Some Thoughts On Grading and Signaling

Some Thoughts On Grading and Signaling:

I have been spending the evening tonight grading papers and my thoughts have wondered to something that I often enjoy discussing with my students around the idea of grades
(a small caveat, I don't usually bring this up in my online courses as it is open for misinterpretation that I can't read on my student's faces when recording a video lecture. )

I often present to students the idea that a big part of college is not what you are actually learning in any given course (unless you are in the "hard sciences") but rather the idea that by finishing college you are signaling to potential employers that you are able to finish what you have started, as well as apply yourself to the long process of getting a degree.  This includes dealing with bureaucracy (as any UMass student can testify to) as well as the social / cultural skills of interpreting what different professors with different personalities / goals in education think to be important.  It is not learning introductory economics that earns you an A in my course it is learning how to figure out what someone like me thinks is important to memorize / do.  Show up, participate, whatever...

This is of course not really the case, but there is some truth in the signaling model.  Success after college is a mixture of what you have learned, and the ability to show that you were capable of learning it, and all the effort that goes into getting through college beyond the course material. 

Like it or not, (and I generally don't), part of our job as professors is to rank our students for their future employers. Part of this rank is a student being able to signal to a future boss that they are productive and highly exploitable.  A portion of my role is to help the student show just how good they will be at getting exploited.  Gotta love capitalism.

More Post Modern Baseball: The MVP Award

The following is part of an email exchange from a conversation between myself and an employee at a major sports news organization.  He has been surprisingly receptive to my current method of wasting my academic time, still, trying to spread post-structural analysis to professional baseball is an uphill battle at best:

You regularly make the argument that voters should not consider making the playoffs as part of their MVP voting (the Ellsbury example from last year seems to be the most common case cited).  I disagree.  The award is for most valuable player, not "Best Statistical Player".  I will not argue that advanced statistics (WAR etc.) do not matter, they do!, and have added a lot to my enjoyment of following baseball, both fantasy and real.  Also, the movement towards modernism in professional baseball front offices is long overdue.  Why not analyze the players you are spending millions on with all the tools available to you?

The other side of this coin, is that statistics cannot capture all of what matters, in baseball or elsewhere.  If the MVP award was the "best player" award then I would agree with your argument that the voters should not consider the record of the team that the player is on.  It is because of how I perceive "valuable" in MVP that my opinion differs from yours.  A player having a great year on a team that is in contention is more "valuable" to that team than a great year on a team that is not contending. 

On Thursday's show you made that point that it doesn't matter if Houston loses 95 or 120 games this year.  Flipping this around, and taking just one statistic as an example:  A player having a great individual season resulting in a bad team going from 60 to 70 wins (10 WAR) is, in my opinion, less "valuable" towards that player's organization than a player that finishes with a WAR of 7 on a team that wins their division by 2 games. Value in terms of "most valuable player" is not independent of the record of the team.  I would argue that the closer as team is to contending the more "value" can be added by strong performance.  Also a great year on a great team means less than to a team that is just barely contending.  A player having a WAR of 4 in the remaining games of the Yankees is less valuable than the same performance on the White Sox. I know this is not quantifiable, but neither is winning a baseball game in the broad sense. 

I understand why you make the argument that finishing in the playoffs should not matter for an MVP award, as far too many of the people who do vote for MVP are statistically ignorant "old time" baseball guys who just look at "good player on good team, therefore, MVP. However, you are in danger of taking this argument too far in the opposite direction. Statistics, for all their use in analysis of the game we love, cannot fully capture the value of a player to their team.  "Value" and "Most Valuable" are complex and overdetermined concepts that cannot be considered independent of the ultimate goal of any professional sports franchise, winning, and all the revenue that comes with it.  Until the MVP award is changed to "Best Statistical Player", it is not appropriate to ignore the situation of the player's team when handing it out.

Revisiting a Problem Shared By Many Marxists

A common "mistake" in Marxian theory is trying to arrive at what Marx "really thought" at various points in his life and/or in his many writings.  What Marx meant is relevant certainly, and should be studied, if you are a historian of Marxian thought.  
Marxian theories (like all overdetermined aspects of existence) evolve through time, and the writings of Marx himself should be viewed as a starting point, not dogma.  Arguing over what Marx "meant" is academic masturbation not economic theory.  These types of arguments are as wasteful of our time as trying to directly transform prices into values.

Losing Money In Europe

A disjointed post ending in a far different place than it starts:

I post this link only because of the second paragraph:
http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=ca98a2c2-ed7c-4e12-865c-11beea3ff00c

 Just as Europe undoubtedly felt the backlash from America's economic crisis, American companies are now feeling pain as a result of Europe's troubles. j

Two points:
1. If you are writing for MSN money why haven't you gotten the memo that global inter-connectivity is a consistent economic reality for the modern imperialist firm?   Is this really worth mentioning?

2. Regarding the 500 Million dollar loss, but Ford's domestic operating budget is 7 billion dollars.In Europe they sell about 1.5 million vehicles a year.  The average price is around $10 000 US, this means total revenue is about 1.5 billion?  Correct me if I missed a zero?  How does a company lose 1/3 of its total revenue?  I have an idea but I want to look for more numbers before I go nuts.  My guess would be more cannon fodder for the "workers and unions are killing business" right wing.  Historically the far right gains support concurrently with the left.  A bit of a late night stretch for my brain, but this narrative (if it appears) will be more evidence of a political polarization caused by the current western world recession (depression). I love speculation!