Infestation in the ivory tower

Education dons gather for pre-prandial sherry in the Senior Common Room

In the Mid-Western United States, we have species of cicadas, which are referred to ’17-year locusts’. Every 17 years, the grubs emerge from the tree trunks where they feed, grow wings and swarm, mating as they go. The mess and noise that result are impressive.

There is a species of middle manager with a similar life-cycle. These are the education reformers, who emerge from the darkness every decade with a plan and a promise to fix all problems in the system. They are a parasitic and destructive organism.

While not technically predatory, they will scavenge weaker and more timid creatures. For that reason, their preferred habitats are the fields of Mathematics and Science. There, they are able to clear great swathes of space and build large numbers of flimsy and unusable structures in short periods of time.

Just before the extent of the actual damage becomes known, they retreat safely into academia, full of grant funding, and rest until the next generation emerges.

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Education: Grade Inflation Wastes Lives, Destroys Talent

By Paddington

Where others see conspiracy theories, I see badly thought-out plans. The Law of Unintended Consequences is, after all, a modern restatement of the old proverb, “The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions”.

This is especially applicable to US Education policy.

About a decade ago, the powers that be finally realized that their comfortable lives relied on technology, which in turn relied on a large contingent of well-educated people to create and maintain it. It also became clear that we were not training enough of those individuals, and had imported those brains for decades. They decided that we should produce more, and like Captain Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise, said, “Make it so”.

Departments of Education throughout the country increased the number of Mathematics and Science courses which students had to pass to graduate from high school. People became aware that there was a lot of scholarship money in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines, and also that those majors got productive jobs, while the Liberal Arts majors all too often moved back home after graduation. The diligent middle-class parents forced their children to take even more material, and do better at it, just like the armies of tots forced into gymnastics after each Olympics.

In turn, this meant that teachers in public and private education were faced with legions of students with neither talent nor motivation. Yet, they were expected to succeed in teaching them. The result could have been easily predicted. There was massive grade inflation and a lowering of standards, plus extra punitive measures against teachers.

We in higher education in those STEM disciplines are now faced with two large groups of ‘problem’ students.

The first have been told that they have mastered material which they have not, and deeply resent us for dropping them into lower-level courses. They then spend years repeating courses, until they run out of student loans, or finally pass.

The second have a great deal of talent, but have not been stretched to their capacity. They were the success stories, who expect A’s on everything. It is really sad, but many cannot emotionally handle their first failure (or even a C). We see eating disorders, suicides, and too many drop-outs from this group. The knee-jerk reaction in the popular media is that these students are too stressed from the expectations placed on them. I claim that it is because they have been given unrealistic feedback, and this is strongly supported by international studies on such things.

Of course, some universities and colleges have lowered their standards, and Mathematics and Science departments in those which have not are now being referred to as ‘roadblocks’. Any guesses as to what will happen next?

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Does management justify its own costs?

Throughout history, the university systems of the world have evolved from a monastic model, through the industrial model as a driver of social mobility, to the latest, which is the ‘business’ model.

Like all models, this one has assumptions. In this case, the underlying but usually unstated one is that the faculty who teach and research, and the people who maintain the buildings, are not working hard enough.

The proposed solution is to add layers of middle managers, whose only contribution is to ‘motivate’ and generate policies to make everything ‘more efficient’.

The sad reality is that no amount of increased efficiency or hard work on the producers of the system can make up for the cost of this increased administration.

A cynic might argue that the only purpose of these changes is to provide jobs for those who can’t do anything productive.

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Democrat vs Republican economics

Eric Zuess' book "They're Not Even Close" compares the economic record of the American political parties from 1910-2010. His analysis shows that most aspects of the US economy are historically stronger under Democratic control than under Republican control. This is also true for the individual states, in that those which lean Democrat have a strong correlation with a robust economy and educational attainment.

Given that Republicans are strongly in favour of self-reliance, big business and the free market, while the Democrats have inclusion and the common good as their official platform planks, this data appears to be counter-intuitive. It does, however, explain why the Democrats have a hard time getting anything done, as they try to please everyone.

One possible explanation is the Game Theory of John von Neumann and John Nash. In brief, many human interactions, including economic transactions, can be modeled as a finite collection of players playing a game. Each player has a finite set of possible decisions/strategies, and a pay-off function, which depends on all of the current choices being made (for a very good explanation, see the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium ).

Nash showed that each such game has at least one Nash equilibrium. This is a choice of strategies such that, if any single player changes their choice, their pay-off will decrease. Getting there requires perfect knowledge of all other choices, which is most easily achieved by cooperation.

For a brilliant and simple example of the dangers of pure competition, consider Martin Shubik’s bidding game: We auction off $1 to a group of players. The highest bidder wins it. However, the wrinkle is that the top two bidders have to pay. The only possible non-negative pay-offs for the group as a whole require cooperation, with the maximum being one player bidding 1 cent, and the others not bidding at all.

These models explain why wolves do better than tigers, and ants beat everyone.

So what is it that Democrats do ‘better’? I would argue the concept of public spending as investment, not waste. Here are the kinds of projects usually funded by Democrats, but vehemently fought by Republicans.

Infrastructure – build better roads, water systems, airports etc, and companies can move products and workers more efficiently. In addition, construction involves well-paid jobs, which increases the tax base.

Entitlements – as onerous as this word is to hard-working people, we don’t often see the elderly starve to death, or massive epidemics. Every US city is probably safer than Buenos Aires. How would that change if the poor were actually living on the streets in large numbers?

Education – better-educated people make for a better society, are healthier and less likely to commit crimes (except for fraud).

Science – a bigger contributor to economic growth than abundant natural resources. The problem is that it requires huge investment for unlikely pay-off. This is generally not what companies like to do. Those that do so want results to be proprietary, which necessarily stifles the free exchange of information that progress requires.

So what can we conclude? Mathematics can predict that some cooperation is better for the economy than pure competition.

However, this prediction is after the fact, which is much less useful than before. The only people who will accept the original data are those to whom it is emotionally satisfying, namely economists and Democrats. Republicans will find a way to ignore or explain it away. In other words, the book is sadly unnecessary.


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Oh, what a surprise!

When things go wrong, the modern meme is to blame the “Law of Unintended Consequences”, which is the modern way of saying “it’s just God’s will”. However, in all too many instances, the “unintended” consequences could be easily predicted.

 Case 1: Most stocks are now owned by mutual funds. The fund managers are interested in fees, which means waiting for price increases, and selling the stocks. Their sole interest is short-term price gains. The CEO’s are hired with bonuses for price increases, and the only oversight is the Board of Directors (consisting of CEO’s of other companies), and the annual stockholder meeting (dominated by the fund managers). Then there is general surprise that many companies are managed for short-term stock price increases, and not for long-term performance!

 Case 2: Most US school systems have curricula which are dominated by methods courses, and very light on the content that they will teach. We put those ill-educated teachers into the field, and give them the message that any failure of a student means that the teacher is incompetent (I was told this by an education professor recently). We then test students and blame the teachers for every bad result. Why are we surprised at grade inflation and cheating on tests?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

US education: another turn of the wheel

To get the full feel of US culture, it helps to know a few things. One is Churchill’s correct observation that, “Americans do the right thing, once they have tried everything else.” Another is the cultural preference to make everything a matter of black and white, “If you’re not a winner, you’re a loser.”

This refusal to acknowledge shades of grey means an awful lot of cognitive dissonance, and bending of the rules. It also means massive and regular policy shifts. Progress is more a matter of stumbling onto new ideas in a Drunkard’s Walk than a gradual set of small improvements.

Nowhere are these false dichotomies more obvious than in Education. For example, when studies indicated that there might be too much rote learning in the standard curriculum, it was replaced by “discovery” or “inquiry-based learning”, with absolutely no memorization at all. For another, the famous No Child Left Behind initiative of President G.W.Bush requires by law that every single student in the country perform above benchmarks by 2014. Not surprisingly, this has led to massive cheating, and very low benchmarks.

On the surface, the US education system looks free and democratically-driven. Each state has its own Board of Education, which sets the statewide standards and basic curriculum, from which each school district generates its own requirements. That is, unless you live in Ohio, Louisiana, Kentucky, Kansas, or several other states, where the process has been hijacked by a vocal religious minority, who wish to ignore centuries of scientific advancement.

When new studies showed that not enough students were “ready for higher education”, a group of states signed on to the Common Core, an agreed-upon set of material that every high school graduate should know. With Teutonic efficiency, school administrators have leapt upon the idea that this minimum should be the maximum. Not only that, but the results of the students’ tests will be used to measure teachers, and “eliminate the failing ones.” This appeals to US conservatives, who rail against public education, and to corporations such as Pearson publishing, now poised to make billions. One of their income streams is to provide scripts to teachers, from which they are not permitted to deviate. Another is to generate the aforementioned assessments.

 As I get ready for retirement. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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Education: where does the money really go?

"Paddington", a maths professor, writes to a local newspaper in Ohio:

Public higher education is under attack from all sides. Conservatives criticize the concept of spending money on it, and appear not to recognize that it is an investment in our future. Liberals decry the rising costs to the students. The reforms which are proposed all focus on ‘increasing efficiency’ by trying to cut the expense of teaching, apparently under the impression that this is the largest part of the budget.

How does this belief compare with the facts?

Locally, we have a recent news item which states that the full-time faculty at The University of Akron will be awarded a 2% raise pool, amounting to $1.3 million. This means that the salaries of full-time faculty total about $65 million per year, with perhaps another $15 million for fringe benefits, and $10 million for part-time faculty. That sounds like a lot, until one considers that the total University budget is $360 to $450 million.

In short, the people who do the teaching and research (which are the reasons for the existence of the institution) have direct costs which are at most 25% of the budget. Compare this to a typical local school district, where teaching salaries and benefits are at least 60% of the total.

It sounds quite efficient, doesn’t it?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Gedankenexperiment

Caveat: I am not an economist, I just like playing with numbers.

Consider an economy with 3 classes of people.

Class C: 50% of the population, earning an average of $50,000 per year, and spending all of it.

Class B: 49% of the population, earning an average of $100,000 per year, spending $95,000, and investing $5,000.

Class A: 1% of the population, earning an average of $1,000,000 per year, spending $300,000, and investing $700,000.

Assuming equal rates of return, class A will receive 74% of any gain in wealth.

Take modest growth of 3.03% per year for 60 years. The total wealth W has now grown to 6W.

Even if they started with nothing, class A now has 3.7W, almost 2/3 of the total wealth.

USA: Murder in the chicken shack

Email from America 3: the rural dream, and bloodstained reality

A decade ago, our second son had just been born and I was settling quietly into middle age. My wife had other ideas, and decided that we should move to the country. We bought 9 acres with a house and a barn, our own well and sewage system, and neighbours who leave us in peace. We cut our own wood for winter heat, breed goats for meat and milk … and raise chickens.

It started innocently enough with a call from the main post office on a Saturday afternoon, letting us know that we could pick up a package of live animals. What we got was a small cardboard box, stuffed with 50 fluffy chicks. We cooed over them, moved my car out, and installed them with a heat lamp in the garage. Within a month, they had some real feathers, and looked like badly-dressed inner-city schoolboys. One more month, and they were fully-fledged chavs – pushing, pecking, shoving, and occasionally killing each other.

They were so nasty that I didn’t feel really guilty when we drove them to the processor. They returned neatly wrapped and ready for the freezer, costing only 2-3 times what our local supermarket would charge. But they tasted better, or so we told ourselves.

We are now 8 years into our hobby, and have learned a lot. For example, give a rooster 10 hens, and he will hump and torment all of them. Put 20 hens with two roosters, and the dominant one will fight the other for all of them. It isn’t just the males. Remove all roosters, and one hen will take over, like a bad lesbian prison movie. It is distressingly human.

With selective breeding, we now have roosters who will defend their hens, but (usually) not attack people. In our microcosm of social engineering experiments, that may be the best that we can do. At the very least, it has given our children an appreciation for the convenience of grocery stores, and survival skills that rival those of an Eagle Scout.

Tim is a math professor in Ohio.

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USA: Taking the Oath

Email from America: 2

The article below was first published in the pages of the Record Courier of Ravenna, Ohio.

 

Why I became an American

Last Friday [April 18, 2008], after nearly 30 years as a British ex-patriate working in the USA, I became an American citizen.

You may wonder why it took me so long. My wife says it’s because I hate change; I like to think it’s because I want to make the right decision.

I thought about it seriously, because it’s saying goodbye as well as hello. I had to swear in front of a Federal judge that my father’s birthplace and my mother’s adopted country would no longer be ‘home’.

But thanks to my friends and family, I realize that this is the best ‘home’ I’ve ever had. Americans value the individual, even when his views, like mine, are unorthodox. Here, in my homestead in Northeast Ohio, surrounded by my friends and family, I fit in better than I ever did while growing up. And now, I belong.

There are things I miss about England, of course, but most of them are just memories: quiet pubs that served ‘warm’ beer; fish and chips wrapped in newspaper; the selective university system that gave me a great education. Now, those pubs and chip shops have become noisy night clubs and McDonalds, and as for college, I remember how brutal it was for those who couldn’t succeed immediately. Here in America, the system gives you a second chance.

Most of all, I miss the English bloody-mindedness, the determination to push back against stupid rules; but that is also mostly gone. As the British government tightens restrictions on personal freedom, few people protest, and the mechanisms to fight back just aren’t there. As my brother frequently reminds me, we in the U.S. have a written Constitution, and a legal system willing to support it and challenge the government on our behalf. In fact, we have the best of the English tradition right here, alive and feisty.

Now that I’m an American, I will have to make some changes. I can’t say ‘you Americans’ any more; though I refuse to delete the ‘u’ in ‘colour’, or to stop pronouncing ‘garage’ the way I do. But I can still weigh in pounds and ounces, pump gas in gallons and measure height in feet and inches; which is more than my English brother can do.

And, I will finally be able to participate in that greatest of all American entertainments, a national election.

As for the future, I will always remember the Judge’s speech at our ceremony, where he quoted President Reagan: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same”. I intend to do my best to honour that commitment.

Tim is a math professor in Ohio.

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USA: The Immigrant

Email from America: 1
 

This series of pieces is a humble homage to ‘Letters from America’ by the late, great Alistair Cooke, who took the Oath of Allegiance in 1941 and whose life’s mission thereafter was to present the American experience to the rest of the world.

I first visited the US in December 1977, and moved here in June 1978. Since then I have lived in Northern Ohio, part of what is called the ‘Midwest’. Looking at a map will go a long way to explaining our local thinking.  But Ohio is by many measures a very average state, which explains the media’s interest in us only every four years, during the national elections. What we see here is as average  'American' as it gets.

Much of my free time has been spent trying to understand this society, and after 35 years it’s still a work in progress. It’s not a coincidence that a leading satirical website is called The Onion, because our culture has many layers, and will bring tears to the eyes.

For all that, like Cooke and millions of other newcomers, I’ve made it my country. To the often ill-concealed pleasure of our national enemies and allies, we’re expert at flaunting our faults and divisions. I shall explore these in future posts, but I also hope to show you some of the virtues that our critics seem more reluctant to learn.

Tim is an English-born math professor and lecturer on gambling strategies.

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Problem-Solving

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has recently released a report on the impending shortage of people trained in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines. They note that mathematics courses are a bottleneck in this process. In a brilliant example of problem-solving, they have squarely fixed the blame on mathematics teachers, and decided that the cure is to have mathematics courses developed and taught by faculty in ‘mathematics-intensive’ disciplines instead. As I have said on numerous forums, the study of mathematics has been honed, pruned and refined for 2,500 years. I would suggest that we might be doing something right. Perhaps, as some good educational and cognitive psychology studies suggest, ability in mathematics is a fairly rare talent, but nonetheless essential for the training of good scientists?

A mild defense of Dawkins

This is in response to Sackerson’s piece on Richard Dawkins. It is probably not my best work, given my lack of sleep.

I have read ‘The God Delusion’, and Anthony Flew’s review of it. Most of the former is concerned with the science of why religion appears to exist, based on the scientific evidence available. In his first major point, Flew chooses to focus on Dawkins’ discussion of Einstein, in which he says:

“But (I find it hard to write with restraint about this obscurantist refusal on the part of Dawkins) he makes no mention of Einstein’s most relevant report: namely, that the integrated complexity of the world of physics has led him to believe that there must be a Divine Intelligence behind it.”

The problem for Flew is that I have read Einstein’s writings and comments on the subject. The latter explicitly said that he did not believe in a deity, and that the most that could be said is to deify the structure of the Universe itself. This is not quite what Flew implies. The rest of his review does not address the science presented.

That being dealt with, I have far more interest in the reasons for the outspoken anti-religious tactics of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers and Christopher Hitchens.

It is my claim that they are a product of the current social forces.
Since I moved to the US in 1978, I have seen a rise in the loudness and power of the Religious Right, who have supplanted the fiscal conservatives as the core of the Republican Party. These people are not the pleasant vicars and church-goers of my youth. For my UK readers, I note that Ian Paisley was educated at Bob Jones University, a font of wisdom for the fundamentalist community. His style is representative of many in the movement.

This rise in power can be explained in part by the political and economic uncertainty from the gradual decline in the power of the US, and from the many scientific discoveries which show that emotionally-charged deeply-held beliefs (especially ‘no evolution’) are simply not supported by reality. As any psychologist will tell you, this conflict between the frontal lobe and amygdala results in anger, directed firmly at anyone who rejects their ‘correct’ beliefs. Some have coined this the Ameritaliban.

A few people, such as Pope John Paul II and Stephen Jay Gould, tried to make peace, by showing that religion and science could live in harmony. This has also been tried by the Templeton Foundation. These efforts were roundly rejected by the anti-science crowd, who continue to vilify the former two after death, and use every tactic possible to neuter science education and research.

Faced with a call of ‘no quarter’, is it any wonder that voices like these arose on the pro-science side?

An interesting graphic

  Click here for details on how our economic activity is distributed.

Anatomy of a Hedge Fund

Last year, John Paulson, a hedge fund manager, made $5 billion dollars. There was a great deal of damage control on this news, including by Business Insider, explaining that $4 billion of that amount was gains from his own investment in his fund.

That lead me to the following analysis:

A typical hedge fund manager gets a 20%/2% to run the fund, which means 20% of the annual profit, and 2% of the value of the fund.

Assume no tax dodges, so that the investors (including the manager) pay 15% Capital Gains tax on the annual gains (directly from the fund).

Being confident in his own abilities, the manager invests his after-tax income in the fund.

At the start of a year, the investors have $M_old in the fund, the manager has $m_old, and the fund gains r%.

Capital Gains tax on the investor money is $0.15*r*M_old, 20% of the after-tax gain goes to the manager, and remainder gets rolled into the investor funds. The manager then gets 2% of the total.

For the manager, his share of the fund increases by $r*m_old, of which $0.15*r*m is Capital Gains tax. He also gains the 20% of the after-tax investor gains, and 2% of the fund, on which he pays a 35% tax rate.

Thus, we have

M_new = (0.98)*(1+(0.8)*(0.85)*r)*M_old

m_new = (1+(0.85)*r)*m_old+(0.2)*(0.85)*r*M_old+(0.65)*(0.02)*(1+(0.8)*(0.85)*r)*M_old

What is the result?

If the fund gains 20% per year, it only takes 16 years for more than half of the money in the fund to belong to the manager. At 10%, it takes 23 years.

The Stock Market made simple?

A correspondent on Usenet took umbrage recently when I referred to traders as (possibly necessary) parasites on the economic system. That he used to be one probably had something to do with his outrage, but I meant the term in the biological sense, in that traders generate no wealth, nor provide any real service, at least in my simplistic understanding.

Perhaps the illuminati here can shed light on my misunderstanding by considering the following simple scenario:

1. MomandPopCo decide to expand, and so release an IPO of 2,001 shares. They keep 1001 to have majority control, and sell the rest for $100 per share. With a 1% fee charged by the brokers, they realize $99,000, and the latter get $1,000
2. A short time later, Amy sells her 100 shares for $105 per share to Bob. She gets $395 in profit, and the brokers get $105 for their service.

Questions:

1. Where does all of the money come from?
2. Why does Bob pay more for the shares than Amy did?
3. Why was Amy able to charge more than she paid?

The answers are clearly(?):

1. From the investors.
2. Unless Bob is an idiot, he assumes that the stock price will either further increase, or the dividends will cover his costs.
3. Amy must be taking the discounted value of the future dividends of the company, or we are starting yet another bubble. This is easier to see if the company is buying and raising cows for sale, being a transaction of finite duration.

Notice that the company does not benefit at all from the second transaction. Even if their stock goes up, they cannot sell any more without losing control.

Trickle-up Economics

One standard conservative argument is that the wealthy are rich because they invest their money. The poor are that way because they spend their money.

The answer is thus to decrease taxes on the rich to stimulate the economy and increase employment.

Thirty years of trying have shown this not to work.

The problem is that the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

If we take the logical approach to this, we should increase taxes on the wealthy, and make sure that the lower-income folks get it. They will spend it, possibly in stupid ways, and thus stimulate local economies. Thus, more people get jobs, the government gets more tax revenue, and the corporations make even more money.

Wisconsin News

For those of you following the union-busting moves in Ohio and Wisconsin:

Breaking news: Wisconsin has immediate openings for 250,000 serfs. Must provide own smock.

People are a problem

The traditional European education systems are brutally exclusive. Students (except children of the rich) are not allowed to progress unless they can perform at the necessary level.

This puts pressure on students.

The US education system (and the English one for the past 30 years) is inclusive. Very little expense or effort is spared to have every student reach their 'full potential'.

This puts pressure on the teachers and the rest of the system.

The US and English systems should be producing a better 'yield' of the STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics) people that we need, yet they are not.

A possible reason is above.

Mathematics Education

The end of a very frustrating day in academia. It's mostly off-topic (not dealing directly with the storm to come), but shines some light on why it is coming at all.

Below is an edited version of an email which I sent to a colleague in our college of education.

I am also rather distressed by your comment:

"A PhD is a terminal degree which means we are capable of self-teaching material we are unfamiliar with".

I know a great deal of mathematics, computer science, statistics, engineering and physics. I would still have much trouble teaching something like Abstract Algebra, and I have had several courses in the subject. It's not all 'just math'.

The problem, which is very close to that of our meeting today, is that mathematics is one of the most tiered subjects there is. As one of my administrative superiors told me, many subjects have an 'Intro' course, after which one can take any number of courses. This just isn't true for our discipline, until about the senior level. That is why we take the issue of prerequisites and previous material so seriously.

It is also upsetting to experts in other fields (especially education) that success at one level of mathematics is no guarantee that one will ever succeed at higher levels. A previous administrative superior couldn't understand it at all, which is one of the reasons why he publically stated that learning algebra was unnecessary 'for anyone'.

In (not so) short, this is why I take the problem of training future mathematics and science teachers so seriously. With all too many school administrators having the idea (as another administrative superior told me) that 'anyone can teach math', no wonder that we have the problems that we do.

I have been party to many discussions on mathematics education on usenet and elsewhere. Every single time, my honorable opponent criticizes how the subject is taught. They then either offer no ideas at all, or ones which have already been shown to fail elsewhere.

Ponder this: Mathematics has been taught as a discipline in its own right for about 2,500 years. The subject itself lends itself to brutal editing and revision, so that only the most robust facts and proofs survive. Given those millions of man-years of developing and teaching the subject, isn't it reasonable to suppose that we are doing some of it correctly, or at least we might know better than outsiders?