Education: "The Machines are Taking Over."

Computers have been used as classroom tools for many years, but now they may actually be becoming useful. This NYT magazine article describes how or ex-teacher is trying to replicate expensive tutoring that usually only wealthy kids get.

Each time her students use the computerized tutor to do their homework, the program collects data on how well they’re doing: which problems they got wrong, how many times they used the hint button. The information is automatically collated into a report, which is available to Delaney on her own computer before the next morning’s class. (Reports on individual students can be accessed by their parents.) “With ASSISTments, I know none of my students are falling through the cracks,” Delaney told me.

After completing a few warm-up problems on their school’s iPod Touches, the students turned to the front of the room, where Thienpont projected a spreadsheet of the previous night’s homework. Like stock traders going over the day’s returns, the students scanned the data, comparing their own grades with the class average and picking out the problems that gave their classmates trouble. (“If you got a question wrong, but a lot of other people got it wrong, too, you don’t feel so bad,” Tyler explained.)

It may not replace the teacher but it potentially increases the effectiveness of teaching by allowing some automated one-to-one responsiveness.

 

Zizek: Genius or clown?

I've been looking at some contemporary leftist thinking recently, just out of a sense I should be familiar with their arguments. I think often they mistly speak just to the like-minded and don't get challenged enough.

Slavoj Zizek is one of the major figures, but it's difficult to know where to start with his huge output of books. So here's a starting point: John Gray writes about the famous leftist theorist in the NYRB:

There may be some who are tempted to condemn Žižek as a philosopher of irrationalism whose praise of violence is more reminiscent of the far right than the radical left. His writings are often offensive and at times (as when he writes of Hitler being present “in the Jew”) obscene. There is a mocking frivolity in Žižek’s paeans to terror that recalls the Italian Futurist and ultra-nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Fascist (and later Maoist) fellow traveler Curzio Malaparte more than any thinker in the Marxian tradition. But there is another reading of Žižek, which may be more plausible, in which he is no more an epigone of the right than he is a disciple of Marx or Lenin.

Whether or not Marx’s vision of communism is “the inherent capitalist fantasy,” Žižek’s vision—which apart from rejecting earlier conceptions lacks any definite content—is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility. That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the current model of capitalist expansion.

Here's a more sympathetic view in the LA review of books.

Žižek will frequently present what he views as a commonly accepted belief, then turn around and ask, “But is not the exact opposite the case?!” And then, as one continues reading, it often begins to seem as though the forcefully asserted opposite view is not quite Žižek’s own; it too gets called into question, with the surprising result that the first naïve view begins to look somehow less naïve.

The initial reversal can sometimes look alarmingly like a cheap, Christopher Hitchens-style contrarianism, particularly since Žižek’s political writings often start with a mainstream liberal view and then assert one that sounds much more right-wing. Yet the point is not simply to “provoke” liberals or to play devil’s advocate. Rather, these reversals are part of a strategy to keep the thought in motion. Instead of proposing a solution or finding a resting place, Žižek relentlessly seeks out further conflicts and contradictions, carrying out what Marx called “the ruthless criticism of everything existing.” The goal is not to arrive at a settled view, but to achieve greater clarity about what is really at issue, about what is really at stake in a given debate.

I'll read one of his books at some point, probably Less than Nothing.

Celebrity Gossip and the Good Life

You have to feel sorry for Kate Middleton. Now an Italian magazine is planning to publish many more photos of her sunbathing topless.

 

Two things have gone very wrong here. The first is the whole polluted commercial cult of celebrity gossip, including the massive TMZ-led gossip industrial complex in the US.

There is something so deeply prurient and controlling about it, at the same time as it is louche and superficial. Who is fat, who is cheating, who was well-dressed and who had a fashion disaster at the Oscars, and so on.

It is partly an obsession with wealth and fame, of course. But it is also an obsession with flaws and failure and evaluation and judgment. It's not just the flash bulbs and arc lights of glamor, but the night of personal agony too.

Is it so bad to humiliate or take the rich and powerful down a bit? Isn't it part of the deal of being famous? No. Not when you had Princess Diana hounded to death by paparazzi, of course. Or the meltdown of Britney Spears a few years ago. It is suspect when the aim of the people on the other side of the lens is to make a lot of money out of humiliating people.

It feels more like a blood sport, with a baying mob following its prey with a strange mixture of admiration and envy and hate. There is a clear hypocrisy about it. Few of the paparazzi could withstand such arc-light scrutiny of their private lives.

It's not clear what you can do to stop it, either, when the Internet can evade most picture restrictions and privacy laws.

But it should make us ask about the kind of things we admire as a society. It should make us question whether the whole tinselly celebrity aesthetic itself shows there is a void in what we find admirable.

I always wonder about the fact you have a solid primetime hour of celebrity and entertainment news on networks like NBC every night, for example, the endless Extra and Access Hollywood.

I've talked before , such as here, about how we've mostly lost genuine discussion of the Good Life as a society. This is what we get instead, by default. Materialistic, superficial, plastic, judgmental and destructive. You are today's sensation and tomorrow's embarrassing road kill. Market or celebrity norms drive out other norms of behavior.

The other thing major problem which this incident highlights is, of course, privacy. This was an appalling violation of the intimacy and privacy of the couple, in a private house 800 meters from the road and the camera.

G says to me, Kate surely has done nothing wrong herself here. Of course not, I say. She is topless on a romantic break with her own husband.

But it also shows we have increasing confusion over privacy in general. Plenty of people have had unfortunate photos put up on Facebook, or got tagged in embarrassing situations. Plenty of people reveal far too much about themselves on Facebook anyway (I hardly ever log on).

The whole notion of privacy is utterly confused. The celebrity papparazzi ethos is destroying lives in Podunk and Portland as well as Malibu.

People need a sphere of their own in order to live, a space where they are not minutely scrutinized and obliged to play a role , or maintain a face for a universal panopticon.

A lot of our social behavior and appropriate balance instincts were evolved for the small hunting group or the village. But now we can gossip or provoke or offend instantaneously, worldwide, far outside the initial social group. Things can leak out of their context, out of their zone of appropriateness, when all walls and barriers come down.

That is partly what is wrong with the Mohammed film riots too. What goes in LA doesn't go in a slum in Cairo. But each wants to impose its mores on the other, which is impossible.

(edited 9/16 for flow)

 

Clashes and riots

Walter Russell Mead, in a civilized and wise essay:

The person who comes out of all this looking smartest is Samuel Huntington. His book on the “clash of civilizations” was widely and unfairly trashed as predicting an inevitable conflict between Islam and the west, and he was also accused of ‘demonizing’ Islam. That’s not what I get from his book. As I understand it, Huntington’s core thesis was that while good relations between countries and people with roots in different civilizations are possible and ought to be promoted, civilizational fault lines often lead to misunderstandings and tensions that can (not must, but can) lead to violence and when conflicts do occur, civilizational differences can make those conflicts worse.

The biggest potential danger is potentially a massive breakdown in relations between Copts and Muslims in Egypt.

Unfortunately, Islamic radicals are deliberately hoping to promote a clash of civilizations in the belief that a climate of polarization will strengthen their political power in the world of Islam. Attacking the embassy in Cairo is an effort to push Egyptian opinion in a more radical direction, but the radicals hope that this is part of a larger push that will bring them to power across the Islamic world. Like Boko Haram in Nigeria, which hopes to provoke a religious war with the Christians partly in order to achieve power in the Muslim North, radicals use the prospect of a clash of civilizations to further their own cause throughout the troubled Islamic world.

 

Burning up the page

A remarkable series of 36 photos of the Islamic protests on the Atlantic website.

 

Islamic attacks spread

Islamic protests have now spread to twelve countries, says the NYT. The British and German embassies have been attacked in Sudan, and there is trouble in Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Gaza, Iraq and Bangladesh, among others: even lockdowns at colleges in North Dakota on bomb scares.

Is it in part just extremists being willingly provoked by other extremists, a game which seldom plays out well? Perhaps in part. Some Arabs evidently suspect it is a way for Salafists and others to throw countries into a religious frenzy at the expense of secular forces.

 

But it is still a horrific picture of crazed excess. The Economist chooses this inopportune moment to call for more engagement for the US in the Arab world, not less: the opposite of what i was calling for.

On the campaign trail Mitt Romney has been clobbering Barack Obama for being too keen on the Arab awakening. Many conservative Americans associate it with hostile Islamists, like the Muslim Brothers and their friends who now run Egypt and Tunisia, and see it as a threat to America’s ally, Israel. Americans of all sorts are nervous about being dragged into Syria and worried about Iran getting the bomb. They are fed up with being described as anti-Islam when their country is in fact far more welcoming to Shia Muslims than, say, Sunni Saudi Arabia is. With their troops now mercifully out of Iraq, their efforts to push the Israeli-Palestinian peace process going nowhere and shale gas reducing their dependence on Arab oil, surely it is time for them to leave the world’s least grateful people to make a mess of their lives by themselves?

This is a seductive narrative—and no doubt it will play even better on the campaign trail after Mr Stevens’s death (see Lexington). But it is deeply wrong in both its analysis and its conclusions. Many parts of the Arab world are in fact heading in the right direction. And in the parts that are not, notably Syria, the United States is more needed than ever.

America has spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives trying to nation-build in the Muslim world in the last decade. The optimistic Bush view that all Arabs needed was to be freed from tyrants looks ever less realistic.

It is insane to imagine America getting involved in Syria, at least on any terms of engagement "international opinion" would accept which would entail US troops being allowed to adequately defend themselves.

America needs to disengage or destroy, not nation-build for those who do not want it. And the US is rarely if ever cruel enough to destroy, like Tokyo or Berlin in the Second World War. So that logically leaves disengagement.

 

The World Economy in very long view

I've been reading Angus Maddison's Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Maddison is one of the major figures in quantitative economic history. As you might expect, the book is a little dry. But it is fascinating to have measures of wealth, income per head and distribution that stretch all the way back to the provinces of the Roman Empire.

In fact, the average gdp per capita was just $473 in France in 14 AD measured in 1990 dollars, $400 in Britain, and a higher $809 in Italy because of cumulative inflows of booty. For Western Europe as a whole in 1 AD, income per head was $576, compared to $19,912 in Western Europe today measured in the same terms.

We have come a long way. But not evenly. On the same measure, average per capital income in Asia was still just $717 in 1950. It had risen to $4434 in 1990 dollars by 2003.

Inflation has also been around for a long time:

Between the first century and 270AD, the silver content of coins fell from 97 per cent to 4 per cent.

Moving on from Rome, he traces the history of the Middle East, Africa and Asia in economic terms from earliest times, and brings it right up to date for the world as a whole.

One thing I didn't know: he (politically incorrectly) says most of the slave trade was organized by Muslim traders preying on non-Muslim populations:

Slavery was endemic in Africa before western contact. There was a flow of more than four million from black Africa across the Sahara in the eight centuries before 1500, an average of somewhat more than 5,000 a year (see Table 4.5a). The traffic was organized by Muslim traders from the north. The flow from north to south was negligible.

Slave traders were generally the most Islamized. Slaves tended to be taken from the acephalous, stateless, and least Islamized groups. There were two reasons for this. The Muslim states tended to have the most powerful armed forces, and they generally avoided enslaving Muslims.

I did know Western slave traders almost never actually caught slaves, who were captured and transported by Africans from the interior, but I didn't know that there was a cultural or religious aspect. I wonder if it is a much older explanation of the tensions between Muslim North and Christian/Animist south that runs right across Africa, including Cote D'Ivoire, Nigeria and former Sudan. That said, I doubt it explains slaving much further south, like Angola.

Turning back to the world as a whole, the most obvious feature is just how much wealth and incomes have risen.

Real per capita income in the west increased 2.8-fold between the year 1000 and 1820, and 20-fold from 1820 to 2003. In the rest of the world income rose much more slowly-slightly more than a quarter from 1000 to 1820 and seven-fold since then.

Capital goods per head soared.

The most dynamic feature was the explosive growth in the stock of machinery and equipment per head. It rose by a multiple of 155 in the UK and 372 in the US between 1820 and 2003, 332 in Japan after 1890. The stock of non-residential structures rose much less, 21-fold in the UK, 33-fold in the US and 89-fold in Japan.

Leisure has increased significantly in longer perspective (even if Keynes' expectations of shorter working hours today have missed the mark.)

A significant part of the augmented production potential was taken in the form of leisure. Labour input per head of population dropped by 47 per cent in Japan, 40 per cent in the UK and 23 per cent in the US between 1820 and 2003.

Explanations for Growth

He offers an explanation of these growth trends, although it seems a bit sketchy. The main ones were as follows:

1. A fundamental change was the recognition of human capacity to transform the forces of nature through rational investigation and experiment.

Europe had an advantage over technologically proficient China, however, because there was less central control.

The major difference between Europe and China was the competitive character of European publishing, and the international trade in books. This frustrated the attempts of the Papacy to achieve thought control through the Inquisition and censorship. China was a centralized state, with vestigial foreign contacts. The education of its bureaucracy was devoted to ancient classics, and they were able to exercise thought control by more subtle and effective methods than the papacy in Europe.

As for other factors,

2. The emergence of important urban trading centres in Bruges, Venice, and other cities in Flanders and northern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was accompanied by changes which fostered entrepreneurship and abrogated feudal constraints on the purchase and sale of property.

3. The adoption of Christianity as a state religion in 380AD led to basic changes in the nature of European marriage, inheritance, and kinship.

The Church's prohibition of cousin marriage made it much more likely that narrow tribal kindship groups would be broken up and loyalties would shift to broader entities like nation states. The variety of nation states also helped:

4. A fourth distinctive feature was the emergence of a system of nation-states in close propinquity, which had significant trading relations and relatively easy intellectual interchange in spite of their linguistic differences.

 

Macro measurement & Defense

Maddison also looks at the history of macroeconomic measurement. It essentially began with Englishman William Petty in the 17th century.

Macro-measurement started in the seventeenth century, but did not emerge as a basic analytical tool for policy analysts and economic historians until the 1940s. In the past 60 years there has been an explosion in the sophistication of policy analysis and the interpretation of history.

One of the most important steps in macro measurement in the twentieth century was Keynes' How to Pay for the War, published in 1940. The title is a clue. In fact, one of the most important drivers throughout the history of macro measurement, from Petty onwards, was war potential. Governments wanted to measure both their own and adversaries' potential military resources.

This was also a major driver of measurement in the twentieth century.

The main reason for the massive increase in coverage and quality of official national accounts from 1950 onwards was the realization of their usefulness as a tool of macro-economic policy. Denison, Gilbert, Kaldor, Kuznets, Ruggles, Stone, and others in the UK and US, knew from personal experience that such accounts were also an extremely important tool for resource mobilization in wartime.

In other words, much of the usefulness was war-related - and if one thinks about it, this measure of resources in many ways underlies how we still see the economy. It helped lead to a focus on economic growth, although it helped measure more than just tanks and planes.

New measures of GDP and other quantities were not universally welcomed in the economics profession, which I find very interesting as well.

This new macro-economic perspective was very different from that of Hayek and Schumpeter. The latter considered `total output a figment which, unlike the price level, would not as such exist at all, were there no statisticians to create it. We seem indeed to be faced by a meaningless heap-for most purposes, a highly inconvenient composite' (Schumpeter 1939: 484, 561).

I didn't realize there was so much opposiiton. National accounts data just seem so much like a fixed fact of life today. But the measures really only date back to the 1940s and 1950s and to particular narrow purposes.

Hedonic measures

Perhaps the most interesting single thing in the book is his deep distaste for hedonic measures of economic activity, which take into account the quality as well as the quantity of output. Maddison thinks they are "hallucinogenic" and "chaotic."

Hedonic indices are perfectly respectable in small doses, but one can be skeptical about the widespread assumption that quality changes have been so large and monotonically positive. ..

More than 40 years ago, Milton Gilbert warned that such adjustments could open Pandora's box: `In the end, they would make it impossible to construct measures of output and price changes that are useful to the study of economic growth' (Gilbert 1961: 287).

That undermining of simpler quantitative approaches may of course be why Maddison is so opposed to them. But it does not necessarily help if we have accurate measures of a misleading measure.

One of the most famous examples of the hedonic approach is William Nordhaus's measures of improvements in lighting. Maddison says of Nordhaus:

He illustrates the implications of his approach in measuring real wages. The conventional measure showed a 13-fold increase between 1800 and 1992. The `true' rise, he suggests, was between 40- and 190-fold. He derived this result by converting conventional price indices into hedonics for three economic sectors.

Maddison thinks this implies past income would have been much too low.

I estimate that US per capita GDP rose 21-fold from $1,087 in 1800 to $23,169 in 1992. An increase of 190-fold would mean an 1800 level of $122 which would be well below subsistence.

But that doesn't really follow. It just means the incomes were not commensurate in price terms. It is a matter of apples and oranges, as if we tried to measure everything today in terms of grain equivalent. People today would be consuming, who knows, ten tonnes of grain a day in Roman terms, which doesn't make sense either.

I'm very sympathetic to hedonic measurement, because it allows for shifting needs and consumption patterns. But clearly it undermines the usefulness of the standard national accounts, which Maddison is not enthusiastic about.

Overall, it's very interesting to see good quantitative measures over so long a period and have a sense of the deeper history of national accounts. But I'm reminded one has to be careful of quantitiative economic measures as well