As it turns out, I had prepared to show you something but failed to do so. I have access to your I-Card photos, which I hope will allow me to match name, face, alias, and the work you do much faster than it has happened in prior offerings the course, where it took between a month to 6 weeks, and that was a for a student who came to class regularly. Now I hope that will happen in the next couple of weeks. We'll see.
Armed with this bit of information, I wanted to investigate a little whether interactions in the class might be different if I know you in this way and you know that I know. In a large lecture class, the professor almost surely doesn't know you. In that sense, you are anonymous. If you have a TA, the TA might learn who you are the same way I learned the identity of my students, but typically there is only one discussion session per week. So it might not be till mid semester before the TA knows everyone in the discussion section. And perhaps it is even longer. TAs might have 3 different discussion sections. I have only the one class that I teach now.
So today I had planned to have some discussion about whether anonymous interactions differ from interactions where the people know each other, and if so why. You may recall that I had a senior moment during the class today. After that I lost my path to this particular question. If someone prompts me on this next Tuesday, it might be a good topic to consider.
Here I will present the punchline and you can ask whether it makes sense. Gift exchange is much more likely to occur when the people know one another. In the situation where identities are unknown and where they are likely to remain that way, gift exchange is unlikely. Do note that when you are first meeting someone new, particularly when the people are from different cultures, gift giving often occurs as a symbolic gesture up front to create the conditions for subsequent dialog.
One last point here. In our class, actual gifts from student to professor or from professor to student, are out of bounds. If you want to give me something that I will value, put some effort into the course. I will try my best to reciprocate.
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Evaluation of Second Class Session
These instructions are very much like the instructions for the first session, since we've not yet had a chance to review the results and possibly critique what is being asked in the evaluation. We will soon consider whether the criteria in the survey make sense for our class or if they should be tweaked to something more sensible.
The evaluation is more about our process in the class discussion than about the content, but if you want to say something about that, you can do so in the comments. The form is meant to be easy to fill out. Note that you receive bonus points for completing the form as long as:
a) you choose the alias that has been assigned to you and sent to you by email, and
b) you checked in at the start of class so there is a record that you were there.
Students who are currently not registered but plan to add the class should not complete this particular evaluation. There will be ample opportunity to earn bonus points by doing subsequent evaluations on future class sessions.
The deadline for this class session is at 9 AM the day of our next class. This will give me time to process it and show the results to the class.
Below is the information about the class session that can be found in the calendar entry for it.
Overview of the Gift Exchange model. The University as organization.
pptx file:
pdf file:
The evaluation is more about our process in the class discussion than about the content, but if you want to say something about that, you can do so in the comments. The form is meant to be easy to fill out. Note that you receive bonus points for completing the form as long as:
a) you choose the alias that has been assigned to you and sent to you by email, and
b) you checked in at the start of class so there is a record that you were there.
Students who are currently not registered but plan to add the class should not complete this particular evaluation. There will be ample opportunity to earn bonus points by doing subsequent evaluations on future class sessions.
The deadline for this class session is at 9 AM the day of our next class. This will give me time to process it and show the results to the class.
Below is the information about the class session that can be found in the calendar entry for it.
Overview of the Gift Exchange model. The University as organization.
pptx file:
pdf file:
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Setting up a blog for class - part 2
This is the rest of the tutorial. Once you've made a test post, please email me the link to it. I will then subscribe to your blog and list it on the class site. Having subscribed to it, I will automatically see updates to your blog.
Setting up a blog for class - part 1
As an alternative to the instructions below, you can use the campus blogging service at publish@illinois. Then you log in with your NetID and password. You can adjust your screen name to your alias, to protect your privacy. But I don't know whether you can access the site after you graduate. Also, for commenting on the class site you will either do that anonymously or use your real name. If you use Blogger and make your alias your screen name, then your comments to posts will also be given by your screen name. (That assumes you are logged into your blog.)
As still one other alternative, you can have a blog in Moodle, which is then not publicly available. Truthfully, this is much less convenient than the other alternatives. But it protects your privacy the most because the the rest of the world doesn't have access to the Moodle class site. If you want to pursue this alternative you must contact me about it. I have to set it up for you.
- - - - -
The instructions below and in the next post are aimed at setting up your blog so that you post under your alias - nobody outside the class will know who you are - and make sure that everybody understands this is a blog of a student, not of the person from whom the alias was constructed.
The video below was made for the class from a few years ago. It is applicable still, though Blogger has changed a bit since. Also note, that it assumes you are making a new Gmail account just for this use. As an alternative, you can use your non-university Gmail account equally well, if you are not already using Blogger with it. Do not use your campus email. That will not work.
Note that in video where it says My Econ 490 Alias, your alias is of the form Famous Economist Econ 490 fall 2017. Also that that for the url of the blog, you should take the spaces out, but for the name of the blog and your screen name, you should leave the spaces in. (And for the screen name, the name of the famous economist suffices. The rest is redundant.)
The main thing is to use the Blogger Profile, not the Google Plus profile. The Blogger Profile is what allows you to post under an alias. See the image below. You can find this on your blog dashboard under Settings, then User Settings.
As still one other alternative, you can have a blog in Moodle, which is then not publicly available. Truthfully, this is much less convenient than the other alternatives. But it protects your privacy the most because the the rest of the world doesn't have access to the Moodle class site. If you want to pursue this alternative you must contact me about it. I have to set it up for you.
- - - - -
The instructions below and in the next post are aimed at setting up your blog so that you post under your alias - nobody outside the class will know who you are - and make sure that everybody understands this is a blog of a student, not of the person from whom the alias was constructed.
The video below was made for the class from a few years ago. It is applicable still, though Blogger has changed a bit since. Also note, that it assumes you are making a new Gmail account just for this use. As an alternative, you can use your non-university Gmail account equally well, if you are not already using Blogger with it. Do not use your campus email. That will not work.
Note that in video where it says My Econ 490 Alias, your alias is of the form Famous Economist Econ 490 fall 2017. Also that that for the url of the blog, you should take the spaces out, but for the name of the blog and your screen name, you should leave the spaces in. (And for the screen name, the name of the famous economist suffices. The rest is redundant.)
The main thing is to use the Blogger Profile, not the Google Plus profile. The Blogger Profile is what allows you to post under an alias. See the image below. You can find this on your blog dashboard under Settings, then User Settings.
Gift Exchange and Collegiality as the Basis for a High Productivity Work Environment
There is a rather large literature on "efficiency wages," where workers earn job rents (they are paid more than their opportunity cost) and this is done for productivity reasons. There are a variety of explanations for this. The gift exchange story gives one of those and is attractive, in part, because it is more sociology than economics. (We clearly care about the welfare of others, but that conern is usually absent in the economics approach.) The efficiency wage approach, in turn, followed a similar approach called "implicit contracts" where, in effect, the employer and the workers have a mutual agreement of the sort, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. When it's time for your own back to scratched, you earn a (quasi) rent. The hero of the implicit contracts story is Arthur Okun. He referred to the back scratching arrangement as "the invisible handshake." Incidentally, implicit contracts can exist elsewhere than the labor market. For example, a shop owner might very well have an implicit contract with her loyal customers.
The gift exchange model is the brainchild of George Akerlof. Given that Janet Yellen is now the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Akerlof may come to be widely known as her significant other. But he is a first-rate economist in his own right. Indeed, he is a Nobel Prize winner.
The vision for why gift exchange produces superior performance was supplied by Dumas père in The Three Musketeers. It is embedded in the relationship between Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (the workers doing the same job) and D'Artagnan (their manager) and is captured in the phrase, "All for one and one for all." Akerlof crafts that vision and related ideas from sociology to make an economic model of it. For the non-economist, it might be framed as collegiality-driven productivity. Here are the model's basic elements.
There is a minimal performance standard below which the employee will get fired. There is a performance norm, substantially above the minimal standard, that typifies what workers produce. The difference between the minimal standard and the higher norm constitutes a gift that workers give to the firm. Likewise, there is a minimal wage below which workers would quit and find work elsewhere and there is an actual wage above that minimum that the firm pays to workers. The difference is a gift that the firm gives to its employees. Gift giving demands reciprocation for it to be sustained. When that happens all involved feel good about the place of work and productivity is high as a consequence.
There is one more piece to the puzzle. This regards how productivity is observed and what explains variation in productivity from one worker to the next and for one worker over time. From the worker's own perspective, this is mainly due to random factors - circumstances beyond the employee's control. Or, in the case where there is clearly a drop off in a particular employee's performance, it can be attributed to outside of work stresses (e.g., a sick child at home) that are apt to be temporary in nature. The correct response in this case is not to punish the employee but rather for co-workers to chip in and pick up the slack. Sometime in the future, the employee who received such help will lend a hand when another co-worker has a similar problem.
Someone who favors pay for performance but comes to the issue of appropriate compensation with an open mind might grant that collegiality-driven productivity can be a good thing, as long as the fire burns within all the workers, but will argue that eventually a worker burns out and turns into dead wood. That is not temporary. It is a permanent change. Then he will argue that the gift exchange approach sustains the dead wood, who act as a drag on the entire system. One needs, instead, a time-consistent way to purge the system of the dead wood. Performance based pay does that. (This issue has been discussed quite a bit with regard to teacher pay and teacher tenure.)
Akerlof's model does not address that critique. Before I provide my own answer, let me take a slight detour. The Akerlof gift exchange model is essentially social in nature. There is a different reason to depart from performance based pay that is intellectual in nature and is particular to knowledge work. This other view is articulated by Daniel Pink in this RSA Animiate video and focuses on psychological explanations for productivity. There can be performance anxiety or, if you prefer, writer's block. High performance is achieved when intrinsic motivation is strong and the individual becomes so involved in the work as to entirely lose a sense of self. Making extrinsic rewards overt moves the individual's focus away from the intrinsic motivation and thereby lessons productivity. Better to have the economic rewards provided up front so that one can put them out of mind when the real work commences. While I have critiqued this video on how it represents the economics, I concur with its representation of the importance of intrinsic motivation.
Burnout then can be thought of as the disappearance of intrinsic motivation. The response to the critique is to look at the causes for why intrinsic motivation should disappear. One possible cause is a sense of plateauing in the work. There is little left to learn, no inherently new challenges. For the most part it is a rehash of what's come before - been there, done that. When it happens, it would seem to make sense that the worker should move onto a new challenge; do something else. There is, however, a different cause that is also possible. It is that the individual confronts organizational barriers that seem arbitrary and anti-productive and those barriers repeatedly thwart the individual's creative efforts. Eventually, the individual wears down from not seeming able to accomplish sensible change. Gallows humor becomes part of the routine as the individual loses the desire to fight the system. This second cause might reasonably dictate that more fundamental organizational change is necessary. The burden shouldn't be placed on the individual to accommodate organizational inertia.
It is this second cause that forms the basis of the response to the critique. The Akerlof gift exchange approach must happen within a dynamic organization that makes organizational learning paramount. (See Senge's The Fifth Discipline.) Employee burnout might still happen in such organizations, but it would be far rarer. When it does happen the appropriate organizational response should be job reassignment rather than immediate severance, this in accord with the gift exchange view. Collegiality, in tone and actual practice, then characterizes good jobs and is at the heart of how the organization remains productive.
In my years working in learning technology, everyone I've encountered knows this implicitly, though I expect that the vast majority of them were not acquainted with Akerlof's gift exchange model. I wonder if people reading this post with a prior disposition toward pay for performance might consider collegiality based alternatives instead.
The gift exchange model is the brainchild of George Akerlof. Given that Janet Yellen is now the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Akerlof may come to be widely known as her significant other. But he is a first-rate economist in his own right. Indeed, he is a Nobel Prize winner.
Akerlof's theory is rather simple to articulate, as is the debate over the right way to provide incentives in the workplace. The quintessential issue is whether pay should be performance based and hence vary from individual to individual who hold the same job or if instead pay should be position based and not feature such idiosyncratic variation, except perhaps on a seniority basis Of course, even with fixed pay per job, performance matters. But it is rewarded differently than when there is pay for performance. The argument is that promotion should be the primary reward for exceptional performance. Within a job classification, the workers need to be managed fairly, which provides the basis for equal treatment. Fairness is more of a sociology concept than an economics one.
The vision for why gift exchange produces superior performance was supplied by Dumas père in The Three Musketeers. It is embedded in the relationship between Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (the workers doing the same job) and D'Artagnan (their manager) and is captured in the phrase, "All for one and one for all." Akerlof crafts that vision and related ideas from sociology to make an economic model of it. For the non-economist, it might be framed as collegiality-driven productivity. Here are the model's basic elements.
There is a minimal performance standard below which the employee will get fired. There is a performance norm, substantially above the minimal standard, that typifies what workers produce. The difference between the minimal standard and the higher norm constitutes a gift that workers give to the firm. Likewise, there is a minimal wage below which workers would quit and find work elsewhere and there is an actual wage above that minimum that the firm pays to workers. The difference is a gift that the firm gives to its employees. Gift giving demands reciprocation for it to be sustained. When that happens all involved feel good about the place of work and productivity is high as a consequence.
There is one more piece to the puzzle. This regards how productivity is observed and what explains variation in productivity from one worker to the next and for one worker over time. From the worker's own perspective, this is mainly due to random factors - circumstances beyond the employee's control. Or, in the case where there is clearly a drop off in a particular employee's performance, it can be attributed to outside of work stresses (e.g., a sick child at home) that are apt to be temporary in nature. The correct response in this case is not to punish the employee but rather for co-workers to chip in and pick up the slack. Sometime in the future, the employee who received such help will lend a hand when another co-worker has a similar problem.
Someone who favors pay for performance but comes to the issue of appropriate compensation with an open mind might grant that collegiality-driven productivity can be a good thing, as long as the fire burns within all the workers, but will argue that eventually a worker burns out and turns into dead wood. That is not temporary. It is a permanent change. Then he will argue that the gift exchange approach sustains the dead wood, who act as a drag on the entire system. One needs, instead, a time-consistent way to purge the system of the dead wood. Performance based pay does that. (This issue has been discussed quite a bit with regard to teacher pay and teacher tenure.)
Akerlof's model does not address that critique. Before I provide my own answer, let me take a slight detour. The Akerlof gift exchange model is essentially social in nature. There is a different reason to depart from performance based pay that is intellectual in nature and is particular to knowledge work. This other view is articulated by Daniel Pink in this RSA Animiate video and focuses on psychological explanations for productivity. There can be performance anxiety or, if you prefer, writer's block. High performance is achieved when intrinsic motivation is strong and the individual becomes so involved in the work as to entirely lose a sense of self. Making extrinsic rewards overt moves the individual's focus away from the intrinsic motivation and thereby lessons productivity. Better to have the economic rewards provided up front so that one can put them out of mind when the real work commences. While I have critiqued this video on how it represents the economics, I concur with its representation of the importance of intrinsic motivation.
Burnout then can be thought of as the disappearance of intrinsic motivation. The response to the critique is to look at the causes for why intrinsic motivation should disappear. One possible cause is a sense of plateauing in the work. There is little left to learn, no inherently new challenges. For the most part it is a rehash of what's come before - been there, done that. When it happens, it would seem to make sense that the worker should move onto a new challenge; do something else. There is, however, a different cause that is also possible. It is that the individual confronts organizational barriers that seem arbitrary and anti-productive and those barriers repeatedly thwart the individual's creative efforts. Eventually, the individual wears down from not seeming able to accomplish sensible change. Gallows humor becomes part of the routine as the individual loses the desire to fight the system. This second cause might reasonably dictate that more fundamental organizational change is necessary. The burden shouldn't be placed on the individual to accommodate organizational inertia.
It is this second cause that forms the basis of the response to the critique. The Akerlof gift exchange approach must happen within a dynamic organization that makes organizational learning paramount. (See Senge's The Fifth Discipline.) Employee burnout might still happen in such organizations, but it would be far rarer. When it does happen the appropriate organizational response should be job reassignment rather than immediate severance, this in accord with the gift exchange view. Collegiality, in tone and actual practice, then characterizes good jobs and is at the heart of how the organization remains productive.
In my years working in learning technology, everyone I've encountered knows this implicitly, though I expect that the vast majority of them were not acquainted with Akerlof's gift exchange model. I wonder if people reading this post with a prior disposition toward pay for performance might consider collegiality based alternatives instead.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Evaluation of First Class Session
The evaluation is more about our process in the class discussion than about the content, but if you want to say something about that, you can do so in the comments. The form is meant to be easy to fill out. Note that you receive bonus points for completing the form as long as:
a) you choose the alias that has been assigned to you and sent to you by email, and
b) you checked in at the start of class so there is a record that you were there.
Students who are currently not registered but plan to add the class should not complete this particular evaluation. There will be ample opportunity to earn bonus points by doing subsequent evaluations on future class sessions.
The deadline for this class session is at 9 AM the day of our next class. This will give me time to process it and show the results to the class.
Below is the information about the class session that can be found in the calendar entry for it.
The class as an organization. Review of Syllabus. Overview of the course.
pptx file
pdf file
a) you choose the alias that has been assigned to you and sent to you by email, and
b) you checked in at the start of class so there is a record that you were there.
Students who are currently not registered but plan to add the class should not complete this particular evaluation. There will be ample opportunity to earn bonus points by doing subsequent evaluations on future class sessions.
The deadline for this class session is at 9 AM the day of our next class. This will give me time to process it and show the results to the class.
Below is the information about the class session that can be found in the calendar entry for it.
The class as an organization. Review of Syllabus. Overview of the course.
pptx file
pdf file
Friday, August 25, 2017
Attention Shoppers
This is an interesting piece about the consequences of Amazon buying out Whole Foods. Alas, all the Whole Foods stores in Illinois are in the Chicago area. There isn't one in or near Champaign-Urbana. So I'm not sure whether this will have much consequence on local food shopping. But it is something to watch for over the next few months.
Thursday, August 24, 2017
Subscribing to the Class Calendar
This is the ICAL address for the calendar
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/6jbnfi5rmfle9jos4481bvneng%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
And this is the HTML address.
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=6jbnfi5rmfle9jos4481bvneng%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Chicago
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/6jbnfi5rmfle9jos4481bvneng%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
And this is the HTML address.
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=6jbnfi5rmfle9jos4481bvneng%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Chicago
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
America's Battle with Creativity - Is School Killing It? What else might explain this?
The issues about learning that will be raised during the class session are not just for members of the class but really are for society overall. To show the concern that has been expressed on the matter of creativity (and that we're not doing as well as we should) consider the following two pieces from a few years ago. I wonder if in reading them you find yourself surprised. I was when I read them.
If you buy the results in the piece linked above, the question is why this is happening. One argument that has been advanced is that kids get too much supervision these days so don't develop a sense of autonomy and that they can function well by making their own independent judgments. A piece called The Overprotected Kid makes this argument quite forcefully.
The linked piece contrasts conformity with creativity and argues that most people want to conform. They don't want to buck the system. On this one, rather than ask why, I'd like to ask simply whether this agrees with your own experience. On campus, are most students conformists in your experience?
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