Prior Trap Preview

Arnold Kling has an interesting post on Inequality, that references Brink Lindsey's piece in the Wall Street Journal.

My October talk at GMU is going to be on the same issue that Lindsey refers to as the Culture Gap.

The type of facts that go to the heart of my concern and apperantly his is this:

Among students who received high scores in eighth grade mathematics (and thus showed academic promise), 74% of kids from the highest quartile of socioeconomic status . . . earned a college . . . 29% for those in the bottom quartile [did as well].

That is socio-economic status seems to have an effect independent of ability.

Lindsey argues that it is a cultural phenomenon. On one level I do not disagree.

However, I believe that "culture" is the rational extrapolation of unknown parameters from the behavior of people in your reference group.

Whew! In other words:

Look life is full of choices. The consequences of those choices depend upon the complex interaction of factors that you don't have the time or in many cases even the resources to understand. So what do you do? You copy the behavior people who seem to be doing well given similar circumstances. If you think Joe is doing good for himself and Joe has constraints similar to your own then you copy Joe. If Fred is screwing up royally and Fred was faced with the same choices that you had, you avoid Fred's behavior.

This is in part why people feel moved by an example "they can relate to." This is simply a way of saying the constraints in this problem as sufficiently similar to my own that I can use it as a data point.

When your circle is an unbiased sample of population consequences this works remarkably well. It is possible for people to make fully optimal choices in the face of no data, apart the actions and consequences of those around them.

In other words, to be successful you don't have any clue about how the world actually works, you only have to learn from the experience of the people around. This is nice because in academia some of the smartest people, with the most powerful computers and the largest data sets spend all day trying to understand how the world actually works and they still have no clue.

When your sample is biased, however, you can be steered off track. If everyone you see is a high school drop out and most of them are just as smart as you, then what makes you think that you can or should finish high school, let along go to college.

Remember that investing in education requires giving up work and leisure today for the possibility of gains tomorrow. Working at McDonald's or spending time with you friends pays off with probability one. College? Well in a world where the only person you know that has graduated from college is your teacher, what are likely to conclude about the expected return from that investment.

The corollary to my theory is that good teachers are not ones who have high instructional ability but high motivational ability. Good teachers encourage already successful students to push themselves even harder. Good teachers can relate to at risk students and convince them that the pay off from education is indeed positive.

Rick Hanushek shows that working with great teachers four years in a row can eliminate the performance gap between low income and high income students However, what makes a great teacher has little to do with education or experience. He says that the missing factor is unknown but probably innate.

I suggest that the missing factor is the ability to gain a student's trust. The ability of a teacher to convince a student to disregard that giant data set called her community and instead believe the message the teacher is painting. This often requires disregarding parents as well. After all, poor parents are disproportionately likely to be people who estimated a low expected return to education themselves.