Mindfulness over at Wikipedia

Over at the ever helpful Wikipedia, is their CTER section. It stands for Curriculum, Technology, and Educational Reform and is sponsored by the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Here is their mindfulness entry.

Not very good or interesting, I would say. Unlike many entries in Wikipedia that I know something about, this seems downright impoverished- not as bad as, say, Conservapedia's entry on snakes but thin, thin, thin. Other entries seem quite good, so it looks as if we have some work to do.

Crosspost: Kevin Drum

Over the past couple of decades the wage premium for getting a college degree has gone up dramatically. In 1973 a typical college grad earned 30% more than a high school graduate. Today a college grad earns something like 90% more.

Standard economic theory predicts that this should lead to way more people getting college degrees, but that hasn't happened. Altonji, Bharadwaj and Lange report that, when various socioeconomic factors are held constant, "the supply response to the increase in skill premium between cohorts was small: about 1% on average and about 1.5% at the median." In other words, kids aren't bothering to increase their skills very much even though the reward for doing so has skyrocketed.

Why? Brad DeLong proposes that part of the answer may be the surging cost of college, which not only makes the return on a bachelor's degree lower than it would be otherwise, but probably makes it seem even lower than it really is to teenagers with short time horizons. He's also got some other ideas that he muses about here.

But I want to toss out another possibility that's been tickling my brain for a while. On the right is an EPI chart that shows declining wages for college grads over the past seven years. Ezra Klein comments:

As an economist told me a year or two back, "there's never been a worse time to be a college graduate. But there's never been a worse time not to be a college graduate." Your wages may be higher than those of less educated cohorts, but they're stagnant nevertheless.

Right. And maybe that's the problem. When I say that the premium for getting a college degree used to be 30% and now it's 90%, what do I mean? One possibility is something like this:

• 1973: high school grad makes $42K, college grad makes $55K.
  

• 2006: high school grad makes $42K, college grad makes $80K.
  

This probably would motivate more kids to get college degrees. But that's not what actually happened. Here's what actually happened for male workers (all figures adjusted for inflation):

• 1973: high school grad makes $42K, college grad makes $55K.
  

• 2006: high school grad makes $31K, college grad makes $61K.
  

The skill premium hasn't gone up because a college degree is way more lucrative than in the past. In fact, it's only slightly more lucrative over the long term and completely stagnant among recent grads. Rather, the skill premium has gone up because the value of a high school degree has cratered.

So here's my thought: even though the two scenarios above are (roughly) economically equivalent, they might not be psychically equivalent. If the value of a college degree had gone way up, that really might prompt more kids on the margin to study harder and go to college. Not only would that higher value be fairly obvious since it would get a lot of attention, but the prospect of doing better is highly motivating.

But does the declining value of a high school degee motivate them in the same way? I doubt it, even though mathematically the effect is the same. For starters, many teenagers may not really understand the hard reality of the trend in non-college wages, and in any case a slow but steady decline simply doesn't motivate people the same way as dangling a reward in front of them does. Instead of making them try harder, it tends to make them feel helpless and angry.

Am I explaining myself adequately here? I'm not sure. But it seems to me that there are lots of cases where real-life behavioral responses depend not merely on monetary differences, but on the direction and reason for those differences. Perhaps if you want more kids to go to college, you need to reward them for going to college, not merely punish them for not going.

Dan Siegel, again

This is a passage that jumped out at me:

In 1988, Siegel heard one of the pioneers of attachment theory, Mary Main, give a talk about her work on what she called "coherent narrative." Main and her colleagues had devised an instrument called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), in which parents were asked about their recollections of their own childhoods. What Main's research indicated was that the way these parents told their own stories-how they made sense of their past lives, or didn't-was the most powerful predictor (85 percent accuracy) of whether their own children would be securely attached to them.

If adults could create a reflective, coherent, and emotionally-rich narrative about their own childhoods, they were likely to form a good, secure relationship with their children-no matter how "insecurely attached" they themselves had been as children or how inadequate or even abusive their own parents were. It wasn't what happened to them as children, but how they came to make sense of what happened to them that predicted their emotional integration as adults and what kind of parents they'd be.

I think a key aspect here is "emotionally-rich". Many very unhappy people- rigid, judgmental, etc- have coherent narratives. Think of all the people we've known over the years who not only tell the same story of their lives, but with details emphasized the same way, as if the audience and context never changes. This is a lack of engagement, a lack of communication and mutuality, that really shrinks a person's social world.

Reflective speech can be learned: think "therapized". But "emotionally-rich" means the speaker is being generous to his or her listener. This empathy, or understanding of another, is a crucial frontal lobe function.

Our own coherent narratives- much like in traditional folk tales and post-modern fiction- is open ended. But not formless or sprawling. Each narrative loops back through the listener to the speaker, changing slightly, accommodating subtle social information. Irrelevant details are maintained in a low energy state, perhaps to be charged with significance at some later time.

In this way, the previous post regarding an older reader's slowing down over apparently irrelevant details points to another quality of the brain: each area seems to suppress other areas. Life changes such as injury, open up other possibilities. When we are telling our stories, we keep in reserve details for other situations and other audiences.

Perhaps older brains tell richer stories as well- less purposeful- but emotionally deeper. And maybe this is a quality we associate with wisdom.

Memory

from a NYT article:

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Here is the whole article

Interestingly, an overfocus on a singular interpretation of a text leads to a lessened ability to use certain details. This is why a technical article in a field one is familiar with, if read with a specific purpose, can be read quickly, whereas a poem- a good one, anyway- shouldn't be.

Every use of language has a multiplicity of interpretations and "purposes". The brain has evolved for a multiplicity of outcomes...