Keeping up with the FITs, 5/20
Cowen and Gross on scouting talent; Cowen on interview questions; Scott Sumner vs. Brad DeLong; C. Bradley Thompson on the educational deep state; Martin Gurri appears on video
Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross write,
the scouting model tends to be effective when talent search is about starting with a very large pool of candidates and needing to narrow it down to a much smaller number of plausible competitors. Furthermore, scouting does best when there is no simple way to measure talent from a distance.
. . .Scouting is also becoming more important as the options for self-education are rising. With more people trying their hand at various avocations than ever before, that places more and more burden on talent search. We need to be more open to the accomplishments of self-taught individuals without traditional training, and that holds all the more true for the tech world, where many of the most important founders have eschewed the institutions of traditional education.
To me, this sounds like a point in favor of the Network-Based University idea.
In an interview, Tyler says,
a question he likes to ask during interviews: “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?”
“It’s not a question anyone is prepared for,” he said. “It’s very hard to fake, because you could ask the person to talk about those open tabs. But it tells you how they spend their time. What do they read? What are they engaged with? Who are they communicating with? And from that, you get some sense of their honest signals.”
My tabs now are Feedly, this page that I am editing, his interview, my Gmail, Andrew Sullivan’s latest essay which I just wrote a post about, a Google search for my macro memoir which I was just referring to in another post I just wrote, a link to one of my old blog posts about back-sleeping for infants which is another topic I’m writing about, and the macro memoir.
That is not necessarily a representative set of tabs for me all the time, but it does illustrate how I work on my substack.
I read Talent the other day, and I wrote a review recommending it. Probably to appear in three weeks.
Did Scott Sumner and Brad DeLong visit the same bond market? Sumner writes,
With the recent decline, 5-year TIPS spreads are about the same as 6 months ago, albeit still higher than a year ago. But the situation is much worse than it looks. . . it is a big problem under average inflation targeting where past inflation rates matter. This is why the inflation problem is getting steadily worse, even as inflation forecasts stay around 3%.
As of Friday, May 6, the bond market expected US consumer price inflation to average 2.5% between five and ten years from now. That is the rate of inflation needed to equalize returns on inflation-indexed and non-indexed US Treasury securities. And given that CPI inflation has been running higher than the rate associated with the implicit price deflator for personal consumption expenditures, I count that 2.5% five-year, five-year-forward rate as hitting the US Federal Reserve’s 2% price-deflator inflation target.
Without question, the principal transmission belt delivering Critical Race Theory directly into the bloodstream of America’s K-12 schools is through America’s teacher-training institutions. For almost thirty years now, CRT has dominated the pedagogic philosophy of the nation’s “ed” schools. As one “ed” school professor put it to me recently, “America’s teacher-training institutions are CRT indoctrination factories.”
. . .Yet another avenue used to deliver CRT to America’s K-12 schools is through the Education Establishment’s network of Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) consultants, who are pocketing a fortune in taxpayer dollars to smuggle CRT into the schools in order to promote the socialist “equity” agenda. These DEI consultants (usually “ed” school professors) are almost always hired by local school boards, who, in consultation with school administrators, are driving the CRT agenda in America’s government schools.
If your local school district has more than 10,000 students, I’ll bet they have hired an “anti-racist” (meaning CRT) consultant at some point in the past 24 months.
Martin Gurri explains his “Revolt of the Public” thesis, in a video by John Papola. About 44 minutes in, Martin describes the elites as, rather than wanting to adapt to the new century, wishing they could “reconfigure the public” to go back to the 20th century. Recommended.
"Without question, the principal transmission belt delivering Critical Race Theory directly into the bloodstream of America’s K-12 schools is through America’s teacher-training institutions."
How come? Well, the people in the education business think that school is the primary cause of upward mobility in the United States. Indeed, that it is disproportionately responsible for what is good in America; see, e.g., the bumper sticker, "If you can read this, thank a teacher." For at least 60 years, people in the business have been very, very concerned about "the gap"--the fact that white students (on average) do considerably better than black students. Ed schools have come up with lots of ways to attempt to close the gap but nothing has worked.
It is hard to exaggerate how frustrating this is. Why is nothing working? Why can't we do what we know we should be able to do? Explanations are required. The only constraint is that they must not "blame the victim". But that leaves only one possibility: It's still white people's fault. Even if there is no explicit or conscious racism, there is such an overpowering system of white privilege that schools can't do what they should be able to do, which is to close the gap. If it weren't for white privilege, they would.
As long as "blaming the victim" explanations are forbidden, something like CRT is the only possibility.
I think you do better to just look at the futures markets in the ordinary bonds, or just the bond prices themselves today. As I have written before, a recession will end this bout of inflation immediately, and may already be doing so.