He is known for tirelessly bringing the facts to every debate and applying economic theory in the midst of heated arguments. The unknown economist works behind a veil of nerdiness, invisible to normal people going about their daily lives. Yet through his perseverance we hope that some order is brought to the world, one internet argument at a time. We can now exclusively reveal his secret identity…
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The Dim Post has a great guest post up that demonstrates what researcher drily refer to as ‘ability bias’. I’m not going to reproduce it all here but it’s worth reading if you’re not familiar with the problem.
The bit that I find really depressing about the article is this:
So, after all this has been done, Ministry Faktdrones come in and look at one piece of paper that has all of our grades on it. They don’t look at the students as humans, don’t look at any of our processes, and often don’t even look at previous results which would let them know things like value-added results. They look at one sheet of results and say “Look here – the class with 30 all got Achieved, and the class with 15 all got Achieved too. That means, statistically, class size doesn’t make a difference. Let’s cram forty of the little firestarters in there next year!”
Something I constantly and tiresomely have to harp on about when I’m talking to (at?) people about this and other education issues, is that the students are not statistics, and sometimes can’t be pigeonholed to fit a statistically clean model.
I’ve worked with people in the Ministry of Education’s research division a fair bit and they’re all hugely knowledgeable and competent people. They’re well aware of these problems with the statistics and highlight them in their research papers. They even work with the people who gather the data to try to improve the way it’s collected and overcome some of the measurement problems. So why do teachers still perceive Ministry researchers as ‘Faktdrones’? Either the research is being poorly interpreted by the policy teams or the outcomes of the research are being poorly communicated to the teachers. Possibly both.
Whatever the problem is, the author’s response seems to be to reject the use of statistics to inform policy because “students are not statistics”. Unfortunately for the author there is unlikely to be a reduction in the reliance on statistics to determine policy. From what I can tell the trend is actually for more statistics. Given that, the solution to problems such as ability bias is to collect better data. Sadly, the experience of teachers such as the author of this piece is likely to deter them from helping researchers interested in collecting more detailed data about their students.
In policy circles people often say that some data, however rough, is better than no data at all. Unfortunately, a little bit of data coupled with a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. If it causes practitioners in the profession to be alienated by policy makers then it may actually be detrimental. It’s sometimes hard to remember that the ultimate goal of research is to help the people being studied, not simply to study them and experiment for its own sake. At times that may require a bit of caution and restraint.
The recent budget reduced the number of students who are eligible for the student allowance, particularly for postgraduate students. There have since been almost daily articles in the newspapers lamenting the students’ plight. Today there is an article in which a student describes how she will have to take on extra debt to finance her postgraduate education. Similarly, my Facebook is full of people wondering why the government refuses to ‘invest in our future’. The reason is fairly straightforward: when the government pays for tertiary education it transfers money from poor people to wealthy people. Tertiary students, particularly those in postgraduate education, are some of the wealthiest people in our society and don’t deserve to get a free lunch on top of it.
You might wonder how I can justify that statement when most students have very low incomes. Well, they are not rich because of their present income, but because of the income they will earn in future. Three years after completing their degree, a bachelor’s graduate will earn 51% more than someone with only secondary qualifications. Someone with a master’s degree will earn 74% more and a doctoral graduate 120% more. Yet it was the secondary graduate, working full time while the student was studying, that helped fund about 75% of their education. How can that possibly be fair?
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Brian Rudman in the Herald, discusses the cost-benefit analyses of major infrastructure investment that are required by Treasury guidelines:
I’ve come to the conclusion that the main beneficiaries of the big events politicians subsidise at our expense are the cost-benefit analysts hired to justify the expenditure in the first place.
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The cynical take on the process is that the whole cost-benefit palaver was introduced by politicians to put a veneer of neutrality on the decision-making on pet projects.
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That doesn’t worry me that much [but if] politicians … are going to support certain events and projects, despite the evidence of the cost-benefit analyses, why is so much public money wasted commissioning these expensive reports?
I’m a bit torn on the subject of CBAs of major projects. On the one hand, I think they should be extremely useful for informing political decisions. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that politicians don’t pay any attention to them.
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While browsing Andrew Gelman’s recent posts I also came across this gem, which reinforces my priors in every possible way. So of course I loved it! He writes:
More and more I feel like economic reporting is based on crude principles of adding up “good news” and “bad news.” Sometimes this makes sense: by almost any measure, an unemployment rate of 10% is bad news compared to an unemployment rate of 5%. Other times, though, the good/bad news framework seems so tangled.
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Who’s supposed to be “concerned” [about the drop in the price of Facebook shares]? … I just don’t get it. Why should I care? If the shares underperform the market, people can buy a piece of Facebook for less. That’s fine too, no?
I think Gelman has put his finger right on the problem: news needs to be normatively charged to be worthwhile. A drop in share prices is good for some people and bad for others, but it probably doesn’t involve a loss of social welfare. Yet, to be a good news story, it needs to have a normative dimension with a hero and a baddie. I’m not blaming the reporters for that; it’s just human nature to want it. Unfortunately, it makes the job of reporting on economics particularly difficult.
In fact it explains why economists are constantly accused of being unable to reach a conclusion. It’s not because they don’t understand what’s going on: it’s because they attempt to describe the costs and the benefits of policies, which usually accrue to different groups. Few policies are unambiguously good or bad, so almost any economist’s commentary provides ammunition for both sides of the normative debate.
