Also, the study of history leads to closed-mindedness. After taking an American history course, students become considerably less open to the idea that Millard Fillmore might have been Abraham Lincoln’s vice president.

Meanwhile, the study of chemistry makes people less ambitious. Chemistry students are particularly unwilling to invest in lead-to-gold conversion kits, even when they are conveniently offered over the Internet.

Geology students are just plain nasty. Among all majors, they are the least likely to participate in coordinated meditation exercises for the prevention of earthquakes — even when the organizers estimate that hundreds of thousands of lives might be at stake.

And economics majors are so greedy that they are particularly unlikely to donate to left-wing interest groups that seek to undermine capitalism.

I made all of those up except for the last one, which I got from University of Washington Lecturer Yoram Bauman’s contribution to yesterday’s New York Times, where he actually (and this part I swear to God I am not making up!!!) draws the conclusion that students who have studied the merits of capitalism are among the least likely to support its detractors and then manages to conclude that this is because economics students are greedy.

What can one possibly say? Did no alternative hypothesis present itself to the editors of the New York Times? Did it not occur to them, for example, that economics courses might, you know, teach something about critical thinking? Except, of course, when those courses are taught by the likes of Yoram Bauman.

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For clarity: When Stigler refers to an academic “field”, he is referring to a sub-discipline. Economics is a discipline; industrial organization and public finance are fields. Physics is a discipline; particle physics and solid state physics are fields.

We cannot build universities that are uniformly excellent … I shall seek to establish this conclusion directly on the basis of two empirical propositions.

The first proposition is that there are at most fourteen really first-class men in any field, and more commonly there are about six. Where, you ask, did I get these numbers? I consider your question irrelevant, but I shall pause to notice the related question: Is the proposition true? And here I ask you to do your homework: gather with your colleagues and make up a numbered list of the twenty-five best men in one of your fields — and remember that these fields are specialized. Would your department be first-class if it began its staffing in each field with the twenty-fifth, or even the fifteenth, name? You have in fact done this work on appointment committees. I remember no cases of an embarrassment of riches, and I remember many where finding five names involved a shift to “promising young men”, not all of whom keep their promises. I leave it to the professors of moral philosophy and genetics to tell us whether the paucity of first-class men is a sort of scientific myopia, a love of invidious ranking, or a harsh outcome of imprudent marriages. But the proposition is true.

My second proposition is that no one school has much in the way of financial resources … No school, not even the richest, has a wages-fund sufficient to hire one of the six best men in each field within the traditional arts and sciences. Fifty or a hundred institutions seriously seek such men, and even the fiftieth in wealth — which is about one-fourth as rich as the first in wealth — can bid enough for one or two such leaders to make them prohibitively expensive to others. The richest museums cannot acquire all the Rembrandts, and the richest school cannot hire all the leaders.

…

Universities will make their peace with the forces of specialization by making a choice that falls somewhere between two poles: a universal mediocrity, at one end; a select and none too lengthy list of truly distinguished departments, at the other. I diffidently interpret the tradition of Chicago to be that which I, too, desire: the preservation of pre-eminence in a dozen of the most durable and basic disciplines, with at least respectable competence in the remainder of the basic disciplines — and nothing more.

…

But the goal of selective eminence cannot be pursued effectively if one ignores its selectivity. The goal cannot be achieved if we fail to be ruthless with proposals to increase our comprehensiveness: it is a fact of life that a vote for a school of journalism or an institute of automation is a vote to get rid of one or two first-class men in physics or anthropology or law. The goal cannot be achieved if we insist that every department be almost pre-eminent: a vote to hire two expensive number-twenty men is a vote to be rid of a number-one man. These are different ways of saying that we must steer the difficult course between easy achievement and romantic impossibility. Some women are not fastidious, and others insist upon marrying only perfect men. I know Chicago will not become a harlot; I do not want it to become a spinster.

I would add a word concerning a very troublesome lot who insist upon intruding into the discussions of their betters — I refer to the students. The student cannot achieve the best possible instruction in every specialized field at any one institution; this I shall now treat as a corollary. Though a student does not study every specialized field even within one department, he would often profit by dividing his time between institutions whose strengths complement one another. There would be much merit in the development, at the graduate level, of spending a half year or a year at a second institution. This practice, you will recall, was prevalent during the fourteenth century; and, on balance, transportation has improved since then (aside from parking). The student would also gain perspective by living in a different intellectual atmosphere, and the professors — for whom things must be good if they are to be good for the country — would also gain by the diversity of students.

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This seminar probes how economic thinkers from the right and left view human behavior and the proper role of government in society. Each week, seminar participants read and discuss a brief, nontechnical, policy-oriented book by a prominent economist. Regular writing assignments are also required. Students should have some background in economics, such as an AP economics course in high school or simultaneous enrollment in Social Analysis 10.

The ten books on tap for this semester are:

• The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner
• Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, by John McMillan
• Thinking Strategically, by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff
• Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman
• Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, by Arthur Okun
• Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
• How the Economy Works, by Roger E.A. Farmer
• The Return of Depression Economics, by Paul Krugman
• The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek
• The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Bryan Caplan
• The Big Questions, by Steven Landsburg

What would your list have been?

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I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it.

This is from her valedictory address to her fellow graduates; you can read the entire speech on her blog.

What do you think?

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I have never tried to count the times I have read a newspaper article explaining that students are bored with math that has no visible practical application, and follows with an example of a teacher, or club, that rectifies the situation in some novel and engaging way.

In the present case a class has built a sculpture that resembles a graph of a modulated wave motion. Of all the practical, real-world
applications of mathematics! It is as practical as a snowman.

Why doesn’t anyone ask for real-world applications of table tennis? What a bore any game must be, that has no real-world application! Why do kids stand for it? Ping-pong again? Ugh.

But I can think of something: Let’s all make a model of a ping-pong ball in the school yard, seventy feet high, blocking all the entrances and thus preventing all us students from entering the (ugh) school. Then we can take our fishing poles and torn straw hats out from under our beds and, with the hats on our heads and fishing poles over our shoulders, all traipse together down the dusty road to Norman Rockwell’s house.

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An anonymous math department chairman reports on his own strategy for cutting down on the workload. He believes that one of the most important determinants of a successful career is luck. So each year, he randomly rejects half the applicants without even reading their folders. That way, he eliminates the unlucky ones.

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A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory…Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music”. It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music…are considered very advanced topics and generally put off till college, and more often graduate school.

As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language—to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key…One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”

…

Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this sort of nightmare.

So begins Paul Lockhart’s scathing critique of how mathematics is taught in this country, A Mathematician’s Lament. The book is an expansion of Lockhart’s essay of the same title. I encourage you to read the essay, buy the book, and share your thoughts in comments.

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Today I read it. Wow, was I wrong. This is Caitlin Flanagan at her blistering best. I’ll offer you a few choice quotes, but my real recommendation is to leave now and go read the entire piece.

With the Edible Schoolyard..the idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a social agenda has reached rock bottom. This kind of misuse of instructional time…has been employed to cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours over the years, so that they might be indoctrinated in whatever the fashionable idea of the moment or the school district might be. One year it’s hygiene and the another it’s anti-Communism; in one city it’s safe-sex “outercourse” and in another it’s abstinence-only education.

Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it?…If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: A way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.

Until our kids have a decent chance at mastering the essential skills and knowledge that they will need to graduate from high school, we should devote every resource and every moment of their academic day to helping them realize that life-changing goal. Otherwise we become complicit—through our best intentions—in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, undereducated underclass, but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its state.

There’s much more where that came from. Why are you still here?

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Question 6. When Eve works, she produces exactly one apple per hour. Adam is completely unproductive and can produce nothing at all. Eve’s income is taxed at a flat percentage rate, with the proceeds delivered to Adam. What determines the optimal tax rate? What does “optimal” mean here, and what philosophical justification would many economists give for adopting this tax rate?

To make the problem concrete, you can assume that both Adam and Eve, if it were both possible and necessary, would be willing to work up to 1 hour for 1 apple, up to 2 hours for 4 apples, up to 3 hours for 9 apples, and up to x hours for x² apples. Now what is the optimal tax rate? (Your answer should be a number.)

Question 7. Jack and Jill play a game. First, each flips a coin. After seeing their own coins (but not each others’), each player (separately) says either “Red” or “Black”. If they name opposite colors, then the Black-sayer gets $4 and the Red-sayer gets nothing. If both say Black, then they both get either $5 (if both flipped heads) or $10 (otherwise). If they both say Red, then they both get either nothing (if both flipped heads) or $20 (otherwise). Assume both players play optimally. If Jack flips heads, what is the probability that he says “Black”? What if Jack flips tails?

Edited to add (in response to a comment from Ron): Assume that neither Jack nor Jill says either Red or Black with probability zero.

Question 8. The five Dukes of Earl are scheduled to arrive at the royal palace on each of the first five days of May. Duke One is scheduled to arrive on the first day of May, Duke Two on the second, etc. Each Duke, upon arrival, can either kill the king or support the king. If he kills the king, he takes the king’s place, becomes the new king, and awaits the next Duke’s arrival. If he supports the king, all subsequent Dukes cancel their visits. A Duke’s first priority is to remain alive, and his second priority is to become king. Who is king on May 6?

Question 9. Suppose the government mails every taxpayer a check for $300. Under a variety of assumptions, discuss the short run and long run effects on a variety of economic variables such as output, employment, the interest rate and the trade balance.

Question 10. Suppose you want to study the effect of education on wages. You have wage data for 100 pairs of siblings, where one member of each pair attended college and one didn’t. Based on these data, you make some estimates. Now you learn that all 100 pairs of siblings are in fact twins. Does this increase or decrease your confidence in your results? Make some arguments in both directions.

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I thought my readers here might be interested in seeing the written exam. It’s by no means comprehensive; entire areas of economics are omitted. Instead, it’s supposed to test core material and ways of thinking that I believe should mostly be second nature to any top economics graduate.

Where necessary, I’ve translated some of these questions from the original economese to something approximating English. Occasionally, a little has been lost in the translation, but not, I think, too much.

There were ten questions on the exam. I’ll post five today and the remaining five next week.

Here, then, is Part I:

Question 1. When the price of peanuts rises, Frieda reduces her root beer consumption. If Frieda’s income rises, will her root beer consumption go up or down?

Question 2. Bananas cost $6 apiece, except for members of the banana club, who pay $2 apiece.

• Given full knowledge of Thomas’s prefereces, explain how you’d compute his willingness to pay for a membership in the banana club.
• Given knowledge only of Thomas’s demand curve for bananas, explain how you’d estimate his willingness to pay for a membership in the banana club.
• Under what circumstances is your estimate an overestimate? Under what circumstances is it an underestimate?

Question 3. Snidely Whiplash owns all the grocery stores and all the houses in the Yukon Territory. He charges a competitive price for groceries, and rents the houses at the highest price residents (who are all identical) are willing to pay. (If he charged any more, they’d all leave town). True or False: If Snidely raises the price of groceries, he’ll have to lower the price of housing, so he’ll be no better off than before.

Question 4. Discuss the consequences for economic efficiency of giving your father a Barnes and Noble gift card, under various assumptions about how he uses (or doesn’t use) the card.

Question 5. Rank these taxes in order of how much you’d dislike paying them:

• A tax on consumption
• A tax on wages
• A tax on income (including wages, interest and dividends)

Assume that the tax rates are adjusted so that your total tax bill is the same in each case.

(Edited to add): At the request of a reader, I’ve also posted the questions in the orginal economese.

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