Is the internet making us quick but shallow?

CNN article "Is the internet making us quick but shallow?" (June 7th, 2010) offers results from a study on one measure of student achievement but ignores alternative (and more relevant) measure:

The cognitive penalties can be particularly severe for students. In one revealing experiment, researchers at Cornell University divided a class into two groups. One group was allowed to use their laptop computers to surf the web during a lecture. The other group attended the same lecture but had to keep their computers closed.

Immediately afterward, the students took a test measuring how well they remembered the lecture's content. The students who used their laptops performed significantly worse on the exam. It didn't matter, moreover, whether they surfed sites related to the subject of the lecture or unrelated sites. All the surfers performed relatively poorly.

The "daily-learning" metric for student performance that the article suggests is not the metric of performance over which students optimize. Students care about end-of-year performance, not daily learning. Students may find it optimal to learn at a time different than during class. In this case, those with computers may be maximizing their total learning over time by doing something else during class--by no means does this imply that they will have learned less at the end of the year than their counterfactual classmates who are forced to listen to an entire lecture. If there are increasing returns to studying later in the year, then students will optimally postpone their studying. If they are constrained to study more earlier in the year, then they may preform worse overall. For example, if a farmer is forced to pick low-hanging fruit from a tree early in the season, picking fruit is costly, and fruit picked early begins to decay, then that farmer will have less revenue from selling his fruit than a framer who optimizes his fruit-picking without constraints. Student performance should be measured by final output rather than by an intermediate step in a dynamic process.

Why we protest education cuts

CNN.com article "Why we protest education cuts" (March 4th, 2010) claims that:

While California is facing the largest cuts to education, similar cuts are happening all over the country, making it harder for students to afford college and lowering the quality of the education they receive.

It would be reasonable to assume that some students of high quality attend lower-quality public universities because they want to save money. We would predict that as the monetary difference between school decreases, student selection into schools will become more quality based. In fact, this would cause the quality of the best institutions to increase, and that of the worst to decrease. The marginal student is the student who expects to gain from a college education exactly what he paid for it. Thus, as the cost of education rises, we should see that students gain more from their education are the ones who continue to receive an education.

This student quality improvement could be met also with an improvement in teacher quality. The article, turning to a discussion of why charter schools are poor makes the following statement:

Furthermore, charter schools are almost always non-union, which means their teachers receive can receive lower compensation and have less job security.

Less job security for teachers would lead to an improvement in teacher quality. First, job security distorts incentives. Without job security, and teachers will work hard to keep their jobs. In addition, without job security the worst teachers get fired and replaced with fresh faces. These younger replacements have lower salaries, saving the state even more. In general, we should expect that increased efficiency would only increase the quality of education.

Unhealthy habits are what's killing us

CNN.com article "Unhealthy habits are what's killing us" (December 28th, 2009) appears to misunderstand that total utility of life comes from both quality of life and quantity. Furthermore, Corrections notes that higher rates of early death for minorities appears as a natural outcome of maximization, rather than a product of irrationality or a failure of willpower.

So if the U.S. health system does such a good job saving its middle-aged and elderly sick, why do Americans die comparatively young?

Answer: because Americans are much more likely to get sick in the first place.

And that likelihood owes very little to the health care system and a great deal to the bad choices American individuals make.

If you eat too much, exercise too little, drink too much, smoke, take drugs, fail to wear a seat belt or ignore gun safety, there is only so much a doctor or hospital can do for you.

Corrections does not see bad health and dying early as a bad decision. Total happiness comes from both quality and quantity of life. Individuals enjoy eating, drinking, smoking, and consuming drugs. The author begs the question whether or not Americans are actually making the right choices.

CNN.com has one additional observation that is not contradictory to a rational-individual hypothesis. Specifically, that minorities often engage in self-destructive behavior at higher rates than whites.

Acting on this information won't be easy: It violates too many taboos. Americans understandably treasure their right to make their own choices, including the choice to super-size it. And many are uncomfortably aware that self-destructive behavior is most often found among the poor and among minorities: Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to be severely obese.

This may be a rational discrepancy. If minorities also have lower wages, then their foregone earnings from dying early are less. The shadow cost of unhealthy behavior is lower--we should therefore expect higher rates of early death, coming not from irrationality or dynamic preferences, but from rational maximization.