Education and Earnings

In the US, the earnings premium received by those with four year college degrees over those with no college degree has gone from 30% to over 90% over the past three decades suggesting that the economy’s skill requirements have outstripped the educational systems’ ability to meet them. Because the required skills acquired through formal education have become relatively scarcer, the education premium has risen, underpinning a more uneven more uneven distribution of income and wealth.

Grading Places: What Do the Business Climate Rankings Really Tell Us Peter Fisher Economic Policy Institute - Oregon Center for Public Policy

Grading Places: What Do the Business Climate Rankings Really Tell Us: "With a ranking of 1st being “best” and 50th “worst,” Oregon ranks 39th on the Small Business Survival Index, 10th on the State Business Tax Climate Index, 15th on the Competitiveness Index, 42nd on CATO’s Fiscal Policy Report Card, and 29th on the Economic Freedom Index."

Rankings seem erather arbitrary and so are given to ideologic interpretations. Perhaps a deeper analysis would help produce better analysis; rather than "climate" as the analogous concept we could more properly use "ecology" and "environment."

Economic activity is as much biologic activity as is are any other activities of living systems. As such economic agents choose and respond to their environments just as biologic organisms do.

What government does is to present itself as part of the environment to which economic activity must adapt. The economic ecology doesn't require government to be part of it but if it is, government may increase harm and danger in the economic ecology. Government can create toxic or restrictive environments by outlawing certain activities such as hiring undocumented workers, engaging in drug trade, using certain drugs, violating zoning laws, conducting business without licensing, or violating prohibitions. Like parasites, government can feed off the economic agents by drawing off their economic energy by taxing them. Government raze a diverse ecology to create economic mono-cultures by requiring exclusive government services in some sectors such as public schools or postal services or health care. Government can restrict the economic enviroinment or the ecoomic agents by tariffs or restrictions on free trade. Government can favor some species of economic agents by giving them special protection through licensing, rent seeking endowments, or outright economic aliament with tax breaks or subsidies.

From the biological point of view, government usually is harmful and can at best be limited to protecting an economic ecoogy from destructive agents such as court and police agencies to protect economic agents from force and fraud. Government cannot contribute positively to the development of the economic ecology since the source of development of the economic ecology comes from the living economic agents who are at work interacting and creating to the extent they are free to conduct their constructive activities.

When government over-controls the economic environment, no ecological succession of economies can develop. Only very simple, primitive forms of economic activity can survive as in the examples of the economic ecologies of sub-African nations. The natural activity of living systems is to construct, adapt, extend their environments, organize relationships with their environments and the other living systems that are part of their environments.

If government is not restricted, it can only interfere with living economic systems by distorting them, destroying their accumulated resources, or making their economic environments more toxic. Government cannot create or develop the economic organisms who are the living agents of construction of the economic ecology. It can only slow down or even stopo economic adaptation and evolution.

The great advance of the human good comes as the economic agents, the citizens of a nation, gradually realize government is not a source of the common good but a detractor. And it is a realization that can only unfold incrementally, step-by-step within the large time frame of history as itself a form of biological evolution operating on the plane of the development of human thought.

The Problem of Epistemology in Education: The Debate Between Direct Instruction and Constructivist Approaches

Education and instructional methods often trigger debates among opposing positions regarding how the growth of knowledge operates in students. Some positions are content oriented while others are child centered. But each of these should not be an exclusive position.

We are, after all, teaching students who are psychological subjects however conceived. On the other hand, what we are teaching, the content to be taught, comes from the academic disciplines and must be respected as to its valid forms and the facts which it embodies. Regardless of the debates, then, any notion of education must eventually not only take account and explain both of these twin aspects but integrate them into an coherent explanation of how disciplinary knowledge arises in student thought such that it matches the valid forms of the adult understanding. To ignore one or the other reduces the problem to one or the other pseudo-necessity that arises out of a centration either on learning the valid form of the disciplinary knowledge, an external factor as the essential source of academic growth, or a centration that embraces necessity of the constructive involvement of students, an internal factor. In either case, the one seems to call for ignoring the other.

As such, these opposing positions raise the problem of the respective contributions of external factors—such as verbal and social factors, experiences with physical objects, direct teaching effects, textbook presentations, etc—and the subjective processes of the students in the formation of knowledge within students—their construction of misconceptions and misperceptions, their attempts to solve problems and formulate an expression of their understanding, their attempts to represent things either verbally or graphically, etc. and proper conceptions. Thus, the problem as defined in this way is one of epistemology since it involves more than the two disciplines of psychology and the curricular content.

The problem goes deeper to examine the sources of knowledge and whether the formation of knowledge is due to the external aspect or to an internal one and their relative contributions especially as the relation between the two as to their relative contributions might change with development. At one time, the child is instructed in how to perform a simple mathematical operation, and it then appears in his thinking as if a simple, learned effect. Later, the learned effect appears to be replaced by a logically valid logical-mathematical system of understanding that allows extension and generalization without new learning. The facts that were taught appear to be replaced by norms of reasoning.

Thus, this apparent change from the students’ growth by simple accommodations of learning of external information to the replacement of these simple accumulations by a valid system of understanding and reasoning that integrates and extends the thought of students strongly suggests there is more going on in the growth of knowledge than a simple additive process at work. There appears to be no simple accumulation of information since at every level there is an apparent re-organization and replacement of previous accommodations with more advanced systems of thought by the learner. Thus, neither the external nor the internal can account for the growth of knowledge. What at one time appears to be a simple act of learning at another level appears as a mental construction.

Furthermore, since the subject develops in the ability to learn, the processes by which the interaction between the student and external educational factors changes and develops in that it becomes richer and more complex. It does this enrichment not by simple addition but by transformations of both the students’ abilities to learn and the nature of the content that students see and believe they know. Since there is transformation of both the methods and the content of learning, it is no longer a matter of a simple linear progression or of the simple replacement of earlier forms of knowledge with later ones. And to investigate and understand that developmental process requires its own precise methods and theoretic models. That investigation, is of course, the essence of developmental epistemology.

BABSONKNOWLEDGE.ORG: March 2006 Archives

Compare innovation in public schooling with innovation in other areas such as business. How much innovation by public schools is apparent in these categories?



While in business, "product innovation is certainly important, and in some ways it offers the clearest economic payoff for innovation,"does the fact that innovation not only has no economic payoff for public schools but it is more likely to be punished than rewarded have anything to do with their inability to either reform themselves or to be reformed from the outside? Is it even possible to have any significant product innovation from public schools who are all controlled in the product they must produce by by a single, mandated set of curriculum standards and testing?

Greg Mankiw's Blog: How to Write Well

Here's some of the good tips from a list on writing well passed on by Greg Mankiw's Blog: How to Write Well

• Stay focused. Remember the take-away points you want the reader to remember. If some material is irrelevant to these points, it should probably be cut.
• Keep sentences short. Short words are better than long words. Monosyllabic words are best.
• The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
• Positive statements are more persuasive than normative statements.
• Use adverbs sparingly.
• Avoid jargon. Any word you don’t read regularly in a newspaper is suspect.

And of course, the last rule: keep it simple.

Is There More to Knowledge Than Just Learning?

Even if students take in and retain the information from teaching, is there something more involved in understanding or making meaning out of the material? Is there something involving creativity or problem solving that students must be able to do either with the material or as a separate skill that goes beyond simply retaining the material? Jay Mathews in
The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills - washingtonpost.com seems to accept there is something deeper but rejects trying to teach it, at least before the basics are learned.

I am not so impressed. I have been writing cranky columns about 21st-century skills on washingtonpost.com calling the movement a pipe dream whose literature should be tossed in the trash.

Here's another typical response to the "something deeper" or different that goes beyond simple learning from a Direct Instruction advocate. Rob Kremer states,

Starting with the front page, where there's a big article on the controversy over math instruction. For years, the educrats have been trying to shove down the throats of parents and children their ridiculous theories on how kids learn math. When parents see the stupid stuff their kids are doing (group projects, math journals, spending hours on trivial problems) they go crazy. The educrats hem and haw, try to run out the clock. The persistent parents win.

Well, the article today tried to put the best face on it for the education establishment. The real story is that parents resent their kids being used as guinea pigs as the educrats try once again to pretend they have this new approach to learning (which is nothing more than the same old bullshit John Dewey 'constructivism' packaged in some other shiny box) but the parents know better.

Johnny can't multiply 9 times 5 in the fourth grade, but the educrats yammer on about 'conceptual understanding.'"

Terms such as "understanding" are much too vague and open to misuse so we should not rush to judgment. It is possible writers who decry constructivism see bad teaching rather than actual constructivism in the scientific sense.

Nice Economic Thinking by a 7th Grader

David Boaz :shares the insightful question of his daughter, Mary, in response to a speaker from Fannie Mae who recently visited Mary’s 7th-grade class at a Maryland Catholic school to discuss poverty. The speaker said, “I love my job because I make money helping people.” And Mary raised her hand and said, “What job doesn’t help people?”