Tag Archives: Education

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. You might have heard that just giving the poor cash, no strings attached, is all the rage in the effective aid community. Some people have suggested that if organizations want to give (more expensive) in-kind aid (food, cattle), they should first show that it’s more effective than cash. Dev Patel just recirculated a relevant paper (summary here) from Cunha, De Giorgi, and Jayachandran, who tested giving cash vs. in-kind food aid...

The three r's plus c. Reading, writing, 'rithmetic, and coding.Wholeheartedly agree. Digital natives need to be digitally literate.I would a reasoning to the three r's.Coding relates closely to reasoning in addition to acquiring symbolic literacy in a computer language. It is also a bridge to mathematical reasoning.Bloomberg ViewKids Should Know How to Code The Editors

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. We don’t do enough thinking in the U.S., much less in developing countries, about end of life “palliative” care, helping people with difficult terminal illnesses suffer less. But a lot of suffering happens at the end of life; if your goal is to alleviate suffering, pain management is doable. The BBC has a very interesting story of the woman who singlehandedly brought palliative care to Mongolia. David Evans summarizes a post and...

I’ve noted a few times that the political center needs to come to grips with research on genes and intelligence or we risk ceding the field to people with scary impulses and frightening goals. I think something like what the center-left position should be is reasonably well articulated by Richard J. Haier. Haier is a professor emeritus in the University of California at Irvine medical school, editor in chief of the journal Intelligence, and he was one of the...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. I know this week for many of us it’s been hard to pay attention to what else has been going on in the world, what with the release of Stata 15 and all, but I’ll try to help with some stuff you may have missed: The World Bank’s Hedy Sladovich &Emanuela Galasso put together several very accessibly written one-paragraph summaries of recent findings on what works in early childhood development. It pairs nicely with this (mostly...

In this post, I want to look at the murder rate, by state. I ran a regression with the state murder rate for 2015 as the dependent variable, and literally threw the kitchen sink at it: demographics, weaponry, income, education, population density, etc. Basically, if its something some reasonable percentage of the population believes matters, and I could find data for it, I threw it into the hopper. I also included variables relating to immigration status. The...

Over at the web site of the Calgary Homeless Foundation, I’ve written a review of the recent Alberta budget. Points I make in the blog post include the following: -Alberta remains the lowest-taxed province in Canada. -Alberta’s net debt-to-GDP ratio remains the lowest in Canada. -For the third consecutive year, the Rachel Notley government announced a tuition freeze for (domestic) post-secondary students. -No major changes were announced to social assistance benefit levels. Thus, a “single...

The Master of Arts degree in Economics at John Jay College is a new graduate program providing both practical skills for work in economic policy, and a foundation for study at the PhD level. Located in the heart of Manhattan, it is one of a handful of graduate economics programs in the country that makes alternative perspectives a core part of the curriculum. Students at John Jay will study the history of economic thought, Marxian and Post Keynesian theory, economic history, the economics...

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Last week, I went to my son's graduation ceremony. He has just completed a B.Sc in sound & light echnology at Derby University. So he is one of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) graduates that we are told this country so badly needs.As I watched the graduates from the College of Engineering and Technology walking past the dignitaries on the stage, I became aware of a huge gender gap. The vast majority of the young people filing on to that stage were boys. I...