Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes, and that also might reflect the earlier finding, where we find the teachers who had 10 or more years of experience seem to be better teachers. They are also coming from an earlier cohort relative to the teachers who have less experience who are becoming teachers more recently. So, one of the things you see from other research is some evidence that the quality of teachers in earlier cohorts, where women were more likely to go into teaching — high-skilled women — was much higher. So I think that’s plausible. If we’re trying to separate out the influence of environment on children, young children, what’s your opinion of twin studies? There’s plenty of studies of genetically identical twins , but due to adoption, they’re raised in different families, and then you can look at them down the line and see where they’re similar, see where they’re different. If I understand those papers correctly, they seem to suggest the environment doesn’t matter all that much. Are you convinced by those, or do you feel that’s somehow a select sample of people we’re looking at and it’s not an indicative result more generally? Well, there are a number of twins studies which show that there are significant differences in kids’ outcomes depending upon the conditions in which they were raised.…

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