In the old, old movie, from the H. G. Wells story, “Things to Come,” the forces of scientific good (led by Raymond Massey) use a gas to knock out warring parties, to stop the shooting, and to give the good guys a chance to disarm disputants and set things right.
1936 movie poster for "Things to Come" - WikiMedia image
That was fictional. The “Gas of Peace” doesn’t exist.
The sniping will continue about P. Z. Myers’ complaint that some Catholics grossly over reacted when they threatened death to a fellow who didn’t swallow his wafer at communion, and then kept the wafer (not a hostage — the wafer has been returned), and a lot of the sniping will come from Rod Dreher at the Dallas Morning News.
Santayana’s Ghost needs to do more active haunting. We can’t excuse tyranny from a church, nor tyranny from any government in the United States of America, either. Freedom typically works better when the freedom to offend is greater than the privilege of being free from being offended. Why doesn’t Dreher see that?
In the U.S. we still have people throwing themselves in front of Zambonis to protest doing anything about global warming. In Russia, warming is taken as a fact.
If a guy beats someone to death, it’s murder, right? And so the nation’s labor laws hold an employer liable for the death of a worker when unsafe working conditions caused the death.
But what if the worker doesn’t die? What if the worker only loses his arms, or legs, or arms and legs?
No death, no crime, U.S. law says.
What if the employer poisons the worker with cyanide that eats away the worker’s brain?
No death, no crime, U.S. law says.
My colleagues and I were shocked to learn that an employer who breaks the nation’s worker-safety laws can be charged with a crime only if a worker dies. Even then, the crime is a lowly Class B misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of six months in prison. (About 6,000 workers are killed on the job each year, many in cases where the deaths could have been prevented if their employers followed the law.) Employers who maim their workers face, at worst, a maximum civil penalty of $70,000 for each violation.
To maintain its standing as an economic power, the United States must encourage programs that help students achieve the highest levels in math and science, especially in poor communities where the teacher corps is typically weak.
The National Academies, the country’s leading science advisory group, has called for an ambitious program to retrain current teachers in these disciplines and attract 10,000 new ones each year for the foreseeable future. These are worthy goals. But a new study from a federal research center based at the Urban Institute in Washington suggests that the country might raise student performance through programs like Teach for America, a nonprofit group that places high-achieving college graduates in schools that are hard to staff.
Recruiting high-achievers, across the board and not just with the help of a flagship do-gooder program, will require that starting salaries be competitive with those jobs where people of high caliber flock. Education competes with accounting, law, medicine and other high-paying professions for the best people.
If Milton Friedman and Adam Smith were right, that most people act rather rationally in their own interests, economically, which jobs will get the best people?
Teaching is the only profession I can think of where the administrators and other leaders threaten to fire the current teachers, work to keep working conditions low and unsatisfactory, and say that more money will come only after championship performance.
There isn’t a person alive who hasn’t cursed George Steinbrenner and said that he or she could run the Yankees better. Whenever he opens his checkbook, the nation howls. And yet, year in an year out, the Yankees win.
Is there any fool alive who thinks Steinbrenner could do what he does by cutting pay, not cleaning the locker room, and drafting the cheapest players he could find? Were we to assume Steinbrenner the world’s most famous lousy boss, there are a million education administrators who would need to step it up to get to Steinbrenner’s level.
As Utah Phillips famously said, graduates are about to be told they are the nation’s greatest natural resource — but have you seen how this nation treats its natural resources?
Oh, I miss Molly Ivins.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The site offers a lot. E-mail updates on issues, cheap DVDs of the movie ($10.00 each for the first 10, $9.00 each for the next 10 . . . you may want to get a copy for each social studies classroom), background stories to the movie, story of Annie Leonard, background sheets, lists of organizations working on the issues and reading lists and more. I found no lesson plans, but you can surely cobble one together for an hour class, with 20 minutes taken up by the film. Plus you can download the movie, for free.
Go noodle around the site: There are lots of possibilities for student projects, student discussions, in-class exercises, homework, and fun.
This movie details, quickly and with good humor, the economics of recycling, the economics of waste disposal, and the economics of production. This provides a great gateway to talk about civics and government, and how to make things happen like garbage collection and recycling; a gateway to talk about economics, especially the various flows of money and goods; a gateway to talk about geography and how we have used our land and rivers to bury and carry waste; and how we use natural resources generally.
This would also be a good video for Boy Scout merit badge classes for the Citizenship in the Community and Citizenship in the Nation badges.
Contrasted with most of the industrial grade video I’ve seen for economics classes, this is fantastic. It’s better than any of the sometimes ambitious, but ultimately dull productions from the Federal Reserve Banks (are you listening, Richard Fisher? Hire Will Brehm’s group). (No offense, Osgood — yours is the best of that lot.)
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., probably has political objections to the movie, claiming it leans left, which indicates it’s in the mainstream. If you’re using any other supplemental material in your classes, this just balances it out.
Screen capture from the film, “Story of Stuff”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Evening at the Fed Dinner and Discussion for High School Teachers Dallas, November 29, 2007
Houston, December 4, 2007 San Antonio, December 11, 2007
El Paso, December 13, 2007
Financial Markets: Innovations and Challenges
The 2007 Evening at the Fed series will feature Jeffery Gunther, assistant vice president and senior economist in the Dallas Fed’s Financial Industry Studies Department. Gunther will speak on factors leading up to the recent financial market turmoil, in particular the role of nontraditional financial instruments. He will address such questions as:
Are financial innovations, such as hedge funds, forever changing the financial landscape?
What happened in the U.S. sub prime real estate market?
What does the consumer need to understand about nontraditional financial instruments?
What impact do these new financial instruments have on the US economy?
Join us at a location convenient for you. The fee to attend is $15, which includes dinner and materials. Space is limited and the registration fee must be received by the cut-off date.
This would probably be a good session for government and U.S. history teachers, too.
From this lead paragraph in a BusinessWeek story could come a heck of a semester of high school economics:
Leonid Hurwicz was born in Moscow in 1917, the year that Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Ninety years later—on Oct. 15, 2007—Hurwicz was awarded a Nobel prize in economics, in part for explaining the fundamental flaw in the central planning that Lenin imposed in the Soviet Union.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It’s headed up by a bunch from downunder. U.S., Canadian and Mexican bloggers haven’t got on the bandwagon a lot, yet. As the organizers describe it:
On October 15th – Blog Action Day, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind.
In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment.
What Each Blogger Will Do
Bloggers can participate on Blog Action Day in one of two ways:
Publish a post on their blog which relates to an issue of their own choice pertaining to the environment.For example: A blog about money might write about how to save around the home by using environmentally friendly ideas. Similarly a blog about politics might examine what weight environmental policy holds in the political arena.Posts do not need to have any specific agenda, they simply need to relate to the larger issue in whatever way suits the blogger and readership. Our aim is not to promote one particular viewpoint, only to push the issue to the table for discussion.
Commit to donating their day’s advertising earnings to an environmental charity of their choice. There is a list of “official” Blog Action Day charities on the site, however bloggers are also free to choose an alternate environmental charity to donate to if they wish.
And that’s it.
A gentle nudge to a better planet. Seems like a good idea to me.
Today is the 46th anniversary of the beginning of the Berlin Wall. The post I wrote last year on this topic continues to be popular, day in and day out, but especially when high school curricula get to the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift, the 1960s, and the collapse of the Soviet empire, best exemplified by the destruction of the Berlin Wall itself and the reunification of Germany.
Here is another photo from his collection. It comes without caption; from the barbed wire and the uniform and helmet, I would say This is cropped version of a photo of an East German soldier, Conrad Schumann , assigned to shoot people trying to breach the wall to escape to West Germany, who instead decided to leap to freedom himself, probably at Checkpoint Charlie, one of three gates between East and West Berlin. I regret I have no further credit information on the photo on August 15, 1961. The photo is by West German photographer Peter Leibing, then working for Contiepress, in Hamburg.
German authorities announced the Wall was open for travel between the two entities of divided Germany on November 9, 1989. Jubilant Germans on both sides of the wall tore down sections, poked holes in the concrete barriers, and generally vandalized the wall over the next few weeks. Negotiations then led the way for the Reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990.
The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.
On so many levels, that discussion offers opportunities for students of economics to understand how markets, finance, and borrowing work. This news report alone could be the foundation for a couple of weeks of lesson plans on international finance, the Federal Reserve system, government spending, and general operation of markets.
Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning – for the first time – that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress.
Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies.
Described as China’s “nuclear option” in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels.
It would also cause a spike in US bond yields, hammering the US housing market and perhaps tipping the economy into recession. It is estimated that China holds over $900bn in a mix of US bonds.
Xia Bin, finance chief at the Development Research Centre (which has cabinet rank), kicked off what now appears to be government policy with a comment last week that Beijing’s foreign reserves should be used as a “bargaining chip” in talks with the US.
Could China afford to try such a move? Would it sink their economy, too? How could the U.S. try to mitigate such a move? Does this mean the U.S. needs to seriously control trade with China, or would that kind of interference in free markets do more damage by itself?
Disregard all hysteria. The ailing Greenback will not collapse this year, not in ten years, not in twenty years, not in half a century. There is no credible currency against which it can collapse. (Unless you count gold). None of the world’s rival power blocs have the economic and demographic depth to challenge American dominance.
What do your local newspapers say? How can you use this to weave together a coherent narrative for your economics curriculum, starting in a week or two?
While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.
— Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), “Wealth,” in the North American Review, June 1889.
Rosten is probably most famous for the introduction he once gave to the comedian W. C. Fields, a spur-of-the-moment bon mots that so exactly described Fields comedian persona that it is often listed as a line Fields himself wrote: “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.”
That story also tells us that Rosten looks at Adam Smith coolly, through no rose-colored glass.
It is a clumsy, sprawling, elephantine book. The facts are suffocating, the digressions interminable, the pace as maddening as the title is uninviting: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. But it is one of the towering achievements of the human mind: a masterwork of observation and analysis, of ingenious correlations, inspired theorizings, and the most persistent and powerful cerebration. Delightful ironies break through its stodgy surface:
“The late resolution of the Quakers [to free] their Negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great …”
“The chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.”
“To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising customers [is] unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”
So comprehensive is its range, so perceptive its probings, that it can dance, within one conceptual scheme, from the diamond mines of Golconda to the price of Chinese silver in Peru; from the fisheries of Holland to the plight of Irish prostitutes in London. It links a thousand apparently unrelated oddities into unexpected chains of consequence. And the brilliance of its intelligence “lights up the mosaic of detail,” says Schumpeter, “heating the facts until they glow.” Sometimes.
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 – not as a textbook, but as a polemical cannon aimed at governments that were subsidizing and protecting their merchants, their farmers, their manufacturers, against “unfair” competition, at home or from imports. Smith set out to demolish the mercantilist theory from which those politics flowed. He challenged the powerful interests who were profiting from unfree markets, collusive prices, tariffs and subsidies, and obsolete ways of producing things.
Immigrants’ Contribution to Economic Growth “The pace of recent U.S. economic growth would have been impossible without immigration. Since 1990, immigrants have contributed to job growth in three main ways: They fill an increasing share of jobs overall, they take jobs in labor-scarce regions, and they fill the types of jobs native workers often shun. The foreign-born make up only 11.3 percent of the U.S. population and 14 percent of the labor force. But amazingly, the flow of foreign-born is so large that immigrants currently account for a larger share of labor force growth than natives (Chart 1).”
Foreign-born share of U.S. Labor Force and Labor Force Growth; Orrenius, Dallas FRB
No, the company didn’t go out of business. It was taken private by its management, after being a public company for three years. From the Baltimore Sun morning e-mail:
Educate becomes a private company
Educate Inc. has completed its transition into a private company, ending its three-year run on public markets.
Best known for its Sylvan tutoring centers, the Baltimore company, which was purchased in a management-led buyout, traded for the last time on the Nasdaq yesterday.
The investor group that purchased the company is led by chief executive officer R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric, other executives and affiliates of Sterling Capital Partners and Citigroup Private Equity. They paid $8 a share for the company in the deal valued at $535 million.
The company announced this week that more than 75 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which came as the firm has struggled with poor product sales.
Internal reorganization was swift. The company’s website carried this note this morning:
On June 13, 2007, through a merger transaction, Edge Acquisition, LLC became the owner of Educate, Inc. In a related series of simultaneous transactions, the companies which were part of Educate, Inc. have been split into the following independent companies:
Educate Services, which includes Sylvan Learning, Catapult Learning, and Schulerhilfe;
Educate Online, Inc., which includes Catapult Online and eSylvan;
Progressus, Inc.; and
Educate Corporate Centers Holdings, Inc., which is a franchisee of various Sylvan Learning and owner of Sylvan Learning Centers.
The companies are now operating independently to better serve students, families and schools across the country. To learn more about the merger and related transactions, click here.
Making a profit delivering education is rare. Milton Friedman notwithstanding, free market rules do not apply to educational enterprises in the same way they do to other services. This is one more example, or set of examples, that should give pause to any rational person considering making public schools “compete” for money to improve education for any child, especially any group of children. Sylvan Learning Centers are considered to be the top of the heap in their niche; Hooked-on-Phonics is a cliché success story. And they “struggle with poor product sales.”
I hope the company finds the education answers, the magic bullets, and can retail them at affordable prices.
The answer, by the way, probably is not 42.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
