Connecting the Dots: A Meta-Post



Halfway through the semester is a good point to stop and evaluate blogging as an exercise, as well as a meta-analysis of the themes of my own posts. I added the class a week into the semester due to some problems with scheduling, and so I believe I missed some of the opening discussion on what a blog post should entail. The first substantive one that I wrote was on my own experience with organizations, which I was told via comment was too across the board: shallow analysis of a few different organizations, rather than a treatise on one. To some extent, I think that’s a little unfair of an analysis, I had experience at many organizations and I felt by reading the prompt that week it would be best to share things from many angles. Organizations are full of different people doing different tasks, and I felt that offering perspective from a few different sources would be a beneficial assessment.
The next week; however, the prompt was perhaps unclear to me, or perhaps less interesting than what I wanted to talk about. We were given free rein to write something other than the prompt, and I took advantage of this with “Opportunism and Subjective Ethics,” which was more a short essay than it was a blog post. I actually quite liked this post, though I tend to think it was ill-received. I wanted to touch on something at a more meta-level, examining the reasons why someone might behave in an opportunistic manner instead of simply recounting an instance where they had done so. Still, in no short words I was encouraged to not do that, and for my next blog I wrote very in line with the prompt, and explained in some detail a very small section of my life as a Boy Scout, and the process of leadership in that organization.
I suppose one theme that’s coming out of this is that I continually have to shrink my scope, focus on the smaller, anecdotal arguments which the rest of schooling has tried to drill out of my head. Perhaps I’m thinking of these posts too much as essays, and not as the blog posts they are. Still, broader themes do emerge from the sheer simplicity of writing about the same topic (opportunism) from many different angles. I don’t know if any of them are novel ideas: power corrupts, certain people will swindle one another if given the chance, and leadership is a difficult mix of checks and balances, but for those interested in organizational leadership, knowing these things by heart may at least provide the backdrop for developing a personal style of leadership which alleviates some of these woes.
Now perhaps I should put myself in Professor Arvan’s shoes with writing these prompts. With any specified action, a person has a specified goal in mind, and if we look at the course surveys, a picture is generally painted of what the goals of the course are. Synthesis and transfer of ideas are two of the most important goals, as well as hearing discussion points from many different voices. The unfortunate problem of many discussion-type classrooms is that usually only a handful of students actually interact with the professor (I tend to think of this as a free-rider problem in its silliest form where people freeload intellectual stimulation off of the more outspoken students), so the blogs are an interesting way to at least have everyone contribute to the conversation. And applying them rather simply to an individual’s past experiences is also a way to simply tie a discussion topic from theory to practice. Personally, I think this could be done better by posing an ethical question, then having the student use the blog post to reason it out using their newfound knowledge, rather than simply recounting a past experience. In this way, the student synthesizes the ideas learned in class with the past experience looking forward, training people for the jobs that they want to have, which I believe is the worthwhile pursuit of any proper education system.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanOctober 14, 2017 at 12:48 PM

    Let me try to give you a different angle to consider your posts. (Blog posts are essays, in my view, not something else.) Much of our writing these days is informed by a style that is practiced in journalism. We lead with the example. The example is meant to illustrate the large issue and to provide some human interest in the story. It allows the reader to make a personal connection to what is being discussed. So the writer needs to do both, provide an interesting example and then work through the abstract argument that the example is meant to illustrate. In what you wrote above you seem to think I want one but not the other. I want both. And you should want it to.

    Here is a little aside about me that might help you. I was a math guy as an undergrad. I learned economics in grad school as a kind of applied math. I was comfortable thinking about the economics that way. And I was quite comfortable talking with other math econ types as a consequence. But I really struggled explaining the economics to non-economists and tended to shy away from having those conversations. This continued for me as an assistant professor. Life changed for me after I got married and had kids. That brought me back down to earth and I had now problem talking with other parents about kids stuff - we were all going through the same sorts of experiences. A little later, I found I could then have conversations with non-economists who were academics about other academic issues. You need to find commonality to do that. Abstraction is the language used by insiders. Bringing the conversation down a peg or to allows for others to participate in it.

    On the matter of you adding the course late, indeed I don't know how to manage that well. I don't believe you missed thoughts specifically about the blogging, but you surely missed my discussion of Akerlof's model of Labor Markets as Partial Gift Exchange, and how collegiality on the job enhances productivity. I was trying to set the tone with those initial sessions and, of course, you missed that through no fault of your own. I did have presentations for each of the initial sessions which were heavily annotated. I wonder if you went through those. But even if you did, it's not the same as being in the live class session.

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  2. Susan Athey Econ 490 fall 2017October 17, 2017 at 5:44 AM

    You mentioned our class discussions as a silly example of the free rider problem. I don't think this is a silly example at all; I couldn't agree more. We've talked a lot about opportunism in this course, and our class discussions are certainly an environment where opportunists might take advantage.

    For the first six weeks of this course, I was under the impression that our attendance counted for points. Of course our attendance matters, in the sense that showing up is the best way to learn that day's material. There are posted lecture slides, but the best synthesis of information comes from our class discussions. That said, I recently reviewed the syllabus and realized that attendance is not actually a component of our percentage grade. The only incentive is the 5% bonus offered for the class session feedback surveys, available only to those that attend.

    Knowing this, we can understand why some students might show up simply to initial next to their name at the start of class and proceed to zone out for the next 80 minutes. This is the free rider problem you mentioned. Presumably, Prof. Arvan offers the bonus points to encourage people to come to class so that they will participate. When students bypass the participation and simply claim the points, they are free riders on the system. They don't contribute any new ideas to the discussion, even though they very well may have unique experiences to share, either as a result of not caring enough to participate or not paying attention.

    There may also be a small fraction of the class that show up and are too shy to speak in group settings. These people are also free riders in the sense that they show up for the knowledge the lecture conveys that day; they gain new ideas from their classmate's input, and yet they contribute nothing. The common theme here is that free riders claim value without providing any input. I could ponder this thought for a while, but I'm not sure there is an efficient solution at the university level. The upside seems to be that the 'goods' the econ 490 free riders are after, points and knowledge, are not distributive. More free riders does not decrease the resource pool, but one could argue the free riders are still negatively affecting the students that show up to participate.

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