I write this as the college basketball season heads down the road to another final four. Teaching and coaching have some similar goals, but differences in delivery and motivation are worth discussing. The coach I have observed most over the years is Jim Calhoun, men's basketball coach at the University of Connecticut. He may have mellowed some, but he still sometimes will seem furious with his players during games. As one press account this season noted, "UConn trailed the plucky Wolf Pack by 18-11, and Calhoun loosened his tie and lit into his team." (New York Times, 20 November 2003). On rare occasions he appears so enraged, he can't speak, or won't speak, to them during time-outs—he just glares.
According to Calhoun's coaching memoir, Dare to Dream, (Broadway Books, 1999, 228 pages), the UConn athletic department once complained that they had no photo of him to put on press guides and programs. Photographers had never snapped a picture of him smiling during the game (p. 185). And this is just his public display of affection. One can only guess what happens during practices and in the locker room at halftime.
This behavior is not confined to men's teams. Geno Auriemma, the women's basketball coach at UConn, can also seem angry and sarcastic. After one game this past January, he told the press, "Our big guys are girly-girls, you know? They play girl's basketball. We've got to get them to play college women's basketball." (Hartford Courant, 27 January 2004).
Calhoun and Auriemma are the most successful coaches in UConn history and among the most successful in the country based on their winning records, tournament results, and pay (Calhoun makes about $900,000 a year and Auriemma, about $600,000). So their behavior appears well within accepted bounds. These coaches are not alone, or even the most demonstrative (think Bob Knight).
Here's my question: Why can a coach berate players publicly, even on national
television, yet a teacher who questions a student's discipline and drive, even
in the privacy of the office, might be considered insensitive? I have discussed
this double standard with the coach of a major college program (not UConn),
and he claims that a coach can push players harder because they realize that
the coach just wants them to live up to their potential.
That sentiment is echoed in Calhoun's book: "The players, I push them and prod them, beg them and scream at them. There are times, driving home in your car, sitting up in bed late at night, you question yourself: Have I gone too far? Am I too tough? Do they understand what I'm doing? Do I have the right to put the burden on them? ….I do it because I like you, I want you to be better, the best you can be." (pp. 186-187, emphasis in the original). At least one current player sounds like a believer: "[Calhoun] still wants you to compete on every play. He still wants you to become the best basketball player, and the best person, you can be" (St. Petersburg Times, 20 March 2003).
I believe two reasons college coaches get more emotional than teachers are (1) coaches can get away with it and (2) coaches have more at stake. The coach has more riding on each game and the practices that lead up to it than a teacher has riding on each exam and the classes that lead up to it. A coach carries a won-loss record for life, and that metric determines the coach's career. What if we were judged after each exam based on how well our students performed against students in a competing class taught by someone else? And what if we carried that record with us till kingdom come? Our record would appear in parenthesis after our name. Journalists might write about teachers with the best or worst record, the largest winning percentage, or the most improved since the last academic year. If this were the case, we might become more animated if we found students were dogging it in a way that would end our teaching careers.
Coaches perform for a variety of audiences. One of the most important is potential recruits. Even the best coaches need talent to compete. Since Calhoun, Auriemma, and other hotheads manage to recruit some of the best player in the world, we must conclude that recruits are not turned off by these sideline fits. Top recruits are likely looking for someone who will push them enough to make the National Basketball Association, where the annual pay now averages $4 million.
Why don't our students accept such prodding? First, students perceive the stakes as smaller. Few believe their success upon graduation depends on how much they learn in a particular course. What many really want is the college degree (and the grades) without the discipline. As M. Scott Peck wrote: "The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature." We would all rather avoid being pushed, but we prefer being pushed to pushing ourselves, particularly if the stakes are high enough. We are willing to limit our personal freedom by playing for a tough coach, hiring a personal trainer, agreeing to a submission deadline we know will be tight, attending alcoholics anonymous meetings, asking a casino manager to bar us from gambling, joining weight-watchers, or undergoing gastric bypass surgery.
At 2:00 p.m. last January 28th, the Dow was up about 50 points, as the market awaited word from the Federal Open Market Committee's two-day meeting. Few expected the federal funds rate to change from its 45-year low of 1 percent, but what would the Fed say about future rate changes? Going back to last August, the summary statement included the phrase "…the Committee believes that policy accommodation can be maintained for a considerable period." The January statement shifted slightly to "the Committee believes that it can be patient in removing its policy accommodation." Securities markets didn't like the difference, and the Dow dropped about 190 points, or 1.8%. Other indexes fell more in percentage terms, giving U.S. markets a $400 billion haircut by the 4:00 p.m. close. Securities markets around the world followed the U.S. down. A jump in long-term interest rates added to the capital losses.
As you know, the FOMC consists of the seven Board Governors, the New York Fed president (who executes open market operations) and, on a rotating basis, four of the 11 other regional bank presidents. As permanent members of the FOMC and because of their other monetary responsibilities, the Board of Governors is arguably the most important appointive economic body in the world. Six of the seven Governors hold Ph.D.s in economics: Ben Bernanke (MIT '79), Susan Schmidt Bies (Northwestern '72), Roger Ferguson (Harvard '81), Edward Gramlich (Yale '65), Donald Kohn (Michigan '71), and Chairman Alan Greenspan (NYU '77). The seventh member, Mark Olson, holds a B.A. in economics from Saint Olaf College as his highest degree. Before his appointment, he directed the staff of the U.S. Senate's Securities Subcommittee. (His career, incidentally, is an exceptional example of what a student can do with just a bachelor's degree in economics).
You may think that having six Ph.D. economists on the Board is unremarkable, since the position would seem to call for this expertise. But such representation has occurred only recently—six months during 1998 and since August 2002, or for only about two of the Fed's 90 year history. Nor has a Ph.D. been common among Fed Chairmen. Of the 13 Chairmen since 1914, only Greenspan and Arthur Burns held Ph.D.s. Burns was the only former academic to head the Fed; during his term (1970-1979), the Fed took flak from his former student, Milton Friedman. Greenspan is the second longest serving Chairman so far (since 1987). William McChesney Martin, a former stockbroker, served the longest (1951-1970). Third in tenure was Marriner S. Eccles (1934-1948), who had been in finance and real estate.
Textbooks tell us that the 14 year staggered terms of Board members were designed to insulate the body from political stacking. No U.S. president can be sure of appointing more than two of the seven members during a single presidential term. But few Governors serve out their terms. The overwhelming share appointed since 1936, when the 14-year term was introduced, resigned before their terms ended. How come? Maybe some board members became bored members—perhaps the job wasn't stimulating enough. Maybe some members felt the Chairman got all the media attention and the glory (aside from Greenspan, how many board members could you have named). Or perhaps staying more than a few years diminished the present value of a future income stream. After all, becoming a Board Governor would dress up most anyone's resume, boosting later job opportunities and pay prospects. But earning $154,700 for a few more years as a Governor reduces the time left to make more as a corporate or university executive, consultant, or investment banker. For example, Wayne Angell went from teaching economics at Ottawa University in Kansas (which currently has 70 full- and part-time faculty and 225 adjuncts) to serving as a Fed Governor to becoming Chief Economist and Managing Director of Bear Stearns.
With most board members resigning prematurely, U.S. presidents get to appoint
more of them. For example, President Clinton made eight appointments plus the
reappointment of Chairman Greenspan. Clinton could have appointed two more toward
the end of his second term, but he left the positions unfilled. Just in his
first two years, President Bush appointed four Governors and reappointed another,
so he had the opportunity to fill five of seven positions.
John Steele Gordon's book, Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable (Walker & Company, 2002, 240 pages), tells of efforts to lay the first operating cable between Europe and North America. The star is Cyrus Field, the entrepreneur who made it happen. His drive and determination were incredible. His challenge was to come up with a wire 2000 miles long and sink it into the Atlantic Ocean up to two miles down. No ship at the time could carry anywhere near that amount of wire.
Field put his own wealth at risk, but he could not do it alone. He attracted investors and talent from both sides of the Atlantic. Partners in the enterprise included Samuel Morse, of Morse-code fame, and William Cengage, who later became Lord Kelvin. Like others who pursue projects that have never been tried, Field and his partners didn't know what they were getting into. Far from smooth sailing, the effort encountered technical, financial, legal, and political setbacks. Although Field was prone to violent seasickness, he made some fifty transatlantic crossings, more than any other businessperson of the era. The disasters were tragic and the timing unfortunate, yet Field persisted through storms, mechanical failures, bad luck, even suspected sabotage (workers laying the cable were required to wear overalls without pockets or front openings because someone was suspected of jamming needles into the cable).
In 1858 the brief communication between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan via the just-laid cable created a "titanic" reaction. A diarist of the day not given to hyperbole observed that while newspapers were trying to outdo each other in heaping praise on Field and his enterprise, "Moderate people merely say that this is the greatest human achievement in history" (p. 133). What the public didn't know at the time was that, because of a weak signal, the exchange between the Queen and the president took 16 hours to complete—about ten minutes a word. When the cable went dead a month later, Field and his partners were viciously lampooned in the press. Some claimed there was no cable and that the entire event had been staged. It took another eight years and several tries before Field succeeded laying a workable cable.
The richness of the story is in the details, such as just how the material used to make the cable came to be. Aside from porcelain, materials of the eighteenth century were also used by the Romans. Material science began transforming the world in the nineteenth century. Coal tar proved to be a rich source of new substances, including naphtha, which waterproofed cloth, and creosote, which preserved wood, especially railroad ties and telegraph poles. The synthesis of aniline dyes from coal tar in 1856 freed up millions of acres of agricultural land used for dye crops such as madder and indigo.
To paint the picture, the book is richly illustrated with maps, diagrams, and
portraits. It's now in paperback and would be an interesting supplement for
courses in entrepreneurship, technological change, finance, or even information
technology. Gordon writes a regular column, "The Business of America,"
for American Heritage, and has authored several business histories.
A standing joke about economists is that if you lined us up end-to-end we wouldn't reach a conclusion. The media reinforce this because of an inclination to offer both sides of any issue and because disagreement makes for a better story. Since many in the media don't really understand economics, they may take comfort in the perceived disagreement (after all, how detrimental can ignorance of economics be if even the experts can't agree).
But how much do economists disagree? Surveys over the years have found a fair amount of consensus, particularly on matters of positive analysis. In the most recent study, Dan Fuller and Doris Geide-Stevenson of Weber State surveyed 1,000 American Economic Association members and posed 44 propositions, many drawn from earlier surveys. Based on responses from the 300 or so who completed the survey, the authors found a relatively high degree of consensus, especially with microeconomic and international propositions.
The respondents generally agreed on the efficiency of markets in production and distribution. This consensus strengthened between 1990 and 2000, particularly on international trade and finance propositions, where the benefits of free trade and flexible exchange rates were widely embraced. Perhaps surprisingly, in light of the growing rumblings against globalization (e.g., see Joseph E. Stiglitz, "The Broken Promise of Nafta," New York Times, 6 January 2004), economists were less concerned in 2000 than in 1990 with large trade deficits, international financial instability, and possible degradation of national labor and environmental standards. There was also some shift in support during the decade toward monetarist and supply-side propositions.
Among propositions posed for the first time in 2000, three quarters of respondents
"agreed," or "agreed with provisos," that "Welfare
reforms which place time limits on public assistance have increased the general
well-being of society." The same share went for "The Earned Income
Tax Credit program should be expanded." And four out of five did not believe
that "Internet delivery and distance education will significantly reduce
the demand for academic professionals in the not-too-distant future." Results
are reported in "Consensus Among Economists: Revisited," in the Fall
2003 issue of the Journal of Economic Education, which can be found at
http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/
It's been a while since I reported on economic Weblogs, or "blogs." I'll say a little about each site and the blogger's background. I am limiting this brief survey to bloggers with Ph.D.s in economics who blog more than once a week. Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, still has the best site (www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/) in terms of quality, timeliness, and the frequency of entries (I discussed this blog in the Fall 2002 issue). My only question is: does Professor DeLong have a life? Tyler Cowen of George Mason University blogs at Marginal Revolution (http://www.marginalrevolution.com/). He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard and is Director of the James Buchanan Center. Another blogger on that site is Alexander Tabarrok, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University with a Ph.D. from there. He is also research director at the Independent Institute. The Knowledge Problem: Commentary of Economics, Information, and Human Action (http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/) is written by Lynne Kiesling, director of economic policy for the libertarian Reason Foundation in Chicago. Her focus is on oil prices, hydrogen power, and the electrical grid. She also teaches at Northwestern, where she earned a Ph.D. EconoPundit: Economics News and Views (http://www.econopundit.com/) is written by Steve Antler of Roosevelt University in Chicago. Although Professor Antler has written for The Nation, his blog is eclectic with a market orientation. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and is also a "semiprofessional" magician. Newmark's Door (http://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/), is Craig Newmark's of North Carolina State University take on "Things one middle-aged economist finds interesting." He has a Ph.D. from UCLA. ARGMAX: Economic News, Data, and Analysis (http://www.argmax.com/) is written by John Irons, Senior Economic Research and Policy Analyst and Staff Economist at OMB Watch, a Washington D.C. nonprofit organization. Before that, he taught at Amherst. He earned a Ph.D. from M.I.T. I haven't yet come across any blogs by economists with a focus on teaching (as opposed to economic issues of the day). Suggestions are welcome.
Craig Freedman of Macquarie University in Australia has profiled the teaching career of George Stigler. He sums it up as follows: "For most students, economics is painfully nonintuitive, but Stigler saw no reason to compromise. He unequivocally spoke in the shorthand of his profession, refusing to make links obvious. Like his teachers before him, Stigler expected his students to battle their way to his level. To use a modern term, he was distinctly 'user unfriendly.' His own textbook was a clear example of that tendency…It is written for the instructor rather than the student."(p. 287) Stigler's approach no doubt worked for some students, but probably not most. See "Do Great Economists Make Great Teachers?" Journal of Economic Education, (Summer 2003), which can be found at http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/.
But there is no question that some great economists are great teachers. I found James Buchanan organized, stimulating, and inspiring. He had graduate students critique recent journal articles; several of these critiques were published as comments in journals such as The Review of Economics and Statistics. Some great economists can get their point across through sheer enthusiasm. For example, William Sjostrom of National University of Ireland writes in his blog: "In grad school at the University of Washington, I learned microeconomics from Stephen Cheung. He was a wretched teacher by any conventional measure. He never came to class prepared. What he did was walk into class and talk about whatever problem he was thinking about. (Why do all the good seats sell out first?) He was amazing. He used to say, in his heavy Chinese accent, "Economics so powerful, it scares me" (http://www.atlanticblog.com).
In the Fall 2003 issue of The Teaching Economist,
I related an exam excuse from a student who broke his leg running to get to
my quiz. Two weeks later that student was addled on a midterm exam because of
medication he took for the leg pain. Don Coffin,
of Indiana University Northwest, believes he can top that. His student called
on the morning of the exam to say he couldn't make it. As the student put it,
"I was in my living room last night, studying for the test, when I heard
a noise outside. I went out on my porch and two guys were stripping my car.
I yelled 'Hey. Cut that out.' And one of them pulled out a gun and shot me in
the leg…It's on page 47 of today's paper." Professor Coffin opened
the paper and found the account. Case closed—another otherwise eager test-taker
taken down by a leg injury. I invite you to tap into your years of experience
and share exceptional excuses with colleagues here in The Grapevine.
As part of the debate on whether great players make great coaches and whether great economists make great teachers (see "The Natural," in the Fall 2000 issue of The Teaching Economist), consider the backgrounds of coaches in the National Football League. Of the 32 head coaches this past season, only eight played in the NFL for at least one season, and only three of those played regularly. None made it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a player. In the recent Superbowl, neither the winning nor the losing coach ever wore an NFL uniform.
Each Thursday the New York Time publishes the "Economic Scene," written by one of four alternating columnists: Alan Krueger, of Princeton; Hal Varian, of Berkeley; Jeff Madrick, Editor of Challenge Magazine, and economics writer Virginia Postrel. An archive of Krueger's contributions can be found at http://www.irs.princeton.edu/krueger/EconomicScene.html, Varian's at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/articles.html, and Postrel's at http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/nyt/index.html. (I found no archive for Madrick.) Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, writes a syndicated column two or three times a week, which can be found at http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/archive.shtml. Many of his columns point to shortcomings of government regulations. Robert Samuelson has been writing a weekly column for the Washington Post since 1977 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/opinion/columns/samuelsonrobert/). He also writes weekly for Newsweek, though online access to the Newsweek columns is limited. Samuelson focuses on the economy, with a market orientation. Paul Krugman of Princeton writes twice weekly in the New York Times, at http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/ For some months he has been critical of Bush Administration policies, with columns such as "The Awful Truth," "Democracy at Risk," and "Our So-Called Boom."
In the College Fed Challenge, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, students play the role of monetary policymakers in this annual competition by analyzing current economic conditions and recommending an appropriate monetary policy. Teams of three to five undergraduates make a 20-minute presentation and respond to questions for 15 minutes. The 2003 winning team was from Barnard/Columbia. For more details, go to http://www.ny.frb.org/education/fedchallenge_college.html.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco offers a University Symposium to
help undergraduates understand the functions of the Federal Reserve System.
Materials include student handouts, FOMC simulation assignments, and background
materials. For example, "The professor will divide the class into seven
groups that will act as research teams of economists." The Fed Chairman
is supported by one of those teams, Fed Governors get three teams, and FRB Presidents
get three teams. For details and supporting materials, go to http://www.frbsf.org/education/teachers/symposium/index.html.
Return to Contents of Issue 26, Spring 2004
