites. [not equal]

Women are more pro-redistribution then men, even though the effect of gender is much smaller than that of race. [not equal] Even after controlling for income, education enters with a significant and negative coefficient: more educated individuals are more averse to redistribution. Perhaps this captures prospects for upward mobility: people invest more in education, holding income constant, to be upwardly mobile. More left-wing individuals are more pro-redistribution even after controlling for income, which already points in the direction of models highlighted above where an ideological dimension matters. [not equal]

In this section, we briefly look at preferences for redistribution using cross-country evidence. [not equal] Eastern European countries are the most pro-government redistribution (a not surprising effect of left-wing ideology), followed by Latin America and Northern European countries. Asian countries, the US, Australia and New Zealand are in the bottom part of the distribution.

8:24:39 AM    

My kind of cartoon.

From XKCD (HT: Rocco Weglarz & Robert Wiblin)

[Andrew Leigh]
6:12:43 PM    

McKinsey maps the world's innovation clusters - dominicbasulto [Endless Innovation]
5:48:56 PM    

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Jim Cramer Pt. 2
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things w/ Demetri Martin Political Humor

11:32:37 PM    

Low-paid workers, changing patterns of work and life, and participation in VET. This item includes an audio recording of an interview with researcher Barbara Pocock; the accompanying interview transcript; and the occasional paper itself. In this interview, Steve Davis talks with researcher Barbara Pocock about her paper, 'Low-paid workers, changing patterns of work and life, and participation in vocational education and training'. This paper outlines the issues emerging from the first year of research undertaken by University of South Australia's Centre for Work + Life on what influences people's decisions to participate in vocational education and training, particularly for low-skilled and low-paid workers (that is, those earning less than $15 per hour). [edna]
11:22:39 PM    

On a potentially amazing resource. I don't usually simply plug other sites, but one cannot but admire the chutzpah of this site;

"Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world[base ']s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community, and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone."

By noreply@blogger.com (James A). [Recent Reflection]
2:16:47 PM    

They took our jobs.

The Australian Government intends to head into the G20 meeting in April with strong warnings against the dangers of growing economic nationalism around the globe, so we should not expect the Government to exhibit any such traits in the lead up to the London meeting.¬[sgl dagger]

On Sunday morning Wayne Swan was offered the chance to pillory ANZ for out-sourcing 500 back office jobs to India.¬[sgl dagger] He was asked on the ABC Insiders program¬[sgl dagger]whether the Government was getting enough in return for the financial guarantees provided to the banks, given that jobs are being sent off-shore.¬[sgl dagger] Swan’s reply was reassuring in its economic liberalism.¬[sgl dagger]¬[sgl dagger]Swan said that the guarantees and off-shoring of jobs were unrelated issues, and he only urged banks to look after their employees.¬[sgl dagger]

So far so good.¬[sgl dagger] But then on Monday we hear that the Government is to slash Australia’s skilled migrant intake.¬[sgl dagger]

¬[sgl dagger]This is a bad¬[sgl dagger]decision on every level.¬[sgl dagger] It trashes the Government’s credibility in arguing against economic nationalism; it restricts the flow of valuable human capital into Australia; and it pulls up the ladder people who are in the pipeline and could reasonably have expected to come to Australia this year.¬[sgl dagger]¬[sgl dagger] Josh Gans explains below that there is little or no evidence that immigration increases either unemployment or rents in a¬[sgl dagger]recession.¬[sgl dagger] ¬[sgl dagger]

We are a nation of immigrants.¬[sgl dagger] Apart from our¬[sgl dagger]indigenous¬[sgl dagger]population, everybody who lives in Australia is descended from immigrants (and/or convicts).¬[sgl dagger] Our immigration policy has served the nation fantastically well and should¬[sgl dagger]not be¬[sgl dagger]used as a semi-annual labour market policy instrument (the skilled immigration quota increased substantially only 9 months ago).

The Government might just as easily have announced that in the global war for talent the GFC¬[sgl dagger]presents a unique opportunity for Australia to bring in a wave of talented and energetic immigrants that will carry us forward for decades.¬[sgl dagger] It might have announced that in the interests of up-skilling the economy and solving the demographic problems of a greying population, skilled migration will be increased by 100% for the next three years.¬[sgl dagger] Skilled immigration is like adrenaline to any society and an opportunity to attract this much talent is unlikely to present itself again, so lets go for it.¬[sgl dagger]

But, alas no.¬[sgl dagger] Instead we have a sop to ACTU lobbying that does a lot of harm and and very little good.

[Core Economics]
2:13:16 PM    

Developing Australia's digital skills. To fully participate in the digital economy, Australians need effective digital, media literacy and e-business skills. We are talking about skills at all levels[~]individual, business and higher education and vocational training. Read on for more detail about these issues and to let us know the best ways we can develop Australia's digital skills... [Digital Economy Future Directions Latest Topics]
1:57:33 PM    

What does the digital economy encompass? What does it mean for Australians?. A useful starting point for any discussion about how we can maximise the participation of Australian households and businesses in the digital economy is to understand what we are referring to when we use the term 'digital economy.' Read on to see recent data about internet and broadband take-up and to give your feedback on what the digital economy means to you... [Digital Economy Future Directions Latest Topics]
1:56:59 PM    

When Good Leaders Hit Bad Times.

In early-1993, Australian unemployment peaked at nearly 12%. In 1992-1995, six of Australia’s eight states and territories ousted their government. By contrast, unemployment averaged 5% in 2003-2006. In these years, no state or territory government was ousted from power.

In Australian politics, conventional wisdom has it that the state government oustings of the early-1990s were due to bad leadership, while the victories of the early-2000s were due to skill. But could it be that Carr wasn’t more skillful than Cain & Kirner, just luckier? In a paper that we released last year, Mark McLeish and I showed that Australian state governments were more likely to lose office when the national economy turned sour.*

To check that our results weren’t being driven merely by the modest contribution that state leaders make to economic performance, we were able to show that our results held up even if we only used a purely unrelated source of growth - the US economy. Here’s a chart that shows our central result: the bars indicate the share of state governments losing office in each 5-year period, while the line is the US unemployment rate.

Why do Australian voters turf out their state governments when the US economy tanks? The answer seems to lie in something psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’, which is the fact that humans aren’t very good at separating situational factors from ability when making assessments. So for example managers tend to be bad at taking task difficulty into account when assessing their workers, sports fans don’t appropriately adjust for field conditions when judging ability, and shareholders tend to overpay CEOs when the market booms. Consequently, it isn’t all that surprising that voters aren’t very good at separating out the component of economic growth that lies within the control of state politicians from factors outside their control.

Our results suggest that a 1 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate lowers a Premier’s chances of re-election by 3-5 percentage points. So the 1 1/2 percentage point increase in the Queensland unemployment rate over the past year has lowered Premier Bligh’s chances of re-election on the weekend by 5-8 percentage points (the average Premier in our sample had a 66% chance of re-election).

But the fundamental attribution error doesn’t just affect Australian state elections. In earlier work, Justin Wolfers showed that luck affected US state elections in a similar way (though Australian voters seem a little more gullible than their US counterparts). And in work on national elections, I’ve recently shown that when the world economy slumps, national leaders tend to get voted out of power.

Here’s a chart plotting world growth against re-election rates over recent decades (I exclude the US and Japan, since they make up a large share of world GDP).

We don’t know the optimal turnover rate of governments, so it could be that voters in national elections get rid of too many governments when the world economy slumps. Or perhaps they axe too few when the world economy booms. But either way, some more national leaders are likely to join the ranks of the unlucky unemployed.

One last prediction. I’m guessing that the prognostications of the pundits will over-emphasise competence and under-emphasise luck. After all, it’s not just voters who commit the fundamental attribution error.

* As part of the Australian state elections paper, we also produced estimates of Australian state unemployment rates from 1913-2006, which are available here.

[Andrew Leigh]
1:25:56 PM    

External Link: Apple Updates AirPort Design Guide. Apple has revised its guide for planning and building Wi-Fi networks, formerly called Designing AirPort Networks. The new guide, Apple AirPort Networks, is a fairly in-depth effort at explaining with step-by-step instructions how to configure Apple base stations for various kinds of networks and tasks.

 

Copyright © 2009 Glenn Fleishman. TidBITS is copyright © 2009 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you're reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman). [TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us]
12:32:00 PM    

Sony Reader Gets 500,000 Free Public Domain Titles from Google.

Google made a practical move with some of the 7 million books it's scanned from academic collections by making 500,000 titles with no remaining copyright protection available to Sony for its electronic book device, the Reader. Reports indicate only books from 1922 or earlier were included, as 1922 is the latest date for which public domain status is entirely clear. (Many works published after 1922 are also in the public domain, but each work has to be researched individually to determine its status.)

Earlier this year, Google added an option to view but not download 2 million public domain books on the iPhone; see "More Ebooks Available for the iPhone/iPod touch," 2009-02-09. Think of it like iTunes song purchases versus a Pandora stream.

Google's program to scan books ran afoul of publishers and authors' concerns about the right to scan and archive titles, and the legality of snippets being displayed from these scanned works. A preliminary settlement between Google and various interested parties should make millions of books available for viewing, printing, download, and purchase in the coming months; these titles could also wind up being previewable and for sale on the Reader. (See "Authors and Publishers Settle with Google Book Search," 2008-10-29.)

It's clear that Google has chosen a side (for now) between the two giants of electronic book readers, Sony and Amazon. The Wall Street Journal notes Sony said its Reader sales are at 400,000 and reported that Citigroup estimated Amazon Kindle sales at 500,000.

The Kindle 2, introduced in February, improves on the design of the original device and has a faster screen refresh. Amazon released Kindle for iPhone shortly after the Kindle 2 hardware. Amazon offers 245,000 books for sale along with subscriptions to dozens of magazines and newspapers, and hundreds of blogs. The iPhone software can download only books, not subscriptions. That may change with Apple's iPhone 3.0 software, which now enables in-application subscriptions and purchases.

Lest we forget, Project Gutenberg's volunteers have been assiduously typing, scanning, and correcting out-of-copyright works for many years. Its catalog, now at 27,000 books, includes downloads in text and other formats, including a DRM-free ePub format that both the Reader and Kindle 2 can handle. Affiliated and partner projects bring a grand total to 100,000 titles.

While Project Gutenberg has a fraction of what Google has made available, the quality should be higher, as works have been prepared for accuracy instead of volume, and represent works of a great likelihood to be interesting to a modern audience instead of historians and researchers.

 

Copyright © 2009 Glenn Fleishman. TidBITS is copyright © 2009 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you're reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman). [TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us]
12:29:13 PM    

Odds Of Tipping: Better Than Even Chance Of Major Changes In Global Climate System, Experts Predict. According to the estimates of climate scientists in a newly published expert survey, there is more than a 50% chance of major changes in the global climate system if global warming proceeds at the current rate. Should average global temperature increase by more than 4 degrees Celsius, one or several parts of the climate system could tip to a new state. [ScienceDaily: Latest Science News]
12:25:04 PM    

Unemployment rate on upwards trend.

The unemployment rate data published this morning shows a not surprising continuing rise in the unemployment rate. The headline rate is 5.2%, up from 4.8% a month ago, and a low of 3.9% last year. It is well to remember that this is still a very low unemployment rate, but the worrying issue is that the rate is heading up fairly quickly, that full time job losses are large, and that layoffs continue at a fairly rapid pace. In the US the unemployment rate has risen very quickly to a current rate of 8.1% - as recently as April last year the US unemployment rate was below our current 5.2% rate.

So it is appropriate for the government to be spending money to try to slow the rate of unemployment growth. But with the latest payments going out to families and individuals it was interesting to see two recipients on last nights ABC news. One punter was spending the payment on an overseas holiday, while the other was buying a new PC. Both punters are probably creating more jobs in Thailand than in Australia. Once again, the most effective way to create jobs is not to give away handouts, but to spend on infrastructure.

[Core Economics]
6:37:25 PM    

Macedon Youth Awards 2009. It’s that time of year again! Nominations are now open for the 2009 Macedon Ranges Youth Awards . ... [Central Ranges LLEN News]
4:58:52 PM    

Protecting rural economies in Scotland.

Scotland's rural schools can be fundamental to safeguarding small, fragile local economies and the Scottish Government is committed to protecting their often unique place in the community.

[eGov monitor - A Policy Dialogue Platform - Education & Skills]
4:32:53 PM    

Australian vocational education and training: Research messages 2008. This report is a collection of summaries of research projects published by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research in 2008. It includes conference papers; occasional papers; and an overview of research highlights. The summaries are grouped under 5 NCVER themes: Industry and employers; Students and individuals; Teaching and learning; VET system; and VET in context. [edna]
6:59:44 PM    

School spending needed in record time. The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has told education ministers and schools representatives to treat the rollout of the economic stimulus package like a national emergency. The Federal Government has begun its briefing on its $42 billion package, which is yet to be approved by the Senate. If it is passed unamended almost $15 billion will be spent on school maintenance and new buildings. ABC News, 6 February 2009. [School Education Headlines]
3:03:55 PM    

Strong demand for training. The Productivity Places Program has resulted in a strong growth in course commencements and completions over 2008. It offers training for job seekers in areas where there are existing skill shortages. Demand has been very strong across a wide range of industries at both Certificate II and III levels. The most popular courses for job seekers have been in health and community services, education, and transport industries. [Vocational Education & Training Headlines]
3:02:10 PM    

Education Dept figures on school enrolments. Abc.net.au - Sat Feb 21, 02:52 am GMT [News4Sites - Australia Education]
3:00:55 PM    

Should we bother trying to save energy?.

Not according to the Australia Institute who today came out with a press release on the insulation package, arguing that with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, it won't reduce emissions.The Government says the scheme will help households save energy and cut carbon emissions by up to 49 million tonnes by 2020.

But the Australia Institute's executive director Richard Denniss says the Government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme will just reallocate those emissions.

“The way the Emissions Trading Scheme is designed, every kilogram of emissions saved by a household frees up an extra permit for a big polluter,” he said.

This is something John Quiggin noted the other day. And strictly speaking, it is true for a public policy of this kind. So for the 2 tonnes in CO2 saved for each household per year or around 4 million in total, that is an equivalent amount of permits that can be used for something else.

So while that looks like reallocation of permits, it is actually focusing on the wrong thing. What it means is that the demand curve for permits will shift to the left by 4 million units. Depending upon its elasticity, that will translate into some reduction in permit prices. Is that a bad thing? Think about it. The environment is no worse off but the cost to the economy is reduced. And as that is the biggest constraint on stricter emissions targets that solves a policy impediment too.

Does this mean we should value the social return above the energy costs to insulation at the expected carbon price times 4 million per annum? Probably not. But it could be a much larger amount or a smaller amount. Regardless there is some benefit there.

Actually, if the Australia Institute were really wanting to go at this, it is better to think about the fact that the costs of producing the insulation will be borne this side of the ETS. That means that any pollution that production process gives rise to, especially given the extreme concentration of capacity (and hopefully not a big investment in it) at a relatively short period of time, will not be priced and so there will be no incentive to economise on emissions. But then again, this argument gets preciously close to being happy about the recession because it is good for the environment. Hmm, a slippery slope but I guess, to be honest, I can’t rule it out as a theoretical possibility.