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Introduction to Databases and more

Big Thinkers from Yahoo- The Economists

Richard Thaler

Kenneth Arrow, "Facing a Long and Uncertain Future"

Al Roth, "What Have We Learned from Market Design"

Paul Milgrom, "Economics of Combinatorial Auctions"

Mindmapping for Teaching

Schools killing creativity?

Ken Robinson with Riz Khan

Most Educative Economics Blog for past Month

The joint winners are Economist's View and Stephen Kinsella.

Can kids teach themselves?

Lectures and Talks

Reviving the Invisible Hand: the case for classical liberalism in the 21st century

Principles and Practice of Global Economic Governance
Prof. Jose Antonio Ocampo, former UN Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, currently Professor in the Professional Practice of International and Public Affairs at SIPA, Columbia University

Understanding tribal warfare: Kenya

The Natural State
Prof. Douglass C. North

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature

Public Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century

Democracy and Autocracy in Eurasia: Georgia in Transition

Finance in East Asia: from crisis to integration - challenges of second generation reforms

Good Governance
Prof. Jobst Fiedler, Associate Dean, Hertie School of Governance

A discussion about the Federal Reserve
Markus Brunnermeier, Wei Xiong, Harrison Hong

South Korea’s Cram Schools

“Min-ju, do your best! Fighting!” Mr. Chung shouted as his daughter disappeared into the building. Min-ju turned around and raised a clenched fist. “Fighting!” she shouted back.

South Koreans say their obsession to get their children into top-notch universities is nothing short of “a war.” Nowhere is that zeal better illustrated than in cram schools like Jongro Yongin Campus, located in a sparsely populated suburb of Yongin, 25 miles south of Seoul.

Most Jongro students are “jaesoo sang,” or “study-again students.” Having failed to get into the university of their choice, they are preparing relentlessly for next year’s entrance examination. Some try and try again, for three years running after graduating from high school.

The Jongro school pursues a strategy of isolation, cut off from competing temptations of any sort. Its curriculum is so tightly regulated and the distractions so few that students say they have no option but to study.

“Sending Min-ju here was not an ideal, but an inevitable choice,” said Mr. Chung, a 50-year-old accountant. “In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person’s future. It’s a sad reality. But you have to acknowledge it; otherwise you hurt your children’s future.”

Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious young South Korean. The university that students attend in their 20s can determine the jobs they get and the money they make in their 50s. The top-tier schools — Seoul National, Korea and Yonsei Universities, collectively known as SKY— may hardly register on global lists of the best in higher education. But here, their diplomas are a ticket of admission, an envied status symbol and a badge of pride for graduates and parents.

The life of a South Korean child, from kindergarten to high school, is dominated by the need to excel in standardized entrance examinations for college. The system is so demanding that it is credited with fueling the nation’s outstanding economic success. It is also widely criticized for the psychological price it exacts from young people. Among young people 10 to 19, suicide is the second most common cause of death, after traffic accidents.

-A Taste of Failure Fuels an Appetite for Success at South Korea’s Cram Schools

Qualification to be a president- skill at giving exams?

Akhil Reed Amar writes;

Barack Obama’s exam questions and answers engaged me on several levels.

First, As a constitutional law professor, I came away impressed — dazzled, really — by the analytic intelligence and sophistication of these questions and answers. A really good exam — an exam that tests and stretches the student, while simultaneously providing the professor with a handy and fair index to rank the class — is its own special art form. Composing such an exam is like crafting a sonnet or a crossword puzzle. We don’t have Obama’s answer key every year; but the questions themselves are in many instances beautifully constructed to enable students to explore the seams and plumb the depths of the Supreme Court’s case law. I am tempted to use variations of several of these questions myself in some future exam. (I won’t say which, lest I tip my students off.) When I read Jodi Kantor’s piece, I was very interested to hear that the University of Chicago Law School was willing to offer Obama tenure. In these materials I see why.

Second, as a student of history, I couldn’t help thinking of Lincoln. Not just because we have a skinny guy from Illinois who is largely self-made and who can write a great speech — I knew that already. Lincoln was a brilliant lawyer, who did his own thinking and writing and cut to the essence of hard legal issues with amazing incisiveness. Lincoln understood the Constitution and its deepest structures as well as or better than any of the Justices on the Supreme Court of his day. These materials helped me see Obama in a similar light.

Which brings me to the last level — the moral level. Like Lincoln, Jefferson and Madison were also brilliant. But Jefferson and Madison lived and died as slaveholders and did much less than they could have done to put slavery on a path of ultimate extinction. Nixon had a keen legal mind, but a large moral blind spot. Lincoln had a rare combination of moral depth and legal brilliance. Make no mistake, he was a politician who understood how to tack and trim. But he was a politician with a strong moral compass and a deep understanding of the rule of law. Similarly, there is a great deal of moral seriousness in Obama’s legal materials. They are not just about technical and technocratic legal questions. Some of the great mysteries and tragedies of human life and American society — involving marriage, divorce, childbearing, cloning, the right to die with dignity, infertility, sexual orientation, and yes, of course, race — are probed in these materials in ways that encourage students to think not just about law, but about justice, and truth, and morality.

Source: The Caucus Blog

The Art and Practice of Teaching Statistics

Teaching Economics -'Aim high in steering'

The latest EconTalk with McCloskey is highly recommended- the last part of the discussion talks about the art of teaching economics.

Discipline of economics, McCloskey was Russ's teacher of micro, style of economic teaching that is puzzle-solving, intuition based. Profession has become more Samuelsonian, more mathematical. Where would you like economics to go if you had your druthers? Teaching 18-year olds. Adam Smith, more Smithian economics, economics where maximizing is in a context of ethics where the economic actor is thought of as being a human instead of a maximizing machine. The Economic Conversation, elementary book, students and faculty are urged to talk about economics. It's not the math itself that's the problem; it's the thinking that mathematical thought is the same thing as economic thought. Math is a tool. If all we do is run models over and over again, what is point of scholarships? Chess problems, econometrics. Hayekian direction as Russ's personal revolt against Max U. Either the use of emergent market based thinking or the conversational exploration of concepts are hard to write exams for. Compulsion to grade. Time-consuming to give a grade. When we have to give a grade we fall back on the Max U kind of problem. Language is how an economy operates and it's how a science operates. An emergent market is a talk shop. Austrian approach: These conversations are creative and that's why they can't be formulated as exam problems. Information. Talk about the role of language in the economy. Best economic education tragically takes place outside the classroom. "Aim high in steering.

Though teaching style have not made much progress, textbooks are improving for the better.

Related;
Intermediate Macroeconomics- from draft of textbook by Kevin Hoover

Current intermediate macroeconomics texts suffer from three common problems:

♦ Theory is detached from the facts of the U.S. economy. Textbooks often include boxed case studies to illustrate theoretical principles and illustrative graphs and tables of current data. The numbers in the chapters on national income accounting are updated with each edition. Yet, the facts of the economy are usually peripheral – not woven tightly into the main exposition. And it is common for students to emerge nearly as ignorant at the end of the course of the basic features of the U.S. economy as at the beginning.

♦ Exposition of theory is not well adapted to the real world. Macroeconomic news generally reports rates of change (e.g., growth rates, inflation rates), while typical textbooks focus on levels (e.g., the aggregate supply and demand curves determine the level of prices and GDP). The teacher knows how to translate from one context to the other, but the average student finds it difficult. Much of real world macroeconomics is closely tied to the complexities of financial markets. Textbooks typically focus on “the” rate of interest as determined by the supply of and demand for money, leaving a richer analysis of financial markets to later money and banking courses.

♦ Too much stress on theoretical closure and advanced topics at the expense of first principles. Many intermediate macroeconomics textbooks read like graduate textbooks without the mathematics.

From another forthcoming Intermediate Macroeconomics book by Chad Jones;

Economic growth is the first major topic explored in the book. After an overview chapter describes the facts and some tools, Chapter 4 presents a (static) model based on a Cobb-Douglas production function. Students learn what a model is with this simple structure, and they see it applied to understanding the 50-fold differences in per capita GDP that we see across countries. Chapter 5 presents the Solow model—but with no technological change or population growth, which simplifies the presentation. Instead, students learn Robert Solow’s insight that capital accumulation cannot serve as the engine for long-run economic growth. Chapter 6 then offers something absent in most (all?) other intermediate macro books: a thorough exposition of the economics of ideas and of Paul Romer’s insight that the discovery of new ideas can drive long-run growth.

Chapter 12 is where the payoff occurs, and we see the simple, familiar AS/AD framework. The innovation is that the graph is drawn with inflation on the vertical axis rather than the price level—perfect for teaching students about the
Volcker disinflation, the Great Inflation of the 1970s, and modern monetary policy. All of the short-run analysis—including explicit dynamics— can be performed in this single graph. Another innovation in getting to the AS/AD framework is a focus on interest rates and the absence of an LM curve. The central bank sets the interest rate directly in Chapter 11; Chapter 12 introduces a simple version of John Taylor’s monetary policy rule to get the AD curve. A final innovation in the short-run model is that it features an open economy from the start. Business cycles in the rest of the world are one source of shocks to the home economy. To keep things simple, however, the initial short-run model does not include exchange rates...

Relative to many intermediate macro books, this text features more emphasis on the world economy. This occurs in three ways. First, the longrun growth chapters are a main emphasis in the book, and these inherently involve international comparisons. Second, the short-run model features an open economy (albeit without exchange rates) from the very beginning. Finally, the book includes two international chapters in Part 4: in addition to the standard international finance chapter that appears as Chapter 15, Chapter 14 is entirely devoted to international trade.

Brad DeLong can improve;

I wrote this book out of a sense that undergrad macro needed to have the barnacles scraped off of its hull. It is more than three-quarters of a century since Keynes wrote his Tract on Monetary Reform; it is two-thirds of a century since Hicks and Hansen drew their IS and LM curves; it is more than one-third of a century since Friedman and Phelps demolished the static Phillips curve, and since Lucas, Sargent, and Barro taught us what rational expectations could mean. All this time undergrad macro has been becoming more complicated, as new material is added while old material remains. It seemed to me that if I could successfully streamline the presentation of material, both traditional and more modern, the result would be a more understandable and comprehensible book. I hope that I have succeeded—that this book does move more smoothly through the water than its competitors, and will prove to be a better textbook for third-millennium macroeconomics courses.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Related;
Larry Summers on the role of universities;

But I think that we will almost certainly make more progress in advancing the values that we all share, if every issue is open for academic debate and if the response to distrastful argument is logical counter argument, rather than statements of revulsion. So I will always wish that I had handled that whole situation differently, but at the same time I think it is very important to uphold the principle of the right to be speculative, the recognition that when you offer hypotheses and judgments in a tentative way, they sometimes turn out to be right and they sometimes turn out to be wrong. People will debate over time the merits of different hypothesis. But I think it is something that is very, very important. Which isn’t to say that with the benefit of hindsight not gone to the NBR that day, but it is to say I think we do need to do a certain amount of soul searching around concepts of freedom of discussion and how we regard controversial hypotheses.

GMU and Chicago- the believers, the rest atheists

David Friedman has an interesting comment about the role and belief of economists;

I think it's still an important difference among economists and economics departments, and one that young academics ought to care about. I remember a long time ago commenting to a graduate student at Chicago that it seemed to me that there were a lot of economists who didn't really believe in economics. It was what they did in working hours, not how they thought about the world. His response was that some of his fellow graduate students had noticed that–when visiting other schools.

I was reminded of that incident when visiting one of the colleges my daughter is considering for next year. Wandering around the economics department to get a feel for the place, I spoke with three faculty members–none of whom struck me as an economist in my sense of the term. My daughter, having audited an econ class, commented to me on the fact that a student had made a comment which any economist should have responded to with some version of "that sounds plausible but is wrong because"–a point that would seem obviously right to a non-economist, obviously wrong to an economist. The professor simply let the comment go.

I don't know enough about economics department to say which ones currently are in what category, with two exceptions. Chicago, so far as I can tell, is still a place where economists believe in economics. So, less obviously, is George Mason. One simple test, I suspect, would be to have lunch with members of the department, perhaps also with graduate students, and see what they talk about.

I should add that my point is not that economics is true, although I think it largely is. I am not inclined to take theology very seriously. But if I did take a course in it, I would expect to learn more, and have a more interesting time, if the professor was a believer than if he were an atheist.

Economics Department wants Accountants

The Economics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz is recruiting for lecturers who can teach at both the lower- and upper-division level. Our most urgent need (currently) is for applicants who can teach accounting courses.

Link of the Day

The Prices and Ratings of Economics Textbooks

As economists, we are not surprised that publishers seek to maximize profits. Economic theory predicts that the ratio of a seller's price to marginal cost will be high if demand is inelastic. While publishers are unlikely to respond to moral suasion, they are likely to respond to increased price elasticity. Thus we hope that this website will have two beneficial effects. The direct effect is that it may help you find a better deal for your students. An indirect effect is that the more attention that consumers pay to prices, the more elastic will be demand, and hence the lower will be the profit-maximizing prices.

Firefox, is it really that good?

Browsers were all the buzz over the weekend, beginning with the news that the developers of Mozilla Firefox feeltheir latest build is ready for widespread general use,despite technically being still only a beta. I'm not ready to make the leap full-time yet myself, but I'll definitely be looking at Firefox's new features in the coming weeks.

Firefox has long been my browser of choice; and judging from my own, completely unscientific study, I'm not alone. Access logs for my own sites show some 33 percent of visitors now use the open source browser -- an impressive market share for any software.

Apple's Safari browser, on the other hand, accounts for less than 5 percent of the hits. Apple appears determined to up this statistic, butthe tactics it has chosenreally get my goat -- and here again I'm not alone.

-Firefox, Safari, or Neither?

I find hardly any difference between Firefox and Explorer in using many browsers at the same time (I usually have 40 browsers open at any point in time). For computer geeks out there, which browser is best for multiple browsing?

Are your kids learning maths at school?

Close to half of all seventeen year olds cannot read or do math at the level needed to get a job at a modern automobile plant. Barring some other special knowledge or talent that would allow them to earn a living as, say, a plumber or artist, they lack the skills to earn a middle-class paycheck in today’s economy.

Schools in US are failing students in Maths;

“The sharp falloff in mathematics achievement in the U.S. begins as students reach late middle school, where, for more and more students, algebra course work begins,” said the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed two years ago by President Bush. “Students who complete Algebra II are more than twice as likely to graduate from college compared to students with less mathematical preparation.”

The report, adopted unanimously by the panel on Thursday and presented to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, said that prekindergarten-to-eighth-grade math curriculums should be streamlined and put focused attention on skills like the handling of whole numbers and fractions and certain aspects of geometry and measurement.

It offers specific goals for students in different grades. For example, it said that by the end of the third grade, students should be proficient in adding and subtracting whole numbers. Two years later, they should be proficient in multiplying and dividing them. By the end of the sixth grade, the report said, students should have mastered the multiplication and division of fractions and decimals.

The report tries to put to rest the long, heated debate over math teaching methods. Parents and teachers have fought passionately in school districts around the country over the relative merits of traditional, or teacher-directed, instruction, in which students are told how to do problems and then drilled on them, versus reform or child-centered instruction, emphasizing student exploration and conceptual understanding. It said both methods had a role.

“There is no basis in research for favoring teacher-based or student-centered instruction,” Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, the chairman of the panel, said at a briefing on Wednesday. “People may retain their strongly held philosophical inclinations, but the research does not show that either is better than the other.”

The report found that “to prepare students for algebra, the curriculum must simultaneously develop conceptual understanding, computational fluency and problem-solving skills.” Further, it said: “Debates regarding the relative importance of these aspects of mathematical knowledge are misguided. These capabilities are mutually supportive.”

More Econ Blogs

Economic History of the World

Sybil's Star

Welker's Wikinomics

Chandan Sapkota's blog

Bonaconomics

China Economics Blog

Random economics blog

A high school economics teacher from UK;

Started my working career as a fishermonger before becoming an insurance analyst, retail manager, safety inspector, accountant, an elected politician and an educator. Formerly Head of Development and Head of Business Education Faculty on the SMT at Roedean, a leading boarding school in the UK.

Book I received today from Amazon

The Cult of Statistical Significance
How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives
Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey

You might want to preorder the following book;

The Economic Conversation
by Arjo Klamer , Deirdre McCloskey , Stephen Ziliak

The Economic Conversation is a new principles of economics textbook, designed to make students aware of the rhetoric of the discipline of economics through the use of dialogue--"conversations" among the authors, as well as a few fictional students. The goal is to draw attention to the assumptions, goals and values that underlie economic principles, and to do so in a manner that introduces them to coherent and well-known alternative economic perspectives.