Monday, though, he got up my nose [no link -- sorry -- stuff.co.nz doesn't actually want you to find anything easily]. He was discussing the new DSM-5, which has courted controversy by redefining psychological pathologies. We are all — well, half of us — apparently in need of treatment by the very people who decide whether we need treatment.

In his brief history of the DSM, Brockie said that psychology moved away from Freud to science. The meaning of this is clear: there is real, true knowledge that is produced through science, and then there’s all that other stuff that people believe without it actually being true, and that’s where Freud (and by extension, Lacan) belongs.

There are two enormous problems with this. The first is that this statement is glaring proof of the social production of scientific knowledge. I’d venture to guess that Brockie has not actually studied Freud, and has little knowledge of the split between Freudian psychotherapy and Anglo-American psychology. What he knows is likely to be what he’s been told, the stories he’s heard along the way. Science proceeds not only ‘funeral by funeral’ but clique by clique, lunch table by lunch table. Waving the ‘Freud’s not science’ flag isn’t so much a statement of fact but a not-so-secret handshake that marks him as one of gang.

And what a gang it is. They are in charge of funding, and funding allows science research. That’s the second problem with Brockie’s statement. They’ll say they want investigator-led research; they’ll say they want to give researchers the ability to follow their curiosity and investigate all manner of topics, regardless of where they might lead. The truth is, they are perfectly happy to strangle research in the crib if they don’t like it.

I know this, because they have strangled mine, repeatedly, while intoning ancient rites of scientific concern. They have just done the same to novel research proposed by a friend and colleague. We can show the theoretical basis for the work, we can demonstrate the linkages to international peer-reviewed literature, we can link the primary research to the hypothesis — we can do all the things these quartermasters of science demand. And then, they say that it isn’t ‘science’ because the science hasn’t been done because it hasn’t been funded.

It doesn’t help that we are talking about inter-disciplinary research – research that falls somewhere in between the disciplinary silos. Call it economic psychology, or psychological economics, or decision sciences if you like, but it is just the latest area of research in which we develop theories of human behaviour and test them. I’ve tried to explain it here (pdf), Andrew Dickson tried a different angle here, and yet another perspective is here. And still we get things like this 2012 article saying ‘Surprisingly little scholarly work has linked food and Lacan’.

Maybe that has something to do with funding decisions rather than lack of curious researchers. You want to say that Freud is not science? Give me a few a million dollars over several years to do the research. If I fail, you can have your talking point.

The scientists controlling the money are like Abraham, driven by Yahweh to demonstrate their obedience by sacrificing the young Isaac. But Yahweh is I Am Who Am, certain in His existence. Science can also be a jealous and uncertain Master, a Cronus who must devour his young to protect his reign. When he guides Abraham’s hand, he doesn’t stay the knife.

A surprising 14% of high-school graduates earn at least as much as people with bachelor’s degrees, and 17% of those with bachelor’s degrees outearn compatriots with professional degrees, the authors found.

The study in question is here, a Brookings Institutions report about the variability of returns to education.

The main thing I wanted to point out was the framing of these numbers. Research has shown that the way that percentages are presented changes how people react to them. Is it a 20% chance of failure or 80% chance of success? Is it a 1% probability of damage or a 1-in-a-hundred chance? It matters.

So let’s flip it around. Are you surprised that 86% of high school graduates earn less than people with bachelor’s degrees? How about that 83% of people with bachelor’s degrees earn less than graduates with professional degrees? If you were playing the percentages, would those results encourage you to get a degree?

What the authors are telling us is that earnings by degree have a distribution around some mean. There is some distance between the means, and the overlap of the distributions isn’t all that large (15%-ish). I haven’t gone through the report, but the results would be affected by whether they are doing a sort of t-test of the two distributions, or doing something like analysing joint distributions of two random variables.

Does this mean we are sending too many people to university? I’d suggest we don’t have enough information. If we think of it as a comparison of two distributions, what would we be trying to do? Are we trying to:

1. create enough distance between the means so that the overlap is small? But why should we encourage a larger premium for education when on average the benefit-cost ratio of education is already around 5?
2. shrink the left-hand tail of the distribution for the more-highly educated? But how do we reliably identify these students, and should we give up on majors or degrees that don’t have a high enough return on investment?
3. do something with the right-hand tail of the high school graduate distribution? But what do we do with them? They have done well as high school graduates — it doesn’t then logically follow that they should have more education.

I don’t see that there’s necessarily a problem. The fact that a small-ish percentage of people don’t get much from a university education means that we are casting the net wide enough to bring in most of the people who potentially would. The fact that some high-school graduates can still make a good living shows that there are still opportunities for all kinds of people, not just top STEM graduates from top schools.

Bets don’t always pay off; investments sometimes fail. But if I were playing blackjack and winning 86% of the time, I’d be at the table all night.

General observations:

• Under ten grand — quite variable projects; some are easy and some are impossible
• $35,000 —  a really horrible number. The client wants a $50k project but doesn’t have the budget
• $40,000 — oddly, usually much better than $35k. If the client had wanted a $50k project, they would have found the extra money. They really just want $40k of work
• $80,000 — sweet. This is a great project size. Enough budget to do something interesting, small enough that admin effort is low, reasonable client expectations
• $90,000 — client wants $100,000 project but that’s a scary number
• Over $100 grand — it all depends, so manage carefully.

For those of you who are visual, I came up with the following chart to show average effort:reward ratio by project size (solid line) and the spread around the average (dotted line). Values over 1.00 mean the effort is greater than the reward; values under mean the opposite.

On several recordings, James Brown calls to Maceo Parker to take his solo. Oh, man, can Maceo play — the pacing, the expressiveness, the musicality — no wonder he’s gigged with everyone.

On ‘Cold Sweat’, as Maceo is finishing up, Brown asks, should we give the drummer some? Wikipedia says this is the first recording in which Brown does this. This call for a solo highlights the importance of the drummer for the whole enterprise. Maceo can play with the rhythm and Brown can give us all his famous ‘uhs’ and ‘good Gods’ because that drum is keeping things together, keeping it tight.

Now, let’s shift to some economics (sorry, but you knew it was coming). I’m involved in a few projects right now that are mainly modelling projects. We aren’t doing primary research in the sense of going out and collecting data and producing new empirical findings. Instead, we are organising existing information. We are using not only economic data, like price elasticity of demand, but also information from other disciplines, like dose-response functions for medicines or nitrogen leaching rates for different land uses.

It occurred to me that we are the drummers in these projects. We have a particular set of skills — keeping information organised and finding ways of making different types of data fit together. But the value of the drummer isn’t the particular beat they’re laying down. Their value is to provide a groove that the rest of the music can revolve around.

The drums provide a solid structure, and that’s what a good model does. As a result, the rest of the information makes more sense, in the same way that a horn solo makes more sense once the beat is established. A good model also demonstrates which parameters are important or which relationships determine the outcomes, just like a solid beat lets the singer shine.

Sometimes, we modellers even get the spotlight; sometimes, even the drummer gets him some.

Canterbury gets a couple of extra pages for the earthquake impacts. Very sobering to see tourism and education series just plummet.

Here’s one graph I felt like sharing. It appealed to me, thinking about the New Zealand economy like a Fibonacci sequence:

NZ as sum of regions, MBIE Regional Economic Activity Report

When the student arrived an hour late to the professor’s brand management class, Galloway told him to leave. Later the student emailed Galloway, explaining that he was shopping around for classes, which is why he was late: “It was more probable that my tardiness was due to my desire to sample different classes rather than sheer complacency.”

The student, it seems, really did believe he was customer of the university. He was shopping around, trying to find the product that best met his needs. And why shouldn’t he think that? The metaphor has been around for a long time, and the more students are asked to contribute to the cost of their education, the greater currency it has. I came across this article in the Times Higher Education, from 1999:

Universities face a wave of student litigation because of a failure to grasp their changing contractual relationship with fee-paying undergraduates, an academic lawyer has said.

…

Mr Birtwistle, a principal lecturer, found that only a minority of universities surveyed understood the potential impact of the introduction of fees. “There can be no doubt now that students hold a consumer contract with their university,” he said. Mr Birtwistle said that now students pay their fees directly means they are, in legal terms, buying a service. They are therefore entitled to private law redress for breaches of contract.

‘Students are our customers’ goes from being a business-school metaphor to being a statement of civil law. Students who are dissatisfied have therefore appealed to the courts for redress — for not providing promised support, for a poor grade (the case failed), for not getting a job, for failing to provide courses in a timely fashion [can't find a link].

Looking through the various cases, it is clear that courts do not want to meddle with academic issues. They tend to side with universities, who defend themselves by saying they are upholding academic rigour. Interesting, Prof Galloway did not appeal to academic rigour, or even professorial authority. He appealed essentially to accepted standards of behaviour.

Now, we could view the NYU episode as an example of the teaching/learning that can happen at a university beyond the subject matter. The professor is trying to teach the student how to behave in, as it were, polite society. But that doesn’t break the metaphor. It just means that the lessons the student is buying are more than the lectures and slides. They are behaviour lessons — the so-called ‘soft’ employment skills — that make a difference to how people get along in the workplace.

Once again, we get back to the purpose of a university education. Is it to produce graduates who know how to behave? Is it to teach them specific areas of knowledge? To get them jobs? It’s probably a bit of all those things. But that also gives universities a lot of ways they can fail their students, and a lot of potential grievances to be redressed.

What happened in Bangladesh was the result of the safety standards that are currently in place not being enforced. As Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, told Democracy Now!, Bangladesh “already has some rules and regulations for safety,” with which some politically powerful owners are not complying.

How many times have I heard, ‘whatcha gonna do about it?’ Hey, that’s my seat! Wait a minute, I was parking there! There’s a line waiting here! Oh yeah, whatcha gonna do about it!?

There’s the other way of saying it, too, the resigned sigh. The DMV closed early but didn’t let anyone know. The bank put my deposit in the wrong account and charged me for an overdraft. The insurance company is denying my claim after they pre-approved it. Oh yeah [sigh], whatcha gonna do about it?

I remember being 19, and 22, and 26, like the Tsarnaev brothers. I remember the anger and frustration. First, dealing with other guys who were willing to challenge you over a comment or a girl or a beer or a driving manoeuvre. And then there were the institutions with their bureaucratic procedures: fill out these forms and take them to that office and have them signed by that person and I-don’t-care-that’s-how-it’s-done.

It wasn’t any better being middle class and in elite universities. In some ways, it’s worse. They existed long before you and will continue long after you’re gone. They don’t care and they don’t need to. If you don’t like it, someone else will happily take your spot.

What to do? To deal with the individuals, you learn to ‘handle yourself’ in those situations. Confront or defuse, fight or flight, save face regardless. Ironic, isn’t it, that dealing with other people is called ‘handling yourself’.

With the institutions, well, it’s really suck up and deal. Choose the hill you want to die on, as a friend used to say.

But what if there’s not enough upside? What if there isn’t enough money or prestige or security on the line? What if all the promises of some future with a job and wife and house and car and all the books and booze you can manage — what if they start looking hollow? And you start thinking you’re never going to make it, it’s never going to stop being a fight, you’re always going to be pushed around by incidental bullies and petty tyrants.

Whatcha gonna do about it?

it has been used as an inconsistent marketing tool by people for selling their own unrelated ideological policies….

I’m going to be careful here. Media interviews are not the same as academic writing. Keeping my thoughts straight while listening to someone else’s questions, and then controlling the random thoughts that spring to mind whenever (ask my poor students — I don’t censor digressions quite the same way in lectures) while not babbling — hey, it’s fun and energising but only approximately accurate. So, I’m not going to pile on.

I’m fascinated that it was a spreadsheet error, at least in part. Most economists I know proudly and loudly avoid Excel for anything analytical. Grunty programmes like Stata, sure, and nerdy open-source stuff like R (thanks, Auckland!), absolutely. I mean, these are guys (yes, guys) who sneer at SPSS. To find out that R&R were relying on Excel is like, I don’t know, seeing a celebrity chef eating at Burger King.

There’s a lesson for consultants here. Excel is the sort of programme that gave rise to this:

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

Nevertheless, I like Excel a lot. Despite all the stupid and paranoid security controls that Microsoft has added, it is still a portable way to give clients the analytical details of what I’ve done. It also allows me to build dynamic tools to help clients tweak the analysis for their own questions. And, I can show them exactly which number is multiplied by which other number, and then transform it all into pretty pictures clearly and transparently. Throw in some macros and buttons, and it’s really powerful.

The best advice I’ve heard about building those sorts of files is to treat them like programming tasks. You are essentially programming a new bit of software. There are established protocols for tracking versions and checking code — that’s a place to get some tips on good design processes.

It’s the best advice, but I’ve generally ignored it (like a lot of good advice). It’s just too hard. So, let me offer my own advice:

• do it differently — there are always multiple ways to make calculations. I like to make calculations two different ways, and then check whether they have the same values (‘=A3=B3′ will give a TRUE or FALSE; or, use an IF statement)
• back-of-the-envelope — just the other day, we were looking at a spreadsheet model (again, portability is important), and we did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to check whether they were sensible. It’s similar to the idea of an elevator pitch — can I explain in simple language and logic why we get these results?
• have someone check — give it to someone else. Let them see everything, get them to check everything. Make sure they have the chops, too, to do it right. Now, that can be expensive, several hours of work. So ask yourself, do I feel lucky today is it worth it for the job or the client? I mean, if I’m going to recommend unemployment for a few million people, I want to make sure my cell references are right. But not all clients warrant that level of scrutiny.

After all that, though, mistakes will happen. The best thing to do is be a mensch — I’m not sure what the New Zild translation is. Own up, walk the client through the impacts, and do as much work as you need to do with the client to restore some credibility.

And then, add it to your bag of tricks. You’ve just learned an expensive lesson.

So that leaves the research side of the university. What’s the point? Is it to be ‘critic and conscience of society’, which is the New Zealand job description for an academic? Is it to advance knowledge and understanding?

What got me thinking about the topic was this profile of Noam Chomsky by Glen Greenwald. Greenwald, a journalist, has been a relentless critic of the security state that the US has put in place over the last two presidencies. Chomsky, an academic, has been a critic of American hegemony for decades. It is likely that academic tenure has helped Chomsky speak his mind. That is, the economic security of his job allowed him to have ‘a room of one’s own’ (Virginia Woolf) and be a critic of society.

University research, then, might be about providing an environment in which individuals and teams can pursue research, whether that research is criticising society or supporting it. The university buffers researchers from that same society — providing them time for the research to come to fruition, shielding them from reactions when their opinions or findings are unpopular. The uneasy bargain is that society pledges resources to the university — even when it bites the hand that feeds it — because of a belief that ultimately it will be for the social good.

But is it? Or, more precisely, is it at the margin?

And that question takes me to findings like those discussed here:

Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

So it seems that much university research isn’t even of value to researchers themselves.

There is also discussion of the ‘need’ for academics to contribute more, be more engaged with society, adopt more of a public intellectual stance. Those discussions suggest that society — government, business, the chatterati — might feel that academics aren’t pulling their weight.

Where I’m getting to is this: if MOOCs call into question the near-monopoly of universities for delivering advanced education, then universities will have to lean more heavily on the research function to justify their existence. But, the research side seems anemic, at least at the margin. The additional contribution of the extra dollar of spend seems to deliver little in the way of engagement or criticism. Oddly, the crisis in teaching raises the title question: what’s the point of research?