Education and History
So I had been planning to write a paper on temple-building in medieval south India. The paper is for the workshop on law & economics. Unfortunately, historical data from the time period is sparse, and I was unable to find enough support for my hypothesis.
Luckily, I've been working on a fallback topic, and I've made a big breakthrough. The basic idea is to look at foreign aid spending as a function of the scope and quality of history education. My theory is that broader and deeper education in history results in more political support for foreign aid. Foreign aid is really just a proxy for a nation's engagement with the world, which is why this work is relevant today.
Unlike my last topic, this one has plenty of data. TEXT/TRACK is a national database of the full text of textbooks for primary and secondary education. It goes back all the way to the early 1900's, and it has a huge amount of data, all searchable and suitable for statistical analysis.
People have looked for the effect I'm describing before, but without much luck. I think this is because most of them are sociologists. Economists are just better trained to think clearly about the use of statistical evidence.
My methodology was simple. I looked at foreign aid and found that, as a percentage of GDP and as a fraction of tax revenue, foreign aid was more generous in the two decades after World War II than in the two decades after World War I. Then I turned to TEXT/TRACK. The results were stunning.
I searched TEXT/TRACK for the years 1920-1940. The very first term I tried turned out to be pure gold. I searched for the phrase "World War I," and I got literally zero hits. I tried other possible formulations like "WWI" and "World War One," and still found nothing. Then I tried searching for "World War II" in the years 1945-1965. I got tens of thousands of hits, and even more when I included other formulations. Not only that, but the textbook publishers had learned their lesson: I got nearly as many hits for "World War I" as I did for "World War II."
Now, I do recognize that there's a problem with this data. Spending on foreign aid shouldn't track education immediately, because most of the elementary and high school students can't vote and have little influence on policy. There should be a lag between the improvement in education and the increase in foreign aid. Clearly some of the causality isn't so simple. A country that is more outward-oriented will also pay attention to its history education. I'll have to account for this factor, but I bet my results will still be strong. Such a drastic shift in educational standards has to have a profound effect on society.
The really neat part of this paper is that it allows us to see the way that history feeds into education, and then education feeds back into history. If we are as careless as we were after World War I, we may face a generation that doesn't understand the world and thus fails to engage it productively.
Luckily, I've been working on a fallback topic, and I've made a big breakthrough. The basic idea is to look at foreign aid spending as a function of the scope and quality of history education. My theory is that broader and deeper education in history results in more political support for foreign aid. Foreign aid is really just a proxy for a nation's engagement with the world, which is why this work is relevant today.
Unlike my last topic, this one has plenty of data. TEXT/TRACK is a national database of the full text of textbooks for primary and secondary education. It goes back all the way to the early 1900's, and it has a huge amount of data, all searchable and suitable for statistical analysis.
People have looked for the effect I'm describing before, but without much luck. I think this is because most of them are sociologists. Economists are just better trained to think clearly about the use of statistical evidence.
My methodology was simple. I looked at foreign aid and found that, as a percentage of GDP and as a fraction of tax revenue, foreign aid was more generous in the two decades after World War II than in the two decades after World War I. Then I turned to TEXT/TRACK. The results were stunning.
I searched TEXT/TRACK for the years 1920-1940. The very first term I tried turned out to be pure gold. I searched for the phrase "World War I," and I got literally zero hits. I tried other possible formulations like "WWI" and "World War One," and still found nothing. Then I tried searching for "World War II" in the years 1945-1965. I got tens of thousands of hits, and even more when I included other formulations. Not only that, but the textbook publishers had learned their lesson: I got nearly as many hits for "World War I" as I did for "World War II."
Now, I do recognize that there's a problem with this data. Spending on foreign aid shouldn't track education immediately, because most of the elementary and high school students can't vote and have little influence on policy. There should be a lag between the improvement in education and the increase in foreign aid. Clearly some of the causality isn't so simple. A country that is more outward-oriented will also pay attention to its history education. I'll have to account for this factor, but I bet my results will still be strong. Such a drastic shift in educational standards has to have a profound effect on society.
The really neat part of this paper is that it allows us to see the way that history feeds into education, and then education feeds back into history. If we are as careless as we were after World War I, we may face a generation that doesn't understand the world and thus fails to engage it productively.
posted by James | 3:20 AM
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