Tuesday's Assorted Links
Tuesday's Assorted Links
AI Cheating, video gamers, Kiwi emmigration, job hunting, and rental collusion
Hi y’all! Here are five stories from this week that contained some neat applications of economic principles or are related to teaching:
AI cheating is getting worse [The Atlantic]
More attractive adults are less likely to spend time gaming compared to less attractive adults because better-looking adults have more close friends [NBER Working Paper]
More than 1,500 people are leaving New Zealand each week due to the high cost of living and lack of economic mobility [The Sunday Times]
A New York Federal Reserve survey shows 28% of Americans are looking for a new job, a 10-year high [NBC News]
The Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing property management software company RealPage of helping landlords artificially inflate rental prices [NPR]
Apps like LineLeap are turning a night out into an economics class, where efficiency wins over equity. While some students relish the convenience of LineLeap, others feel sidelined, unable to afford the extra cost. This shift from "first come, first served" to a pay-to-play model has sparked debates about fairness.
The Price of Cutting in Line
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Having students write papers has always been a vaguely arbitrary, not-directly-related, and mostly inadequate assessment of topic mastery. Now that we have tools to eliminate drudge work -- calculators to do arithmetic, AI to write 2500-word essays -- the obvious solution is to embrace the technology. It's time to find methods of assessment that focus more on topic mastery and less on the vehicle of presentation. But institutional inertia is real, so I'm sure universities will just continue to kvetch about the tools 🙄