History Readings

“We are in this position as a country because we assumed that the magic of the marketplace would provide competition and provide world-class communications,” she said. “But history has demonstrated that left to their own devices, companies will gouge the rich, leave out the poor, cherry-pick markets and focus solely on their profits. It isn’t evil, it’s just the way things work.”

experience shows that even environmentally conscious people need prodding and incentives to change their behavior permanently.

most experts believe it will take a stiff stick to break a habit as ingrained as this one is in the United States. (In many European countries, like France and Italy, the plastic bag thing never fully caught on.)

All across the country, plastic bags are the bane of recycling programs. When carelessly placed into recycling bins for general plastic — which they often are — the bags jam and damage expensive sorting machines, which cost huge amounts to repair.

Where they exist, bans and charges or taxes (when set high enough) have been extremely successful and often raise revenue for other environmental projects. Unfortunately, these tactics are deeply unpopular in most of the nation.

an economist at University College, Dublin, who has studied the effects of Ireland’s 10-year-old bag tax — the first in the world — is skeptical: “As regards the plastic bag issue, whatever is done has to be mandatory,” he said. “The New York model is designed to fail.”

“There is now greater urgency for the U.S. to step up assistance to the moderate opposition forces who can lead Syria after Assad.”

“attack the media and spread truth on it” and the second is to “make damage to a specific country or to the terrorist groups in Syria by using the famous media’s social media accounts or Web sites to publish false news.”

warn that Twitter was a threat to national unity,

Many Saudis have seized on Twitter as the most immediate and effective way to open little windows into a traditionally opaque society.

A number of web activists have been detained, including at least one for the alleged apostasy, a charge that could carry the death penalty.

Billionaire businessman Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, who presents himself as a reformist, has described attempts to restrict social media as a losing battle.

Because they had bigger bodies, they required more calories to survive than we do. They may have lacked sewing skills. Neither Neandertals nor Homo sapiens lived long (the rare 30-year-old Neandertal was old), but at some point, for reasons not really understood, the life spans of Homo sapiens began to increase. More longevity provided a grandparent generation to impart knowledge, skills, and more resources to the group.

Another discovery bearing on the subject are the extreme climate fluctuations that occurred between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago. The Neandertals had bodies and cultures adapted to ice and snow. This time of fluctuation involved such rapid climate change that in one lifetime “all the plants and animals that a person had grown up with could vanish and be replaced with unfamiliar flora and fauna,” writes Wong. The environmental stress may have decimated their ranks to below zero population growth.

Hirschman was suggesting that doubt could be a source not of paralysis and death but of creativity and self-renewal. One of his last books, published when he was about eighty, is called A Propensity to Self-Subversion. In the title essay, Hirschman celebrates skepticism about his own theories and ideas, and he captures not only the insight but also the pleasure, even the joy, that can come from learning that one had it wrong.

Hirschman’s work changes how you see the world. It illuminates yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His categories become your categories.

Hirschman sought, in his early twenties and long before becoming a writer, to “prove Hamlet wrong.” In Shakespeare’s account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt—he never doubted it—and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong

Who else would publish an essay in The American Economic Review exploring the “overproduction of opinionated opinion,” questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one’s opinions and even one’s tastes? Hirschman thought that strong opinions, as such, “might be dangerous to the health of our democracy,” because they are an obstacle to mutual understanding and constructive problem-solving.

The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. The objections are “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain). Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic, and often wrong

He insisted that human history provides “stories, intricate and often nonrepeatable,” which “look more like tricks history has up its sleeve than like social-scientific regularities, not to speak of laws.” He was interested in “the many might-have-beens of history,” including “felicitous and surprising escapes from disaster.

Hirschman was delighted by paradoxes, unintended consequences (especially good ones), the telling detail, inventories of actual practices (rather than big theories), surprises, and improvisation. In his view, “history is nothing if not farfetched.”

He invented the term “possibilism,” meant to draw attention to “the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone.” In his lifetime, one of many such outcomes was the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which almost no one anticipated.

Shifting Involvements—a small masterpiece that illuminates the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and protest movements of diverse kinds. Hirschman emphasized that human beings are often choosing between private and public life, and thus between the different forms of happiness that are associated with each of them. He described “pendular motions of collective behavior,” in which people swing from happiness to disappointment in one kind of activity, and then to the other. For example, the disappointments and frustrations of the student rebellions of the late 1960s encouraged a return to private life in the 1970s and 1980s. Rejecting the highly influential idea that the problem of collective action has a kind of invariable, ahistorical “logic,” Hirschman drew attention to the immense importance of history and timing as, in Adelman’s words, “people leave the streets and plazas disenchanted with politics to seek happiness in the shopping malls”—and vice versa.

The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in his mid-seventies, was an outgrowth of the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, and it speaks directly to our current debates. Hirschman was struck by the routine, stylized, even mechanical character of much conservative thinking—and its close connection, in its rhetoric, to arguments that have been made for hundreds of years. Indeed, conservative rhetoric is the book’s target, perhaps above all in the person of Edmund Burke,

But if The Passions and the Interests was his favorite, and Exit, Voice, and Loyalty his most important, there can be no question about his most characteristic: The Rhetoric of Reaction. The sustained attack on intransigence, the bias in favor of hope, the delight in paradox, the insistence on the creative power of doubt—all these prove a lot of people wrong, not just Hamlet.

At the meeting, my colleague Dr. Benard P. Dreyer, professor of pediatrics at New York University and a past president of the Academic Pediatric Association, called on pediatricians to take on poverty as a serious underlying threat to children’s health. He was prompted, he told me later, by the widening disparities between rich and poor, and the gathering weight of evidence about the importance of early childhood, and the ways that deprivation and stress in the early years of life can reduce the chances of educational and life success.

When Tony Blair became prime minister of Britain, amid growing socioeconomic disparities, he made it a national goal to cut child poverty in half in 10 years. It took a coalition of political support and a combination of measures that increased income, especially in families with young children (minimum wage, paid maternity and paternity leaves, tax credits), and better services — especially universal preschool programs. By 2010, reducing child poverty had become a goal across the British political spectrum, and child poverty had fallen to 10.6 percent of children below the absolute poverty line (similar to the measure used in the United States), down from 26.1 percent in 1999.

Dr. Dreyer said: “Income matters. You get people above the poverty level, and they actually are better parents. It’s critical to get people out of poverty, but in addition our focus has to be on also giving families supports for other aspects of their lives — parenting, interventions in primary care, universal preschool.”

Robert H. Dugger, managing partner of Hanover Investment Group, who made the economic case for investing in young children. “History shows that productivity increases when people are able to access their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Mr. Dugger told me. “There is no economic recovery strategy stronger than committing to early childhood and K-through-12 investment.”

“There will be additional efforts made, and unfortunately the violence will not end.

The campaign is taking shape as open season on Ahmadinejad's legacy and his combative style that bolstered his stature among supporters but alarmed critics.

The poll will be the first presidential election since 2009, when mass protests dubbed the "Green Movement" erupted after the disputed re-election of Ahmadinejad over reformist candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoub

The prestige of Iran's most powerful man, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now appears threatened by intense rivalry between groups polarised by Ahmadinejad, who has been accused of wanting to erode the system of clerical rule.

four of the nine countries surveyed believe that citizens of Western nations do have equal rights and duties.

Residents also express considerable admiration for the West's political values and structures

Respondents are most likely to say they admire the West for its scientific and technological expertise,

five of the nine countries say that Western nations produce enjoyable films and music (although in three of the nine countries, Pakistan, Iran and Morocco, the vast majority of residents disagree with this statement).

In Indonesia, Kuwait, and Iran, more than half of those interviewed refer to the West's technological accomplishments, as do nearly as high a percentage of Jordanians and Moroccans.

respect for human values, rights, freedom, and democracy are the most frequently occurring responses.

The image that dominates respondents' negative perceptions of the West is clear-cut: the immoral lifestyles, a weakening of family structure, a decline in social courtesy, and the loss of traditional deference to elders in Western nations

they perceive as negative Western attitudes toward Muslims generally or Arabs specifically.

are arrogant and believe their societies and civilization are more superior and advanced are excessively prone to interfere in the internal and political affairs of other nations are insufficiently attached to their own religion, religious beliefs, and ethnicity

But who gets to decide that tyranny is imminent, and by what measure is the imminence of tyranny determined?

A commenter posting under the name Sanchez explained that “Tyranny consists of many things we have experienced the last 4 years, the firearm issue the latest in the line of them.” The point was echoed and amplified by another commenter, William Gill: “The second amendment is the only one that can assure the protection of your other rights which are being attacked almost daily by the current administration.” (In short, the Obama administration = tyranny.)

A commenter posting as Steve responded, “It’s not ‘Tyranny’ just because you were outvoted. That’s Democracy.”

he is met immediately by two responses from other commenters. First, “Steve, you’re assuming that the voting process was above board! Let’s face it, this election in November was by no means above board.” That is, the election results did not reflect majority will but some form of corrupt manipulation. (Those conspiring to overthrow government cite a conspiracy theory as their justification.)

The second response cuts deeper: “We live in a Republic Steve … majority rules is a problem indeed” (Buck Harmon). Harmon is invoking the familiar distinction between a democracy and a republic. In a democracy the majority determines what the law is and could, at least theoretically, take away the rights of individuals for the sake of the “public good.” In a republic, majority will is held in check by constitutional guarantees that forbid legislation encroaching on individual rights even if 51 percent or 95 percent of the population favors it

The N.R.A. militants have an answer. The purpose of the American Revolution was to secure the freedom of individuals and that means a minimally intrusive government. Representatives elected to safeguard that freedom may become intoxicated by their power and act in ways that restrict rather than enhance individual choice. At that point it is the people’s right and duty to rise against them. Measures limiting gun ownership are a sure sign that government is moving in the direction of central control and tyranny.

So for Angle and others, that’s the shape of tyranny — legislation that, in their judgment, abridges constitutionally protected rights. Sanchez explains: “We are all to decide what tyranny is. Just as we decide what law we obey or not.”

This antinomian declaration — our inner light will tell us when and when not to obey — flies in the face of another commonplace of democracy: ours is a government of laws not men (a declaration found in the 1780 Constitution of Massachusetts).

Another version of the commonplace is, no man is above the law.

C. P. takes the logic to its conclusion: “Secession is near. Can’t wait. Which by the way is Constitutional.” It’s constitutional, in this view, because a government in the act of eroding constitutional values is itself unconstitutional and has become a tyranny. Therefore to oppose it by whatever means available, including force, is not to undermine constitutionality, but to affirm it.

is it — to return to my original musings — un-American? Yes and no. On the one hand, nothing can be more American than throwing off the shackles of a government that has overstepped its bounds and disregarded the rights of its citizens.

on the other hand, the American tradition of accepting the results of elections — even when they bring with them policies you believe to be misguided at best and disastrous at worst — is in danger of being undermined when groups of armed people decide that the present leadership is infected by unpatriotic, socialist ideas and must be resisted at all costs.

A government founded in a revolutionary moment is always vulnerable to a determination by a zealous minority that its revolutionary ideals have been compromised by itself. When that happens, each side will engage in its favored rhetoric,

In recent months, Mr. Sharif has adopted a more conciliatory tone.

almost 13 percent of student-loan borrowers of all ages owe more than $50,000, and nearly 4 percent owe more than $100,000

Some 17 percent of student-loan borrowers were 90 days or more behind in payments at the end of 2012. When only those in repayment were counted — in other words, not including borrowers who were in loan deferment or forbearance — more than 30 percent were 90 days or more behind

America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities. Average tuition, and room and board, at four-year colleges is just short of $22,000 a year, up from under $9,000 (adjusted for inflation) in 1980-81.

Compare this more-than-doubling in tuition with the stagnation in median family income, which is now about $50,000, compared to $46,000 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation).

it was not surprising that total student debt, around $1 trillion, surpassed total credit-card debt last year

the challenge of controlling student debt is even more unsettling. Curbing student debt is tantamount to curbing social and economic opportunity.

What economists call “human capital” — investing in people — is a key to long-term growth. To be competitive in the 21st century is to have a highly educated labor force, one with college and advanced degrees. Instead, we are foreclosing on our future as a nation.

It’s a vicious cycle: lack of demand for housing contributes to a lack of jobs, which contributes to weak household formation, which contributes to a lack of demand for housing.

As bad as things are, they may get worse.

Interest rates on federal Stafford loans were set to double in July, to 6.8 percent.  Good news came on Friday: it appears that there is a temporary reprieve, as Republicans have come around. But the stay would be temporary and would not address a more fundamental issue: if the Federal Reserve is willing to lend to the banks that caused the crisis at just 0.75 percent, shouldn’t it be willing to lend to students, who will be crucial to our long-term recovery, at an appropriately low rate?

a real long-term solution requires rethinking how we finance higher education. Australia has designed a system of publicly provided income-contingent loans that all students must take out. Repayments vary according to individual income after graduation. This aligns the incentives of the providers of education and the receivers. Both have an incentive to see that students do well. It means that if an unfortunate event happens, like an illness or an accident, the loan obligation is automatically reduced. It means that the burden of the debt is always commensurate with an individual’s ability to repay. The repayments are collected through the tax system, minimizing the administrative costs.

Some wonder how the American ideal of equality of opportunity has eroded so much. The way we finance higher education provides part of the answer. Student debt has become an integral part of the story of American inequality. Robust higher education, with healthy public support, was once the linchpin in a system that promised opportunity for dedicated students of any means. We now have a pay-to-play, winner-take-all game where the wealthiest are assured a spot, and the rest are compelled to take a gamble on huge debts, with no guarantee of a payoff.