It’s finals week here at Stanford. I’m just finishing up a research paper entitled “Imperat aut servit: Managing our knowledge inheritance” which will likely be published here after the quarter has ended. Apart from writing, I’m beginning to think about further independent research. I’ve been investigating patterns in Romanian etymology and am considering engaging in some sort of formal analysis. Hayek is also still on my mind — I’ve been wondering about how I can model a particularly interesting statement in “The Use of Knowledge in Society” using genetic programming. More on all of this later, I’m sure.
For now, here are the interesting parts of my (very sparse) reading this week:
- Hoxby (2009) details a trend of “re-sorting” among college applicants over the past decades which has led to a more efficient “matching” between high-aptitude students and high-selectivity schools. She demonstrates that per-student resources at highly selective universities have skyrocketed due to this higher efficiency: as better-matched students arrive at top-tier colleges, they demand the support they have been looking forward to. Furthermore, the paper reveals a curious trend in the financials of premier American colleges: the average student only pays around 20% of the value of the resources offered to him, while the remainder is repaid by alumni donations.
- Growing Artificial Societies by Epstein and Axtell has been useful as I think about developing a system to model problems in economics (see introduction).