We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Sheila Lawlor, director of the think tank Politeia, is concerned that the status of teachers is low and that too few people apply to become teachers. She regrets that in Britain it is rather easy to get a place in a teaching course whereas elsewhere in Europe the entry qualifications are strict. In an article for the Times entitled Get higher grades from teachers first, she writes:
Would raising entry standards at least to those of comparable European countries help to improve matters? Or would, as one union threatened some time ago, a GCSE Grade B in maths mean that applications to the profession collapse? Probably more terrifying for the Government than bad teachers is the prospect of no teachers. Yet far from threatening the supply of teachers, higher and tougher entry standards bring greater competition for places. In France five candidates compete for each job. Here the highest entry levels set for medical school go along with the most sought after university places.
This is an interesting argument. Well, not exactly argument, since having raised the question of whether making it harder to become a teacher might not reduce the supply of teachers as common sense and two and a half centuries of observed economics might lead one to expect, she simply asserts that the converse is true: “Higher and tougher entry standards bring greater competition for places.”
I think the bit that is meant to be the argument is the next sentence, saying that in France – where, as the article has said earlier, the status of teachers is high, and the qualifications required to become a teacher are also high, there are many people who want to be teachers.
Back in 1974 the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture in which he described the beliefs of certain primitive tribes:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.
See, the tribe of the French get the cargo. Let us do as the French do and surely the cargo will flow to us!
Ms Lawlor, like the cargo cultists, is persuaded that by imitating some of the forms (runways, men with headphones, high entry qualifications for teaching) associated with a desired state of affairs (free goodies from the gods, high status of teachers) one can cause that state of affairs to come about.
To be fair to Ms Lawlor, economists do speak of certain goods for which demand, contrary to the usual way of things, goes up as the price goes up. I think they are either called Veblen goods or Giffen goods but trying to nail down which might apply here is giffen me a headache. I will concede that just possibly increasing the entry qualifications for teaching might conjure down a little status from the sky. Perhaps one or two easily-led souls might be induced to apply for a teaching course as a result. But compared to the numbers put off from doing so by the frequent unpleasantness and occasional danger involved in teaching in a British state school, this is very minor magic indeed.
Sorry. No airplanes land.
The government forgets that George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, and not a blueprint
– Chris Huhne
“Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources they’re going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems. And, by the way, if they come up with a better solution but it can’t be cheaper – which, in the beginning, most things aren’t – nobody says you have to buy it. If you think this new drug is too expensive, it’s not a good deal, we have a crisis, buy the old one. It’s a generic now. It’s cheap. You can’t look at the problem and say, “I want them to do more, better, faster miracles – and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.” It’s unrealistic. And people know that about most things. They do. Nobody expects that just because they’ve made computers better they’re going to give them to you free.”
– Dean Kamen, warning about how US medicine will be demaged by socialistic “reforms” by Mr Obama. Mind you, I get the distinct impression that health care could turn out to be one of the biggest problems for The Chicago Community Organiser, who seems to be losing a lot of his post-election goodwill. And not before time.
Tom Palmer on the late, Marxist philosopher, G.A. Cohen, who died a few days ago:
Millions had to die so that Cohen and his rich friends could enjoy “a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism”. Words almost fail me. But not entirely. He should have spent his life begging forgiveness from all of the people who suffered from his pro-Soviet (he spent a good bit of his youth as a Soviet propagandist, which was essentially a family enterprise) and pro-Communist activities. He was no different than any old National Socialist who might have regretted that National Socialism wasn’t nationally socialist enough, but who enjoyed the “mental space” it created to construct fantasies of an ideal life.
They say it is wrong to speak ill of the dead, or at least, recently deceased. But given the enormity of the evil associated with Soviet Russia – the millions killed, starved to death and generally immiserated – that I consider it to be a moral failing not to call out those who chose to look the other way, or make excuses, for what that regime represented, and what it did. G.A. Cohen was more honest that some Marxists/egalitarians in at least recognising the force of the classical liberal critique of his views; he did, for example, appreciate that the Lockean idea of Man as a “self owner” and the associated right to pursue the acquisition of property was a serious challenge to collectivism. But in the end he brushed it aside. I did not realise that Cohen was an apologist for the Soviet Empire in the way that Palmer describes. That came as quite a shock.
By the way, G.A. Cohen’s arguments are nicely and civilly dissected by Jan Narveson’s splendid book, The Libertarian Idea. And Tom Palmer’s own book looks also to be well worth checking out.
Okay, be honest now… this time last week, how many of you had heard of Georgian blogger Cyxymu? Hello? Anyone? No, I suspected as much. Me neither.
So… imagine you are some Russian nationalist jackanapes hoping to silence a critic of Russian foreign policy and you get a bright idea:
“Hey Boris! Lets unleash the bots of war and do a massive world wide takedown of Twitter, facebook and Livejournal so that no one will read those nasty things mean old Cyxymu is saying about Mother Russia!”
Pure genius. Now, does anyone who reads the tech press (or indeed the mainstream media) not now know who Cyxymu is?
Although Russia abounds with fascistic nationalists who could have done this off their own initiative, in truth an epic fail of this magnitude anywhere in the world generally implies government involvement.
Russia continues its steely eyed march into hilarious self-parody and irrelevance (unless you happen to be a tiny powerless neighbour)…
… get yer pecs out Obama, your soul mates want to play.
One of the Republican senators who voted for the new US Supreme Court member has quit to “get on with his life”. As the man is a Cuban, perhaps he will consider doing that back in Cuba as clearly he cares nothing for private property rights (Sotomayor supported the majority on Kelo)… or maybe he supported Sotomayor because he thinks race trumps al?
… either way he is exactly the sort of person who needs to be drummed out of the party in disgrace.
What does one call a state partially ruled by a club for police chiefs and ‘law enforcement’ bureaucrats who do not wish to obey the law?
As I read a recent issue of New Scientist this morning, I very nearly skipped over an article titled “Falling Out of Love With Market Myths” with a photo on the fold of Ronald Reagan walking with Margaret Thatcher. The title and presentation leads one to expect the sort of thing one would expect from British academic types, and ditto, check… the article was written by an Oxford educated academic named Terence Kealey, now a Vice-Chancellor at the University of Buckingham.
I plowed on any way and was rewarded by a very surprising statement:
In fact, the evidence shows otherwise. In 2003, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published The Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries, reporting on a comprehensive regression analysis of the factors that might explain the different growth rates of the world’s 21 leading economies between 1971 and 1998. This indicated that only privately funded R&D led to economic growth, and that publicly funded R&D did not. Worse, the public funding of R&D crowded out private funding, and thus slowed economic growth.
Surprising, that is, in the sense of being a key element of an article in New Scientist by a member of academia. It is a very interesting article and well worth reading.
… for the US Supreme Court. Quelle surprise, Judge Sonia Sotomayor gets approved for the highest court of the land in the USA.
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life
Thus sayeth Sonia Sotomayor in 2001. As Newt Gingrinch pointed out, can you imagine the reaction if a white male Bush appointee for the Supreme Court had ever, and I mean ever said:
I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life
The New York Times and Washigton Post would be filled cover to cover with KKK allusions and the nomination would be ‘challenging’ to say the least. But of course this only works one way.
This is yet another useful litmus test on Republican politicians (and indeed anyone who calls themselves ‘conservative’).
Did they implacably oppose Sotomayor? If not, they are indisputably and unequivocally ‘on the other side’, which is to say they are unalloyed statist collectivists and exactly the sort of people who must be driven from the party if it is even going to be worthy of the title ‘opposition’, rather than ‘Obama’s Loyal Cheerleaders’… and until the Republicans can become a meaningful opposition party, it cannot be a alternative that is worth voting for because in truth voting for such a party is just voting for more of the same, just in a different wrapper: a toxic illusion of choice.
Now is not the time for Republican unity, it is the time for for the party to tear itself apart and put a great many people to the political sword without remorse or pity… starting with nine US senators.
I must admit that in many respects, I find the former Labour cabinet minister, Roy Hattersley, to be a bit of a buffoon in his clinging to socialist dogmas of a planned, highly taxed economy. But he can write: and this essay on the funeral of Harry Patch, who had been the last surviving British soldier of the First World War, is first class.
In a perhaps understandably nasty tirade about Harriet Harman, Rod Liddle, the Spectator’s resident yob, we get this paragraph:
“The reason we should have disquiet about Harriet is because she is either thick or criminally disingenuous. My guess is thick. Being a bit thick should not disqualify someone from leading their party, I suppose, as both Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Salisbury would concur.”
Well it may be true that Ms Harman is as dumb as a stump, a moron of heroic proportions, completely out of her depth, etc. But Lord Salisbury? The gentleman, who was prime minister for long periods at the end of the 19th Century when the British Empire was at its greatest extent, was hardly thick. Wrong, maybe, but thick, no. His shrewd handling of foreign affairs for certain periods, for example, puts him considerably ahead of most contemporary politicians. And he was quite libertarian in many ways, a skeptic about the efficacy of government power to improve human lives. A sign of wisdom, I’d say.
In making such an assertion about Lord Salisbury’s alleged thickness, Mr Liddle comes across as a bit of a thickie himself. And in wondering out loud about the sexual desirability, or lack, of these various New Labour women, he also undermines what might have been a good essay on the awfulness of their ideas by being so incredibly crass. But maybe I am just old fashioned or something. “That is the trouble with you, Johnathan, you’re not “edgy” enough.”
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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