Links to Consider, 7/23
a review of a book on schooling; Peter Arcidiacono on affirmative action; Tove K on climate sin; Joseph Politano on rent inflation
One of Scott Alexander’s readers has a long review of a book by Kieran Egan. Egan re-imagines K-12 schooling. The reviewer writes,
I think Egan is Joseph Henrich for education.
Given what I think of Henrich, that is a strong endorsement.
Egan argues that the problem of early schooling is that it’s trivial — and it’s trivial because the dominant theories of educational psychology see children as lesser versions of adults. What else would we teach them, except dumbed-down versions of what adults learn? But children have certain cognitive strengths that schools aren’t making systematic use of. If we rebuild elementary schools on those strengths, we could turn schooling upside down. We could stop seeing the curriculum as a bag of information to impart, and start seeing it as a set of great stories to tell — and invite kids into. Kids could experience (both intellectually and emotionally) the great struggles of humanity and see that they can join in them. Students could experience the story of education as the beginning of a very real adventure.
Also,
Egan argues that schools don’t work because they ignore the tools that have worked for hundreds (and thousands) of years — things like humor, emotion, stories, metaphors, extremes, gossip, idealism, general schemes, finding one’s place in the world, and the lure of certainty.
Yascha Mounk talks with Peter Arcidiacono, who says.
Our society has fundamentally failed African Americans, to the point where 1% of African Americans get above a 1390 on the SAT, while that figure is 8% among whites and 25% among Asian Americans.
…Over 50% of African American men who started in STEM and economics switched out, while 8% of white men switched out. … preparation matters, and they're coming in with much worse preparation, both because of affirmative action and because of what's happened prior to college.
And yet we are told that colleges will work around the ban on affirmative action. If so, it means that colleges will find other ways to admit ill-prepared African-American students, to their own detriment.
the carbon dioxide problem fits very well with Western religious traditions. It actually has quite a few similarities to the Christian traditions that are currently being abandoned by an increasing number of people:
*The We Sinners component. Christianity has it, and Christianity made the Western world unusually successful. Talking about general sinfulness probably has a sobering effect that makes people more community oriented. People in formerly Christian societies seem ready to adopt the concept.
*The notion that everyone, even the smallest child, can make contributions to salvation.
…Compare that to past environmental problems, like the ozone layer depletion, lead poisoning or the acidification of rain. They didn't have those wide social implications. They were all problems with numerous victims, but with few perpetrators.
the New Tenant Repeat Rent (NTRR) Index…tends to lead the official CPI rent components by one year—and right now, it is saying we should expect significant disinflation over the next three quarters.
Inflation is hard to measure. Scott Sumner likes to use measures of changes in nominal wages, which have risen about 4 or 5 percent over the past year. I am also inclined to look at commodity prices, particularly for energy, metals, and minerals, which have fallen over the past year.
Anecdotally, I believe that the biggest price increases are related to vacations—vacation rentals, air fares, restaurants, and so on. I don’t know what that signifies for the economy as a whole, but it would seem more positive than negative.
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Whenever I hear someone's new idea on teaching kids, it's too bad we don't have universal for-profit, private K-12 schools. If we did, they could put their money where their mouth is.
I'll take a different tack on the idea that the American system has failed blacks. The idea that we can change their test scores, as if test scores matter all that much, does not make any sense because of their genetics. It is like complaining that a hybrid chicken breed that is reasonably good at producing eggs and meat in a hot, malarial climate is not specialized in egg production in a cold weather climate. The hybrid breed is not a bad chicken, but it is a bad chicken if you are trying to force it to be something that it isn't.
The way the US system is set up is to make life very unrewarding for people who are low socioeconomic status (SES). The attitude of our political system is that the low SES belong on welfare, in prison, earning money in illegal jobs, or all of the above, and that we should outlaw all low SES production so as to send it to overseas territories that the US has trade relationships with. The problem of populations that tend towards low SES is addressed rhetorically by the notion that the "gap must be closed" and practically by the welfare office, the abortionist, and the prison warden. This was highlighted for me recently when I drove through Navajo country, where Planned Parenthood has absolutely plastered the highway with abortion advertisements. The progressive approach to the Navajo is essentially to palliate the ones who are alive and to kill as many of them as they can while they are still in the womb. Indeed it reflects recent progressive despair on the possibility of "closing the gap," which is again, akin to trying to get the milk production of a Holstein cow from an Angus cow.
It's very challenging to solve these problems with the way that our system is set up. Welfare has to be less generous, and we need to legalize low SES jobs and/or to export the population that is low SES to countries or special economic zones where it is legal. The way that our political system is set up, a job making socks in Indonesia for export to the US is copacetic, but if you create that job in the US with American citizens, it is triple plus mega bad human rights abuse sccccrreeeeech.