Nearly a decade ago, Daniel Hamermesh of UT-Austin and Jeff Biddle of Michigan State found that, for a variety of occupations, a person's looks have a statistically significant effect on earnings ("Beauty and the Labor Market," American Economic Review, December 1994, pp. 1174-94). Other things constant, people with above average looks earned about 5 percent more than people with average looks, and those with below average looks earned about 5 percent less. Whether this premium results from higher work productivity remains an open question. Perhaps better looking people have the confidence to seek better paid positions or people who earn more can afford better grooming, a more stylish wardrobe, and more cosmetic surgery and dental work.
As a way of moving closer to the productivity question, Hamermesh and Amy Parker, an undergraduate economics major at UT-Austin, wanted to find out whether an instructor's looks affects course evaluations. Their sample consisted of student evaluations of 463 undergraduate courses taught by 94 instructors at UT-Austin during the academic years 2000-2002. Underlying the sample were 16,957 completed evaluations.
To develop an index of beauty, the authors asked six undergraduates (three males and three females) to independently score each instructor's looks based on a photograph. Beauty scores were fairly consistent across the six judges. The authors also gathered other information about each instructor, including gender, tenure-track status, minority status, and whether educated in an English-speaking country.
They found, after adjusting for other factors, that courses taught by instructors judged as better looking received significantly higher course ratings. On a scale from 1.0 to 5.0, with 5.0 the best, evaluations ranged from 3.5 for the least attractive instructors up to 4.5 for the best looking, other things constant. The average course evaluation was 4.0. The effect was robust and found within university departments and even within particular courses. Compared to female instructors, male instructors gained more of a premium for good looks and more of a penalty for bad looks.
The question remains whether beauty makes instructors more productive in the classroom—say, because students pay closer attention or because better looking teachers are more self confident—or whether students are simply giving those with irrelevant beauty characteristics higher evaluations.
Average evaluations were lower for females, minority faculty, non-native English
speakers, and tenure trackers. The higher evaluations for non-tenure trackers
may at first seem surprising but these instructors are often selected specifically
because of their teaching ability. "Beauty in the Classroom: Professors'
Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity" (July 2003) is available
at www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Hamermesh/listpapers.html.
Every now and then a book comes along that weaves a common thread of history into a powerful narrative. In Salt: A World History (Walker and Company, 2002, 484 pages), Mark Kurlansky argues persuasively that a vein of salt has run through civilization for millennia. For example, Jericho was founded nearly 10,000 years ago as a salt trading center. The earliest trade routes crossing deserts and oceans were forged by the market for salt. The Byzantine road networks in North America resulted mostly from trails first trod by animals in search of salt licks.
Salt provoked some wars, financed others, and was a strategic resource in still more, including the Revolutionary War. The British blockade of colonial ports in 1775 contributed to a severe salt shortage for George Washington's Continental army. British forces also attacked and destroyed colonial salt works. During Napoleon's retreat from Russia, thousands died from minor wounds because his army lacked salt as a disinfectant.
Salt revenue funded important public projects including the world's first major dam built in China in 250 B.C. The French salt tax—the gabelle—became the leading revenue source for the crown in the 17th century. This had to be one of the most inefficient taxes in history. Every person over the age of 8 was required by law to purchase seven kilograms of salt each year, much more than anyone could consume unless it was used for curing fish or meat. But such use of gabelle salt was illegal.
Salt was once the most sought after mineral on earth and served as money in many economies. The industry boasts 14,000 uses for its mineral—from salt baths to rust removal-but most salt is now used to keep roads safer in winter.
Like Forrest, Gump, salt seems to show up on the world stage during significant historical events. The Erie Canal was built to carry salt to New York City. The West Indian slave trade was underwritten by salt sales, more so than by sales of rum or molasses. The salt tax in India led to Ghandi's salt march, which set in motion the overthrow of British rule there. The oil discoveries in Texas that fueled the petroleum age were serendipitous by-products of drilling for salt mines.
Kurlansky ties together hundreds of such threads, but his book is no mere string of salty tales. His narration is a gripping economic history and a tour de force of organization. A reporter for 25 years, he traveled the world to research Salt. His taste for salt was no doubt cultivated by his earlier book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.
Salt is terrific a book and one that could enliven an economic history course
or any applied course. The hardback is available on Amazon for $19.60; the paperback
for $13.60. I'm touting it here because Salt received no notice in the profession's
major house organs. It has not been reviewed or even annotated in the Journal
of Economic Literature, and has not been listed among Bernard Saffran's
"Recommendations for Further Readings" in the Journal of Economic
Perspective.
In September 2002, MIT began offering free online access to materials for some of its courses. The project began with 32 courses in 17 disciplines, but the plan calls for covering 500 courses this fall and most of MIT's two thousand courses by 2006-2007. It has been a hit around the world, with site visitors from 210 countries and territories. Students, faculty, and other interested learners are using OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html), as it's called, to supplement courses, prepare course material, or just to see what an MIT education involves. Canada and Germany are the most frequent country sources of site hits outside the United States (China likely would have ranked first, but it denied its citizens access to OpenCourseWare until February 2003).
The most popular course is "Problems of Philosophy." I can see why. Course materials are well organized with online notes offered for each of the 22 lectures. Each lecture has an intriguing title such as "Evil and Free Will," "Moral Luck," and "Egoism." Eighteen economics courses were among those available online as of mid-September 2003. This amounts to about one third of the economics courses listed in the MIT catalogue. Principles of Macroeconomics is one of the online courses, but the material is disappointing. There are only two sets of lecture notes and they focus mostly on stocks, bonds, and interest rates, with a little IS-LM analysis—timely topics, no question, but macro is obviously much more. Students already think economics is mostly about stocks and bonds, so this material will reinforce that misconception. There also are some sloppy errors, such as saying stocks when bonds were the apparent intent, and referring to the Price/Dividend ratio in the notes, but the Dividend/Price ratio in the charts.
As you know, making course materials available online is not new. Nearly a decade ago, the World Lecture Hall began offering course links submitted by faculty from around the country (www.utexas.edu/world/lecture). I gave this site a mixed review seven years ago in The Teaching Economist ("Reality Bites," Issue 12, Fall 1996, http://www.swlearning.com/economics/mceachern/economist.html). There are now only 48 links to economics courses, and one third of these links are either dead or password protected. There were 63 links three years ago. This is little presence given the thousands of economics courses offered around the country.
Much broader coverage of online course materials is found at Syllabus Finder (http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi), a search tool offered by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. About 200,000 syllabi are at the Center's site, and 500,000 are accessible using a customized Google search engine that targets syllabi. Both are driven by key words you chose. For example, "Mark Kurlansky salt" links to two syllabi where the Salt book appears (at Brown and Bryn Mawr). "Behavioral economics" shows up on 1,060 syllabi, "economics" on 30,500, and "plagiarism" on 46,700. Plug in a favorite term and/or name (your own?) and see what turns up.
What's new about the MIT project is that a major institution would try to offer online material across the board for free. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, MIT made its decision only after a consultant concluded there was no market for selling course materials online. The MIT project was funded by the Mellon and Hewlett Foundations. The estimated cost of the seven-year effort is $100 million. To make OpenCourseWare more accessible around the world, online materials for 25 courses became available in Spanish and Portuguese in September 2003. Carnegie Mellon and Princeton Universities are also working on making course materials more widely available.
With greater frequency, behavioral economists are pointing out oddities that raise questions about how "rational" people really are. Interdependent preferences have been used to explain a variety of these anomalies. It's becoming clear, for example, that an individual's rank in the income structure is an important consideration in how that individual values a given level of income. Preference interdependence has implications for wages, tax policy, and even the grades we hand out. Students are concerned both with the grade they receive and their relative standing in the class.
To explore income interdependence, Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick and Daniel Zizzo of Oxford University designed an experiment to see if people dislike other people's income enough to give up some of their own money to reduce it. At the beginning of the experiment, four players were given money and told they could bet any portion of it. After the betting round, two of the subjects received a "gift" of money, based on the alphabetical order of their last names. All players were told about this distribution rule. The combination of betting outcomes and the selective gifts created an unequal income distribution from the game. Subjects who received the gifts had about twice as much income as those who did not. Although subjects operated independently and anonymously on a computer terminal, each was fully informed of the results of the other three players in the experiment.
In the final round of play, each subject was allowed, though not encouraged, to anonymously destroy, or "burn," other subjects' income from the experiment. To do so, a player had to give up some of his or her own income from the experiment. The price varied from 2 cents to 25 cents for each $1 burned (I must give up 25 cents to burn $1 of your money). Subjects could keep whatever money remained after the burning round.
And burn they did. Nearly two thirds of those tested chose to burn at least part of another test subject's money. Half of all laboratory income was deliberately destroyed. Although the amount burned declined when the price rose from 10 cents to 25 cents, the proportion of players who burned other players' money did not change after the price increase. Players burned other players' money as frequently at a high price as at a lower price.
Subjects who did not receive gifts burned money of those who did—apparently these gifts were perceived by the ungifted as undeserved windfalls. Most subjects, especially the ungifted, burned the money of the wealthiest of players at least as much as they burned the money of those who ranked second in wealth, and at least as much as they burned the money of those who ranked third in wealth. So the money of the rich was burned more, but the money of the poor also got burned.
A total of 29 sessions were carried out with four subjects each, for a total sample of 116 subjects. Subjects were mostly students and support staff with an average age of 25. The research was published last year as "Are People Willing to Pay to Reduce Others' Incomes?" in Annales D'Economie et de Statistique, Vol. 64, February 2002, pp. 39-65. It is also available at Professor Oswald's site at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/oswald/ .
The study suggests that the subjects chose to reduce the income of other players, even at a cost to themselves. Does this make sense? Certainly it's not surprising that someone would like to take high income subjects down a few pegs. That's one reason most people root for the underdog. The results are consistent with several emotions—jealousy, covetousness, envy, even the desire for revenge.
The dictionary defines the German word schadenfreude as the joy experienced from the troubles of others. The word breaks down into schaden, or damage, and freude, or joy—getting joy from damage. This may motivate terrorists, vandals, computer hackers, and computer virus instigators. But the Oswald-Zizzo results suggest wider relevance than this narrow group of misfits.
The tabloid media exploit schadenfreude by joyfully reporting celebrity
troubles. Stories are usually accompanied by unflattering celebrity photos,
which is why celebrities dislike paparazzi. Radio host Don Imus readily admits
that his show feeds on the troubles of the well known, and he's grumpy when
this group is not behaving badly. Perfectionist Martha Stewart's stock problems
brightened many people's day.
Could schadenfreude extend even to friends and relatives? Maybe. Suppose
a friend of yours in the department just received stellar teaching evaluations.
What would be your honest feeling? Gore Vidal once said that "Whenever
a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." What about relatives?
Sibling rivalry is as old as Cain and Abel. One of the most popular shows on
television is motivated by just that. Robert Barone experiences joy when brother
Raymond gets in trouble. The irony of the show's title underscores the source
of Robert's frustration-"Everybody Loves Raymond." Well, not everybody.
R. Kim Craft and Joe Baker of Southern Utah University, using a national sample, found that lawyers who took undergraduate courses in economics earn more than other lawyers, other things constant. Economics is the only undergraduate field associated with earnings that differ significantly. Their research, "Do Economists Make Better Lawyers? Undergraduate Degree Fields and Lawyer Earnings," is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Education. When it's published, it can be found at http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/
What is the relationship between schooling—particularly the cognitive skills learned in school—and labor productivity? Paul Glewwe of University of Minnesota and the World Bank reports in a survey article that cognitive skills acquired during schooling appear to be directly responsible for part, if not most, of the impact of schooling on labor income. Even after adjusting for years of schooling and innate ability, cognitive skills nearly always have a statistically significant impact on income. Innate ability does have an indirect effect on income by enabling students to acquire the cognitive skills. But innate ability seems to have no impact on income after controlling for years of schooling and cognitive skills. See Glewwe's "Schools and Skills in Developing Countries: Education Policies and Sociological Outcomes," in Journal of Economic Literature (June 2002), pp. 436-482.
To help distinguish between fixed costs and variable costs, Erik Steger of East Central University in Oklahoma, uses recreation examples. He explains that certain recreation choices involve a relatively high fixed cost—such as owning a boat or a motor home or having a golf or tennis club membership. Variable costs for these choices—such as maintaining equipment and the opportunity cost of your time-are relatively low. Other recreation choices such as movie and concert attendance involve only variable costs, like the cost of tickets and transportation and the opportunity cost of your time.
John Siegfried of Vanderbilt University finds that the decline in economics majors that occurred in the early 1990s has reversed itself. The total number of students majoring in economics has been rising in recent years through 2002. He reports these findings in "Trends in Undergraduate Economics Degrees, 1991-2002," in the Summer 2003 issue of the Journal of Economic Education. You can find it at http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/
Norman Cloutier and Dennis Kaufman of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside surveyed students to determine the most each was willing to pay for an "A" in the course. With the answers—and with other characteristics of each student—they estimated a well-behaved demand curve. "The Price of Success: The Demand for an 'A' in Economics Principles," was published in the Summer 2003 issue of the new online Journal of Economics and Finance Education, which can be found at http://www.csb.uncw.edu/ecfejournal/current.PDF.
In Economics of
Popular Film, a course offered by Satya J. Gabriel at Mount Holyoke College,
students view Erin Brockovich as a prelude to a discussion of the environment,
Wall Street to consider corporate finance, and The Matrix to gain
perspective on the way we perceive reality (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/filmcourse.html
). Don Leet of Cal State-Fresno shows how film plots illustrate economic
problems and issues. He writes of his experience in "Economics Goes to
Hollywood: Using Classic Films and Documentaries to Create an Undergraduate
Economics Course," which will be published this fall by the Journal
of Economic Education. You can find it at http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/
Having taught more than ten thousand students over the years, I have heard most of the excuses for missed exams. One common explanation is a death in the family—especially a grandmother. Grandmothers do die, of course, but mortality rates in my large principles class made me want to alert the Center for Disease Control. Ironically, the wildest excuses are usually the most credible (students tend to be risk averse and stick with garden variety excuses). Here's a fractured excuse I once received that I'm sure is true. After a quiz in a discussion section, I received the following message from the student infirmary: "[the student] fell while racing to get to the exam. Leg may be dislocated or fractured. Is on his way to Windham Hospital." Two weeks later, that same student wrote on the cover of his exam: "Please take into consideration that my pain killers make it hard for me to concentrate. Not only did I study while on them, but I needed to take some this morning. Thank you, (student with broken leg)."
In the beauty-contest research discussed on the front page, one sixth of the faculty pictured were dressed more formally-neckties for men and blouse and jacket for women. Twenty years ago this would have been more than half. Could it be that the more formal dress signals better organization or some other attribute that students find appealing? Faculty pictured more formally did in fact earn higher course evaluations, but even after adjusting for this possible bias, the essential findings of the study still held up.
What's the most expensive meat sold at a grocery store? Filet mignon? Porterhouse steak? A new product, ready-crisp bacon, may top the list, selling at $4.29 for a three-ounce package at my local supermarket. That's about $23 a pound. If you like bacon, it's a good buy, considering the time and mess of frying it and disposing of the grease.
When quarterly GDP growth figures were recently revised upward from 0.7% to 1.4%, Mark Haines, host of "Squawk Box" on CNBC, squawked "Economists blew it again." At other times, I have heard him complain, "Economists, what good are they?" Haines has been a news anchor for most of his working life; he is also a lawyer and member of the New Jersey State Bar. Business-show hosts who are lawyers, what good are they?
The Library of Economics and Liberty (http://www.econlib.org/index.html) offers economic resources with a libertarian spin, including a "Concise Encyclopedia of Economics."
Economics and Human Biology published its first issue last January with titles such as "Research Project: A History of Health in Europe from the Late Paleolithic Era to the Present," by Richard Steckel of Ohio State. Abstracts and full text from the first issue are available at http://www.elsevier.com/homepage/sae/econworld/econbase/ehb/frame.htm.
"The mind
of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual
state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to
that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it." -Adam
Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments
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