THE VALUE OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION. In this interesting article on income distribution by the author of a very important blog, I was surprised to learn that “In the United States, the average earnings premium received by those with four-year college degrees over those with no college has gone from 30 percent to 90 percent over the past three decades, as the economy’s skill requirements have outstripped the educational system’s ability to meet them.” And in those thirty years there has been a remarkable increase in the number of college graduates. (reference from realclearpolitics).
Archive for January, 2007
THE VALUE OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION.
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007WHEN BEING TALL IS A POLITICAL DISADVANTAGE.
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007WHEN BEING TALL IS A POLITICAL DISADVANTAGE. The Wall Street Journal had an article yesterday (January 30) by Alan Cullison about possible successors to Putin if he retires. In the article, he mentions Dmitry Medvedev as a candidate, but says, “Detractors say that, at 41 years old, Mr. Medvedev is handicapped by a lack of political experience and gravitas—at 5-feet 5-inches tall he is one of the few top Russian officials shorter than Mr. Putin.” I was of course struck by the assumption that being short equates to lacking gravitas. But I was reminded of some stories told by R. Barry Farrell to his class in Russian politics over fifty (!) years ago. Farrell said that Stalin was quite short and that every one of his lieutenants was shorter than he was. Each also had a major disqualification (Mikoyan was Armenian, Khrushchev played the part of a buffoon….). Farrell said that he attended a diplomatic event in Russia shortly after Stalin died and saw all the short members of the collective leadership arriving in their small Russian cars. Then he saw Marshal Zhukov, a tall man, arriving separately in an army jeep. He correctly predicted that Zhukov would be one of the first to be eliminated in the struggle for succession. Perhaps being shorter than Putin is not a disadvantage in vying to be his successor.
BEN FRANKLIN, LIBRARIES, AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007Currently I’m reading a book my father gave me last Christmas, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN by Edmund S. Morgan. It’s a pretty comprehensive biography that moves at an appropriately brisk pace, which is good because there is so much ground to cover. Something that caught my attention was the section about the lending library he founded, the first one this side of the Atlantic. This library, in turn, promoted the growth of many other libraries of its kind. Franklin proudly wrote the following:
“These Libraries have improv’d the general conversation of the Americans, made the common Tradesmen and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges.”
Morgan adds, “Libraries helped to make Philadelphians and Americans what they became.” Personally, I think that books have played an enormous part in forming the person I am today. The first and mightiest influence is that of my parents, but books come in a strong second.
MUSCLE MEMORY AND HOT HANDS FOR BASKETBALL PLAYERS.
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007MUSCLE MEMORY AND HOT HANDS FOR BASKETBALL PLAYERS. I was really pleased to find the neuroscience blog of Jonah Lehrer. I looked at the archives. This is a consistently interesting blog. One of the posts described the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky that concluded that basketball players do not have hot shooting streaks. It makes sense that people would make the mistake of thinking they do because it has been shown that people generally underestimate the extent to which a series of random tosses of a fair coin will generate long strings of heads or tails. I was amused that I found the post just before Jamal Crawford of the Knicks had an evening when he missed his first four shots and then hit 16 in a row. I’m inclined to believe that Crawford’s success was a random event. I don’t believe in hot streaks, but I do have doubts about a related proposition. It seems to me that a basketball player has a stroke and that his stroke can be corrected (or “grooved”). Basketball players do warm up by practicing shooting and Michael Jordan was known for taking a lot of practice shots before a game. If muscle memory is important in shooting, the best test would be of free throw shooting. If the first shot was a little long, the player can make a minor correction on the second. I did do calculations for the free throw shooting of the Boston Celtic players given in the Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky paper. Eight of the nine players did about five or six percent better on the second shot of two (Kevin McHale was the exception). Scanty evidence at best.
HOLLYWOOD STARS AND THE THEATER.
Monday, January 29th, 2007HOLLYWOOD STARS AND THE THEATER. I revere Alan Ayckbourn, but I disagree strongly with this article in which Ayckbourn claims that Hollywood and television actors who are poor theater actors are destroying British theater. Anything to build an audience I say. I think Ethan Hawke is a better movie actor than a stage actor, but he gets the job done as a stage actor. He helped build audiences for Kevin Kline’s HENRY V and I believe that he has been very helpful in getting Stoppard’s COAST OF UTOPIA mounted in New York. I wish that there were more actors who moved between stage and Hollywood.
DO BASEBALL PLAYERS HAVE HOT STREAKS?
Monday, January 29th, 2007DO BASEBALL PLAYERS HAVE HOT STREAKS? I had always refused to pay attention to the junk statistics on TV sports shows about players’ performances in the previous short run of games. “Small samples,” I sniffed. But last summer two bits of new information made me wonder. First, I was told that Tom Seaver always wanted to know before a game which opposing hitters were on hot streaks. Second, a major league hitter was quoted as envying one of the great hitters because he was able to keep the same swing all year long rather than “finding it and losing it all year like the rest of us.” Seaver evidently believed that hitters have hot streaks and the hitter suggested a reason for this: a swing results from a complicated series of muscular movements and sometimes hitters get it right and get their muscle memory to repeat that swing. I am more open-minded now about whether hot streaks for hitters exist. I just don’t see how you can test whether they do.
DIAMOND AND OTHER MARKETS.
Monday, January 29th, 2007This article describes a kind of market that has been very important in history. The kind of diamond market it describes is one of over two dozen diamond bourses scattered over the world. In this kind of market, enforcement of contracts is easier because most of the participants are both buyers and sellers, everybody knows everybody else, reputation is important and there is arbitration available as a backup.
COLORS.
Sunday, January 28th, 2007COLORS. This article begins with the fact that Welsh is one of a group of languages which does not distinguish between blue and green (called “grue” languages because they conflate blue and green). Is color perception a result of nature or nurture? The article says that current research suggests that it is both nature and nurture. There was a good article by Eric Konigsberg in the New Yorker of January 22, 2007 on the color industry and how color fashions are determined. Unfortunately, I didn’t link it immediately and the New Yorker search engine is the most bizarre search feature I have ever encountered so I can’t provide a link. It points out that the eighties were the height of the gray period while Wasabi green (a “light, yellow-based green”) has been the most popular color of the last five years. Three characteristics of colors are “undertone”, which is a measure of how much yellow or blue it has in it; chroma, which measures the brightness of a color; and value, which measures how light or dark a color is. There are regional patterns in color preferences. An example is Birmingham, Alabama, where “even the sided houses tend to be brown or brick red.” Reading the article, I wonder if preferences in Birmingham were shaped by the dark red, iron-rich soil. There are lots of other good things in the article if you can find it.
WHY DO ROMAN MATRONS BEHAVE SO BADLY? I BLAME SUETONIUS.
Saturday, January 27th, 2007WHY DO ROMAN MATRONS BEHAVE SO BADLY? I BLAME SUETONIUS. Why is it the fall of the Roman republic that draws so much interest today? Because it resonates with our historical circumstances? I think it’s simply such a good story. Caesar is assassinated, not by a hired killer, but by public figures. The only other event I can think of with such a good story line is the murder of Rasputin. I give the same reason for the rascally Roman matrons on ROME. In I, CLAUDIUS Livia showed how deliciously wicked a wicked Roman matron could be. I was taught that Robert Graves took most of I, CLAUDIUS from Suetonius and that Suetonius, as secretary to a Roman emperor (Hadrian), printed all the gossip from the imperial files. It’s as if a good contemporary tabloid got hold of raw FBI files, whereas most Roman history reads as if the Washington Post or the New York Times was reporting on Hollywood.
PROUST AND NEUROSCIENCE BY AN EXPERT.
Friday, January 26th, 2007PROUST AND NEUROSCIENCE BY AN EXPERT. I posted earlier on Proust and Happiness Psychology. This was a layman’s reaction to reading STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS by Daniel Gilbert. In reading about Milton Friedman just now I came across the fact that Jonah Lehrer will be publishing a book entitled PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST later this year. Jonah Lehrer has a blog called The Frontal Cortex which discusses Proust and neuroscience. He says, “I actually argue that Proust anticipated some fundamental discoveries in modern neuroscience. But he wasn’t the only artist with prophetic powers. I also argue that Walt Whitman, George Eliot, August Escoffier, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf (basically a Who’s Who of modernism) also anticipated the shiny new facts of neuroscience.” You can imagine how much I am looking forward to this book.
