We know how financial bubbles work, and I've been thinking... can there be such a thing as a prestige bubble? Here is the scenario: some group of people gains status beyond what they are actually worth, expectations grow unrealistic, more and more social and political capital is invested in these status-boosting games, and then the whole thing collapses as everyone laughs at the naked emperors. It's basically a bubble in investments denominated in the fuzzy currency of social status. I could argue that investment bankers have gone through such a bubble in recent years.

I know some people have suggested that there is a financial bubble growing right now in the field of education. Even the Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article which pretty much says that the educational sector with the most influence on social policy - graduate school in the humanities - is not just a bubble but an outright pyramid scheme. I suspect that there might be an even more important prestige bubble happening to the prestige of an Ivy League degree. Here are a few quotes from posts Arnold Kling has made this week:

I think that people can legitimately complain that the educated class that dominated Wall Street and Washington first made the mortgage mess and then railroaded through a bailout in which a transfer of wealth from main street to Wall Street was marketed as a benefit to main street. The educated class is losing the respect of the rest of America for reasons that are well deserved.

Harvard types believe that they are smarter than markets. And, at this moment in history, the Harvard narrative is that the financial crisis was caused because of blind faith in markets regulating themselves. According to this narrative, the election was a mandate to Harvard to deal with huge market failures in finance, health care, aggregate demand (hence the stimulus), and climate/energy. Based on this narrative, Harvard is absolutely committed to expert control over the economy

That certainly sounds like the status of "Harvard types" - people educated at the best American universities - is inflated, and being furiously inflated further. These are the people who, in practice, rule the world. What if the bubble pops and their status quickly sinks to the level of, say, computer programmers before bottoming out? I'd say "sinks to the level of fry cooks", but that would just be wishful thinking on my part...

Back when I was living in the American Southwest, I knew a man who went into politics. He ran for the local school board, won the election, and gave up in disgust after one term. What turned him off was the decision-making process - he said the most important factor in all the decisions was not making sure the kids got a good education or that the teachers were happy, but that the schools would avoid lawsuits.

This struck me as strange for two reasons. One, he was a university professor, so he should have had some clue about how educational institutions are run. Two, school districts don't really need to fear lawsuits, do they? I mean, it's not like the local schools can be actually driven out of business by a lawsuit. The law requires them to exist and educate, so even the most hideously expensive lawsuit's costs will just get passed on to taxpayers one way or another. That's not the disaster it would be for a privately owned business that would have to pay with its own money. Besides, many lawsuits aren't aimed at wringing out money but at forcing schools to change some policy or another. However annoying that might be, it can't be much less annoying than preemptively changing the policy in advance of a potential lawsuit.

I finally was able to make sense of this after thinking about the theory that the main value of education is not learning but signaling that you were smart enough to get into a good school and hard-working enough to finish it.

Lawsuits don't really threaten schools' existence or ability to educate, but they do look embarrassing on the news. If the purpose of your school is to give its students the ability to say that they went to a good school, a string of lawsuits just will not do. Remember that this is America, where government-run schools don't have the status that religious or private ones do - only homeschooling, GED or dropping out are worse for your status than a public school education.

The school board was doing the logical thing in a world which values going to a good school more than it values what you learned there. Looking at the politics of education more broadly, we also see why progressives love education so much. After all, if education is mostly about signaling how smart, hard-working and classy you are, and progressivisim is all about signaling about how smart, good and classy you are, they are a natural match. No wonder educational institutions end up filled with and run by progressives.

Too bad I can't ask the former school board member what he thinks of this hypothesis - he died years ago.

London, UK - Test results in the UK could show huge progress for the first time in decades, according to the encouraging reaction of students after their A-levels this summer.

Exam results are not published for almost two months, but the early evidence is promising; almost every student has failed.

A large number of the unintelligent students left the exam disorientated. Later turning indignant, they then logged onto Facebook, creating a group to discuss their collective failure at not being able to understand words.

One comment left says: “I spent every day reading literally dozens of sources learning how the Nazis were tyrants. But nowhere did it mention how the Nazis were specifically ‘despotic’ tyrants. Alarmed and antagonised by this completely unexpected phrase, I then wept into my paper for the rest of the ninety minutes.”

Subsequently, leading universities have been quick to praise the tougher, more intuitive testing.

Admissions officer for Christ Church at Oxford University spoke earlier: "No longer will we have to so rigorously weed out any uncultured morons that manage to slip through into our interview process. This is fantastic news."

The students who performed well were also content. According to one: “I didn’t exactly know what ‘despot’ meant, but I inferred it from the context. That’s why I’m not a complete dunce and why I’m studying law at Kings College London next year. Thank God the examiners will be marking on a bell curve!”

An article over at Amerika.org made me think recently about how important perspective is in parenting. These days, it seems many parents are either leaving their children in the care of others, or when they are in the care of their parents, the parents are hauling the kid around to Mommy and Daddy's activities and trying to force-fit a child's life into the same structure used by parents during their working (read: waking) hours. Brett Stevens explains an important reason for this disconnect that we often disregard:

Humanity has slipped into its own world, a world ruled by social devices and the avoidance of conflict, and as a result, cannot face reality.

Kids see this, because it’s new to them and they’re very afraid of these adult things they see coming down the pipe.

So now adults and kids not only exist in two different realities, but are heading toward different polarized political views, one of which is liberal and one of which is reactionary.

Brett hits the nail on the head. Parenting isn't about social trends or fitting into a lifestyle. It's about your children, and what you do as a parent to help them succeed in life while also giving them critical thinking capabilities so that they can become better versions of you while also having to make tough choices on their own during crucial points in their development into adulthood.

It reminds me of something I was told by an education major when I was in college. He was student teaching and children in his class had to draw their perception of a Japanese classroom after hearing about it from their teachers with no visual aids. One student drew an environment where comformity was king: the students were identical robots and the teachers were more evil, sinister looking robots. The teacher in this class forced the child to erase the drawing and start again, but my friend, the student teacher, gently encouraged him that it was okay to think what he wanted (outside of earshot, of course, to preserve his job).

And therein lies the problem, highlighted by Brett above: even if you raise a child to think critically and absorb the information given to him (important to note as Brett did in his entry that children may have a more honest view of the world around them but it is still centered around them only), independent thinking is not rewarded even in what we like to think are free, liberalized classrooms of "free" thinking teachers and administrators. And we wonder why this generation gap persists?

In the next few years between birth and schooling, my wife and I will think very hard about education options for our child. Home schooling and Montessori both seem preferable to even the "great" education system we have in Massachusetts, but we still have to think of developing those all important social skills, without giving in to egomaniacal trends that run rampant in our society.

Don't worry, this post isn't about Cristiano Ronaldo's conquests. It's university exam season in much of the world, and some research news I ran across this morning is immediately applicable by all the students thinking of staying up all night to study:

Researchers, led by Jessica Payne of Harvard Medical School, set out to determine if sleep boosts the creation of emotionally salient memories, and memories relevant to future goals, when it follows soon after learning. At the heart of the study is the notion that the sleeping brain actively and selectively consolidates memory. So, let’s say that what you are trying to learn is a side of beef, and your sleeping brain is the butcher. When you sleep (according to this hypothesis) the butcher takes the side of beef and trims it down to a stack of top sirloin and fillet mignon.

It turns out that’s not too far off the mark, but it’s even better than that. The results show that not only does sleep consolidate the most relevant, adapative and useful information, but the effect can last for up to four months. The trick is that you have to sleep soon after learning. Waiting 24 hours after learning greatly diminshes the effects.

This research adds more substance to the argument that the sleeping brain isn’t dormant in any sense of the word. It’s actively calculating what’s most important about our recent experience, and selecting what can be consolidated for long-term storage.

There you have it - sleeping is an important component of learning and you will not learn more by pulling all-nighters. Well, they might be effective in helping you pass that exam tomorrow morning if you really are unprepared, but if we define learning as the acquisition of actual knowledge and not the passing of exams, sleep is an essential component.

So that's for intellectual young folk. Some of us are long past the age of having exams, though. Sleep is important for us, too. Coach Charles Poliquin has a piece of excellent advice, as well as a quick test of whether a guy is getting high-quality sleep:

High-quality sleep means putting your head on the pillow and not waking up until the next day. You also want to wake up at the same time every day.

But quantity of sleep isn't the only problem. Erratic sleeping patterns are also bad for your health and your physique. If you wake up in the middle of the night to go pee, it's not good sleep.

Remember, all the anabolic-hormone cascades depend on the quality of your sleep. A lot of males with low Testosterone levels can be cured simply by fixing their sleep patterns.

A low estimate is that 68% of the population doesn't sleep properly. When I work with pro teams as a consultant, the first thing I do is teach them all the tricks I have for improving quality of sleep.

Now, a young guy can go out on Friday night, hunt for quiff until 4 a.m., then go to the gym on Saturday morning and deadlift without it affecting him much. Eventually, though, it starts to take a toll on you. Many men these days start to see a decline in Testosterone at age 31. Thirty-one is the new 50.

If you're not sure if you're getting quality sleep or not, this is your standard: You should always wake up under a teepee. If you don't have a boner so solid you have to do a handstand to take a morning piss, your Testosterone levels are probably low.

Since I read that last month I've been making a deliberate effort to stop getting up in the middle of the night but no, I'm not going to tell you how well it's working according to that test. Sorry.

What's Wrong With The World brings us a fun story of an American university lecturer gives us a great example on the proper way to hurt sensitive peoples' feelings and be called a Nazi. Or if you find yourself among a different kind of sensitive people, a mixed-race homosexual or whatever.

Afew years ago I was asked by the instructor of a philosophy class, then titled “Roots of War,” to discuss with his students the culture of the U.S. military community. After identifying myself as a former career military officer, I discussed my impression of our military’s culture. When I was done, a young woman who had been glowering at me and holding her arms tightly across her chest raised her hand. When called upon she vehemently said, “I don’t agree with you. I don’t think it is anything like that. You have just been brainwashed by the military.”

“OK,” I said, “what do you think our military’s culture is like?”

“Well, certainly nothing like that,” she sputtered. I could see some heads in the class nodding in agreement.

I asked, “Could you share with us your experience in or around the military?”

“I haven’t had anything to do with the military,” she indignantly replied.

“Have you extensively studied the U.S. military or worked with current or former members of the military?”

“No,” she angrily said.

“So where have you gotten your impression of the military’s culture?” I tried to ask softly.

“I am entitled to my opinion, and I think you are a Nazi!” was her voracious reply. The class was clearly enjoying her attack on me at this point and the philosophy professor sat smugly satisfied.

I decided to end this ridiculous exchange: “So let us review. You have no personal experience or knowledge of the military. You have not studied the military. You cannot explain why you disagree with me. And you think you are entitled to your opinion. Well, I agree with you on one point. You do have a right to an opinion, and I have a right to point out that yours is an ignorant opinion—ignorant because by your own admission it is not based on any facts, education, research, or experience. Your opinion is apparently based on nothing more than simple ignorant prejudice.”

The class was silent for a moment. The young woman began to sob and yell at me, “You can’t say that to me!”

I replied, “Yes I can, because it is the truth.”

The now visibly upset philosophy professor said, “Doug, you are being a little harsh on her.”

“No Ron, I am just stating the truth.”

“Well Doug, you have to respect her feelings.” Much of the class was nodding in agreement while attempting to soothe the young woman who was now obviously enjoying the attention.

“Gee Ron, I thought this was a university where we discussed subjects rationally using facts and logic.”

“A lot of us feel the same way she does,” the philosophy professor responded, as if that were justification for her ignorance and her personal insults.

Beyond being an example of what becomes of education when feelings trump reason, this is a great example of how to act around sensitive people who have feelings. Show no irritation of any kind. When people get emotional and respond with insults, either act amused or (like this guy) flat out refuse to even acknowledge that you were called a Nazi. Be blunt and confident. Escalate. That all sounds familiar, doesn't it?