A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
Suggested by Philip Salter, founder of The Entrepreneurs Network
If pushed to come up with a shortlist of interesting dinner party guests, Mark Zuckerberg, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen would all have a decent shot of getting an invite. Luckily the've had the conversation without me needing to cook.
For those familiar with Collison and Cowen's shared thesis and their wider views, this interview might not offer much that's new (besides the not insignificant pleasure of seeing their intellectual world collide with Zuck's). But for everyone else, it's a worthy use of an hour (or perhaps less if you skim the transcript).
So what's the big idea? There are quite a few, but Tyler expresses one that too many people fail to grasp: that there is connection between the need to build more homes in cities and the prospects for young people in rural areas:
"Let's say you want to improve the lot of people in West Virginia. One growth enhancing way of doing that is to make it easier to build, say, in Washington D.C. and the Bay Area. Right now, to move from West Virginia, say, to Menlo Park, it's extraordinarily expensive. You can't just pick up and show up here and hope to get a job washing dishes the way one might have done in America 50 years ago. So by having more building, more economic growth, also more GDP, it would increase more opportunity. So economic growth and opportunity – they do tend to be correlated, and sometimes the problem is we don't have enough growth, not that we have too much."
Teacher effects on student achievement and height – a Cautionary Tale
Suggested by Sam Dumitriu, research director of The Entrepreneurs Network
How do you distinguish between good and bad teachers and schools? You might look at student achievement, which school or class has the best exam results. There’s an obvious pitfall: private schools, for instance, might get better grades, but you can’t attribute them solely to the teaching. Students from wealthier households may be more likely to be privately tutored, to have more attentive parents, and face fewer environmental hazards (e.g. air pollution). To use a footballing analogy, winning the league with Manchester City isn’t the same as winning the league with Leicester City. (Coincidentally, the Economist have a fun piece on football management along similar lines.)
Looking at value-added, the difference between a student’s predicted grades and their actual achievement might be a better approach. However, a new study offers a cautionary tale. Using administrative student data from New York City, they use commonly estimated value-added models to an outcome teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height and find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement.
Science funders gamble on grant lotteries
Suggested by Philip Salter, founder of The Entrepreneurs Network
For many, the idea of a lottery for science funding will seem instinctively unfair. After all, shouldn't the best ideas win? But as reported in Nature, a growing number of research agencies are assigning money randomly.
The argument is that above a threshold, it's wasteful trying to rank (nearly) equally good grant applicants. As economist Margit Osterloh explains: “Referees and all kinds of evaluation bodies do not have really good working criteria,”... while "random chance will create more openness to ideas that are not in the mainstream."
Randomness has also been shown to reduce biases and Osterloh thinks it might be good for scientists' egos: “If you know you have got a grant or a publication which is selected partly randomly then you will know very well you are not the king of the Universe, which makes you more humble,” she says. “This is exactly what we need in science.”
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