The Hidden Curriculum Workshop: February 28 and March 1

With Mark Anderson and Dan Rees

We are nearly done with February, and there is another workshop coming up next week taught by Mark Anderson and Dan Rees. Mark is a professor at Montana state and Dan is at UC3M in Madrid. This workshop is called “The Hidden Curriculum” and it’s one that I think is fantastic. Let me share a little about it.

William Shockley, the Nobel Prize winner, has this interesting article about the productivity of highly productive “right tail” researchers. Lots of grants, lots of cites. Many of you know the paper. There is this paper in the paper where he lays out a Cobb Douglas production function in which writing papers is a function of 8 inputs, and what makes the function interesting is:

1. What he says the inputs and therefore what they aren’t.

2. The production function is multiplicative not additive.

The first part is alone interesting. He says, “consider the factors that may be involved in publishing a scientific paper. A partial listing, not in order of importance, might be:” and then he gives a surprising list. Coming up with good problems, having the ability to work on it, knowing when you have a worthwhile result, knowing when to stop and start writing, having adequate write by skills, how to profit from criticism, the resilience to submit to a journal, and keeping at it until it is published.

What’s interesting about that list is I think none of them would ever be necessarily taught. They are maybe part of the hidden curriculum — they’re the things needed to publish but which are not often talked about as such.

And then of course there is the production function — output is a function of the product of all eight combined. And that’s crucial because it means it’s not enough to be excellent at 7 only but be unable or unwilling to do the 8th. That’s the nature of production functions like these — you have to have at least some of each unit to produce anything. Put it differently, it would be better to be adequate at all 8 than to be excellent at 7 but have no willingness to do the 8th.

I say willingness purposefully because if I said “no ability”, I think it would be false and self defeating. We all have the ability to have all eight of those attributes. And if we do not know them, then we go learn them and then we do them. All of us can learn and grow and improve. And the purpose of Mark and Dans workshop is designed to help people learn more about this Cobb Douglas production function as it relates to the important but often unstated and therefore unknown elements that are needed to publish.

That’s a description of the workshop. And here are the dates. I highly encourage you to come. Mark and Dan are very down to earth, so friendly, incredibly smart and helpful. They’ve both been editors for a long time and they both have had such productive careers, measured in a lot of different ways. I am biased towards them, as I think they are really talented economists and this workshop is unlike any one that you could find anywhere else.

So come, check it out. I think you’ll get a lot out of it. And if not you, consider sponsoring your student or students, maybe your assistant professors or colleagues. If you know someone who you think would benefit from this, please share it.