It’s amazing to me how much this presidential election reflects ideas and conversations that have been percolating around college campuses for the past several years. I often tell students that their movements have an uncanny way of being on the right side of history (OK, I see that I’m begging the question, sue me) and I think that this is being borne out in all caps this year.
Month: September 2016
Millennial Madlibs
Check out this phenomenal quote from this article by Polly Mosendz at Bloomberg:
Producing knowledge from information
Thinking today about an old, abandoned line of research of mine. How about this: when information is cheap, knowledge is expensive.
“Reason” is not value-neutral
Zipping across my desk this afternoon is “The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence“, an article title conceived in a laboratory to make my eye twitch and take possession of my clicking finger.
Some of my research on targeting in networks
A topic that I’ve researched a bunch over the years is the interaction between people in a network of relationships and an outsider who wants to tell or sell them something. You know something about the structure of the network that people belong to: who talks to who. Which people do you send messages or promotions to?
Psst: study what you want
Hot on the heels of my post yesterday about rhetoric and valuation in higher education, Steven Pearlstein has an article today for the Washington Post that gets at similar questions from a different angle: parental pressure to get a “practical” degree.
A short story about how to spend $300m
This is the first paragraph from a really neat economics paper by Budish, Cramton, and Shim (QJE 2015):
What is not measured is lost
In a column yesterday, Tim Harford asks “are universities worth it?“. Surely a topic worth discussing. Yet there is an asymmetry in Harford’s summary of the debate. While Harford explicitly considers not just money but also time and intellectual resources as opportunity costs of running higher education, his taxonomy of the benefits is restricted to the financial.
Jim Campbell 