Economics research and some MOOC thoughts

I want to write a post about students calling for an overhaul of how Economics is taught. You have probably seen the posts - too mathematical, more heterodox stuff...(yada, yada). I think there is a possible project in there - asking fourth years about this, maybe starting a blog on which they can help co-create a syllabus. I'm going to get a team together and do something like this for a paper at next year's ESSA conference. But at the moment I can't make the time for enough reading for a sensible post. Give me a shout if this sounds like something you and your students would be interested in.

I have written about MOOCs before and following my reading of Average is over I also think that there are limits to what students will teach themselves online. There is a big role for professor as missionary and coach, and face-to-face higher ed is here to stay. And then I had my ideas confirmed by a post at the Education Outrage blog. It makes some good points, for example:

What is education? Its an experience, mentored by an expert, in which the student tries to accomplish something, fails, and then after some discussion with peers and mentors, tries again.
This is not a new idea, Most PhD programs work this way. But since universities care about undergraduates just enough to require a thousand of them to fill a lecture hall, now they are doing it online so the numbers can get much bigger. It's all about money. (And, to be honest, the fear of seeming to be falling behind.)

For me the big insight was how boring those lectured captured MOOC video's are. Watch any of them, or watch all that the post links to - you will have to be really motivated to work through a whole course like that on your own. I doubt if many of my students are. And that probably means that they are coming to class for other reasons than to hear me speak.

Luckily we are close to the end of the semester now, with more sensible posts (and hopefully classes) to follow after the exam.

A few good links: Economics and academia

Next month we are hosting the annual campus open day and I am thinking that the School of Economics should lead with the slogan: Come for the signalling, stay for the human capital! As it turns out, it is probably a combination of the two that matters. The blog Cognito Mentoring has an interesting post on why Economics majors in the US earn more than majors in the other social sciences. It could be:

• That we teach them more employable skills,
• That they have greater pre-existing ability,
• That economics students seek higher paying jobs,
• That they have a pre-existing desire to make money,
• Or some signalling combination of all of the above.

The blog promises some evidence soon.

I also found a excellent post at The Blue Review on how academics spend their time. It is a long post, explaining the study, the sample, the method and results, but worth the read. We sometimes think that US academics are all important, high-impact researcher types, so it is heartening to read that the the average Joe also spend lots of time on the mundane tasks of academia. Scary amounts of time go towards meetings and emails. It also says that Departmental chairs work slightly fewer hours per week, so I am clearly doing something wrong!

But, if you are not caught in that rat race you may be an academic celebrity. The Chronicle had a good post this week on TED speakers, celebrity authors and bloggers. I wonder who their South African counterparts may be…

Finally, Felix Salmon had an interesting bit in Politico magazine and asked if there is a wonk bubble. It is all about the data journalism, storytelling and policy etc that you see in new sites like Vox.com and FiveThirtyEight.com and other familiar sites / mega blogs. He argues that the wonk bubble is still relatively small and the more wonkery there is, the more valuable it becomes. I am following both of the above via Flipboard and both have interesting content. 538 has more US content, sport etc that I am less interested in (but there was an interesting post on 'peak beard' today), but Vox has had some good pieces and posts with a nice flip card, web native format. Check it out and support the wonks.

Average is over: Future of Economics

For the final part of my Average is over posts I want to share some of Tyler Cowan's thoughts on the future of Economics.

In chapter 11 of the book he writes about the end of average science. He argues that science is going to become harder to understand for three reasons:

• The problems are ever more complex and simple, intuitive, big breakthroughs are unlikely.
• Individual contributions are becoming more specialised, and
• Soon intelligent machines will become researchers in their own right.

He goes on to explain how machine intelligence and specialisation are reshaping theoretical mathematics and physics, and how the average age of Nobel Prize winners has increased over time. Once machine science goes beyond human understanding - think of proofs in the multi-dimensions of string theory - science will also become harder to regulate. But what does all that mean for Economics?

Cowan argues that in recent times data gathering and crunching has been pushing out theoretical intuition. (if this sound interesting, also read Noah Smith's post on the death of theory) Economists still like their models but, "the real action and value-add comes from the data and its handling, including data from field experiments, laboratory experiments and from randomised control trials". Sooner rather than later, big data will reinforce the use of machine intelligence in Economics. Data from, for example, your social media profiles, online shopping and loyalty cards will be looked at by a computer programme and it will search for patterns in more complex ways than researchers can do. Cowan hopes that this will reinforce our understanding of some basic regularities behind economic phenomena. He goes on to write:

We are not far a way from having a single de facto, more or less unified, empirical social science. In that social science, researchers invest a lot in learning empirical techniques and then invest some marginal energies in the simpler theories that surround their chosen field of study. Finally, they spend their research time looking for new data sets, or looking to create that data, whether by detective work or by lab and field experiments.

I'm sure this sounds familiar.

He goes on to write that economists who favour more intuitive approaches will have to take a different approach to survive. They will focus less on producing their own original research and will become clearinghouses for and evaluators of the work of others. That means translating the work of others for fellow economists and for the public. It is about seeking out, absorbing and evaluating information.

If you are blogging already, this will sound familiar too.

Publishing, perishing and social media

I have been going on about this for a while now and this week I am taking my social media story to a conference at the Maastricht School of Management. The conference has the theme: Revolutions in education: New opportunities for development.

My point is that it is getting tough to publish. Even your local society journal wants clean identification of causal effects. The quick reply to such worries are to do better work. I argue that that is necessary, but may not be sufficient. You also need to work on your reputation for doing good work and collaborate with people who already have that reputation. It is at this point that the social web can come to the rescue.

Prof Wim Naude and I will soon launch an online survey about this. Stay tuned for some empirical results.

So many links, so little time

I don't make enough time to share some thought on this blog. Weeks rush by with meetings, classes and late night reading of students' chapters 2 and 3 (they want to submit dissertations in November!). I do however have a few things to share.

The first came too late for my ESSA papers. Branco Malanovic (@BrancoMilan) tweeted a nice disclaimer that I could have used: All calculations are preliminary. All regressions are suggestive and show correlations, do not imply causation. And then he went on: Conclusions are provisory & not endorsed by the authors. Actually, the paper does not exist and was never written.

I have speculated a fair bit about why we need to upload full papers for this year's conference. I does not seem like they will be reviewed. Is there an oversupply of papers? Is the programme overbooked? Are the organisers prepared to turn away colleagues who have paid the registration fee and then have empty slots in the programme, or will they reorganise it into a shorter conference? Is the idea that having full papers available can give attendees a better idea of what they want to listen to before arriving in Bloem? I can see why full papers are required at something like CSAE, but I am underestimating ESSA? Could the whole thing be part of someone's research into papers and publications in SA economics and we are now part of the sample?

But anyway, other interesting links include this one to the Top 200 influential Economics blogs. There are some fun choices of names. By the way, Marginal Revolution blog celebrated 10 years this week. Someone congratulated Cowen and Tabarrok for blogging like they have never heard of opportunity cost!

On the subject of social media, David Roberts had a good post about why he is taking a year off from Grist. Burning out in the blogosphere is a real danger: "I spend each day responding to an incoming torrent of tweets and emails. I file, I bookmark, I link, I forward, I snark and snark and snark. All day long".

Finally, I found a nice MOOC article: MOOCs and beyond: The revolution to come. It gives a good summary of the brief history of MOOCs, the main players, the issues in the US. It makes a number of good points about the nature of this sea-change or revolution:

In the first instance, it is helpful to see this change not just as a new technology for delivering teaching to large numbers of students. It is really more a wider set of socio-technological changes that might be better explained within a theory of postindustrial education focusing on social media as the new culture.

And it goes on to explain:

Social media differ from industrial media: social media are based on "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content" (Kaplan & Haelein, 2010). In this sense then, MOOCs might be seen as a form of industrially scaled automation of the teaching function that uses Internet platforms to deliver content globally. MOOCs are based on the traditional one-to-many broadcast principle rather than the many-to-many, horizontal peer-learning structures. The question is to what extent massively large online classes permit or encourage peer learning or interaction.

Towards the end there is an interesting characterisation of MOOCs: as a type of marketing, as a financial policy for higher education, as an academic labour policy, as a speculative financial instrument, as an expression of Silicon Valley values, or as kind of entertainment media. It is worth reading the whole thing.

Academic Economics: winner-take-all or winner's curse?

For those of you who may have missed these posts, last week saw two interesting studies of the academic economics field.

The first looked at agglomeration and peer effects in research, using data from French Economics departments. I have also thrown around some ideas about economic geography and research, but these guys have done the econometrics and have some interesting findings:

Department characteristics have an explanatory power that can be as high as that of individual characteristics. The departments that generate most externalities are those where academics are homogeneous in terms of publication performance and have diverse research fields, and, to a lesser extent, large departments, with more women, older academics, star academics and foreign co-authors. Department specialisation in a field also favours publication in that field. 

Marginal Revolution blog linked to an article with the title: An empirical guide to hiring assistant Professors in Economics. The research looked at the research productivity of PhD's from the top programmes and predictors of the number of AER-equivalent publications at year six after graduation (when they will be applying for tenure). The finding is that the student's rank in the class and the departmental rank are important predictors of future research productivity. The bit that was tweeted around is this: "even at Harvard the median graduate has only 0.04 AER-equivalent papers at year six".

even at Harvard, the median graduate has only 0.04 AER papers at year six - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/academic-economics-is-more-winner-take-all-than-you-might-think.html#sthash.OhXMIZgT.dpuf

even at Harvard, the median graduate has only 0.04 AER papers at year six - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/academic-economics-is-more-winner-take-all-than-you-might-think.html#sthash.OhXMIZgT.dpuf

even at Harvard, the median graduate has only 0.04 AER papers at year six - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/academic-economics-is-more-winner-take-all-than-you-might-think.html#sthash.OhXMIZgT.dpuf

A few thoughts on management and dashboards

I am coing up to one year in my management job at the end of this semester and often hope that I am doing more good than harm. Last week I found a post that made me think about different approaches to the job.

Chris Blattman wrote a post in response to Bill Gates' write up of Morten Jerven's book Poor numbers. Gates wrote that more resources need to be devoted to get basic GDP number right. Blattman responded that everyone would like to see better GDP numbers, but it is not really a top-ten constraint facing poor countries. He sums it up as:

The problem with those of us in the development complex, be we academics or Presidents or foundations or NGOs, is we want the world nicely ordered with levers to pull and a dashboard to monitor. And so we put a lot of energies into levers and dashboards and monitors.

Even if that is the way the world works, there is an opportunity cost and Blattman goes on to outline some of the other types of missing information that we also would  like to know more about.

Which brings me to my point about management and dashboards. I recently completed my own performance agreement. It is in dashboard, scorecard format on the intranet. It breaksdown the university's plan to a campus plan and "cascades" down from the rector, to the vice-rectors, to the dean's performance agreement. There are 187 target items have been weighed and will have to be scored at the end of the year.

I can see the appeal of doing it this way, it reduces complexity to lots of nice targets, it can be fine-tuned, the automation will save someone somewhere a bit of time. But I also have doubts about whether this is the way to ensure academic excellence (to the extent that any head of school can do that anyway). I want to throw out the questions to the academics out there:

• What makes for a good Head of School / Chairperson / Director?
• What are the things that we need to measure to manage?

I want to paraphrase Blattman: Reducing frictions and eliminating constraints is maybe the best thing outsiders managers can try to help with, freeing entrepreneurs and citizens academics to do their thing.

Chalk dust to star dust

Tomorrow I am speaking at UP's departmental seminar and quickly want to share the slides here. I really hoped that Manoel warned everyone that it is not going to be about serious research. For a while now I have been thinking about how South Africa's academic economists use social media and I finally have a presentation. I also have a short questionnaire that I hope they will complete. If it goes well, I will go on the road and bring it to your school or department.

I'm saying stuff about the economy in the local paper!

Friday afternoon reading

I'm stuck at the office on a Friday afternoon, trapped by a light hail storm and thought to do a quick round-up of links for the week.

In the geographical economics vein The Economist's Free Exchange blog has a nice post on how cities matter for growth. It also quotes research about the importance of research even for academic work: 

when a prominent researcher moves from one city to another, his peers in the origin city are less likely to cite his patents. Innovation today requires an ever-larger crowd of experts, preferably working in the same garage.  

This nicely resonated with Johan Fourie's post on the agglomeration of top restaurants in Stellenbosch.

The New Enquiry had an interesting essay about the rise of the celebrity Economist. They are not to keen on the idea and concludes:

In the online marketplace of ideas, the influence of a few celebrity economists creates an illusion of scarcity of new, heterodox voices. Yet now more than ever, to prevent costly and irreparable policy errors, economics needs its crowded-out Cassandras.

Noah Smith Asked whether econ blogging can hurt your career? He doubts it and I agree. Blogs and working papers are ever more relevant and there are many more voices out there than just the few celebrities.

Finally, I also read a good post at Inside HigherEd on technology and education. These days terms like MOOCs, BYOD, flipping the classroom are everywhere, but in fact, the ideas about technology and education have a long history:

The sort of tools that we have needed to help students learn have been around for 100 years, albeit continuously improved. It is our job to - finally - use those tools.

Finally, finally, congrats to Economist colleagues who have new NRF ratings: Andrea Saayman (NWU), Stan du Plessis (US), Servaas vd Berg (US), Steve Koch (UP) and James Blignaut (UP). These are the ones that I have heard of, but please add a comment if there is more good news to share.

The econoblogosphere

Recently there has been marked interest in the impact of blogs on teaching and research. David McKenzie and Berk Olzer of the World Bank have argued that there are benefits to the blogger and substantial positive externalities associated with good economics blogs.

I do not want to make the all the arguments for blogging now. One of my research leave dreams is to put together a presentation on why South African economists should start blogging and to travel the country, spreading the word. For now I want to mention David McKenzie's recent blog on journal turnaround times to highlight the power of blogs.

His point is that it takes time to publish papers and few journals publish turnaround times. The AER is way out of my league but it is interesting to note that in 2011 a paper there was in review for an average of 37 weeks. From submission to acceptance took 69 weeks and from thereon a further 61 weeks to publication. This is not to say that AER is quick or slow, but that the latest issue of any journal does not present the latest research. And then a paper in the AER represents to pinnacle of a body of good work that was built up over years before that first submission.

So how does one get to know what is going on, or let others know what you are working on? Earlier this year Paul Krugman wrote about open science:

...the traditional model of submit, get refereed, publish, and then people will read your work broke down a long time ago. In fact, it had more or less fallen apart by the early 80s.Even then, nobody at a top school learned stuff by reading the journals; it was all working papers, with the journals serving as tombstones. 

You knew which working papers to read by being in the right conference loop. "Journal publication was so slow relative to the pace of ongoing work that it no longer acted as an information conduit". Today it is all about online working papers and blogs.

A key part of the research process involves academic engagement: demonstrating and defending your work. Typically this occurs at seminars and conferences and eventually publishing working papers and journal articles. Blogs provide an additional outlet to disseminate ideas and receive feedback. The format holds a number of benefits:

• The writing has to be accessible, which opens the discussion to non-specialists, policymakers and students.
• The feedback is rapid.
• It can foster a virtual community – you do not need to be in a large department with an active seminar series and can participate from anywhere.

This is my call to South Africa's academic economists: Eat, sleep, blog, Economics.

Industrial policy on my mind

For the last few weeks I have thought about writing a blog post on industrial policy. I am working a report that that interprets the Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP-2) for the North West Province, and it seems that we are in fashion. As a preface to the North West Province posts, here is a short primer on the ideas and things I have been reading.

Recently The Economist ran a special report on State Capitalism, entitled The visible hand, The Mail & Guardian argued that South Africa should follow the Chinese model and Johan Fourie commented on both of these. President Zuma's State of the Nation address focussed on infrastructure investment with specific sectoral and spatial implications (and Johan and I also commented on SONA).

Internationally, Dani Rodrik has written that industrial policy is back, in fact, it never really went away. He writes that

"...industrial policy never went out of fashion. Economists enamored of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus may have written it off, but successful economies have always relied on government policies that promote growth by accelerating structural transformation".

Rodrik argues that it is not a question of whether one should have industrial policy, but how it should be practiced. He goes on to outline three principles:

• Industrial policy is a state of mind, built on collaboration between government and the private sector.
• Incentives should be temporary and based on performance.
• Policies need to be transparent and open to new entrants - policymakers should be accountable.

He concludes that the argument should not be about government's ability to pick winners, but about whether they are trying different approaches and letting the losers go.

An example of success comes from the latest edition of The Economist and an article about manufacturers in the British Midlands. Different factors have allowed them to survive and some to thrive, but from a policy point of view:

"...local firms credit two helpful outfits. One is Made in the Midlands, a business network that supports its 250 member firms by putting them in touch, largely online, to help solve mutual problems and share market intelligence. Another prop is the Manufacturing Advisory Service, run through regional development agencies, which provides expert help to small and medium-sized enterprises".

The manufacturers described in the article link to a recent NBER paper by Richard Baldwin. The title is Trade And Industrialisation After Globalisation’s 2nd Unbundling: How Building And Joining
A Supply Chain Are Different And Why It Matters. He aruges that multinationals and global supply chains have killed import substitution and this requires a rethink of 20th century industrial policies.

All together it makes for interesting reading. More details on SA policies to follow.

My ERSA presentation

Geograph econ lecture

View more presentations from School of Economics, North-West University.

The Gated City, chapter 1

This month I'm reading Ryan Avent's The Gated City. He writes for The Economist and recently had two excellent blogs on geographical economics:

Moving towards stagnation
Moving towards stagnation, continued

The Gated City is a Kindle Single in which Mr Avent argues that “Our cities are where most of us live, where most of our economic output is produced, and where most of the ideas that enrich our lives originate. When they function well, the act as engines of discovery and opportunity. When they do not, the economy suffers, and the labour force with it”.

Something has gone wrong:

He starts with the concerns about the U.S. economy: slower growth and rising inequality. He also briefly outlines some of the explanations:

• Worker bargaining power has declined (Krugman)
• The demand for skills has shifted (Autor)
• The education system has not been successful at increasing educational attainment (Katz & Goldin)
• The emerging world is catching up
• The low-hanging fruit of available land, uneducated population and revolutionary technological innovations are gone and growth has slowed (Cowen).

Mr Avent agrees that there is some truth to all these explanations, but wants to add another: “That America has made its productive locations ever less accessible. The best opportunities are found in one place, and for some reason most Americans are opting to live in another”.

He argues this point by highlighting the productivity of cities, but notes that cities are often reined in “because we worry that urban growth will be unpleasant”. His example is of the San Francisco Bay area, which, despite wonderful climate, culture, innovation and much higher than average wages, have lost residents, while places like Phoenix, Arizona have been growing. This is ascribed to differences in the cost of living, specifically housing. It is a question of supply not meeting demand in the right places and it is often caused by residents who oppose development because they want to “protect neighbourhoods, views and buildings they love from changes they fear”. This, Not-In-My-Back-Yard view has significant consequences.

Mr Avent estimates that migration from costly cities to affordable but less productive ones overthe period 2000 to 2009 may have cost the American economy between 0.25% and 0.5% of GDP per year. Adding the effect of lost innovation of growth, new firm creation and employment, the cost may be trillions in lost output.

Megapolitan regions

This week has seen some interesting news coverage of a new book Megapolitan America by Arthur Nelson and Robert Lang. The Atlantic Cities showed a map of large regions of interconnected metropolitan areas.

These megapolitan regions are expected to house two thirds of the U.S population by 2040 and are seen as the interface with the global economy. Such agglomerations drive growth through the external economies that they generate. Economic geographers argue that concentration of economic activity cumulatively causes a thick labour market, specialised suppliers of intermediate inputs and knowledge spillovers 'that are in the air'. The end result is lower costs and faster growth.

The coverage by The Atlantic Cities focussed on the role that infrastructure can play in supporting such agglomerations. The Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is presented as a success in coordination of infrastructure investment between metro regions.

In South Africa drawing a map like this of economic activity (local GDP) is complicated and the topic of a lot of my data work planned for this year. It is slightly easier to track down exporters through SARS data and work by two of my colleagues (Wim Naudé and Marianne Matthee) show interesting agglomerations.

Exporters typically require the thick labour markets, suppliers of intermediates, knowledge spillovers and infrastructure characteristic of agglomerations. In South Africa the port cities of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban are key agglomerations but the landlocked Gauteng economy is the powerhouse.

Hopefully I will be taking a closer look at South Africa agglomerations in the year to come. Stay tuned...

More top of the lists to you

And the round up of top 10's of 2011 continues. The first is the World Bank's top 100 blogs of 2011. There are quite a few good ones. There is some thorough development economics along with the blog on the impact of blogs (that got me interested at the start)!

For fun there is also Mail & Guardian's top 10 Zapiro cartoons of 2011. Enjoy.

To finish up, this is my first try using Blogsy on the iPad. Hopefully it will be easier as I get to know the app!

More round ups of 2011

If you want a quick recap of events in 2011 (and like me, pretend that you have not fallen that far behind with everything) have a look at these links.

The Economist charts the year and I like this one: Google searches for "gold price" as a measure of uncertainty and volatility.

For some SA info, have a look at the Mail & Guardian's special report 2011-its-a-wrap. It mentions, amongst other things, the Wallmart deal, the Opperheimer family selling their stake of De Beers and the Nationalisation debate.

Best of 2011

It is the time of the year when everyone is making lists of the best of 2011 - the best books (of which I have not read enough), the best albums (I've heard some of the songs), the top 10 iPad apps (I'm actually using a few!) and many more. The BBC, The Atlantic and the Washington Post's Wonkblog asked economists about the most important graphs of 2011. There are a few interesting ones, check them out:

• The BBC
• The Atlantic
• Wonkblog

As the ECB started its largest refinancing of banks yesterday, this is good one showing how interest rates reflect the Euro crisis: