Near Cagnes, evening, 1924 by Félix Vallotton (Swiss, 1865-1925)

Near Cagnes, evening, 1924 by Félix Vallotton (Swiss, 1865-1925) 

Click to enlarge.

I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 8 page 153.  This section of his will is interesting in the context of the New England Puritan wills which are a mere two decades after Shakespeare's death.

Shakespeare left £350 in cash plus four houses and their contents and a good deal of land—worth a little under £1,000 all together, it has been estimated—a handsome and respectable estate, though by no means a great one. His bequests were mostly straightforward: To his sister he left £20 in cash and the use of the family home on Henley Street for the rest of her life; to each of her three children (including the one whose name he could not recall) he left £5. He also left Joan his clothes. Though clothing had value, it was extremely unusual, according to David Thomas, for it to be left to someone of the opposite sex. Presumably Shakespeare could think of no one else who might welcome it.

The most famous line in the document appears on the third page, where to the original text is added an interlineation, which says, a touch tersely: “I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture” (that is, the bedclothes). The will does not otherwise mention Shakespeare’s widow. Scholars have long argued over what can be concluded about their relationship from this.

Beds and bedding were valued objects and often mentioned in wills. It is sometimes argued that the second-best bed was the marital bed—the first bed being reserved for important visitors—and therefore replete with tender associations. But Thomas says the evidence doesn’t bear this out and that husbands virtually always gave the best bed to their wives or eldest sons. A second-best bed, he believes, was inescapably a demeaning bequest. It is sometimes pointed out that as a widow Anne would automatically have been entitled to one-third of Shakespeare’s estate, and therefore it wasn’t necessary for him to single her out for particular bequests. But even allowing for this, it is highly unusual for a spouse to be included so tersely as an afterthought.

A colleague of Thomas’s, Jane Cox, now retired, made a study of sixteenth-century wills and found that typically husbands said tender things about their wives—Condell, Heminges, and Augustine Phillips all did—and frequently left them some special remembrance. Shakespeare does neither, but then, as Samuel Schoenbaum notes, he offers “no endearing references to other family members either.” With respect to Anne, Thomas suggests that perhaps she was mentally incapacitated. Then again it may be that Shakespeare was simply too ill to include endearments. Thomas thinks it’s possible that Shakespeare’s signatures on the will were forged—probably not for any nefarious reason, but simply because he was too ill to wield a quill himself. If the signatures are not genuine, it would be something of a shock to the historical record, as the will contains half of Shakespeare’s six known signatures.

He left £10 to the poor of Stratford, which is sometimes suggested as being a touch niggardly, but in fact according to Thomas it was quite generous. A more usual sum for a man of his position was £2. He also left 20 shillings to a godson and small sums to various friends, including (in yet another interlineation) 26 shillings apiece to Heminges, Condell, and Richard Burbage to purchase memorial rings—a common gesture. All the rest went to his two daughters, the bulk to Susanna.

Apart from the second-best bed and the clothes he left to Joan, only two other personal possessions are mentioned—a gilt-and-silver bowl and a ceremonial sword. Judith was given the bowl. The likelihood is that it sits today unrecognized on some suburban sideboard; it was not the sort of object that gets discarded. The sword was left to a local friend, Thomas Combe; its fate is similarly unknown. It is generally assumed that Shakespeare’s interests in the Globe and Blackfriars theaters had been sold already, for there is no mention of them. The full inventory of his estate, listing his books and much else of value to history, would have been sent to London, where in all likelihood it perished in the Great Fire of 1666. No trace of it survives.

History

Etruscan Gold Centaur Earrings, c. Late 4th - Early 3rd Century BC. pic.twitter.com/os6ThRKZrt

— Archaeology & Art (@archaeologyart) April 8, 2022

 

History

The medieval Titanic! The sinking of the White Ship in 1120. This tragic event had significant consequences for English history and for history of Europe as a whole. But what caused this ship manned by experienced sailors to sink? Let's explore this event! pic.twitter.com/ZsNi1uxGCL

— Aristocratic Fury (@LandsknechtPike) April 7, 2022

 

An Insight

UN routinely warns us that we have just a few years left until catastrophe:

In 1990, Tolba, head of UN Environment Programme told the world must fix global warming before 1995

— Otherwise, we'd lose the climate struggle

Earth Island Journal; Summer 1991, Vol. 6 Issue 3, p38 pic.twitter.com/ZMZyE7viuZ

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) April 7, 2022

 

I see wonderful things

Octopus don't have bones. Their only solid body part is their beak – so they can squeeze through anything larger than that. pic.twitter.com/ANz9kxvl0z

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 6, 2022

 

Offbeat Humor

Remember when people got a cold, laid up for a few days with ginger ale and chicken noodle soup, took some Vitamin C, and then lived the rest of their life without virtue signalling about it?

— Conscious Reflection 🌖 (@ReflConscious) April 9, 2022

 

Data Talks

How times have changed: 10 most downloaded apps in App Store in #Russia, February (left) and March (right) pic.twitter.com/rCAMHW3I0j

— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) April 7, 2022

 

The open door, circa 1910 by Peter Vilhelm Ilsted (Danish, 1861-1933)

The open door, circa 1910 by Peter Vilhelm Ilsted (Danish, 1861-1933)

Click to enlarge.

Student loan debt - The result of a well intended but badly designed predatory government program

From Who Really Benefits From Student-Loan Forgiveness? by Jerusalem Demsas.  The subheading is The proposal’s prominence has less to do with its merits than with college graduates’ agenda-setting power.

Much of interest in the article and I do not dispute the main conclusion - that student debt forgiveness is being mooted in the Democratic Party, not because it is good economic or social policy, but because it disproportionately benefits members of five key constituencies in the Democratic coalition; the upper middle class, journalists, government employees and teachers unions, and academia.  

Regrettably, Demsas never tackles the most central and relevant issue.  Does the federal student loan program(s) as currently constituted deliver on its mission which is to equitably make higher education accessible to all Americans and thereby increase the financial prosperity of the recipients?  That is a noble mission even when sensibly caveated by concerns related to declining returns on education, attrition, etc.

I am uncertain that the answer is yes.  There is evidence that the number (and percentage) of people attending university and receiving degrees has indeed risen, in part owing to the loan programs, but there are also many indicators which suggest that the degrees earned are not delivering increased prosperity to the recipients and the costs for most recipients are not commensurate to the benefit.

If, hypothetically, in a given age cohort, 25% will earn a college degree and will increase their otherwise anticipated familial income by doing so, that is the benchmark to use.  If a federal student loan program allows 30% of the cohort to attend university and earn a degree but the additional 5% of degree earners do not actually increase their income, then the program is a failure.  It has cost the nation a lot, it has cost the 5% a lot, and it has not added to the national prosperity.  I suspect that that is where we are.

I have heard the federal student loan programs as appearing to be the result of a predatory design committee made up of drunken sociopathic high school students who aspire to be loan sharks.  Virtually every rule of common sense and fairness is insulted by the programs as they are actually executed.  

The way the program is designed, it is easy for too many naive people to end up taking on too much debt pursuing degrees of too little value and then ending up with ever ballooning interest payments.  The old notorious company store except run by the government.  

It appears to me that the 25% (or whatever the benchmark number might be) will always attend university and benefit from doing so.  The extra 5% facilitated by these loan programs will incur costs and attain no benefits and their life arc will be materially degraded.  By the government.  By design.

Demsas identifies five reasons why this has happened and all of those five have some merit.  I think the biggest reason remains unstated.  The programs are ill-designed and deliver bad results for everyone despite their good intentions.  To reform the programs and redesign them to deliver better results will expose too much, gore too many oxen, and deprive too many interests of their sinecures.  

We have gotten ourselves, as a nation, into a very bad and very deep hole ($1.7 trillion deep).  We need to reform the whole program or it will keep wasting scarce national resources and immiserating too many naive young adults, probably disproportionately concentrated among the poor and marginalized.

Instead, our unspeakably immoral and ignorant political leaders want to make a bad program worse by wiping out $1.7 in national assets while leaving the program in place to immiserate the next generational cohort.  

This is reprehensible in the extreme.

From the article.

Some items end up on the agenda because a towering majority of Americans demand change—the most obvious recent example is rising gas prices. Student debt feels different. After all, just 13 percent of the country carries federal student debt. Gallup frequently asks Americans what they believe is the most important problem facing the country today. According to the Gallup analyst Justin McCarthy, the pollster is unable “to report the percentage of Americans who have mentioned student debt or student debt cancellation because it hasn’t garnered enough mentions to do so.” In 2022 so far, he told me via email, Gallup has conducted four polls on the question and “just one respondent mentioned this as the most important problem facing the nation.”

Why, then, is student-debt cancellation having such a moment in the national political conversation?

Demsas identifies five reasons and overlooks the main reason (that it is embarrassing to reform such a bad  program because it will reveal just how bad it is).  Reason five has some merit.

Reason five: The power of college graduates

According to Catalist data, roughly 43 percent of the 2020 Biden electorate graduated from a four-year college or university. Compare that with 2012, when, according to Pew, just 36 percent of registered Democrats had completed a four-year degree or more. Given that trend, student-loan forgiveness may seem like the classic tale of a political party transferring a valuable benefit to a crucial constituency.

Although college-educated voters are an important segment of the Democratic Party, no one identity group is completely dominant. The party has long been a coalitional organization stitched together loosely and lacking a clear ideological core. Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, explained a coalitional shift within the party in recent years. “Democrats are becoming more consistently liberal in a variety of ways, and they’re becoming more upper-middle-class all at once,” he told me. “And that creates some awkwardness.”

Awkward indeed that so much energy has been spent on a policy proposal that would affect just 13 percent of the population, and that would send the most dollars to high-income earners and those with graduate degrees. The fervor with which student-loan advocates argue that these policies are in fact racially and economically progressive may be an attempt to resolve the awkwardness that Schlozman describes—advocates of debt cancellation are trying to build a coherent narrative for why a diverse coalition, many of whom have never attended college, should be in favor of forgiveness.

College-educated voters are not just dominant within the Democratic Party; they also dominate the media and, naturally, academia—two institutions that have significant power over what issues are brought to the fore. Importantly, academia and media have also become notoriously unstable work environments lacking sufficiently well-paying jobs. The demographics and precarity of these fields are likely playing a role in the prominence of the student-loan-forgiveness debate.

Interestingly, Demsas also overlooks one final aspect of the Democratic coalition.  Women.  They are 56% of the Democratic Party voters.  Women are 60% of college students but they also have a strong inclination towards earning the least monetarily valuable degrees.  They would be among those to benefit the most from debt forgiveness.  

The Democratic Party has ended up in a position where they are arguing to maintain a program which does not achieve the goal of increasing access to financially beneficial higher education and which does harshly penalize people whose devalued degrees are not worth the debt incurred to receive them.  

They are also arguing that already preferentially treated upper middle-class and women (who disproportionately end up as government workers) should be granted loan forgiveness by a nation of middle class and blue collar workers facing much greater financial burdens and much more uncertain  economic prospects.

Student loan forgiveness is important to the Democratic Party and its needy constituents but at the expense of the rest of the nation.