links for 2008-04-25

• Concrete examples don't help students learn math - EurekAlert
• Frank pushes for mortgage intervention - FT
• Bagehot's Lessons for the Fed - WSJ.com
• The cost of food: facts and figures - BBC
• Someone is wrong on the internet again (Coase Theorem) - The G Spot
• A better economic boost - Los Angeles Times
• Inflation Is on the Rise, Fed Should Stand Pat - John Berry

Comments

[Elvis]

about link #1. [concrete examples and Math]
Thanks for posting this. I teach languages and this has obvious cross-over value.

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/changeless-economics/

April 25, 2008

Changeless Economics?
By Paul Krugman

OK, my bosses are right that the price of textbooks * is an issue — and my status as a textbook author (Robin and I refer to our entry as "Economics 401(k)") puts me in a weak moral position. But what's this about?

"But there is no reason for an introductory textbook to carry a price tag of, say, $140 in an area like economics where the information changes little from year to year."

Economics is a field where the information changes little from year to year? I'm currently revising the macroeconomic chapters — and everything has changed. We've gone from a world in which recessions were mostly generated by the Fed to control inflation to a world in which bursting financial bubbles lead the way, from a world in which discretionary fiscal policy was considered uncouth to one in which both parties feel it's essential, from a world in which central banks were considered omnipotent to one in which my former department chairman is trying desperately to get some traction — and all of this has happened in just a few years.
I think they could have picked a better example.

* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/opinion/25fri4.html

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/opinion/25fri4.html

April 25, 2008

That Book Costs How Much?

College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell "unbundled" versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles.

The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway costs. That means using digital textbooks, which can often be presented online free of charge or in hard copies for as little as one-fifth the cost of traditional books. The digital books can also be easily customized and updated.

Right now, textbook publishers are calling the tune. They add as many bells and whistles as they can and pump out new editions as quickly as possible — as a way of making perfectly good textbooks obsolete. Not every book can be cheap. A specialized text that only a few people know how to write and that reaches a small audience will be costly by definition. But there is no reason for an introductory textbook to carry a price tag of, say, $140 in an area like economics where the information changes little from year to year.

Schools are beginning to balk at outrageous pricing. Rice University offers textbooks for some classes free online and charges a nominal fee for the printed version. A new company called Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, N.Y., plans to offer online textbooks free and hopes to make its profit by selling supplemental materials like study guides and hard copies printed on demand.

A study being carried out by the geographer Ronald Dorn at Arizona State University suggests that students who use free online textbooks perform as well academically as students who buy expensive copies from traditional publishers....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/arts/design/25darw.html

April 25, 2008

What Darwin Saw Out Back
By CORNELIA DEAN

IN 1860, while studying primroses in the garden of Down House, his home in Kent, England, Charles Darwin noticed something odd about their blooms.

While all the flowers had both male and female parts — anthers and pistils — in some the anthers were prominent and in others the pistils were longer. So he experimented in his home laboratory and greenhouses, cross-pollinating some plants with their anatomical opposites. The results were striking.

"He determined that if they cross-pollinate, they produce more seed and more vigorous seedlings," said Margaret Falk, a horticulturalist and associate vice president at the New York Botanical Garden. The variation is evolution's way of increasing cross-pollination, she said.

Now the Botanical Garden is replicating this work, and more of Darwin's Down House experiments, in a stunning, multipart exhibition called "Darwin's Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure."

In all, the tour is 33 stops, spread throughout about half of the garden's 250 acres. Visitors who enter the exhibition through the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory will encounter a replica of a room in Darwin's house, designed so they can look through the window, as he did, to a profusion of plants and bright flowers: hollyhocks, flax and of course primroses, what Todd Forrest, the garden's vice president for horticulture, calls "a typical British garden." On a table stands a tray holding quills, brushes, sealing wax and tweezers, the kinds of simple tools Darwin used to conduct his world-shaking research.

Darwin grew the flowers not just for their own sake, Mr. Forrest said, but as subjects for observation and experiment, work he carried out in his home laboratory and greenhouses, on workbenches like those in the exhibition. The work displayed on the benches is typical of studies Darwin made of pollination, how plants grow, even what happens when a carnivorous plant devours an insect. Orchids on display remind visitors of the varieties Darwin studied, and how his observations and dissections of their blooms led him to conclude that particular species were pollinated by particular species of insects, a conclusion later research confirmed.

The exhibition also includes a "tree of life" map that guides visitors to the garden's plants and describes where they fit in the natural scheme of things; books, drawings and notes, some in Darwin's own hand; and an interactive exhibit for children.

It anticipates two Darwin anniversaries next year — his 200th birthday and the 150th of his world-changing book, "The Origin of Species."

Though most people associate that book and Darwin's ideas generally with his voyage to the Galápagos and his study of finches there, his work with plants was far more central to his thinking, said David Kohn, a Darwin expert and science historian who is a curator of the exhibition.

Even in the Galapágos he focused on plants, said Dr. Kohn, who is general editor of the Darwin Digital Library of Evolution at the American Museum of Natural History. "He did not even label the finches," he said. "He was fascinated by plants," particularly the way their variation and sexual reproduction challenged the idea that species were stable, a key idea in botany at the time.

As Dr. Kohn writes in the exhibition catalogue, "plants were the one group of organisms that he studied with most consistency and depth over the course of a long scientific career" of collecting, observing, experimenting and theorizing. But Darwin studied more than flowers. He was intrigued by what Dr. Kohn calls the "behavior" of plants — how they move, respond to light, consume insects and otherwise act in the world....

[anne]

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/d/darwin/charles/d22o/d22o1.html

1859 - 1872

The Origin of Species
By Charles Darwin

VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION

Causes of Variability

WHEN we compare the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us is, that they generally differ more from each other than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature. And if we reflect on the vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment, we are driven to conclude that this great variability is due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent species had been exposed under nature. There is, also, some probability in the view propounded by Andrew Knight, that this variability may be partly connected with excess of food. It seems clear that organic beings must be exposed during several generations to new conditions to cause any great amount of variation; and that, when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues varying for many generations. No case is on record of a variable organism ceasing to vary under cultivation. Our oldest cultivated plants, such as wheat, still yield new varieties: our oldest, domesticated animals are still capable of rapid improvement or modification.

As far as I am able to judge, after long attending to the subject, the conditions of life appear to act in two ways,—directly on the whole organisation or on certain parts alone, and indirectly by affecting the reproductive system. With respect to the direct action, we must bear in mind that in every case, as Professor Weismann has lately insisted, and as I have incidentally shown in my work on Variation under Domestication, there are two factors: namely, the nature of the organism, and the nature of the conditions. The former seems to be much the more important; for nearly similar variations sometimes arise under, as far as we can judge, dissimilar conditions; and, on the other hand, dissimilar variations arise under conditions which appear to be nearly uniform. The effects on the offspring are either definite or indefinite. They may be considered as definite when all or nearly all the offspring of individuals exposed to certain conditions during several generations are modified in the same manner. It is extremely difficult to come to any conclusion in regard to the extent of the changes which have been thus definitely induced. There can, however, be little doubt about many slight changes,—such as size from the amount of food, colour from the nature of the food, thickness of the skin and hair from climate, &c. Each of the endless variations which we see in the plumage of our fowls must have had some efficient cause; and if the same cause were to act uniformly during a long series of generations on. many individuals, all probably would be modified in the same manner. Such facts as the complex and extraordinary out-growths which variably follow from the insertion of a minute drop of poison by a gall-producing insect, show us what singular modifications might result in the case of plants from a chemical change in the nature of the sap....

[The Baron]

I'm currently revising the macroeconomic chapters — and everything has changed. We've gone from a world in which recessions were mostly generated by the Fed to control inflation to a world in which bursting financial bubbles lead the way, from a world in which discretionary fiscal policy was considered uncouth to one in which both parties feel it's essential, from a world in which central banks were considered omnipotent to one in which my former department chairman is trying desperately to get some traction — and all of this has happened in just a few years.

*Devil's Advocate* So, Paul you admit that you have been selling, at outrageous prices, textbooks that were completely wrong and whose information may have lead current economists to exacerbate the current crisis? So where are your refunds to those poor slobs who you so misinformed? And with such a poor track record, why should we be willing to pay even higher fees for your newest load of half baked theories?*End Devil's Advocate*

Now, Paul Krugman is an excellent economist, and a fantastic educator, but his argument does fall a bit flat in trying to defend high textbook prices. Most textbooks do change very little edition to edition, and the constant minor revisions is a deliberate effort by the publishers to destroy the used textbook market. Throw in the fact that Universities, Departments, and even individual professors make sweetheart deals with these same publishers to enforce monopoly power and turn textbook selling from a sales basis to on-going rent seeking, and it is the powerless student that gets sheared.

Of course, students aren't completely powerless, even back-in-the-day our campus copy shop had a thriving black market textbook photocopying trade. You know that when you can buy last semester's textbook (at a used book shop or from an ad, because the school's bookstore wouldn't buy them back) and add in about 80 pages of back-of chapter problems and answer keys, for one-third the price the current version is selling for, that something is seriously rotten in the world of textbook publishing.

[Bubble]

"It was down to 1% at the end of the year and into early 2004 – a full three percentage points less than what the Taylor Rule would have prescribed."

This is where control was lost. Lowering rates into sustained real negative territory for no other reason than to maintain the CPI "cushion" above the zero bound excited too many highly leveraged bubble plays. A zero percent inflation rate is not a problem when the economy is booming, and the unemployment rate is low. The economy does not need an extra demand boost from inflation at such times.

[Golden Rule]

WSJ..."By slashing interest rates too much in 2007-2008, the Fed has accentuated the foreign drain and thus made the alleviation of the domestic drain more difficult."

We do not use gold today, but have no net domestic savings (in a form that can be loaned out). Maintaining foreign savers' confidence is essential to maintaining credit flow under these circumstances.