I’ve had one comment in response to my previous Blog, “Making too much of and from a public good.” It’s from Alex, who says, “Leonhardt’s statement begs the question, conflating free markets (read capitalism) with anarchy. This is nonsense. Implicit in Capitalism is the social contract, and that includes things like police, courts, defense.” The [...]
Archive for March 2010
More on Public Goods
March 30, 2010Making too much of and from a “public good.”
March 27, 2010David Leonhardt, in this Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine says: “A public good is something that the free market tends not to provide on its own, to the detriment of society. Pollution laws and police departments are classic examples.” Elsewhere, in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal I read: “In Vallejo, CA compensation packages for [...]
On the Opinion Pages of the New York Times
March 24, 2010How do I begin my day? Well like so many other members of my tribe of (idle) idea mongers, I begin it with coffee and the Internet Times, still posted there on the Web, free for the taking. After a brief glance at the principal news stories, and when there’s nothing on the first page [...]
“… the idea of making them less dumb.”
March 17, 2010There are any number of writers on education whom I admire, and not only those of much earlier times going back to the Greeks. In my own lifetime there have been many whose words have shown me the way forward, as it were. What they have written on the subject of education has stimulated and [...]
More Idle Thoughts on “the Schools”
March 16, 2010Why do we go on comparing the achievement of our middle and high school students to those of other countries? I’m thinking, in particular of an article, “What Makes Finnish Kids so Smart,” from the WSJ of February, 2008, one that I happened to read for the first time today, in WSJ reprints I think, [...]
More on Common Sense
March 13, 2010In my previous Blog I said that our representatives in Washington were mostly without common sense in their too often futile attempts to solve the nation’s problems. In today’s papers I encounter two voices of common sense, neither one in a position of power in Washington, one speaking about job creation, and the other about [...]
Common Sense and our Country’s Problems
March 11, 2010What does common sense have to say about some of the problems that currently plague our country? Regarding perhaps the five most talked about, if not most critically important issues or problems that we currently face, there is probably little or no disagreement in regard to goals — we pretty much agree on what we [...]
More on School Reform
March 10, 2010In my earlier Blog I said that if Diane Ravitch had read George Santayana’s Reason in Common Sense she wouldn’t have written her most recent book, The Death and Life of the American School System. Here is why I said that. Santayana in the passage quoted, says this: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends [...]
Reason and Common Sense, One
March 10, 2010There are many who say things better than I do. It seems to me that I’ve known that forever, and have a long ingrained habit of keeping the thoughts and words of others that I most admire in several thousand books on my library shelves where I can look at them, read the spines, be [...]
Google Translate is not there yet.
March 9, 2010In an article “Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool” in today’s NYTimes I read this: “In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic translation service that the company [...]
