History Readings

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.

students have to jump through ever-more demanding, preassigned academic hoops. Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests. Instead of wandering across strange domains, they have to prudentially apportion their time, making productive use of each hour.

Then they move into a ranking system in which the most competitive college, program and employment opportunity is deemed to be the best. There is a status funnel pointing to the most competitive colleges and banks and companies, regardless of their appropriateness.

Then they move into businesses in which the main point is to beat the competition, in which the competitive juices take control and gradually obliterate other goals

We live in a culture that nurtures competitive skills. And they are necessary: discipline, rigor and reliability. But it’s probably a good idea to try to supplement them with the skills of the creative monopolist: alertness, independence and the ability to reclaim forgotten traditions.

At Stanford more than elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for the better

Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by their students or colleagues. There are probably more faculty millionaires at Stanford than at any other university in the world.

In his twelve years as president, Stanford’s endowment has grown to nearly seventeen billion dollars. In each of the past seven years, Stanford has raised more money than any other American university.

But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune.

A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent.

many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”

Stanford is not the only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others, does, too. But Kelley’s effort is widely believed to be the most audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health and wellness; and K-12 education.

Feeling dejected or unhappy in a place like Stanford causes one to feel abnormal and out-of-place, so we may tend to internalize and brood over this lack of happiness instead of productively addressing the situatio

his principal academic legacy may be the growth of what’s called “interdisciplinary education.” This is the philosophy now promoted at the various schools at Stanford—engineering, business, medicine, science, design—which encourages students from diverse majors to come together to solve real or abstract problems. The goal is to have them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise. “Ten years ago, ‘interdisciplinary’ was a code word for something soft,” Jeff Koseff says. “John changed that.”

Among the bolder initiatives to create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the mechanical-engineering department.

Distance learning threatens one day to disrupt higher education by reducing the cost of college and by offering the convenience of a stay-at-home, do-it-on-your-own-time education. “Part of our challenge is that right now we have more questions than we have answers,” Hennessy says, of online education. “We know this is going to be important and, in the long term, transformative to education. We don’t really understand how yet.”

financial aid has produced a campus of diverse students who are unburdened by student debt—and who thus don’t have to spend the first five years of their career earning as much money as they can.

“The kinds of project we put in front of our students don’t have right and wrong answers,” Greenberg says. “They have good, better, and really, really better.”

he was impressed by “the bias toward action” at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy, committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the Post, “diversity” was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different.

Byers has kept in touch with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as “quiet and quite humble,” by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students.

The United States has “two types of college education that are in conflict with each other,” he said. One is “the classic liberal-arts model—four years of relative tranquility in which students are free to roam through disciplines, great thoughts, and great works with endless options and not much of a rationale.” The second is more utilitarian: “A college degree is expected to lead to a job, or at least to admission to a graduate or professional school.” The best colleges divide the first two years into introductory courses and the last two into the study of a major, all the while trying to expose students to “a broad range of disciplines and modes of thought.” Students, he declared, are not broadly educated, not sufficiently challenged to “search to know.” Instead, universities ask them to serve “the public, to work directly on solutions in a multidisciplinary way.” The danger, he went on, is “that academic researchers will not only embrace particular solutions but will fight for them in the political arena.” A university should keep to “its most fundamental purpose,” which is “the disinterested pursuit of truth.

Stanford, along with its peers, is now justifying its existence mostly in terms of what it can do for humanity and improve the world,” he answered. “I am concerned that a research-intense university will become too result-oriented,” a development that risks politicizing the university. And it also risks draining more resources from liberal arts

students spent too much time networking and strategizing and becoming “slaves to the dictates of a hoped-for future,” and too little time being spontaneous. “Stanford students are superb consequentialists—that is, we tend to measure the goodness of actions by their eventual results,

We excel at making rational calculations of expected returns to labor and investment, which is probably why so many of us will take the exhortation to occupy Wall Street quite literally after graduation. So before making any decision, we ask one, very simple question: What will I get out of it?”

“At most great universities, humanities feel like stepchildren,”

The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the different spheres of their experience.

Instead of erecting buildings, Andreessen says, Stanford should invest even more of its resources in distance learning: “We’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to every single kid around the world. And the idea that we were going to build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to me, tragically undershooting our potential.”

In late January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor, consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from thirteen departments, including engineering, political science, business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter, and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children. Another was to design a bicycle-storage system.

The “key question,” he says, is: “How can we increase efficiency without decreasing quality?”

online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford. Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more efficiency is synonymous with a better education.

Known for their strict focus on Islamic law, the Salafis often talk of reviving medieval Islamic corporal punishments, restricting women’s dress and the sale of alcohol, and cracking down on heretical culture.

Salafi leaders described their decision in part as a reaction against the presidential candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful and established Islamist group that now dominates Parliament. Though more moderate than the Salafis, the Brotherhood also favors the fashioning of an explicitly Islamic democracy in Egypt, and on social and cultural issues the group is closer to the Salafis than Mr. Aboul Fotouh is.

a spokesman for the Salafi group, acknowledged a big difference with Mr. Aboul Fotouh over his understanding of a verse of the Koran declaring, “There is no compulsion in religion,” which he interprets to mean that the state should not compel people to follow religious rules. But such compulsion “in reality is not possible now” in any case, Mr. Shahat said.

Leading Salafis hinted in recent days that they did not expect quick fulfillment of their goals for a state governed by Islamic law. Instead , they wanted a president who could deal with Egypt’s pressing needs while allowing them freedom to preach and advocate.

the Salafi endorsement also appeared to provide an unexpected validation for Mr. Aboul Fotouh’s argument that mixing preaching and politics would be “disastrous” for both Islam and Egypt,

Although the Salafis are more conservative on many cultural issues, they also typically disapprove of the Muslim Brotherhood’s emphasis on internal obedience and orthodoxy.

Mr. Aboul Fotouh has explained that his candidacy and his expulsion from the Brotherhood are part of a larger dispute over whether in a democratic Egypt the Brotherhood should control its own political party, or instead go back to its roots in preaching and charity while its members apply their own values to political life.

he has alluded to threats to the credibility of religious leaders in the unseemly day-to-day of political life, ranging from the appearance of compromises in the interest of power to more vivid embarrassments

The overlap between what’s partisan politics and what’s missionary is disastrous for the religious mission and a disaster for the party as well,” Mr. Aboul Fotouh said of the Brotherhood in the El Rahma interview. “They will see in the future the result of this threat, which is a threat to the homeland and to religion.

Mr. Aboul Fotouh also speaks fluently in the language of Salafis. He has talked at greater length and in greater detail about what Islamic law demands than the other Islamist candidates, including those of the Muslim Brotherhood, who fear alarming moderates. Among other things, he often argues that the first priorities in advancing Islamic law should be individual freedom and social justice.

he argued that Egyptian Muslims were not waiting for a president to teach them to follow their faith. They wanted a president to develop their agriculture and industry, as he said Islamic law also required.

Mr. Aboul Fotouh, who spent more than six years in jail for his Brotherhood leadership, brought to the competition for the Salafi vote a special authenticity. Many Salafi leaders came out of the Islamist student movement that Mr. Aboul Fotouh led in the 1970s, before he and some others from the student group joined and revitalized the Brotherhood.

The younger generation includes millions of so-called “parasite singles” who still live with (and off) their parents, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the “hikikomori”—“young adults,” Eberstadt writes, “who shut themselves off almost entirely by retreating into a friendless life of video games, the Internet and manga (comics) in their parents’ home.”

Mr. Olmert said in the interview that Israel should quietly build American support behind the scenes, and not publicly declare that it will act with or without America, given its dependence on American military aid and hardware. “America is not a client state of Israel — maybe the opposite is true,” he said. “Why should we want America to be put in a situation where whatever they do will be interpreted as if they obeyed orders from Jerusalem?”

Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel, plunged on Sunday into the country’s growing debate over Iran policy with harsh criticism of his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Drawing boos from a largely American audience in New York, he fired off a wide-ranging broadside against Mr. Netanyahu’s foreign policy, saying that the prime minister was unprepared to offer meaningful compromise to Palestinians, disrespectful to the United States and dismissive of the international community at a time when Israel particularly needs foreign support to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe. Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University, a Romney economic adviser, once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine.

The New York Police Department conducted more than 684,000 of the street stops last year. The police say those stopped were behaving suspiciously — by moving furtively or carrying a pry bar, for instance — but they were not necessarily suspects sought in any particular crime.

He advised logging off sites like Google and Facebook as soon as practicably possible and not using the same provider for multiple functions if you can help it. “If you search on Google, maybe you don’t want to use Gmail for your e-mail,”

Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a “We do not track or bubble you!” policy. Bubbling is the filtering of search results based on your search history. (Bubbling also means you are less likely to see opposing points of view or be exposed to something fresh and new.)

turn on your browser’s “private mode,” usually found under Preferences, Tools or Settings. When this mode is activated, tracking cookies are deleted once you close your browser, which “essentially wipes clean your history,”

private mode does nothing to conceal your I.P. address, a unique number that identifies your entry or access point to the Internet. So Web sites may not know your browsing history, but they will probably know who you are and where you are as well as when and how long you viewed their pages.

Shielding your I.P. address is possible by connecting to what is called a virtual private network, or V.P.N., such as those offered by WiTopia, PrivateVPN and StrongVPN. These services, whose prices price from $40 to $90 a year, route your data stream to what is called a proxy server, where it is stripped of your I.P. address before it is sent on to its destination. This obscures your identity not only from Web sites but also from your Internet service provider.

there is Tor, a free service with 36 million users that was originally developed to conceal military communications. Tor encrypts your data stream and bounces it through a series of proxy servers so no single entity knows the source of the data or whence it came. The only drawback is that with all that bouncing around, it is very S-L-O-W.

Free browser add-ons that increase privacy and yet will not interrupt your work flow include Ghostery and Do Not Track Plus, which prevent Web sites from relaying information about you and your visit to tracking companies.

“Companies like Google are creating these enormous databases using your personal information,” said Paul Hill, senior consultant with SystemExperts, a network security company in Sudbury, Mass. “They may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”

if you look at 2002 to 2007 and you observe the structural forces at play in that business expansion -- mainly that the middle class income dropped, that very, very few jobs were created and that the higher value-added jobs tended for the most part to be replaced by lower paying ones -- those trends became pronounced in the 2009 recovery onwards. That suggests that this is a deep structural problem with the way globalization and technology is impacting the majority of the American workforce. I'm agnostic as to whether this reduces America's overall growth rate. The gains of growth are so deeply skewed to the very highest earners. But there is a lot of evidence in studies of other economies that when you have gross, Latin American-style inequality, growth and competitiveness tend to get advertsely hit.

So what does football mean to our culture, and why does it occupy such an important place? I think it means everything. I think it feeds and fills a lot of gaps.

Football means money for television networks. It means escapism for most of the country. I read a book by Mariah Burton Nelson called The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football. That's a really interesting concept. The game feeds something that's primal in males; in a lot of women, it feeds something sexual.

You've also written, "Any parent who has a young tackle football playing child with an underdeveloped brain is committing apathetic child abuse if they do not educate themselves on this issue." Why? I wrote that because I interviewed a neurorehabilitation specialist. She talked to me about when she has kids in her office. I asked her, what's the difference between the times when she has the kids by themselves versus when the parents are there? When the parents are in there, it's scholarships. How they can make it in football. When the kids are alone, it's a different story. They feel so much pressure. They feel they have to do this to mitigate the financial damage they're going to cause their families by going to college

They don't understand that it's not just about second-impact syndrome killing you. It goes way deeper than that. There are people who literally do not become the people they were supposed to be becoming. Or they experience huge bouts of depression.

Are you allowing your son to play football? No. Now, if he's a 16-, 17-year-old kid and says, "Dad, it's in my blood, I have to do this," I would have a hard time saying no. I honestly would. I don't want to live his life for him. But I think my kid is smart. The last thing he wants to do is affect his brain because he knows it's his future. If you give him enough information, he can make smart choices. I hope people who see my film can make informed decisions. I think there are young kids who will watch this film and actually be able to challenge their parents, to say, "You know what? I don't think football is a good idea for me." I'd love to give young people the strength to stand up to their fathers. And it's not me saying that. It's all the people in the film.

Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.

What about investment banks, with their complicated financial derivatives and overleveraged balance sheets? Conard argues that they make the economy more efficient, too. The financial crisis, he writes, was not the result of corrupt bankers selling dodgy financial products. It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, which, he says, were just doing their job

He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound. They were new tools that served a market need for the world’s most sophisticated investors,

“A lot of people don’t realize that what happened in 2008 was nearly identical to what happened in 1929,” he says. “Depositors ran to the bank to withdraw their money only to discover, like the citizens of Bedford Falls” — referring to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “that there was no money in the vault. All that money had been lent.”

In 2008 it was large pension funds, insurance companies and other huge institutional investors that withdrew in panic. Conard argues in retrospect that it was these withdrawals that led to the crisis — not, as so many others have argued, an orgy of irresponsible lending

Conard concedes that the banks made some mistakes, but the important thing now, he says, is to provide them even stronger government support. He advocates creating a new government program that guarantees to bail out the banks if they ever face another run.

the central role of banks, Conard says, is to turn the short-term assets of nervous savers into risky long-term loans that help the economy grow.

we live longer, healthier and richer lives because of countless microimprovements like that one. The people looking for them, Conard likes to point out, are not only computer programmers, engineers and scientists. They are also wealthy investors like him

As Conard told me, one of the crucial lessons he learned at Bain is that it makes no sense to look for easy solutions. In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them.

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money

He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.

he expressed anger over the praise that Warren Buffett has received for pledging billions of his fortune to charity. It was no sacrifice, Conard argued; Buffett still has plenty left over to lead his normal quality of life. By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits. If anyone was sacrificing, it was those people. “Quit taking a victory lap,” he said, referring to Buffett. “That money was for the middle class.”

Unlike Romney, Conard rejects the notion that America has “some monopoly on hard work or entrepreneurship.” “I think it’s simple economics,” he said. “If the payoff for risk-taking is better, people will take more risks

Conard sees the success of the U.S. economy as, in part, the result of a series of historic accidents. Most recently, the coincidence of Roe v. Wade and the late 1970s economic malaise allowed Ronald Reagan to unify social conservatives and free-market advocates and set the country on a pro-investment path for decades. Europeans, he says, made all the wrong decisions. Concern about promoting equality and protecting favored industries have led to onerous work rules, higher taxes and all sorts of social programs that keep them poorer than Americans.

Now we’re at a particularly crucial moment, he writes. Technology and global competition have made it more important than ever that the United States remain the world’s most productive, risk-taking, success-rewarding society. Obama, Conard says, is “going to dampen the incentives.” Even worse, Conard says, “he’s slowing the accumulation of equity” by fighting income inequality.

Conard’s book addresses what is perhaps the most important question in economics, the one Adam Smith set out to answer in “The Wealth of Nations”: Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same)

Nearly every economist I spoke with said that Conard has too much faith in the market’s ability to reward only those who create real value. Conard, for instance, insists that even the dodgiest financial products must have been beneficial or else nobody would have bought them in the first place. If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conard says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefited society. Even pro-market Romney supporters take issue with this. “Ed ought to be more concerned about crony capitalism,” Hubbard told me.

“Unintended Consequences” ignores some of the most important economic work of the past few decades, about how power and politics influence economic growth. In technical language, this field is the study of “rent seeking,” in which people or companies get rich because of their power, not because of their ideas.

wealthy individuals and corporations are able to influence politicians and regulators to make seemingly insignificant changes to regulations that benefit themselves. In other words, to rig the game

Conard’s version of the financial crisis ignores much reporting and analysis — including work I’ve done with NPR’s “Planet Money” team — that shows that some of the nation’s largest banks actively manipulated customers and regulators and, sometimes, their own stockholders to profit from dangerous risk

Rather than simply serving as an invitation for everybody to engage in potentially beneficial risk-taking, inequality can allow those with wealth to crush new ideas.

Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right — that it sometimes discourages innovation — then we should worry

on this one he resorted to anecdotes and gut feelings. During his work at Bain, he said, he saw that successful companies had to battle against one another. Nobody was just given a free ride because of their power. “Was a person, like me, excluded from opportunity?” he asked rhetorically. “If so, I wasn’t aware!”

both could be true. The rich could earn a great deal of wealth through their own hard work, skill and luck. They could also use their subsequent influence to make themselves even richer

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.

Glenn Hubbard said only that at a broad level, Romney and Conard share “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking.”

Conard and Romney certainly share views on numerous policy matters. Like many Republicans, they promote lower taxes and less regulation for those who achieve financial succes

said he had “grave concerns” about concussions, but also denied the problem was as widespread or severe as Gladwell implied. Citing a study from the University of North Carolina, he said there were more direct fatalities in lacrosse, water polo and baseball than football, so why not ban those sports?

"Dual allegiance is incompatible with the moral basis of American constitutional democracy." The fact that even a patriot like Bachmann would do something like this is testament to how thoroughly the moral relativism of the post-national Left has permeated our culture.