Planning or Searching for STEM and Foreign Aid?

In Tyler Cowen’s new book Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, sustaining and improving economic growth is the key to the future. Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments—A Review (Quillette, November 21, 2018) notes that small shifts in growth rates shift future prosperity dramatically:

Cowen gives a hypothetical example: “redo U.S. history, but assume the country’s economy had grown one percentage point less each year between 1870 and 1990. In that scenario, the United States of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990.”2 That would mean hundreds of millions of people working longer hours and receiving a lower standard of living in return. On the other hand, if we imagine that the growth rate were one percentage point higher during those years, Americans would be far wealthier than we currently are.

Seemingly small policy reforms to improve governance–say by reducing barriers to new company permits and to land titles–would unlock and mobilize “dead capital” to increase growth rates in Central and South American, Middle East North Africa, Europe, India, and Asia. The “Key Concepts” page for  the Power of the Poor explains:

“Dead capital” is Hernando de Soto’s term for an asset that cannot easily be bought, sold, valued or used an investment. Despite obvious poverty in the informal sector, de Soto’s work shows that even those who live in slums possess far more capital than anyone realizes. These possessions, however, are not represented in such a way as to make them fungible assets. Dead capital cannot, therefore, create value for the poor.

So development economists call for institutional reforms such as improvements in governance, judicial transparency, sound money, tax and trade policy etc.. Earlier development economists underestimated legal and cultural systems and thought just transferring capital through foreign aid to poor countries could jump start their economies.

Other researchers claim more engineers may be more important than more economic freedom. TODAY’S PROSPEROUS ECONOMIES OWE WEALTH TO ENGINEERS OF THE PAST (Vancouver School of Economics, March 1, 2018) argues:

Using case studies and empirical evidence from the United States and Latin America, the researchers found the number of engineering graduates per 100,000 male workers a nation (state or county) had in 1880 is correlated with a countries’ present day income. The data suggests that even a slight variation from the average number of engineers a country had at the time can account for up to 30 per cent difference in a country’s current wealth.

“Our work offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role engineers played in driving modern economic growth,” said Felipe Valencia Caicedo, VSE professor. “The amount of advanced technical human capital, or lack thereof, explains why countries with similar levels of income at the turn of the 20th century diverged so much economically over the next century.”

If increasing numbers of engineering graduates is key to improving economic growth, then policies increasing school focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) courses would seem a policy priority. But what policies are best to improve the quality of STEM courses and to attract more students? (And what if “higher quality” courses translates to intense courses that drive many students away from STEM degrees and careers?)

Debates over STEM courses have much in common with ongoing debates over foreign aid programs and policies. Politicians and planners have for some time wanted more young people to pursue STEM degrees. Every country wants more high-wage engineers active in more technology and manufacturing firms. This from Obama White House Archives, Office of Science and Technology Policy:

100Kin10 is a coalition of more than 150 organizations responding to President Obama’s 2011 call to train 100,000 new, excellent STEM teachers over the next decade. With leadership from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the coalition has raised more than $30 million from foundations and philanthropists to meet this goal, and serves as a powerful network for meeting measurable commitments toward expanding, improving, and retaining the Nation’s best STEM teachers.

And from Press Release (July 17, 2012):

• A rigorous selection of the best and brightest math and science teachers from across the country: The STEM Master Teacher Corps will be established in 100 sites – each with 50 exceptional STEM teachers – and will be expanded over 4 years to reach 10,000 Master Teachers. Accomplished teachers will be selected for the STEM Master Teacher Corps through a highly competitive process, based on demonstrated effectiveness in teaching one or more STEM subjects, their content knowledge, and their contributions to the continuous improvement of teaching and learning both within their schools and across the community of STEM teachers. The selection process will be administered locally or regionally, but aligned to a set of national benchmarks.

As with foreign aid planners, STEM planners face the challenge of how to turn government initiatives and grants into effective programs and progress. Debate students can research whether the STEM Master Teacher Corps initiative has been effective over the last six years. Economists would try to measure how much time the “50 exceptional STEM teachers” at each of the “100 sites” spent in meetings and with administrative paperwork, all at the cost of time spent in the classroom teaching. The goal seems to have been to have “expanded over 4 years to reach 10,000 Master Teachers.” So by 2016? Or maybe the program was to start later.

Consider one of hundreds of alternative approaches, outlined on the Modern Classrooms “Our Approach” page:

Modern Classrooms are founded on four core practices:

• Blended Instruction: Teachers replace lectures with videos, and spend class time working directly with students.

• Self-Paced Structure: Teachers differentiate instruction based on data, so that students are always challenged and engaged.

• Mastery-Based Assessment: Teachers assess students on understanding, not completion, and no student advances until ready.

• Metacognition: Teachers help students become better learners and problem-solvers through constant feedback and reflection.

Local STEM-related program like Newton’s Attic in Lexington, Kentucky may be far more effective drawing students to STEM:

Mission Statement
Our mission is to stimulate interest in science and engineering through exciting, hands-on projects, classes, and summer camps.

Core Values
• Intensive learning occurs when individuals are driven internally by an inherent interest to acquire knowledge.
• Newton’s Attic will promote scientific thought based on sound principles and data-driven analysis. Non-traditional teaching methods can produce exceptional educational results.

Strategic Goals
• Challenge young people with unique educational experiences that allow them to apply technical knowledge in situations that are meaningful and relevant to them.
• Create rich learning environments full of resources that promote critical thinking. Expose all people to the concept that scientific principles can be explored and utilized in exciting ways.
• Enhance the competitive context of the engineering industry by providing exceptional learning experiences for young people who will become our future workforce.
• Guide students to pursue technical careers, especially related to engineering and science.

Which are likely to be better approaches to inspiring more students with effective STEM instructions: top-down federal plans for a STEM Master Teachers Corps, or dozens maybe hundreds of decentralized STEM education programs each searching for effective training and teaching activities?

If STEM teaching improvements increase engineering graduates, and if the Vancouver School of Economics research (above) holds up, them STEM teaching programs matter in poor countries as well as rich. Can targeted foreign aid programs improve STEM education in poor countries? [Update: see story on $75 million USAID support for computers in classroom in Kenya: In poor countries technology can make big improvements to education (The Economist, November 15, 2018)]

The debate over the effectiveness of foreign aid turns out to be complicated…

Is aid a $2.3 trillion failure? (The Guardian, September 23, 2006) reviews the planners vs. searchers critique of development economist William Easterly:

As an example, Easterly laments the fact that while the free market managed to deliver 9 million copies of the latest Harry Potter book to die-hard fans in a single day last year , there are many thousands of people dying in Africa for want of drugs costing as little as 12 cents.

‘There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards. It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can’t get 12-cent medicine to dying poor children.’ …

Easterly would like to see money going to smaller, local groups with specific, achievable goals (get malaria medicines to the people in this village; get the kids in this town into school). It might not be as inspiring as high-flown calls to ‘make poverty history’, but, he argues, it is much more likely to work.

[Update: see also: The Anti-Bill Gates:How do poor countries get rich? Not with World Bank help but by unleashing the talents of the poor, says Bill Easterly... (Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2018)]

Similarly for expanding STEM training, the searchers approach would be to leave it to science associations, foundations and smaller local groups to develop and support STEM teaching and learning. If engineering, manufacturing, and tech firms want more engineers, they too can invest in initiatives for young people to take STEM courses and STEM video games (STEM Challenge, for example, or STEM-Works). See also How Video Games Help Students Level Up STEM Learning (Forbes, October 9, 2018):

While nobody wants children and teens to disengage from the world in favor of their devices, video games can actually be an effective way to engage students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects. The power of video games in this area is twofold. First, gaming is highly engaging, so teachers and parents can harness kids’ interest and steer it toward math and science learning. Second, video games require a tremendous amount of STEM knowledge to develop, which makes them a natural hook for teaching coding and other computer skills.

Federal STEM advocates, like UN foreign aid advocates, tend to dismiss ad hoc efforts as an “inefficient web of hundreds of competing charities.” Against Easterly’s advocacy for smaller, bottom-up decentralized searching are UN foreign aid advocates calling for centralization. The Guardian article, gives an overview of the aid debate looking forward from 2006. Advocating centralization:

Kozul-Wright dismisses the latest attempts by the World Bank and IMF to allow governments more ‘ownership’ over their own policies, as ‘old wine in new bottles’. He says many countries are still being urged to adopt a discredited package of privatisation and liberalisation policies. And the stakes are high: Unctad accepts that if this ‘big push’ doesn’t work, taxpayers and governments will lose confidence, and their generosity will falter. …

Unctad’s answer is to replace the current, inefficient web of hundreds of competing charities and donor governments with a central UN agency. It says the new cash should be disbursed in a similar way to the long-established European structural funds, which require matching money from domestic governments and have helped to build roads and attract jobs across the EU.

It’s not clear how effective EU grants for roads and jobs have been (a lot depends upon where roads are built, how they are built, and how much they cost to maintain), but advocates cite aid to Ireland, Costa Rica, and South Korea as examples of how millions of aid dollars over decades helped future private investment and development.

With the economies of the world mixed (part government, part private), whenever an country takes off, as Ireland and South Korea did, government aid advocates can claim the credit but so can advocates for privatization, deregulation, and lower taxes. Success has many fathers. Economic freedom advocates point to market reforms and international investment that energized today’s fast-growing economies.

Foreign aid advocates focus on the past government aid these countries received:

Against those who argue that aid has simply failed over the past 50 years, Kozul-Wright offers a list of success stories, including Botswana, Mauritius and Costa Rica, all of which have managed to attract significant foreign investment after years of substantial financial help. He also points out that some of the most successful Asian economies, including those of South Korea and Taiwan, were helped by generous support in the postwar years.

The Case for Economic Freedom
Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World: 2018 Annual Report makes the case for improving economic freedom along five measures:

• Area 1: Size of Government – As government spending, taxation, and the size of government-controlled enterprises increase, government decision-making is substituted for individual choice and economic freedom is reduced.
• Area 2: Legal System and Property Rights – Protection of persons and their rightfully acquired property is a central element of both economic freedom and civil society. Indeed, it is the most important function of government.
• Area 3: Sound Money – Inflation erodes the value of rightfully earned wages and savings. Sound money is thus essential to protect property rights. When inflation is not only high but also volatile, it becomes difficult for individuals to plan for the future and thus use economic freedom effectively.
• Area 4: Freedom to Trade Internationally – Freedom to exchange—in its broadest sense, buying, selling, making contracts, and so on—is essential to economic freedom, which is reduced when freedom to exchange does not include businesses and individuals in other nations.
Area 5: Regulation – Governments not only use a number of tools to limit the right to exchange internationally, they may also develop onerous regulations that limit the right to exchange, gain credit, hire or work for whom you wish, or freely operate your business.

Economic Freedom in Action: Changing Lives, a page and documentary streaming on FreetoChoose.tv explains (drawing from the 2012 Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report)