Today was like one of those fly dreams

Tuesday was bad. I gave my principles students their first exam. Seventeen questions total: 5 short answer, 12 multiple choice. The test was so hard, and so long, that one girl - one very hard working young student - actually was crying during the exam. You read that right: crying. I made her cry with my test. Well, I came out of it feeling defeated, because last semester's evals were bad. Like the worst evals I've ever had. And I just wanted to make the whole test problem go away. So based on conversations with colleagues, I decided to do something I'd never done. Rather than curve the test, I sent them the test in an email and told them "You have til next Tuesday. Redo the test, and any question that you got wrong but not get correct, you earn half the points back." It's kind of like I'm taking the average of every question, assuming they got it wrong the first time but right the second time. This accomplished two things. One, I kept promise not to technically curve. I wanted students to learn this material, and they have a week to do it. But two, I bought back good will. And after working with them today on the new material, I could see something I'd never seen before. And the adage is this: an instructor should never under-estimate the importance of good will with your students. When you lose the good will, you lose the class, and when you lose the class, you lose (because those evals are going to stink to high heaven) and they lose, because they'll give up. And throwing in the towel a little bit now ultimately let me get back into the right place with them. I also think I learned a little something new. It took me 45 minutes to finish my exam from start to finish. That means, if it takes them twice as long, they essentially had an hour and a half to finish the test. But the class is only an hour and 20 minutes. So way too long. But I've learned, and from now on, the longest my tests will be on an order of three, not two. That is, for every 1 minute it takes me to do a problem, it will require them 3 minutes. That means I have to write a test that is around 20-25 minutes for me to finish. The second thing I've done is commit to giving them my old exams. It was time to let those things go. They really were holding me back. I wanted to keep them hidden as an option to recycle them. But screw that. I'm rebuilding this pedagogy from the ground floor back up, and I'm cleaning house. So tests are gone to them. They'll need them to see where I'm going with this class. If my homeworks and lectures really are poor barometers for them, then this will definitely improve their ability to forecast the exams.

But today? Well, today was unbelievable. Awesome. I had one of those days teaching where I felt like I changed students' lives. I basically successfully sold the notion to them that economic growth is one of the most important things that humans can care about. I found some great material online, and my own, showing just how the same the world was for thousands of years, and then in a mere 200 years, the world was turned upside down. This is from Brad DeLong, channeling Greg Clark.



What a stark graph! It's like all of human history was a runway, and finally in 1800, the pilot got off the ground. But notice the "great divergence" DeLong marks. Some countries climb so freaking steep - almost reaching a vertical climb, wherein the year-to-year changes are themselves dwarfing millenia changes. I told the students that the difference between 2007 and 2008 will be more different in terms of overall living standards than 8000 BC was to 1500 AD! You can see more of that in the table below (also stolen from DeLong's slides. Thanks Brad! I listened to his macro lecture last night on the Solow Growth model. I think that man is a genius. He was talking about the domestication of the cow versus the buffalo, and I was hanging onto every word he said. Maybe I was really just channeling Brad DeLong today.). Secondly, though, notice the different lines moving from 1800. The ones at the top are the US, Luxemburg, the UK, Australia, Japan, etc. In other words, the first world. The ones at the bottom, though - the ones where each year the relative gap in incomes between them and the first world get larger and larger - are your Sierra Leone, your Congo, your Kenyas. These poor people are only marginally better off than their primitive ancestors, where we practically look like aliens compared to ours.



And finally, I showed them some growth in per capita income for 1870-2000 for a few select countries. I thickened the lines for Australia, Japan and the US to show just how much shuffling there had been between then and now. Notice that in 1870, Japanese per capita income was around $900 per person. Australia, the wealthiest country in the world at that time, was over $5000. Japan grew, as all the countries in this series did, from 1870 to 1950, but something happened in 1950 that caused Japan to overtake almost everyone and become one of the world's most productive economies. Had the 1990s financial crisis in Asia not happened, who knows where Japanese incomes would be on this series. Point is, a poor country can catch up to a wealthy country by the power of compounding interest. It just takes time and consistent growth rates that are larger than others and that country will catch up. In Japan's case, average growth rates from 1950 to 2003 were almost 5% a year, compared to half that maybe for Australia? That means incomes were doubling every 70/5 years, or every 14 years. That's incredible!



Anyway, today was a good day. It was such a good day, I'm going to leave you with some verse.

Today was like one of those fly dreams
Didnt even see a berry flashing those high beams
No helicopter looking for a murder
Two in the morning got the fat burger
Even saw the lights of the goodyear blimp
And it read ice cubes a pimp
Drunk as hell but no throwing up
Half way home and my pager still blowing up
Today I didnt even have to use my a.k.
I got to say it was a good day.