Game Theorist

Ironic punishments: Snot edition

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 17:01:00 +0000

Ironic punishments: Snot edition

Apparently one of the behavioural challenges as a parent is to convince children to wipe snot and other related facial dirt from their face in an appropriate manner. It turns out that they learn fairly quickly that transference of snot to other body parts is not pleasant and look for alternative means. I know this because I have observed a two year old of mine toddle up to their mother saying "I want a hug," getting said hug and, while the parent was suitably caught up in a loving embrace, deposit a snotty nose onto the parent's shoulder. The parent is completely fooled by this, interpreting the snot swiping as some affectionate nuzzling. A shrewd child learns to also throw I legitimate hugs regularly so as to hide their parent's role as a handkerchief.

As they get older parental hugs are not as easy to come by. So the child resorts to the use of their own clothing. This is usually a sleeve but again a sophisticated child might note that this gives rise to external evidence and so instead uses the underside of a sleeve or shirt as a covert alternative. There is also the issue of using other materials but as those post is nauseating enough I'm not going to go there.

Child No.2, who is now 12, is not a sophisticated snot transferer. For some reason he continues to use the outside sleeve and continues to be caught regularly. He does this with a tissue already i his pocket! He even does this with short sleeves. Then again these aren't far from the nose.

We haven't been able to nip this in the bud and are worrying he may not grow out of it. So we are resorting to ironic punishments.

Our first of these is to remove his shirt privileges. He literally loses his shirt if he transgresses. This is embarrassing if in public and cold if outside. But it hasn't done the trick.

My new initiative which I have not yet had an opportunity to put into practice is to go with it. OK, so your shirt is a tissue now? Well then it is a public good. Anyone in the family can use it as a tissue. Even he admitted this punishment was a "good one" but I know it requires a supply of snotty noses on hand to really have an effect.

Anyhow given that spring allergies are around the corner I thought I'd post this to see if anyone else wants to share their strategies for dealing with perverse snot behaviour in older children.

Bullying, what is it good for?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0000

You know what the thing about bullying is? I don’t like it.

“Great,” you are probably thinking (rolling your eyes), “this is sure going to be deep and insightful post.”

But I have thought about it and that is what I’ve got. I thought about it because I was – I’d like to say fortunate enough but I guess I can’t – to receive an advance copy of Emily Bazelon’s new book, Sticks and Stones, subtitled Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. This is a book written for adults and, indeed, all adults with some responsibility towards kids. And as one of those responsible adults, I came away from the book thinking that “bullying really sucks and really I would prefer it didn’t exist. It’s just so unfair.”

However, if my teenage daughter can whine to me about things that are hard to deal with that she just would prefer wouldn’t be there – such as the cost of paintballs or why her clean clothes haven’t emerged from the magic basket that transports them to her closet or the fact she has to write another poem in iambic pentameter – I don’t see why I can’t just join her.

Bazelon is not an unfamiliar person toreaders of this blog. Her kids must be about the same age is mine and so for a good eight or so years, her issues in Slate were my issues too. I didn’t always see eye to eye on her approaches but I was forced to think about my own after reading her work.

This time it was different. Bazelon was not motivated by anything that was happening to her kids – or if she was, she didn’t say. Instead, she was motivated by the criminal trial of six teenagers accused essentially of bullying another teenager, Phoebe Prince, to take her own life. This turned out to be a case of prosecutorial over-reach that makes what happened to Aaron Swartz look very tame in comparison.

What Bazelon does is centre a broad investigation of bullying focussing on three children. The first, Monique, is a straightforward (if that is the right word), case of a bullied child. The second, Jacob, is the bullying of a gay kid. And the third is not Phoebe Prince but Flannery, one of the six accused of bullying her. Bazelon does something that, when you think about it, is surely extraordinarily difficult. In each case, she investigates and tries to work out what really went on.

I cannot imagine what that was like. The easy case would have been Flannery because there were court documents that assembled evidence and testimony (including texts and Facebook posts). But the other cases, she would have been forced to be the judicial investigator; basically disentangling the hearsay, the inferences, the judgments, the interpretations to find out what was real and what wasn’t. All by interviewing and talking to teenagers. In reading this, I kept wondering what kept Bazelon herself from just shouting at them all asking them “to get a grip.” I know there were times I was doing that, rolling my eyes so much that they hurt. “Oh please, you cannot be serious.”

But Bazelon kept her cool and ploughed on. She took us back and forth from the stories to the academic literature on the subject. She touched on cases written about in the past. And she kept an eye on where she wanted us all to go.

And where I ended up was: I was essentially grateful; which I know contradicts how I seem to have begun this post but bear with me. Right, at this moment, my kids are not being bullied and have never been bullied to the extent of the stories Bazelon tells. It is just hard not to breathe a sigh of relief at that because what was happening to the kids in Sticks and Stones was a parental nightmare. To be sure, we, as parents, have had to deal with a bullied child (I’ll come to that in a bit) but it was dealt with and things are very good now. But it is hard not to read this book and really just think that we are currently very lucky. Not just to not have bullied children but what personally would seem much worse, to be the parent of a bully.

To cover this, I am going to reverse the order that Bazelon chose and start with Flannery. Flannery was not bullied but, as I am pretty sure Bazelon wants us to conclude, she was bullied be the system. She was the victim of a culture that finds it easy to assign simple blame in the face of tragedy. She was also the victim of a enforcement approach that now values “making a public example” of would be wrong-doers. In that she disproportionately is harmed by the system trying to minimise future enforcement actions. Again, the analogy to Aaron Swartz would not be lost on anyone. This time, however, it was another, essentially troubled kid who died. The problem is that in some ways more lives were taken with her. All of this perhaps could have been avoided.

But this also reveals the difficulties associated with bullying. It can be mis-diagnosed. Accusations of bullying may be made where none exist. Bullying may be ignored or passed off as something else where it does exist. And this is all made worse by the fact that it is all hard to deal with even when it is properly diagnosed. This is because teenage social existence involves an awful about of pain and learning. The issue is when to intervene.

The second case of Jacob is an insidious one. Jacob was openly gay at school in much the same way as other kids are openly geeky or otherwise express a preference from differing from the norm and thereby drawing attention to themselves. It is so easy to cringe and plead for conformity just to avoid the pain. But that is precisely the wrong response. One does not necessarily expect Jacob to be popular as a result of his chosen style but when he is subject to trauma as a result of it we are creating a less free society if it is allowed to continue. The appropriate response isn’t to hide or to bide your time until you can move to an accepting group; creating social ghettos. Instead, it is to bake acceptance into the pie early.

The first case of Monique is, in many respects, what should trouble parents the most. There is a sense in which it is typical. Basically, Monique seemed to be doing just fine at school until one day, it all changed. And by one day, I mean one day. Monique went to school an unbullied although not necessarily popular kid and came home a bullied and isolated one. And it never stopped. And it was miserable. And for some reason, it seems to happen in almost every grade of almost every school in the world. I saw it happen and it happened for a time to me when I was in high school. And when it is bad, to the beleaguered parents there is no easy course of action.

The problem parents face is that they usually suspect it will pass. They advise changing strategies, avoiding the bullies and reassurance it will get better. The problem is that the reason this has occurred is that there is a bully playing this game. The bullied child is a unwitting victim of a bully’s desire to exercise power. For them to rise to the top of the social heap, they have to demonstrate some form of superiority over another. The bullied child is their victim and, moreover, they just don’t do it once and move on. Instead, it seems to be a continual target. In other words, bullies don’t spread the pain around. Not only is it wrong for obvious reasons, it is fundamentally unfair. Why my child and not some other? If it is some other, then I wouldn’t have to deal with it.

Dealing with it is hard. My daughter became the target of a bully a few years ago. The bully wasn’t popular and had a history of bad behaviour. But she made my daughter miserable. Eventually, like Monique’s parents, this was only solved by moving schools. In our case, we had other reasons to shift schools than the bully but she was at the top of our daughter’s list. Indeed, she vetted new schools herself to see if there were likely bullies among them. Somewhat ironically, during the time we were in the US, the bully actually moved schools herself – to my daughter’s new school! It won’t surprise you that this was one of the things at the top of her list advocating a move to Canada rather than going back to Australia. And to tell you the truth, we were grateful with a by-product of that decision not having to deal with the bully issue again.

Bazelon covers a lot of ground with all sorts of strategies that can be deployed to mitigate the bullying problem. It is all good advice. And it is all hard work. And it has to start early and continue on while involving the kids, their parents and the school. She spends an entire chapter on social media that concludes that those running Facebook and the like should also be part of the conversation. Bazelon has shielded her own sons from Facebook for the moment. As you may know, this is where I partsignificant company with her. I want my kids on Facebook early and with some parental supervision. That way I have a chance of helping them work through these things. Moreover, in social media, all of the evidence is in writing. That makes a difference in many ways. But importantly, and I have seen this, there is much mutual support and good social behaviour there as there is bad. And to have perspective you need to see it all and not just hear about things when there is a problem.

My point is this. For the most part, incidents of bullying are fundamentally random from the perspective of the parent. It would be awful for someone to read these cases and cocoon their child. For the vast majority of kids, they won’t be subject to the worst cases. Freedom socially is an important thing that they must have in order to really learn.

That said, it seems to happen all of the time to someone. If it is happening to your kid now, I suspect this book isn’t going to help much. You probably have already investigated the literature, talked with teachers and anguished at the situation. Once it happens, you are no longer an objective player in this as a parent.

But it could happen to you. And the message of this book is that you need to think about these things in advance. Sticks and Stones may break your heart on the way, but being forced to think about this when you are less emotionally invested, will never hurt you.

So I don’t care if you, like me, don’t like bullying. But deal with it today by taking a few hours to prepare yourself with this book.

An allergic story

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:43:00 +0000

A well-known economist friend of mine wrote the following post on Facebook. It follows an algorithmic bent typical of those in my tribe so I asked for permission to post it here.

How to have your very first allergy attack when you have just turned two, by [a two-year old].

0. Prepare for incident by refusing to have your nails filed.

1. Try new food.

2. Start breaking out in hives. Scratch yourself with your pre-sharpened nails. Scream "tummy itch!" Draw blood. Repeat.

3. When adults try to give you spoonfuls of Benadryl, spit it back in their faces. Scream "mess!" Make sure it is distributed widely so no one has any idea if you swallowed any.

4. When adults hold you down and put a dropper full of Bendryl in the back of your throat, stay quiet for a moment until they think you must have swallowed it, spray it in their faces and all over yourself. Scream "Mess!" again and smear Benadryl on the bleeding wounds where you gashed yourself.

5. Scream and scratch yourself all the way to urgent care. Get increasingly red and puffy.

6. When you arrive at the doctor's office, recognize the place as the same place where you got a shot last month and start screaming "Poke leg! Poke leg!" Allow this to distract you from ripping at your clothing.

7. Writhe in your mother's arms as she attempts to explain to person at counter that you need to see a triage nurse. Scream "Lady no poke leg!" at her just to be sure she will not give you a shot.

8. Run around to see all the toys that the very ill looking children are playing with. Try to grab their face masks and get angry when your mother prevents you from getting near. Resist when your mother suggests you should sit in a chair with her.

9. Calm down when your mother pulls out the iPad. Play a game for 30 seconds. Switch to videos. Notice that some annoying adult has turned off the sound. Turn the sound back on as loud as it goes. Immediately attract a crowd of very ill looking children.

10. When your mother turns the volume down, scream "Loud!" as loud as you can. Hurl iPad to the floor. Hurl yourself to the floor. Scream "I fell down!" as loud as you can. Attempt to rip your clothes off, revealing that your entire body is now even brighter red, puffed out, streaked, and punctuated by self-inflicted gashes. Notice that parents of very ill looking children now look alarmed and are holding their kids back from you.

11. Remain on floor thrashing and scratching until nurse calls you in. Shout "Lady no poke!" to be sure you will not get a shot.

12. Behave nicely while getting examined. Listen to your mother breathe a sigh of relief that your airways are fine. Listen to lady discuss whether you can be restrained to get Benadryl or whether you need a shot of Benadryl.

13. Start scratching and flailing again. Wriggle out of your mother's lap and throw yourself on the floor. Bang your head on the way down. Scream and scratch more. Make sure to also rub your face so that any germs on the floor make their way to your nose and eyes. Scream louder when your mother wipes your hands.

14. Wonder why the lady decides you should get a shot.

15. Remain on the floor until the doctor comes in, screaming whenever your mother speaks or moves towards you. Repeat steps 12-14.

16. Scream bloody murder when more ladies arrive with shots.

17. Receive shot. Decide mother's lap is better than the floor. Curl up there and fall asleep while completing observation period.

To all this I added: 19. When wake up, ask for new food.

This kid is alright although the parents are somewhat traumatised. As it turns out the food in question was Indian masala sauce and so the reaction was likely to cashews there.

Canadians Irrational Fear of Snow Days

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 18:44:00 +0000

My 13 year old daughter walks to school yesterday.

Just before we were going to move to Canada, many people in the US told us how different those Canadians were. Now we had met many Canadians and, to us, they seemed pretty darn normal and definitely polite. So we put it down to the Americans being the different ones.

During our first winter here there wasn't much or really any snow. But yesterday, a snow storm hit (as it did later on for the North-East of the US). This storm generated about a foot of snow, exactly as forecast. Now when we were in Boston that forecast would have triggered a snow day. Basically, school would be cancelled and we would be expected to stay home and off the roads. We must have had about four or five of these during our two Boston winters.

But here in Toronto, things were different. I would have conversations like this:

"So do you think they are going to call a snow day tomorrow?"

"No way. I can't remember there ever being a snow day. The University of Toronto has never had one and neither has my kid's school."

"The whole time I was growing up, we had only one snow day. My parents were so upset they marched us to school anyway just to check and left us standing at the school gates for an hour."

"Wasn't that terrible."

"Noooo. We wanted to go to school. What was terrible was that the teachers didn't show up."

The Canadians take pride in the fact that they don't let snow interfere with their intention to pursue normal activities. I say intention because when you get a foot of snow, it interferes with normal activities. This was driven home to me literally yesterday morning as I tried to drive the kids to school, ploughing through the snow as we went, windshield freezing up in the negative 10 degrees Celsius temperature. What were these people thinking? No one should be out on a day like this.

Thomas Schelling in his Nobel prize speech remarks at how amazing it was that for more than 60 years, no nuclear bomb has been dropped in anger. His thesis was the longer time went without a bomb, the more repugnant the idea of using it became. Jerry Seinfeld posits a similar way of keeping count on activities as a way to avoid procrastination.

For Canadians, this is encapsulated in the 'days since the last snow day' count. Yesterday's storm was the worst in five years. Five years ago, therefore, they had a worse storm. It was so bad that they had to bring out the army to clear the road. And did they have a snow day then? Noooo. The kids remembered the army on the streets as they drove or trudged by. In the real world, when the army is on the streets the public shouldn't be there save for an Armistice or Remembrance Day parade. For these Canadians they behave like the dark night in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "it's just a few flurries. That won't stop us" as their arms fall off from frostbite.

Now, as it turns out, my kids go to a more international school than is usual. So when they got there, half the class hadn't shown up. Why? They knew better unlike ourselves.

So what did they do that day? Well, and remember it was negative 10 degrees and a snow storm out, they increased the number and length of recesses and played outside! Basically, they doubled down on the snow day. Not only did they not stay away from the snow, they took it as a signal to get down with it. Suffice it to say, my two youngest kids had the best day ever.

That was until the drive home. That is something that usually takes about 15 minutes from my work as I navigate through the Toronto streets to pick up scattered children. Yesterday, it took 2 hours. Why? Because there is a hill going north in Toronto. Not a big hill but a hill nonetheless. And cars were just struggling to get up it. Not most cars but one or two without snow tyres etc. People got out to help push only for the car to slide back towards them. It was chaos ... the sort of chaos that would normally cause people to stay at home.

I proclaimed that we would 'go rouge' on our definition of snow days in the future. I would look at the forecast and if it seemed insane to go out, we would all stay at home and bugger the consequences. They can send the army for us for all I care.

"No way you can do that Dad."

"Why not?"

"Well, I'm not going to hold to it. My school has never had a snow day and everyone showed up today. I am not missing a minute of class!"

"Then you are on your own ..."

"I'll walk [it would be 8 kilometers]. I'm not stopped for just a little flurry."

"Or a flesh wound."

"Exactly."

I guess you could say, at least for one member of our family, assimilation achieved. Well played, Canada.

The Classroom Seating Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:32:00 +0000

I have blogged about the issues of matching students in classes previously. Last night, my son had a task ...

Me: "What are you doing?"

Son: "The teacher asked me to do the class seating plan."

Me: "Sounds like fun."

Son: "No, it isn't fun. I don't know how teachers can do this several times a year. There are four girls who want to be on the same table and three boys. There is one boy who wants to be in a corner. And there are several people who can't be near each other. All that and it has to be boy-girl, boy-girl. It can't be done."

Me: "Well, you know +Al Roth won a Nobel prize for doing this with thousands of people. Some of them married."

Son: "This is harder."

Me: "That doesn't seem ..."

Son: "Did he know any of these people? Did he have to turn up to class with them each day if he got it wrong?"

Me: "I guess not."

Son: "Maybe he should visit Middle school and deal with really hard problems."

He must have spent 2-3 hours on the problem. Eventually, he decided that the only solution involved re-arranging the design of the classroom to a 'horseshoe' format. It also transpired that the teacher had made the problem even harder as he was required to take into account who would work well together and who might be disruptive together. So it just wasn't about student preferences at all.

This morning he went to school quite anxious. Having submitted his proposal last night, he had received about 13 lobbying emails from his classmates. I don't think economics is going to invent any algorithms to re-solve all of that any time soon.

10 Years of Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:26:00 +0000

I should have been paying more attention but I missed the 10th anniversary of my blogging career. It is more of a technical anniversary anyway. It started with this post on 3rd January 2003 which was, predictably, about toilet training. Some of the words of that post found its way into Parentonomics. But I actually didn't return again to this blog until 2006 when I literally rediscovered it as I decided to get into the parenting blog thing in ernest.

In the meantime, I started the Core Economics blog which involved into a multi-authored blog involving Australian academic economists. In 2011, I co-started the Digitopoly blog relating to economics and the digital world. I have also contributed to HBR Blogs, a venture that led to my recent book, Information Wants to be Shared. Finally, I contribute intermittently to a host of blogs at ContributionEconomy.net. I have really loved how blogging has changed my life prompting me to become both more informed and more engaged outside of academia. In addition to books, it even led to at least one published paper and certainly numerous policy advances.

This past year, my parenting blogging has appeared first at Forbes.com. However, I was recently informed by them that they were changing focus and that my blog would be sunset. So there will be no more of that and my parenting blogging will return here; a place that is more natural in any case.

Thanks to all those regular readers who have continued to visit along the way. I realise the frequency of posts has dropped off as my children have become older but hopefully it will still be a place where parenting and economics can meet for some time yet.

A Talmudic Shipping Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 19:07:00 +0000

We don't do Christmas but I do encourage my kids to take advantage of Christmas specials. So when ThinkGeek offered a 20% discount on orders over $100 my kids knew they had an opportunity.

It turns out that working out what you might want is quite tricky. This is because ThinkGeek has clearance items like Giant Inflatable Robot Fists that apparently no one other than my son wanted. But they eventually did it and their cart looked like this.

They came to me to enter credit card information.

"OK but I need to know what I am taking out of each of your bank accounts?"

"Well, just what each of us paid for what we wanted."

"Yes, but what about shipping? That's $42.84 to Canada. What are each of you paying for that?"

"Well, we will divide it by three."

"Then your 8 year old sister, who is ordering one Hair Bow and a few Guitar picks will end up paying $14.28 for that alone when her stuff only cost $3.98. You need to come up with something fairer."

And then the problem ensued. What was fair? They would allocate the shipping costs using some other dimension.

Child No.1 argued that they divide it on the basis of the number of items ordered. Child No.2 argued that they divide it on the basis of the price paid. So they did the maths. This is what they came back with.

Well, Child No.1 was shrewd. While dividing on items had her pay much more than Child No.2 for shipping it was the better deal. It was also better for Child No.2. However, the amount for Child No.3 was still above what I would have regarded as fair. So they proposed to use the price-based cost allocation.

"I'm still not sure that is fair. Your sister is order very light weight things. Surely they don't contribute as much to shipping?"

"Well, how will we tell? We don't know what ThinkGeek is doing."

"You'll have to work that out."

So they went back and decided to look at what it would cost to ship each of these separately. For Child No.1 it was $29, for Child No.2 it was $31 and for Child No.3 it was $6.95. It turns out that weight was a consideration but there was some fixed component for each order -- perhaps for the box. The two eldest then tried to assert that the original $1.67 allocation to their sister was fair.

"But is she really causing that amount of cost? What happens to shipping if you just leave off her order?"

With a sigh, they went back and did that run. It turned out that it made no difference to shipping cost.

"So shouldn't she pay zero then?"

"No, she is still getting a benefit of sharing our box. What is more, she is getting a discount. That wouldn't happen if not for us."

"Then how much should she pay?"

"She should pay an amount equal to the discount she is getting. She should pay $1."

"But that means you two get her discount. Why should you get all of that?"

I argued, on Child No.3's behalf, that she should only have to pay 50 cents and she should share half her discount with her siblings. Child No.1 dug her heels in and argued with Child No.2 who want to accept the deal.

That took a little while but eventually they came back and argued Child No.3 should share 50 cents of her discount and contribute 50 cents towards 'the box.' While it was the same as the previous accepted deal, it was better argued so I accepted that.

Many will recognise this as a classic cost allocation problem. Eventually, with prompting, the kids ended up with a solution that was in the 'core.' This is something that Talmudic scholars had discovered centuries ago.

It was then time to finally order the goods. Unfortunately, this negotiation (and maths exercise) had taken too long. By the time it was resolved an hour or so ago, ThinkGeek had ended their promotion. The discount and an important basis for the whole exercise was gone. It turns out that this was one of those time sensitive negotiations but we didn't quite know it. Another lesson to accompany the maths and social choice of the day.

I persuaded the kids that they might be better waiting until December 26. There was argument over that. I fear this issue will last all week.

A Fear Tolerant Equilibrium

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 18:49:00 +0000

Like everyone else, it has taken me some days to even begin to process the tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. There is a part of me that wonders if we ever will but then again, evil things have happened before and somehow life goes on.

In thinking about this, I kept coming back to the strangeness of what Americans find acceptable and how different the experience is for those who come from many other countries, like me, from Australia. Let me provide a story that illustrates this.

From 2010 to 2011, we lived in Brookline MA. This is a fairly prosperous community with a very strong public school system. The strength of that system attracted residents who cared about the education of their children and that, in turn, fostered a community around those schools. One of the aspects of that community were regular meetings between parents to discuss issues. We hosted one of these meetings, which is why I was at it, amongst Grade 7 parents. The attendees discussed many things but one topic for conversation was "rules for where your children can have playdates." As it turned out, this is not something we had thought enough about to really have rules but I guess we implicitly had them. And I can't remember what rules emerged in the discussion except for one; the very first one mentioned. "Well, I don't allow my kids to go over to a house that has a gun." There were nods all around in broad agreement but to my partner and I, our jaws dropped.

This was a level of experience that had never occurred to us. We had simply not thought that there might be a gun in people's homes anywhere, let alone Brookline. But as it turned out there were. And I guess our initial reaction was that that sounded like a pretty good rule and we should probably adopt it.

It didn't take us long to start to wonder more about this. First of all, how do you know? Do you like ask the parents if they have a gun and then implement your rule accordingly? How does that discussion work?

Second, what precisely was the issue with the gun in the house? The first thing that I thought about was that it wasn't safe. The kids might play with it and it is safe to say that is a bad idea. But actually it wasn't clear that was the issue the other parents were worried about. The guns were usually locked away because, after all, the house had kids too. What the other parents seemed to be worried about was the type of person who would have a gun in the house. But I didn't know what to think about there either. I mean there are so many things that I might not like about other parents and having a gun is not necessarily at the top of the list. What would I be worried about? Were they violent? Were they too scared? Did they have a strong protective streak? Or was this a sign of mental instability? Something did not sit right about screening on guns. After all, some of the weird views parents express at these parent meetings gives me much more pause!

In the end, we left the US and moved to Canada where there is no need to have a 'gun in the house' policy so it became a moot point. But the whole experience was a wake up call as to how different it is in the US.

At some level, the US seems more tolerant of living in a fearful equilibrium. It seems obvious to so many outside the US, that it is better to keep guns tightly controlled, if only to keep them out of the hands of the mentally unstable that time and time again, the reaction to events where guns have been in the hands of the mentally unstable and done harm has led to more gun control rather than less. For instance, when 35 people died at the hands a single assailant in the town of Port Arthur Tasmania, the conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, instituted strong controls (although not a prohibition) on semi-automatic and automatic weapons. Moreover, realising that stopping future sales wasn't enough, engaged in a buy-back scheme to remove 600,000 existing weapons from the public hands. Think about it, this was expensive costing half a billion dollars and requiring a 1 percent tax on all income. (The scheme actually had a statistically significant effect on both gun related homicides and suicides). Here is Howard's response to the Newtown tragedy.

But what remains true is that there is no 100 percent protection. Someone determined and calculating can do terrible things as the Norwegian 2011 massacre demonstrated. That led to serious policing reorganisation but gun control was already tight. Interestingly, it did not lead to a weakening of gun controls.

Why do I say that is interesting? Well, it is worth considering the baseline argument in the US underpinning the right to bear arms. It comes from a belief that guns and gun proliferation actually deters gun crime. The quintessential case would be a mentally unstable person opening fire in a public place only to be cut short by gun carrying citizens. Better still, and this applies less to the mentally unstable, a would be murder would be deterred entirely. The point here is that the fear of armed crimes fuels a baseline argument for more gun ownership. In that respect, it is as much a symptom as a cause of that fear.

But how does this relate to the particular problem of protecting school children? One thing that gun control advocates and detractors appear to share is that school children should be protected from gun crime. The gun control method is to remove the guns. This won't prevent calculated criminals from getting guns but it may well prevent the mentally unstable ones from so doing. One of the things that came with the Australian gun laws was very strong monitoring of gun ownership.

What is the alternative view? The idea is that if there were more guns at hand, a gun criminal entering a school could be either deterred or stopped in their tracks. Now, for the mentally unstable, it does not seem plausible that deterrence is the issue. What about a gun-led response?

This is tricky on a number of levels. First of all, it is not necessarily an issue related to gun control at all. For instance, regardless of whether there is a right to bear arms, you could permit certain forms of security in schools. You could have guards or even arm teachers in some way. The point is that whether you choose to do that is unrelated as to whether you control guns elsewhere; although the need would be related.

Second, can it work? What would the plan be to defend a school? Should all schools in the US receive some combat training plus drills and contingency plans? That sounds expensive but what is interesting is that those who fear gun crime and believe counter-force is a response do not appear to be advocating this.

More likely is that trained security professionals are installed in the schools. Now I have had a taste of this. In Australia, my kids attended a Jewish day school. These schools received bomb threats and so there was always some security concern. There were security guards but they were not armed. The basic idea was that if there was some agitator, they could be dealt with. Perhaps if a bomb were being delivered there may be a little more warning. That was the idea.

One day some parents became concerned that that wasn't enough. So they moved to train more parent volunteers in hand-to-hand combat. As it was put to me, the logic was two fold. In both cases the logic was flawed. First, we were told that the security guards were low paid and so we couldn't expect them to really risk their lives for the children. Better to have parents there. Well, that was already wrong. If you believe the incentive issue for the security guard, it was even worse for the parents. They were parents of other kids. Did people really think that was better protection for their own kids? If I was the parent out there, I can tell you that it wouldn't be. In any case, as we have seen recently, teachers -- also low paid for what they were asked to do -- did have the motivation to protect the children.

The second argument was that with clearly visible parent volunteers (they would wear jackets) a would be criminal would see this and, if they are intent on doing damage, go to another school. While this argument was one that worked for one school it seemed to me to be morally abhorrent. You want to train parents in protection to get the crime to move to harm kids in other schools? That didn't work for me.

I wasn't alone amongst parents though of thinking that visible security was not what we were after. Yes, there were risks but living in a way that reacted to and acknowledged very low probability fears was not going to work.

The point, however, is a stronger one. When there is a non-zero probability of a gun related attack on schools, there is no way of countering that perfectly. You could put security into the schools but there is actually an incentive issue there, there is certainly an economics issue and there is an issue of the allocation of security strength. The last thing an education system needs is an arms race on protection. After all, the goal would be to be the most protected school in an area. That is a race to the bottom.

The alternative to all this is more guns in the community to prevent crime where-ever it might spring up. But the same issue -- you cannot eliminate fear -- remains. Israel which comes as close that situation as anywhere has not been able to stop terrorist attacks within its borders.

In any case, this is a digression. To the rest of the world, gun control is natural and obvious. Many in the US, were surprised when Rupert Murdoch tweeted as such two days ago. I wasn't surprised. He is an Australian and to non-US people, gun control seems obvious.

The question is why isn't it so obvious within the US. It could be a bad equilibrium. There are so many guns that it is (a) impossible to do anything about it and (b) that level of gun ownership leads to others wanting to have guns.

But I think there is also a tolerance for living in fear that exists in the US that doesn't exist elsewhere. To gun control opponents, they would rather live with the fear of another person with a gun potentially harming them and have that fear be acknowledged by a delegation of control to deal with that person themselves. This is the idea of putting safety in their own hands. They fear other people and also fear no other person can protect them.

To gun control advocates, they fear those with guns. This was the reaction of the Brookline parents. They fear that gun owners cannot be relied upon to be responsible. The vast majority are. So they often favour outright bans rather than the more intrusive licensing and regulations that other countries have put in place. In other words, they shy away from a nuanced response to gun control in favour of blanket bans. But those bans only last so long as someone invents around them.

The US is tolerant of fear. In this case, it manifests itself in lax gun control laws. But it also appears to lie at the root of other policies where the US differs from the rest of the world. Not having universal health care, comes with the notion that there it is alright for people to live in fear of a personal health crisis. And airport security perpetuates the fear of terrorism. In each case, the argument that something might be doing just because there will be less fear in the population does not win in the political process.

For the rest of us, last Friday was one of those days that reaffirmed our choices not to live in the US. We just can't understand it.

Seven Economist Mistakes About Parenting

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:46:00 +0000

This post is a reaction to the post at FoxNews by PhD economist, Gertrud Fremling, “An economist’s seven rules for raising kids.” The fact that I have titled my post here “economist mistakes” implies that I disagree with Fremling but I

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 10: Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, speaks during a discussion on the Economy at the National Press Club, on June 10, 2011 in Washington, DC. Goolsbee spoke to the Committee for Economic Development about the status of the U.S. economy and job creation. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

should preface that the word “mistakes” is harsh. There are different parenting styles and some work for different parents. I have no doubt Fremling’s choices work for her. My qualms here are, first, that her rules are actually natural, first principles, applications of economic logic but, second, for reasons that relate to the failings of that logic, are unlikely to be of use for many parents. Indeed, they could hardly be described as “parenting rules” in the same way that, say, not leaving a toddler wandering around in traffic is not simply good advice but is a rule.

Let’s begin with posited Rule No.1: “Limit Their Options.” Here Fremling basically says that her kids do not get anything beyond basic needs without having to work for it. No TV, restriction of video games and probably much else. Now it is unclear why this rule is implied. This seems like an imposition of parenting preferences on the preferences of children; something that is usually considered pretty anti-economic and free choice. But as we progress through the rules, you will see that this is essential for the running of a market-based household. The Fremling household creates scarcity and with that creates demand from their children, in terms of what they are willing to work for. Without that, it is hard to get the rest to follow. From this perspective, they start their market economy with a state-run monopoly.

Which gets to Rule No.2: “Economic Incentives — Offer Plenty of Jobs.” The Fremling household is the land of opportunity. Everything is an employment opportunity for which a child can receive a set amount of pay. That sounds like a pretty neat economy but so much can go wrong with pay. I pretty much wrote a book on the basis of the difficulties of applying this to young children. But a recent tweet by former Whitehouse Council of Economic Advisors head, Austan Goolsbee, recounted the time he paid his young son a fee for each cricket he disposed of in his Washington DC home. The arrangement ended when he found his son opening the back door to let more crickets in. But even with unintended consequences, how do you know what price to set? $1 for a dishwasher load? That seems high to me. I can’t imagine having to work this out for every chore and task in the house. So much better to have a broad deal like we have, do the tasks you are supposed to, or else? There’s an incentive. It is a little vague but it does save on transaction costs.

Of course the Fremling household have that covered in Rule 3 “Bidding/Auctions” although that doesn’t seem like a rule but rather a mechanism. They have five kids and so sometimes there can be actual competition to undertake a task. In that case, consistent with good principles of competitive bidding, they let them low ball each other. Sometimes they even have an outsourcing option to compete against their own internal workforce. My kids would never go for all this. The first thing they would do is collude and as they have more time than us to work out these things, they would likely get away with it too.

Now Rule No.4 “Encourage your kids to come up with ideas” is hardly an objectionable rule but it isn’t an economics rule. They let their kids suggest other things they could do to earn money. I’m not going to say more about that here.

Then comes Rule No.5: “Respect for Property Rights.” This hits the economist the minute a child goes to pre-school and there is a broad philosophy of sharing. When a kid proclaims that they were told that they “like to share” I recall vividly the Alex P. Keaton alternative in Family Ties, “I know what’s mine.” In the Fremling household everyone knows what’s theirs. Their kids don’t share, they negotiate exchanges. Having set prices for the work required to get stuff, it is not to hard to set prices to rent stuff to each other. But there is a hint that all is not well here:

Property rights also mean you are free to sell off a game or toy to a sibling, as long as the buyer fully understands the consequences of the deal.

See that last part. I think a bit of exploitation occurred in the Fremling economy at some point and they weren’t free market enough not to impose some judicial oversight on contractual arrangements consistent with consumer protection laws.

The problem here is obvious. If everything has a price, it seems natural to vest control rights with one person. But there is so much in a household that is of a public good nature. Unless you start with everything being privately acquired, there is ambiguity over ownership and in that case you require collective decision-making. Some might argue that that doesn’t prepare kids for the economy. True, not for the pure market economy. But so much of what people do as economic transactions — especially those who work for businesses — is not a pure market economy. Property rights are ambiguous and so kids need to be prepared for that too. To be sure, that can be messy but it is still learning.

Rules No.6 and 7 have to do with contract law. Good parenting involves commitments. In the Fremling household that means parents sticking to contracts and, as it turns out, they have found that hard on occasion. But kids do like these things and I have to admit that this is where the Gans and Fremling households come closer together. To that end, let me quote from anolder post of mine on contracting.

Recently, my 8 year old daughter complained that her mother kept reneging on promises. She would promise one thing and then when the time came to keep the promise, she would change it or move it further away in time. It was, of course, all true.

So we had a discussion as to what to do about it. I suggested that perhaps she would like to get things in writing the next time Mummy made a promise.

“What good would that do?”

“Well you would have a record of what the promise is.”

“So what? She will just change it again.”

“In that case you could point out that it is a binding contract.”

“What does binding contract mean?”

“It means that if Mummy doesn’t keep her promise, the government will step in to enforce it.”

“Really, how?”

“You could take Mummy to Court and a judge would order her to keep her promise.”

With that she whipped up Microsoft Word and drew herself up a contract including her consideration not to complain about the broken promise unless it was broken. Her mother was surprised to get the contract, in duplicate, but signed it anyhow.

Tonight, I found myself being presented with my own contract terms. I had, over dinner, promised to let my daughter stay up late over the Spring break if she went to bed early before it. An hour later I was asked to sit down and sign a contract to that effect, including the standard ‘no complaint’ clause. I happily signed and our signatures were witnessed and the contract was filed away.

I am a little worried that I have opened a can of worms here. Everything has suddenly gone from informal to highly legalistic. I guess our daughter has a few trust issues. But at the moment I have no complaints.

The Fremling household has its own “Mom’s Court” but it involves not only contract law but tort law. In their rigorous private property household, infringements occur.

Most families seem to practice “time-out” as punishment. But that requires considerable monitoring and fails to give restitution to the victim. And holding long moral lectures is boring, both for the parent and the child.

Imposing fines instead worked very well. Most cases were trivial and routine. Such a minor offense as saying “bad words” resulted in a quick judgement of a small fine to the household.

When it comes down to it, punishing is hard. There is something hands-free about parenting with set fines and punishments. But it is rarely the case that an infringement does not uncover deeper issues of understanding and getting along. You just can’t avoid hands-on management even if it is long and boring. This is what was borne out in the Planet Money podcast featuring my daughter. Economists like to think that they can offer simple, market solutions to all manner of problems. But within the household as in the real world, things are never so simple and you cannot avoid management by enforcing an economy. The Fremling household has chosen to put their efforts in establishing an economy. I tried that to once but time and again, it is has taught me more about how hard that is and why it is mistaken to think that there are economic rules that can be applied carte blanche to good effect.

Learning should fit the child

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:43:00 +0000

Ericsson have produced a new video on the Future of Learning. It is about what technology can do for education.

There is often a sense that technology is a toy. That if it engages kids it is because it is more exciting and bright than tired, old books. This is, in many respects, the rhetoric at the heart of moves towards ‘interactive’ textbooks. The issue, of course, is that while that may be true, the real potential for technology in education is to break us from the requirements of standardization.

Standardization in education came from resource constraints. We have a fixed number of teachers and, in the past, a lack of access to technology. But that resource constraint is being shattered. That means that standardization can feasibly be challenged. No longer do we have to education children based, as Sir Ken Robinson would say, on “their date of manufacture.” We can allow both self pace but also multiple channels that may resonate and work with different children. One example of that highlighted in the video is Knewton. But it is just one of many experiments in non-standardized learning including Khan Academy andCodeacademy.

Perhaps no place more does this issue arise than on the issue of memorization. My biggest parental challenge in education comes from convincing my children to memorize things. Now when it comes to a foreign language or even spelling that may make some sense (but it isn’t a given). But just last night my daughter was busy learning the countries and capitals of the EU. She was suffering immensely from a problem I didn’t face when I was growing up; that break-up of Yugoslavia. That made the memory challenge exponentially harder.

So I helped her by testing her on what she had learned. But all the way, the question was why? Why was she memorising this? Why in this way? The best we have is that sometime in the future some political issue could arise and it will be important to know what the capital of Slovenia is. But even that is weak. Can’t she learn that later? There is no clear rationale.

What is more, the exercise was even obscuring the point of about the EU. Along the way, I asked her: what’s the capital of the EU? “The EU has a capital?” she responded. “Yes, it’s a form of government. It needs a home.” In other words, the forest had been completely obscured for the trees. (By the way, it turns out that, in this case, there is no one capital).

Anyhow, if you haven’t been following these developments, this video is a good place to start.

First There Was Apple's MapGate, Now Welcome ParentGate

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 23:34:00 +0000

[This post was originally published at Forbes.com on 3rd October 2012]

One of the virtues of a Mac that I have always heralded to anyone who might ask was their parental controls. Unlike PCs, these were built right into the operating

system. And in a typical Apple way they have always been very easy to use. You can set it up to allow your children to open certain apps, you can set the time limits on use sensibly (including time of day as well as total time per day) and you could manage the websites they visited. What is more, if there was an issue, you could simply create an exception with a username and password. What is more, it would keep logs of precisely what it was your child was doing.

Put simply, it struck the right balance between control but also annoyance. So many other gatekeeper programs I had experienced would lead to continual restrictions. They basically handcuffed children so that you might as well be sitting there with them. Apple's solution allow the children to roam relatively free. In other words, they were a hands off approach to being hands on. And when I would explain this to other parents, it was often the key factor that caused them to switch to Macs.

But Apple recently updated its Mountain Lion operating system and completely broke parental controls. My 8 year old, started to complain that she wasn't able to access websites. This included the school sanctioned, IXL program. A message would pop up saying "Parental controls restricts access to secure websites." I then could supposedly sign in and give parental permission to add the 'secure' website to the list of permitted ones. The first time this happened I duly entered that permission thinking it was just something new. But then, each and every time the website reloaded or who knows what, it would ask again. For the very same website! I shouted at the computer but to no avail. No Siri to complain to here. I entered it again and again. I tried other websites. It was a continual problem.

So I did what most people would do. I rebooted. Nope. I reset the parental conditions to allow her to visit all websites. In fact, that didn't work either. I then searched Apple's forums to see if the issue was widespread. I found this one but alas I was logged on to my daughter's account and wasn't able to give myself permission to view it. Apple were blocking their own darn help site!

Anyhow once I logged on as myself, a verified adult, I could access the site. I was joined by one hundred or so other grieving parents. It was there that I discovered the term 'parentgate' or something to its effect. This had been going on since September 21.

The evolution of that forum is interesting. First, there was denial. "I think it must be me, but is anyone else having this problem." Then there was anger. "I can't believe that Apple have let this happen." That was my current stage. Then I read on to bargaining. "Is there anyone out there who has come up with a solution to this?" or another "[m]akes the mac almost unusable for them. FIX THIS PLEASE SOON APPLE." And there were some solutions some of which required the use of the terminal program which, of course, led to depression. "It has been three weeks, I can't understand why they have abandoned us to run code." And finally there was acceptance.

I jumped right to that. Like many others on the forum I decided that parental control was gone and I would just have to let go. I opened up system preferences, selected my daughter's name and switched parental controls to off. She was completely free. (Well, as free as you get with out the coveted administrator control). Apple had forced my daughter to grow up too quickly. How could they. Oops moving back to anger, need to look to the future. It will be OK. How bad could it be?

Chances are I won't find out how bad it can be until she hits puberty but by the then her web surfing will probably be the least of my worries.

Following the Apple parent group's acceptance of the situation and its confirmation that someone in Apple had acknowledged the issue, their focus turned to "how?" It is pretty clear that they didn't test the new operating system upgrade properly. Let's face it, that is kept to employees and some developers and likely not to anyone with children to control. Quality control failed because Apple has so much secrecy that it cannot deal with kids.

For the moment, Apple have shipped a faulty product. I am an Apple fan and so this distresses me. I can't sell this feature on their behalf anymore as it is turned into a bug. But I did note that with all the MapGate controversy there has been no attention on tech blogs to ParentGate. Hopefully this post will fix it and spur Apple to action soon.

[Update: Well, less than 24 hours after I first posted on this Apple has released a 'supplemental' update to OSX that is reported to fix this issue.]

[Update 2: I have tested the update. It works but what has happened is that Apple have changed the way websites are approved. Previously, this was done in the background with the occasional problem. Now it seems that you have to approve every site for your child. Suffice it to say, if your child is experienced this is a big fat pain. I ended up opting for unrestricted website usage and decided to use Chrome as the browser rather than Safari. That way I could use Google's safe search to at least prevent unwelcome sites randomly popping up.]

Who can sit next to children on flights?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 18:36:00 +0000

[This post originally appeared on Forbes.com on 14th August 2012].

It seems almost silly to ask the question: who can sit next to children on flights? Obviously, parents would be desirable but sometimes that can’t happen. It may be that a child or children are flying

Virgin Australia's Airbus A330-200 (R) taxis past a Virgin Blue Boeing 737-800 (R) after landing at Sydney International Airport on May 4, 2011. Domestic carrier Virgin Blue and its international offshoots, Pacific Blue and V Australia, will all be known as Virgin Australia, with negotiations underway to bring Polynesia Blue under the same umbrella. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

unaccompanied or maybe, because of poor airline seating policies, they are apart from parents (Air Canada, I’m talking about you here). In those cases, they are going to end up seated next to an adult they don’t know.

Well, it turns out that some airlines actually have a policy on this. Specifically, it appears that if the adult stranger (to the children) is a women, that’s fine but for a man, that’s prohibited. Story No.1 comes from Virgin Australia. They apparently have this policy and unseated fire fighter, John McGirr, who had been seated next to two children. McGirr recounts the experience:

‘Sir we are going have to ask you to move’

‘Why’, I said.

‘Well, because you are male, you can’t be seated next to two unaccompanied minors’.

Shocked, I replied, ‘ Isn’t this sexist and discriminatory?’

She replied, ‘I am sorry, but that is our policy’.

Basically, he felt like a pedophile precisely because he was treated like one. The story created an uproar (although not everyone disagreed with Virgin’s policy). Virgin are now reviewing their approach.

Virgin are not alone. The week brought a similar incident on Qantas who claimed they were maximizing “the child’s safety and well-being.” Really Qantas? You seem to run out of pre-ordered children’s meals quite quickly if that is really what you are doing.

And here is Boris Johnson’s experience on British Airways. Yes, that is Boris Johnson who is now mayor of London.

There we were, waiting for take-off, and I had just been having a quick zizz. It was a long flight ahead, all the way to India, and I had two children on my left. Already they were toughing each other up and sticking their fingers up each other’s nose, and now — salvation!

Hovering above me was a silk-clad British Airways stewardess with an angelic smile, and she seemed to want me to move. “Please come with me, sir” said the oriental vision.

At once, I got her drift. She desired to upgrade me. In my mind’s eye, I saw the first-class cabin, the spiral staircase to the head massage, the Champagne, the hot towels.

“You betcha!” I said, and began to unbuckle. At which point, the children set up a yammering. Oi, they said to me, where do you think you are going? I was explaining that the captain had probably spotted me come on board, don’t you know. Doubtless he had decided that it was outrageous for me to fly steerage, sound chap that he was. I’d make sure to come back now and then, hmmm?

At which the stewardess gave a gentle cough. Actually, she said, she was proposing to move me to row 52, and that was because — she lowered her voice — “We have very strict rules”.

Eh? I said, by now baffled. “A man cannot sit with children,” she said; and then I finally twigged. “But he’s our FATHER”, chimed the children. “Oh,” said the stewardess, and then eyed me narrowly. “These are your children?” “Yes,” I said, a bit testily. “Very sorry,” she said, and wafted down the aisle — and in that single lunatic exchange you will see just about everything you need to know about our dementedly phobic and risk-averse society.

Johnson was saved public humiliation but say the injustice in the policy. Subsequently, British Airways was forced to change its policy following a law suit. They now try and sit children together. They apparently think, against all evidence, that an adult is more likely to be a sex offender than a child might be a bully.

Which brings me to my story. I wasn’t discriminated against but having been incensed by all this discussion and the fear of pedophiles, I took a different approach. The other day we boarded our long, 13 and a half hour flight from Sydney to LA. Our family had two seats at an end and then three of the four seats in the middle of our Qantas aircraft. Our plan had been to seat the two eldest children together and have the two adults with the youngest one. The youngest wasn’t too happy about this as she wanted to be next to her brother and sister. But then we got on the plane and sitting in the four seat was a man. That caused me to think about our youngest child’s plea. Why were we doing things that way? It could be we were trying to spare the stranger any discomfort from sitting next to a child. But it could also have been that we subtly held ‘stranger danger’ feelings ourselves? I couldn’t risk the latter so I let the children sit with each other while we parents slinked over to a separate area (in the same cabin but over the continuous mathematical line that would be perfect accompaniment). We would defiantly protest Qantas’ policy.

Now the news is, of course, that nothing bad happened. Well, to our children. To the man, I’m not so sure. It was a pretty smooth flight but you can’t get perfect behavior for 13 odd hours. But he didn’t call a waitress and claim that he should be moved according to Qantas policy so it couldn’t have been too bad. Perhaps he was pleased that some parents had confidently not considered him to be a sex offender.

But think of the alternative. Yes, Qantas might be discriminating against men by making them appear to be sex offenders but, when they get their seating policy right, a disproportionate number of women are finding themselves seated next to unaccompanied children on flights. Boris Johnson’s heart lept when he thought he might be moved from his own children as we know that adults, if given a choice, would rather be next to other adults. And there are many more women suffering from this than men likely being moved. Sounds like another consequence of discrimination to me.

When it comes down to it, like so many aspects of airline policy — consider how you are forced to turn off a Kindle on takeoff — the airlines have got their priorities wrong because they can’t get their statistics right. Consider the caption in this recent British Airways ad.

We test our cheese as meticulously as we test our engines.

If not for the accompanied small font explanation that might be taken in a bad light. We expect airlines to quantify risks well when it comes to safety but surely our confidence in them might be harmed a little when they can’t calculate risks in relation to other matters.

For unaccompanied children, I suspect the risk of any criminal behavior befalling them is might less than say, them being misplaced by an airline. On that score, this recent United Airlines experience may given parents far more cause for concern.

Can economics help you find a spouse?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:31:00 +0000

[This post was originally published at Forbes.com on 9th August 2012]

That is the question reported Jessica Irvine put to me a couple of weeks ago. It is the type of question that instills fear in an economist. Why? Because the truthful answer can cause trouble at home.

What is the truthful answer? Here is what economist and now Australian parliamentarian Andrew Leigh told Irvine:

‘‘Economically, the answer to this is easy,’’ says Andrew Leigh, a federal Labor MP awarded the Economic Society of Australia’s young economist of the year award last year. ‘‘You’re solving an ‘optimal stopping’ problem. You know you’ve found ‘the one’ when you determine that the expected quality of all future matches is lower than the value of your current partner.”

You see the problem. Economics tells you that you should eventually settle in your search for a spouse. But for the Economist saying it, doesn’t that imply that he settled as well?

Leigh realized his problem and so immediately went what we could term the ‘sap route.’

In my case, I knew I wanted to pop the question to Gweneth [Leigh’s wife] because she made my heart beat faster each time she entered the room.

At this Olympian time, I believe we can score this using a diving analogy. The whole exercise had a degree of difficulty but there was some splash associated with Leigh’s re-entry. Basically, his answer was completely unrelated to the conundrum. Leigh appears to say that he settled but knows why he settled. By referencing the heart he alludes to abandoning his economic mind but we can’t really be sure.

Now let’s turn to the attempt by Rory Robinson. He is an economist but in the private sector:

A similarly sweet, but matter-of-fact, assessment is offered by Rory Robertson, a leading financial markets economist, of his wife. ‘‘In the process of choosing, my assessment was that my wife had the highest weighted-average of all the things I felt were important: looks, ‘compatibility’, kindness, inherent optimism, competence, diligence, and general enthusiasm for a happy life and family.’’

When I ask if he considers it fortunate his wife also assessed him as having the highest weighted-average of her preferences, Robertson replies: ‘‘Something like that, I’d like to think!’’

Robinson offers a longer CV for his partner’s attributes but ultimately is hedging. Again a splash.

Now you might be interested in what a disaster looks like. If so, let’s watch Tim Harcourt, author of The Airport Economist:

‘The economics of love or marriage is like search theory in the labour market. You start out with preferences about what you may like in a partner, but over time you may, if searching unsuccessfully, drop your ‘‘reservation wage’’ – ie lower your standards – to settle on a job or love match. I have a lot of great, smart, good-looking female friends in Sydney who seemed to have had to reduce their reservation wage over time.”

Oh dear. While he gets points for accuracy, in terms of any ‘at home constraint’ I think this one belly flopped. To be sure, Harcourt may have been quoted out of context but you can see just how difficult this exercise is.

Of course, you are by now wondering how I did at this dive. I guess the fact that I am drawing your attention and my spouse’s attention to it gives the answer. While it wasn’t published my opening set-up was this.

… Dateonomics is about finding the right ‘other parent’ for your future children. Economics has a lot to say about that in much the same way it has a lot to say about finding the right employees for your business.

But you can now watch the actual dive:

Economist and author of ‘‘Parentonomics’’, Joshua Gans, says that in looking for that perfect parent for your unborn child, it doesn’t make sense to wait around for Mr or Ms Perfect.

‘‘In the search for the right [partner], economics tells us that you would almost always settle. You search and there are search costs. A rational person should have an optimal stopping rule and if that rule is to find the perfect match out of 7 billion living people, mathematics tells us you will never stop. Except, of course, in my case where settling turned out to be indistinguishable from optimising! For everyone else, they have settled and so if your spouse isn’t perfect you can at least take comfort in the fact that you saved the costs of shopping around.’’

That last bit was the ‘money quote’ for the article. But it was the middle where I took myself out from the entire population as an exception. My spouse didn’t buy any of it (she is too much of a rational engineer to believe in exceptions) but did offer up an “I love you too dear” for effort. I’ll take that as, “I made it!”

Irvine’s entire piece on Dateonomics will appeal to readers of this blog as will likely her new book, Zombies, Bananas and Why There are no Economists in Heaven. There are no economists in heaven? Makes sense. Most economists I know pretty much adhere to the thought experiments in John Lennon’s Imagine which pretty much rules heaven out.

Camps, Sickness and Smell

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 19:30:00 +0000

[This post was originally published at Forbes.com on 22nd July 2012]

As regular readers are possibly aware, all three of our children (ages 13, 11 and 7) are away at Camp this month. We have been in irregular communication with them consisting of emails sent by us through

Contagion (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

the Bunk 1 service and intermittent letters sent by them through the ordinary post. In our case, we have recounted in detail all of the activities we have been able to undertake (mostly travel) because we aren’t with them. In their case, there is a recount of activities they have been involved in, a description of other kids they like or dislike and then complaints as to the things other children where allowed to bring that we prohibited based on our ‘letter of the law’ reading of camp rules.

This weekend, however, was Visitor’s Day where we can travel a few hours north to visit our children at camp. That was the plan. However, last week, we were informed that our youngest children had succumbed to what appears to have been a major outbreak of stomach flu. They recovered in time for Visitor’s Day but enough other children were still ill that the whole day changed. It was supposed to be a situation where we went to see the camp and what our kids had been up to. Instead, it turned into a highly structured set of manoeuvres whereby we could pick up our children to take them out for a few hours. We had to drive up to a location far from the camp. We could not leave our vehicle. Our children could then walk to the vehicle and get in but not before another dose of hand sanitizer.

As it turned out, our children were well acquainted with the ‘Plague protocols’ that turned out to be closely modelled on the movie Contagion. For a week they had been living in a strictly enforced totalitarian regime. No one could get food or touch anyone without permission. Whole cabins were quarantined. That may have sounded bad but, as it turned out, being sick had the silver lining of a break from camp activities and lounging around watching TV. All in all, this proved an education for the children in germ warfare. That said, it is unclear that it did much good. What it did do is keep the whole plague under wraps. When we took our children into town they were all blissfully unaware of the pox that had hit their area.

The sickness had another advantage. Normally, picking up kids from camp is an unpleasant activity. When we drove our eldest back from New Hampshire last year to Boston, we almost died of the smell. We were prepared for the worst this time around but it turned out that part of the protocols was rigidly enforced washing. That saved us much distress.

Our expectation had been that the kids would not want to see us. As it turned out, the tough week had softened them up and they were all happy to be free of austerity for a little while. While we didn’t get to see camp life we got to hear all about it. I suspect all three will be returning next year.

We were also softened up for all this. Thanks to Bunk1, whose incentives are to ensure that parents never forget their children are at camp so that they will write more emails, we had been peppered with Newsletters about things that can go wrong. Here is one. I enjoyed the tick advisory. That seemed to involved wrapping your children in clothes and giving them a level of organization unprecedented for anyone other than Mr Monk.

Of course, the Bunk1 theme has spread through the Internet. In particular, the nightly search through hundreds of photos for one with your own child. Here is a great video capturing the situation there.

Is it a good idea to communicate with your child at camp?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 19:23:00 +0000

[This post was originally published at Forbes.com on the 11th July 2012]

For the first time ever, all three of our children (13, 11 and 7 years) are away at Summer Camp. Fortunately, they are all at the same camp which saves us considerable bureaucracy and also provided some comfort that they might be there for each other.

Images from our first Summer Art Camp of the year, "Wild and Wacky Portraits" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, near as I can tell our children would prefer to have nothing with each other while at camp. To say that this experience is liberating for us, as parents, is an understatement. We seem to have been transported back to a calmer time and have constantly had to challenge our usual behaviours of intense planning and tight scheduling. Things are very, very relaxed.

Suffice it to say, this was enough to spur our kids to grudgingly make contact with us. The 7 year old was the most enthusiastic and seems to send a letter a day. Her first one said: “Dear Mum and Dad, I miss you very much so I want to stay 4 weeks.” She was signed up for just 2 weeks. While the logic of her argument was flawed, as it turned out our lives were very different without her, so we promptly agreed to the extension.I believe that the same sense of liberation is going on for our kids. We are fairly strict parents and certainly on one key dimension — food — very strict. Camp provides a menu that is supposedly healthy but, in fact, is much more kid-friendly than our children’s usual fare. For instance, they appear to have dessert; a concept our kids dream about. At camp they get it every day. The also have something called ‘tuck’ that allows them to get special treats twice a week. But ‘tuck’ comes with a condition — no letter home, no tuck.

Our eldest wrote a varying set of sentences that were not so much designed to convey information but to be written neatly and cover exactly two pages with neat handwriting. We learned from that letter that the tuck letter writing requirement was a two page letter precisely because she ended the second page mid-sentence and did not even bother to sign the letter. We will likely receive the rest as the two page requirement for another instalment.

Our 11 year old son was the only one to convey actual information including his slow evolution of thought about staying on for two more weeks. He has decided to do so.

Alas, the tuck incentive has led to an imperfect flow of information from our children to us. But, in many respects, that is what the Camp wants. Every detail can be seized upon by parents and it is a thankless task.

But what about the flow of information in the other direction. Our Camp uses a service called Bunk1. That service gives parents the opportunity to pay in order to write emails that are printed out and delivered to children. It isn’t cheap and it requires being at a computer to use (I guess you could do it on a phone but it is hard). According to this Time article about ‘kid sick’ parents, Bunk1 was founded by Ari Ackerman to provide a “one way window” into the Camp world. With these emails I guess we can throw things through that window.

What do you write to a child on camp? Our main news is all the wonderful things we, as parents, have been able to do while they were at camp. They might be interested but my guess is that they are not. But given how much we are paying I feel we need to fill in the lines. So, with my son, I decided to just make stuff up. Basically, he receives an email from me every couple of days with an ever-increasing sinister plot that is unravelling. It started with the disappearance of our pet hamster (she’s fine) and then led to the disappearance of all of the pets of children who had gone to camp around Northern Toronto. Some pets have shown up at kids camps but then there was the Higgs Boson and heatwave melded into the story. Frankly, I don’t know where this is all going and now I have to extend it out for another two weeks and then bring it all to some resolution. This is a dangerous game indeed. I think this evening the hamster will reappear at home but just a little different. And of course, given that this is a one way affair I have no idea how this is being consumed at the other end. A dangerous game indeed.

Anyhow, Bunk1 don’t just rest with emails. You can also send your kids puzzles (Sudoku etc) and then you can view pictures that the Camp posts on the Bunk1 site. There are hundreds of these and, basically, what you do as a parent is sift through them to see pictures of your own children. For the first day of pictures we found our youngest and she was never smiling. This was a bit of a worry. But later on she seemed happier. Of course, this may all just be camp censorship. Who knows?

The Time article suggests parents obsess over this. We aren’t quite doing that but because it is there we do look. What is true, however, is that Bunk1 has tapped into a missing market for parent camp communication. I’m not sure I’d want a cheaper option as that might only encourage more communication. What we have here is more than enough.

Should parents tax their children for eating too much candy?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 19:21:00 +0000

[This post originally appeared at Forbes.com on 10th July 2012]

A couple of years ago, I sat down with Chana Joffe-Walt and my then-11-year-old daughter for a long interview with the NPR podcast, Planet Money. This week Planet Money replayed the podcast and I was able to reflect on how it all turned out.

Before I get to that, here is the podcast itself.

The toilet training story was, in fact, told in my very first blog post in 2003 and there was much more to it than could be conveyed in the interview.

Now, in the podcast, the health tax accrued no revenue because it completed curbed spending on candy. Of course, we are now two years down the track with a more independent child. The issue with independence is that allows for another thing that often accompanies attempts to collect a tax: under-reporting. It did not take us too long to discover that the allowance was being used to purchase candy and my daughter owed a ton of back taxes.What was more recent was the whole notion of using an allowance combined with taxes to nudge behavior. If you haven’t a chance to listen to the podcast the story was that, while we gave our kids an allowance, we didn’t want them spending it all on candy and so imposed a steep “health tax.” The health tax was not just arbitrary but meant to be a compensation for imputed additional costs we would have to pay if they ate too much candy. To be sure, there is no calculation to actually work out those costs but it did do one important thing: it sent a signal to our children that there were costs to these actions and not all of the costs fell on them.

But this highlighted how difficult the tension between giving a child an allowance to foster independence versus providing signals as to potential adverse consequences is. The household economy will operate like the real economy. Thus, we have had to take the health issue out of our tax system and rely on more conventional forms of parenting to foster good eating habits. It also highlights that what might work — or in this case, not work — for one child can actually work for others.

Our other children don’t have the same preferences for candy and so we get some good behaviour for free. The best one can say for things like a health tax is that they put an issue on the table. They might be able to nudge behavior in a good direction but they cannot be expected to make great leaps and bounds. This is the same tension that Bloomberg will face with the ‘Big Gulp’ regulation in New York. It will be good for nudges but those who want lots of soda will get lots of soda.

So can a parent be a good manager? Sure. But can good management create perfect parenting outcomes? No.

Now my 11 year old tries Stanford's Computer Science Course

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:01:00 +0000

This post was originally published at Forbes.com on 27th June 2012.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about my 11 year old son’s experiences in taking Stanford’s online Game Theory course. It was a challenging course (at or above the level I teach my own MBAs) and while he fell just short of the

NEW YORK, NY - MAY 01: (L-R) Jason Tanz, New York Editor, WIRED and Sebastian Thrun, Google, Stanford, Udacity attend Wired Business Conference in Partnership with MDC Partners at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on May 1, 2012 in New York City. (Image credit: WireImage for Wired via @daylife)

seventy percent pass grade, he learned a lot and was subsequently able to apply game theory in the field (supposedly for charitable purposes). In the end, his experience taught me quite a lot about how far online education has to go to be really significant.

First, one cannot simply take a standard University course and port it to the online format. This is what the Game Theory instructors experimented with to see how costly the transition might be. But the result was rather bland, highlighting the inadequacies of many University instructions — something that I’m sure the professors involved more than compensate for with lively classroom discussion in the corporeal version of their course.

Second, and related to this, the online format requires us to rethink the pace of lectures and also the rationale for assessment. Assessment deadlines can really help people keep up with continuous learning but if they are unforgiving, as they often are when assessment is also an incentive device for performance, then they can detract from opportunities to learn and master. The Khan Academy has famously moved towards mastery as the chief role of assessment and I think that this is something online courses should build themselves on.

The Stanford course was offered on a platform called CourseRA. But that wasn’t my son’s first preference for online learning. He wanted to do computer science. It wasn’t initially available but no sooner had he finished the exam for the Game Theory course that he immediately enrolled in Computer Science 101. Now this was an introductory computer science course and you wouldn’t think that, in this day and age, an 11 year old would need to learn about the basics of what goes on in computers and networks but that is to mistake the ability to use for the ability to understand. The basic technology behind what he thinks of as a computer is obscure and this course was all about lifting the lid on that box and looking at what goes on inside. Unlike Game Theory where it is obvious how it can enlighten, I can imagine Computer Science introductory courses that may be bland. This one was certainly not that and held is interest throughout its 4 or 5 weeks but it hasn’t yet led to him taking on more of our IT support roles at home.

Computer Science was designed more appropriately for the online space than the Game Theory course. The lecture videos were bite sized and interspersed with learning activities that themselves took advantage of the digital medium. There were some quizzes both most seemed to be well structured coding exercises. And, more significantly, the emphasis was on mastery rather than performance assessment.

In the end, he was able to complete the exercises on time and, in fact, quite easily. So now he has a Certificate of Accomplishment signed by the instructor, Nick Parlante. My only criticism is that perhaps it was too easy for him to do. He got most exercises right the first time (out of 100 possible attempts). That suggests to me that Parlante could make the course more challenging.

As to future adventures, my son did enrol in Udacity‘s “How to build a search engine” computer science course. This is something we were told would be more challenging and it employed an innovative way of presenting lectures (closer to the Khan Academy blackboard style) with interactive quizzes neatly built in. My son did comment that both of these courses have missed an opportunity to work on coding while the lecture videos were playing; a kind of continual worksheet.

Sadly, as of writing this post, I don’t know how Udacity’s course will go. Summer has intervened and my son’s attention has turned to hacking Minecraft rather than formal learning. He is then off the grid at Summer Camp. So it is on a pause for a while and, if it is still permitted, he may continue at Summer’s end. That said, computer science will have competition. Check out Udacity’s video explaining their Introduction to Statistics course. Apparently Lego trumps learning Python! Udacity are trying to get school students from all around the world enrolled in that one. We will likely have two from our household but if you know of a school that wants to enrol a team of students just click here for more information.

Nudging Workplaces to Allow People to 'Have it All'

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published at Forbes on 23rd June 2012.

Princeton Professor, Anne-Marie Slaughter has certainly brought to life an important discussion of the expectations of women regarding their life choices. In a beautifully constructed and compelling written essay in The Atlantic, she raises a number of issues but ultimately concludes that the promise that women can have both a high-powered career with a minimally acceptable level of family time is not easily attainable. In part, this is because some jobs will never permit a balance between work and life. But more importantly, it is because expectations in the workplace do not permit people to exercise trade-offs. “Having it all” translates into “All or Nothing”; a black and white choice rather than a carefully considered balance.

WASHINGTON - MAY 03: Professor of politics and international affairs Anne-Marie Slaughter testifies during a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee May 3, 2011 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The hearing was to discuss the end-state in Afghanistan and how the death of Osama Bin Laden will affect the withdrawal of U.S. troops, transition strategy, and partnership in the region. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Now one of the issues with the essay, of course, is that Slaughter does appear to have had it all. She rose to the top of academia while maintaining a healthy family life. It is only when she went to Washington to work at the State Department that the family life suffered beyond what she wanted. One suspects, as Dan Drezner has argued, that those types of jobs really involve a all or nothing trade-off as part of their intrinsic nature. But aside from that Slaughter’s main argument resonates. Academia is, for the most part, well suited to work-life balance choices. (I, say, for the most part because science, maths and engineering appear to have deeper problems). That is, indeed, why I chose that path for myself. But, for the vast majority of other workplaces, there is way too little attention paid as to how to design jobs to allow people to achieve a balance. The evidence, neatly summarized by Slaughter, indicates that workplaces that are designed for employees to exercise more inside-outside work choices end up being more productive. So why is it that so many workplaces make this so hard?

It is instructive to look at academia, a place where choices are relatively easy, to understand the pressures. I know from my own experience that when your ‘boss’ (in my case a Dean) does not factor in family constraints, poor outcomes result. When my first child was due back in 1998, I anticipated that I wanted to be home the following semester at nights and not to be teaching. We had a part-time MBA program that was taught at night so I requested not to have that assignment for the semester after my daughter’s birth. Now the family leave policy for fathers at the University of Melbourne was to allow for two weeks off. But I did not even get that when I was called into a couple of days after her birth to the Dean’s office because they had decided to revoke my request and needed me to get my course syllabus and materials in right away. Near as I can tell this was all done because they could rather than do some more difficult re-scheduling. But for that time and the next semester, being away a few nights a week (and not to mention teaching with little sleep) tore me up. I vowed not to let it happen again and have since that time spent considerable energy in working out how to move my workload to activities other than teaching. Nothing in this was good for my workplace.

But even when I could exercise choice it was amazing how costly it could be. When we had our first child, we decided that this would be the best time for my wife to pursue an MBA as it would allow her not to have a visible CV gap. It was actually really hard to do that. What we wanted was a part-time program that allowed day-time classes but arbitrary University rules stood in the way. Once this was explained to us that she could not take a day-time class because those students were full-time and would have expectations on her to meet for study groups that, taking time to say, nurse a baby, would interfere with! MBA programs were really missing out on opportunities here.

Faced with that, she took classes at night. For the initial period, we had to interweave nights to accommodate my teaching. But MBA studies required study. Say whatever you want about their value, they require work. That meant that I took on the majority of the housework. That was fine and exhausting but it also allowed me to bond with my children in ways so many miss out on. And clearly, it got me thinking about parental issues which is why I can write here today.

But there was actually a cost and I only realized it many years later. For over two years, I could not travel. For academics, especially ones in Australia, travel is very important. It is how you maintain visibility and sell your work. Perhaps my best academic paper was written just before my second child was born. People constantly ask me why it is so poorly cited. The reason was that I only presented it twice. Academics pick up on the work of others through presentations much more than just picking up journals. Now, in this case, that career cost fell on me (although I should say that the benefits to family vastly outweighed that cost). But consider a world where this cost mostly falls on women academics and it becomes easier to understand why, in academia, with its better work-life balance, women are still so under-represented. I should say, however, that despite taking on the vast majority of household duties during my wife’s MBA time, I was fired from most of them as soon as that degree was done. My way of doing things was apparently less valuable than I had thought.

Moving beyond my experience, again from academia, I had a friend who had, at a very young age, risen to a Dean’s position. At the same time as the upper level University job she was made for and was perfect for came up, she was pregnant. I was thrilled as I saw this as an opportunity for someone to hold a top position and to enable the organization to fit around family balance. But that turned to dismay when she decided to withdraw her candidacy because of concern that she would not be able to strike the right balance. As I read Slaughter’s article, it occurred to me that I was being unfair in my judgment. It isn’t fair to expect someone, just because of her gender, to take a risk on her family especially for purposes of setting an example. The whole issue is that we expect women to behave in certain ways and it expect it to be as a role model is part of the problem. And it would have been a risk. It is easy to imagine that one can strike a balance in a higher powered job. It is more sensible to realize that might not be possible.

What this means is that we actually need broader changes rather than individual changes to improve the balance in most jobs. Slaughter talks about many of these but I thought here I would concentrate on what governments can do; in particular, parental leave policy. Everywhere except the US, governments have state mandated parental leave policies. Some of these give mothers (and in some cases fathers) rights to leave upon the birth of a child from six weeks to a year. Employers have to hold their jobs and not put them at a disadvantage upon re-entering the workforce. In some cases, the parental leave is paid through government subsidies or mandates on employers. But while commonplace, these policies concern me. Yes, they make taking parental leave easier but they do not take into account the root of the problem. Rightly or wrongly, many employers believe that having employees who sacrifice work for family life is costly to them. These policies actually increase those costs and may lead to employers opting to employee ‘lower risk’ people. And let’s face it, today as it has been before, that ‘lower risk’ is more likely to be a man than a woman.

We have to think outside of the box when it comes to parental leave. A few years ago when this issue was being debated in Australia, I argued that parental leave should come in the form of a tax credit paid to employers rather than a subsidy. To be sure, rights to parental leave should always be there but the question was: a right isn’t much value without an income but how do we pay for that? My tax credit plan worked as follows: if an employer successfully had an employee take parental leave and then return to the workforce, the employer would receive a tax credit on that employee’s income for the first year of return to work. My reasoning is that it was on return to work that the issues of work-life balance really came to the fore. But it was precisely then that the workplaces failed to allow a balance to be struck. That is where things would start to fall apart.

With a tax credit, a returning employee would suddenly be much cheaper for employers. That would give them an incentive to make the return to work, well, work. Moreover, employers would want to pay some of that benefit forward by introducing paid parental leave schemes. After all, if you didn’t tie the employee to come back to you, you would miss out on the tax credit. Done the right way, employers could see employees with family lives not as a risk but as an opportunity. Once a workplace gets over the hump of how to organize for families we might be on our way to a better outcome for women or anyone else desiring more flexible arrangements.

Tax rebates are one way governments might be able to break the cycle that leaves us with too many jobs having too poor design for work-life balance. Yes, there is much more to the issue than economics. But my hunch is that by getting the economic policy right we can nudge workplaces in the right direction.

For more on my parental leave idea you can watch this series of short videos or read about it, here, here or here.

Can Apps Transform Learning into Games?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:01:00 +0000

[Originally Published at Forbes.com on 13th June 2012]

There has been much excitement about the possibilities for using tablets and mobile devices in education. Because they are so easy and intuitive to learn, they do not create barriers for kids. There is much experimentation going on as a result. To date, some of the most successful apps replicate learning games in the classroom but perhaps with a little more fun. Futaba create games that can be played up to four people to help with reading, mathematics and other more rote learning concepts. These games do not provide learning per se but create a set of competitive games where you do better if you have paid attention in class. Kids find it fun but I wouldn’t class it as a learning experience. That said, it is a fun game for adults to play with their kids.

Beyond this, apps that actually allow for learning that have real potential. On the high end, there is this excellent app that teaches you to visualize higher dimensions. But perhaps more relevant for kids is the magnificent Algebra Touch teaches algebra the right way by allowing kids to manipulate objects (e.g., dragging a term from the left to the right hand side of an equation). It does something that is very difficult to do in a classroom.

Today, a couple of apps were launched that allow for learning but are clearly games. DragonBox+ is an app that teaches kids to play algebra. It is a puzzle game with animations that are a bit Angry Birds and a bit Fruit Ninja. I tried out this one and to say that the fact that it is teaching mathematics is subtle is an understatement. Basically, you have to eliminate ‘objects’ on each side of the board but you are restricted to moves that, when you think about it, follow the rules of algebra. The idea is that you get comfortable with the game and then can move on to doing exactly the same thing with equations.

Also launched today is a different type of learning app, PenyoPal Food Frenzy. Before I describe it, some disclosure. PenyoPal is a start-up that is part of Canada’s Next36. This is a very exciting entrepreneurial incubator project that takes 36 of the brightest Canadian undergraduate students and puts them into nine teams each with up to $50,000 in start-up funding. The teams come up with mobile app ideas and then come to the University of Toronto for the summer where they work more and receive lectures in business. I was one of the instructors this year teaching them about competitive strategy. So I have more than a keen interest in the apps developed on the program.

PenyoPal Food Frenzy is the first of the apps to reach the market. Its goal is to help kids learn Mandarin. Not surprisingly, there is a keen interest in this nowadays but also, in particular, from parents of Chinese origin who want to pass on the language to their kids. Of course, as with all of these things getting kids to learn a language is difficult. PenyoPal want to make it fun.

As with many of these things, achieving that is much easier said than done. But what PenyoPal’s first app has managed to do is provide an environment where you learn in the game and the more you learn the better you get. It is a little like the Khan Academy that way. The basic idea is that you have to identify Chinese words with particular food objects. But the words can come in a phonetic English form, Chinese characters and even spoken form. It is a little frenetic but kids actually seem to learn. My 11 year old tried out the beta version the other week and he played nonstop for an hour. And this was not playing where the alternative option was normal classroom instruction. This was playing when he could have just played any other game. In other words, for him at least, the game was fun in of itself. But what impressed me is that it could only be fun if you progressed — that is, learned the words. Now my son is actually taking Mandarin at school so it is hard for me to judge how much he learned but the time spent told me something. What is more, as a parent I could view a report to see how far he had progressed mastering the concepts.

What this taught me about these apps is that there is a way to embed learning in a game. But the learning cannot be like mixing in tomato sauce to make the vegetables taste better. The learning must actually be the achievement in the game. PenyoPal have more apps coming including a very interesting conversational version that requires you to speak phrases properly to progress. Food Frenzy is available for free in the iTunes App Store with in-app purchases giving you more word options. From what I can see, parents will end up being surprised as their kids ask them to buy vegetables!

If World Leaders Can Misplace Children, What About the Rest of Us?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:00:00 +0000

[Originally Published at Forbes.com on 11th June 2012]

News today that UK Prime Minister David Cameron left his 8 year old daughter in a pub. This happened a few months ago but apparently Cameron thought his daughter was with her mother and her mother thought she was with

SANTA GERTRUDIS, SPAIN - MAY 29: Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha Cameron walk hand in hand through the centre of Santa Gertrudis at the beginning of their holiday on the island of Ibiza on May 29, 2011 in Spain. After leaving the G8 summit in France, British Prime Minister David Cameron, with children Nancy (7) and Arthur (5), took a flight to the Balearic island of Ibiza to join his wife Samantha and their baby daughter Florence, who had arrived the day before. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

him. In fact, she was in the bathroom and neither realized it. Of course, Cameron’s daughter learned of the error first and was safe and sound with the pub owners.

On the one hand, as those who watched The West Wing know, the story does not paint a good picture for the PM’s security detail who, let’s face it, need to be on top of things like this. On the other hand, sans the whole security thing, this is a pretty plausible scenario. It is one of the reasons Home Alone resonated with parents.

The ‘joint responsibility’ over child misplacement scenario is actually the milder ones of parents because it is difficult to assign blame. We almost lost our eldest daughter in a crowd in Hong Kong. My wife and I became separated from each other and we agreed on the phone that rather than working out how to find each other we would get in a cab and go to the hotel. She had our two youngest and thought I had our eldest. I thought she had all three. So I was very surprised when our eldest daughter popped up as I was getting into a cab and said, “wow, it was hard finding you.” That was seconds away from disaster although I am fairly confident we would have located her eventually as she knew our phone numbers.

What can be worse for parents is the ‘sole responsibility’ scenario. That is where one parent has clear responsibility and loses a child. I lost our youngest at Disneyland. As I searched around all I could think was that her mother was going to kill me. I actually had little concern for our daughter’s safety. It was Disneyland after all! They excel at lost children so much so they call their locator service ‘lost parents.’ If a child finds themselves there they have a fun time and an ice cream. Actually, I wonder sometimes that the Disney solution may be so good, parents might ‘accidentally’ lose a child and have a couple of hours rest.

The point is that if world leaders can misplace a child and all is well, we know there is no reason to truly fret about it. Sadly, as this post shows, the world hasn’t caught up to a more relaxed notion. Sometimes the law freaks out instead.

[Update: And I should tell you that I am not making this up. While I was writing this post, my son's school rang to ask where my son was. Turns out that he was supposed to go on an excursion and somehow wasn't accounted for. We had left him at school but he had to do something prior to the excursion that was not part of the normal flow of the day. Suffice it to say, when they realized that the school worked out where he was. I can imagine that the 'school responsibility' scenario is not one that teacher's relish.]

Is There Evidence Free-Ranging on Facebook is Bad for Tweens?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:59:00 +0000

[Originally Published at Forbes.com on 8th June 2012]

Emily Bazelon at Slate thinks that the suggestion this week that Facebookmay open up to under-13 year olds would be a bad idea. As regular readers can imagine, I disagree. However, Bazelon has been one of the more thoughtful

Cover via Amazon

journalists on the issue of social interactions amongst children and teenagers and so her thoughts are worth considering seriously.

Bazelon articulates several concerns and ends up concluding that it would be a good idea for governments to look to restrict childrens’ access to social networks: “Figuring out how to monitor kids online is hard enough as it is. We don’t need Facebook to make it harder.” So what are her concerns?

First and foremost is bullying. Bazelon haswritten extensively about Phoebe Prince, a schoolgirl who committed suicide after being bullied (including on Facebook). Her concern has been about the criminal treatment of the alleged bullies and how these cases can be more complicated than they might appear on the surface. Since then, Bazelon has had a keen interest in the issue. She quotes Pew data that bullying occurs on Facebook and that “unkind things” were experienced by many, especially 12 and 13 year old girls. But interestingly, she quotes this data without much comment. For instance, the obvious one is that bullying and socially negative events occur to these same children outside of Facebook. Is Facebook a new medium for an old issue or an instrument that increases these behaviors? The data does not say.

Second, Bazelon turns to research, mainly by Stanford professor Clifford Nass, that 8-12 year girls had more social success when they had more face-to-face communication but also that those who used online communication had more negative feelings about their friendships and were more likely to be friends with others who they think their parents will disapprove of. Nass claimed that Facebook was akin to junk food. It drew activity away from better things.

This intrigued me so I tracked down the actual study that was the source of these conclusions; published in Developmental Psychology just this year. The associations there were indeed correlations found in the study. But they were just that and in the paper the authors claimed no causal inference could be drawn (even more so because the survey itself was conducted online). And that is important. Because what could be happening is that the types of children hanging out online may be precisely the types of children who struggled with face-to-face communication. In other words, there is no guarantee at all that obliterating Facebook from their lives (and by the way, the study did not single this out specifically nor make any claim it would be a good idea) would improve their social outcomes. It could. But equally, it may be that for those children, Facebook gave them confidence in friendships in a way that stimulated face-to-face communication. The study hints that this may not be the case as those online were less likely to also engage in face-to-face communication. But we would like to work out if they truly were these substitute activities or complements. That matters.

But even more so, if the goal is to encourage more face-to-face communication, the study identified another potential culprit that took away from this: reading. In some of the regressions this had a bigger negative correlation than online activity. Children who read more also had less socially successful outcomes. Now I don’t believe there is a causal story here any more than I believe that there is one for Facebook but, if you are going to advocate banning Facebook on the basis of this, surely you might at the very least wonder whether reading shouldn’t be getting the large subsidies and active pushing it is getting now.

Now, as I wrote about the other day, Facebook are not moving to do anything illegal but in fact to make legal a prevalent activity. They will do this by providing a mechanism for parental permission. What Bazelon appears to be against is allowing parents to give permission for their children to be on Facebook. And in the end, she argues that this might be convenient for some parents, quoting K.J. Dell’Antonia at Motherlode: “As a parent, the biggest difference I see between a Facebook that allows children and one that doesn’t would be that more children on Facebook would mean more social pressure to join.” This seemed to me to be the weakest argument of them all.

There is a thin line between banning Facebook to shield children from social pressure than banning children from all manner of activities because of perceived risk to some of them. This is a theme that Lenore Skenazy has taken up with her Free Range Kids movement. This movement rails against the vast swathe of restrictions placed on parents (both themselves and legally) that prevent kids from developing independence in the world. The same applies for online activities. Do we want children to be shielded until age 13 and then unleashed without any parental instruction?

My own experience with my 13 year old daughter suggests not. I am blessed that she is on Facebook and is still my friend. That has allowed me to observe her first years of interaction on that medium. In fact, for the most part, it is my only observation of her social interactions. And I must tell you that, for the most part, it has been very positive. There are constant reaffirmations and not about looks — in fact, I don’t recall seeing that. What is more I even saw an incident where someone made a homophobic remark only to have their friends come down on that as inappropriate very quickly.

And for my daughter I have been able to guide her. For instance, “You can complain about such and such homework but don’t complain about a teacher by name.” Once she posted an insensitive remark in an update that she didn’t realise could be taken that way. She ended up being called on it and apologised. There was real social learning going on there and I could then talk to her about it.

If you ban parents from allowing their kids to join Facebook at their own social pace, you prevent us from having a role in their social education. Ms Bazelon, do you really think that will improve their social success by denying parents that option?

Opening Up Facebook is Essential Because Kids Need Training Wheels

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:58:00 +0000

[Originally published at Forbes.com on 4th June 2012]

The Wall Street Journal reported thatFacebook is considering ways to open up its social network to under 13 year olds. Well, what they mean is finding ways of allowing access to 13 year olds officially. Research by Danah Boyd and her colleagues has shown that they are already there. What’s more, they are there with the help and assistance of parents, over half of whom know that officially Facebook is off limits for their kids but help them get on anyway. Recently, my daughter turned 13 and I took a close look at the legal and official situation. It is, frankly, a mess and does little to protect privacy or children. Indeed, as I have noted, the whole matter has caused confusion as to who might be violating laws regarding under 13 year olds on social networks.

The report suggested that parents could grant their kids access and control over who they friend. It would also allow them to control applications. This sounds like the right approach as it essentially enables parents who are currently helping their kids on to Facebook control the process more transparently. It should also give confidence to those who shy away from these things to let their kids in.

It is worthwhile remarking that while I do not believe that Facebook are acting to “get them young” there are some commercial issues that are likely driving this. First, Google Apps for Education has made its way into schools. That gives kids access to Google’s social network — Google +. I’ve seen Facebook blocked at school but the kids just move on to Google+ that can’t be similarly blocked. Facebook have probably noticed.

Second, the millions of kids on Facebook are currently seeing ads. That means for Facebook advertisers you don’t know if your age-targeted ads are really hitting people of that age. You may be targeting a 17 year old but getting an 11 year old. That’s wasted advertising dollars. For that reason alone, Facebook has no choice but to clean up the age situation. Without that it is crimping the products they are selling to advertisers.

Of course, it isn’t hard to find someone to criticise these moves. Aspokesperson from Common Sense Media was quoted saying that there was simply no educational value to Facebook and so children should be barred from it. But, in fact, such off the handle views neglect a critical element of online social networks; they are how adults are communicating. Moreover, they are likely to be how children when they grow up will communicate. What that means is that we want children to experience these networks. Put simply, a parental supervised approach is like giving them training wheels for society. There are rules of interaction and norms of appropriate behavior. Either you believe parents have a role in helping kids with that or not. And at the moment what the law and Facebook’s official policy are saying is: when you turn 13 you are on your own. I don’t know about you but my preference is not to throw my thirteen year old into society unprepared.

In the Huffington Post, Larry Magid presents a sane voice of reason:

I think Facebook should allow children under 13 but, as I said last year, it has to be done carefully and thoughtfully with extra precautions. There needs to be parental involvement and control and Facebook needs to provide extra privacy protections for young children that would include more secure defaults than it has for older teens and adults. There are already additional privacy protections for users under 18, but the company needs to be even more careful for younger children. Ideally, I would like to see children under 13 have an ad-free experience and Facebook certainly must avoid collecting and storing personal information about children other than what is needed to provide them the service.

I would agree with this mostly but not the last part. If the notion of having children on Facebook is about ‘training wheels’ then they have to be trained to understand what that means. Children need to sort out ads and how to react to them. Children need to work out how to manage their data and privacy. This is part of the mission. I am happy for these things to be under parental control but I wouldn’t require or even insist on Facebook playing a role in structuring the social and commercial experience for kids.

As a final thought, think about it this way: if your child is your ‘friend’ prior to 13, they are likely to be your friend for a while afterwards. Sure, they’ll eventually likely want to block posts from your view but it would be nice to get a few extra years in to see what’s going on in their lives. Who knows? Start early and they might get used to staying as open to you as they are to the rest of the world.

How to Hot Wire the Dollhouse

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 28 May 2012 17:26:00 +0000

[This post was originally published on the Parentonomics blog at Forbes on May 21, 2012]

Many people, including myself, have ruminated over the gender differences in toys. Well, as if inspired by that rumination, comes Roominate; a Kickstarter project that plays the gender game but with a different set of bells and whistles. Basically, the idea is to build

components for a doll house that include the wires: you can, literally, wire the doll house up for electronics. Here is a video explaining the product. The product comes with normal building components, decorations and then wires and electronics to put in lights, bells and other jazzy features. The catch is that the electrical bits have to be built just like the material bits. But you can experiment and design as you please.

The theory here is that early exposure to science and engineering can inspire more women to eventually go into those disciplines. That is a pretty old notion. What is interesting here is how Roominate’s engineers have decided to hit on the problem. If you look at the end product, once it is built, it is a pretty normal doll house. What is different is that the back is a mess of wires. Now I can’t vouch for how this will be to use but at least the video got my seven year old daughter excited. I backed this one for that reason just to see how the end product turns out.

Of course, there are many options available these days for getting kids interested in electronics in a gender neutral, as opposed to gender-specific way like Roominate. One that seems interesting is littleBits. As demonstrated in this TED talk by Ayah Bdeir, these are building blocks but with electronic interactivity. They look expensive but again the motive was to broaden the appeal of electrical engineering. Another is Ardunio which is open source and from the looks of it is one that I would have to leave to my electrical engineer wife to explore with the kids.

What is encouraging is that entrepreneurs are taking this challenge seriously. What is also interesting is that they are drawing on their experience rather than a focus group to develop these ideas. Perhaps that is why these are all ventures independent of major toy manufacturers.

Can Facebook get a child expelled from school?

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Mon, 28 May 2012 17:25:00 +0000

[This post was originally published in Forbes on May 17, 2012]

Apparently in one school in Queensland, Australia, it might do just that.

I’d like to say that this news story surprised me but, at some level, it didn’t. The ignorance of educators about Facebook is extraordinary. What’s the story? First, Facebook, to comply with US law, says that under 13 year olds cannot use it. A Queensland high school, Harlaxton, has used this as a shield to first issue a warning:

As most parents would be aware, your children must be 13 to be able to join Facebook. I am aware that there are many parents out there making their children adhere to this legality. We applaud you for holding strong in what example you are setting. We are also extremely pleased to know that many parents of students over the age of 13 are ensuring they are one of their child’s Facebook friends. Well done you are acting protectively and supervising from the sidelines. Many of our students lie about their age – that is, they are making a false declaration. There is a reason why the legal age for Facebook in Australia is 13. There is an assumption that by that age children will have been taught (and understand) the implications of using social media. It is anticipated that the child will have gained a strong moral purpose and be able to differentiate between what is socially acceptable and lawful and what could be considered libellous and unlawful. We have spent the last five years teaching our students about respect, relationships and resilience. It may seem insignificant to lie about your age to gain access to a social media site but where does it stop? Will they then think it is okay to lie about their age to gain a licence? Parents, you are your child’s first teachers. What do you want them to learn? How do you want them live their lives? Is your example a socially acceptable example?

First of all, the notion that the law is about children understand morals is completely false. Instead, the under-13 law makes it difficult (but not impossible) for websites and companies to collect data regarding children. Companies like Disney operate within its constraints. Facebook, to date, has decided to not make changes to accommodate under-13s but it does not aggressively do anything about them either. The point is not that interacting on Facebook is harmful to children the way drinking alcohol may be. Instead, its intention at least is to protect children’s privacy from companies. Moreover, it is not clear there is an Australian equivalent of this law and, in any case, it would be Facebook not children or their parents that would face the legal issue here.

Secondly, the entire statement is a presumption that children are engaging in lying without parental permission. Research has demonstrated that not only are there millions of children on Facebook but 55% of parents know this and the vast majority of them actually helped their children sign up. So, in effect, the principal is extending her reach into the home.

That is what makes the next message from the principal extraordinary. She followed up with a threat:

It has come to our attention that some Harlaxton students, under the age of 13, have a Facebook account. Facebook requires its users to be at least 13 years old before they can create an account. Providing false information to create an account is a violation of Facebook’s ‘Statement of Rights and responsibilities’.

It is Harlaxton State School policy and expectation that parents and their sons/ daughters would uphold the State and Commonwealth laws, as well as the guidelines set by social networking sites, with regard to their child’s use of such sites. Therefore, no student of Harlaxton who is under the age of 13 is to have a Facebook account, as per the Facebook terms and conditions and guidelines. In addition, parents should understand that a student who contravenes the law or rule in a digital scenario may need to meet with the Principal to discuss this issue and their continued enrolment at Harlaxton.

In the letter they also asked parents to search and report underaged children to Facebook. Basically, this was saying that Harlaxton would consider expelling students who simply had a Facebook account. This was apparently a child safety issue. In other words, if parents were not, by the school’s standards, keeping their child safe, the child could be removed from school. And if you look at this carefully, the expulsion could be simply because guidelines of social networking sites had not been adhered to.

The rationale behind this, it shouldn’t surprise you, was the school’s attempt to control bullying. But rather than target the bullies and work out who they were, the school wanted to punish every child. And not for behaviour within school grounds but for behaviour at home and possibly sanctioned by parents.

I have written before that there are good reasons for the decision as to whether a child joins a social network to lie with parents and not be banned by the government and certainly not enforced by a school. Parents need to be able to give their kids ‘training wheels’ in all aspects of social life, including digital ones. And what is more, the directive from the Principal, Leonie Hultgren, surely masks a double standard. I wonder are there any Jewish children at her school whose parents have given them a sip of wine in clear violation of Queensland laws? Has any teacher at the school received a speeding ticket? Again, what sort of example would it be to children to know that a teacher had broken the law in a road safety matter. My guess is not. Instead, this is one school’s attempt to ‘get out of management free’ and not have to deal with real issues of bullying that all schools have to contend with. And even after all that, what happens when the children turn 13? What’s the school going to do about all this then?

The Wiggles Are No Longer Ready to Wiggle

noreply@blogger.com (Joshua Gans) — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:04:00 +0000

[This post appeared on the Parentonomics blog at Forbes on 17th May 2012]

Today marks the end of an era for parents. The remaining three original members of The Wiggles are leaving the group after 21 years. The grind of touring had become too much for Australia's most successful musical export of

: The Wiggles Movie Soundtrack (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

recent memory. (And they were a big export still earning $45 million in 2009).

It is hard to imagine how we could have survived parenthood when our children were very young without The Wiggles. When we got married in the mid-1990s, it seemed that the future was a purple dinosaur named Barney with excruciating songs. But unbeknownst to us at the time, The Wiggles had already arrived and by the time we became parents in 1998, they had produced nine albums of the greatest children's music ever. And by great I mean, not annoying to parents.

Children's music has the quality that it invites repetition and that repetition destroys the soul of new parents. While it is the case that new parents often claim they are investing in Mozart for babies in the hopes of spurring child development or something, instead it is the hope that their children might not want to list to children's music. That turns out to be a false hope.

But The Wiggles were different. This Australian group did what entrepreneurial types now call a 'pivot.' Two of the Wiggles started out in a more child unfriendly mode as The Cockroaches in the 1980s. They had a modest hit with "She's the One" but then faded. The other two Wiggles were studying to be pre-school teachers when the four met. A school project, in fact, became their first album where they proclaimed the world, "Get Ready to Wiggle" as the opening track. The album was otherwise lacklustre with traditional children's music. However, it did contain few other songs penned by the band members including one famously introducing Dorothy the Dinosaur that would continue as a muse throughout the band's life. In 1993, they introduced Captain Feathersword a decidedly friendly pirate.

But it was Yummy, Yummy that was their first true classic and incredible tour-de-force that introduced children to fruit salad recipes, amongst other food related themes, including their signature hit "Hot Potato". While it might be a stretch to call this a concept album, as it was unclear where the "Numbers Rhumba" fit in, it was one that could move to a 'parental sanity secure' high rotation on the car's CD player. We would sing along too while driving sometimes to discover that we had no children actually in the car at the time. The Wiggles had hit on a secret sauce for children's music -- something that would be liked by all.

Of course, the Wiggles weren't done innovating. In the next two years, as if it couldn't get any better, the Wiggles bought a car that was big and red and also pretty much a lemon. Their troubles and heartache inspired a new set of

: The Wiggles performing at the MCI Center, November 8, 2007 with the new yellow Wiggle, Sam Moran. Photo by Anthony Arambula (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

songs and then an incredible celebration of auto-movement with "Toot toot" with its improbably optimistic claim that they would "ride the whole day long."

The followed a tour of world music, including New Zealand, but the pressure of coming up with concept related themes was starting to show. Their collaboration with Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, in 2000 generated a rush to the stores by parents reminiscent of The Beatles White Album but while not bad, it did not live up the hype. From there, with a stock of solid songs to cater for my children, I lost interest and no new albums were purchased in our household. But we would attend concerts into the mid-2000s joining other parents in chanting for another round of "Wake Up Jeff" but sometimes I got the feeling that The Wiggles only wanted to do the new stuff.

The Wiggles will all be replaced and the franchise will live on. For each of us parents, The Wiggles have given us reprieve from an otherwise horrific music existence. Of course, as the children grew older our risks would change. Now with young teens, we have Glee.