Sex Robots from the Future

Academia in New Zealand's always had a bit of a public perception problem. Because credential inflation came very late to New Zealand, a large number of very talented people have been successful without having bothered to go to university. They're sceptical about whether universities add much value.

The New Zealand press yesterday gave extensive coverage to research from the University of Victoria at Wellington predicting that, by 2050, we'll have extensive robot-based sex tourism, and it'll be based in Amsterdam. Here's the original paper.

At first I'd thought the least plausible prognostication is that customers would be paying €10,000 for a robot brothel experience, but the fault was in the reporting rather than in the original article. The press reported €10,000 as the typical price paid by tourists: wholly implausible absent massive inflation or really pernicious turns in patent law. But the original article says it's the price at the "top" club for business travellers. It's not nuts to think the Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Max Mosley of the future would pay those kinds of prices. Otherwise, the price seemed more likely to be on par with the cost of buying a robot, not the cost of renting one.

They reckon dangerous STDs are going to be a big push for robot-sex. I'd expect cheap personal tricorders would let customers and workers sort out really quickly whether STDs are an issue. The only thing that would stop this would be masking agents deliberately taken to avoid STD detection, but it's also pretty plausible that there would be reasonably strong criminal penalties attached to using masking agents.   And, it would then just be an arms-race with the tricorders. Once we've worked out tricorders, we probably wind up with an STD segregation equilibrium in dating and sex markets. I can buy improved services as a demand-based reason for the shift; I'd be very surprised if it were STD worries.

I should probably leave it there.

PBRF games

Martin Lally warned about contracting shenanigans meant to game New Zealand's academic research ranking exercise. Recall that while keeping "R" graded staff has no direct effect on a University's funding, the number of R staff falling into the denominator of the Average Quality Score will affect league tables; consequently, Universities faced no downside cost to ensuring that likely Rs are off the books on the census date.

The Tertiary Education Commission seems to have agreed with his critique.

People are keeping Rs off the books:

40 As part of the preparations for the 2012 Quality Evaluation, the TEC has contracted KPMG to undertake an audit of TEOs. The first stage of the audit process has indicated that there appears to be differences in Human Resource practices across TEOs. In particular, differences in the way in which TEOs are applying the staff eligibility criteria in relation to staff whose EPs are not likely to meet the standard for a funded Quality Category. 

41 The extent of these differences indicates that there is potential for these practices to affect the credibility of the published results of the 2012 Quality Evaluation, including the way in which TEOs are ranked (at both the overall organisational level, and by subject areas), and for the reporting of the relative quality of research by panel, subject area, and nominated academic unit generally.

42 In addition, the TEC has received information from TEOs which indicates that the overall number of PBRF-eligible staff whose EPs are unlikely to meet the standards for a funded Quality Category has declined significantly between 2006 and 2012.

Dave Guerin's excellent ED-insider [subscription, sorry; blog version here] notes some of the fun highlighted in the KPMG report: Otago deems a higher proportion of their staff as being PBRF-eligible than does Canterbury, but then manages to exclude them as being "under strict supervision".

TEC's preferred option is to drop Rs from the denominator for AQS calculation. This seems the most obvious tidy solution. They say universities would then have no incentive to game contracts. I wonder whether that's true. Where universities previously had strong incentive to keep Rs off the books, they'll now have some incentive to keep Cs off the books as every C necessarily brings down the average.

Incentives to game on Cs have to be weaker than gaming on Rs because C-ranked researchers still do bring in some incremental funding to the university.

We'd expect then that universities will crank through an optimization balancing the marginal increase in tuition income (foreign and domestic, with different expected elasticities) with a higher AQS against the marginal decrease in research income from dropping a C. We'd also expect that contractual shenanigans with more research-active staff are more expensive than those for less research-active staff, so total shenanigans ought to go down even in the absence of an income trade-off.

It's hard to imagine a fix that will be immune to gaming. The TEC-proposed one will improve things, but there will still be incentives to game.

Meanwhile, in Economics at Canterbury, we're likely to be punished for working harder to get our two teaching specialists research active; their becoming research active will now wind up hurting our AQS.  Our own fault for not responding to incentives as we should have and getting them officially off the books on census date.

Academic salaries

Marginal Revolution points to an international index of PPP-adjusted faculty salaries. Alas, New Zealand isn't there listed. We'll work up the NZ figures; the Inside Higher Ed table is cribbed at the bottom of the post.

Entry-level in New Zealand is Lecturer; Assistant Lecturer is a rank generally reserved for those still finishing up their Doctorates. Or, at least, that's how it's used in Commerce at Canterbury.

OECD says the PPP exchange rate for 2010 was about 1.6

The starting rung on the Lecturer scale is around NZ$71,500. As a monthly salary, that's NZ$5,950. Or US$3720. Between Italy and Australia.

A mid-range Senior Lecturer gets around NZ$100k, or US$5,200 per month. Between Germany and The Netherlands.

The middle of the Professorial scale sits around NZ$150k, or US$7800 per month. Higher than Oz and the US.

What's missing? Non-salary compensation is going to be a bigger part of the bundle at US schools than at NZ ones, so differences are somewhat understated. Further, I'm not sure whether the salaries reported for the States are 9 month or 12 month; while in New Zealand we're on annual salaries, a lot of American schools have faculty on 9 month contract that are supplemented by summer research grants that might not be included in these figures

Also, American averages mask a lot more dispersion than do Kiwi ones that tend to be pretty flat across disciplines. Our compensation schedules are consequently relatively generous in English literature and relatively weaker in business disciplines.

On the whole, though, we're more competitive than I'd thought. Especially once you account for that, once you're here, you adjust your consumption bundle with the changes in relative prices instead of just trying to buy the bundle you would have bought in the US - things could look a bit different if we used a Kiwi consumption bundle as benchmark.

[note: updated to fix formatting]

Monthly Average Salaries of Public Higher Education Faculty, Using U.S. PPP Dollars

Country	Entry	Average	Top
Armenia	$405	$538	$665
Russia	433	617	910
China	259	720	1,107
Ethiopia	864	1,207	1,580
Kazakhstan	1,037	1,553	2,304
Latvia	1,087	1,785	2,654
Mexico	1,336	1,941	2,730
Czech Republic	1,655	2,495	3,967
Turkey	2,173	2,597	3,898
Colombia	1,965	2,702	4,058
Brazil	1,858	3,179	4,550
Japan	2,897	3,473	4,604
France	1,973	3,484	4,775
Argentina	3,151	3,755	4,385
Malaysia	2,824	4,628	7,864
Nigeria	2,758	4,629	6,229
Israel	3,525	4,747	6,377
Norway	4,491	4,940	5,847
Germany	4,885	5,141	6,383
Netherlands	3,472	5,313	7,123
Australia	3,930	5,713	7,499
United Kingdom	4,077	5,943	8,369
Saudi Arabia	3,457	6,002	8,524
United States	4,950	6,054	7,358
India	3,954	6,070	7,433
South Africa	3,927	6,531	9,330
Italy	3,525	6,955	9,118
Canada	5,733	7,196	9,485

Why retire?

I've never quite understood why academics retire. Jeremy Bentham wanted his auto-icon propped up in the University long after his death; he's apparently still brought out for the occasional meeting of Council where he's listed as "present but not voting". That doesn't seem all that bad.

Nick Rowe wonders why people bundle so much leisure into retirement. It's difficult to conceive of models in which doing so is optimal. Sure, work gets harder as we get older, but so too does leisure.

The obvious answer is that our productivity falls as we age. So it makes sense to consume more leisure when the opportunity cost is least. But there's also an obvious problem with that explanation. If our productivity at work falls as we age, maybe our productivity at leisure falls as we age too. Which will get worse more quickly: my ability to give an economics lecture; or my ability to portage a canoe?

Honestly, there's a very short list of things that would have me retire from lecturing:

1. Being forced to retire;
   • But this does require either legislation mandating a retirement age, or constraints on recontracting for reduced duties and wages commensurate with depreciated human capital. I'm pretty sure Canada has the former. [David Giles, in comments, says Canada no longer forces retirement.]
2. Health problems that affect labour in more embarrassing fashion than leisure coupled with a stronger sense of shame than I currently have;
3. Strong technological innovation in leisure-complementary activities;
4. Technological changes in academia that make lecturers obsolete [read read read]

The fourth I most worry about because it could hit rather sooner than I'd like. Society invests too much in higher education. The bottom tier of students would do better in taking a trade qualification than a Bachelor's; rather too many undergraduates are learning absolutely nothing^* [HT: Isegoria]. Things like MITx (InsideHigherEd) will let top institutions provide more credentialling services for those who ought to have university training. Government R&D funding has been being crowded out, so when the sector eventually loses the funding coming from students who never really should have been there, academia will contract (and especially severely if MITx takes off). The good times can't last forever.

On the plus side, much of what universities provide isn't really instruction. Instead, it's a bundle of instruction, signalling, consumption, and complex relational and social capital not easily provided elsewhere. The instruction can be handled by MITx, but I'm not sure the rest of it can be. Teleconferencing hasn't eliminated either face-to-face business interactions or academic conferences. That gives me hope I can still be in the classroom in my 80s. But if teleconferencing ever advances sufficiently for virtual conferences to supplant traditional ones,^** I'm going to get just a little bit nervous.

* The book cited finds no improvement in complex reasoning, writing, or reading skills among a substantial proportion of undergrads. I haven't read the just-released book, but I expect the problem's largely one of fit. A bottom tier of students just cannot be taught by the methods that are appropriate to the middle and upper tiers of their classmates and would have better outcomes in community college or technical training environments. Starting g matters.

** I think it'll require holodeck-style virtual hospitality suites.

Who Speaks?

Chris Barton in the NZ Herald wonders why so few academics join public debate in New Zealand.

The faint voice of academics seemed odd, especially in light of the Education Act 1989, which requires universities to "accept a role as critic and conscience of society". Bridgman found some reasons why: universities, made over by the market reforms of the 80s and 90s, did little to encourage the critic and conscience role; academics believed making regular public contributions would harm their careers; taking a public role was time-consuming, meaning less time for publishing research in academic journals, which are vital to career advancement.

There were also concerns about being misquoted; fears that comments would be seen as a "dumbing-down" of academic knowledge; plus not having the skills to communicate with a wider audience. A common theme, says Bridgman, was the influence of the PBRF system and its bias against research on the New Zealand context, which is harder to get published in the higher rating international journals. In other words academics were, by and large, frightened, self interested and confined by oppressive research demands to their rarefied sphere of influence.

Then there is the long Kiwi tradition of regarding the word "intellectual" as a term of abuse. In his essay The Public Intellectual is a Dog, Auckland University English Department lecturer Stephen Turner sums up the problem: "Just talking about public intellectuals make you, or rather me in this case, a wanker rather than a well rounded bloke." The British have also been bagging intellectuals for a couple of centuries, as Auckland University associate professor Laurence Simmons points out in his introduction to Speaking Truth to Power. It's a stereotype which says experience rather than abstract ideas, the supposed currency of intellectuals, offers the better guide to social and political practice.

I'd add to that some pretty serious thin market problems: we just don't have the think tank environment in New Zealand that is found elsewhere to help encourage academics to take on a more public role.

In any case, of the 24 academics listed as providing expert public analysis on New Zealand's business climate, I'm the only one listed from the University of Canterbury. I'm a bit worried that the other hundred-odd academics in the College of Business and Economics know more about Canterbury's system of incentives, rewards, and (in the current environment of redundancies) punishments than I do.

I would have added Canterbury's Glen Boyle to the list of academics who speak on business. I'm also surprised that they missed Matt Nolan at TVHE in their list of occupational economists; he's done rather more than I have on topics around the financial crisis.

Graduation

I attended the University of Canterbury's graduation ceremonies on Wednesday afternoon. I'd avoided attending each of my own graduations other than high school, mostly because I expected them to be mind-bogglingly boring. I also had the handy excuse of being well out of Winnipeg by the time of my undergrad graduation ceremony, in New Zealand by the time of my doctoral graduation ceremony, and of its being a faux pas for a PhD student in the States to attend his Masters conferment (signals that you think you won't finish).

Don't get me wrong - the speeches from our Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor, and from Ruth Richardson, were excellent. The awarding of the research medal was nice. The pomp and ceremony of the event is also itself important. Getting all dressed up in regalia is great fun for staff and students alike. A graduation ceremony consisting of those speeches, and some abbreviated degree-conferment ceremony with appropriate pomp, would be great. But I struggle to understand the utility function of those who attend graduations as they currently exist: a half-hour of good content interspersed among a couple of hours of watching, and applauding, a bunch of people you mostly don't know walking across the stage to be given their degrees in alphabetical order by degree.

I can imagine, as a student, the value of getting to walk across the stage and shake hands with the head of the University. And parallel benefits for the parents. But is that benefit worth the couple of hours of watching a few hundred^* other people doing the same thing? Can it really be the case that the median student prefers the current form of graduation to one where we keep the nice speeches but forego handing out the diplomas to each graduand?

The first response is that students attend because parents demand it. But that just pushes the problem back a level: why should any parent prefer sitting there for two hours, watching a bunch of people they've no chance of knowing walk across the stage in exchange for the 45 seconds in which their kid gets to walk across the stage? The parents definitely enjoy watching their kid cross the stage, and I can understand getting utility that way; I would too. But at that cost? Surely there are other ways of celebrating your child's achievement: a graduation party at home with friends and family instead of formal graduation, for example. Even more puzzling: parents of international students fly in to attend; the two hours at graduation are a trivial part of the overall cost.

Potential explanations:

• The 45 seconds' utility trumps the time cost for most people; Crampton is a pod-person.
• Note that the second clause can be (is almost certainly) true regardless of the rest.
• The ceremony with public awarding of degrees is a binding enforcement mechanism preventing students from lying about their academic progress.
• But a lot of US schools run graduation with fake certificates because final grades haven't yet been tabulated!
• It's a horrible showing-you-care equilibrium. Parents attend because they want to demonstrate how much they appreciate their kids' having worked really hard to get their degrees; kids attend because their parents want them to and they want to show their appreciation for parents' financial support. Both would be better off if they could agree to a graduation party at home instead, but the one proposing it risks being seen as not caring.
• But then a University could do well at the margin by offering a more efficient graduation ceremony. Maybe they wouldn't really attract more students by it, but they'd at least save the opportunity costs of the stage party. That nobody does this suggests the median student isn't in the showing-you-care equilibrium.
• People attend to feel validated about having purchased this educational bundle. Sure, it's after the fact. But a nice ceremony makes the degree feel more credible both for those getting it and for those who funded it. It's a bit irrational: you should seek quality signals ex ante, not ex post, and I don't know of anybody who decides which school to attend ex ante on the basis of graduation ceremonies. But if it makes appliance buyers happy when their fridge's instruction manual starts out with a friendly "Congratulations on having chosen wisely in purchasing our brand!" maybe this holds here too. The obvious inefficiency of the ceremony, and observing that other parents attend, somehow signals the strength of the brand and the wisdom of their prior investment decision. In this version, waiting through all the other kids is a benefit, not a cost: "Look at all these fine young people among whose ranks my child now stands!"

Best guess: a good quarter of folks are there only because it's a bad equilibrium (as in the next-to-last bullet), another quarter are there because the disutility from waiting through the other graduands for their kid isn't that high, and the rest split either between validation or simply attending because it's the thing to do.

Note also that I completely understand the University offering the event given that parents and students seem to demand it - none of this is meant as critique of Canterbury, or of any University's putting on these ceremonies. And I also understand Faculty attendance as part of the job. I'm struggling to understand the demand side, not supply.

Could somebody who is not a pod-person help explain why they enjoyed attending their graduation or their kid's?

I wonder whether there are testable hypotheses in here. We have records on student characteristics - tons of records. We know who attends graduation and who stays home. Some hypotheses:

• If students from lower-decile high schools are more likely to attend than those from higher-decile high schools, that's consistent with either opportunity costs of time being lower among attendees, or benefits of seeing the kid's graduation being higher where college attainment is less common. 
• I'd predict higher proportionate attendance among those receiving first class than third class honours, mostly on the benefits side of the calculus (being announced to everyone as having first class honours)
• I'd predict higher attendance among those from underrepresented ethnic groups holding constant incoming school decile - benefits of seeing graduation higher where college attainment is less common.
• If the "showing you care" story is right, we expect highest attendance among those departments where "showing you care" is integrated into the discipline's way of being - Social Work, Cultural Studies - and lowest attendance among departments like Economics. 
• Others?

^* Canterbury splits its graduation ceremonies across different days for different faculties to make things tractable. Commerce, Laws, Engineering, and Fine Arts was Wednesday afternoon. Relatively few Econ graduands attended graduation, suggesting their utility function is more like mine.

Flattery is a Prisoners Dilemma game

If you're not already reading Xavier Marquez's Abandoned Footnotes, you should be. N is low and quality is very high. His latest post works through status, inequality, and flattery in the Roman empire.

Augustus pretended humility and kept a lid on excess flattery to allow the Senate to pretend that it continued to have status equal to the Emperor.

The Republic was built on norms that rejected kingship and competitively allocated relatively “equal” high social status among the senatorial class, so that any credible signals of an intention to re-establish kingship seem to have greatly lowered the coordination costs of dissatisfied senators for conspiring against the emperor.

Caligula wanted to move toward Kingship, so fuelled flattery inflation:

Strategically speaking, the point of this seems to have been to lessen his dependence on the senatorial aristocracy and to move the regime towards a Hellenistic model. (Winterling discusses some suggestive evidence that Caligula might have been planning to move to Alexandria, an obviously symbolic move to the historic capital of Hellenistic dynasts). Runaway flattery inflation not only makes it exceedingly difficult for conspirators to succeed (even the most innocuous comment can be used against you when flattery inflation is in full swing) but also succeeds in completely humiliating the flatterers (in this case the senatorial aristocracy) and lowering their collective social status vis a vis the ruler. If flattery hyperinflation is not stopped, the end result is that the ruler no longer has to use "ambiguous" language to manage his relationship to the selectorate. He can just order them to do things, without worrying about slighting their status.

Individual Senators could do no better than flatter, though it debased the Senate.

I think one can extract a more general model of flattery inflation from all this. When material resources are more much more unequally distributed than status, and status is competitively allocated, flattery inflation can result. But rulers (or those who control material resources) will usually try to dampen or manage this kind of inflation, since flattery has obvious disadvantages from their perspective. Yet there seem to be circumstances under which they will try to encourage flattery hyperinflation, e.g., when the costs of coordination for challengers are relatively low and the maintenance of "low inflation" requires extensive communication management.

I would be so poorly cut out for that kind of world.

On the other hand, if you flip the word Senate for Faculty and Emperor for... ah, well, never mind. It's an exercise best left for the reader.

Fun conferences I've not attended

I'd thought @adzebill was trolling us when he started livetweeting this conference. You can see how I was confused by tweets like:

Knives out already: speaker upbraided for not "addressing the sociology of the paua". #NZFoodHist

and

The Symons Touchstone Score for Biscuit/Cake Iconism peaks in the 1920s. #NZFoodHist

But here are some of the conference papers:

Aaliyeh Naqvi-Sherazee – “Food, identity and place-making: Indian settlers in 1920s New Zealand”

Donna Brien – “‘An Affaire de Stomach’: Australian and New Zealand 1920s Food Writing”

Duncan Galletly – “Iconism in cakes and biscuits”

Helen Leach – “Home Science and the arrival of the ‘modern kitchen’ in 1920s New Zealand”

Janet Lymburn & Diane Langman – “Driving Change: Imaginative Thinkers”

Janet Mitchell – “Mélanie S. Primmer, B.A. and the Up-to-date-Housewife”

Jeanette Fry – “The influence of generic cookbooks and pamphlets over the past 90 years and the role of advertising in reducing the cost of daily living; Or, how mustard saves you money on every meal.”

John Webster – "Trying to find Miss Fidler"

Nancy Pollock – “Chinese contributions to New Zealand gastronomy”

Nicola Saker – “By their menus ye shall know them: Or, if you are what you eat, what you eat is who you are”

Tui Flower – “First-hand experience of kitchens”

It all sounds ridiculous fun; I envy @adzebill's attendance.

Meanwhile, @BruceSchneier points to a U Minnesota conference on Cephalopods and Art:

Why do we make images, where do they come from and what is their primary function? Human image production and image distribution systems have made rapid growth to the level of unimaginable saturation in urban contemporary life through design, architecture, city planning, Internet, fine arts, and other media. The Origin of Image Making: Behavioral Ecology of Cephalopods and Art brings together scientific, humanistic and artistic attempts to investigate these ever critical existential questions by examining the cognitive and interpretive systems of the adoptive coloration of cuttlefish as a model to code and to re-map visual information such as paintings, photographs and video.

This conference’s primary goal is to create a discussion platform among scholars, experts, and students from different academic and non-academic fields. During the two-day conference, we will focus on cuttlefish research including neuroscience, comparative psychology, animal behaviorology, and art as conceptual, practical and/or tangible foundations to understanding our own visual communication system.

I wonder if male cuttlefish better able to make artistic displays in their patterning enjoy more reproductive opportunities. Does the Art Instinct extend to cuttlefish?

Better biologists?

Glenn Boyle previously reckoned that New Zealand's relatively flat academic pay structures mean less than stellar research performance in areas where American universities pay a premium - Seamus and I are paid peanuts, and so must be monkeys (though the same holds for Glenn as well, as he is first to admit).

I read today that new biology PhDs earn about $37-$40k in the US - less than the starting salaries for undergrads starting in industry. That has to be less than New Zealand starting salaries, even given purchasing parity adjustments.

More than 86,000 biology majors graduate each year, to compete for entry-level positions in research, environmental monitoring, health care and teaching. Salaries start at $40,000 to $50,000 a year, college placement offices say, compared with $55,000 to $65,000 for graduates in computer fields and engineering.

Spending six or more years to earn a doctorate doesn’t pay off, either. There is such a glut of biology Ph.D.’s that only 14 percent find tenure-track academic jobs within six years.
Younger Ph.D.’s face the biggest problems. Many entered graduate school when federal financing for health research surged a decade ago. But most of the money to fight cancer and search for other breakthroughs went to established researchers. At the same time, in the face of financial realities, universities are clamping down on tenure-track spots in all fields. As a result, many new Ph.D.’s are stuck in one postdoctoral research job after another, helping run laboratories set up by senior scientists, waiting to see if they can win permanent academic appointment.

Starting pay is low, $37,000 to $40,000, and more than a third of biologists are still working in these and other non-tenure track jobs six years after receiving their Ph.D.’s. Others teach at community colleges or high schools, jobs that would not have required as much training, or work for industry or the government.

Federal, state and local agencies employ 40 percent of biologists at all degree levels, and they are tightening their budgets. The pharmaceutical industry has laid off 300,000 workers over the last decade, and is outsourcing basic research jobs to India and China.

A PhD in biology starts looking more like an MFA in puppetry; Big Bang Theory's Bernadette waitressing while in grad school in biology also starts making more sense (though her subsequent hiring at high salary less so).

If we look to the QS rankings, New Zealand has, in economics, Auckland ranked 37th, Canterbury 51-100, Massey 101-150, Otago 101-150, Waikato 101-150 and U Vic at Wellington 101-150.

In biology, we have Auckland at 39th, Otago 51-100, Waikato 51-100, Canterbury 151-200, Massey 151-200, and U Vic at Wellington 151-200. Only Otago and Waikato match the expected relative rankings given salary differentials. I wonder why New Zealand universities' economics departments are so much better at recruiting, given salaries, than are their biology departments. Or is it that biologists require complementary investments in kit that New Zealand universities are less able to supply?

Reject!

David Trafimow and Stephen Rice ask "What if Social Scientists had Reviewed Great Scientific Works of the Past?" (HT: @JavierAparicio). Here's the summary of reasons for rejecting a circular earth, Newton's laws of motion, and Borlaug's Green revolution, among others.

I'm reminded of the number of rejects Gordon Tullock received.

I suppose Table 1 will be of value to referees in a hurry to come up with reasons for rejecting submissions.

Coaching

Could a good surgeon use a coach? Dr. Atul Gawande thought he might. He'd reached a performance plateau and so went out looking for help from one of his former teachers, a retired surgeon. Result?

That one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years. It had been strange and more than a little awkward having to explain to the surgical team why Osteen was spending the morning with us. “He’s here to coach me,” I’d said. Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice. Like most work, medical practice is largely unseen by anyone who might raise one’s sights. I’d had no outside ears and eyes. Osteen has continued to coach me in the months since that experiment. I take his observations, work on them for a few weeks, and then get together with him again. The mechanics of the interaction are still evolving. Surgical performance begins well before the operating room, with the choice made in the clinic of whether to operate in the first place. Osteen and I have spent time examining the way I plan before surgery. I’ve also begun taking time to do something I’d rarely done before—watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.

In a Hansonean turn, Gawande then considers why coaching isn't used more often:

Osteen watched, silent and blank-faced the entire time, taking notes. My cheeks burned; I was mortified. I wished I’d never asked him along. I tried to be rational about the situation—the patient did fine. But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.

This is why it will never be easy to submit to coaching, especially for those who are well along in their career. I’m ostensibly an expert. I’d finished long ago with the days of being tested and observed. I am supposed to be past needing such things. Why should I expose myself to scrutiny and fault-finding?

I have spoken to other surgeons about the idea. “Oh, I can think of a few people who could use some coaching” has been a common reaction. Not many say, “Man, could I use a coach!” Once, I wouldn’t have, either.
...
“Most surgery is done in your head,” Osteen [the coach] likes to say. Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow. I knew that he could drive me to make smarter decisions, but that afternoon I recognized the price: exposure.

For society, too, there are uncomfortable difficulties: we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely, and yet hold in confidence what they see. Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. Yet the allegiance of coaches is to the people they work with; their success depends on it. And the existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement. Are we ready to confront this fact when we’re in their care?

“Who’s that?” a patient asked me as she awaited anesthesia and noticed Osteen standing off to the side of the operating room, notebook in hand.

I was flummoxed for a moment. He wasn’t a student or a visiting professor. Calling him “an observer” didn’t sound quite right, either.

“He’s a colleague,” I said. “I asked him along to observe and see if he saw things I could improve.”

The patient gave me a look that was somewhere between puzzlement and alarm.

“He’s like a coach,” I finally said.

She did not seem reassured.

Every now and again, universities think it would be a good idea to send all of their profs off to take coursework in teaching. A former classmate of mine had to complete such a degree when he took a job teaching economics at Monash University several years ago; Canterbury talks about similar requirements. I would be very surprised if there were any positive return on the time investment.

But few of us seek out colleagues for constructive criticism. Exposure's not comfortable. Perhaps universities keen on improving teaching quality would do better in identifying standout teachers to assist as coaches rather than mandating completion of tertiary teaching degrees.

HT: @Isegoria

Peer review and error rates

Inside Higher Ed points to a 30-year old study I'd not seen:

Although peer review is often portrayed as an institution that arose with the scientific method, Fitzpatrick suggests the roots of peer review were “more related to censorship than to quality control,” serving mainly to concentrate academic authority in the hands of journal editors and, later, their expert reviewers.
While this system created an effective supply-side filter, it was also susceptible to bias, as Douglas Peters and Stephen Ceci demonstrated in a 1982 experiment. Peters, of the University of North Dakota, and Ceci, of Cornell University, took already-published articles in 12 esteemed psychology journals and resubmitted them, changing only the authors’ names and affiliations and the phrasing of the opening paragraphs. Three of the 12 articles were caught by journal editors as duplicates. Of the nine that were not, one was published. The other eight were rejected, most on methodological grounds.

You'd think that's the kind of study that wouldn't now work - it would be too easy for a referee to catch plagiarism on a quick Googling. But maybe not. Nevertheless, I'd expect human ethics committees to object to the deceit involved on the part of the researchers, to deem the deceit and the cost imposed on external reviewers to be too perilous, and to kill the study; replication nowadays seems unlikely.

I wonder if the result is that surprising. Filters are set such that it's better to reject a whole lot of good articles rather than to let an unsound one through; if the signal is noisy, we'd expect that few articles would make it through twice. The experiment shows that articles by prestigious folks get rejected when re-submitted with a less prestigious affiliation, but without a control group of articles originally written by folks from less prestigious place, we can't tell whether the result is just what we'd expect from running things through the filter twice or if it demonstrates bias favouring those affiliated with prestigious institutions.

The rest of the Inside Higher Ed piece features interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick on her recent book advocating changes in the academic publishing model; it's worth reading.

Cutbacks

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

When the recession hit in 2009 and colleges and universities saw many sources of funds contract, they did reasonably well making cuts to services that did not touch the academic core of the university, according to the latest annual report by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.

While revenues declined in most sectors of higher education in the 2009 fiscal year, the report found, most institutions managed to increase what they spent on instruction by making reductions in other areas and not imposing across-the-board cuts -- a departure from how colleges and universities have usually handled economic difficulty in the past.

The Delta Project’s report, now in its third year, attempts to provide a broad picture of the revenue that colleges take in and how they spend it. In addition to finding that colleges and universities protected the academic core, this year's report found that community colleges were the hardest-hit during the first year of the recession; that tuition increases at public universities were not enough to cover decreases in state funding; and that all types of institutions did a better job graduating more students and getting them to graduation with fewer extra course hours. In aggregate, the report paints a picture of colleges and universities approaching budget cuts in a fundamentally different way than they did in previous recessions.

Freypeats

It just keeps getting worse for Bruno Frey.

I can't help but wonder though how many folks would survive similar examination. As we strive towards the "least publishable unit" as the optimum rather than articles that exhaust a particular line of investigation, there's always going to be substantial overlap in material across journal articles. The literature review and contextualization will be similar. Maybe the next iteration of the paper has a specification or two that weren't included in the first published version. But the main thrust of the results are similar.

Eventually, somebody will run EconLit, JSTOR and SSRN through TurnItIn. And the results won't be good.

Regressive free tuition

Stephen Gordon finds Canadian tuition subsidies are largely a transfer to the upper middle class.

The tuition subsidy is distributed equally across the student population. But the student population is not representative of the population as a whole; upper income groups are over-represented. If we apply Bayes' Rule (is there anything it can't do?) to the information in this graph, we can calculate the percentage of the university student population that comes from each income quartile:
Lowest:    17% 
Second:   22% 
Third:      25.5% 
Highest:   35.5%
So 61% of the tuition subsidy goes to students from the top half of the income distribution, and the proportion of the budget that goes to the top quartile is more than twice as large as the share that goes to the lowest quartile.

Once you account for that higher income people pay more in taxes (and so may expect more in benefits), it doesn't look quite as regressive. But it's hardly a great equalizer. If you care about university access for poor people, means-tested scholarships are a better way of targeting things than uniformly low tuition rates. Or, means-tested loans. Or, even better, fixing the high schools attended by lower decile students so that they want to continue with post-secondary education when they have the academic ability to do so.

I'm curious how closely NZ data tracks Canadian data here; it would be kinda fun to figure out just how regressive the Greens' proposal to provide generalized transfers to university students would wind up being.

Immigrants

The Head of Maori Studies at Auckland, Professor Margaret Mutu, called this weekend for restrictions on immigration of people of European ancestry:

A Maori academic says immigration by whites should be restricted because they pose a threat to race relations due to their "white supremacist" attitudes. The controversial comments come in response to a Department of Labour report, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Star-Times, which found Maori are more likely to express anti-immigration sentiment than Pakeha or any other ethnic group. Margaret Mutu, head of Auckland University's department of Maori studies, agreed with the findings and called on the government to restrict the number of white migrants arriving from countries such as South Africa, England and the United States as they brought attitudes destructive to Maori. "They do bring with them, as much as they deny it, an attitude of white supremacy, and that is fostered by the country," she said.

The survey results are no particular surprise, at least as far as ethnic differences go:

Maori were the least likely to consider New Zealand a welcoming place and the most likely to want less migration. Maori were the most likely to disagree with positive statements about immigration and most likely to agree with negative statements. These results are backed up by other studies which have reported less positive attitudes towards migrants and immigration by Maori. The negative statement that Maori are most likely to agree with is Migrants take jobs away from other New Zealanders with almost half of Maori (45 percent) agreeing with this. This is higher than those agreeing with the statements around immigration being a threat to New Zealand’s culture, suggesting that the reasons for the more negative views of Maori have an economic basis. This is likely to be because migrants are seen as a threat in the job market, particularly during a recession.  

The ethnic differences correspond with what I've found in the New Zealand Election Survey. Here are some results from the 2008 NZES. Note that the researchers oversampled Maori and youth; results presented here haven't corrected for the oversampling. But as we're mostly interested in whether immigration sentiment has an ethnic correlate, the oversampling ought only increase the precision of the estimate unless the oversample draws disproportionately from segments more heavily anti-immigrant.

A few cross-tabs results.

The NZES asks whether New Zealand ought to increase or decrease the number of immigrants (zimmig). Among those providing a response (excluding the roughly 5% of both groups that say "don't know"), the median person not claiming New Zealand Maori background says immigration levels ought to remain the same; the median respondent claiming New Zealand Maori background says immigration ought to be reduced "A little". But look at the difference in the cross tabs here:

Increase or decrease immigrants	Not Maori	Maori
Increase a lot	4%	2%
Increase a little	13%	5%
Same	36%	23%
Reduce a little	26%	25%
Reduce a lot	20%	45%

The results really don't change much if you use different ethnicity measures.

On the whole, there's not much support for increasing immigration, which is pretty disappointing. Maybe this is driven by the 2008 survey's having been conducted at the time of the global financial crisis. But, the figures from the 2005 survey, at the height of an economic boom with a massively overheated labour market, aren't a lot different. Among non-Maori, support for reduced immigration drops from a total of 46% (2008) to 40% (2005). But 48% of Maori respondents in that 2005 survey replied "Reduce a lot", with another 25% saying "Reduce a little". So, during a boom time, Maori opposition to immigration was higher than it is now. A couple quick regressions on the 2008 data suggest the ethnic divide remains very strong after controlling for ideology, urban/rural status, income, education, age, employment status, owning your own home, household finances as compared to a year ago, having children, and a few other things. 

So that there's a rather strong ethnic divide on immigration desirability seems reasonably robust.

Now, the 2008 survey doesn't ask the question, but the 2005 survey does: "Is immigration good for the economy?" The Department of Labour survey suggests concern about economic effects of immigration as driving ethnic differences. The raw data suggests the same in the NZES (2005). Among those not claiming Maori descent, over 60% agreed or strongly agreed that immigration is good for the economy. Among those claiming Maori descent, only 35% did. But if we look at correlates of policy views in the 2005 dataset, and include a whole whack of control variables I'm not going to bother mentioning (huge kitchen sink), the coefficient on Maori ethnicity is only cut by roughly twenty percent if you control for views on whether immigration helps or hurts the economy. So Maori anti-immigrant sentiment isn't just driven by differences in views of how the economy works.

And so it's odd then to see calls for Margaret Mutu's resignation. 

"As a Maori, I welcome white immigrants," [Ngapuhi leader David] Rankin said. "They are the ones most likely to bring employment opportunities for our communities, and we don't see the sort of racism Margaret refers to."

Rankin said Mutu has no place working at a university.

"I think Auckland University are scared of her," he said. "And so they lack the courage to deal with her, but I think after this episode, they will be having another look at her position and the harm she is bringing to Auckland University."

Rankin said Mutu was a "champagne radical" who turned up to a foreshore and seabed hikoi in her "Armani suit".

"What she doesn't realise is she's actually pulling Maoridom apart - she's an absolute trouble maker."

Rankin said he didn't think Mutu believed a word she said and would probably "hide behind" a section in the Education Act that affords her the right to speak as the "critical consciousness of society".  

Mutu's controversial comments came in response to a Department of Labour report which found Maori are more likely to express anti-immigration sentiment than Pakeha or any other ethnic group.

I'm totally with Rankin on the desirability of immigration. But Mutu's views are hardly idiosyncratic among Maori, at least as far as the NZES data suggests. 

And I get worried when employment protection accorded academics when acting in a critic and conscience role is called "hiding behind" a section of the Education Act. Especially since much of what appears on this blog enjoys that status.

The high cost of cheap parking

Seamus loves citing the old line by former University of California Supremo Clark Kerr:

"The three purposes of the University? To provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty."

Apparently, Dalhousie has failed on one of these three margins.

For professor Dan Middlemiss, the thought of another year navigating the parking lots of Dalhousie University was simply too much to bear.

On Monday, after an hour of waiting in line for a parking pass on the Halifax campus, the expert on Canadian defence policy stormed up to university administrators and handed in his resignation.

“I went straight upstairs, I said, ‘I’m not kidding this time, I don’t have to put up with this. I’m resigning,’” he told a CBC camera crew after flagging it down.

Prof. Middlemiss had been one of hundreds of professors, students and staff lined up on the campus Monday afternoon in a bid to snatch up an annual parking permit from a dwindling supply.

Normally, it’s a calm and orderly affair, but this year, amid news that the university was trimming parking privileges, Dalhousie drivers staged a run on the university’s security office, which issues the $260 permits.

...
Dalhousie only has 2,000 parking spaces for roughly 20,000 students and staff. In past years, administrators have sold upwards of 3,300 parking permits, earning them the derisive nickname of “hunting passes.” According to Prof. Middlemiss, in order to teach a 2:30 p.m. class he needed to have his car in the lot before 7 a.m. Otherwise, he would be stuck circling the block for a metered space — or hiking in from a distant residential street.

“I’m getting old to the point where I’d like my beauty sleep,” he said.

Simply letting the market clear by prices rather than queuing would solve a lot of problems. Equilibrium prices could be high though:

Drivers can get around the musical chairs of Dalhousie parking by paying $1,200 to $1,400 for a reserved space in a parkade, but even then, each year administrators are forced to turn away more than two-thirds of the applicants.

If all the parking spots cleared in prices, there's no way prices would be as high as in the parkade.  I don't quite understand why they don't build another parking garage that would charge high daily prices.

We used to have problems finding parking at Canterbury; it doesn't look likely to re-emerge as a problem here anytime soon.

Fortunately, New Zealand universities have never been called on to provide sports for the alumni. Or, perhaps unfortunately; having a US-style alumni network which could be drawn upon for support in times of earthquake would be ridiculously helpful. University sports then could be serving as a very expensive insurance policy.

I have no clue to what extent we're successful in ensuring sex for the students; we kinda leave them to their own devices on that one and hope for the best.

Incentives Matter: Conference edition

New Zealand academics are fast approaching the PBRF deadline for quality-assured research outputs to be counted and, perhaps, weighed. Since counting is easier than weighing, and since "quality-assured" doesn't have to be that hard, there's a demand for conferences. Especially ones with published conference proceedings.

And so this turned up in my inbox. Academics get lots of invitations to conferences. This one, I expected to be for a conference held in India or Malaysia. But it's being held in Auckland. It certainly looks high quality. Check it out.

I won't copy most of the conference details, but the key bit for Kiwi academics needing published QA conference proceedings before end-December is that the refereed conference proceedings will be published before the mid-December conference date. I also love how all of the accepted papers will subsequently be published in one of a set of refereed journals within six months of the conference "subject to compliance to the review report, editorial comments and journal's guidelines." Multiple best paper awards will also be presented. And committees that do better at weighing than counting will take note.

Incentives matter. Academics who insist otherwise when it comes to policy sure seem to respond to them when it comes to PBRF.

Here's my absolute favourite bit from the call for papers:

E.  Venue, Conference Lunch And Dinner  Our conference venue is at Rendezvous Hotel in Auckland, New Zealand. You will have several feedings such as arrival, morning and after-noon break-foods , buffet lunch and conference dinner . We  welcome you to this international gatherings of  academics and researchers from many countries of the world. 

The attendees will enjoy several feedings in addition to getting a QA publication in conference proceedings.

Has academia in New Zealand really come to this?

Beauty in Economics

Dan Hamermesh writes:

While we don’t have studies of economists’ beauty and their salaries, we do know something about the impact of their looks on non-monetary outcomes. In a profession that pays well, but that does not offer immensely higher monetary rewards to the top people, the distinctions offered by various honors become important. One such measure of distinction is the esteem in which they are held by their colleagues.

In one study I examined how success in competitive elections to office in the American Economic Association, the leading professional organization in the field, is affected by the economists’ looks. Each voter (member of the association) receives pictures of the candidates along with the ballot so that the candidates’ looks confront you when you cast your vote.

Clearly, in such elections someone will win. So the relevant consideration is not the looks of the candidates alone, but instead how their looks compare to those of other candidates. The results show that moving from the 84th to the 16th percentile of looks lowers a candidate’s chance of winning the election — of obtaining this honor — from 56 percent to 44 percent. This effect adjusts for measures of the candidates’ scholarly productivity, their gender, and other characteristics. It suggests that even the choices of economists, many of whom like to think that they and their fellows are among the most rational people in the world, are affected by looks.

Good thing I'm not planning on running for any kind of office....

Previously...

On the paucity of public intellectuals

KiwiPolitico a few months back tried to put together a list of the "coming generation" of left and right public intellectuals in New Zealand. The lists are embarrassingly thin, with minimum standards for inclusion very low by international standards.

A year ago, I'd have said Denis Dutton (for the right) and Jim Flynn (for the left) were the only picks worth noting in New Zealand. Both have built a substantial body of scholarly (not necessarily academic) work and have built on it to engage the debate in public forums. That's the general minimal condition for a serious public intellectual. Internationally, you'd think of, on the right, Chris Hitchens, Theodore Dalrymple, Greg Mankiw, Tyler Cowen. In the younger set, Will Wilkinson's excellent. There's nobody in New Zealand who hits that kind of bar on either the left or the right.

Why?

First, thin markets. The very best small number of people in a big country will be better than the very best small number of people in a small country. That's why India's always surprised (or at least the lunchroom tells me) that New Zealand manages sometimes to field a non-embarrassing cricket team despite having a population roughly equivalent to a small town in India. But most kids here grow up holding a cricket bat and despising eggheads.

Second, academia's usually the first place to look for public intellectuals. You've a set of folks who are paid to spend all their time thinking; it would be surprising if a few of them didn't build on that to enter debate. And a few have. But that kind of work gets low to negative weight by University higher-ups: for promotion (Dutton did not make Professor until his 60s), for research evaluation, for salary negotiation. I'm going to put up the blog for the 2012 PBRF research evaluation. But if I had redirected my efforts from the blog to publishing 3-4 really crappy articles in really crappy journals that nobody but the referees would have read [Offsetting's well north of 200k visits and 300k page views, adding RSS would at least double that], I expect that the PBRF panel and my employer would have been happier with me. One of the folks over on the admin side who tries to encourage more adoption of web technologies says other academics he's encouraged to try blogging have always replied "Does it count?". This blog perhaps survives through slack in the principal-agent relationship, though is well supported within the Department.

Third, small markets mean no real think tank environment - the other typical sponsors of that kind of work. Small markets mean few patrons, and it's tough to get public intellectuals without patronage. Roger at the NZBR works hard to make sure that the pro-market folks at least know who each other are, but they're not really resourced for patronage.

So who gets picked in the Kiwipolitico comments? A few newspaper columnists the depth of whose work is limited by the thinness of the NZ market for serious essays, some bloggers, and an academic or two. Lots of folks on the lists are disseminators rather than generators of ideas; lots of others who mostly run play-by-play on local politics. Both are important roles, but it's not really what we expect from public intellectuals.