My Sunday reading turned up three examples of glaring numeracy errors. I make plenty of my own errors, so I have sympathy for the perpetrators. But I did want to highlight them as examples of what can happen when quantitative thinking runs off the rails. And the need to remain mathematically vigilant in your daily [...]
Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category
A Sunday Numeracy Quiz
Posted in Data, Life, Teaching, tagged Ethicist, Gambling, Graphics, New York Times, Wall Street Journal on February 5, 2012 | 2 Comments »
Online Education and Self-Driving Cars
Posted in Internet, Teaching, Technology, tagged Auto, Education, Google, Teaching, Technology, Wired on January 30, 2012 | 10 Comments »
Last week, I noted that former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun enrolled 160,000 students in an online computer science class. That inspired him to set up a new company, Udacity, to pursue online education. A new article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek adds some additional color to the story. Barrett Sheridan and Brendan Greeley answer a question many folks [...]
Can One Professor Teach 500,000 Students At Once?
Posted in Teaching, tagged Education, Teaching on January 26, 2012 | 1 Comment »
That’s what former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun aims to do. Sound impossible? Well, he’s already taught a class of 160,000 students. As Felix Salmon recounts: Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he [...]
How Will Colleges Innovate?
Posted in Teaching, tagged Education, Teaching on July 15, 2011 | 6 Comments »
That’s the question that Jeffrey Selingo poses over the The Chronicle of Higher Education (ht: Jack B.): [I]f current economic trends continue, much of traditional academe is going to be forced to change. Families can no longer use their house as an ATM. States are making tough choices about the size of government, and public colleges [...]
Double Tax Rates, Quadruple the Economic Harm
Posted in Budget, Teaching, tagged Taxes on February 7, 2011 | 11 Comments »
At last Wednesday’s hearing on tax reform, three witnesses–Rosanne Altshuler, Larry Lindsey, and I–invoked a famous rule of thumb about taxes. We each told the Senate Budget Committee that high tax rates are disproportionately harmful for the economy and that: If you double tax rates, you quadruple the resulting economic harm. If a 10% tax [...]
Menu Engineering
Posted in Microeconomics, Teaching, tagged Behavioral Economics, Microeconomics on December 12, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Earlier in the semester, my students bravely endured the usual microeconomic approach to understanding consumer choice. You know: budget constraints, indifference curves, and tangencies. Very useful when deployed appropriately, but rather abstract. To lighten things up—and illustrate some important truths about how consumers actually behave—we then spent a class on the psychology / behavioral economics [...]
Cupcake Economics
Posted in Microeconomics, Teaching, tagged Cupcakes, Microeconomics on November 28, 2009 | 8 Comments »
As the New York Times noted a few days ago, cupcakes are hot. I’ve seen shops sprouting around the DC area, and according to the article we are not alone: New York, Los Angeles, Denver, and other cities are also enjoying cupcake boomlets. I must admit that I don’t know what’s driving the rise of [...]
Yuppie 911 and the Financial Crisis
Posted in Finance, Teaching, tagged Finance, Risk on October 27, 2009 | 2 Comments »
If you make an activity safer, people will take more risk. The inventions of seat belts, air bags, and anti-lock brakes, for example, have all inspired people to drive more aggressively. And if you put drivers in SUVs, rather than regular cars, they are more likely to hit the road during a snow storm. In [...]
Opium Economics in Afghanistan
Posted in Teaching, tagged Afghanistan, Drugs, Teaching on October 8, 2009 | 6 Comments »
If you are troubled by opium production in Afghanistan, Jeff Clemens at Harvard has some bad news for you: eradication efforts are doing little to reduce opiate production. (ht: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution). Moreover, to the extent they are having an effect, it’s to drive up prices and thus enrich the farmers who illicitly [...]
Human Organs, Behavioral Economics, and Insurance Mandates
Posted in Behavioral Economics, Health, Teaching, tagged Behavioral Economics, Health, Kidneys on September 27, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Like the minimum wage and rent control, the market for human organs is a classic topic when teaching the basics of supply and demand. Organ markets are largely outlawed and, as a result, the demand for organs greatly outstrips the supply. For example, according to some estimates, as many as 4,000 people in the United [...]
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