How much do institutions matter

According to Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (disclaimer - I’m going only by the book blurb and my previous reading of their papers), much of the failure can be attributed to institutions. While there is no doubt that institutions matter, the question is how much do they matter?

Jared Diamond writes a good review:
While institutions are undoubtedly part of the explanation, they leave much unexplained: some of those richer temperate countries are notorious for their histories of bad institutions (think of Algeria, Argentina, Egypt, and Libya), while some of the tropical countries (e.g., Costa Rica and Tanzania) have had relatively more honest governments.

Here are some other thoughts:
Consider the following tropical countries: Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Philippines. Acemoglu et. al.’s previous work would indicates that these tropical locations would have similar rates of mortality from malaria and hence the colonial experiences would be similar in terms of the type of institutions that were set up. Their data set does not have Philippines and Malaysia and Singapore share the same mortality rate although the rate for Indonesia is 10 times the rate for Malaysia. (Why?  David Albouy notes that this is because there was a war in Indonesia.)

My prior would be that these mortality rates from disease would be fairly similar and that the data point for Indonesia is conflated by war - and assuming that they were, then these countries should all have the similar growth experiences. Yet they don’t. The obvious difference is Malaysia vs. Singapore - but the Philippines (colonized first by the Spanish and then the Americans) and Indonesia (by the Dutch) also have had different experiences.


The counterpoint to this would be that it is institutions just not the classification that Acemoglu et. al. assigns (i.e. extractive versus stable) and that would be cultural differences i.e. British vs. Dutch vs. Spanish. Of course this comparison could also mean that the Dutch and Spanish were more extractive in nature compared to the British.

What RCTs can reveal

From the NBER WP:
Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves by Rema Hanna, Esther Duflo, Michael Greenstone

Abstract:
It is conventional wisdom that it is possible to reduce exposure to indoor air pollution, improve health outcomes, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in the rural areas of developing countries through the adoption of improved cooking stoves. This belief is largely supported by observational field studies and engineering or laboratory experiments. However, we provide new evidence, from a randomized control trial conducted in rural Orissa, India (one of the poorest places in India), on the benefits of a commonly used improved stove that laboratory tests showed to reduce indoor air pollution and require less fuel. We track households for up to four years after they received the stove. While we find a meaningful reduction in smoke inhalation in the first year, there is no effect over longer time horizons. We find no evidence of improvements in lung functioning or health and there is no change in fuel consumption (and presumably greenhouse gas emissions). The difference between the laboratory and field findings appear to result from households’ revealed low valuation of the stoves. Households failed to use the stoves regularly or appropriately, did not make the necessary investments to maintain them properly, and usage rates ultimately declined further over time. More broadly, this study underscores the need to test environmental and health technologies in real-world settings where behavior may temper impacts, and to test them over a long enough horizon to understand how this behavioral effect evolves over time.

Thoughts:
An incredible amount of work went into this in terms of data collection.
Forcing technological adoption when the population isn’t ready for it will not lead to any measurable impact.

What do computer science majors learn

I’ve been working as a SAS programmer for almost 20 years even though I was not a CS major. (I was a BA and PhD in economics.) Perusing some computer science course websites over the years I have been surprised at the following:

1. There appears to be very little programming. The main decision an instructor has to make is whether to pick C++ or Java.
2. There appears to be a lot on algorithms, complexity, P=NP, etc. and applying programming to them.
3. There appears to be some concentration on applying programming to problem solving not related to algorithms e.g. databases.

From an outsider’s perspective this seems to imply that CS majors learn very little in terms of practical programming in the job market:

1. Making code efficient and readable is more or less left to company/industry standards. Perhaps this is understandable due to the fact that different industries/companies use different languages.
2. Software requirements gathering is an art to be learned as you go along even though getting this information is almost an important as coding.
3. There is very little being taught or introduced in terms of software project management (not the budgeting etc.) but the cycle through which a software product is created - requirements, specifications, prototyping, change management, etc.
4. Working in teams e.g. eXtreme programming, etc.

Reading Ed Yourdon’s Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, I was surprised at how much the above matters but doesn’t seem to be taught or even introduced. The CS curriculum in college seems to be targeted toward finding the innovative and creative spark that can develop something new whereas the nitty gritty things that many data processing projects require are left to companies to pick up. Companies almost have to retrain CS majors. Perhaps vocational schools and community colleges teach this nitty grity but I doubt it. It is not surprising then that programmers who come out of college seem so unprepared in the real world. Thus  There may be a role for an industry sponsored CS curriculum that targets these details.

There aren’t that many who are going to be the ones to come up with a new algorithm or a new software product but perhaps it is because we think we might be the one who will come up with the next Windows or Java or Facebook that we ignore the boring institutional details. The romance and excitement of two or three guys coding like hell on little to no-sleep, surviving on Red Bull and stale pizza is so ingrained in us that we think that this is the nom. Perhaps this is why most software projects adopt a code like hell approach almost by default.

Teaching programming in middle school

One the things K1 will need next year is a TI-84 calculator. This calculator retails for $140, $99 at Amazon for now without shipping. At a time when many kids have computers (at home) which come with Microsoft Excel as well as a plethora of freely available software such as R, Python, Scilab, etc. (OpenOffice is also a free spreadsheet program.) I wonder about the utility of such a pricey calculator.

The only advantage that I can see is that students are able to bring with them into an exam hall. At a time when programming skills seem to be gaining importance and it is possiblel that even college graduates in economics don’t know how to use Excel, it seems questionable for schools in general to adopt a math curriculum that adheres to the use of such an archaic instrument.

I find it the whole middle school math curriculum where she’s at (it’s the IB math curriculum) decidedly backward. Even when graphs and plots are taught there is very little hands on use of software to explore lines and curves. (Graph paper is fine for the beginning, but after awhile it just gets tedious - and that’s what computers are for.)

How hard is it to teach programming at the middle school level? I have no doubt that the concepts are hard - which is why an early introduction even to Excel and VBA is essential. Alice is one organization that is trying to make programming teachable at the high school level. Storytelling Alice is an option for the middle school level but doesn’t seem to have made much inroads.

In general, I am disappointed not only in the math curriculum but in the way programming instruction is being taught at the high school level.


Update: Duke University has some nice Alice teaching material.

A more reasonable statement of climate change uncertainty

From the same magazine that drew my contempt:

The main uncertainties involve what might happen as carbon-dioxide levels reach 450 ppm and above. In particular, the question is how and when “positive feedback” loops would kick in, so that the hotter things get, the faster they will get even hotter. …
“The reality of it is that in many cases, there may not be any fixed threshold for ‘irreversible’ change,” Michael Mann told me. “What we have with rising CO2 levels in general is a dramatically increasing probability of serious and deleterious change in our climate.” He went down the list: more frequent, severe, and sustained heat waves, like those that affected Russia and the United States this summer; more frequent and destructive hurricanes and floods; more frequent droughts, like the “thousand-year drought” that has devastated Australian agriculture; and altered patterns of the El Niño phenomenon, which will change rainfall patterns in the Americas. In other cases, he said, there could be important thresholds. For example, the possibility of dramatic rises in ocean levels, which could affect the habitability of New York, London, Shanghai, Miami, the entire Netherlands, and many other modern conurbations, along with coastal areas in India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. “It would be nice to know where such thresholds are so we can avoid crossing them,” Mann said. “We can’t know that. What we do know for certain is that with each fraction of a degree of warming, the probability of such potentially catastrophic outcomes goes up.”

When skepticism is stupid

Among intelligent nonexperts who have weighed in on climate change, Freeman Dyson has become, now that Michael Crichton is dead, perhaps our most prominent global-warming skeptic. Charlie Rose began his interview with questions about the climate. Dyson answered that he remained very skeptical about the dangers of global warming. He did not believe the pronouncements of the experts. He did not claim to be an expert himself, so he would not argue the details with anybody; he had not given much time to the issue and did not pretend to know the real answers, but what he knew for sure was that the global-warming experts did not know the answers, either.

Dyson did not deny that the world was getting warmer. What he doubted was the models of the climatologists, and the grave consequences they predicted, and the supposition that global warming is bad. “I went to Greenland myself, where the warming is most extreme,” he said. “And it’s quite spectacular, of course, what you see in Greenland. But what is also true is, the people there love it. The people there hope it continues. It makes their lives a lot more pleasant.”

Dyson argued that melting ice and the resulting sea-level rise is no cause for alarm. He said that the release of increasing volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a very good thing, as it makes plants grow better. The important thing to remember, he said, is that the planet is warming mainly in places that are cold, and at night rather than during the day, so that the phenomenon is essentially making the climate more even, rather than just making everything hotter.

“Have we been kind to the planet?” Rose asked at one point.

“Yes. I would say, on the whole, yes.”

When Rose expressed surprise at this answer, the physicist backtracked slightly.

“No, the fact is, of course, we’ve done a lot of damage to the planet, but we also repair the damage. I grew up in England, and England was far more filthy then than it is now. We had the industrial revolution first, so England was much more polluted than the United States ever has been, and England now is quite comparatively clean. You can go to London and your collar doesn’t get black in one day.”

The question that phrases itself now, in the minds of many, is: how could someone as smart as Freeman Dyson be so dumb?

This is from the Atlantic. Read the rest for a perspective on what the author thinks. The author points out that Dyson is wrong in the claims that he makes on carbon dioxide being good for plants, as well as the fact that the planet is better off. No disagreement from me here. However, he makes no pronouncements on whether it is good to inject some skepticism of models of sea level rises.

The author’s tone reminds me of the time of the run-up to the Iraq war. The experts declared that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Any disagreement with the experts and the Bush regime was prima facie evidence of disloyalty and stupidity. The author appeals to the same one percent doctrine of Dick Cheney. If there is even one percent probability that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction we should invade Iraq and render the country impotent. In the author’s case, we should expend all our resources on reversing the effects of climate change especially when there is a one percent chance of catastrophe. Anyone who disagrees with this statement is putting the world in mortal danger through his stupidity.

For all the diatribe against financial models and its failures as well as its role in the collapse of the economy, it would seem that we should be viewing expert models of climate change with a healthy grain of skepticism - yet any skepticism is labeled as dumb as though skepticism cannot possibly be allowed in the discussion.

Subjects and skills

Noah Smith’s post (HT: MR) on what students actually gain from college is a reminder that not all acquired skills are necessarily related to subject matter or academics. His list is the following:

1) Motivation,
2) Perspective, and
3) Human networks

I’m not in full agreement with his analysis except perhaps for #3 but it served as a reminder that in my post that learning classical music seems to take all the fun out of learning music - it’s not necessarily about the music. M claims that learning the notes and to play teachers perseverance and discipline. Someone else claimed that if nothing, all the recitals that one has to go through teaches confidence through public appearances.