voluntaryXchange

Research Productivity: Your Grad School vs. Your Job School

Publish or perish: but do you publish because of where you were trained or where you work?

This paper does a matched pair analysis (yeah for that technique) on science Ph.D.’s from 1970 to 2011. Here’s what they found:

For two people who land jobs at the same place:

• The one from the more prestigious graduate school gets more cites
• But neither publishes significantly more papers.

For two people who come from the same graduate school:

• The one who lands the job at the more prestigious school gets more cites, and
• Publishes more papers.

In short, it’s where you work that counts, not where you went to school. Of course, the problem is how to land that plumb job when they seem to go mostly to the people from the better schools.

The authors then eliminate pre-hire productivity, departmental expectations, and retention as explanations. This leaves facilitation of research by departments as the prime explainer of productivity differences.

What they find there (in their Model 1) is that departmental prestige, faculty size, and number of Ph.D. students per faculty member are the big factors in explaining productivity of the faculty.

The message for young faculty is get to the best department you can, and stay there. In the longer term, you probably can’t do much to make it more prestigious, but bigger is better.

N.B. Yep, pretty much the opposite of what I did.

Hat tip to Cold Spring Shops.

When They Can’t Read or Count

In academics, publishing is a big deal. There’s an aphorism about administrators though: they can’t read, but they can count. What this means is the quantity of your research often outweighs the quality (this is very true inside most institutions, but less true when looking across institutions for a new job).

Anyway, I just saw something I’ve never seen before. This was in an authors’ footnote of a paper that recently came out:

Joshua B. Miller is Associate Professor of Economics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. Adam Sanjurjo is Associate Professor of Economics, University of Alicante, Spain. Both authors contributed equally, with names listed in alphabetical order. Their email addresses are Joshua.Benjamin.Miller@gmail.com and sanjurjo@ua.es. [emphasis added]

An authors’ footnote typically appears on the first page of the paper. I have never seen the emphasized text appear in print.

It points to a further problem of academic administrators. I was taught that, except for rare exceptions, authors should be listed alphabetically by last name. Unfortunately, some administrators default to giving more weight to authors listed earlier.

(On a personal note, I had a dean who did this. It was a constant struggle, and honestly, I think he devalued all my work because with the last name Tufte my name was always near the end).

I suspect that these authors face the same problem. So they are wasting a little bit of journal space and a little bit of the reader’s attention.

I hope this non-Coasian solution works.

The paper is:

Miller, Joshua B., and Sanjurjo, Adam, “A Bridge from Monty Hall to the Hot Hand: The Principle of Restricted Choice,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2019, 33, 144-162.

Why Is Macro So Hard? Marx, Engels, and Plato

The Open Syllabus Project tracks over 100K college syllabuses to see which texts are used.

At number 3 is The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (this is the shorter, more political than economic book, that is often paired with readings from the 3 volumes of Marx’ Capital).

WTF.

My guess is that this may be the primary exposure to economics that many students get.

An analogy would be if Paley was read by far more students than Darwin.

This is not to say that Marx wasn’t a great economist. He definitely recognized and discussed the big unsolved or unaddressed problems of his day. But that was half to 2/3 of the way back to Adam Smith. A lot has happened since then. That’s like contemporary chemists reading Priestley: old, seminal on some points, and woefully wrong and out of date on others.

And Marx’ labor theory of value, his core idea, was a failed attempt at explaining the paradox of value. An important aspect of why it failed is that he came up with an answer before others did, that was later shown to be flawed by the marginal revolution. In most fields, that would be called a valiant attempt, with emphasis on the attempt part.

And yet, I have never, ever, had an incoming student at any level who could explain why it was wrong. This makes me think that while # 3 is being covered a lot, an essential part of the story is being left out.

In context, Marx is best thought of as a low and thick branch on the tree of economics knowledge. It was a worthwhile direction to go as the field explored new directions. But when it didn’t work out, economics as we now understand the field to be, backed out of that branch and went down the others, and flourished.

At number 2 is Plato’s Republic. OK. I’ll give on this one. It’s a great and seminal piece of social thought. But I wonder how many students get through as much of it as they can and come out the backside understanding that it doesn’t have much to do with democracy, republics, and elections as they’ve come to understand them?

In an event, as an economist, I find this work to be blissfully unaware that decentralized exchange is important or worthwhile. And yet understanding of decentralized exchange is what economics is all about.

A case in point is the prisoners’ dilemma. It wasn’t until halfway through the 20th century that a couple of mathematicians hit on a fundamental problem for understanding economics: optimal choices do not always lead to optimal outcomes. Plato knew nothing of this when he considered the best government to be that of an all-wise and all-knowing philosopher king, who made nothing but optimal choices.

So why is macro so hard? Because these authors are blithering idiots on the subject of what we now call economics, or on the subject of economics as presented in the news every day. If this is informing students’ viewpoints on some topics, no wonder they find what we do difficult.

I’ll even update my analogy. Paley was at least talking about some of the same things as Darwin. Better yet would be Origen and Augustine, discussing diversity without any conception of the random part of random selection producing it. That’s what teaching Marx, Engels, and Plato is doing to college students.

How Management and Data Work

Last time I checked, the major weakness of decision making based on data was … making up the data you don’t know, and then not doing sensitivity analysis of those assumptions:

Wait … what? Don’t I know and love a certain university whose Provost did this with a policy change about increasing online enrollments?

From the January 7, 2016 Dilbert.

Should We Say Goodbye to Confucius Institutes?

Confucius Institutes were billed as a way to engage China in the American education of the students they send here.

It seems it’s the kind of engagement some schools didn’t want in the first place.

The report from NAS recommends that universities close their Confucius Institutes. “Confucius Institutes permit an agency of a foreign government to have access to university courses, and on principle that is a university function,” Rachelle Peterson, the author of the report, said in an interview. “Institutions should have full control over who they hire, over what they teach, and Confucius Institutes basically act like class-in-a-box kits that come ready-made for universities to use.”

Ooh. Class-in-a-box kits is exactly the sort of thing that administrators love, and professors decry as just not that easy (or useful). Of course, that can even more top down, as legislators increasingly discover that education is more expensive than they told themselves. The National Association of Scholars advocates shutting down these academic get rich quick schemes.

My school has a Confucius Institute. Of course, we’re not large or particularly pathbreaking, so we were late to the game.

Hmmm.

Best Paragraph I Read Today

Tyler, of course, discussing the college admissions scandal:

In this case, those charged are mostly wealthy Americans of high social status, not gangsters. They probably thought of themselves as law-abiding Americans, with exceptions so minor as to be negligible. In other words, this case illustrates what a low opinion America has of its system of higher education. As a university professor, I would feel much better if it had been mobsters charged with these alleged crimes.

I would add that, here in flyover country, a lot of the rich bicoastal population is already regarded as mobsters. Thus, Trump: a rich, bicoastal, who probably is a mobster.

Its Evidence of Poor Teaching ;-D

Carpe Diem notes that Monday is National Grammar Day, and shows some evidence from basic Google searches. I’ll go one better and show Google Ngrams. Not every one of Mark Perry’s searches shows up, but some do.

Exhibit B: A Google search finds more than 17,000,000 results for the incorrect phrase “at it’s best.”

Here’s my Google Ngram take on that:

Exhibit C: A Google search for the incorrect phrase “it’s fullest” finds more than 700,000 results.

Surprisingly, that one was popular way back when, but it is on the increase of late:

Exhibit D: Do a Google search for “in it’s own right,” and you’ll also get more than 900,000 results.

All of these are generally on the rise since 1960, and after a little dip in the 80’s, most have increased drastically since then.

Do note that these ngrams are shown in percentages of words/phrases used, so they are scaled for increases in publications.

I suggest that this is prima facie evidence that our grammar has gotten worse, and further that the temporal correlation across all three shows that this is a society-wide breakdown in the teaching of grammar.

Word Tip # 26a: Update On Pasting Photos Into Table Cells

I wrote in Word Tip # 26 about pasting photos into table cells (I use this for seating charts for class).

My PC got an upgrade in October. My earlier tip did not work. I actually spent several minutes on Google searches to figure out why, but I came up empty-handed. Many people suggest what I had done before.

But it was failing for some, so it’s not just me.

Towards the end of this thread, I came upon a workaround that was quick and easy for me.

1. Do follow the old tip, which amounts to fixing the size of the cells in the table.
2. Paste the oversize photos into the table, and don’t worry about them.
3. When you are done pasting, resize one, by right-clicking on it to bring up a context menu, and then choosing Size and Position.
4. Without doing anything else, go to the next photo, and click F4, which repeats the last action. Repeat as needed.

A Real Blast from the Past

In my elementary school back in the early 1970’s, there was a memorial in the library for a boy a few years older than me. He had fallen into a boiling pool at Yellowstone while on family vacation.

I hate Facebook, but it’s good for some things. On a thread about that elementary school, was a link to this article about that event.

I’ve told this story to my kids, so I’m reprinting it here in full. It’s from the Billings Gazetter circa 1998.

By Michael Milstein

The Billings Gazette

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. - On June 28, 1970, Andrew Hecht and his family watched Old Faithful shoot its scalding spray into the sky. Then the Buffalo, N.Y., family of five continued their first visit to Yellowstone National Park by following a path among nearby geysers and springs.

It was a path that would come to devastate the Hecht family and, later, to rattle the foundation of the U.S. national park system.

The path the family took led to a wooden boardwalk, which the Hechts followed to Crested Pool, a deep and quietly boiling aquamarine spring with a crusty white mineral rim. At the edge of the pool, without a guardrail, the boardwalk split at almost right angles and continued around the pool in each direction.

But 9-year-old Andy Hecht, for whatever reason - some say steam blinded him, others believe he tripped, fell or jumped - did not turn with the boardwalk. Instead, he went straight ahead and splashed into the seething spring.

His head rose once from the frothing water, his mouth agape but silent. Then he sank out of sight.

200 died in parks in 1970

Andy Hecht was one of about 200 people who died in the national park system in 1970. But his death was like no other because it rallied his parents to beat on the door - or perhaps beat down the door - of the National Park Service until the stolid agency finally took steps to make national parks safer.

The Hechts' campaign for safety in the national parks led to more funding and new safety officers in major parks and regional offices. Park visitors encountered more caution signs and alerts from rangers.

And this summer, after years of pleas by the family for some tribute to Andy, workers in Yellowstone installed new warning signs funded by the Hechts throughout the very Upper Geyser Basin where the boy died.

"A lot of it is just attitude," said Andy's father, James Hecht, a retired chemical engineer who now lives in Denver and keeps careful watch over park safety efforts. "It's not that no one in the Park Service pays attention to safety, but it just takes one act of negligence to leave a person without warning that might prevent them from getting killed."

Last year 179 visitors were killed in national parks - six of them in Yellowstone, not including the two Yellowstone employees also killed.

The worrisome numbers force park managers onto a delicate tightrope. They must protect the millions of people who visit the parks - often without realizing the dangers of wild settings. But they must do so without sanitizing the very wild settings that so many people come to see.

"We have to identify to the best of our abilities the risks visitors are encountering," said Richard Powell, the National Park Service's top safety officer, based in Denver. "We can't prevent them, but we can tell people: `Here's what you face.' And I think we can do a better job with that."

Both the weaknesses and strengths of the Park Service's approach to safety show themselves in the tragic death of Andy Hecht and its aftermath.

The Hechts had arrived in Yellowstone after flying from New York to Billings, renting a car and driving over the Beartooth Highway to the park's northeast entrance.

No rangers at entrance

It was late in the day and no rangers were on duty, James Hecht recalls, so the Hechts entered Yellowstone for the first time without receiving any maps, information or warnings.

At Old Faithful, the family talked with a ranger, who told them about the trails through the geyser basin but did not warn them of the boiling water that often lies just beneath thin mineral crusts, James Hecht said.

Andy was walking with his older brother and sister - and amid a crowd that had dispersed from Old Faithful - when he plunged into Crested Pool. His father remembers the shock.

"Why us? How could this happen? When it happened we weren't out in the wilderness. We were on the boardwalk.

"We think of Andy when we look at our other two kids," says James Hecht. "He would be 37 now. He was a terrific kid, very bright. He was very outgoing. He was gutsy. He'd play football with bigger boys and dive for the ball. He was a charmer. He was interested in the pretty girl across the street."

Unable to sleep that night, James Hecht arose and wrote a letter to Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel. In writing, he told Hickel: "I torture myself, but I do it in an effort to give a little more meaning to Andy's life. We believe his tragic death was caused by inadequate safety precautions."

Congress responded by more than doubling funding for the Park Service's safety program, which paid for new safety officers in major parks and regional offices.

Soon crews in Yellowstone rerouted the boardwalk so it no longer encircled Crested Pool and erected a railing to prevent future falls. They also added more warning signs.

While John Hast, the National Park Service's top safety officer at the time, acknowledged the park's insufficient warnings, he concluded that such messages would not have prevented Andy Hecht's death.

After four hours of watching visitors near Crested Pool in August 1970, Hast wrote to higher-ups that "the demonstrated lack of parental control while in these areas is alarming. . . . We must find a better way to reach people with a message on the hazards of the areas."

In the wake of accidents, James Hecht said, the Park Service pays more attention to what the victims did wrong than what park rangers might have done to prevent the accidents.

"People will do something foolish and the Park Service says they're foolish, but the question is, did they know of the risk?" he says. "Did the Park Service take the reasonable steps to promote knowledge of the risk?"

The Hechts settled their $1 million lawsuit against the government for $20,000 and used the money to start a foundation named for their son that sponsored a safety award for Park Service employees.

Today, visitors to Yellowstone receive a park newspaper with pages of red safety warnings. It has been 10 years since someone died due to burns in Yellowstone and that was in an undeveloped, backcountry geyser basin.

"The information is there, but we can't force people to read it," says Yellowstone safety officer Galen Warren. "We have to hope they do."

The Hechts visited every Park Service director since Andy's death to discuss safety and their hope for some kind of memorial to their son in Yellowstone. Every director resisted the plea, responding that they could not turn parks into impromptu graveyards, until the Hechts visited Roger Kennedy, who was Park Service director until last year.

Kennedy directed officials to work with the Hechts and the park staff proposed updated signs warning of the dangers of the geyser basin with a short mention of Andy's death.

I went to a conference this autumn about public lands usage. The discussion in a van on the way back from an off-site event was about how the parks can and/or should manage risky behavior.

Grousing

For the first time in my life, my university built a new building and gave me an office in it. I like that part.

I do not like the penny-wise-pound-foolish decision to not provide enough shelves.

Here’s Bill Nordhaus in his office:

Last I checked, professors used books. And the best place to store them is on shelves.

In my new office, I have four. Shelves. Not bookcases. Shelves.

BTW: This does not seem to be a university wide problem. The English faculty, who got refurbished offices instead of new ones, have 21 shelves. And, our old bookcases (I had 3 of them) have been repurposed for the use of the Geosciences faculty.