Too Much Goverment Spending on Schools?

July 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A comment on an earlier post raised the question of whether “rich Republicans . . . pay so much for their kids' education but don't want to pay for the education of poorer children .”

Neither that comment nor the response to it had much to do with the substance of the post itself (which was about the ways in which the SAT might be biased). It was a tempest in the shot glass that is the Socioblog and not of much relevance, so I said nothing.

But just now I read this WaPo story saying that the Minnesota government shutdown is going to be resolved. It looks like the Mark Dayton, the Democratic governor, caved. Here’s the relevance:

• Rich Republicans: “Dayton reluctantly acceded to Republican demands not to raise any taxes . . Dayton {had] wanted to include a tax increase on the state’s top 2 percent of wage earners.”
• Paying for public education: “The plan would balance the state’s budget by cutting programs, delaying state aid to local school districts . . .”

So the Republicans would rather delay aid to schools than allow a small tax increase on the very rich.

It’s only one case, but I also did a quick-and-dirty rummage through the GSS, specifically the question of government aid to education. Here’s the breakdown by party and income.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

In the highest income groups, the percentage of Democrats and Independents saying “too much” is zero. Among Republicans, 8.8% and 12.7%.

The good news (good if you think that cutting education spending isn’t going to do much for educational results) is that not many Americans think we are spending too much. Most think we’re not spending enough. Who are those folks who think that the government is overspending on public education? Republicans, especially rich Republicans.

Like a Virgin – Whatever That Was

July 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Virginity has mattered as far back as we can tell. It is introduced in Genesis . . . and is mentioned repeatedly throughout the Hebrew Bible.

So says Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his recent book How Pleasure Works. But Bloom’s “as far back as we can tell” ignores most of the evolution of the human species.

Bloom is certainly no creationist who believes that our species dates back only a few thousand years and is no older than the people in the Bible. He believes in evolution, and one of his arguments about how pleasure works is that evolution accounts, in part, for what we find pleasurable.

Pleasure draws upon deep intuitions . . . it is smart, and . . . it is evolved and universal and largely inborn. [my emphasis]

Culture and society, in Bloom’s view, matter only in that they vary the foods that feed these largely inborn hungers.

Belgian chocolates and barbecued ribs are modern inventions, but they appeal to our prior love of sugar and fat.

Since the importance of virginity goes back “as far back as we can tell,” it must be like the love of sugar – largely inborn. In that same chapter on sex (you couldn’t very well write a book called How Pleasure Works and not have a chapter on sex), he writes,

The obsession with virginity is one of the ugliest aspects of our sexual psyche.

I could be wrong; Bloom is, after all, a Yale professor – smart and well-educated – and the book jacket has accolades from heavy hitters like Steven Pinker. But if the obsession with virginity, like the taste for fat and sugar, is hard-wired  by evolution, it must have been with us since our earliest days on the savanna. But unfortunately, Bloom’s truncated history (“as far back as we can tell”) ignores most of our time on this planet.

For a few hundred thousand years, we humans lived as hunter-gatherers – small, egalitarian bands, nomadic and with fluid membership . And not much concern for virginity. The societies that prize virginity are agricultural and pastoral. They have been around for only the past 15,000 years or so. Agrarian societies may seem like the “real” humans, but that’s only because they account for all of our recorded history. Pre-literate hunter-gatherers left no accounts detailing their canons of morality.*

So maybe the concern with virginity is not inborn or universal but just a patriarchal blip in a much longer history, a fad that captured our imaginations for a few thousand years and fit well with other ideas but is now fading. As societies move from agricultural to industrial or post-industrial modes, people come to regard virginity as something like the horse-drawn plow – a curious, antiquated instrument that might have been important to people once upon a time but is not really of much use today at the office. Even in an advanced country like the US, you can still see the link between agrarian life and the value on virginity.  It is in the regions closest to their agrarian past (and present) where people are likely to see virginity as a necessary sign of virtue.

Also, even in the agrarian era, just whose obsession with virginity was this anyway? My guess is that women were and are far less obsessed than men. If you want to argue that the obsession is part of the sexual psyche that evolved over millennia, you would have to show how the male and female brain evolved differently with regard to this very specific idea that virginity is of paramount importance.

So when I read that sentence about the obsession with virginity being part of “our sexual psyche,” I am tempted to ask, “What you mean ‘we,’ patriarchal agrarian?”

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*Update. True, we have no information about the morals of humans who lived long before the dawn of recorded history. But we do have accounts of hunter-gatherers in the past few centuries, and these do not provide much support for the idea that virginity has always been a universal and eternal obsession.

SAT, GPA, and Bias

July 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

Is the SAT biased? If so, against who is it biased?

It has long been part of the leftist creed that the SAT and other standardized tests are biased against the culturally disadvantaged - racial minorities, the poor, et. al. Those kids may be just as academically capable as more privileged kids, but the tests don’t show it.

But maybe SATs are biased against privileged kids. That’s the implication in a blog post by Greg Mankiw. Mankiw is not a liberal. In the Bush-Cheney first term, he was the head of the Council of Economic Advisors. He is also a Harvard professor and the author of a best-selling economics text book. Back in May he had a blog post called “A Regression I’d Like to See.” If tests are biased in the way liberals say they are, says Mankiw, let’s regress GPA on SAT scores and family income. The correlation with family income should be negative.

a lower-income student should do better in college, holding reported SAT score constant, because he managed to get that SAT score without all those extra benefits.

In fact, the regression had been done, and Mankiw added this update:

Todd Stinebrickner, an economist at The University of Western Ontario, emails me this comment: “Regardless, within the income groups we examine, students from higher income backgrounds have significantly higher grades throughout college conditional on college entrance exam . . . scores.” [Mankiw added the boldface for emphasis.]

What this means is that if you are a college admissions officer trying to identify the students who will do best in college, as measured by grades, you would give positive rather than negative weight on family income.

Not to give positive weight to income, therefore, is bias against those with higher incomes.

To see what Mankiw means, look at some made-up data on two groups. To keep things civil, I’m just going to call them Group One and Group Two. (You might imagine them as White and Black, Richer and Poorer, or whatever your preferred categories of injustice are. I’m sticking with One and Two.) Following Mankiw, we regress GPA on SAT scores. That is, we use SAT scores as our predictor and we measure how well they predict students’ performance in college (their GPA).

(Click on the image for a larger, clearer view)

In both groups, the higher the SAT, the higher the GPA. As the regression line shows, the test is a good predictor of performance. But you can also see that the Group One students are higher on both. If we put the two groups together we get this.

Just as Mankiw says, if you’re a college admissions director and you want the students who do best, at any level of SAT score, you should give preference to Group One. For example, look at all the students who scored 500 on the SAT (i.e., holding SAT constant at 500). The Group One kids got better grades than did the Group Two kids. So just using the SATs, without taking the Group factor (e..g., income ) into account, biases things against Group One. The Group One students can complain: “the SAT underestimates our abilities, so the SAT is biased against us.”

Case closed? Not yet. I hesitate to go up against an academic superstar like Mankiw, and I don’t want to insult him (I’ll leave that to Paul Krugman). But there are two ways to regress the data. So there’s another regression, maybe one that Mankiw does not want to see.

What happens if we take the same data and regress SAT scores on GPA? Now GPA is our predictor variable. In effect, we’re using it as an indicator of how smart the student really is, the same way we used the SAT in the first graph.
Let’s hold GPA constant at 3.0. The Group One students at that GPA have, on average, higher SAT scores. So the Group Two students can legitimately say, “We’re just as smart as the Group One kids; we have the same GPA. But the SAT gives the impression that we’re less smart. So the SAT is biased against us.”

So where are we?

• The test makers say that it’s a good test - it predicts who will do well in college.
• The Group One students say the test is biased against them.
• The Group Two students say the test is biased against them.

And they all are right.


Huge hat tip to my brother, S.A. Livingston. He told me of this idea (it dates back to a paper from the1970s by Nancy Cole) and provided the made-up data to illustrate it. He also suggested these lines from Gilbert and Sullivan: And you'll allow, as I expect
That they are right to so object
And I am right, and you are right
And everything is quite correct.

Records and Performances

July 6, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(A personal rant. If you are not interested in language or horse racing, read no further.)

One of these things is not like the others.

1. “He’s a guy with a track record that's beyond reproach.” (Nationals GM Mike Rizzo speaking about Davey Johnson as manager. USA Today, June 27)
2. The decision to publish was made easier by Ritter’s proven track record as a songwriter. (Steven King reviewing a book by Josh Ritter, NYT July 3)
3. Members of the House don't have a very good track record in primary campaigns. (Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight NYT blog on Michelle Bachman, June 23, a post called “Handicapping the Republican Field..”)
4. That’s what the OLC is good at, and what it has a long track record of doing on war powers. (Ruth Marcus on the Office of Legal Counsel, WaPo, June 22)
5. He walked a 20-kilometer race in Finland in 1:23:49.39 . . . just nine seconds off the U.S. men's 20K track record, which, as it happens, is held by his coach. (An article on racewalking, USA Today, June 24)
6. That No. 1 finish extends Pixar’s perfect box-office track record - all 12 of its feature films have opened in first place. (NYT article on “Cars 2,” June 27)
7. G.M.’s track record for making cars people want has not exactly been inspiring. (Joe Nocera, NYT, June 26)

One of these things uses “track record” in its original and logical sense. Can you guess which one is not like the others by the time I finish this post?

In the previous post about history, I said that horseplayers use the past performance charts to handicap the horses – i.e., to assign each horse a probability of winning – and decide which horse to bet on. “Past performances” are the details of each horse’s performance in previous races. It’s a lot of information.

Here’s an excerpt of the past performances for the horses in the first three post positions in this year’s Belmont Stakes. (A tutorial on how to read past performances is here.)

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view. Or go here and click on this same image for the full thing at readable size.)

After the race, horseplayers become historians. They go back to the same past performance charts to find the information that explain why the winner won (and why their horse finished out of the money).

The term “track record” also comes from horse racing. It indicates the fastest time for a given distance at a given track. The track record allows you to compare the performances of horses that have been running at different tracks.

For some reason, beginning in the late 1960s, “track record” spread far beyond the track.


The results were disastrous. Now, just about everybody except horseplayers – i.e., just about everybody – says “track record” when they mean “past performances.”

In the examples above, only #5 uses “track record” as it should be used (pardon my prescriptivism). Nate Silver (#3) even calls his blog post “Handicapping the Republican Field.” For Godssakes Nate, if you’re going call what you do “handicapping,” use the language of handicapping correctly.

It’s possible that this use of “track record” differs slightly from “past performances” and that the speaker is referring to someone’s record in some particular bailiwick, some metaphoric “track.” But in nearly every case, there is no other “track” that it could possibly be confused with. The added word “track” is totally unnecessary. Go back and read the sentences above, mentally removing the “track.” Go ahead, I’ll wait.

A simple “record” instead of “track record” retains all the meaning. And to my ear, once you remove the distraction of “track,” the sentences are clearer.

Why do people need to misuse the beautiful and precise language of horseplayers? Maybe they think that using a racing term gives their persona a dash of risk and romance, the roguish and the raffish. But inevitably, they get it wrong.