Tyler Cowen’s Discover Your Inner Economist has come. It may be that its superficial level of analysis was thought appropriate to a general audience.
To take an example, Cowen comments briefly on the use of financial incentives to reward students for good grades:
Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard, decided to conduct an experiment and pay students for better grades. A new pilot program will reward schoolchildren if they do well on reading and math exame throughout the school year. A score of 80, for instance, would receive a $20 bonus, with further payments for later improvements. Fryer remarked to a reporter: “There are people who are worried about giving kids extra incentives for something that they should be intrinsically able to do…I understand that, but there is a huge achievement gap in this country, and we have to be proactive.” Read the rest of this entry »
