Category — UL
Should the Irish government give a temporary tax rebate to first time buyers to stimulate the housing market?
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August 27, 2008 No Comments
Should New Parents Take a Mandatory Parenting Course?
New parents face the uncertainty of a life-altering event for which they can never be fully prepared. Traditionally, parenting skills were passed down through the family, but, with the disintegration of the traditional family archetype in today’s Ireland, parenting skills can be lacking in new parents, which exposes the child, and its parents, to still greater uncertainty regarding the quality of the child’s care. Should a new parent be given a mandatory course on parenting and life skills before being allowed to apply for the children’s’ allowance?
There is mounting evidence traditional social ties are breaking down. One of the benefits these social ties gives was inter generational transfers of information and skills—your mother showed you how to hold the baby’s head, feed and bathe the baby, and so on. One worrying trend, perhaps due in part to this breakdown of ties, is the rise of parents with little or no parenting skills. One way to address a lack of parental training is a mandatory government-sponsored course of parenting skills.
Imagine the following scenario: you fall pregnant, and go to your GP. They refer you to a parenting course (examples here and here) run at a convenient time, and automatically enroll you. The course is not mandatory, however. If you sign up to the course and pass it, you qualify for an increased children’s’ allowance significantly above the rate enjoyed by other new parents who decide not take the course. It is still your choice whether or not to learn. The government has not forced you to choose to learn how to become a better parent, but once the incentive is great enough, so the thinking goes, in general, people will decide to take the course. As long as the course is well designed and run, the social benefits of a well-informed cohort of parents will outweigh the costs of running the program.
The idea behind this policy isn’t mine—it comes from behavioural economics. Championed by University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler, (and legal scholar Cass Sunstein), who proselytises his thinking in a new book, Nudge. Behavioural economics discards the economists’ traditional assumptions about people being super rational calculators, and focuses more on their flaws to create policies which affect people’s behaviour without also creating more centralised bureacracy. Thaler argues people don’t compute their optimal level of happiness at every moment. For the most part, people do what they did yesterday. And this creates conditions where people make mistakes. Mistakes like not finding out how to be better parents.
Group parent training programs already exist in pilot programs in North Dublin run, in one instance, by the Northside Partnership with their Parenting for Life programme, and have been shown to be beneficial in several international studies. Parents learn ‘life skills’, coping mechanisms, and nutrition., amongst other things As a father of two, if I had known these courses existed, I would be first in line to sign up. All I did was read six books and confuse myself.
What about the draconian effects of this proposed policy? Aren’t I really just giving the illusion of choice rather than an actual one, using Thaler’s Nudge idea? Isn’t this idea just traditional state paternalism rebranded using some psychological tricks? Not really, because if someone has a strong aversion to the parenting course, say on religious or ethical grounds, then they have a measure of the strength of that conviction—the income foregone in the making of the choice. More realistic policy options can also be constructed: we could offer several tiered children’s allowance options, one without the course, one with the course, and so on, where increases are passed on incrementally. People might argue this will put pressure on the poorer segments of society to take the course, but as lower levels of education are strongly correlated with lower incomes, perhaps this is may be a benefit rather than a cost of the program.
We need to have a debate about what constitutes good parenting: what skills, tools, and tips do we as a society think every parent needs to have in their possession to give their children the best chance possible? Once we have such a list, then we need a delivery mechanism for this information. We could do worse than asking every parent to learn a little about parenting before becoming one.
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- On markets, voters & behaviorial economics
- James Harkin: This nudging stuff is nothing new - and it’s all a bit shaky
- Harry Phibbs: It’s a mag, mag world
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- George Osborne: Nudge, nudge, win, win
- Greenspan: It’s Richard Thaler’s Fault
- The Glenn and Helen Show: Cass Sunstein on Libertarian Paternalism
- A pitfall in behavioural economics
- Of Two Minds When Making a Decision [Mind Matters]
August 21, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-08-20
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Free collection of wikibooks.
August 21, 2008 No Comments
Good News for Limerick Students: Rents should be cheaper this year
Take a look at the Daft.ie second quarter report on the rental market. It makes for some fascinating reading. I’m always amazed at the quality of research and analysis these guys put out.
The report makes two strong claims, backed up by Ireland’s largest rental database.
First, rental rates will, on average, fall across the country due to a drift in the supply of rental homes, as we can see from the chart above from page 8 of the report. Click to enlarge it.
Second, and most important for UL students, the oversupply of rental properties in this area makes it much more likely rents will stay static (meaning that, due to inflation, your bedroom is cheaper this year than last) or may actually fall. Because the rental sector, according to daft.ie, is now a ‘buyers’ market, students can afford to shop around a bit, and perhaps demand better accommodation standards than they could in the past.
The report goes on to claim rents themselves have fallen, year on year, by 8.6% for a single room in Limerick city, though suburban areas have seen a slight bump of 4.7%, and rents have stayed almost static overall.
So, the bottom line:
- students can shop around for better accommodation, expecting rental prices to drop or stay static, and
- landlords interested in filling their rental properties should advertise widely, early, and offer quality accommodation at a fair price to secure revenues over the coming academic year.
Students with more money will spend it all on books, right?
August 20, 2008 No Comments
College Fees Discussion
Liam and the Geary blog have put a post up to focus resources on getting a concise guide to readings and discussion on the topic of reintroducing college fees.
Anyone interested in discussing this topic should head over there and bang the ideas about.
This is exactly what the issue needs.
August 14, 2008 No Comments
How to introduce fees into higher education without hurting students’ interests—or society’s
Irish universities need more money if they are to compete internationally. The Minister for Education is considering the reintroduction of fees for third level students. I think this is a good idea, and I’d like to propose a mechanism to help students and their families pay for the cost of their education.
The basic idea is this: following admission to a course, when students and their families pass a means test, they automatically qualify for a very low interest loan, which covers tuition and living expenses over the course of the degree. This loan is paid back in subsequent years. Those who can’t pay, don’t. The government takes out the loan for them in a transparent process. The funds for the loan come from the interest earned on the national pension fund. In addition, we create a government-backed high interest savings account for parents who wish to save for their children’s education. Think SSIAs for college.
Take a pencil and paper and follow my reasoning. We have 84,000 students enrolled at HEA institutions alone out of 131, 000 students in third level education nationally. If the numbers enrolled at HEA institutions alone grows in line with population growth, we’ll have 100,000 students in higher education by 2015. The problem is to pay for these students when they can’t pay for themselves, and minimise the hardship taking large amount of personal debt entails, while allowing the universities the funding to compete internationally. Assume we increase fees and maintenance to 30,000 per year for each student, a number which certainly overstates the true amount, even in 2015. Then we need 100,000 times 30,000 = 3 billion euros per year to cover every HEA student in Ireland, even those who don’t exist yet. We currently spend 1.4 billion on third level education. This back of the envelope calculation obviously overstates the case, but bear with me for the sake of the argument. The national pension fund can earn this in interest, and is expected to grow to 140 billion by 2025, so the money is there to fund it. Though the fund lost money this year, it has made 3.8% returns since 2001, more than enough to fund a loan system like this several times over. Once the principal and interest is paid back into the national pension fund, the fund will remain as capitalised to fulfil its original purpose of securing old age pensions into the 21st Century. Several authors, including Prof. Philip Lane of TCD, have argued against using the National Pensions Fund for domestic purposes, but I believe a case can be made on social welfare grounds for using the funds generated on the principal of the pension fund to further a social good like higher education.
So, how would the scheme work? Means test each student and/or their family when they apply through the CAO for courses. Allow the universities to price each course individually according to demand for the course as measured by the CAO. If they can pay for an individual course, students automatically qualify for a national pension fund-backed loan, with an very low interest rate designed just to cover administration costs and defaults. If students can’t pay, the government pays for the loan, from the same fund, exactly as in the current system. Marginal cases get referred to a board which arbitrates on a case by case basis. Students pay back loans, into the pensions fund, at their own pace, when they get their degrees. As mentioned above, allow the creation of a high interest, government-backed investment account, SSIA-style, to cover the cost of education, so parents with the means to help their children can do so in a cost effective manner from the moment of their children’s birth. Those parents without the means to help their children are not penalised in this system—the government policy is still welfare-enhancing. Those who can pay, do, and those who can’t, don’t.
Universities are currently constrained by the government to cap the price they charge for the service they provide—education. Because the quantity of people wanting to be educated is relatively stable over time, and the cost of educating them is rising, the total surplus available to universities is getting smaller. This is not the way to fund a world class university system. Under the suggested plan, universities can access increased funds through a competitive system on a course-by-course basis, so while the `price’ of medicine is unlikely to go down over time, demand for (and hence the price of) courses like computer science can fluctuate. Students can make informed decisions on individual courses, based on which they qualify for through the CAO and means-testing schemes, and decide which ones they most want to go into. Now the well funded universities can offer scholarships and bursaries to attract better students, buy better facilities, and hire superstar faculty. The university will offer a better educational experience, and the degrees students are awarded will be worth more nationally and internationally.
Who loses in this plan? The private grind schools will see demand for their services waning while the local authority will lose out, but they’ll manage. Those families who previously benefited from the free fees will obviously not be impressed. However, the quality of their childrens’ educations will increase as the university will have the resources to offer a world-class educational and research environments. As we progress towards a knowledge society, a properly resourced and internationally competitive university sector can only be welcomed.
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August 14, 2008 No Comments
Economic Possibilities for my grandchildren
I am thirty years old, and I have two children under two. I have a middle class job, and a middle class lifestyle, and can reasonably assume I’ll live to be eighty, all going well. My sons can expect to live to be ninety or so, according to the Central Statistics office (see here for details). If they have children when they are around thirty as well, my grandchildren will be born in or around the year 2030, when I’m in my sixties, and my grandchildren will live between 90 and 100 years. My grandchildren will see the 22nd Century.
Here is my question: what will life be like for an educated, middle class family in the mid Twenty-first century in Ireland? What trends can be reasonably relied upon to hold their magnitudes and directions this far forward into the future?
Environment
Well first, they won’t have an oil problem the way we have one. By 2040, there is general agreement we won’t have enough oil to power the world’s needs (see World Oil Supply and Demand, here, for details). Something else will have taken it’s place, most likely a combination, of nuclear and cleaner, greener energy sources. In fact, I would place a bet the world economy will still largely be in a transition from oil-dependent energy generation technologies by the time of my first grandchild’s birth. The general cost of things may be well above our current level for that reason, because prices shocked out of their trends by a costly technological change would tend to be higher for that reason. Economic output in Ireland may suffer as a result, but this will be temporary. It might feel like a long time for my grandchildren, though.
My grandchildren won’t have to worry about climate change the way I do: for them it will be an ever escalating reality. While we debate the severity of the oncoming environmental damage the post-industrial generations have inflicted upon the planet, they will experience it firsthand. I wonder will they thank us for our actions today.
Ireland will be a smaller place, in terms of square miles, thanks to climate change, and erosion, but also because of a larger population. Irish people have enjoyed relatively low population densities (that is, numbers of people in an area divided by the size of the area) relative to other rich western countries, but this will change. All population growth rates for Ireland are projected above 2%, much higher than international averages, thanks in part to the recent economic booms and inward migration (CSO.ie, here) . What this means is through compounding, our population will double by 2040, and we will see over 8 million people living on this island. The figure below shows the upswing in population growth over the last 20 years.
Society
My grandchildren will have access to more information than all previous generations of mankind combined. In previous generations, mere volume of information was a strong predictor of success in warfare, industry, or any other sphere of life. Now the quantity of information will not be a problem. The quality of that information, my grandchildrens’ ability to see patterns in this information, and the basic rules they have for dealing with flows of information, will be a hallmark of their generation. They will face problems of choice, and a complexity in decision making, that we can only imagine. Their education will have to include skills, training, and techniques to cope with the onslaught of information from such an early age. My toddler already has a youtube.com favourites list, what will his children be watching at age 2?
Irish society will, I suspect, be largely the same as our generation: the traditions and customs which matter will persevere. It is only two generations forward, remember. What is certain is my grandchildren will not be as influenced by religious culture as I was through my childhood, as the influence of the Catholic church wanes further. Concomitant with this secular trend, the rise of a more isolated, fractured society will result in more failed marriages and divorce, and less formal living arrangements for the raising of children.
Economy
The Irish economy subsisted as an agricultural economy for thousands of years and, up until 1970, a larger proportion of Irish adults were employed in agriculture than any other sector. These days agriculture is on the decline, but with soaring oil prices leading to increased costs of moving goods from abroad to Ireland, we will see a shift toward smaller, but more efficient farms, which are farmed part time by farmers working other jobs to pay their way. The manufacturing sector will see a sharp decline over the next twenty years, as more and more basic assembly-type jobs succumb to the forces of globalisation and move to lower waged countries. Wealth generation therefore, year to year, must come from services. This is a very hard area to predict growth or decay in, for three reasons. First, there is very little good data on service level productivity in Ireland, so we’re not quite sure how good we are relative to our neighbours and competitors internationally. Second, service sectors tend to experience technological progress much faster than other sectors, so a large scale disruptive technology, which no one could foresee, might affect this sector in highly unexpected ways. Who twenty years ago expected to be buying groceries online?
Policies
What policies can the Irish government enact to make sure the economic possibilities my grandchildren face are as favourable as possible? Well first, they need to help me save. The more the middle class saves, long term, the more their children and their children’s children will benefit. Second, they need to make sure my children survive, by providing a health service which will make the chances of this more likely. Third, the government must ensure the natural environment my grandchildren inhabit is as conducive to their happiness as possible, while allowing service sectoral growth and general economic development to maximise the economic possibilities for my grandchildren.
August 6, 2008 1 Comment
Issuu.com or Scribd.com?
Inserting .pdf files onto websites isn’t a great idea for handouts for two reasons: first, I can’t see how many students actually download or view the thing, and second, I can’t be sure which version of the handout or whatever students are looking at.
I’m currently trying out scribd.com, but issuu.com came out today, and I’m taking a look.
Any other .pdf viewers like this anybody know of?
August 4, 2008 2 Comments
Unpleasant Economics of Medical Innovation
A profile of one of our papers appeared in Medical News Today, here’s some of the article:
Three to five million central lines are placed into people’s hearts in the United States every year. Some have complications, and these are costly. There are two methods of placement, ultrasound guided placement, and placement by hand, or the ‘landmark’ technique. Ultrasound guidance has fewer complications, but is more expensive. A recent study has asked how much would be saved in complications if every central line were placed by the ultrasound technique.
The study, “Ultrasound Guided Central Line Placement versus Standard Landmark Technique: Some Unpleasant Arithmetic for the Economics of Medical Innovation”, set out to measure the cost of ultrasound guided central line placement using Medicare reimbursement data. This study, which is published in Value in Health, has costed-out the impact of these complications nationally based on US Medicare data reveals the initial ‘cost’ of placing central lines was found to be $390,780,000 - $651,300,000 dollars per year by the landmark technique, as compared to $494,820,000 - $824,700,000 dollars per year by ultrasound guidance. The study was co-authored by Stephen Kinsella and Nicholas Young, of the University of Limerick, Ireland, and Colorado, USA.
You can read the rest of the article here, or look at the paper itself here, which will be published in Value in Health, Vol 12(1), 2009.
August 2, 2008 No Comments
data visualisation test 1
Just a test post. Here are a few charts of the same data from a paper I’m working on using different services. I’m going to use one of them in lectures next semester.
This chart from Widgenie.com.
This chart and the one below from Google Docs.
Finally, this chart from Swivel.com:
August 2, 2008 No Comments
Map of the Market
I’ve been on a bit of a data visualisation trip since talking to Liam Delaney about it a few days ago, and just came across this.
This is so cool, I might just write a course based on it.
July 25, 2008 No Comments
Modularisation isn’t the answer—having students buy into their degrees is
Liam Delaney has some interesting thoughts on this post I wrote earlier on this week. One of Liam’s points concerns increased flexibility of degree offerings, the idea being students will work full time and take modularised ‘for credit’ courses along the American model which will add up to a degree as and when the students decide to complete their course.
Liam puts it better than I could:
Modularisation will resolve some of this as students can stagger their degree more and, in many cases, embed evening courses and so on. If attendances are declining at traditional lecture formats, more flexibility of this nature seems a likely route. As someone who took a distance masters in philosophy (still completing some) while i was working on a very hectic job, I was extremely grateful for the flexibility of the format and it mellowed me out from thinking that such courses lowered the standards in higher education. They simply provide more choice and we should think more about these as options where students are clearly signalling that they do not want the traditional format. The market will then decide how much they value the qualifications.
I’ve no issue with the modular degree format, but I don’t think it’s the answer to why student attendance is dropping.
Increased choice will result in more students showing up to take their classes, but the problem will persist, in my opinion, because even if you offer the students lectures at times which suits them better, there will still be a cohort of student who haven’t bought into the idea of the degree.
One way to increase the level of ‘buy in’ is to make students financially liable for each module they take, again on the American model. When I taught in the US, each module cost close to 5 grand per student. If you missed a lecture, it was costing you 250 dollars, so you’d want a pretty good reason not to show up.
Professors knew the students were expecting a good lecture from them—you can’t go into an MBA class costing the students that much money and waffle for 40 minutes and leave, they’ll rip your head off—and so put in a better effort, again in my opinion, because of that.
This did also lead to rampant grade inflation, but even hyper inflated, the grades produced a ranking of students, which is all that mattered.
So perhaps one way to encourage attendance is to create financial incentives and disincentives to showing up and not showing up.
Behavioural economics has something to say about that, I think, see: “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” (Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein)
Update: here’s a piece of software to help stop online cheating. Sounds cool.
July 25, 2008 No Comments
Ph.Dizzled
Congratulations to my friend and colleague Donal Palcic, who passed his viva yesterday.
Congratulations to my Charlie Larkin, who also passed his viva recently.
New doctors all over the place!
Remember, don’t use your new superpowers for evil. Just don’t.
July 25, 2008 1 Comment
Writing, Typing, and Economics; JK Galbraith on Writing
Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought. It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven’t thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you do not understand. Clarity thus exposes flaws in the thought. The person who undertakes to make difficult matters clear is infringing on the sovereign right of numerous economists, sociologists, and political scientists to make bad writing the disguise for sloppy, imprecise, or incomplete thought. One can understand the resulting anger. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes were writers of crystalline clarity most of the time. Marx had great moments, as in The Communist Manifesto. Economics owes very little, if anything, to the practitioners of scholarly obscurity. If any of my California students should come to me from the learned professions, I would counsel them in all their writing to keep the confidence of their colleagues. This they should do by being always complex, always obscure, invariably a trifle vague.
July 22, 2008 No Comments
“If I’m not learning, why go?”
Image via WikipediaWhy don’t students go to class anymore?
This is a constant refrain in faculty lounges around the world. One answer MIT surveyors found was when students didn’t feel they were learning, they didn’t go.
This is certainly because the penalty to not going to a lecture is reduced by the presence of online learning materials like power point slides and handouts.
However, the old standards still apply–the researchers found students were less likely to go if they thought the lecturer wasn’t very good, and if they thought they wouldn’t learn much, which makes perfect sense, and, it should be noted, has nothing to do with technology.
Several other interesting articles on this issue have been summarised by Dr. Paul L. Latreille in this article for the economics network. They make for fascinating reading, but re run many of the arguments my colleagues and I have about the relationship between student access to notes online and their attendance. In particular, Dr. Latreille takes attendance in his lectures, and allows access to that lecture’s notes using a password system. He found this strategy increased student attendance throughout the term.
My stand on issuing notes, etc, to students is pretty clear from this website. I give students everything I can think of to help them learn—lecture notes, handouts, podcasts, readings, coursepacks, software, solutions to past tests, links to current and past events that I think help them learn, and more. I don’t care where they get the information from, I just want to see them learn the material. I happen to think the best place to do that is inside of a lecture hall, but if a student decides to spend their time elsewhere, then so be it.
So I don’t take attendance at any lectures, and I won’t. Ever. I don’t remove bits of power point slides or other reductive strategies like that to make students show up. I’ll try to tell a decent story as best I can on the day, and hope most of them make it out of bed on time to hear it.
I will, however, quite cheerfully fail people who don’t make the grade, precisely because of this laissez faire policy.
Here are Dr Lattreille’s references in his case study, all of which are fascinating.
Barrett, R., Rainer, A. and Marczyk, O. (2007) “Managed Learning Environments and an Attendance Crisis?“, The Electronic Journal of e-Learning, 5(1), pp. 1-10
Burd, E. and Hodgson, B. (2006) “Attendance and Attainment: A Five Year Study“, Innovation in Teaching And Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 5(2)
Clay, T. and Breslow, L. (2006) “Why Students Don’t Attend Class“, MIT Faculty Newsletter, XVIII(4)
Clearly-Holdforth, J. (2007) “Student non-attendance in higher education. A phenomenon of student apathy or poor pedagogy?“, DIT Level 3, 5
Related articles
July 21, 2008 No Comments
Yet another beautiful sentence
It’s official: sucking dead-dinosaur juice out of the ground and burning it is officially uncool.
Tags: Oil, Credit, Post+Oil+World, Cool+Phrases
July 5, 2008 No Comments
Ten Lessons for Micro Costing in Health Economics
––Oscar Wilde
July 4, 2008 No Comments
Best Sentence you’ll read all day.
Wired editor Chris Anderson has recently claimed there’s so much data available on every topic we don’t need theory anymore—just looking at the data is enough. One reaction:
Like finding your wife rubbing butter onto a naked clown shaving your dog, there’s just so much wrong with that it’s hard to know where to begin.
Tags: General, Scientific Method, Awesome Phrases
July 3, 2008 No Comments
Ul Teaching and Learning Presentation of Text Message Doo Hickey
Here’s the presentation I gave at UL’s annual Technology in Teaching and Learning conference on this piece of software.
Slides (made with 280slides.com as an experiment)
June 7, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-05-08
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The impact of healthcare interventions on health utility values is most frequently measured using a preference-based instrument. Each of the available instruments instructs the respondent to report their health status over different recall periods ranging
May 8, 2008 No Comments
