All posts by mchughrussell

Once more the refrain: Inequality is bad for growth

economics, , , , ,

Equality and EfficiencyEarlier this year, a couple of high-level staff at the IMF’s research department and a colleague at the IBRD published a paper on the determinants of long-term growth – that is, of growth spells that continue over time rather than sinking countries into depression and stagnation. Among the determinants they found were: “the degree of equality of the income distribution; democratic institutions; export orientation…; and macroeconomic stability.”

That is, the more equal the income structure of the country, the longer the country would be able to sustain growth. The fact that the IMF is now publishing research making this link clear may be surprising, but the result itself is not. After all, Nancy Birdsall has done work for years showing the link between income equality and economic development – she’s even developed a course on the subject! She’s hardly alone. A group of Action Canada fellows (which included Sauvé Scholar alum Sadia Rafiquddin) wrote a well-received report last year pulling much of the literature together, and trying to explore  the implications of these insights for Canada. There are lots of good reasons why this might be the case. Even The Economist is getting in on the game!

On the other hand, there is a problem with this entire kind of analysis. Sure, there is the usual normative broadside of “why do we care about growth!?” but I also have a methodological concern I’ve alluded to elsewhere. As two of the authors, Berg and Ostry, make clear in a summary of the equality dimensions of this research, “[t]he immediate role for policy, however, is less clear. More inequality may shorten the duration of growth, but poorly designed efforts to reduce inequality could be counterproductive.”

From Berg and Ostry

Such ambiguity fits perfectly with their actual data (so often a repository of key information missed by linear regression): high-inequality countries may not be able to sustain growth, but having relatively low inequality only makes sustained growth possible, not assured.

What should be obvious is that the ability of more or less income equality to translate into growth has to do not only with national trade law, or the frequency of elections, or the independence of the central bank. It also has to do with institutions. Strictly speaking, Berg and Ostry’s study, like much of the related literature from recent years, do not ignore institutions, or not exactly.

Somewhere in the background, Berg and Ostry know that institutional structures are at play. Their discussion of “distorted incentives” in Chinese farming policy makes this clear. they totally ignore the qualitative structure of institutions. But by referencing the “quality of economic and political institutions” , they seem to suggest that the role of institutions can be reduced to a single, numerical dimension. Good institutions give people incentives to work (or to save, or to “create jobs”, or to invest in human capital, or in new technology); bad incentives keep people lazy and greedy. Anyone who has had to wrestle with actual on-the-ground  policy-making, though, knows that those incentives don’t always line up, and understanding institutions is at the very least about trying to see how people’s incentives coordinate in economic activities, not only whether individuals are inspired to serve the ends of growth.

Learning and Meta-Learning

education, , , , , , ,

Over at Tomorrow’s Professor, an excerpt from a book on ePortfolios (for the unnaturally curious, the book is Documenting Learning with ePortfolios: A Guide for College Instructors):

ePortfolios…allow learners to make connections among varied learning experiences and transfer knowledge and skills to new contexts and situations. This approach, particularly when it capitalizes on the features of ePortfolios together with a culture of folio thinking, can promote deep and integrative learning. For students, however, the value of ePortfolios and folio thinking may be unclear. Students may initially assume that the use of ePortfolios in a course or program is simply a new and faddish approach to teaching and learning. Indeed, without effectively communicating the purpose of ePortfolios and the benefits that ePortfolios are intended to produce for them, students may resist the approach, thereby making it challenging for them to really capitalize on those benefits.

This is a challenging issue. In my experience of the university setting, students often come to learning experiences with preconceptions both about what they are supposed to be learning, and about how they should best be taught those things. The solution presented here is to show your cards: make pedagogical methods explicit.

The difficulty of framing is that an entire level of learning gets lost. It may be true that students who are told how something will add to their knowledge-base or skill-set will overcome their “resistance” and allow them to “capitalize” on a learning technique. Yet being so explicit allows them to be smug in their presumption that they know how learning works, and how teachers should teach, informed, more often than not, by what Paul Freire called the “banking model of education.”

Freire’s point, in his critique of this model, was partially that one should not view the teacher and the student as polar opposites, with the student as an empty vessel and the teacher as a the holder of knowledge with gets ‘desposited’ in the learners. On a substantive level, his argument implied that both teacher and students are learners, that both have knowledge to share, that education should aim to combine that knowledge in a mutual learning process. Fine: but if I want to learn Portoguese, then its likely that I am going to find a teacher who has more relevant knowledge than I do.

His criticism also has an implication about the process of learning. Education is not a mechanical process; I cannot, in fact, put my knowledge directly into your brain, techno-utopian fantasy notwithstanding. Rather, learning is necessarily active. I can tell you something – say, the definition of GDP – but your ability to remember it will depend on what you do when I tell you; on whether you are writing it down when I am talking; on what you are using to write it down; on how soon you return to it after first hearing it. My sense is that the best way to really learn the definition of GDP is to be forced to use it in practice, or to reflect on its meaning: why is it defined this way? Why does the result of this calculation matter? What would be wrong with other calculations? How else might we have tried to capture this information? How do we measure this aggregate in practice? I would argue, even further, that the definition of GDP only becomes useful once a person can provide answers to these questions. Memorizing the definition might get you marks on a test; only your ability to think about it in context will make you a better economist.

Telling someone how a process or technique is supposed to aid their learning treats becoming a better learner (“meta-learning”) as a passive, rather than an active process. Learning itself is a skill, and like all skills, it is only sharpened and refined through practice. Telling students what contribution ePortfolios might make to learning therefore ignores both elements of Freire’s insight: first, it assumes that the teacher knows exactly what contribution the process might make to the student’s competence as a learner and that this knowledge is simply transferred to the student; second, it does not require students to use this knowledge, and is almost sure to be ineffective at making them better learners. In other words, it may convince students to use ePortfolios, but it will not make them better learners.

The reality is, the best way to increase student learning competence is for them to be reflectively engaged in the learning process; to constantly push them to think about how they learn best, to consider what they might learn from a given experience, to adopt practices which maximize their own learning, to experiment with alternatives, to ask better questions. In other words, it requires departing from a simple image of education as a service that universities provide to students, and recognize that education is work which requires creativity, thought, engagement and participation by students.

Thinking Art Brain Dump

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Saturday, in catches and glimpses, unordered: learning by doing • designing by making • art as its own language •  art as its own, different way of interpreting the world • or each artform as a unique way of interpreting the world • Nancy Adler: strategic planning by design, rather than by analysis • or designing an option worth choosing, not choosing an option • or focusing on a positive vision, rather than a negative criticism • Tim McDonald: the difference between making buildings, and making buildings on paper • weight, balance and tension • don’t try to design an experience; art is not a meatgrinder to push people through • but also “I don’t design buildings, I design communities” • Marx and Hayek: emergent and planned, top-down and bottom-up, edge versus centre • drawing as a conversation with what comes to the surface • thinking with your hands • Richard Serra as an artist of weight • “have you ever seen a Rothko?” • depiction versus representation • Paul Klee ~ do not paint the thing, but what brought it into being • Phil Ochs: “Ah but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.” • art as a tool • the need for beauty in the mess of today’s world • cactus music • the sun and planets • and the music of the spheres • 250 cardboard boxes • abecedarians • clowning works by going to the essence; that is why it works without words • thinking so essentially all the time would be exhausting • the birth of the modern public • problem solving through dance • art as a tool • found phrases and found sounds • the gap between sound and music • “do you smell me?” • “thank you for sharing your privilege” • music and brain science • “I wish I could be friends with all of these people” • dancing around a conflict point • stone and water • circle, full circle • creation as an act of humility • How Should a Person Be and the value of recognizing ugliness • “really quite accomplished pieces” • eight dimensions of the actor’s work • having the patience and humility to let the ideas come to you • thinking with and without concepts • the role of language in thought • writing, dead and alive • you can just tell when writing is a lie • teaching writing by revealing lies • breaking social codes as the core of humour • and timing, always timing • music as a material, spatial medium • the role of collaboration in artistic discovery • letting what it will be unfold • the need for new ways of understanding the world • the hegemony of the word and the hegemony of the image • how collaboration changes art • the centrality of making art, not just experiencing • Mark Antaki: “Art thinks somatically, bodily.” • The Tempest • playing with the idea of performance and performativity by switching the actor half-way through the scene • the depth of the text • frenetic, but only when she is thinking with words • Karl Polanyi • Quebec Solidaire • day camp for art nerds • finding the wallness of the wall • architecture as a dynamic medium • and musical • Adorno v Heidegger • radical politics, in theory and practice • global leadership, “as if that were a thing” • language, art and dream as  forms of thought • the combined and inseparable presence of two actors in one character • as I wrote, the poem revealed quite deep, intimate memories • Pop-pop • men who want to harness energy, which is to say, us • down here with the dancers • poetry, which wants to hitch a ride on the freight that words already carry • drawing without looking at the object • drawing without looking away from the object • disability studies, forcing us to re-examine our assumptions about ugliness • social structures and the structures of thought • the mess we are in • and who is “us”? • teaching an art form in three hours • progress, balance and beauty as regulatory ideals • capitalism and its agendas • what we need more of and what we need less of • the need to look at the world differently • “and of course, repetition” • the impact of framing on the experience of the audience • the impact of framing on the experience of the participants • “we have raised a lot of questions, but not found a lot of answers” • fresh-ground jasmine • spandrels • collaboration and meta-collaboration • picturing and planning versus making and finding • small failures and experimentation • capturing light, literally and metaphorically • don’t work towards an imagined user experience • let me paint you a picture • the productive possibilities of artistic thinking • artistic thinking as counter-narrative to economic rationalism • revealed rather than curated experience

Addenda: how could you teach an amateur as much about law in three hours as the facilitators did about art, given that they had to curate collaborative art-pieces to be completed for presentation once the time was up?

Hacking Humanities

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McGill’s very cool, very innovative, very cutely-named Institute for the Public Life of Art and Ideas (IPLAI, i.e. “I play”)  is running a fascinating workshop this Saturday on Thinking Art, which I was lucky to grab a spot in. The session seems akin to the participatory, open-ended unconferences of the barcamp model, displacing the “talking-head parade” which provides the skeleton for most academic conferences. In inviting working artists to interact with university-based scholars, it also promises to draw on the creative possibilities of bringing together different professional communities, much like the very successful launch of HackingHealth last fall (with a shout-out here to fellow Sauvé Scholar Jeeshan Chowdhury, a lead on this project).

In its format, then, the event opens a wide door on the possibilities for productive meetings in a university setting and, more importantly from my perspective, on the relationship between academia and the public. While there was an application process, the sessions – which are animated by such well-knowns as dancer Margie Gillis – are open to anyone who thinks they have something to learn and to teach about the interaction between the arts and the humanities as ways of interacting with and understanding the world.

Which also indicates that nothing is lost in the content, either. When people think of innovation, they often think about tech; the session is built on the idea that imaginative thinking is an important element of responding to our changing world. That theme seems to be integrated into the entire design of the session. The day’s activities include art-making, performance and discussion, but the theme of what art-making and humanities research can offer each other provides an orienting principle. The push against tired, repetitive thinking was at the forefront of the application process, which asked potential participants “In what ways does art think?”

Working through my answer was both intellectually invigorating and painfully humbling:

The difficulty of such a question is that we do not usually understand concepts or categories as themselves capable of thinking. Rather, the metaphor works this way: we think using conceptual objects; thinking is the manipulation of the boxes and bags of thought; it is the climbing on the net of ideas, not the net itself; certainly neither the net nor the nodes can do the thinking; the box cannot unpack itself.

However: when Winston Churchill (of all people!) remarked that “first we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us” he pointed to the possibilities of art as artifact. The making of art in the world gives ideas substance, and while architecture or painting leaves a concrete residue, all art makes its mark on us. And we are thus manipulated. Put before us, we cannot control how art, too, shifts around the bags and boxes of thought; how it adjusts its weight upon the net. We can hardly avoid it. Even those standing guard against the risk that art  might change them, inevitably adapt in response to each experience of art – and thereby change.

We might say, then, that art thinks by placing our own thought outside us, or before us. It thinks not only by acting as a distorted mirror but forcing us to act as mirrors ourselves. It shapes us just as we shape it. What we put of ourselves into us, it unpacks of itself in us, transformed.

Given that even the application was able to force me to think obliquely to my own habits makes me very optimistic about Saturday’s outcomes. The question, however, is what value such a session could have to a lawyer, or to someone studying legal institutions. They asked me that question, too. Here’s what I said:

I am interested in parallels between the ways that art creates artifacts of thought in the world, which then constrain and shapes our actions, and the way in which law does the same thing. Obviously there are differences. Our experience of law is inherently normative; it not only pushes upon our thoughts, but also places its weight on our conscience. What concerns me more is the dynamic relationship which exists between art as a reflection of our regularities of thought and action, and vice versa. The two obviously exist in an imperfect correspondence, and there is much of ‘culture’ as artifacts of shared, persistent belief which may not fall under the sweep of ‘art.’ Yet I think there is some parallel between art and law, in the factor of deliberate shaping, in the understanding that we can somehow have an impact on thoughts and behaviours which is determinate, or at least delimited. In particular, I am interested in how artists and lawmakers may think of their craft not as forcing us to think or act a certain way, but as providing tools to help others live well.

 

An ‘historic’ victory in Quebec

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A friend asked me what I have to say about the results of the ‘historic’ Quebec election. It seems that the French press have slightly misread the tea-leaves on this one if those relying on such coverage see the victory as having some meaningful contribution to global independence movements.

After all, support for sovereignty among Quebecers is at historic lows after the separation question was narrowly defeated in a 1994 referendum. The newest generation of Francophone Quebecers is certainly still seized by the belief that Quebec’s distinct culture requires a high level of autonomy within the Canadian federation, but the focus is on determining the society’s own future, not leaving Canada.

Marois’ victory is historic in one sense – if she succeeds in forming a government with the minority of seats she won, she will become Quebec’s first “première ministre” (emphasis on the “being a lady”). It is also historic in another way, but probably not in the way you would imagine. Because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, Marois’ Parti-Quebecois (PQ) was able to win a plurality of seats despite receiving a lower percentage of the vote than previous elections where another party formed a majority government. Looking province-wide rather than seat-by-seat, it’s their second-lowest level of support in any election since 1973.

As for what it might mean, even if they had received a strong mandate: the PQ itself nominally supports independence, but their game is a long one, indeed: their goal is only to have a referendum on independence “at some point” and almost certainly not before the next election. They realize that there is insufficient support in the province to win a vote – so their main goal is to increase that support by getting into fights with the federal government. Another party, that promised an immediate referendum, received negligible support. Why then, was Marois able to form government? First, Quebec has been seized by a sizeable political corruption scandal, which goes at least as far back as the last PQ government, but which Jean Charest’s Liberals did nothing about during their ten years in power – save for being strongarmed into holding a public inquiry; unfortunately for them, voters assumed that the dirty laundry belonged to the people currently living in the house. Second, the province was seized by protests causing significant disruption which, though sparked by a student strike against a proposed tuition fee increases, eventually expanded to include concerns about civil liberties and a challenge to neoliberalism more generally. Opponents and supporters of the protests both felt that Charest’s government had failed them, either for being too heavy-handed, or not being heavy-handed enough. A new party, the CAQ, essentially billing itself as the law and order option bled much of Charest’s support away, despite being nominally sovereigntist. Despite the softness of her position, Marois was also able to attract supporters of the student strike to vote against Charest with her mixed message of solidarity with the students, bolstered by one student leader standing as a candidate for the party (successfully).

The second explanation of the victory is, unfortunately, also what makes the election historic. And not in a good way. It can easily be claimed that the PQ campaign marked the greatest amount of fear-mongering against linguistic, ethnic and religious minorities of any election in Quebec – at least in the last fifty years. One key plank of the PQ platform was the exclusion from any public employment – firefighters, clerks, teachers, doctors, police, administrators, secretaries, policy advisors; anything – of anyone wearing a visible religious symbol. We are talking about firing a significant number of public employees, essentially because of what religion they belong to. Another was disqualification from any elected office of anyone who does not speak French – presumably, despite the province’s large English minority population, a job which could be ably done by the electorate. The PQ then reversed and said this would only apply to new immigrants…sigh. The subtext here was a concern about those people (read: immigrants) who could not speak ‘proper’ French, i.e. who were not pure-laine. All of this, of course, was backed up by spurious claims about threats to the French language and Quebecois identity in the province.

These things might have scared away some voters. The PQ has traditionally been seen as a progressive alternative, and I know many anglophones who voted for another, left wing sovereigntist party, Quebec Solidaire, while holding their nose on the sovereignty issue. The PQ was obviously happy to be rid of anyone of this stripe who might have voted for them in the past. It was clear that the PQ’s strategy, and a successful one, was that any loss was significantly made up by the support of a base rallied by the worst forms of paranoid, parochial, pseudo-racialist nationalism, ensuring that they did not vote for another sovereigntist party, or simply choose to stay home. It seems to have worked; the only thing which prevents it from significantly tarnishing the great affection I have for my adopted province is that it worked, but only barely. The victory they were able to scrape out of deploying these tactics was a narrow one.

Taxing the Poor, Gambling on the Rich

economics, politics

First, Helen Dewitt (in a Berlin fashion week spread!) on how things used to work in Britain:

I started thinking about it when Britain introduced the National Lottery. Before the Lottery there was an investment scheme called Premium Bonds which gave participants the chance to win a million pounds: you had to buy a minimum of 100 Premium Bonds for Ł1 apiece, you were assigned 100 numbers, and your numbers went into the draw every week. You could get your Ł100 back at any time. You could leave them going into the draw for years. You could buy up to Ł20,000. In other words, you were gambling the interest you could otherwise have earned if you had left that Ł100 in a bank. When they brought in the Lottery, they reduced the frequency of draws in Premium Bonds to once a month. They also promoted the Lottery very heavily – it was widely advertised, tickets could be bought over the counter in newsagents, people could pick their own numbers. So it was much more entertaining, but you were almost certain, not just not to win, but to lose the money you put in. That was interesting in itself, and also seemed to be connected to other things that were going on in Britain at the time.

Given what we know about incentives, beliefs, identities, risks and rationality in modern society, it is hard to argue that the lotteries are anything other than a tax on the poor. God knows the 1% aren’t buying tickets. Of course, it doesn’t feel like a tax to the participants, but rather feels like gambling. But marginal expected loss (the proportion of every dollar paid that the government keeps, averaged out over all participants, including the winners) of the lottery is so high that calling it gambling pushes against the fair definitions of the word. Your chances are better betting on black at Vegas.

It’s interesting to wonder how people characterized their purchase of Premium Bonds under the old system. There is a good argument that people felt at least in part that they were investing in the country, and in the good of society. It’s that, along with the clearly much lower withholding rate of the bond, which make the scheme seem less egregious in light of marginal tax rates on the rich.

But these ruminations lead to a thought, not about how to tax the poor less, but how to tax the rich more. The last thirty years of relative political influence of the world’s well-to-do indicate that, in aggregate, they are not particularly prepared to pay higher taxes, even when it is clearly intended for the overall benefit of the population. So the question is, is there some way that paying taxes to the government can be made to feel like gambling, or like investing on their own account, for society’s wealthiest members?  The rise of social impact bonds seems to suggest one possible avenue of pursuing such “behavioural” policy-making. The only problem with these schemes, as with a large portion of private-public partnerships, is that the private party often seems to be the one leaving the table with all the chips.

Good advice for weekends (or dead astronauts and hot metal)

culture, , , ,

In a post on touchscreens, Edward Tufte pleads for us to to spend less time having a 2-d experience of our 3-d world. Thus, as interesting as it may be to learn something about how PowerPoint kills astronauts, we shouldn’t forget there are richer things to do:

Plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera. Or hammer glowing hot metal in a blacksmith shop.