Kruse Kronicle

Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

... Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he had given up his teaching role at the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital–Life–Design conference, in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.

During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than “a camera, a pen, and a napkin.” Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.

Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move had been motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digital media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,” he said.

He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said. ...

What does the inequality-immobility link mean?

Marginal Revolution: What does the inequality-immobility link mean?

... As for my take, Justin is painting himself into a corner here of his own making.  Let’s step back for a moment.  I see two big and very real problems: slow income growth for many income classes and a problem with excessively high returns to finance at the very top.  (As an aside, both of these problems contain elements of both “left-wing concerns” and “right-wing concerns,” and both problems are deeper than any particular ideology can solve and they should make virtually everyone rethink their views).

Those are the problems and we should try to fix them.

If we could fix these problems, that would mean a smaller financial sector, less moral hazard, better allocation of capital, and for most/all income classes rates of income growth comparable to the 1948-1972 period, chop it up as you wish.  Imagine that everyone’s income went up three percent a year, every year, and every generation was about twice as rich as the parents.  Whether there then would be more or less marginal “churn” in the relative income rankings is not a matter of irrelevance but having somewhat more churn should not be viewed as a major social goal per se.  It would depend on the reason for the immobility, and the real focus of our concern would be the reason (e.g., bad schools? some kind of unfairness?), and not the marginal change in the numerical churn per se.

Given that background, and those two very real problems, you can in fact create other “problems” by creating and manipulating more complicated statistics, based on the initial problems, and that can lead you to various measures of inequality and immobility.  But not all inequalities are bad, or avoidable, and the same is true for immobilities.  The valid problems, as embedded in the new complicated measures, still will boil down to the two simpler problems mentioned above.  In the meantime, toying around with misleading and less transparent aggregate measures of inequality and immobility will bring confusion as to what is really at stake.

Focus on the two very real and fairly simple (as distinct from simple to fix) problems.

Nokia ringtone during concert of classical music

Talk about being adaptive. I love it.

When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

Mental Floss: When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

... As for the “why,” though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents is rhotacism. The General American accent is rhotic and speakers pronounce the r in words such as hard. The BBC-type British accent is non-rhotic, and speakers don’t pronounce the r, leaving hard sounding more like hahd. Before and during the American Revolution, the English, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don’t know much more about said accent, though. Various claims about the accents of the Appalachian Mountains, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region and Virginia’s Tangier Island sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists. 

Talk This Way

Around the turn of the 18th 19th century, not long after the revolution, non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper and upper-middle classes. It was a signifier of class and status. This posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably. Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally “neutral” and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.

Across the pond, many former colonists also adopted and imitated Received Pronunciation to show off their status. This happened especially in the port cities that still had close trading ties with England — Boston, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. From the Southeastern coast, the RP sound spread through much of the South along with plantation culture and wealth. ...

Have you ever noticed how British and American accents get used in the movies. I always get a kick out of how the artisticratic types ... be they Roman soliders or Star Wars villians ... speak with British accents and how the heros ... Ben Hur or Luke Skywalker ... have American Midwestern accents.

 

Solo nation: American consumers stay single

FortuneCNN: Solo nation: American consumers stay single

A record number of people in the U.S. now live by themselves -- and they spend $1.9 trillion a year. Businesses are beginning to take notice.

FORTUNE -- In 1957, University of Michigan psychology professors Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard Kulka released a survey that examined American attitudes to being single. The findings were stark: 80% of those surveyed believed that people who preferred being unmarried were "sick," "immoral," or "neurotic." At a time when more than 70% of adults were married, it's not surprising that people would express a preference for wedded life. But the scorn certainly sounds jarring to contemporary ears.

Oh, how things have changed. Americans are now within mere percentage points of being a majority single nation: Only 51% of adults today are married, according to census data. And 28% of all households now consist of just one person -- the highest level in U.S. history. That second statistic may appear less dramatic than the first, but it's actually changing much faster: The percentage of Americans living by themselves has doubled since 1960.

The extraordinary rise of living alone is among the greatest social changes since the baby boom. Until recently, no culture in human history had sustained large numbers of people in places of their own. Today more than 40% of households have just one occupant in cities such as Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Denver, St. Louis, and Seattle. In Manhattan, nearly 50% of households consist of a single occupant, a number that seems impossibly high until you discover that the rate is similar in London and Paris, and even higher -- a staggering 60% -- in Stockholm. ...

Once More, With Feeling: Adam, Evolution and Evangelicals (Peter Enns)

Huffington Post: Once More, With Feeling: Adam, Evolution and Evangelicals

... Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, "What does the Bible say about that?" And then informed by "what the Bible says," they are ready to make a "biblical" judgment.

This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about "human origins." It isn't. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.

Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch -- an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about "the beginning," however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question "Where do humans come from?" They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious -- and often political -- beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.

Likewise, Israel's story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to so such a thing is simply wrongheaded.

Reading the biblical story against its ancient backdrop is hardly a news flash, and most evangelical biblical scholars easily concede the point. But for some reason this piece of information has not filtered down to where it is needed most: into the mainstream evangelical consciousness. Once it does, evangelicals will see for themselves that dragging the Adam and Eve story into the evolution discussion is as misguided as using the stories of Israel's monarchy to rank the Republican presidential nominees.

Evangelicals tend to focus on how to protect the Bible against the attacks of evolution. The real challenge before them is to reorient their expectation of what the story of Adam and Eve is actually prepared to deliver. ...

I love Enns ... even if he is a diehard Yankee fan. (Just shows that even great minds have been corupted by sin. ;-) )

A Better Tax System (Assembly Instructions Included)

New York Times: A Better Tax System (Assembly Instructions Included) Greg Mankiw

... Here are four principles of tax reform that most of those economists would endorse:

BROADEN THE BASE AND LOWER RATES The United States tax code is filled with deductions and exclusions that shrink the basis of taxation. The smaller base in turn requires higher tax rates to raise the revenue needed to fund government. The starting point of reform is to reverse this process.

This principle was endorsed both by President George W. Bush’s tax reform commission in 2005 and by President Obama’s deficit reduction commission in 2010. ...

TAX CONSUMPTION RATHER THAN INCOME Almost four centuries ago, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that taxes should be based on consumption, not income. Income measures a person’s contribution of labor and capital to society’s production of goods and services. Consumption measures the quantity of those goods and services he gets to enjoy. Hobbes reasoned that because consumption better reflects the benefits a person receives as a member of society, it is the proper basis of taxation.

Much modern economic theory confirms that conclusion. ...

TAX BADS RATHER THAN GOODS A good rule of thumb is that when you tax something, you get less of it. That means that taxes on hard work, saving and entrepreneurial risk-taking impede these fundamental drivers of economic growth. The alternative is to tax those things we would like to get less of.

Consider the tax on gasoline. Driving your car is associated with various adverse side effects, which economists call externalities. These include traffic congestion, accidents, local pollution and global climate change. If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less. ...

KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID This engineering aphorism is based on the timeless insight that complex systems are more likely to break down, often in ways the designer failed to anticipate. It applies with force to tax systems.

Indeed, unlike engineering systems, complex tax systems go awry because an army of highly paid accountants and tax lawyers is ready to take advantage of any loophole it can find. Remember when President Obama’s stimulus plan offered tax credits for electric cars? Suddenly, the sale of golf carts took off. ...

All good suggestions but their are substanial political barriers to achieving most of them ... moving from an income tax to a consumption tax in particular. It is easy to go from a consumption tax to an income tax but going the other direction is very hard. I've worked all my like paying an income tax. Now late in life when I will be earning less spending more, I will have to pay a consumption tax. It's a double whammy. Negotiating that transition in a society like ours may not be feasible but it's worth trying.

Economic Freedom & Income Equality (Robert Lawson, SMU)

An interesting piece by Robert Lawson at SMU's Cox School of Business. He argues that income inequality isn't related to economic freedom. Furthermore, he argues that income mobility is more important than income inequality, and that income mobility is declining. His two primary solutions? 1. Let rich people fail, and 2. Let poor people get rich.

Do People Become More Conservative as They Age?

Discovery News: Do People Become More Conservative as They Age?

In fact, research shows that seniors become more tolerant and more open-minded in their later years.

... "Pigeonholing older people into these rigid attitude boxes or conservative boxes is not a good idea," said Nick Dangelis, a sociologist and gerontologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

"Rather, when they were born, what experiences they had growing up, as well as political, social and economic events have a lot to do with how people behave," he said. "Our results are showing that these have profound effects." ...

And this is the central thesis of William Strauss and Neil Howe's work on generations. Their additional contribtuion (if you buy it) is that there is an oscillating nature to change. We are influenced by events in our formative years and those influences shape our agendas throughout our lives. But it is precisely our overattention to the things that shaped us that often causes us to overcorrect, setting the stage for a countermovement by the next generations. (Think of the overprotective "Norman Rockwell" parents of the 1930-1940s, to the latch-key kids of the 1970-1980s, back to the "heliocopter parents" of today.)

... Results, which are just starting to emerge, suggest that each belief follows its own complicated pattern. Seniors seem to have become more liberal about subordinate groups, for example, but more conservative about civil liberties.

Overall, what's happening in society at large as people come of age seems to matter most in determining the starting point for their core beliefs, said Karl Pillemer, a sociologist and gerontologist at Cornell University, who conducted more than 1,000 in-depth interviews with seniors for his book, "30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans." From there, people's attitudes can evolve as they age. And flexibility often trumps rigidity.

"Older people said very surprising things about being old," Pillemer said. "One of those things was that old age was a quest for adventure and a time to try new things. Many older people describe themselves as feeling freer or clearer."

Late in life, his research shows, people often become more open, more tolerant, and more appreciative of compassion. Even if they started out conservative, they may become less extreme in their conservatism.

"Many describe themselves as open to ideas or open to new ways of thinking, and they come back to a sense of much greater tolerance for different points of view," he said. "I had someone say, 'I used to think I was always right, but now that I'm 80, I'm not so sure I'm always right.'"

When it comes to change in the church, it is usually not the oldest people who are the biggest obstacles to change. It is usually the fifty-somethings, like me. We've been "paying or dues" all our lives and now it is "our turn." How dare you suggest rearranging the game just when I got here.

Many older adults no longer care about status issues. They are more comfortable with who they are and they care less about what others think. (Remember the Jenny Joseph poem "When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple.") Frequently there is more wisdom about creating a more civil society than with "big ideas" (if I may borrow from U2) of any stripe that will "fix" the world.

The New American Divide - Charles Murray

Wall Street Journal: The New American Divide

The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.

America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality. ...

... To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49—what I call prime-age adults—to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement.

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010. ...

... The only thing that can make a difference is the recognition among Americans of all classes that a problem of cultural inequality exists and that something has to be done about it. That "something" has nothing to do with new government programs or regulations. Public policy has certainly affected the culture, unfortunately, but unintended consequences have been as grimly inevitable for conservative social engineering as for liberal social engineering.

The "something" that I have in mind has to be defined in terms of individual American families acting in their own interests and the interests of their children. Doing that in Fishtown requires support from outside. There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

Changing life in the SuperZIPs requires that members of the new upper class rethink their priorities. Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.

Such priorities can be expressed in any number of familiar decisions: the neighborhood where you buy your next home, the next school that you choose for your children, what you tell them about the value and virtues of physical labor and military service, whether you become an active member of a religious congregation (and what kind you choose) and whether you become involved in the life of your community at a more meaningful level than charity events.

Everyone in the new upper class has the monetary resources to make a wide variety of decisions that determine whether they engage themselves and their children in the rest of America or whether they isolate themselves from it. The only question is which they prefer to do. ...

His new book is sure to be controversial. Businessweek had a book review.

Employee-Owned Companies Are Not a Fix for Crony Capitalism

Economist: The feeling is mutual

... Giving workers shares in a firm may have commercial benefits. Employee-owned companies are more productive and hardier in a recession, according to a 2010 study by Cass Business School. John Lewis, which also owns Waitrose, a posh grocery chain, seems to bear this out. Staff turnover is low; the shop beat many competitors on Christmas sales. Firms with similar structures concur: Arup, an engineering outfit, attributes its business range and “family feel” to being owned by its 10,000 employees.

All of which seems less likely to make the blood boil than reports of huge executive pay-offs. But there is little evidence that shared ownership makes capitalism more “responsible”, as Mr Clegg hopes. It does not prevent bad decisions: having a quarter of shares in employees’ hands did not save Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy. And the benefits for staff are questionable. It is rash to put a worker’s livelihood, savings and pension in one basket case; many employees lost everything when Enron, an energy-trading company, collapsed in 2001.

Companies that are wholly-owned by their staff may face barriers to growth. Many firms need a flexible capital base to expand—one reason the partnership model in banking declined. Employee mobility promotes innovation. At base, it is unrealistic to expect many bastions of capitalism to turn their shares over to their workforce, reckons Ian Brinkley of the Work Foundation, a think-tank. It is, he says, hard to imagine someone like Sir Fred Goodwin, the acquisitive former Royal Bank of Scotland boss who oversaw its demise, “being reined in by some workers’ committee.”

Bogeyman Economics

National Affairs: Bogeyman Economics

This is a very lengthy article that is well worth reading. I'm just presenting the opening and the conclusion here. In short, to quote a former US President from eighty years ago, "... let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." FDR

Whether or not you agree with all the author's analysis, I do think it is wise for us to reflect from time to time on our own characterization of things, on our tendency to manufacture bogeyman on to which we can project our fear, on our temptation to use fear as a means of political gain.

In this moment of economic challenge, it can be difficult to keep our problems in perspective. The scale of the financial crisis and the subsequent recession, the weakness of the recovery, the persistence of high unemployment, and the possibility of yet another shock — this time originating in Europe — have left Americans feeling deeply insecure about their economic prospects.

Unfortunately, too many politicians, activists, analysts, and journalists (largely, but not exclusively, on the left) seem determined to feed that insecurity in order to advance an economic agenda badly suited to our actual circumstances. They argue not that a financial crisis pulled the rug out from under our enviably comfortable lives, but rather that our lives were not all that comfortable to begin with. A signal feature of our economy in recent decades, they contend, has been pervasive economic risk — a function not of the ups and downs of the business cycle, but of the very structure of our economic system. According to this view, no American is immune to dreadful economic calamities like income loss, chronic joblessness, unaffordable medical bills, inadequate retirement savings, or crippling debt. Most of us — "the 99%," to borrow the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street protestors — cannot escape the insecurity fomented by an economy geared to the needs of the wealthy few. Misery is not a marginal risk on the horizon: It is an ever-present danger, and was even before the recession.

But compelling though this narrative may be to headline writers, it is fundamentally wrong as a description of America's economy both before and after the recession. When analyzed correctly, the available data belie the notions that this degree of economic risk pervades American life and that our circumstances today are significantly more precarious than they were in the past. Even as we slog through what are likely to be years of lower-than-normal growth and higher-than-normal unemployment, most Americans will be only marginally worse off than they were in past downturns.

The story of pervasive and overwhelming risk is not just inaccurate, it is dangerous to our actual economic prospects. This systematic exaggeration of our economic insecurity saps the confidence of consumers, businesses, and investors — hindering an already sluggish recovery from the Great Recession. It also leads to misdirected policies that are too zealous and too broad, overextending our political and economic systems. The result is that it has become much more difficult to solve the specific problems that do cry out for resolution, and to help those Americans who really have fallen behind.

Only by moving beyond this misleading exaggeration, carefully reviewing the realities of economic risk in America, and restoring a sense of calm and perspective to our approach to economic policymaking can we find constructive solutions to our real economic problems. ...

And the conclusion:

POLITICS BY HORROR STORY

Because we have yet to crawl out of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, many Americans are willing to believe every negative description of our economic circumstances, no matter how inflated. But it is important to remember that the economic doomsayers did not originate with the recession. They were active in the 1980s, claiming that de-industrialization would be the death knell of the middle class and that Germany and Japan were destined to leave us in the dust. Their claims were prevalent through most of the 1990s, when outsourcing was said to foreshadow disaster for American workers in the midst of a "white-collar recession" (which subsequent research showed had not hit professionals nearly as hard as popular accounts suggested). And the gloom was apparent in the pre-recession 2000s, in all the talk of jobless recoveries, "stagnating" living standards, and families running to stand still.

The unfortunate irony is that, in proclaiming economic doom, these Cassandras may do more to harm the truly disadvantaged than to help them. Economist Benjamin Friedman and sociologist William Julius Wilson have independently argued that societies are more generous to those in need when economic times are good. It is not clear why convincing the broad middle class that it is teetering on the brink should be more likely to inspire solidarity than to inspire tight-fistedness and hoarding.

The horror stories harm workers in other ways as well. In good times, scaring workers may make them less willing to demand more from their employers in the way of compensation or better working conditions. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan famously cited job insecurity as a primary reason for low inflation (and therefore low wage growth) in the late 1990s; on the left, former labor secretary and American Prospect co-founder Robert Reich concurred.

In bad times, meanwhile, scaring workers (as well as consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs) only delays recovery. Digging out of our current hole will require businesses to create jobs, which will happen only when consumers start feeling comfortable enough to spend money again and when investors start feeling comfortable enough to take risks again. We do not have to whitewash the seriousness of economic conditions to talk more hopefully (and accurately) about the enduring strengths of our economy.

Exaggerating economic problems has political costs, too. It is hard to read Confidence Men, journalist Ron Suskind's recent account of the first two years of economic policymaking in the Obama administration, without concluding that health-care reform distracted the president and his advisors from thinking about how to shore up the flagging economy. Even now, the huge political lift — and fiscal cost — of the Affordable Care Act has made it vastly more difficult to enact policies truly capable of fostering economic growth.

Such effective economic policies and reforms will need to build on our economy's strengths in order to address its weaknesses. By badly distorting our understanding of both, the bogeyman narrative adopted by too many analysts, activists, and politicians makes it more difficult to help those Americans who do face very real hardships and dangers. If we are to effectively confront the fiscal and economic challenges of the 21^st century, we will need to begin by seeing things as they really are.