Unintended Consequences in School Accountability Policies. Rajashri Chakrabarti and Noah Schwartz* Over the past two decades, state and federal education policies have tried to hold schools more accountable for educating their students. A common criticism of these policies is that they may induce schools to “game the system” with strategies such as excluding certain types of students from computation of school average test scores. In this post, based on our recent New York Fed staff report, “Vouchers, Responses, and the Test Taking Population: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida,” we investigate whether Florida schools resorted to such strategic behavior in response to a voucher program.
We find some evidence that Florida’s schools strategically reclassified weak students into exempt categories, and we draw some lessons that are applicable to New York City’s education policies. In contrast, we find no evidence of reclassification of students into excluded special education categories. The Distributist Review. Want jobs? Encourage immigration. Google employs 31,300 people. The company's co-founder, Sergey Brin, was born in Russia. To create jobs, U.S. must welcome foreign innovators, says Amy M. WilkinsonWilkinson: 40% of Fortune 500 companies were created by immigrants or their childrenCurrent U.S. visa policy is discouraging innovators from coming here, Wilkinson says We need an "entrepreneurs' visa" based on capital raised or revenues generated, she says Editor's note: Amy M.
Wilkinson is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business and Government and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She is writing a book on global entrepreneurs. Washington (CNN) -- If we want to create jobs in America, we must welcome foreign-born innovators. Yet Ellis Island has put up a velvet rope line. Inviting immigrants in to create jobs may seem counterintuitive, but the facts are clear. Take Google. Amy M. Consider the case of Amit Aharoni, a Stanford Business School graduate. What can we do? Facing Inequality. In the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti concedes the reality of income inequality, but concludes that it’s simply not the government’s place to intervene: Too quick to dismiss the occupiers, too convinced that the bad economy will doom Obama’s reelection, too distracted by the silliness of the Republican primary, too beholden to the egalitarian assumptions of the left, Republicans and conservatives have not responded coherently to the arguments put forward by their newly invigorated opponents. … The way out is to reject the assumption that government’s purpose is to redress inequalities of income.
I completely agree as a general principle. But to see the world in purely ideological or ideal terms is to miss something. Political conservatism, as I understand it, is the constant adjustment of government to changing social, economic and moral changes in society, with a preference for stability and limited government. But this is not where we are, is it? Micro Jobs. Why Bitcoin is a Foundational Change That Won’t Go Away and Could Change Everything. Blue sky money one - the dual mandate. Leland Yeager's (ed.) "In search of a monetary constitution" was the book that most excited my thinking about monetary economics as a PhD student. He asked the contributors to the volume to design a monetary system from scratch.
He told them to think "blue sky". I can't remember all the contents. The answers given were less important than the question he asked. It forced you to think deeply about what you wanted a monetary system to do. I may do more posts like this, so I have called this post "Blue sky money one". The blue sky monetary system here is loosely based on: James Buchanan's proposal for "brick money" in the Yeager volume; something Brad DeLong once said in passing about the unemployed panning for gold; and various MMT economists (I've forgotten exactly who, but I don't feel I have to stick to what anyone else said).
Imagine an economy in which physical gold was used as the medium of exchange and medium of account. But those equilibrating forces could be slow to act. Why 6%? Aquinum's Razor: A Theory of Economics. A Theory of Economics: Here is how the banker's game works. Here is how the banker's game works: 1) Get the government to issue some currency (cash -- paper or reserves at the central bank -- reserves are government issued cash central bank deposits). Government issued cash is around 5% of the currency (money) supply. The government issued currency is put into circulation by the government simply spending it. 2) The rest (95%) of the currency is issued by the private banks. Accumulation of interest charges on outstanding loans means that the currency supply must constantly increase even if it means giving out lower quality loans. 3) The bankers make dam sure that the common public does not understand how the monetary system works meaning that the private banks issue 95% of the currency. 4) The system works until real economic capacity of the economy grows and debts can be serviced and interest charges paid. 5) Eventually, one of these cycles goes so deep that currency supply (and demand) falls so low that too many debts become un-serviceable.
QuNeo, Multi-touch Open Source MIDI & USB Pad Controller by Keith McMillen Instruments. QuNeo is a different species of pad controller for electronic musicians, DJs, VJs and DIY hackers. While it covers all of the functionality of other pad controllers, QuNeo adds the power of touch recognition in other dimensions. QuNeo Features Tactile Pads, Sliders, Rotary Sensors and Switches Each of the 27 pads, sliders and rotary sensors are pressure, velocity, and location sensitive. Even the 17 switches respond to how hard you press. LED Light Feedback A remarkable lumination scheme combines variably diffusive elastomers with 251 multi-color LEDs providing visual feedback that is immediately responsive and delightfully informative.
Trigger Pads 16 square pads provide 127 levels of Velocity response. Rotary Sensors 2 rotary sensors allow you to scrub, trigger, stretch, pinch and play phrases and sound files, manipulate continuous controllers and more . Multi-touch Sliders 9 touch sensitive sliders can be mapped to fader and effects controls. Switches The Size of an iPad.
Artist Endorsements. Roger Craig Broke Jeopardy's Record, with an App. 16 November '11, 02:03am Follow The man below is Roger Craig. He broke Jeopardy’s all-time money record in a single game, surpassing previous champion Ken Jennings) during his second round. He then went on to win every game taped for that week and returned for the Tournament of Champions earlier this month. Watch this clip to see how dominant he was, it wasn’t a fluke either, all of his matches were like this: How did Craig do it? Check out his explanation of the app and how it helped him in the video below, it will blow your mind. With his obvious brain power and the help of his “web interface for quantifying initial and later conditions in learning a body of knowledge for a tv quiz show,” Craig was easily the quickest and surest to all of his answers.
Lest you think that the app wasn’t effective on its own, he tested it with two other anonymous friends, and they both had success going on the show as well. The are more great finds from around the Internet every day at TNW Shareables. Economic Mobility Project | Reports & Research | Other Reports. Demand, Demand, Demand. United States of Hunger. Casey Mulligan noted Wednesday on Economix that United States spending on food stamps had skyrocketed since the recession began.
A new Census Bureau report provides a look at just how big the program has become. Last year, more than one in 10 families received food stamps, with some states having significantly higher participation rates. In Oregon, the share was nearly one in five. Here’s a map showing what share of families in each state received these benefits to help them buy food: Census Bureau In Oregon, 17.8 percent of families received food stamps, officially known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, the highest rate in the nation.
Oregon was followed by Tennessee (17 percent) and Michigan (16.9 percent). The state with the lowest SNAP participation rate was Wyoming, with a rate of 6.2 percent. I must admit I’m a bit puzzled by some of these numbers. Source: Census Bureau Source: Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Cowen: Whatever Happened to Discipline and Hard Work? Tyler Cowen: Whatever Happened to Discipline and Hard Work? , by Tyler Cowen, Commentary, NY Times: ...The United States has always had a culture with a high regard for those able to rise from poverty to riches. It has had a strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit and has attracted ambitious immigrants, many of whom were drawn here by the possibility of acquiring wealth. ... In short, the traditional, pro-wealth cultural vision has a great appeal for me. But I must admit that it is showing some wear and tear, which may partly be why the criticisms made by the demonstrators at Zuccotti Park have so much resonance. The first problem is that higher status for the wealthy can easily lead to crony capitalism. ... The second problem is that many conservatives have become so attached to their cultural vision that they have ceded sound, technocratic reasoning to the left and center.
It remains to be seen how many of us are up to its demands. Generation Jobless: The Toll on Parents When Kids Return Home. Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs. Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits. Most of his employees are Guatemalan.
Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses that hire them. The law, known as HB56, is intended to scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being harassed. Rhodes arrived at work on Sept. 29, the day the law went into effect, to discover many of his employees missing.
There’s no shortage of people he could give those jobs to. It’s a common complaint in this part of Alabama. How Technology is Recreating the 21st-century Economy. W. Brian Arthur, PARC Visiting Researcher series: Entrepreneurial Spirit 4 August 20115:30-7:00pmGeorge E. Pake Auditorium, PARCmap/ directions about PARC forum description Every 50 years or so a new body of technology comes along and slowly transforms the economy.
Brian Arthur -- an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, pioneer of complexity theory, and longtime PARC Visiting Researcher – will attempt to answer these and other questions in this PARC Forum talk. Digital technology runs deeper than merely providing computation, internet commerce, and social media. Presenter(s) W. Arthur pioneered the modern study of positive feedbacks/ increasing returns in the economy -- in particular, their role in magnifying small, random economic events -- and this work became the basis of our understanding of the high-tech economy. Among his many honors, Arthur received the Schumpeter Prize in economics and the Lagrange Prize in complexity science. audio.
Spatial frictions. As of 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s populations live in cities. Understanding urbanisation and its affect on living standards is key for policymakers looking to make informed decisions in the years to come. One issue for city dwellers is ‘spatial frictions’. The world is full of spatial frictions, as revealed by the costs of moving goods and people across space. These frictions influence where consumers and firms locate and how they interact. Trade frictions for shipping goods across cities induce consumers and firms to spatially concentrate to take advantage of large local markets. At the same time, such a spatial concentration generates urban frictions within cities: people spend a lot of time on commuting – because of congestion and long commuting distances – and they pay high land rents.
What would the US urban system look like if there were no spatial frictions? Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8. Oligarchy, American Style. Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter.
Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated. So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. QUOTE: The Summum Bonum (Highest Good) of Social Capitalism. ** Sorry ** This post is a year or so ahead of it's time. Going into my next book and not the one I'm working on. Summum Bonum = Latin for the highest good. The tranformation of Capitalism from an ancillary activity (as opposed to the activities of monarchs) into an engine of material and technological bounty was through the (likely accidental) introduction of an ethical/moral substrate. This ethical substrate enabled a rate of cummulative progress that went far, far beyond what was possible with a traditional Capitalism that was limited to the motivational capacity of ethically unbounded greed (i.e. the ideal type being the speculator, trader, or mercantile adventurer).
With that in mind, here's something to think about from the founder of the extremely innovative and amazingly efficient Khan Academy: Question: Are you interested in turning this into a business? Answer: I've been approached several times, but it just didn't feel right.
The Extraordinary Collapse of Jatropha as a Global Biofuel. The “extraordinary collapse of Jatropha as a biofuel” appears to be due to “an extreme case of a well intentioned top down climate mitigation approach, undertaken without adequate preparation and ignoring conflict of interest, and adopted in good faith by other countries, gone awry bringing misery to millions of poorest people across the world”. Green car congress has coverage In 2003, the Planning Commission of India decided to introduce mandatory biofuel blending over increasingly larger parts of the country with a target of 30% by 2020. The Planning Commission pushed for Jatropha as it was considered to be high, early yielding, nonbrowsable and requiring little irrigation and even less management. NBF has written positively about Jatropha before. It is basically a weed that people thought could grow on land not useful for farming to make a lot of biofuel.
Others followed into the Jatropha Fiasco If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Seven Billion: The Real Population Scare is Not What You Think.
Work & Technology. OccupyWallStreet (OWS) Collapse_of_Civilization.