Posts Tagged ‘economics’
Twenty percent?!
When I saw this tweet, I’m ashamed to say that I did not believe it. I clicked through and read the fine print, expecting to find something misinterpreted or at least out of date. But instead I found this fact sheet, which in turn referenced the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. The figure is part of a 2007 report on the state of higher education. (There does, at least, seem to be an upward trend.)
It’s funny that I doubted the number, really. There isn’t exactly a surplus of women profs around my department, and thinking back, I wasn’t taught by many during undergrad. While my MA cohort is about 50-50, a classmate recently observed that many of the men and few or none of the women are planning on doing a PhD. She suggested that it is because a PhD would make us unmarriageable. Our classmates, for what it’s worth, disagreed.
The pitfalls of relying on American social science
WCI has a fantastic post up about the disproportionate amount of economic research that is about the United States. Frances Woolley suggests that this is in part a matter of data availability, and that’s something I can second. But the post really shines when she gets to the implications of this imbalance:
American experiences are seen as general. (A particularly absurd manifestation of this occurs in international relations, where people will write “A superpower like the United States…” There is no superpower like the US. [...])
[...] In medical research, it probably doesn’t matter whether Canadian or American data is used. A medical treatment that works south of the border will generally work north of the border as well. Indeed, drug trials are not-uncommonly carried out in low-income countries to save costs. The generalizability of studies based on US economic data to Canada is less well-established.
I worry that this is especially true in some of the areas I am most interested in, like education. Of course, that’s difficult to verify without more research. It’s kind of a circular problem, really.
If the US is a bad model for other developed economies, what are we likely getting wrong?
