Measured by the dollar amount involved, the nationalisation of the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced today by the Bush Administration, is the largest in history. No less than $5 trillion of assets and obligations have been taken over by the US government in one hit.
Of course, that debt had long been regarded as having an implicit government guarantee and the companies involved were quangos (in the original sense of quasi-NGOs) rather than genuine private firms. Fannie was a government agency privatised in the 1960s, and Freddie was created to provide competiion for Fannie. So even though the US government will now guarantee virtually all new mortgages, this is more an admission of existing reality than a big step towards socialism.
The significance of the event is not in the marginal change in the status of Fannie and Freddie from quasi-private to quasi-public, but in the abandonment of the pretence that the normal operations of financial markets are capable of cleaning up the mess they have created, even with the liberal helpings of public money that have already been dished out.
There’s an ongoing low-level argument in our house about Teach for America, which may reflect our own dispositions more than any actual disagreement. My spouse doesn’t like it much, because it promotes the idea that teaching is something clever people can do just because they are clever, and she doubts that the students who do it are very good in the classroom (she has some experience of non-standard routes into the classroom, having, herself, entered LAUSD as an emergency credential teacher straight out of college, the year before TfA began). I agree with all that, of course, and the students of mine who have done it give very mixed reports back to me. But taking into account the fact that the classrooms the TfAers occupy would mostly be occupied by similarly under-qualified teachers, most of whom will leave within a couple of years and some of whom within a couple of weeks, and having seen on campus the way that TfA has harnessed (and, it seems to me, contributed to) the idealism of high-performing students, I have a more positive take on it (the dispositional difference here is probably between viewing glasses as half-full or half-empty; though our dispositions are reversed when it comes to politics more generally). So when the TES asked me to profile a “thinker who has influenced education”, my wife suggested Wendy Kopp, and I thought it would be a way to work out my thoughts a bit more. It was a nice coincidence because Charles Windsor had just become the patron of Teach First, the UK organisation modeled on TfA.
“[T]he court made no distinction between what needs were reasonable, given the age of the children, and what simply amounted to a ‘fourth pony,'” wrote Parker, who was joined by Judges Rudy Coleman and Thomas Lyons.
Hilzoy has some “word by word analysis”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_09/014585.php of John McCain’s convention speech, which reminded me that I hadn’t seen anyone do any convention speech Wordles. Which doesn’t mean that no-one has done one – just that they don’t seem to be popping up in the blogosphere. So here are yer wordles for Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, in that order (I’ve used different colour schemes for the Democratic and Republican nominees to make it easier to distinguish them).
Jim Henley “writes”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2008/09/05/8647 :
bq. Oh by the way: “Country First” is a fascist idea. There ought to be a fairly large number of people, things and groups that are more important to you than your “country.”
Well, as a Brit, I oughtn’t to intrude, but I can report that within seconds of reading Jim’s post, a certain Woody Guthrie song was going through my head …..
A Chronicle story, annoyingly behind a paywall, here. The gist:
Kent State University is trying a new and unusual tactic to improve its
status, retention rate, and fund raising—paying cash bonuses to
faculty members if the university exceeds its goals in those areas.
The bonuses are built into a contract, approved last month, that covers
864 full-time, tenure-track faculty members who teach and do research on
the university’s eight campuses. Proposed by Lester A. Lefton, Kent
State’s president, the “success bonus pool” will be divided among
faculty members if the Ohio institution improves retention rates for
first-year students and increases the research dollars it generates and
the private money raised through its foundation.
To key things. The bonuses don’t replace regular pay, and merit increases. Nor does it look as if they will be unequally distributed: it seems that the plan is to distribute them equally among the faculty. The faculty reps seem happy enough with this, as they would be. There’s no word about whether the academic staff and adjuncts are included in the plan; and I just assume that the rest of the workforce, many of whom have the kinds of interactions with students that make a big difference to whether they stay or dont stay, are not included, but I’d like to learn that I’m wrong about that.
Oh how times change! I rather doubt that “a piece of 1958 research on how children behave when locked in fridges”:http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/22/4/628 would make it past a modern university ethics committee!
bq. Using a specially designed enclosure, 201 children 2 to 5 years of age took part in tests in which six devices were used, including two developed in the course of this experiment as the result of observation of behavior. Success in escaping was dependent on the device, a child’s age and size and his behavior. It was also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined. Three major types of behavior were observed: (1) inaction, with no effort or only slight effort to get out (24%); (2) purposeful effort to escape (39%); (3) violent action both directed toward escape and undirected (37%). Some of the children made no outcry (6% of the 2-year-olds and 50% of the 5-year-olds). Not all children pushed. When tested with devices where pushing was appropriate, 61% used this technique. Some children had curious twisting and twining movements of the fingers or clenching of the hands. When presented with a gadget that could be grasped, some (18%) pulled, a few (9%) pushed, but 40% tried to turn it like a doorknob. Time of confinement in the enclosure was short for most children. Three-fourths released themselves or were released in less than 3 minutes; one-fourth in less than 10 seconds. Of those who let themselves out, one-half did so in less than 10 seconds. One-third of the children emerged unruffled, about half were upset but could be comforted easily, and a small group (11%) required some help to become calm.
I wrote a short piece on Howard Gardner for the TES this summer. They’ve been running a series on thinkers who have influenced education. I’m not sure why they asked me to do Gardner, but I was glad to oblige (I also volunteered, at my wife’s suggestion, to do Wendy Kopp: coming soon). It was a slightly odd experience, for two reasons. I’ve quite recently gotten to know Gardner, not very well, but well enough to make it a bit awkward if I had a negative assessment of his work (I don’t, far from it). The other is that, whereas I imagine the TES editors assumed that, as an education professor, I would have come across Gardner’s work in the course of my professional life, that’s not true. In fact my dad told me to read his stuff, starting when I was in grad school. My dad is Gardner’s #1 promoter in the UK, so at least I got to know his work the same way many of the TES’s readers did. Here’s the piece (I disavow any responsibility for titles, by the way).
I see that David Benatar’s excellent book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence has just come out in paperback. It’s almost enough to make me regret that I am on sabbatical this coming year. In my Contemporary Moral Issues course I always teach abortion as the first topic, because it gets them to read two of my favourite pieces of applied philosophy, Thomson’s A Defence of Abortion, and Marquis’s Why Abortion is Immoral. I also take a bit of time to discuss conceptual space, and used to use the view that abortion is always obligatory as an example of conceptual space that no-one occupies. Now, however, I include chapter 5 of Benatar’s book (Abortion: the ‘Pro-Death’ View) in the course packet. Benatar is a terse, unfussy, and careful writer: the argument is complicated, but the writing is excellent, and it is an easy, and compelling, read. I was annoyed that it first came out in an expensive hardback which I could not, in good conscience, assign, and feared that it would not sell well enough to be paperbacked. So, now I’ll be happy to assign it.
The opening lines give the basic structure of the argument:
Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad-and considerably worse than most people recognise it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. Creating new people is thus morally problematic.
Obviously, this shouldn’t be taken too, indeed at all, seriously, but I did a little playing around to try to discover which nation did best at the Olympics. I’m told (or at least, I read in the _Times_ the other day) that some US commentators favour an assessment based on total medals won divided by population. Well they would, wouldn’t they? But obviously, some medals are worth more than others and you want to take some account of relative economic development. So here’s what I did: I assigned 7 points for gold, 3 for silver and 1 for bronze and then divided by Gross National Income in $billion (PPP adjusted) as given by the Nationmaster site. GNI is going to vary positively by population and by economic developement, thereby capturing both relevant facts. The GNI figures are probably not completely accurate, and I had to plug in a figure for Cuba. I also discarded all nations that scored less than 50 points (there’s a pretty big an convenient gap below that score). The result is in the table below. So well done Jamaica, and, among the OECD countries, Australia.
On the strength of my mighty “Back to the Futura” post, I got an offer from the Prospect Magazine to review Font. The Sourcebook [amazon]. And so I have. Alas, it is not available to non-subscribers, but you could always run to your local news vendor and clamor for it. Or subscribe. Writing the piece was an amusing sort of pin-the-tail challenge because I wasn’t quite sure what the editor wanted. So I just did my usual la-de-da look-at-me Holbo-style thing. Which, of course, was very sensibly stripped away. No, really. It was for the best. (When you write brief journalism about language in that style, you end up sounding like William Safir.)
The review got entitled “Building A Better Futura”, so I’m maxed-out on Futura-future puns for the rest of the month. I concluded the review by squeezing in a quick note on my ongoing would-Obama’s-poster-have-been-illegal researches. (Executive summary: the Nazis were crazy.) Now I’ll just sweep together a few other bits and scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor. [click to continue…]
Following on from my stock-picking post of a couple of days ago, it appears that the people selling Obama into the convention were right in as much as they didn’t expect a post-convention bounce.
However, the Obama WTA contract was offered around 54 when I wrote the post, and remained at that level all day. CT readers who bought on my advice can now close out at 59.8 and make a quick 10% turn. So at least I haven’t cost you money.
Two points (I realise I’m getting sucked back into a debate I had sworn to give up, but there you go). First, there was no convention bounce in the polls but there was in the IEM numbers. So was there a convention bounce? I think the fact that this question doesn’t obviously have an answer rather underlines the fact that the IEM market prices aren’t giving us very much useful additional information over and above the daily tracking polls (which are themselves not incredibly useful). Second, all the action is in the WTA contract; the vote share contracts have hardly moved at all over the last few days.
Update: I’m now seeing reports of an “8-point convention bounce, which would make the IEM action seem more sensible, albeit at the cost of rather demonstrating how pointless this short-term horse race coverage is.
I’d like to put an empirical claim on the table for discussion. The claim is that people who have never done a significant amount of informal carework, are extremely likely to underestimate the burdens of care. In this claim I include care for small children, severely disabled people, dependent elderly, or any other human being in need of significant amounts of informal caring. And with burdens of care I mean all sorts of burdens – they can be physical, or psychological, or emotional, or another dimension, or (most likely) a mixture of these.
Now, I am not entirely sure where to look for empirical evidence which can confirm, refute or help me to refine or revise this claim. Perhaps in a psychology or sociology of care literature? I have come across plenty of anecdotal evidence, but haven’t come across a study that has investigated this claim in a qualitatively-grounded quantitative way (or a similar claim, perhaps focusing on just one type of care situation). Anyone suggestions for literature? Anyone views on the plausibility of this claim?
(family stands facing the empire state building) Tourist son: Mom, which one is the Empire State Building? Tourist mom: I think it’s the one with the circley top. (points to the Chrysler Building) Tourist dad: No, honey, it’s the one way out there, on the water. Tourist son #2: That’s the Statue of Liberty. [To no one in particular:] I can’t believe I’m part of this fucking family.
has just come out in paperback. It’s almost enough to make me regret that I am on sabbatical this coming year. In my Contemporary Moral Issues course I always teach abortion as the first topic, because it gets them to read two of my favourite pieces of applied philosophy, Thomson’s 
[amazon].