At 03:39 PM 12/3/01 -0500, Faustine wrote:

Great points, but consider the example "Harvard University." People are willing to pay a premium to be associated with it regardless of the academic worth of the individual programs in the eyes of specialists. A lot of students are after the cachet and couldn't care less about the curriculum. But then, I'm sure it's a mistake to assume education for it's own sake has the slightest thing to do with why the majority of people bother going to college at all.

Ridiculous how so many employers put such stock in a word on a piece of paper too--pure credentialism. How ironic when you contrast that with the fact that the great Herman Kahn didn't have a PhD. I wonder where he'd end up today.

Special agents should read the Economist in addition to NLECTC Law Enforcement & Corrections Technology News Summary http://www.nlectc.org/. http://WWW.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=S%26%2BX%28%2FQ%21%3B%26%... The lemon dilemma Oct 11th 2001 From The Economist print edition This year's Nobel prize for economics honours work inspired by a simple observation about used cars ... This year's other two laureates, Michael Spence of Stanford University and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia, won their prize for analysing how firms and consumers separate the gems from the lemons in a variety of industries. Mr Spence's early work focused on how individuals use signalling to communicate their abilities in the labour market. Job applicants, for example, want to distinguish themselves from the mass of other hopefuls. They may try to do this in a number of ways, from a fancy suit to a fancy education. But for signals to be believable, Mr Spence observed, they need to differ substantially in their cost of acquisition. For example, for education to work as a credible signal, it must be harder for less able employees to get. Indeed, even if such an education gives a student no tangible skillsreading classics at Oxford, sayit can still be a useful signal of relative quality to employers. Signalling is used in many markets, wherever a person, company or government wants to provide information about its intentions or strengths indirectly. Taking on debt might signal that a company is confident about future profits. Brands send valuable signals to consumers precisely because they are costly to create, and thus will not be lightly abused by their creators. Advertising may convey no information other than that the firm can afford to advertise, but that may be all a consumer needs to know to have confidence in it. Perhaps advertising, as a signal, is not money entirely wasted, as some economists argue. ... It's all about signaling. DCF ---- What was the plea bargain which featured the greatest sentence reduction in the history of the criminal law? A reduction from a charge of Sodomy to a charge of Following Too Close. --Courtesy of the National Commission for the Preservation of Politically Incorrect Law School Jokes.

On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Tim May wrote:

By the way, a topic I talked about a month or two ago, the bogus nature of the _Economics_ prize, has been in the news. Some of the descendants of the Nobel family want the Economics prize to have no connection to the name "Nobel."

Their claim is that Alfred Nobel didn't create or fund the prize, so why is it called "Nobel"?

I think the subtext is that the Econ prize is trivializing the other prizes.

It's actually called the "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics". And even though "Moral Philosophy" is not a science, it is a bit easier to award reasonable prizes in than Literature and Peace. "Toni Morrison call your agent." DCF ---- "War was created so that men in primative societies would have a valid excuse for deserting the wife and kids."