ParisTampaBlog

I read that by the end of last year China’s foreign-exchange reserves amounted to $2.85 trillion. It seems now that not a day goes by without some mention of trillions of dollars.

Global GDP (GWP) as of last year was $62 trillion. U.S. GDP stands at about one fourth of that, nearly the same dollar amount as its current debt of some $15 trillion.

Now China evidently has trillions to spend, like no other country in today’s world. What if they were to start spending it, were to set about acquiring some of the world’s and in particular the West’s assets?

As if to help them get started in that endeavor the Economist magazine has come up with a shopping list:

They probably won’t purchase the year’s projected oil output. Even their growing domestic economy would be unable to make use of that much oil.

But what about buying up US farmlands and farm production, and the US businesses including Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Google and others not on the list?

All of these companies are highly profitable, and if the Chinese were to acquire them they would also acquire the profits.

And they could purchase all that and still have enough left over to purchase all of our professional sports teams.

What would keep them from doing so? Because they haven’t yet done this does this mean that our free market is not all that free?

If they did try and our government put a stop to their doing so would that then mean that in this one instance the Tea Partiers would cheer and come down on the side of government regulation of the market?

Anyway, a lot to think about. I wonder what it is that keeps the Chinese and their trillions away from our most prized possessions? What keeps them instead buying only boring US government paper?

And in regard to the 62 trillion dollar world economy, what does hold it all together? Perhaps it’s only hanging by a thread, in this instance the thread being China’s decision, so far anyway, not to go shopping.

Or perhaps there is something else that protects our way of life, something that keeps China’s growing currency reserves away from our most valuable assets?

But it may be simpler than that. The writer of the Economist article probably has it right when he concludes:

“These frivolous calculations illustrate the vast scale of China’s reserves but also the great difficulty it faces in diversifying them. Any purchase big enough to warrant China’s attention will also move the market against it. China can buy almost anything for a price—but almost nothing for today’s price.”

Everyone, well most everyone, agrees that in order to lower the nation’s nearly $14 trillion debt something must be done to bring down spiraling health care costs. Even president Obama and representative Ryan agree about this. Where they differ is about how to do it.

Representative Ryan would rely more on free market mechanisms, and in particular on individuals assuming a good part of the responsibility for meeting, or not meeting, them if the costs of their health care prove unmanageable.

To lower spiraling health care costs President Obama would rely almost exclusively on the government, and in particular on commissions of experts, aka government bureaucrats.

Now isn’t it the common experience of all of us that if a service is given us we will accept it and not question its cost? Whereas if we have to pay for the service, or a good part of that service, we may very well decide to forgo it?

In regard to expert commissions controlling costs here is the highly relevant testimony of one witness. I take this today from a WSJ article, New Efficiencies in Health Care? Not Likely.  

The writer is Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of the physician Anthony Daniels. He is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

“All attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it, and the same goes for cost. Such, at any rate, has been my experience of the British health care system—its famed, or infamous, National Health Service.

“Thus, I could not but smile a little wanly when President Barack Obama said this week that he hoped an increase in the use of generic drugs, together with an expert commission to examine the cost-effectiveness of medical treatments, would make a significant impact on the vast budget deficit of the United States….

“We in Britain have been there and we have done that, and our health-care costs doubled, perhaps not as a result, but certainly at the same time [as all our efforts to reduce them]….

“It is now merely a historical curiosity that, when the NHS was set up, its proponents seriously argued and believed that its cost would decline with time, since it would make the population healthier and less in need of medical attention.

“It turned out, however, that the costs of prevention were decidedly real, while the savings were inclined to be imaginary….

“The British system is now capable of absorbing infinite amounts of money with minimal benefit to the health of the population, though with great benefit to the pocketbooks of those who work in it.

“It is an occupational hazard for politicians to think that they and their ilk know best, and by all indications Mr. Obama [is with them for he] rather likes centralization.

“In my professional lifetime in the centralized British health-care system, however, I have seen a hundred schemes of cost reduction, but I have never seen any reduction in costs, or at least any that lasted more than a few months.

“I can’t remember a single health minister who did not promise more efficiency at less cost, or a single one who actually managed to achieve it.”

Would that our President had talked with Theodore Dalrymple before making his most recent speech on the nation’s burgeoning debt. And in that regard especially, would that he had had some understanding of his own of Dalrymple’s what seems to me inescapable, commonsensical conclusion to his article:

“If we are to have health-care systems that don’t bankrupt us, people will have to accept paying more bills out of pocket and perhaps lowering their standard of living. Tiresome as the advice might be, we had better start saving a good deal more.”

Paul Lockhart in a 2002 piece writes that mathematics is an art, like music and painting, but we don’t teach it that way. Mostly, he says, this is because math teachers are not mathematicians, are not themselves doing, or have ever done, mathematics.

So what, we might ask, is going on in math class? It would seem that at best the kids are learning some math vocabulary and some math syntax, but for the most part they will never go on to actually acquire the language of mathematics, and, in just a few years following school leaving, will have forgotten even the rudiments of the language they were forced fed while in school.

According to Lockhart what should be going on in math class? Well, mathematics, but what does he mean by that? Probably most of us wouldn’t be able to answer the question except by using the very terms we “learned” in school, —algebra, geometry, and for the few of us who made it that far the calculus.

Lockhart gives us a couple of examples of what he means.

With my students, “I might imagine,” he says, “a triangle inside a rectangular box, and I might wonder how much of the box the triangle takes up. Two-thirds maybe?

The important thing to understand is that I’m not talking about this drawing of a triangle in a box. Nor am I talking about some metal triangle forming part of a girder system for a bridge. There’s no ulterior practical purpose here. I’m just playing. That’s what math is— wondering, playing, amusing yourself with your imagination.”

Or, another example, he takes the case of a triangle inside a semicircle. “The beautiful truth about this pattern is that no matter where on the circle you place the tip of the triangle, it always forms a nice right angle.

“Here is a case where our intuition is somewhat in doubt. It’s not at all clear that this should be true; it even seems unlikely— shouldn’t the angle change if I move the tip? What we have here is a fantastic math problem! Is it true? If so, why is it true? What a great project! What a terrific opportunity to exercise one’s ingenuity and imagination!”

One agrees that these problem-questions are beautiful, require imagination, if not magic for their solution. And we agree that students, everyone, should be exposed to these types of problems while in school, and out, and helped and encouraged to come up with their own solutions, never told that there is just one solution that should be memorized for testing purposes.

But are such as these, delightful as they are, even possible in the school environment? Perhaps that’s why there is so little music and art in the schools. For weren’t all artistic imagination and invention left behind, not allowed through the school doors? Perhaps classrooms are no more the proper environment for mathematics than they are for the fine arts.

Yet if real mathematical experiences, along with art and music, are not appropriate for the schools what learning experiences are? What does lend itself to interesting, and productive, and joyful learning in the classroom? Alas, probably not much.

And it’s probably true that schools could much better serve their students, and society at large, if they were much less preoccupied with what students should be learning, in order, say, to go on to college and eventually get a good job, and instead were much more taken up by creating lively and happy and exciting, and yes learning, but even more living and alive communities of, by, and for children.

Lockhart is right to say that what goes on in the math class is not mathematics, but he is wrong to think that mathematics any more than any other real and important and substantial and joyful human activity can prosper in the solid, mostly brick and concrete structures we call schools.

What was it about Latin that for so long had young Americans across the country learning the declensions and conjugations of Latin nouns and verbs? Wasn’t it that our minds were to be properly exercised by the translating and construction of Latin sentences? We didn’t believe it but for some strange reason we believed it enough to go on doing it.

Now there are many who moan the disappearance of Latin in the schools, well many, a few hundred nationwide perhaps. Latin class, in fact, probably never really ended. It just kind of stopped as first teachers and then students went on to other things.

And there have been, and are, any number of replacements, other subject matters that were to teach kids how to think. At the present time the most prominent of these is math, in particular Algebra II.

We’re now being told repeatedly that high school algebra is the leading predictor of first college and then work success, and that studies regularly show that those who hold top-tier jobs have for the most part taken Algebra II or a higher class as their last high school math course.

There are those who point out, and they’re right of course (and by and large not listened to) that the correlation of Algebra II with college success and the acquisition of top tier jobs is not causative.

What may seem to be a causative link simply results from the fact that the most capable students are directed to these particular classes by their parents and teachers.

Now I defy you to name me even one subject matter that if pursued seriously and intensely wouldn’t teach anyone “how to think.” Math and Latin, of course, but also chess, history, Swahili, basket weaving and archery.

There are thousands of subject matters, an endless number of them, that are perfectly capable of being the means of our learning how to think.

We should be grateful that this is the case. That it’s not just Latin and Algebra II, because then even fewer of our school graduates, and dropouts, would have learned to use their gift of reason.

If young people, let’s say if people don’t learn how to think it’s not because they haven’t taken Latin or Algebra II in the schools. It’s much more because they haven’t gone beyond the simplest thinking when applied to whatever it is they may be doing, be it cooking, running, playing a musical instrument, or fixing an automobile engine or cutting hair.

There is no human activity that is without its own depth, and that cannot but come, as a consequence, with its own reward.

If we stopped trying to teach all kids by means of our favorite how-to-think activity and instead simply encouraged and helped them to get serious, to get to work with whatever it was that interested them and for which they may have shown some natural talent, then school might indeed become a place where kids’ minds were active and growing instead of the wasteland it now is for so many.