Month: August 2009

Degree Inflation Of Another Sort, Ctd

A reader writes:

I've been in the K-12 private school world for nearly 35 years, the last 25 either running a school or serving as the chief business officer. The statistics presented in the chart about inflation and educational costs do not surprise me a bit. Here's my take on some of the reasons that underlie this tremendous rate of inflation in educational costs:

1. Unlike in the economy as a whole, it is difficult for schools to become more "productive" in the traditional sense. Increased productivity means increasing output per unit of input. Since the "output" of a school is "students graduated," the only way to get more "productive" is to graduate more kids with the same number of employees (i.e. teachers). This in turn means increasing class sizes or finding other ways (such as through online courses) to increase the number of students taught by a given teacher. The customers (usually referred to as “parents") we serve always swear they don’t want that. In fact, parents emphatically reject the offer of lower tuition if it results in larger class sizes or less access to teachers.

2. Unlike in other industries, technology does not result in greater efficiencies in schools. Alas, it's just the opposite. Computer technology has enhanced learning in many ways, but it also requires tremendous levels of expenditures.

3. A generation ago even very bright students with learning disabilities simply were extremely ill served by schools. Today, schools provide all kinds of support to students with learning challenges. This is clearly good for the students, as well as for society at large, but it has increased costs.

4. Today, schools employ (psychological) counselors; that was not done a generation ago.

5. There are many other services provided today that are either completely new or significantly enhanced. In my experience, this is usually parent driven rather than driven by schools wanting to get ahead of or keep up with the competition

I don't include the cost of the new facilities that private schools and colleges have added, because for the most part, the cost of erecting those new buildings is paid for through fundraising campaigns specifically for that purpose and not out of tuition dollars (though obviously increased operating costs come from tuition dollars).

I would like to elaborate a bit on the first factor above, because in my view it is the most significant in driving up costs. In the economy as a whole, it is possible for workers to receive wage increases above the rate inflation because of increased productivity. If I were making widgets and could find a way to increase productivity and produce (and sell) 5% more widgets that I could a year ago, all other things being equal, I would have 5% "extra" money that I could distribute it in the form of wages to my workers. If the inflation rate were less than 5%, they get ahead.

In the vast majority of educational institutions (I'm not including the very few that have truly substantial endowments), tuition represents, overwhelmingly, the primary source of revenue. In essence, to oversimplify only a little bit, to give employees an x% raise, we have to raise tuition by x% (actually more, since other costs go up as well). If the inflation rate is also x%, our employees are no better off next year than they were this year. Do that for an entire career, and teachers would find themselves in the position of retiring at exactly the same (inflation-adjusted) salary at which they started their careers in education. Who would enter a field with no possibility of after-inflation wage increases? In order to raise real wages, private schools must raise tuition more than the general inflation rate.

Alan Blinder (of Princeton and Federal Reserve fame) wrote an article in (I believe) the 1980s talking about just this phenomenon. He nailed it.

Pretty much everyone says that this is unsustainable into the future. The interesting thing is that people have been saying is unsustainable for over 30 years, and yet, the education “industry” has sustained this approach throughout economic ups and downs. Maybe this economic downturn is different. Then again, once again, experience may prove that the predictions of unsustainability are incorrect.

How Does Porn Work?

by Patrick Appel

Jonah Lehrer explains what's going on inside your mind when watching a dirty movie:

Why do humans (especially men) get so excited by seeing someone else have sex? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: watching porn triggers an idea (we start thinking about sex), which then triggers a change in our behavior (we become sexually aroused). This is how most of us think about thinking: sensations cause thoughts which cause physical responses. Porn is a quintessential example of how such a thought process might work.

But this straightforward answer is probably wrong. Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television or computer screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.

Mirror neurons facilitate this process by allowing the brain to automatically imitate the actions of somebody else. So if I see you smile, or lick an ice cream cone, or do something X-rated, then my mirror neurons light up as if I were smiling, or licking an ice cream cone, or doing something X-rated. We mirror each others movements, which allows us to make sense of all these flailing limbs and contorted muscles; the body is a pretty tough thing to read.

Best Of Wikipedia

by Chris Bodenner

An open-source Tumblr that recommends interesting Wikipedia entries. Ever heard of a whale fall?

Whale fall is the term used for a whale carcass that has fallen to the ocean floor. When a whale dies in shallow water, its carcass is typically devoured by scavengers over a relatively short period of time—within several months. However, in deeper water (depths of 2,000 m/6,600 ft or greater), fewer scavenger species exist, and the carcass can provide sustenance for a complex localized ecosystem over periods of decades. Over 30 previously unknown species have been discovered at whale falls.

If you think that’s morbid, read the entry for Nantucket Sleighride.

Resistant To Change

by Patrick Appel

Brayden King sums up Surowieki's New Yorker article on Obama's flat health care sales pitch:

The big problem with health care reform, as Surowiecki sees it, is that its proponents framed the reform as an attempt to cut costs. This framing automatically invoked the loss aversion biases of the general public. It didn’t help that reform opponents latched on to the bias and have milked it for all its worth.

Health care has been Obama's worst sales job yet. His pitch feels almost romney-esque; it has been focus grouped so finely that individual words have been put into approved or forbidden columns.The administration has morphed into a team of academics while the opposition has gained the emotional upper-hand. Their currency is rage, not hope, but the intensity reminds me of Obama's campaign crowds.

In his excellent new book (and also on his blog) Jonah Lehrer discusses a study where test subjects were either shown a picture of an impoverished African child or were told terrible statistics about the living conditions of individuals much like that child. The test subjects were then asked how much they would donate to charitable causes. Researchers found that those who had been shown the picture gave around fifty percent more. Rationally, those who understood the full extent of the suffering should have been inspired to give the most, but that is not how we are programmed. Numbers do not activate the emotional centers of our brains. Talking only about statistics and numbers neglects the sort of stories Dish readers have been sharing, stories that illuminate the failings of the health care system and make them real in a way no numerical argument can.

Denying The Past

by Patrick Appel

Johann Hari reviews Tracy Kidder's new book profiling "Deogratias Niyizonkiza, a 24-year-old man who had narrowly survived a genocide in two countries and suddenly in 1994 found himself on a flight to a place he had only heard of—America." Hari has questions:

[T]he tale has less-neat edges that Kidder can't smooth. Deogratias seems to have come to terms with his memories of the genocide by convincing himself that the populations of both countries were innocent, and even the perpetrators—who remain faceless and nameless and off-stage for virtually the entire narrative—were simply "misled." They didn't know what they were doing; they were deceived. But this was a grassroots genocide, stoked by governments but carried out—with horrific efficiency—by ordinary people. Those rows of bodies I looked at were carved up by their neighbors, who were staring them in the face. It's hard for the reader to escape the conclusion that Deogratias can live with what happened and build his hospital and do good only by lying to himself about the nature of the recent past.

This raises the chewy problem of why Kidder is telling this story. Is it primarily an inspirational tale of an immigrant-made-good, a repudiation of Lou Dobbs-style bigotry? If so, his book succeeds 10 times over in an uncomplicated way. Or does Kidder believe primarily in the need to record accurately what happened during the darkest moments in human history?

If this is his goal, then he is—subtly, sympathetically—chiding his subject. Deogratias has placed a protective distortion at the heart of his story of the genocide: He has scrubbed it free of perpetrators. Kidder doesn't ask overtly if this delusion has a cost. By placing the cause of the genocide somewhere unreachably distant—somewhere beyond the decisions of the human beings who actually carried it out—is Deogratias powerless to prevent it happening again?