Academia

I know, I know, I am supposed to blog about the employment release -- how nonfarm payrolls "edged down" by 95,000 jobs in September, how private sector employment was up slightly but not enough to offset the decline in government employment by Census workers, and how U-6 rose by 0.4 percentage points to a ridiculously high 17.1 percent of the labor force.  But you already know what I would say about that. 

So let's do something different.  Let's point to efforts underway to make a difference by taking responsibility for way more than anyone could expect.  Today's subject is Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University.  I attended a fascinating conference on Monday, sponsored by the New England Board of Higher Education and hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in its capacity as a facilitator of regional economic activity, "Reinventing the University: New Models & Innovations for 21st Century Realities."  Here's the conference page.  All of the sessions that I attended were interesting, but the best of the day was the keynote speech by Michael Crow.  What he's doing at ASU is truly remarkable -- it put the rest of us in the auditorium to shame.  Find some time today or over the long weekend to listen to what he had to say.  Here's the podcast.

Some interesting work by four economists at Berkeley contains the results of on experiment designed to figure out if relative pay affects job satisfaction.  The results are as you might expect, and it is good to see them documented:

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.

I've got two guilty pleasures regarding science on the web: Olivia Judson's blog and TEDTalks.  From the latter, we have this weekend's intellectual candy and food for thought, with Sir Ken Robinson answering the post title's question in the affirmative.  Very well done.

<!--cut and paste-->

Enjoy!

Word.

It never ceases to amaze me how vacuous these 100-faculty academic petitions can be. Cochrane's conclusion is spot on:

Milton Friedman stood for freedom, social, political, and economic. He realized that they are inextricably linked. If the government controls your job or your business, dissent is impossible.  He favored, among other things, legalizing drugs, school choice, and volunteer army. To call him or his political legacy "right wing" is simply ignorant, and I mean that also as a technically accurate description rather than an insult.

(Of course, Friedman also has a legacy in economics as a first-rate researcher, which is what the MFI will do and honor. The consumption function and the monetary foundations of inflation, are as important to 20th century economics as the discovery of DNA was to biology, quantum mechanics to physics or plate tectonics to geology. But the letter-writers didn't have anything to say about any of this, so neither will I, here. )

Anne Applebaum describes the generation of students coming of age these days as "The Busiest Generation" in her op-ed in The Washington Post today.  Since one of the best parts of my job is that I get to teach and mentor members of this generation at Dartmouth, I figured I would chime in with a few observations.

First, the op-ed makes note of how competitive it is to gain acceptance to top universities.  But the set of institutions with extremely low admit rates is not particularly large.  (See this post from Vox Baby last year.)  There are plenty of opportunities to attend fine colleges and universities without forsaking the freedom of childhood.  And many of our brightest leaders come from these institutions.

Second, I have nothing against a competitive process, but I do regret that the competition takes place in the form of "more is better."  More activities, more time spent on those activities, more lines on a resume.  I wish the competition took place along the dimension of "better is better."  Students should spend their time finding their true intellectual passions, which necessarily involves trying many different activities.  But it also involves prioritizing them, committing to just a few of them, and letting the rest go.