This is not my idea .It has been tossed around for a quite long time.Why don't they show Sri Lankan parlimentary proceedings on TV?Everybody is in favour of it except parliment members it seems.
I just saw RNC chairman being heckled in Howard University in C-SPAN(Live! no kidding).He was speaking about why blacks should support Republican party.
My suggestions...........
A new channel supported by all TV stations in Sri Lanka exclusively for public affairs like C-SPAN.
How to fund?
The Government is collecting a licence fee ,don't they?Ask for piece of that.Share the TV crews of every channel for outside events.
What should be on the channel?
Since it is already recorded it will be easy to put parliamentary proceedings on TV.
Then put all freaking major event SLFP,UNP ,JVP and every major party is conducting.Broadcast their conventions,major rallies and freak-fests etc...They are politicians .They should love TV coverage.
Then put book launches , conferences,professional events of public interrest .Cover the whole damn spectrum from loony left to the radical right(Socialist Party,X group,Hela Urumaya,Jathika Chinthana etc...) .If there aren't enough things to put in the channel show the US congress and British Parliment .Guess it wouldn't cost anything .If you run out of events ,you can always cover press conferences in Killinochchi!
If politicians are dragging their feet on this issue (which everybody loves),shame them into doing it.Run a ticker in the TV newscast "Parlimenthuwa Rupahaniye pennanna beri aie?" or something.Put the same thing in news papers ,underneath the editorial until they do it.Free Media Movement ,editors guild and rest of the media-wallahs ,why don't you take the lead??
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Pet Theory NO:1 English Education in Sri Lanka:Part 4:Conclusion
My family is lower middle class(Sri Lankan sense).Nobody spoke English at home.I was 9 when they had TV outside Colombo.The lower middle class (clerks,teachers,policemen,small businessmen) could somehow afford a TV set in 80's.
Our Generation grew up watching TV all night and discussing them at school.Most of the shows were in English and they didn't have subtitles.i.e.I was listening to English 2-3 hours a day .Without TV that could have been 0.5 hours which was the English period at school.
I learned this only when I moved to US and try to dig up history of the TV shows I watched.We were watching latest hits in US and Britain!For insatnce I remember Cosby show in 1985 in Sri Lanka.When I checked ,the first season was in 1984!Same goes to other guys and quality.From Science fiction (Star Trek,Battles star Gallactica,Blake seven,V etc..) to shows like Knight Rider (or Hawai Five O,Starsky and Hutch,A team ) and to Soaps likes Dynasty (or Dallas) to Sit-coms (Sosby show,Silver spoons,Different strokes ,Jefferesons).I can also remember McGuyver,Street Hawk,LA law,Incredible hulk ,six million dollar man etc..We were watching latest pop culture at the time.They also had some criticlly acclaimed series like roots,kung -fu,north and south .Also great movies in weekend.(mostly from 60's).Also they had ABC wide world of sports every week and quality documentaries.Gamini Weragama used to introduce classic movies in Sinhala on Friday(or Satuday night) which were shown without sub titltes.
As I remeber everybody my age used to watch TV and discuss it in school since that was the only entertainment we had .Rupavahini was the only channel for kids outside Colombo.
Another thing was going on at the time ,too.No (or minimum ) Hindi .To save Sinhala film industry , only two Hindi film were allowed per year(from 1970s I think).That means unlike our previous generation, the main component of pop culture came from West instead of India.(Sinhala commercial service had a 1 hour hindi song program in the afternoon.Thats it.).
Then came libererilization of the media in 1992-93.MTV(Maharaja ) and TNL started.ITN went Island wide.What they showed was second or third rate programs from west and lots of Hindi movies to fill the gaps and get ratings.Multiple radio stations started blasting hindi songs.Era of sub-titled or voice dubbed English programmed began.
Only noticeable English program I could remember from 90's was Beverly Hills 90210,X -Files ,Melrose Place and Baywatch .The English sitcoms dropped out(NO friends,NO Seinfeld and NO Everybody loves Raymond) .Hindi movies replaced English ones.The average middle class kid's English time might have come down again to 0.5 hours .
I remember reading an interview with the famous threater director and writer Sugathapala De Silva .He was angry with the subtitles because they were wrong most of the time and also because it distract the viewer from original dialog.
Now when I visit once a year I notice that still Hindi rules(Teenagers started going to Hindi tuition classes just to understand movies) .The cable TV is limited to a minority in Colombo suburbs.
Since we have a handful of TV stations it is not impossible to reverse the trend.Don't get me wrong .I love some of the Hindi movies.As nation probably we have to decide whether we are going to be first rate imitatators or second rate imitators.Most of the Hindi movies and TV shows are obvious imitations of Hollywood stuff.Are we going going to get the real thing or the second hand version of western shows?
The best example for the TV has on Language ability is the Scandinavian people.The older generation who were not exposed to that much of US program are not that good in English and the younger generation is fluent in English.
Before resting my case I have to thank M.J. Perera the first director general of Rupavahini for keeping my childhood interesting.Specially for the quality programs he inserted to the line up . He took a lot of flak from left and right for "destroying the culture".Aththa ,Divaina and the rest of the Sinhala news media blasted him.
Our Generation grew up watching TV all night and discussing them at school.Most of the shows were in English and they didn't have subtitles.i.e.I was listening to English 2-3 hours a day .Without TV that could have been 0.5 hours which was the English period at school.
I learned this only when I moved to US and try to dig up history of the TV shows I watched.We were watching latest hits in US and Britain!For insatnce I remember Cosby show in 1985 in Sri Lanka.When I checked ,the first season was in 1984!Same goes to other guys and quality.From Science fiction (Star Trek,Battles star Gallactica,Blake seven,V etc..) to shows like Knight Rider (or Hawai Five O,Starsky and Hutch,A team ) and to Soaps likes Dynasty (or Dallas) to Sit-coms (Sosby show,Silver spoons,Different strokes ,Jefferesons).I can also remember McGuyver,Street Hawk,LA law,Incredible hulk ,six million dollar man etc..We were watching latest pop culture at the time.They also had some criticlly acclaimed series like roots,kung -fu,north and south .Also great movies in weekend.(mostly from 60's).Also they had ABC wide world of sports every week and quality documentaries.Gamini Weragama used to introduce classic movies in Sinhala on Friday(or Satuday night) which were shown without sub titltes.
As I remeber everybody my age used to watch TV and discuss it in school since that was the only entertainment we had .Rupavahini was the only channel for kids outside Colombo.
Another thing was going on at the time ,too.No (or minimum ) Hindi .To save Sinhala film industry , only two Hindi film were allowed per year(from 1970s I think).That means unlike our previous generation, the main component of pop culture came from West instead of India.(Sinhala commercial service had a 1 hour hindi song program in the afternoon.Thats it.).
Then came libererilization of the media in 1992-93.MTV(Maharaja ) and TNL started.ITN went Island wide.What they showed was second or third rate programs from west and lots of Hindi movies to fill the gaps and get ratings.Multiple radio stations started blasting hindi songs.Era of sub-titled or voice dubbed English programmed began.
Only noticeable English program I could remember from 90's was Beverly Hills 90210,X -Files ,Melrose Place and Baywatch .The English sitcoms dropped out(NO friends,NO Seinfeld and NO Everybody loves Raymond) .Hindi movies replaced English ones.The average middle class kid's English time might have come down again to 0.5 hours .
I remember reading an interview with the famous threater director and writer Sugathapala De Silva .He was angry with the subtitles because they were wrong most of the time and also because it distract the viewer from original dialog.
Now when I visit once a year I notice that still Hindi rules(Teenagers started going to Hindi tuition classes just to understand movies) .The cable TV is limited to a minority in Colombo suburbs.
Since we have a handful of TV stations it is not impossible to reverse the trend.Don't get me wrong .I love some of the Hindi movies.As nation probably we have to decide whether we are going to be first rate imitatators or second rate imitators.Most of the Hindi movies and TV shows are obvious imitations of Hollywood stuff.Are we going going to get the real thing or the second hand version of western shows?
The best example for the TV has on Language ability is the Scandinavian people.The older generation who were not exposed to that much of US program are not that good in English and the younger generation is fluent in English.
Before resting my case I have to thank M.J. Perera the first director general of Rupavahini for keeping my childhood interesting.Specially for the quality programs he inserted to the line up . He took a lot of flak from left and right for "destroying the culture".Aththa ,Divaina and the rest of the Sinhala news media blasted him.
Pet Theory NO:1 English Education in Sri Lanka:Part 3:"THE THEORY"
When I saw the article by STEPHEN J. DUBNER on Steven D. Levitt I was stunned.There could be simple answers for the seeming unexplainable complex human behaviour?I think I have a case with the pass rate of GCL O/L English .
When you look at the case It looks like there will be several obvious explanations.
1.The exam became tougher gradually from 1992-1998.
Probably not . I happened to know lot of cousins and neighbours who took the exam at the time.Except the usual distaste for exam I don't think there was a specific case for English.Then how do explain gradual slow down(47-30)?Not in jumps.it was like 47,42,38,34 etc....)
2. The quality of teachers went down from 1992 -1998.
This one might have a case.It's almost 30 years since 1956 "Sinhala -official Langauage policy" and the teachers who studied before that and were bi-lingual were retiring.From my own experiance I only knew 1 or 2 exceptional cases from "old guard" and didn't see that much of a difference in 80's when the majority were new comers.All these better older teachers were concentrated in handful of urban high schools anyway.
3.THE GRADUAL CHANGE OF CONTENT IN SRI LANKAN MEDIA ( 1992-1998).
I'm not an economist or a statistitian(although I studied both of them as subjets in my engineering curriculum.I don't remember a thing anymore!)
This one seems like thing we can check.Get the exam numbers from education department from 1981-2003.(why 1981 ?That when the TV was available throughout the country)
Then take TV viewing habit of kids age 10-15 .Get the numbers broken down into langauage ,whether they had subtitles etc....These stats might be found in a locker somewhere in the Rupavahini Corporation or SLBC I guess .
As member of the first generation of Sri Lankans to grow up with TV, I know what kind of influance it had on the whole culture and how it changed in 1990s when the media liberalization happened.I saw what the Hindi invation did to a whole generation.
I will post my experiance and conclusion in the next post.
When you look at the case It looks like there will be several obvious explanations.
1.The exam became tougher gradually from 1992-1998.
Probably not . I happened to know lot of cousins and neighbours who took the exam at the time.Except the usual distaste for exam I don't think there was a specific case for English.Then how do explain gradual slow down(47-30)?Not in jumps.it was like 47,42,38,34 etc....)
2. The quality of teachers went down from 1992 -1998.
This one might have a case.It's almost 30 years since 1956 "Sinhala -official Langauage policy" and the teachers who studied before that and were bi-lingual were retiring.From my own experiance I only knew 1 or 2 exceptional cases from "old guard" and didn't see that much of a difference in 80's when the majority were new comers.All these better older teachers were concentrated in handful of urban high schools anyway.
3.THE GRADUAL CHANGE OF CONTENT IN SRI LANKAN MEDIA ( 1992-1998).
I'm not an economist or a statistitian(although I studied both of them as subjets in my engineering curriculum.I don't remember a thing anymore!)
This one seems like thing we can check.Get the exam numbers from education department from 1981-2003.(why 1981 ?That when the TV was available throughout the country)
Then take TV viewing habit of kids age 10-15 .Get the numbers broken down into langauage ,whether they had subtitles etc....These stats might be found in a locker somewhere in the Rupavahini Corporation or SLBC I guess .
As member of the first generation of Sri Lankans to grow up with TV, I know what kind of influance it had on the whole culture and how it changed in 1990s when the media liberalization happened.I saw what the Hindi invation did to a whole generation.
I will post my experiance and conclusion in the next post.
Pet Theory NO:1:English Education in Sri Lanka:Part 2:The Island articles(2002,2003??)
The other thing my theory is based on was an article(or 2) in The Island(http://www.island.lk) I read ,when it was free.Now you have to pay to access the archive .It will be easier to get the data from Education ministry in Sri Lanka anyway.
The article(s) was about how the pass rate in English as a second language declined from early 90's(1992-93?) to late 90's(1997-1998?) .As I remember it was a significant drop from 47% or so to 32% or below 30!.And it was gradual.
The article(s) was about how the pass rate in English as a second language declined from early 90's(1992-93?) to late 90's(1997-1998?) .As I remember it was a significant drop from 47% or so to 32% or below 30!.And it was gradual.
Pet theory NO:1,English education in Sri Lanka:Part 1:NYT Article
In 2003 I read a great article in NYT by STEPHEN J. DUBNER on Steven D. Levitt.
stephenjdubner.com
Just in case it vanishes from the web I'm linking the article in several other places.
lair.xent.com
phoenix.liu.edu
I'm posting the article below and will be explaining later how this is tied to the English education in Sri Lanka
--------------------------------------------------------
August 3, 2003
The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)By STEPHEN J. DUBNER
he most brilliant young economist in America -- the one so deemed, at least, by a jury of his elders -- brakes to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago's south side. It is a sunny day in mid-June. He drives an aging green Chevy Cavalier with a dusty dashboard and a window that doesn't quite shut, producing a dull roar at highway speeds.
But the car is quiet for now, as are the noontime streets: gas stations, boundless concrete, brick buildings with plywood windows.
An elderly homeless man approaches. It says he is homeless right on his sign, which also asks for money. He wears a torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day, and a grimy red baseball cap.
The economist doesn't lock his doors or inch the car forward. Nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He just watches, as if through one-way glass. After a while, the homeless man moves along.
''He had nice headphones,'' says the economist, still watching in the rearview mirror. ''Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn't look like he has many assets.''
Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the average person. Differently, too, than the average economist. This is either a wonderful trait or a troubling one, depending on how you feel about economists. The average economist is known to wax oracularly about any and all monetary issues. But if you were to ask Levitt his opinion of some standard economic matter, he would probably swipe the hair from his eyes and plead ignorance. ''I gave up a long time ago pretending that I knew stuff I didn't know,'' he says. ''I mean, I just -- I just don't know very much about the field of economics. I'm not good at math, I don't know a lot of econometrics, and I also don't know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market's going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy's going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation's good or bad, if you ask me about taxes -- I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.''
In Levitt's view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt?
And how does a homeless man afford $50 headphones?
Many people -- including a fair number of his peers -- might not recognize Levitt's work as economics at all. But he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science down to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want, or need. Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities (though he does fear calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else had found. He devises a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable. His abiding interests -- though he says he has never trafficked in them himself -- are cheating, corruption and crime.
His interest in the homeless man's headphones, meanwhile, didn't last long. ''Maybe,'' he said later, ''it was just testimony to the fact I'm too disorganized to buy a set of headphones that I myself covet.''
Levitt is the first to say that some of his topics border on the trivial. But he has proved to be such an ingenious researcher and clear-eyed thinker that instead of being consigned to the fringe of his field, the opposite has happened: he has shown other economists just how well their tools can make sense of the real world.
''Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science,'' says Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology. ''He represents something that everyone thinks they will be when they go to grad school in econ, but usually they have the creative spark bored out of them by endless math -- namely, a kind of intellectual detective trying to figure stuff out.''
Levitt is a populist in a field that is undergoing a bout of popularization. Undergraduates are swarming the economics departments of elite universities. Economics is seen as the ideal blend of intellectual prestige (it does offer a Nobel, after all) and practical training for a high-flying finance career (unless, like Levitt, you choose to stay in academia). At the same time, economics is ever more visible in the real world, thanks to the continuing fetishization of the stock market and the continuing fixation with Alan Greenspan.
The greatest change, however, is within the scholarly ranks. Microeconomists are gaining on the macro crowd, empiricists gaining on the theorists. Behavioral economists have called into doubt the very notion of ''homo economicus,'' the supposedly rational decision-maker in each of us. Young economists of every stripe are more inclined to work on real-world subjects and dip into bordering disciplines -- psychology, criminology, sociology, even neurology -- with the intent of rescuing their science from its slavish dependence upon mathematical models.
Levitt fits everywhere and nowhere. He is a noetic butterfly that no one has pinned down -- he was once offered a job on the Clinton economic team, and the Bush campaign approached him about being a crime adviser -- but who is widely appreciated.
''Steve isn't really a behavioral economist, but they'd be happy to have him,'' says Austan Goolsbee, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. ''He's not really an old price-theory guy, but these Chicago guys are happy to claim him. He's not really a Cambridge guy'' -- although Levitt went to Harvard and then M.I.T. -- ''but they'd love him to come back.''
He has critics, to be sure. Daniel Hamermesh, a prominent labor economist at the University of Texas, has taught Levitt's paper ''The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime'' to his undergraduates. ''I've gone over this paper in draft, in its printed version, at great length, and for the life of me I can't see anything wrong with it,'' Hamermesh says. ''On the other hand, I don't believe a word of it. And his stuff on sumo wrestlers -- well, this is not exactly fundamental, unless you're Japanese and weigh 500 pounds.''
But at 36, Levitt is a full professor in the University of Chicago's economics department, the most legendary program in the country. (He received tenure after only two years.) He is an editor of The Journal of Political Economy, a leading journal in the field. And the American Economic Association recently awarded him its John Bates Clark Medal, given biennially to the country's best economist under 40.
He is a prolific and diverse writer. But his paper linking a rise in abortion to a drop in crime has made more noise than the rest combined. Levitt and his co-author, John Donohue of Stanford Law School, argued that as much as 50 percent of the huge drop in crime since the early 1990's can be traced to Roe v. Wade. Their thinking goes like this: the women most likely to seek an abortion -- poor, single, black or teenage mothers -- were the very women whose children, if born, have been shown most likely to become criminals. But since those children weren't born, crime began to decrease during the years they would have entered their criminal prime. In conversation, Levitt reduces the theory to a tidy syllogism: ''Unwantedness leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness; abortion leads to less crime.''
Levitt had already published widely about crime and punishment. One paper he wrote as a graduate student is still regularly cited. His question was disarmingly simple: Do more police translate into less crime? The answer would seem obvious -- yes -- but had never been proved: since the number of police officers tends to rise along with the number of crimes, the effectiveness of the police was tricky to measure.
Levitt needed a mechanism that would unlink the crime rate from police hiring. He found it within politics. He noticed that mayors and governors running for re-election often hire more police officers. By measuring those police increases against crime rates, he was able to determine that additional officers do indeed bring down violent crime.
That paper was later disputed -- another graduate student found a serious mathematical mistake in it -- but Levitt's ingenuity was obvious. He began to be acknowledged as a master of the simple, clever solution. He was the guy who, in the slapstick scene, sees all the engineers futzing with a broken machine -- and then realizes that no one has thought to plug it in.
Arguing that the police help deter crime didn't make Levitt any enemies. Arguing that abortion deterred crime was another matter.
In the abortion paper, published in 2001, he and Donohue warned that their findings should not be seen ''as either an endorsement of abortion or a call for intervention by the state in the fertility decisions of women.'' They suggested that crime might just as easily be curbed by ''providing better environments for those children at greatest risk for future crime.''
Still, the very topic managed to offend nearly everyone. Conservatives were enraged that abortion could be construed as a crime-fighting tool. Liberals were aghast that poor and black women were singled out. Economists grumbled that Levitt's methodology was not sound. A syllogism, after all, can be a magic trick: All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat.
''I think he's enormously clever in so many areas, focusing very much on the issue of reverse causality,'' says Ted Joyce, an economist at Baruch College who has written a critical response to the abortion paper. ''But in this case I think he ignored it, or didn't tend to it well enough.''
As the news media gorged on the abortion-crime story, Levitt came under direct assault. He was called an ideologue (by conservatives and liberals alike), a eugenicist, a racist and downright evil.
In reality, he seems to be very much none of those. He has little taste for politics and less for moralizing. He is genial, low-key and unflappable, confident but not cocky. He is a respected teacher and colleague; he is a sought-after collaborator who, because of the breadth of his curiosities, often works with scholars outside his field -- another rarity for an economist.
''I hesitate to use these words, but Steve is a con man, in the best sense,'' says Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University. ''He's the Shakespearean jester. He'll make you believe his ideas were yours.'' Venkatesh was Levitt's co-author on ''An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances,'' which found that the average street dealer lives with his mother because the take-home pay is, frankly, terrible. The paper analyzed one crack gang's financial activities as if it were any corporation. (It was Venkatesh who procured the data, from a former gang member.) Such a thing had never been tried. ''This lack of focus,'' Levitt deadpanned in one version of the paper, ''is perhaps partly attributable to the fact that few economists have been involved in the study of gangs.''
Levitt speaks with a boyish lisp. His appearance is High Nerd: a plaid button-down shirt, nondescript khakis and a braided belt, sensible shoes. His pocket calendar is branded with the National Bureau of Economic Research logo. ''I wish he would get more than three haircuts a year,'' his wife, Jeannette, says, ''and that he wasn't still wearing the same glasses he got 15 years ago, which weren't even in fashion then.'' He was a good golfer in high school but has so physically atrophied that he calls himself ''the weakest human being alive'' and asks Jeannette to open jars around the house.
There is nothing in his appearance or manner, in other words, that suggests a flamethrower. He will tell you that all he does is sit at his desk, day and night, wrestling with some strange mountain of data. He will tell you that he would do it free (his salary is reportedly more than $200,000), and you tend to believe him. He may be an accidental provocateur, but he is a provocateur nonetheless.
He takes particular delight in catching wrongdoers. In one paper, he devised a set of algorithms that could identify teachers in the Chicago public-school system who were cheating. ''Cheating classrooms will systematically differ from other classrooms along a number of dimensions,'' he and his co-author, Brian Jacob of the Kennedy School of Government, wrote in ''Catching Cheating Teachers.'' ''For instance, students in cheating classrooms are likely to experience unusually large test-score gains in the year of the cheating, followed by unusually small gains or even declines in the following year when the boost attributable to cheating disappears.''
Levitt used test-score data from the Chicago schools that had long been available to other researchers. There were a number of ways, he realized, that a teacher could cheat. If she were particularly brazen (and stupid), she might give students the correct answers. Or, after the test, she might actually erase students' wrong answers and fill in correct ones. A sophisticated cheater would be careful to avoid conspicuous blocks of identical answers. But Levitt was more sophisticated. ''The first step in analyzing suspicious strings is to estimate the probability each child would give a particular answer on each question,'' he wrote. ''This estimation is done using a multinomial logit framework with past test scores, demographics and socioeconomic characteristics as explanatory variables.''
So by measuring any number of factors -- the difficulty of a particular question, the frequency with which students got hard questions right and easy ones wrong, the degree to which certain answers were highly correlated in one classroom -- Levitt identified which teachers he thought were cheating. (Perhaps just as valuable, he was also able to identify the good teachers.) The Chicago school system, rather than disputing Levitt's findings, invited him into the schools for retesting. As a result, the cheaters were fired.
Then there is his coming ''Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990's: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Seven That Do Not.'' The entire drop in crime, Levitt says, was due to more police officers, more prisoners, the waning crack epidemic and Roe v. Wade.
One factor that probably didn't make a difference, he argues, was the innovative policing strategy trumpeted in New York by Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton.
''I think,'' Levitt says, ''I'm pretty much alone in saying that.''
e comes from a Minneapolis family of high, if unusual, achievers. His father, a medical researcher, is considered a leading authority on intestinal gas. (He bills himself as ''The Man Who Gave Status to Flatus and Class to Gas.'') One of Levitt's great uncles, Robert May, wrote ''Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'' -- the book, that is; another great uncle, Johnny Marks, later wrote the song.
At Harvard, Levitt wrote his senior thesis on thoroughbred breeding and graduated summa cum laude. (He is still obsessed with horse racing. He says he believes it is corrupt and has designed a betting system -- the details of which he will not share -- to take advantage of the corruption.) He worked for two years as a management consultant before enrolling at M.I.T. for a doctorate in economics. The M.I.T. program was famous for its mathematical intensity. Levitt had taken exactly one math course as an undergraduate and had forgotten even that. During his first graduate class, he asked the student next to him about a formula on the board: Is there any difference between the derivative sign that's straight up-and-down and the curly one? ''You are in so much trouble,'' he was told.
''People wrote him off,'' recalls Austan Goolsbee, the Chicago economist who was then a classmate. ''They'd say, 'That guy has no future.'''
Levitt set his own course. Other grad students stayed up all night working on problem sets, trying to make good grades. He stayed up researching and writing. ''My view was that the way you succeed in this profession is you write great papers,'' he says. ''So I just started.''
Sometimes he would begin with a question. Sometimes it was a set of data that caught his eye. He spent one entire summer typing into his computer the results of years' worth of Congressional elections. (Today, with so much information so easily available on the Internet, Levitt complains that he can't get his students to input data at all.) All he had was a vague curiosity about why incumbents were so often re-elected.
Then he happened upon a political-science book whose authors claimed that money wins elections, period. ''They were trying to explain election outcomes as a function of campaign expenditures,'' he recalls, ''completely ignoring the fact that contributors will only give money to challengers when they have a realistic chance of winning, and incumbents only spend a lot when they have a chance of losing. They convinced themselves this was the causal story even though it's so obvious in retrospect that it's a spurious effect.''
Obvious, at least, to Levitt. Within five minutes, he had a vision of the paper he would write. ''It came to me,'' he says, ''in full bloom.''
The problem was that his data couldn't tell him who was a good candidate and who wasn't. It was therefore impossible to tease out the effect of the money. As with the police/crime rate puzzle, he had to trick the data.
Because he himself had typed in the data, he had noticed something: often, the same two candidates faced each other multiple times. By analyzing the data from only those elections, Levitt was able to find a true result. His conclusion: campaign money has about one-tenth the impact as was commonly accepted.
An unknown graduate student, he sent his paper to The Journal of Political Economy -- one professor told him he was crazy for even trying -- where it was published. He completed his Ph.D. in three years, but because of his priorities, he says, he was ''invisible'' to the faculty, ''a real zero.'' Then he stumbled upon what he now calls the turning point in his career.
He had an interview for the Society of Fellows, the venerable intellectual Harvard clubhouse that pays young scholars to do their own work, for three years, with no commitments. Levitt felt he didn't stand a chance. For starters, he didn't consider himself an intellectual. He would be interviewed over dinner by the senior fellows, a collection of world-renowned philosophers, scientists and historians. He worried he wouldn't have enough conversation for even the first course.
Instead, he was on fire. Whatever subject came up -- the brain, ants, philosophy -- he just happened to remember something pithy he'd read. His wit crackled as it had never crackled before. When he told them about the two summers he spent betting the horses back in Minnesota, they ate it up!
Finally -- disquietingly -- one of them said: ''I'm having a hard time seeing the unifying theme of your work. Could you explain it?''
Levitt was stymied. He had no idea what his unifying theme was, or if he even had one.
Amartya Sen, the future Nobel-winning economist, jumped in and neatly summarized what he saw as Levitt's theme.
Yes, Levitt said eagerly, that's my theme.
Another fellow then offered another theme.
You're right, Levitt said, that's my theme.
And so it went, like dogs tugging at a bone, until the philosopher Robert Nozick interrupted. If Levitt could have been said to have an intellectual hero, it would be Nozick.
''How old are you, Steve?'' he asked.
''Twenty-six.''
Nozick turned to the other fellows: ''He's 26 years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he's going to be one of those people who's so talented he doesn't need one. He'll take a question and he'll just answer it, and it'll be fine.''
he University of Chicago's economics department had a famous unifying theme -- the Gospel of Free Markets, with a conservative twist -- and would therefore not have seemed the most likely fit for Levitt. As he sees it, Chicago is about theory, deep thinking and big ideas, while he is about empiricism, clever thinking and ''cute but ultimately insubstantial ideas.''
But Chicago also had Gary Becker. To Levitt, Becker is the most influential economist of the past 50 years. Long before it was fashionable, Becker brought microeconomic theory to offbeat topics, the family and crime in particular. For years, Becker was demonized -- a single phrase like ''the price of children'' would set off untold alarms. ''I took a lot of heat over my career from people who thought my work was silly or irrelevant or not economics,'' Becker says. But Chicago supported him; he persevered, winning the Nobel Prize in 1992; and he became Steven Levitt's role model.
Becker told Levitt that Chicago would be a great environment for him. ''Not everybody agrees with all your results,'' he said, ''but we agree what you're doing is very interesting work, and we'll support you in that.''
Levitt soon found that the support at Chicago went beyond the scholarly. The year after he was hired, his wife gave birth to their first child, Andrew. One day, just after Andrew turned a year old, he came down with a slight fever. The doctor diagnosed an ear infection. When he started vomiting the next morning, his parents took him to the hospital. A few days later he was dead of pneumococcal meningitis.
Amid the shock and grief, Levitt had an undergraduate class that needed teaching. It was Gary Becker -- a Nobel laureate nearing his 70th birthday -- who sat in for him. Another colleague, D. Gale Johnson, sent a condolence card that Levitt still quotes from memory.
Levitt and Johnson, an agricultural economist in his 80's, began speaking regularly. Levitt learned that Johnson's daughter was one of the first Americans to adopt a daughter from China. Soon the Levitts adopted a daughter of their own, whom they named Amanda. In addition to Amanda, they have since had a daughter, now almost 3, and a son. But Andrew's death has played on, in various ways. They have become close friends with the family of the little girl to whom they donated Andrew's liver. (They also donated his heart, but that baby died.) And not surprisingly for a scholar who pursues real-life subjects, the death also informed Levitt's work.
He and Jeannette joined a support group for grieving parents. Levitt was struck by how many children had drowned in swimming pools. They were the kinds of deaths that don't make the newspaper -- unlike, for instance, a child who dies while playing with a gun.
Levitt was curious and went looking for numbers that would tell the story. He wrote up the results as an op-ed article for The Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort of plangent counterintuition for which he has become famous: ''If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.''
Trying to get his mind off death, Levitt took up a hobby: rehabbing and selling old houses in Oak Park, where he lives. This experience has led to yet another paper, about the real-estate market. It is his most Chicago-style paper yet, a romp in price theory, a sign that the university's influence on him is perhaps as strong as his influence on it. But Levitt being Levitt, it also deals with corruption.
While negotiating to buy old houses, he found that the seller's agent often encouraged him, albeit cagily, to underbid. This seemed odd: didn't the agent represent the seller's best interest? Then he thought more about the agent's role. Like many other ''experts'' (auto mechanics and stockbrokers come to mind), a real-estate agent is thought to know his field far better than a lay person. A homeowner is encouraged to trust the agent's information. So if the agent brings in a low offer and says it might just be the best the homeowner can expect, the homeowner tends to believe him. But the key, Levitt determined, lay in the fact that agents ''receive only a small share of the incremental profit when a house sells for a higher value.'' Like a stockbroker churning commissions or a bookie grabbing his vig, an agent was simply looking to make a deal, any deal. So he would push homeowners to sell too fast and too cheap.
Now if Levitt could only measure this effect. Once again, he found a clever mechanism. Using data from more than 50,000 home sales in Cook County, Ill., he compared the figures for homes owned by real-estate agents with those for homes for which they acted only as agents. The agents' homes stayed on the market about 10 days longer and sold for 2 percent more.
Late on a summer afternoon, Levitt is in his office, deep inside one of the university's Gothic behemoths. The ceiling is stained, the plaster around the window crumbling. He is just back from sabbatical at Stanford, and his desk is a holy mess: stacks of books and journals, a green sippy cup and a little orange squeeze hippo.
This is his afternoon to meet with students. Levitt drinks a Mountain Dew and talks softly. Some students come for research assignments, some for advice. One has just written her undergraduate thesis: ''The Labor Market Consequence of Graduating College in a Bad Economy.'' For a thesis, Levitt tells her, it's very good. But now she wants to have it published.
''You write like a college student, and that's a problem,'' he says. ''The thing is, you're telling a story. There's foreshadowing going on, all those tricks. You want the reader going down a particular path so when they get the results, they understand them and believe them. But you also want to be honest about your weaknesses. People are much less harsh on weaknesses that are clear than weaknesses that are hidden -- as they should be.''
Be honest about your weaknesses. Has there ever been a prize-winning scholar as honest about his weaknesses as Steven Levitt? He doesn't understand economics, he claims, or math. He's a little thinker in a world of big thinkers. He can't even open a jar of spaghetti sauce at home, poor guy.
Friends say that Levitt's self-deprecation is as calculated as it is genuine. Within academia, economists take pride in being the most cutthroat of a cutthroat breed. Anyone who writes papers on ''Weakest Link'' (contestants discriminate against Latino and elderly peers, Levitt concluded, but not blacks or women) and sumo (to best manage their tournament rankings, wrestlers often conspire to throw matches) had better not also be arrogant.
Or maybe it is not self-deprecation at all. Maybe it is self-flagellation. Maybe what Steven Levitt really wants is to graduate from his ''silly'' and ''trivial'' and ''shallow'' topics.
He thinks he's onto something with a new paper about black names. He wanted to know if someone with a distinctly black name suffers an economic penalty. His answer -- contrary to other recent research -- is no. But now he has a bigger question: Is black culture a cause of racial inequality or is it a consequence? For an economist, even for Levitt, this is new turf -- ''quantifying culture,'' he calls it. As a task, he finds it thorny, messy, perhaps impossible and deeply tantalizing.
Driving home to Oak Park that evening, his Cavalier glumly thrumming along the Eisenhower Expressway, he dutifully addresses his future. Leaving academia for a hedge fund or a government job does not interest him (though he might, on the side, start a company to catch cheating teachers). He is said to be at the top of every economics department's poaching list. But the tree he and Jeannette planted when Andrew died is getting too big to move. You get the feeling he may stay at Chicago awhile.
There are important problems, he says, that he feels ready to address.
For instance? ''Tax evasion. Money-laundering. I'd like to put together a set of tools that lets us catch terrorists. I mean, that's the goal. I don't necessarily know yet how I'd go about it. But given the right data, I have little doubt that I could figure out the answer.''
It might seem absurd for an economist to dream of catching terrorists. Just as it must have seemed absurd if you were a Chicago schoolteacher, called into an office and told that, ahem, the algorithms designed by that skinny man with thick glasses had determined that you are a cheater. And that you are being fired. Steven Levitt may not fully believe in himself, but he does believe in this: teachers and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and politicians, and even C.I.A. analysts. But numbers don't.
Stephen J. Dubner is the author, most recently, of ''Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper.'' He is writing a book about the psychology of money.
stephenjdubner.com
Just in case it vanishes from the web I'm linking the article in several other places.
lair.xent.com
phoenix.liu.edu
I'm posting the article below and will be explaining later how this is tied to the English education in Sri Lanka
--------------------------------------------------------
August 3, 2003
The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)By STEPHEN J. DUBNER
he most brilliant young economist in America -- the one so deemed, at least, by a jury of his elders -- brakes to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago's south side. It is a sunny day in mid-June. He drives an aging green Chevy Cavalier with a dusty dashboard and a window that doesn't quite shut, producing a dull roar at highway speeds.
But the car is quiet for now, as are the noontime streets: gas stations, boundless concrete, brick buildings with plywood windows.
An elderly homeless man approaches. It says he is homeless right on his sign, which also asks for money. He wears a torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day, and a grimy red baseball cap.
The economist doesn't lock his doors or inch the car forward. Nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He just watches, as if through one-way glass. After a while, the homeless man moves along.
''He had nice headphones,'' says the economist, still watching in the rearview mirror. ''Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn't look like he has many assets.''
Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the average person. Differently, too, than the average economist. This is either a wonderful trait or a troubling one, depending on how you feel about economists. The average economist is known to wax oracularly about any and all monetary issues. But if you were to ask Levitt his opinion of some standard economic matter, he would probably swipe the hair from his eyes and plead ignorance. ''I gave up a long time ago pretending that I knew stuff I didn't know,'' he says. ''I mean, I just -- I just don't know very much about the field of economics. I'm not good at math, I don't know a lot of econometrics, and I also don't know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market's going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy's going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation's good or bad, if you ask me about taxes -- I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.''
In Levitt's view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt?
And how does a homeless man afford $50 headphones?
Many people -- including a fair number of his peers -- might not recognize Levitt's work as economics at all. But he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science down to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want, or need. Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities (though he does fear calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else had found. He devises a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable. His abiding interests -- though he says he has never trafficked in them himself -- are cheating, corruption and crime.
His interest in the homeless man's headphones, meanwhile, didn't last long. ''Maybe,'' he said later, ''it was just testimony to the fact I'm too disorganized to buy a set of headphones that I myself covet.''
Levitt is the first to say that some of his topics border on the trivial. But he has proved to be such an ingenious researcher and clear-eyed thinker that instead of being consigned to the fringe of his field, the opposite has happened: he has shown other economists just how well their tools can make sense of the real world.
''Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science,'' says Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology. ''He represents something that everyone thinks they will be when they go to grad school in econ, but usually they have the creative spark bored out of them by endless math -- namely, a kind of intellectual detective trying to figure stuff out.''
Levitt is a populist in a field that is undergoing a bout of popularization. Undergraduates are swarming the economics departments of elite universities. Economics is seen as the ideal blend of intellectual prestige (it does offer a Nobel, after all) and practical training for a high-flying finance career (unless, like Levitt, you choose to stay in academia). At the same time, economics is ever more visible in the real world, thanks to the continuing fetishization of the stock market and the continuing fixation with Alan Greenspan.
The greatest change, however, is within the scholarly ranks. Microeconomists are gaining on the macro crowd, empiricists gaining on the theorists. Behavioral economists have called into doubt the very notion of ''homo economicus,'' the supposedly rational decision-maker in each of us. Young economists of every stripe are more inclined to work on real-world subjects and dip into bordering disciplines -- psychology, criminology, sociology, even neurology -- with the intent of rescuing their science from its slavish dependence upon mathematical models.
Levitt fits everywhere and nowhere. He is a noetic butterfly that no one has pinned down -- he was once offered a job on the Clinton economic team, and the Bush campaign approached him about being a crime adviser -- but who is widely appreciated.
''Steve isn't really a behavioral economist, but they'd be happy to have him,'' says Austan Goolsbee, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. ''He's not really an old price-theory guy, but these Chicago guys are happy to claim him. He's not really a Cambridge guy'' -- although Levitt went to Harvard and then M.I.T. -- ''but they'd love him to come back.''
He has critics, to be sure. Daniel Hamermesh, a prominent labor economist at the University of Texas, has taught Levitt's paper ''The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime'' to his undergraduates. ''I've gone over this paper in draft, in its printed version, at great length, and for the life of me I can't see anything wrong with it,'' Hamermesh says. ''On the other hand, I don't believe a word of it. And his stuff on sumo wrestlers -- well, this is not exactly fundamental, unless you're Japanese and weigh 500 pounds.''
But at 36, Levitt is a full professor in the University of Chicago's economics department, the most legendary program in the country. (He received tenure after only two years.) He is an editor of The Journal of Political Economy, a leading journal in the field. And the American Economic Association recently awarded him its John Bates Clark Medal, given biennially to the country's best economist under 40.
He is a prolific and diverse writer. But his paper linking a rise in abortion to a drop in crime has made more noise than the rest combined. Levitt and his co-author, John Donohue of Stanford Law School, argued that as much as 50 percent of the huge drop in crime since the early 1990's can be traced to Roe v. Wade. Their thinking goes like this: the women most likely to seek an abortion -- poor, single, black or teenage mothers -- were the very women whose children, if born, have been shown most likely to become criminals. But since those children weren't born, crime began to decrease during the years they would have entered their criminal prime. In conversation, Levitt reduces the theory to a tidy syllogism: ''Unwantedness leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness; abortion leads to less crime.''
Levitt had already published widely about crime and punishment. One paper he wrote as a graduate student is still regularly cited. His question was disarmingly simple: Do more police translate into less crime? The answer would seem obvious -- yes -- but had never been proved: since the number of police officers tends to rise along with the number of crimes, the effectiveness of the police was tricky to measure.
Levitt needed a mechanism that would unlink the crime rate from police hiring. He found it within politics. He noticed that mayors and governors running for re-election often hire more police officers. By measuring those police increases against crime rates, he was able to determine that additional officers do indeed bring down violent crime.
That paper was later disputed -- another graduate student found a serious mathematical mistake in it -- but Levitt's ingenuity was obvious. He began to be acknowledged as a master of the simple, clever solution. He was the guy who, in the slapstick scene, sees all the engineers futzing with a broken machine -- and then realizes that no one has thought to plug it in.
Arguing that the police help deter crime didn't make Levitt any enemies. Arguing that abortion deterred crime was another matter.
In the abortion paper, published in 2001, he and Donohue warned that their findings should not be seen ''as either an endorsement of abortion or a call for intervention by the state in the fertility decisions of women.'' They suggested that crime might just as easily be curbed by ''providing better environments for those children at greatest risk for future crime.''
Still, the very topic managed to offend nearly everyone. Conservatives were enraged that abortion could be construed as a crime-fighting tool. Liberals were aghast that poor and black women were singled out. Economists grumbled that Levitt's methodology was not sound. A syllogism, after all, can be a magic trick: All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat.
''I think he's enormously clever in so many areas, focusing very much on the issue of reverse causality,'' says Ted Joyce, an economist at Baruch College who has written a critical response to the abortion paper. ''But in this case I think he ignored it, or didn't tend to it well enough.''
As the news media gorged on the abortion-crime story, Levitt came under direct assault. He was called an ideologue (by conservatives and liberals alike), a eugenicist, a racist and downright evil.
In reality, he seems to be very much none of those. He has little taste for politics and less for moralizing. He is genial, low-key and unflappable, confident but not cocky. He is a respected teacher and colleague; he is a sought-after collaborator who, because of the breadth of his curiosities, often works with scholars outside his field -- another rarity for an economist.
''I hesitate to use these words, but Steve is a con man, in the best sense,'' says Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University. ''He's the Shakespearean jester. He'll make you believe his ideas were yours.'' Venkatesh was Levitt's co-author on ''An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances,'' which found that the average street dealer lives with his mother because the take-home pay is, frankly, terrible. The paper analyzed one crack gang's financial activities as if it were any corporation. (It was Venkatesh who procured the data, from a former gang member.) Such a thing had never been tried. ''This lack of focus,'' Levitt deadpanned in one version of the paper, ''is perhaps partly attributable to the fact that few economists have been involved in the study of gangs.''
Levitt speaks with a boyish lisp. His appearance is High Nerd: a plaid button-down shirt, nondescript khakis and a braided belt, sensible shoes. His pocket calendar is branded with the National Bureau of Economic Research logo. ''I wish he would get more than three haircuts a year,'' his wife, Jeannette, says, ''and that he wasn't still wearing the same glasses he got 15 years ago, which weren't even in fashion then.'' He was a good golfer in high school but has so physically atrophied that he calls himself ''the weakest human being alive'' and asks Jeannette to open jars around the house.
There is nothing in his appearance or manner, in other words, that suggests a flamethrower. He will tell you that all he does is sit at his desk, day and night, wrestling with some strange mountain of data. He will tell you that he would do it free (his salary is reportedly more than $200,000), and you tend to believe him. He may be an accidental provocateur, but he is a provocateur nonetheless.
He takes particular delight in catching wrongdoers. In one paper, he devised a set of algorithms that could identify teachers in the Chicago public-school system who were cheating. ''Cheating classrooms will systematically differ from other classrooms along a number of dimensions,'' he and his co-author, Brian Jacob of the Kennedy School of Government, wrote in ''Catching Cheating Teachers.'' ''For instance, students in cheating classrooms are likely to experience unusually large test-score gains in the year of the cheating, followed by unusually small gains or even declines in the following year when the boost attributable to cheating disappears.''
Levitt used test-score data from the Chicago schools that had long been available to other researchers. There were a number of ways, he realized, that a teacher could cheat. If she were particularly brazen (and stupid), she might give students the correct answers. Or, after the test, she might actually erase students' wrong answers and fill in correct ones. A sophisticated cheater would be careful to avoid conspicuous blocks of identical answers. But Levitt was more sophisticated. ''The first step in analyzing suspicious strings is to estimate the probability each child would give a particular answer on each question,'' he wrote. ''This estimation is done using a multinomial logit framework with past test scores, demographics and socioeconomic characteristics as explanatory variables.''
So by measuring any number of factors -- the difficulty of a particular question, the frequency with which students got hard questions right and easy ones wrong, the degree to which certain answers were highly correlated in one classroom -- Levitt identified which teachers he thought were cheating. (Perhaps just as valuable, he was also able to identify the good teachers.) The Chicago school system, rather than disputing Levitt's findings, invited him into the schools for retesting. As a result, the cheaters were fired.
Then there is his coming ''Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990's: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Seven That Do Not.'' The entire drop in crime, Levitt says, was due to more police officers, more prisoners, the waning crack epidemic and Roe v. Wade.
One factor that probably didn't make a difference, he argues, was the innovative policing strategy trumpeted in New York by Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton.
''I think,'' Levitt says, ''I'm pretty much alone in saying that.''
e comes from a Minneapolis family of high, if unusual, achievers. His father, a medical researcher, is considered a leading authority on intestinal gas. (He bills himself as ''The Man Who Gave Status to Flatus and Class to Gas.'') One of Levitt's great uncles, Robert May, wrote ''Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'' -- the book, that is; another great uncle, Johnny Marks, later wrote the song.
At Harvard, Levitt wrote his senior thesis on thoroughbred breeding and graduated summa cum laude. (He is still obsessed with horse racing. He says he believes it is corrupt and has designed a betting system -- the details of which he will not share -- to take advantage of the corruption.) He worked for two years as a management consultant before enrolling at M.I.T. for a doctorate in economics. The M.I.T. program was famous for its mathematical intensity. Levitt had taken exactly one math course as an undergraduate and had forgotten even that. During his first graduate class, he asked the student next to him about a formula on the board: Is there any difference between the derivative sign that's straight up-and-down and the curly one? ''You are in so much trouble,'' he was told.
''People wrote him off,'' recalls Austan Goolsbee, the Chicago economist who was then a classmate. ''They'd say, 'That guy has no future.'''
Levitt set his own course. Other grad students stayed up all night working on problem sets, trying to make good grades. He stayed up researching and writing. ''My view was that the way you succeed in this profession is you write great papers,'' he says. ''So I just started.''
Sometimes he would begin with a question. Sometimes it was a set of data that caught his eye. He spent one entire summer typing into his computer the results of years' worth of Congressional elections. (Today, with so much information so easily available on the Internet, Levitt complains that he can't get his students to input data at all.) All he had was a vague curiosity about why incumbents were so often re-elected.
Then he happened upon a political-science book whose authors claimed that money wins elections, period. ''They were trying to explain election outcomes as a function of campaign expenditures,'' he recalls, ''completely ignoring the fact that contributors will only give money to challengers when they have a realistic chance of winning, and incumbents only spend a lot when they have a chance of losing. They convinced themselves this was the causal story even though it's so obvious in retrospect that it's a spurious effect.''
Obvious, at least, to Levitt. Within five minutes, he had a vision of the paper he would write. ''It came to me,'' he says, ''in full bloom.''
The problem was that his data couldn't tell him who was a good candidate and who wasn't. It was therefore impossible to tease out the effect of the money. As with the police/crime rate puzzle, he had to trick the data.
Because he himself had typed in the data, he had noticed something: often, the same two candidates faced each other multiple times. By analyzing the data from only those elections, Levitt was able to find a true result. His conclusion: campaign money has about one-tenth the impact as was commonly accepted.
An unknown graduate student, he sent his paper to The Journal of Political Economy -- one professor told him he was crazy for even trying -- where it was published. He completed his Ph.D. in three years, but because of his priorities, he says, he was ''invisible'' to the faculty, ''a real zero.'' Then he stumbled upon what he now calls the turning point in his career.
He had an interview for the Society of Fellows, the venerable intellectual Harvard clubhouse that pays young scholars to do their own work, for three years, with no commitments. Levitt felt he didn't stand a chance. For starters, he didn't consider himself an intellectual. He would be interviewed over dinner by the senior fellows, a collection of world-renowned philosophers, scientists and historians. He worried he wouldn't have enough conversation for even the first course.
Instead, he was on fire. Whatever subject came up -- the brain, ants, philosophy -- he just happened to remember something pithy he'd read. His wit crackled as it had never crackled before. When he told them about the two summers he spent betting the horses back in Minnesota, they ate it up!
Finally -- disquietingly -- one of them said: ''I'm having a hard time seeing the unifying theme of your work. Could you explain it?''
Levitt was stymied. He had no idea what his unifying theme was, or if he even had one.
Amartya Sen, the future Nobel-winning economist, jumped in and neatly summarized what he saw as Levitt's theme.
Yes, Levitt said eagerly, that's my theme.
Another fellow then offered another theme.
You're right, Levitt said, that's my theme.
And so it went, like dogs tugging at a bone, until the philosopher Robert Nozick interrupted. If Levitt could have been said to have an intellectual hero, it would be Nozick.
''How old are you, Steve?'' he asked.
''Twenty-six.''
Nozick turned to the other fellows: ''He's 26 years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he's going to be one of those people who's so talented he doesn't need one. He'll take a question and he'll just answer it, and it'll be fine.''
he University of Chicago's economics department had a famous unifying theme -- the Gospel of Free Markets, with a conservative twist -- and would therefore not have seemed the most likely fit for Levitt. As he sees it, Chicago is about theory, deep thinking and big ideas, while he is about empiricism, clever thinking and ''cute but ultimately insubstantial ideas.''
But Chicago also had Gary Becker. To Levitt, Becker is the most influential economist of the past 50 years. Long before it was fashionable, Becker brought microeconomic theory to offbeat topics, the family and crime in particular. For years, Becker was demonized -- a single phrase like ''the price of children'' would set off untold alarms. ''I took a lot of heat over my career from people who thought my work was silly or irrelevant or not economics,'' Becker says. But Chicago supported him; he persevered, winning the Nobel Prize in 1992; and he became Steven Levitt's role model.
Becker told Levitt that Chicago would be a great environment for him. ''Not everybody agrees with all your results,'' he said, ''but we agree what you're doing is very interesting work, and we'll support you in that.''
Levitt soon found that the support at Chicago went beyond the scholarly. The year after he was hired, his wife gave birth to their first child, Andrew. One day, just after Andrew turned a year old, he came down with a slight fever. The doctor diagnosed an ear infection. When he started vomiting the next morning, his parents took him to the hospital. A few days later he was dead of pneumococcal meningitis.
Amid the shock and grief, Levitt had an undergraduate class that needed teaching. It was Gary Becker -- a Nobel laureate nearing his 70th birthday -- who sat in for him. Another colleague, D. Gale Johnson, sent a condolence card that Levitt still quotes from memory.
Levitt and Johnson, an agricultural economist in his 80's, began speaking regularly. Levitt learned that Johnson's daughter was one of the first Americans to adopt a daughter from China. Soon the Levitts adopted a daughter of their own, whom they named Amanda. In addition to Amanda, they have since had a daughter, now almost 3, and a son. But Andrew's death has played on, in various ways. They have become close friends with the family of the little girl to whom they donated Andrew's liver. (They also donated his heart, but that baby died.) And not surprisingly for a scholar who pursues real-life subjects, the death also informed Levitt's work.
He and Jeannette joined a support group for grieving parents. Levitt was struck by how many children had drowned in swimming pools. They were the kinds of deaths that don't make the newspaper -- unlike, for instance, a child who dies while playing with a gun.
Levitt was curious and went looking for numbers that would tell the story. He wrote up the results as an op-ed article for The Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort of plangent counterintuition for which he has become famous: ''If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.''
Trying to get his mind off death, Levitt took up a hobby: rehabbing and selling old houses in Oak Park, where he lives. This experience has led to yet another paper, about the real-estate market. It is his most Chicago-style paper yet, a romp in price theory, a sign that the university's influence on him is perhaps as strong as his influence on it. But Levitt being Levitt, it also deals with corruption.
While negotiating to buy old houses, he found that the seller's agent often encouraged him, albeit cagily, to underbid. This seemed odd: didn't the agent represent the seller's best interest? Then he thought more about the agent's role. Like many other ''experts'' (auto mechanics and stockbrokers come to mind), a real-estate agent is thought to know his field far better than a lay person. A homeowner is encouraged to trust the agent's information. So if the agent brings in a low offer and says it might just be the best the homeowner can expect, the homeowner tends to believe him. But the key, Levitt determined, lay in the fact that agents ''receive only a small share of the incremental profit when a house sells for a higher value.'' Like a stockbroker churning commissions or a bookie grabbing his vig, an agent was simply looking to make a deal, any deal. So he would push homeowners to sell too fast and too cheap.
Now if Levitt could only measure this effect. Once again, he found a clever mechanism. Using data from more than 50,000 home sales in Cook County, Ill., he compared the figures for homes owned by real-estate agents with those for homes for which they acted only as agents. The agents' homes stayed on the market about 10 days longer and sold for 2 percent more.
Late on a summer afternoon, Levitt is in his office, deep inside one of the university's Gothic behemoths. The ceiling is stained, the plaster around the window crumbling. He is just back from sabbatical at Stanford, and his desk is a holy mess: stacks of books and journals, a green sippy cup and a little orange squeeze hippo.
This is his afternoon to meet with students. Levitt drinks a Mountain Dew and talks softly. Some students come for research assignments, some for advice. One has just written her undergraduate thesis: ''The Labor Market Consequence of Graduating College in a Bad Economy.'' For a thesis, Levitt tells her, it's very good. But now she wants to have it published.
''You write like a college student, and that's a problem,'' he says. ''The thing is, you're telling a story. There's foreshadowing going on, all those tricks. You want the reader going down a particular path so when they get the results, they understand them and believe them. But you also want to be honest about your weaknesses. People are much less harsh on weaknesses that are clear than weaknesses that are hidden -- as they should be.''
Be honest about your weaknesses. Has there ever been a prize-winning scholar as honest about his weaknesses as Steven Levitt? He doesn't understand economics, he claims, or math. He's a little thinker in a world of big thinkers. He can't even open a jar of spaghetti sauce at home, poor guy.
Friends say that Levitt's self-deprecation is as calculated as it is genuine. Within academia, economists take pride in being the most cutthroat of a cutthroat breed. Anyone who writes papers on ''Weakest Link'' (contestants discriminate against Latino and elderly peers, Levitt concluded, but not blacks or women) and sumo (to best manage their tournament rankings, wrestlers often conspire to throw matches) had better not also be arrogant.
Or maybe it is not self-deprecation at all. Maybe it is self-flagellation. Maybe what Steven Levitt really wants is to graduate from his ''silly'' and ''trivial'' and ''shallow'' topics.
He thinks he's onto something with a new paper about black names. He wanted to know if someone with a distinctly black name suffers an economic penalty. His answer -- contrary to other recent research -- is no. But now he has a bigger question: Is black culture a cause of racial inequality or is it a consequence? For an economist, even for Levitt, this is new turf -- ''quantifying culture,'' he calls it. As a task, he finds it thorny, messy, perhaps impossible and deeply tantalizing.
Driving home to Oak Park that evening, his Cavalier glumly thrumming along the Eisenhower Expressway, he dutifully addresses his future. Leaving academia for a hedge fund or a government job does not interest him (though he might, on the side, start a company to catch cheating teachers). He is said to be at the top of every economics department's poaching list. But the tree he and Jeannette planted when Andrew died is getting too big to move. You get the feeling he may stay at Chicago awhile.
There are important problems, he says, that he feels ready to address.
For instance? ''Tax evasion. Money-laundering. I'd like to put together a set of tools that lets us catch terrorists. I mean, that's the goal. I don't necessarily know yet how I'd go about it. But given the right data, I have little doubt that I could figure out the answer.''
It might seem absurd for an economist to dream of catching terrorists. Just as it must have seemed absurd if you were a Chicago schoolteacher, called into an office and told that, ahem, the algorithms designed by that skinny man with thick glasses had determined that you are a cheater. And that you are being fired. Steven Levitt may not fully believe in himself, but he does believe in this: teachers and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and politicians, and even C.I.A. analysts. But numbers don't.
Stephen J. Dubner is the author, most recently, of ''Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper.'' He is writing a book about the psychology of money.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Where do we start?
A really stinking subject!
Sri Lanka Education system!
Sri Lankan mini(rather micro,nano) blogosphere is buzzing about the subject.
http://morquendi.blogspot.com/ ,http://www.mahangu.org/ and http://indi.ca/2005/03/educate-sri-lanka/ discussing the" privatization" issues.
Same goes to Sri Lankan MSM I can access freely .(Sorry, Upali newspawers I will not pay a subscription to read your garbage.).
Sri Lanka Education system!
Sri Lankan mini(rather micro,nano) blogosphere is buzzing about the subject.
http://morquendi.blogspot.com/ ,http://www.mahangu.org/ and http://indi.ca/2005/03/educate-sri-lanka/ discussing the" privatization" issues.
Same goes to Sri Lankan MSM I can access freely .(Sorry, Upali newspawers I will not pay a subscription to read your garbage.).
Why Blog?
Why not?
Seriously, I don't like to layout my boring life in some kinda of gigantic archive where nobody will lookup.What I will want to do is to keep track of crazy/stupid ideas I might get from time to time in an easily accessible way .May be if they happened to be pointed out by somebody else I can say "du'h, I told you so" and point out the date.
For instance I think I know why so many students flunk O/L English in Sri Lanka and I have the remedy.Another line of thought I was having was how similar Sri Lankan and US history are in some aspects.How about the US MSM coverage of Dec.26 Tsunami ? Or Open Source software?
You might have already guessed.Yep.I'm Sri Lankan(speak Sinhalese and English only unfortunately) and currently living in US .I'm sincerely planning to return.I'm in my early thirties.That's ancient,I know.That's enough personal life .period.
Seriously, I don't like to layout my boring life in some kinda of gigantic archive where nobody will lookup.What I will want to do is to keep track of crazy/stupid ideas I might get from time to time in an easily accessible way .May be if they happened to be pointed out by somebody else I can say "du'h, I told you so" and point out the date.
For instance I think I know why so many students flunk O/L English in Sri Lanka and I have the remedy.Another line of thought I was having was how similar Sri Lankan and US history are in some aspects.How about the US MSM coverage of Dec.26 Tsunami ? Or Open Source software?
You might have already guessed.Yep.I'm Sri Lankan(speak Sinhalese and English only unfortunately) and currently living in US .I'm sincerely planning to return.I'm in my early thirties.That's ancient,I know.That's enough personal life .period.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)