Science
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Books by Nobel prize winners to read (or listen to) this summer
One of the great joys of being a student or academic is the ability to engage in self-directed learning. The freedom this affords can be overwhelming, given the massive volume of books, articles, and other media that could be consumed. This raises the question, what should be read for pleasure first? Recently, I've been reading…
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Nobel Prize winners explain how ideology/theory blinded economics (Michael Simkovic)
The Financial Times recently published an excellent profile of Esther Duflo, a French economist who shared the Nobel Prize in Economics with two of her co-authors for pioneering empirical work using field experiments (randomized controlled trials) to evaluate the effectiveness of social policies and the effects of taxation. Over the last several decades, economics has…
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White House proposes to spend approximately nothing on early childhood education to minimize taxes for top 0.1 percent (Michael Simkovic)
NPR reports that the Trump administration has proposed a meager one-time increase in funding for childcare / early career eduction equal to approximately 0.0045 percent of GDP ($1 billion out of $22 trillion estimated 2020 GDP) or about 0.001 percent of household networth. Total federal spending would increase to $5.4 billion, or 0.0225 percent of…
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QJE: Investments in education continue to provide economic benefits two and half centuries later (Michael Simkovic)
A recent article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (the leading journal in economics) finds evidence that early investments in education in the 1600s through mid 1700s continued to provide economic benefits in the form of persistently higher eduction levels and 10% higher wages and centuries later. The study examined the economic performance of communities…
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How Big Tobacco’s star advocate became an education expert for the New York Times and Forbes (Michael Simkovic)
Richard Vedder, a leading opponent of excise taxes on cigarettes, takes a dim view of most of higher education. Vedder depicts colleges and universities as overpriced, wasteful, and deserving budget cuts. Vedder argues that academic freedom and research impede teaching marketable skills. The reality is that public investments in higher education more than pay for…
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President Trump uses scuffle at Berkeley as pretext to pressure universities into promoting views he endorses (Michael Simkovic)
A recruiter for a far-right group that maintains a "Professor Watchlist" was recently punched in the face while using slogans about "hate crime hoaxes" to recruit (or perhaps to intentionally provoke an incident) at the University of California Berkeley. The FBI and Department of Education have both found that serious (at times deadly) hate crimes…
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Raising tenure standards is no free lunch (Michael Simkovic)
Brian Leiter and Paul Caron both recently noted a study by Adam Chilton, Jonathan Masur, and Kyle Rozema which argues that law schools can increase average faculty productivity by making it harder for tenure track faculty to get tenure. While this seems plausible, denying tenure more often is no free lunch. A highly regarded study…
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Financial Times: White House Considered Blanket Ban on Student Visas for Chinese Nationals, partly with goal of hurting Universities (Michael Simkovic)
From the Financial Times: "White House hawks earlier this year encouraged President Donald Trump to stop providing student visas to Chinese nationals, but the proposal was shelved over concerns about its economic and diplomatic impact. . . . Stephen Miller, a White House aide who has been pivotal in developing the administration’s hardline immigration policies,…
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Endowments and Climate Change (Michael Simkovic)
Public pension funds in New York and California are increasingly considering Climate Change related risks as a criteria for guiding their investment decisions. The move to consider climate change is driven in part by a perception of insufficient federal action on these issues and the prospect of environmental harm eroding long term performance for a…
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Testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on the “State of Intellectual Freedom in America” (Michael Simkovic)
I testified earlier today at the House Judiciary Committee on the "State of Intellectual Freedom in America." A copy of my written testimony can be seen here. My shorter oral remarks are available here. An excerpt appears below: "Disagreement between knowledgeable scientific experts and median political views often do not suggest political bias on the…
I’m a software engineer who works at “AI adjacent” startups, and I think this article is a bit dramatic, but…