On the Costs of Research vs. Teaching

     Yesterday, my longtime reader Greg left this comment.

     I find myself commenting a lot less everywhere Mike, so don't take it personally ;-)

    "Honestly on a lot of these matters I've kind of said my piece and sometimes feel like a broken record to a degree. I still love following politics and econ because its like holding my finger up in the wind. Politics drives money and money drives economics."

     "I do share a lot of similar interests with you so I check your site daily. I haven't posted anything on my site for months til today. Im in a reading and information gathering phase and I will find something to regurgitate and discuss soon."

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/sumners-constantly-moving-goalposts-on.html

     I know what he means, I mean I too always feel like the time I'm reading is much more productive than writing. After all, in reading you are learning something new-even those few books that I find reading for a second time I learn something new from. Reading a book again-or for that matter, watching a really good movie again-is not a repetitive act. 

    In writing though you are in a sense dealing with what you already know. Though for me it can be more than this as I often write without knowing exactly where I'm going with something. Nevertheless I agree about the value of learning rather than 'regurgitating' something you already know. 

   What is funny is later I was reading Nick Rowe who had a short post about whether ideas are rival or not. He started out wanting to say they are not but ended up concluding that maybe they are. 

   "I was writing a simple teaching post, on ideas and increasing returns to scale, in micro and macro. I wrote down "Ideas are non-rival". Then I thought I had better explain what I meant by that. Then I thought about professors, who do research (thinking up new ideas), and teaching (communicating existing ideas to other people). Then I thought about how some professors like research but don't like teaching. Then I thought about this post."

   "Sure, two people can use the same idea (ideas are non-rival), but can't eat the same apple (apples are rival). But the second person can't use that idea unless the first person communicates that idea to the second person. The first has to teach it, and the second has to learn it, and teaching and learning are (sometimes) costly. The cost of communicating the idea to the second person might even be greater than the cost of the first person coming up with the new idea in the first place. Sometimes it might be cheaper to reinvent the wheel than walk to the library."

     "And the marginal cost of communicating the idea to the n'th person very probably will be greater than the cost to the first person of figuring out the idea,if n is large enough. Teaching and learning can be very hard and very costly at the margin, if you push the margin out far enough, and try to teach a difficult idea to everyone. If you put "number of people who use the idea" on the horizontal axis, starting with those who are easiest to teach and who find it easiest to learn, that marginal cost curve is going to slope up, eventually. Will it always eventually cross the average total cost curve, at some point? And does this matter, for how we teach the economics of ideas? But is it really the same good, as we move along that MC curve? And can you separate the activities of research and teaching (communicating research)? Professors love to argue that you can't. But then they would say that, wouldn't they?"

    "Maybe Frances is right."

    "Dammit, now I've confused myself. I'm off to the cottage. Have fun."

     http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2015/06/are-ideas-really-non-rival.html

      I must say, he does a masterful job of 'communicating' here. I've said it before-Nick is a born teacher. He has this genuine desire to explain things to students. 

      In this he couldn't be more different than his buddy Sumner. Scott does have his virtues but it's hard to see how was a teacher for as long as he was if he was as snarky with his students as with his commentators. 

     It seems to me that at least dealing with difficult ideas, there is only so far you can go. It's probably the case that you need different people to discover new ideas and those to teach it to a really wide audience. I find it interesting for instance that while the ideas of mathematics were discovered mostly by males throughout history, we have mostly women teach young children mathematics. 

     The temperament to research and teach is not always the same to say the least. 

     With truly difficult ideas the amount of interest is going to wane beyond a certain circle it seems to me. One reason everyone doesn't understand economics is that far from everyone even wants to understand economics. 

     P.S. My point about female teachers can be generalized beyond mathematics to most of the subjects taught in primary education. In modern times we've decided that women have the ability to better educate young children. Part of it is that young children have to be entertained as well-they are far from a wholly willing audience. 

    Our modern school system is largely on the lines of Thomas Dewey-obviously a male- but the everyday practitioners are women. I don't see that as simply an accident. 

    So yes, I do have a suspicion that teaching requires a certain feminine, nurturing element while research is more masculine-in discovering new ideas you're in a hunt fighting the recalcitrant elements that fight against the attainment of knowledge.