A father writes Tim Harford (author of the book Undercover Economist) to inquire on how to divvy up a stash of cash as incentives for his son to pass his exams. Harford answers:
Start by promising more than you can deliver. If you offer €10,000 for a perfect score, you will only need to apologise after your scheme has succeeded. That may seem to undermine your credibility, but the real risk lies the other way: your son may expect to get the money from his doting dad anyway. Discourage this view or your plan will be in vain.
You must also pitch the stakes just right. Research in behavioural economics suggests that trivial rewards are worse than no rewards, but also that performance suffers when too much is at stake.
Finally, focus on the early exams, because success breeds success. Promise your son €200 for every excellent result in these: that should engage his interest without throwing him into a panic. If things go well, the money will run out before the high-pressure exams. But by then he will have mastered his subjects anyway. Link
Now, the question here is can we develop an insurance scheme that will fund the incentives (drawing from the insurance policy)? In the payment term, parents would be pressed to help their child (via tutoring). In the long run, (in the ideal case) the child will have enough study habits and have high enough grades to qualify for college scholarships.
On the other hand, the child may be put off by the hard work involved with studying which will increase the lure of those ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes when he gets older.
Philantrophist Eli Broad has an educational program called Spark to improve school children’s test scores:
Seventh-graders can earn up to $50 a test — for 10 assessment tests throughout the year. There’s a similar program for fourth-graders. The money goes into a bank account that only the student can access. The better you do, the more money you earn, up to $500 a year for seventh-graders. The idea is to make school tangible for disadvantaged kids — short-term rewards that are in their long-term best interest… [Eight-grader Soledad Moya] said she wasn’t a “studying kind of” person before the awards. Now she and her friends like to look in the dictionary and memorize words and their definitions, and they ask their teachers for more practice tests. Even though she’s not eligible for the awards now that she’s in eighth grade, she’s still studying harder before tests, she said. “Once you get started with something, you keep doing it.” The changes she saw in students like Moya caused Lisa Cullen — a literacy and social studies teacher at the school — to go from skeptic to supporter: “I saw how it takes away the uphill battle you have trying to get students to study for tests.” She saw a definite increase in students’ excitement, enthusiasm and effort. Link
Wow! That is exactly of why I studied to ace that Science in fourth grade, to buy myself a horde of comics.
Even though they may say that it’s basically bribing kids to study (isn’t that what scholarhsips are about?), you have to concede that the short-term gains are quite tangible and attractive enough to be taken upon on. In plain economics, it’s the power of incentives!
What experts underestimate here is the power of building a long-term habit in the school children participating with the program. Not only are study habits going to be built, but the confidence and self-esteem of the students will also be given a boost.
A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now. Op-Ed Contributor – Buy American. I Am. – NYTimes.com.
Thanks to Bryan Caplan for the pointer
Franklin D. Roosevelt: First Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men. 7
Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live. 8
Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now. Franklin D. Roosevelt: First Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989.
So what will the post-mortem on Wall Street show? That it was a case of suicide? Murder? Accidental death? Or was it a rare instance of generalized organ failure? We will likely never know.
The regulations and precautions that lawmakers will enact to prevent its recurrence will therefore necessarily remain blunt and of uncertain effectiveness.
That is why you can be sure that we will have another major financial crisis sometime in the future, once this one has disappeared into the recesses of our memory. You can bet your life savings on it. In fact, you probably will. Who Killed Wall Street?.
A never ending cycle of trouble-solution-trouble again.
In the end few people can forsee the big problems of tomorrow, thus we are forever preparing for the last war, but there are things that prove to be scarier. The speed at which information travels has exceeded our capability to make sense of it. This is true for financial innovation, and almost all other forms of innovation fueling our modern world! What we have is I think similar to what programmers have to face. Agile programming was born as a result of frustrations with alot of the management styles that programmers are forced to adhere to. It designs the process ofsoftware development to be more responsive to changes. The processes are designed to help produce code that is easily or more readily tested and responsive to the ever changing user requirements. This is mostly done because of a structure where trust in the abilities of your co-workers and supervisors/team leads are present in abundance.
The thing is because of the fema fication of government we just don’t have that level of trust in the abilities of the people who run the government (Ben Bernanke exempted).
Going back to my main point, The technology is there, hearing Larry Lessig talk (reading on the web but hearing talk is more dramatic) of a more responsive techology enabled democracy, I cannot help but think of how much we need to restructure government to be adaptive, to be more agile.
This is because we will almost always be prepared for the last war, massive leverege, predatory lending, etc those things will be solved eventually, albeit slowly, but if we have structures/processes/agencies that are geared towards minimizing the hurt and maximizing the returns from the new challenges that face us then maybe just maybe we could live as if nothing changes because we have changed ourselves and our government to function in a way where only change is constant.
The whole pot was an excellent read. I’ve discussed my utter hate contempt <insert/hurl other insults here> in another post (ok the post was more of a positive post on not needing resumes) here and here.
The lowdown is simple if you have the ability to learn something fast, If you have the mental structure to do good work fast (programming context: for java people its a good grounding in patterns, for other more advice language its a great understanding and experience in meta programming), If you have the requisite basic social skills to be considered a good to great co-worker, you would probably never want for jobs.
Co-wrokers would refer you, and most of the times the resumes is secondary to the recommendation.
You work with someone for around 6 months and you probably know or have a fairly good idea of how well your co-worker learns, and in programming how ugly his or her code is.
If what you are working on is relatively hard and with deadlines that require you to level up your work output, if you can work in a project with some one that has critical time constraints and is still a hard project or problem you tend to have an idea of how he/she react under pressure.
This is something that no certification, no resume will tell you, and a test short of on the job evaluation will never show you these skills or attributes of a person.
I did a really short term contract a year ago, only a single week, in South Carolina trying to adapt a “free” tool for a use it wasn’t really supposed to be able to do. I had never seen the technology before (an XML publishing tool) and it had to interact with a system I knew nothing about (J.D. Edwards) and a week was all the time I had to learn, master, hack and deliver. I managed to succeed in 4 days (the fifth was a half day of just documenting) despite all the barriers and left on a real positive note from the customer and the agency. How do you put this in a resume? An ability to do anything that’s needed by learning rapidly, applying a lifetime of skills and a creative mind. Yeah, that’s a real good resume line:
Able to rapidly learn anything you need and deliver professional results
Talk about a useless resume. Yet it’s true, but lost in a sea of lies on resumes the statement may as well read “234234 dsfsjkhsdf = %432”.
Maybe resumes are still necessary, since the industry can’t figure out how to match employees and employers with a better method. Maybe people should write tests and challenge anyone to pass them (I think some people have tried that) instead of trolling for perjury. Even that isn’t foolproof since tests can be googled and passing tests doesn’t really prove you can actually deliver (I once knew a guy who passed the Java Developer Certification but couldn’t write two lines of code together that worked). Maybe people should read your blog and see if you know anything meaningful. I don’t have an answer, I just wish there was one people could agree on.
Meanwhile maybe I will try with the one line resume “Will write good code for good money”. I’d like to do some short term PHP work in the DFW area, so a short resume would be a plus.
At least it’s not a lie. Who knows, someone might believe it. the_codist().
I once ate around 3 kilos of chocolate within an hour period, hmm maybe that caused my migraine attack. But what a way to go!!
Death by Chocolate
Where would we be without the internet and wikipedia?
Theobromine poisoning: Chemists with the USDA are investigating the use of theobromine as a toxicant to control coyotes that prey on livestock. Humans are also susceptible to chocolate poisoning if enough is ingested. The lethal dose is placed at around 10 kg (22lbs). Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong.
I’ve personally resisted credit cards because my family has had a history of thinking of credit cards as cash. I almost got one last week but got cold feet when I realized that the only reason I’ve been able to save around 20 percent of my pay is that I can’t buy stuff online. I really like buying things but credit cards go against one of my principles of truly living in the moment (post about this in the future).
(emphasis mine)
So in a nutshell, while the interest rate on your credit cards is going up, the return on your investments has been going down. You know what they call someone who keeps on giving money to their stockbroker, mutual fund or 401k, but doesn’t pay off their credit card balance in full every month, BROKE AND STUPID ! Where To Put Your Money Right Now « blog maverick.
This is straight out of the Nintendo Playbook. I think that if they could promote this in a way where baby boomers view this as another part of the wellness movement and not as a sign of old age this might just work!
It Seems that a good way to increase the web search market share is to reel in those baby boomers into searching as a preventive measure against Alzheimer’s disease. On the 8 Spot » Google vs Alzheimer’s.
Internet searches MIGHT have a positive effect on brain functions of middle-aged adults. Here’s a snippet (emphasis mine):
UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function. The study, the first of its kind to assess the impact of Internet searching on brain performance, is currently in press at the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and will appear in an upcoming issue.
…
“Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function,” said principal investigator Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA who holds UCLA’s Parlow-Solomon Chair on Aging.
For the study, the UCLA team worked with 24 neurologically normal research volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76. Half of the study participants had experience searching the Internet, while the other half had no experience. Age, educational level and gender were similar between the two groups.
Study participants performed Web searches and book-reading tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which… tracks the intensity of cell responses in the brain by measuring the level of cerebral blood flow during cognitive tasks.
All study participants showed significant brain activity during the book-reading task, demonstrating use of the regions controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities…
Internet searches revealed a major difference between the two groups. While all participants demonstrated the same brain activity that was seen during the book-reading task, the Web-savvy group also registered activity in the… areas of the brain which control decision-making and complex reasoning.
…researchers found that during Web searching, volunteers with prior experience registered a twofold increase in brain activation when compared with those with little Internet experience. The tiniest measurable unit of brain activity registered by the fMRI is called a voxel. Scientists discovered that during Internet searching, those with prior experience sparked 21,782 voxels, compared with only 8,646 voxels for those with less experience.
…the Internet’s wealth of choices requires that people make decisions about what to click on in order to pursue more information, an activity that engages important cognitive circuits in the brain.
“A simple, everyday task like searching the Web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older,” Small said.
Small added that the minimal brain activation found in the less experienced Internet group may be due to participants not quite grasping the strategies needed to successfully engage in an Internet search, which is common while learning a new activity.”With more time on the Internet, they may demonstrate the same brain activation patterns as the more experienced group,” he said.
Link
There are a few caveats though, the study didn’t differentiate between the levels of prior internet searching knowledge (maybe one was a power googler while another might’ve only searched for porn before). One more caveat, the participants in the study may have been through ‘self-selecting bias’.
Does anyone know if Google funded this study? It Seems that a good way to increase the web search market share is to reel in those baby boomers into searching as a preventive measure against Alzheimer’s disease. Related articles by Zemanta
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