Education and “Then and Now” Thinking

The great historian A. J. P. Taylor (the ideal historian in the opinion of Professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard/Stanford) shows us the “comfortableness” of the world for at least some people before “the guns of August” and WWI destroyed that social world:

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post-office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. he had no official number or identity card.  He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission.  He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit.  He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home.  For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.  Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service.

“An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence.

“Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those who helped the state who wished to do so.

“The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale:  nearly 200 million pounds in 1913-14, or rather less than 8% of national income.  The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours.  The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13.

“Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment.  This tendency to more state intervention was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905.

Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone. All this was changed by the impact of the Great War.”

(A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945, Oxford, 1965, page 1)

It seems hard to argue that life has become more “charming” since then and this pre-WWI seems much more calm, sane and relaxed than the world of 2019.  Thinking about “then and now” gives us a feel for the decay in some domains despite the cascade of technologies, gadgets, things.

Japan-Watching Business Conditions

Indexes of Business Conditions September 2019 Preliminary Release JAPAN

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“Indexes of Business Conditions September 2019 Preliminary Release” was released at 14:00 (JST) on Nov. 8.

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Data Students Should Follow

The Weekly Coal Production report has been updated for the week ending November 2, 2019.

  • Estimated U.S. coal production totaled about 12.6 million short tons (MMst)
  • This production estimate is 0.6% lower than last week’s estimate and 16.6% lower than the production estimate in the comparable week in 2018
  • East of the Mississippi River coal production totaled 5.3 MMst
  • West of the Mississippi River coal production totaled 7.3 MMst
  • U.S. year-to-date coal production totaled 598.3 MMst, 5.7% lower than the comparable year-to-date coal production in 2018

For more information, read the report.

Contact:
Fadi Shadid
202-586-6393
Email to: fadi.shadid@eia.gov

(U.S. Energy Information Administration, The Weekly Coal Production report: November 7, 2019)

Education and the Question of Fecklessness

We propose in Meta Intelligence an education that is completely global and cosmopolitan from Day 1.

The problem with education as a confusing area of activity is revealed to us in an episode of the great Japanese novel, The Makioka Sisters.

The Makioka Sisters (細雪 [Sasameyuki], “Light Snow”) is a novel by Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (died in 1965) that was serialized from 1943 to 1948. It follows the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family’s attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko.

In the novel, there’s a description of a “failed educational odyssey:”

“Mimaki was an old court family. The present viscount, the son, was well along in years. Mimaki Minoru, son by a concubine, was a graduate of the Peers School and had studied physics at the Imperial University, which he left to go to France.  In Paris he studied painting for a time, and French cooking for a time, and numerous other things, none for very long.

“Going on to America, he studied aeronautics in a not-too-famous state university, and he did finally take a degree, it seemed.

“After graduation, he continued to wander about the United States, and on to Mexico and South America. With his allowance from home cut off in the course of these wanderings, he made a living as a cook and even as a bellboy. He also returned to painting and even tried his hand at architecture.

“Following his whims and relying on his undeniable cleverness, he tried everything. He abandoned aeronautics when he left school.”

(The Makioka Sisters, Vintage Books, 1985, Seidensticker translation, page 473-474)

This person winds up dabbling in architecture after his return to Japan.

This episode in Tanizaki’s great novel gives us a “flashlight” or “searchlight” into the whole problem of educational confusion.  Is this simply a case of one person’s “fecklessness?”  Is this just a case of what’s called “failure to launch” (see the movie by this name)?

Or is it partly perhaps that education as a “lockstep system” of schools, exams, courses, semesters, quizzes and grades is very “inhospitable” to “searchers?”

If we call everyone who “stumbles around” a dilettante and a feckless failure, we might be unnecessarily “binary,” exclusionary and unaware of the problem of “cold educational ecosystems” which punish exploring for those who are not “born specialists.”  Winners and losers are too polarized as an educational judgment, perhaps.

The classic German novel about youthful confusions is Fontane’s classic Irrungen, Wirrungen (Trials and Tribulations, 1888) and perhaps an argument could be made that the coldly “binary view” of “successes” versus “the feckless” causes the loss of many young people who had various kinds of emotional resistance to education as an “Olympics” of sorts, with “winners and losers.”  This might be seen as a kind of overly narrow kind of “edu-brutality” which is intolerant of more difficult adjustment stories for young people, which are not uncommon.

Info Students Should Know

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

BEA News:  Gross Domestic Product by State, Second Quarter 2019

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has issued the following news release today:

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the second quarter of 2019. The percent change in real GDP in the second quarter ranged from 4.7 percent in Texas to 0.5 percent in Hawaii.

The full text of the release [archived PDF] on BEA’s website can be found here.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis provides this service to you at no charge. Visit us on the Web at www.bea.gov.  All you will need is your e-mail address.  If you have questions or need assistance, please e-mail subscribe@bea.gov.

Neuroscience by Itself Limited

Senators John McCain of Arizona and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts died in recent years of brain tumors (such as gliomas and glioblastomas). It is perfectly reasonable to wonder if neuroscience, neuropathology and brain science might one day be able to vaporize tumors without damaging the “host” brain at all.  Who could possibly be against such progress?  After all, if you had an impacted wisdom tooth and could choose between seeing an oral surgeon at a major hospital or going to a dentist at the time of Plato, you would choose the oral surgeon. 

These truths obscure a deeper problem in all “reductivist” sciences namely the relationships between the brain and the mind and the person.  This was anticipated by Gabriel Marcel (died 1973) when he wrote in his journal that he puzzled all his life over the conundrum that “I both have a body while I am a body…having and being are twined around each other.”

The outstanding French philosopher Paul Ricœur (died in 2005) gives us a useful hint:

“To the extent that the body as my own constitutes one of the components of mineness, the most radical confrontation must place face-to-face two perspectives on the body—the body as mine, and the body as one body among others.  The reductionist thesis in this sense marks the reduction of one’s own body to the body as impersonal body.

“The brain indeed differs from many other parts of the body, and from the body as a whole in terms of an integral experience, inasmuch as it is stripped of any phenomenological status and thus of the trait of belonging to me, of being my possession.  I have the experience of my relation to my members as organs of movement (my hands), of perception (my eyes), of emotion (the heart), or of expression (my voice).  I have no such experience of my brain. In truth, the expression ‘my brain’ has no meaning, at least not directly: absolutely speaking, there is a brain in my skull, but I do not feel it. It is only through the global detour by way of my body, inasmuch as my body is also a body and as the brain is contained in this body, that I can say ‘my brain.’

“The unsettling nature of this expression is reinforced by the fact that the brain does not fall under the category of objects perceived at a distance from one’s own body. Its proximity in my head gives it the strange character of non-experienced interiority.  Mental phenomena pose a comparable problem.”

(Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Other, University of Chicago Press, 1994, page 132)

In other words, the removal of brain tumors such as glioblastomas or the alleviation of migraine headaches in headache clinics is one level of activity and is perfectly valid and neuro-scientific. On the other hand, the relation between brain, mind, body and self is a complete mystery as sensed by Gabriel Marcel and Ricœur.  It is not mechanistic and we lack the language to captures such resonances.

Money and funding and prestige and their relationship to science keep obscuring the deeper truths.  This is also why excellent TV shows on PBS, such as the recent The Brain Series with Charlie Rose, led by the marvelous Professor Eric Kandel (Columbia University Nobelist) comes across as overly narrow—too narrow and curiously unsatisfying.  At a certain point, ‘mechanistic’ descriptions of phenomena like creativity are not convincing.

The education we visualize and promote here would happily straddle neuroscience and those levels of understanding that are beyond it.

Japan-Watching Made Simple

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry E-mail Service (2019/11/6) JAPAN

Wed 11/6/2019 3:30 AM

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry

This e-mail is a free service to inform you about new information on the METI Home Page.

On November 6, the following information was added:

[Press Releases]

FIT-Based Contracts between Household Consumers and Electricity Companies Start to Expire Sequentially [archived PDF]

Decision on Cabinet Order for Stipulating the Enforcement Date of Partial Revision of the Patent Act, etc. [archived PDF]

The 32nd Tokyo International Film Festival to be Held [archived PDF]

METI Parliamentary Vice-Minister Miyamoto Visits Slovakia and France [archived PDF]

The Inaugural TCFD Summit Held in Japan [archived PDF]

——–Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry——–

Nietzsche’s Insights Used for Educational Improvement

Nietzsche (died in 1900) said things that are strangely relevant for our educational quest:

1. “ALWAYS IN OUR OWN COMPANY”

“Everything that is of my kind, in nature and in history, speaks to me, praises me, spurs me on, comforts me—everything else I don’t hear or forget right away.  We are always only in our own company.”

(The Gay Science, Number 166, page 135)

Nietzsche sensed the tendency towards solipsism in people. This reminds us of William James in his classic essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.”

One immediately senses then the need for a many-sided cosmopolitan education to combat this “we are always only in our own company.”

2. “BEING DEEP AND SEEMING DEEP”

“Those who know they are deep strive for clarity.

“Those who would like to seem deep to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd takes everything whose ground it cannot see to be deep:

it is so timid and so reluctant to get into the water.”

(The Gay Science, Number 172, page 136)

3. “THE THINKER”

“He is a thinker: that means he knows how to make things simpler than they are.”

(The Gay Science, Number 189, page 139)

There is a way to make things simpler than they are without distortion and oversimplifying (i.e., the skill for “essentializing”).  Thinking means partly:  finding the right way to simplify, as suggested here by Nietzsche.

(The Gay Science, [originally 1882/1887], Cambridge University Press, Bernard Williams, editor, 2001)

Historical Understanding as a Moving Target: Modernity

Daniel Defoe (died 1731) was a great English writer whom you remember from such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

He was also a very astute economy-watcher and published numerous tracts and studies on the British economic scene of the 1720s, such as:

Now normally we associate British industrialism from the 1760s or thereabouts as the launching of modern England with the transport revolutions (railways to cars and buses and subways and cars and planes) and the communications revolution (telegraph to phone to internet to cellphones) and so on.

The very distinguished English historian Christopher Hill shines an alternative light on this trajectory into the modern when he writes: “The England around which Daniel Defoe was beginning to tour at the end of our period (1720s) was very different from that through which James I rode in 1603. We are already in the modern world—the world of banks and cheques, budgets, the stock exchange, the periodical press, coffee-houses, clubs, coffins, microscopes, shorthand, actresses and umbrellas.”

“It is a world in which governments put first the promotion of production, for policy is no longer determined by aristocrats whose main economic activity is consumption. The country as a whole has become far richer. The amount raised in taxes has multiplied by twenty-five.”

(Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714, Norton 1966, page 307)

In the 1720s of Defoe’s commercial travels in England, the techno-industrial revolutions are still far off. And yet Professor Hill states “we are already in the modern world.”

Lastly: if you see the miniseries on TV, Moll Flanders, based on Defoe’s novel, the phrase “the wheel of fortune spins again” is a motif in the series and one gets the feeling that the society is very changeable and “modern transitory,” where, as Marx put it, “All that is solid melts into air.”

Thus so-called “modernity” can be thought of as a “moving target” for our historical understanding.

Staying on Top of Key Data

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

BEA News:  U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, September 2019


The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has issued the following news release:

The U.S. monthly international trade deficit decreased in September 2019 according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.  The deficit decreased from $55.0 billion in August (revised) to $52.5 billion in September, as imports decreased more than exports. The previously published August deficit was $54.9 billion.  The goods deficit decreased $2.7 billion in September to $71.7 billion.  The services surplus decreased $0.1 billion in September to $19.3 billion.

The full text of the release on BEA’s website can be found here.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis provides this service to you at no charge.  Visit them on the Web at www.bea.gov. All you will need is your e-mail address.  If you have questions or need assistance, please email customerservice@bea.gov.