In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.Lincoln appears to me to be making the practical observation that an argument built on logic and data is well and good but what gets done rides on rhetoric not logic.
But let me offer a concrete analogy (recognizing that, as with all analogies, it’s analogous and not identical). Every day, about 30 to 35 people are killed in the U.S. in gun homicides or gun accidents (not counting gun suicides or self-inflicted accidental shootings). And every day, likely about 30 to 35 people are killed in homicides where the killer was under the influence of alcohol, or in alcohol-related drunk driving accidents, again not including those who died in accidents caused by their own alcohol consumption. If you added in gun suicides on one side and those people whose alcohol consumption killed themselves on the other, the deaths would tilt much more on the side of alcohol use, but I generally like to segregate deaths of the user from deaths of others.[snip]
So what are we going to do about it? When are we going to ban alcohol? When are we going to institute more common-sense alcohol control measures?
Well, we tried, and the conventional wisdom is that the cure was worse than the disease — which is why we went back to a system where alcohol is pretty freely available, despite the harm it causes (of which the deaths are only part). We now prohibit various kinds of reckless behavior while using alcohol. But we try to minimize the burden on responsible alcohol users, by generally allowing alcohol purchase and possession, subject to fairly light regulations.
But on balance the answer to “what are we going to do about alcohol-related deaths?” is “not much, other than trying to catch and punish alcohol abuse.” And if someone says, “you’re obviously not serious about preventing drunk driving and alcohol-related homicide, because you’re not proposing any new alcohol bans or alcohol sales restrictions,” our answer is generally, (1) “just because there’s a problem out there doesn’t mean that we should impose new regulations that are likely ineffective and possibly counterproductive,” and (2) “punish misuse of alcohol, rather than burdening law-abiding users.”[snip]
We should certainly consider proposals that aim to ameliorate the problem, and weigh their costs and benefits. But we should not presume that there’s somehow a moral imperative to Do Something. In fact, there’s a moral imperative not to do something that’s likely to make matters worse.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
The credit score, once a little-known metric derived from a complex formula that incorporates outstanding debt and payment histories, has become an increasingly important number used to bestow credit, determine housing and even distinguish between job candidates.For all their biases, I love the amount of content that the New York Times generates. That said, they do have a tendency to try and spot emerging trends before they are real. This might be one of those instances.
It’s so widely used that it has also become a bigger factor in dating decisions, sometimes eclipsing more traditional priorities like a good job, shared interests and physical chemistry. That’s according to interviews with more than 50 daters across the country, all under the age of 40.
“Credit scores are like the dating equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease test,” said Manisha Thakor, the founder and chief executive of MoneyZen Wealth Management, a financial advisory firm. “It’s a shorthand way to get a sense of someone’s financial past the same way an S.T.D. test gives some information about a person’s sexual past.”
It’s difficult to quantify how many daters factor credit scores into their romantic calculations, but financial planners, marriage counselors and dating site executives all said that they were hearing far more concerns about credit than in the past. “I’m getting twice as many questions about credit scores as I did prerecession,” Ms. Thakor said.
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things!
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things!
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eye lashes
Silver white winters that melt into spring
These are a few of my favorite things!
When the dog bites, when the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad,
I simply remember
my favorite things
and then I don't feel so bad!
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.It is the classic confusion between correlation and cause. It is also a special form of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, confusing "They have homes and education because they are middle class" with "They are middle class because they have homes and education."
Wilson's body of work—the books and the rest—is beautifully written but simply too vast to be easily summarized. So let me confine my attention to The Moral Sense and several of Wilson's other books. He would applaud that focus, for he held an old-fashioned idea about the importance of books, namely, that almost no academic article, popular essay, op-ed, or (heaven forbid) blog posting, however trenchant or timely, can do the sustained intellectual heavy-lifting, refine the writer's understanding, and illuminate the reader's mind, the way a good book can. As a collegiate debating champion, Wilson knew the difference between winning an argument, on the one hand, and understanding something for oneself or teaching it to others in a way that, as he often said, is "general, meaningful, and true." Good books on complex empirical subjects leave the reader convinced that a shorter work could not possibly have done justice to the subject.
1) Disparity of powerThis is like the old manufacturing adage; "Faster, cheaper, better - Pick two"
2) Private access to power
3) Equality of groups or nations
Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.
We know how to say many falsehoods that look like genuine things,
but we can also, whenever we are willing, proclaim true things.
It takes a mix of knowledge, means, and need to turn discovery into opportunity.
How big is the gender gap at the top? Very big. Only 4 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are women, as are 9 percent of chief financial officers. Women occupy a mere 16 percent of board seats at Fortune 500 companies. The research and advocacy group Catalyst has collected other relevant numbers: just 20 percent of law-school deans, 23 percent of federal judges, and 27 percent of state judges are women. In medical schools, 13 percent of deans and department chairs and 19 percent of full professors are women. Less than a quarter of university and college presidents are female. Women hold 90 seats out of 535 in the U.S. House of Representatives and 17 out of 100 in the Senate. Slaughter notes that many of the women in high-level government jobs she encountered during her State Department stint are leaving; men will succeed almost all of them.One of the assertions that frequently comes up in the field of books and literature is the accusation that women are discriminated against in the awards that they receive. After the last go around on one of the listservs, I looked at the data and if I recall correctly, found that indeed women did tend to win only about 25-35% of the literary awards. Where the analysis hit something of a brick wall was in terms of determining how many women were in a position to win, i.e. how many women writers were there. If women are only 25-35% of writers, then there clearly is little evidence of discrimination if they then only win 25-35% of the prizes.
Unintended consequences happen in America as well. One study of 70 top law firms by The Lawyer found that the most competitive, least family-friendly, “super-elite” firms had more female equity partners than did firms with heavily used family-friendly policies. “The results seem counterintuitive,” one commentator on the study wrote. “Who would guess that women would fare better on the equity barometer at firms where the odds of making partner are ridiculously slim for everyone? By the same token, wouldn’t you expect that at the less competitive, two-tier firms (especially those with well-established part-time or flexible policies), there’d be women equity partners popping out at every corner?”This is very close to the point Sowell was making in post I had, Moderation in principle is always a vice. Sowell is criticizing affirmative action because of the negative consequences of academic mismatch and pointing out that left to competition based on objective standards, the outcomes will be better and fairer for everyone.
Anyone who follows public policy issues can easily think of policies that help one group at the expense of some other group. What is rarer, however, is a policy that on net balance harms all groups concerned, even if in very different ways. Affirmative action policies in the academic world can claim that rare distinction.As always with Sowell it all comes down to "But what are the facts?" Emphasis added:
The empirical data presented in Mismatch shows that black students admitted to colleges and universities where the other students have higher academic qualifications do not graduate as often, graduate with much lower grades, and, when they start out trying to major in difficult subjects like mathematics, the natural sciences, engineering, or economics, they end up majoring in much easier subjects with much less of a payoff in terms of their careers in later life. Moreover, black students with very similar academic qualifications who attend predominantly black colleges succeed in graduating with degrees in the natural sciences, mathematics, engineering, and economics far more often. Nor is this simply a matter of their being granted college degrees while having less knowledge of their subjects. Predominantly black colleges are 17 of the top 21 colleges whose black graduates go on to receive Ph.D.s in scientific, mathematical, and technical fields.17 of 21 - Wow!
In short, black and other minority students seem to learn better at institutions where the other students are similar in academic qualifications. The same conclusion is implied in data on what happened after affirmative action in admissions was outlawed in the University of California system. When racial preferences were banned by the voters in California, there were dire predictions that this would mean the virtual disappearance of black and Hispanic students from the University of California system. What in fact happened was a 2% decline in their enrollment in the University of California system as a whole, but an increase in the number of black and Hispanic students graduating, including an increase of 55% in the number graduating in four years and an increase of 63% in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher.Again, improvements of 55%, 50% and 63% in the graduation rate, STEM enrolment, and in academic achievement? Wow! That is a phenomenal success. That sounds like a win all around.
Instead of the predicted drastic decline in enrollment in the system as a whole, there was a drastic redistribution of black and Hispanic students within the University of California system. Their enrollment dropped at the two most elite campuses, Berkeley and UCLA—by 42% at the former and 33% at the latter. But their enrollment rose by 22% at the Irvine campus, 18% at the Santa Cruz campus, and 65% at the University of California at Riverside. After this redistribution, the number of black and Hispanic students who graduated with degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering "rose by nearly 50 percent," according to Sander and Taylor. The number of doctorates earned by black and Hispanic students in the system rose by about 20%.
The authors of Mismatch draw policy conclusions from their work. The most obvious conclusion might seem to be that group preferences in academic admissions should be ended. But Professor Sander and Mr. Taylor see that as a virtually impossible thing to achieve, and indeed see a beneficial role for "a race-neutral system of smaller, socioeconomic preferences" focused on increasing the enrollment of people from lower income backgrounds, whether such people are black or white or whatever. They apparently see a role for thoughtful statesmanship toward that end by the Supreme Court, which is now considering academic affirmative action issues yet again, after having tried judicial statesmanship before, in earlier decades.Preferential treatment based on individuals from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds? I am absolutely inclined that direction. But then Sowell reproves me.
I could not disagree more with the distinguished authors of this outstanding study. It was precisely by trying to be judicious social engineers and statesmanlike legislators that Supreme Court Justices have left affirmative action a bleeding sore on the body politic that will not heal, but which only produced polarizing bitterness on all sides. The time is long overdue for them to carry out their judicial function and recognize that the 14th Amendment means what it plainly says about "equal protection of the laws."He is right, there is a sharp tug between logic and sense of fairness. Thomas Paine had something to say about that in The Rights of Man.
Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
that focuses on the benefits of the "success sequence": first education, then a stable job, then marriage, and then children.All the sociological evidence is consistent with this. Those that graduate high school, work full time and get and stay married (without children before marriage) have a less than 2% chance of living in poverty.
Getting people to change their behavior and routines is very difficult, so the benefits of such programs are inevitably modest.Wow! We know what people ought to do but it is hard to get them to do that so we shouldn't expect much on that front. Really? That's your conclusion? James Heckman has done some great work on the role of behaviors (or non-cognitive skills as he terms them) and their role in life success. It is pretty rock solid research. How you behave and the decisions you make are the single biggest predictor of beneficial life outcomes. But Kenworthy would have us believe that since it is hard to get people to change their behaviors and make better decisions, we ought simply to give up on that front.
For thousands of years the Jewish people have been forced to move around — fleeing bigotry, slavery, pogroms, famines and tyrants. But words are portable, and to Jews — who are among those known as "the People of the Book" — they are precious possessions. As Amos Oz and his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, write in their new book, Jews and Words, "Ours is not a bloodline, but a text line."[snip]
On what it means to be a "Jewish atheist"[snip]
Oz: "We regard Judaism as a civilization, not just as a religion. I think there are many, many ways to be a Jew. And one of those ways to be a Jew is to be a nonreligious Jew. The heritage contains, first and foremost, books, texts, spiritual creativity. And religion is only one of the components of this magnificent heritage."
Oz-Salzberger: "But part of the poetry is that we can pick and choose our legacies as we please. Every generation anew. And we feel very much at home with some of the heritage and not so much at home with other parts, and we feel entitled to be lovingly selective."
On the relationship between the early itinerant nature of Jews and their dependency on words[snip]
Oz: "For thousands of years, we Jews had nothing but books. We had no lands, we had no holy sites, we had no magnificent architecture, we had no heroes. We had books, we had texts, and those texts were always discussed around the family table. They became part of the family life, and they traveled from one generation to the next — not unchanged, not unchallenged, but reinterpreted in each generation and reread by each generation."
On the evolution of the idea of chutzpah from the Hebrew term for the court of justice[snip] And best of all
Oz-Salzberger: "The term is beit din chatzuf, which is a court of justice which is not manned according to the rules, but its ruling still passes as legal and viable. So there is a sense of transcending the laid laws which has been part and parcel of the mainstream, the healthy mainstream of Judaism, and we love it very much. We call it, in several places in our book, we call it 'reverent irreverence.' People did believe in God. But they often made no bones about critiquing the Lord, and shouting at him, and waving a fist at him and thinking that he got it wrong. This irreverent reverence is part of what has been called, in modern times, the 'chutzpah tradition,' which we deeply relate to as Israelis and as modern human beings."
Oz: "The very term 'Israel' means 'he who struggles with God.' This is the literal, dictionary sense of the word 'Israel.' So chutzpah is built into this civilization. A pupil is not expected to obey, to follow and to learn by heart. A student is expected to say a chiddush, which means something new, something original, something of his or her own interpretation of the sacred texts."
And by the way, I don't think we are worried about the future of the book either. ... Because in many ways our bookishness has come now — you know, looking at it from antiquity until today — full circle, tablet to tablet, scroll to scroll. And back with the tablets and the scrolls with a vengeance."I love it - tablet to tablet, scroll to scroll.
Finally, there’s been a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans told Pew that children were “very important” to a successful marriage; in 2007, just before the current baby bust, only 41 percent agreed. (That trend goes a long way toward explaining why gay marriage, which formally severs wedlock from sex differences and procreation, has gone from a nonstarter to a no-brainer for so many people.)An additional symptom which Douthat does not draw particular attention to is that the retreat from childrearing reflects a focus on consumption over investment. It is the ultimate vote of no confidence by a society upon itself.
Government’s power over fertility rates is limited, but not nonexistent. America has no real family policy to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden and France suggests that reducing the ever-rising cost of having kids can help fertility rates rebound. Whether this means a more family-friendly tax code, a push for more flexible work hours, or an effort to reduce the cost of college, there’s clearly room for creative policy to make some difference.
More broadly, a more secure economic foundation beneath working-class Americans would presumably help promote childbearing as well. Stable families are crucial to prosperity and mobility, but the reverse is also true, and policies that made it easier to climb the economic ladder would make it easier to raise a family as well.
Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.
Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.
In the realm of religious faith, and in that of political belief, sharp differences arise. In both fields the tenets of one man may seem the rankest error to his neighbor. To persuade others to his own point of view, the pleader, as we know, at times resorts to exaggeration, to vilification of men who have been, or are, prominent in church or state, and even to false statement. But the people of this nation have ordained, in the light of history, that, in spite of the probability of excesses and abuses, these liberties are, in the long view, essential to enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of the citizens of a democracy.Too many people too eager to legislate manners, to reduce choices of free people, and to constrict communication between people. There are limits of course but it seems many people wish to set the perimeter very close to home rather than far out on the distant horizon. Sharp differences do arise but as long as there is no harm, the default assumption should be no foul. There are too many people focusing on fostering divisions by race and class and religion and too few focusing on real problems and real root causes. Lovely to see plain language recalling to us the importance of fundamental principles.
The essential characteristic of these liberties is that, under their shield, many types of life, character, opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed. Nowhere is this shield more necessary than in our own country, for a people composed of many races and of many creeds. There are limits to the exercise of these liberties. The danger in these times from the coercive activities of those who in the delusion of racial or religious conceit would incite violence and breaches of the peace in order to deprive others of their equal right to the exercise of their liberties, is emphasized by events familiar to all. These and other transgressions of those limits the States appropriately may punish.
In his new book, Bruce Bawer has proposed an answer to vexing questions: Why has our culture become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public debate coarsened? Bawer locates the source of these misfortunes in the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation—above all, the emergence of multicultural “identity studies.” The academy, he observes, is “the font of the perfidious multicultural idea and the setting in which it is implanted into the minds of American youth.”Berlinski gives Bawer credit for his efforts but
Yet I’m not persuaded by his ultimate argument that our cultural rot emanates fundamentally from the universities. In the first place, these very universities also — still — produce the world’s deepest study of the humanities. Is it fair to associate, say, the Southern Oregon University Center for Shakespeare Studies with the aforementioned stammering bimbo, Michele? Does the syllabus of Miami University’s “Dostoevsky as a Social Philosopher” suggest any preoccupation with Frantz Fanon? This is perhaps not Bawer’s point, but given his conclusion — that parents have been categorically deceived in placing their faith in higher education — it is not unreasonable to point out that many American universities still provide an outstanding introduction to the traditional canon.I share Berlinski's position - Something is rotten in the state of Denmark but it is hard to pinpoint either the nature of the disease or its cause. Our universities are a great source of intellectual renewal and innovation but they also seem to have been very successful in starting all sorts of counterproductive intellectual hares which have ended up harming both individuals and the nation. One area where I suspect that universities are particularly vulnerable is the criticism that they have not been successful in transmitting the existing culture (the source of current success) with any sort of integrity. It is almost as if large swaths of academia are fundamentally unaware of intellectual and cultural sources of prosperity. Cultural illiteracy seems rampant with an ever narrower circle of common ground for people to share.
Despite the vagueness of his argument, Durden seems to be on the right track. In America, especially, no argument for the liberal arts is likely to succeed unless it navigates between the extremes of public and private virtue. In other words, it has to make a plausible case that study of the liberal arts will actually help students find and succeed in rewarding careers. In trying to make that case, however, Durden avoids an important question. For whom are the liberal arts likely to have that effect?Our failure to deliver a consistently high and comprehensive education in K-12, the roots of which failure are many, complex, and politically unpalatable, roils on, undermining the actual value matriculates are able to obtain from university.
The answer, I suspect, is relatively few of the students currently enrolled in higher education. As my old professor Jackson Toby has observed, students who enter college with strong preparation in reading and writing, abstract reasoning, and simple concentration can profit a great deal from study in the liberal arts. But students who lack these skills are unlikely to learn much in college. And that’s almost always too late for fundamental remediation.
The conclusion that the liberal arts are useful for students who are prepared to benefit from them before entering college is backed up by Durden’s CV. Although he doesn’t mention it in the piece, Durden attended Albany Academy, a respected private day school, before taking his double B.A. at Dickinson.
That doesn’t mean Durden was child of privilege. According to his Wikipedia entry, he was the first in his family to attend college. But it does mean that he began higher education with the skills he needed to make good the implicit usefulness of the liberal arts. Students who struggle with basic tasks in reading and writing can’t do that, no matter who their parents are.
What emerges from this patchwork biography is not just a portrait of contradiction, but a portrait of a woman who was balancing—sometimes ineptly—the roles of mother, wife, and celebrated author. L’Engle published her memoir A Circle of Quiet at age 54 in 1972, the same year Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX. Roe v. Wade would be decided the following year. “For young women who as preteen girls a decade earlier had caught compelling reflections of themselves in the out-of-sorts yet stupendously purposeful character Meg,” Marcus points out, “the new book came just in time to offer some guidance through the minefields of mid-twentieth century American womanhood.” As Marcus makes clear, L’Engle took this responsibility quite seriously, answering hundreds of letters, leading countless writing workshops and retreats, and taking on numerous speaking engagements.Earlier I came across this research report, More Facebook friends means more stress, says Business School report from University of Edinburgh.
But what many of her readers craved was a personal testimony that could serve as a roadmap for their own development. It was something she could not, or would not, offer, preferring to tell a story that she felt hewed closer to a subjective truth. “Something might be factually correct but still lead you to the wrong conclusion,” says her friend Barbara Braver. Indeed it might, but our current age has no patience for useful fictions presenting themselves as fact. In another interview, one of L’Engle’s former fiction editors tells Marcus that the Crosswicks Journals contain “a memoir ethos drawn from another time.” Marcus, on the other hand, has correctly identified that readers today appreciate full disclosure and are willing to sift through competing narratives.
That is why for the early-twenty-first century reader, Marcus’s book is more instructive than the memoirs L’Engle left behind. The contradictions of L’Engle’s life offer the best insights into the complicated acrobatics we perform in the modern world in order to satisfy the competing claims of love, family, success, and ambition.
A report from the University of Edinburgh Business School has found that the more groups of people in someone's Facebook friends, the greater potential to cause offence. In particular, adding employers or parents resulted in the greatest increase in anxiety.Complicated acrobatics indeed. As we become more connected there are fewer secrets, less discretion, an absence of nuance which enriched (and troubled) earlier environments. The desirable attribute of transparency is just a small divide away from a glaring antiseptic light.
Stress arises when a user presents a version of themself on Facebook that is unacceptable to some of their online 'friends', such as posts displaying behaviour such as swearing, recklessness, drinking and smoking.
Ben Marder, author of the report and early career fellow in marketing at the Business School, said: "Facebook used to be like a great party for all your friends where you can dance, drink and flirt. But now with your Mum, Dad and boss there the party becomes an anxious event full of potential social landmines."
Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think of in connection with the empires of the ancient world. The stirrup and the wheel created unique environments of enormous scope. Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike. In our time the sudden shift from the mechanical technology of the wheel to the technology of electric circuitry represents one of the major shifts of all historical time. Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected new environment—it created the public. Manuscript technology did not have the intensity or power of extension necessary to create publics on a national scale. What we have called “nations” in recent centuries did not, and could not, precede the advent of Gutenberg technology any more than they can survive the advent of electric circuitry with its power of totally involving all people in all other people.There's the heart of it - "its power of totally involving all people in all other people". We have created an infrastructure of enormous opportunity to all people in virtually all places. In an environment of information abundance, the critical tasks become filtering, connecting and assimilating information into a coherent and productive framework. What enables one person to realize their potential likewise enables another to dissipate their potential in random searches and intellectual dalliances.
The unique character of the “public” created by the printed word was an intense and visually oriented self-consciousness, both of the individual and the group. The consequences of this intense visual stress with its increasing isolation of the visual faculty from the other senses are presented in this book. Its theme is the extension of the visual modalities of continuity, uniformity, and connectiveness to the organization of time and space alike. Electric circuitry does not support the extension of visual modalities in any degree approaching the visual power of the printed word.
For as long as there been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.Wise men back then. Congress needs a refresher course.
McDonald’s verdict is both well-founded and unsparing: “As pivotal players in the market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must take a large slice of the blame. But above all, it was the distortion of the banking system to achieve political ends that ultimately caused the crisis.” What she does not do is draw any wider lessons. Yet there are, I believe, at least two important lessons to be drawn.My perspective is that this is yet one further example of good intentions joined with fallible politicians deploying complex solutions to achieve desired outcomes but with virtually no clear comprehension of the inherent complexity of the system being manipulated and no systemic feedback mechanisms to exact accountability.
The first is that government-sponsored enterprises, or what in the UK would be called public-private partnerships, are to be avoided like the plague. Designed to secure the best of both worlds, they invariably end up exhibiting, if not the worst of both worlds, the benefits of neither. In particular, they escape both the discipline of effective state (ie Treasury) control and the discipline of the marketplace.
Systemically important banks, considered too important to fail, come very close to being in this category – which is why they need to be as limited in scope and as small a part of the overall banking scene as is practicable.
The second is that the efficacy of financial regulation is strictly limited. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in common with the rest of the US financial sector, were subject to detailed regulation. For reasons well described in this book, it failed completely.
Not to beat around the bush, the Grant study was a study in eugenics, as that term was understood in the 1930s. This was just a decade after Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in Buck v. Bell, upholding Virginia’s sterilization policy on the grounds that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” One of the study’s early leaders, the anthropologist Earnest Hooton, hoped it would lead to “effective control of individual quality through genetics, or breeding.”Caldwell's review is a capstone to three other books I am currently reading: It Ain't Necessarily So (a discussion of the many slips between research and knowledge), The Half-Life of Facts (an exploration of the development and accretion of knowledge) and The Signal and the Noise (an investigation of how we make sense from data).
A mesomorphic (muscular) body type was a sign of the right stuff; blubbery endomorphs and gangly ectomorphs were less promising. But Sigmund Freud had made inroads into American academia, too. So the Grant study was, from the outset, an uneasy mix of phrenology, somatotyping, race theory, and psycho-analysis. Not only did the young men have their skulls, pulses, and scrota measured; they also took Rorschach tests and filled out questionnaires about how they’d been toilet trained and how often they masturbated.
The study was barely a decade old when the revelations of World War II and the nascent civil rights movement brought its original eugenic slant into disrepute. But there had to be some use for those hundreds of blue-blood men on the hook to be studied intimately for a lifetime, and a use was found. In 1954, the tobacco industry gave the study money to look for “the positive reasons” that people smoke. For a decade after 1972, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism sponsored its research, and Vaillant published his book The Natural History of Alcoholism in 1983.
Vaillant is particularly insistent that “defense mechanisms”—character adjustments that allow psycholo-gically wounded humans to adjust to, and overcome, their pain—“are not just one more dogma of the psychoanalytic religion.” He even developed a four-stage hierarchy to prove that mature defense mechanisms, such as humor and altruism, produce a better adjustment to life at age 65 than immature defense mechanisms, such as psychotic distortion and hypochondria. In other words, his study has proved that an ability to adapt predicts an ability to adapt.For all that, it is an example of exploratory science - bold, original well-intended by the lights of the time. Progress is not made by logic but by exploration and discovering the problems as we proceed. Later science builds on the errors of earlier science. Make no mistakes and you make no progress.
Vaillant’s boldest conclusions generally take this form: tautologies presented as if they belong in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. He sets up a “Decathlon of Flourishing”—a rather redundant list of career, health, and family outcomes—and then speaks of a “capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.” Since Vaillant has already defined flourishing as an ability to enter and nurture relationships, this is not a surprise. He also establishes that a person who is well-integrated (i.e., able “to surmount common problems which confront him such as career choice, competitive environment, and moral and religious attitudes”) is more likely to flourish later in life. In other words, people who are good at addressing life’s problems do better at life than those who are not.
* Science Denialism (my opponent is stupid)In a second paper from Kahane, Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental Study, he concludes that
* Misinformation (my opponent is gullible)
* Bounded Rationality (my opponent is ignorant)
* Authoritarian personality (my opponent is a subservient follower)
subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognitionA while ago, I posted about the proclivity of the most educated tend to make worse financial decisions than others (Course credit wise, financially foolish).
But college-educated people were more likely than those with high school or less education to be above this 40 percent threshold - considered to be a risky amount of debt for most households.Finally George Will has an opinion column (Colleges have free speech on the run) citing a researcher indicating that
The association between more education and higher debt was true even after taking into account the fact that people with more education tend to have higher incomes.
those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view.I can't find an original citation on that research.
There are always more plausible accounts of social phenomena than are actually true. Empirical observation and measurement are necessary--not just to enlarge collective knowledge but also to steer people away from dead ends as they search for effective solutions to the society’s problems.We so often come up with a plausible explanation for a phenomena and then, rather than testing it directly, we simply proceed as if the conceptualization of a plausible explanation is the same as proving it with messy objective empirical data.
One of the things I talked about in my Ely lecture was what mechanism might underlie the long term effects, and I raised the idea of “epigenetic” changes as one possibility. The way I like to think about that is you have the gene, which only changes very slowly when you have mutations. But then kind of on top of the gene you have the epigenome, which determines which parts of the gene are expressed. And that can change within one generation. There are animal experiments that do things like change the diet of guinea pigs and all the baby guinea pigs come out a different color. It can be pretty dramatic. ... The idea is that the fetal period might be particularly important because these epigenetic switches are being set one way or another. And then once they’re set, it’s more difficult to change them later on.This ties together both the idea of evolution (genes) and development (epigenetics).
I think we haven’t really been able to look at all of the implications of that given the limitations of the data. We don’t have very much data where we can follow people from, say, in utero to some later period. But, that’s where the frontier is, trying to do that kind of research and make those linkages....
I think a really interesting thing about the fetal origins hypothesis for public policy is that if it’s really important what happens to the fetus, and some people think that maybe the first trimester is the most important or the most vulnerable period, then you’re talking about women who might not even know that they’re pregnant. It really means you should be targeting a whole different population than, say, 15 years ago, when we thought, oh, we need to be targeting preschool kids instead of kids once they reach school age. Now we’re kind of pushing it back. Then it was, “We need to be playing Mozart to infants.” Now the implication is that we’ve got to reach these mothers before they even get pregnant if we really want to improve conditions.
Epigenetics implies that it does not make sense to talk about nature versus nurture. If nature is the gene and nurture is the thing that sets the switches, then the outcome depends on both of those things. So you can’t really talk about nature or nurture in most situations. It has to be some combination of both.
One of the things I talked about in my Ely lecture was what mechanism might underlie the long term effects, and I raised the idea of “epigenetic” changes as one possibility. The way I like to think about that is you have the gene, which only changes very slowly when you have mutations. But then kind of on top of the gene you have the epigenome, which determines which parts of the gene are expressed. And that can change within one generation. There are animal experiments that do things like change the diet of guinea pigs and all the baby guinea pigs come out a different color. It can be pretty dramatic. ... The idea is that the fetal period might be particularly important because these epigenetic switches are being set one way or another. And then once they’re set, it’s more difficult to change them later on."It has to be some combination of both." - Too right as they say in some parts of the world. Epigenetics is one of those knowledge frontiers that well warrants further study.
I think we haven’t really been able to look at all of the implications of that given the limitations of the data. We don’t have very much data where we can follow people from, say, in utero to some later period. But, that’s where the frontier is, trying to do that kind of research and make those linkages....
I think a really interesting thing about the fetal origins hypothesis for public policy is that if it’s really important what happens to the fetus, and some people think that maybe the first trimester is the most important or the most vulnerable period, then you’re talking about women who might not even know that they’re pregnant. It really means you should be targeting a whole different population than, say, 15 years ago, when we thought, oh, we need to be targeting preschool kids instead of kids once they reach school age. Now we’re kind of pushing it back. Then it was, “We need to be playing Mozart to infants.” Now the implication is that we’ve got to reach these mothers before they even get pregnant if we really want to improve conditions.
Epigenetics implies that it does not make sense to talk about nature versus nurture. If nature is the gene and nurture is the thing that sets the switches, then the outcome depends on both of those things. So you can’t really talk about nature or nurture in most situations. It has to be some combination of both.
Most unskilled jobs in developed countries are necessarily in personal services. Workers in China can assemble your iPhone but they cannot serve you lunch, collect your refuse or bathe your grandmother. Anyone who thinks these are not “real jobs” does not understand the labour they involve. There is a subtle gender issue here: work that has historically mostly been undertaken by women at home – like care and cooking – struggles to be regarded as “real work”.Most discussions of gender issues is so much tosh but I think Kay is right, that historical assumptions and stereotypes might cloud clear economic thinking when it comes to the services economy.
“Everyone knows” that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. After all, this is the advice of a multitude of health writers, not to mention authorities like Britain’s National Health Service. Healthy living now means carrying water bottles with us, sipping at all times, trying to drink our daily quota to ensure that we stay hydrated and healthy.Echoes many of the themes in Samuel Arbesman's The Half-Life of Facts which chronicles many instances of things that everybody knows that just aren't so. It also calls to mind the quotation attributed to Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Indeed, often we drink without being thirsty, but that is how it should be: as the beverage maker Gatorade reminds us, “your brain may know a lot, but it doesn’t know when your body is thirsty.” Sure, drinking this much does not feel comfortable, but Powerade offers this sage counsel: “you may be able to train your gut to tolerate more fluid if you build your fluid intake gradually.”
Now the British Medical Journal reports that these claims are “not only nonsense, but thoroughly debunked nonsense.” This has been common knowledge in the medical profession at least since 2002, when Heinz Valtin, a professor of physiology and neurobiology at Dartmouth Medical School, published the first critical review of the evidence for drinking lots of water. He concluded that “not only is there no scientific evidence that we need to drink that much, but the recommendation could be harmful, both in precipitating potentially dangerous hyponatremia and exposure to pollutants and also in making many people feel guilty for not drinking enough.”
I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
Campaigners on important but complex issues, annoyed by the length of time required for public deliberations, often react by exaggerating their claims, hoping to force a single solution to the forefront of public debate. But, however well intentioned, scaring the public into a predetermined solution often backfires: when people eventually realize that they have been misled, they lose confidence and interest.
"The experimental condition created the perception that the driver of this particular vehicle was perhaps a deviant," he said. "And what we did in order to trigger that perception was place a men's magazine on the front seat to suggest some sort of interest in sexuality and a couple crushed beer cans underneath the seat to suggest that the person probably had been drinking and driving."The upshot is that the more you signal that you are different from the expected norm, the more likely you are to suffer negative consequences. In this case, the more aberrant you seem, the more likely other aberrants are to rob you.
Kinkade found that the cash was twice as likely to be stolen from when the magazine and beer cans were present. He also found that larger amounts of money were taken from the car, compared with when the magazine and beer cans were absent
Old enough to remember Simon and Schuster as actual people (“they were as different as chalk and cheese”), Mr. Wouk has written a novel that is startling in its modernity, at least in terms of format. “The Lawgiver,” which arrives on Tuesday, weaves a comedic yarn using letters, text messages, memos, Variety articles, e-mails and Skype transcripts. An epistolary novel, he decided, was the only way to tackle a subject he had spent decades trying to crack: Moses.Almost immediately following that observation, I then came across this article, The Bathsheba Syndrome: The Ethical Failure of Successful Leaders by Dean C. Ludwig and Clinton O. Longenecker.
“In terms of narrative, my boy, there’s nothing but the Bible for sheer storytelling,” Mr. Wouk (pronounced woke) said. “How do you get at something that has already been done so perfectly? I suppose that explains part of my ‘fixation,’ as you put it.”
This paper suggests that many ethical violations by upper managers are the by-product of success — not of competitive pressures. Our research suggests that many managers are poorly prepared to deal with success. First, success often allows managers to become complacent and to lose focus, diverting attention to things other than the management of their business. Second, success, whether personal or organizational, often leads to privileged access to information, people or objects. Third, with success usually comes increasingly unrestrained control of organizational resources. And fourth, success can inflate a manager's belief in his or her personal ability to manipulate outcomes. Even individuals with a highly developed moral sense can be challenged (tempted?) by the opportunities resulting from the convergence of these dynamics. We label the inability to cope with and respond to the by-products of success the Bathsheba Syndrome, based on the account of the good King David (a story familiar in a variety of traditions). Recognition of this phenomenon implies that we change or broaden our approach to the teaching of business ethics. It also implies that organizations must re-evaluate and change structures, procedures, and practices which enhance the likelihood of managers falling victim to the Bathsheba Syndrome.The paper is not especially well written or backed up with the type of data I would like to see which is disappointing. Particularly because I believe they are on the right trail. They have stated what I believe is a true and correct conclusion without providing the necessary underpinning to support it.
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