We wish you all a happy holiday season.
Here is a cinematic modern take on a very old song. Wikipedia: “The 1851 translation by John Mason Neale from Hymns Ancient and Modern is the most prominent by far…” And, “The hymn has its origins over 1,200 years ago in monastic life in the 8th or 9th century.”
Do you like modern takes, or hate them?
Once undergraduates have learned the basics of interpreting regression results, we would like to introduce them to the world of economics research papers. Reading these papers will help reinforce the statistical concepts, and also we want them to get access to the insights in the literature.
Many empirical papers in economics are too long or too difficult to assign to undergraduates, especially if the course is focused more on analytics than economics specifically. Here I provide materials and instructions for teaching two published econ articles to undergraduates. Assume the students have learned the basics of interpreting a regression model (perhaps from a course textbook) but have had few opportunities to apply theses skills or engage in scientific literature.
“The Effects of Attendance on Student Learning in Principles of Economics” is only 4 pages long! Students do not need to read past page 7 of “My Reference Point, Not Yours” to answer the reading guide questions. So, these readings can be assigned outside of class, but I did some of the reading during our class period.
Handing out printed copies of at least one of the papers and my guided questions can make a good classroom activity. If students do not have experience reading tables of regression results, it can be useful to do it together in person.
The questions in the reading guide help students to identify the main variables and hypotheses. Then, students are asked to pull specific results from the tables in the papers. You can customize this list of questions by deleting lines if you do not want to discuss issues like non-linear effects or the null hypothesis.
I provide links below. First is the reading guide with about 30 short-answer questions about the two articles.
2. This is a web link to download the Effects of Attendance paper. (4 pages long and the topic is relatable to undergraduates)
3. Two web sources for “My Reference Point, Not Yours” (15 pages in total in the JEBO manuscript, but students do not need to read past page 7 for this exercise, and they can skip the Literature Review section)
JEBO link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268120300299
SSRN working paper link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3434182
The CGO published a policy paper I wrote with Henry Kronk.
The Slow Adjustment in Tech Labor: Why Do High-Paying Tech Jobs Go Unfilled?
The United States technology industry continues to struggle to recruit new talent. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in technology is not increasing quickly.
Tech jobs pay well and don’t have the drawbacks of some other in-demand jobs, such as the travel schedule of a truck driver or the physically taxing labor required in oil fields.
Tech jobs are sometimes touted as a guarantee of having a comfortable and rewarding career, but the reality is not that simple.
Economics suggests that high wages would eliminate labor shortages, but that’s not the case in tech work. Why?
In this paper, authors Joy Buchanan and Henry Kronk propose a set of factors that have been overlooked and apply broadly to the tech sector.
Individuals with high-status tech jobs report burnout, anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues at higher rates than the general population. They also have to deal with the constant threat of becoming obsolete. Because technology changes so quickly, they must constantly work to update their skills in order to remain competitive.
The authors offer several recommendations for tech companies, educators, and policymakers:
Henry and I examined public data and the existing literature to get a better understanding of the current state of knowledge on this issue. I hope our paper can be helpful, however we partly just highlight how many questions still exist about tech and talent.
My recent paper in Labour Economics, Willingness to be Paid: Who Trains for Tech Jobs?, was designed to add new data to address these questions.
In the Fall of 2020, I blogged about how I introduce students to text mining, as part of a data analytics class.
Could Turing ever have imagined that a human seeking customer service from a bank could chat with a bot? Maybe text mining is a big advance over chess, but it only took about one decade longer for a computer (developed by IBM) to beat a human in Jeopardy. Winning Jeopardy requires the computer to get meaning from a sentence of words. Computers have already moved way beyond playing a game show to natural language processing.
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2020/11/07/introducing-students-to-text-mining/
I told the students that “chat bots” are getting better and NLP is advancing. By July 2020, OpenAI had released a beta API playground to external developers to play with GPT-3, but I did not sign up to use it myself.
In April of 2022, I added some slides inspired by Alex’s post about the Turing Test that included output from Google’s Pathway Languages Model. According to Alex, “It seems obvious that the computer is reasoning.”
This week in class, I did something that few people could have imagined 5 years ago. I signed into the free new GPTChat function in class and typed in questions from my students.
We started with questions that we assumed would be easy to answer:
Then we were surprised that it answered a question we had thought would be difficult:
And then we asked two questions that prompted the program to hedge, although for different reasons.
It seems like the model is smarter than it lets on. For now, the creators are trying hard not to offend anyone or get in the way of Google’s advertising business. Overall, the quality of the answers are high.
Because of when I was born, I believe that something I have published will make it into the training data for these models. Will that turn out to be more significant than any human readers we can attract?
Of course, GPT can still make mistakes. I’m horrified by this mischaracterization of my tweets:
Elon Musk bought Twitter almost a month ago.
The community I follow was speculating, half-seriously, that Musk has abruptly fired so many employees that the entire site would just crash.
My prediction is that many economists will stay on Twitter because it is such a useful venue for sharing work and ideas. There was also a sizable migration to Mastodon this week where a critical mass of economists will likely remain for a while. I made an account there @JoyBuchanan@econtwitter.net I don’t think my habits are going to change much right now, meaning I will not add being active on Mastodon to my current slate of activities. Personally, I find Facebook to be a place for meaningful connection in my professional community, as well, but that might be much harder for younger researchers to break into.
Here’s my “What if it all goes down?” moment. I’ll document a great tweet thread by Dennie van Dolder, who is an inspiration for the art form of announcing a working paper on Twitter. (Mastodon does not currently have the thread format, which might point people back to blogging on the margin?)
Dennie van Dolder of the University of Essex provides a tweet thread
I’ll screenshot that thread (just in case).
He also provides a blog post with high production quality and the more traditional SSRN working paper. It’s 2022 and that’s the trifecta for putting work out online, or at least it was. I have a “News” and a “History” category for classifying these blog posts. Where does this post belong? I settled on “Technology”.
This weekend I am at the Economic Science Association meeting.
Most of the economists in this group use experiments as part of their empirical research. In this post I will highlight some recently published work that is in the tradition of Vernon Smith, who influenced all of us so much.
Martinelli, C., Wang, J. & Zheng, W. Competition with indivisibilities and few traders. Experimental Economics (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-022-09772-9
Abstract: We study minimal conditions for competitive behavior with few agents. We adapt a price-quantity strategic market game to the indivisible commodity environment commonly used in double auction experiments, and show that all Nash equilibrium outcomes with active trading are competitive if and only if there are at least two buyers and two sellers willing to trade at every competitive price. Unlike previous formulations, this condition can be verified directly by checking the set of competitive equilibria. In laboratory experiments, the condition we provide turns out to be enough to induce competitive results, and the Nash equilibrium appears to be a good approximation for market outcomes. Subjects, although possessing limited information, are able to act as if complete information were available in the market.
This small excerpt from their results shows a market converging toward equilibrium over time, under different treatment conditions. With some opportunities for practice and feedback, agents create surplus value by trading.
Figure 4 plots the average efficiency in each round in the four treatments. Efficiency is defined as the percentage of the maximum social surplus realized. … learning takes longer under the clearing house institution; hence, average efficiency under the clearing house institution presents a stronger upward trend over time. Under the clearing house institution, the average efficiencies start at levels lower than under the double auction institution, and remain statistically lower in the second half of the experiment. Nevertheless, we can observe from Fig. 4 that the upward trend of the efficiencies in clearing house treatments persist over time, and at the end of the experiment, the efficiency levels from the two institutions are close.
Every year I request posts about stuff the writers actually use. My logic is that a great wave of stuff-buying is coming, so let’s try to highlight the good items and reduce holiday waste.
For Children
James recommends buying a whole bounce house. It might seem like something you could only afford to rent once a year, but the price of buying one you can use at home is now less than $300. In a big room, you can even do this indoors. Be the Christmas hero. Check on the space requirements.
I recommend two games that help kids learn to read. These are a great complement to Kindergarten or 1st-grade reading assignments. With enough confidence, you can convince kids that these games are toys and not “a book?”.
SPOT IT is a card game that takes up almost zero space in the house or car. No reading or numeracy required and yet fun for adults!
Phantom Toll Booth A book for school-aged kids.
Little Tikes Easy Store Picnic Table with Umbrella, Scott says it’s worth the price if you have young kids around the house. Let them do messy food or activities there.
Food
Sounds like a good gift for adults who like to cook. Scott found a relatively affordable Black Rice.
Office to Garden
Compressed gas for computer maintenance. See Scott’s explanation on PC care.
Velcro Cut to Length – Zachary suggests: “Do you have a phone charger beside your bed that keeps falling on the ground? Just Velcro it to the nightstand lamp and it will stay exactly where you want it.”
Minute Soil is better than the dirt you have. This makes growing plants more fun and easier. Sounds like a great gift to wrap up for someone who likes gardening.
Set for Life
I agree with Zachary that cordless men’s hair clippers are a great investment.
Barge All Purpose TF Cement Rubber – Praise from Scott: “Unlike most “superglues”, it will work on rough or porous surfaces, including situations like leather where flexibility is needed.”
Qwix Mix windshield – Windshield wiper fluid concentrate that is easy to store at home for when you need it.
Lastly, Mike has some correct life advice. Give yourself what your future self would want. For example, if you enjoy video games but don’t exercise enough, then try setting up an exercise bike right in front of your video games. That way you’ll get your cardio in and not have regrets the next week.
Here is a a new paper related to the topic of women getting into technical fields (see previous post on my paper about programming).
Grosch, Kerstin, Simone Haeckl, and Martin G. Kocher. “Closing the gender STEM gap-A large-scale randomized-controlled trial in elementary schools.” (2022).
These authors were thinking about the same problem at the same time, unbeknownst to me. In their introduction they write, “We currently know surprisingly little about why women still remain underrepresented in STEM fields and which interventions might work to close the gender STEM gap.”
My conclusion from my paper is that, by college age, subjective attitudes toward tech are very important. This leads to the questions of whether those subjective attitudes are shaped at younger ages. Grosch et al. have run an experiment to target 3rd-graders with a STEM-themed game. I’ll quote their description:
The treatment web application (treatment app) intends to increase interest in STEM directly by increasing knowledge and awareness about STEM professions and indirectly by addressing the underlying behavioral mechanisms that could interfere with the development of interest in STEM. The treatment app presents both fictitious and real STEM professionals, such as engineers and programmers, on fantasy planets. Accompanied by the professionals, the children playfully learn more about various societal challenges, such as threats from climate change and to public health, and how STEM skills can contribute to combating them. The storyline of the app comprises exercises, videos, and texts. The app also informs children about STEM-related content in general. To address the behavioral mechanisms, the app uses tutorials, exercises, and (non-monetary) rewards that teach children a growth mindset and improve their self-confidence and competitive aptitude. Moreover, the app introduces female STEM role models to overcome stereotypical beliefs. To test the app’s effect, we recruited 39 elementary schools in Vienna (an urban area) and Upper Austria (a predominantly rural area).
This is a preview of their results, although I recommend reading their paper to understand how these measurements were made:
Girls’ STEM confidence increases significantly in the treatment group (difference: 0.047 points or 0.28 standard deviations, p = 0.002, Wald test), and the effect for girls is significantly larger than the effect for boys.
Result 2: Children’s competitiveness is positively associated with children’s interest in STEM. We do not find evidence that stereotypical thinking and a growth mindset is associated with STEM interest.
Lastly, my kids play STEM-themed tablet games. PBS Kids has a great suite of games that are free and educational. Unfortunately, I have not tried to treat one kid while giving the other kid a placebo app, so my ability to do causal inference is limited.
I recommend two games for teaching kids to read their “sight words”. In early school grades, learning sight words can mean doing boring homework or rote memorization of flash cards. Instead use
and
These are both fun interactive games that will get kids reading and talking about sight words. Zingo Sight Words is easier, so I recommend starting there. It’s a lot like bingo with a fun plastic dispenser. Kids can do the matching task to win the game even if they are not yet confident with reading.
Sight Word Swat is a little more advanced but good for expanding vocabulary past the first 50 words. It’s fast paced and fun. Someone yells out a word and then two players compete to “swat” with a plastic mallet the correct “fly” that has the word. Also, if the kid isn’t competitive, they could swat the correct word without time pressure.
Next, I’ll recommend a game that will not remotely feel like an educational exercise. “Spot It” is a genius card game. The tin is small, so you can store it easily and travel with it. The game is easy to teach to new friends because it’s just matching visual patterns. Spot It requires zero reading – not even reading numbers. So, a kid as young as 4 could potentially jump in and start trying to get matches. One of the great things about Spot It is that you play a series of mini games. It’s not the nightmare of a Monopoly game that could take multiple days to finish. So, if you are a parent with limited time to spend on card games, you can parachute in and out quickly.
All of these items are under $20 and potentially all of them could make fun holiday gifts, although your mileage may vary for gifting books and getting smiles. Personally, I bought the sight word games when we needed them for learning instead of trying to make them Christmas gifts.
I had been looking forward to reading the Phantom Tollbooth with my kids for a long time. This is the kind of book that you should read as soon as they are ready to understand most of the action, but not before. If too much is going over their heads, then it isn’t fun. In my case, this book prompted a lot of questions and great conversations with the 7-year-old. The book will teach kids a lot, but if you keep your tone light it feels like just another adventure story.
Economist Writing Every Day 