History Readings

I SPENT 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row. I’ve been free since 2003, exonerated after evidence covered up by prosecutors surfaced just weeks before my execution date. Those prosecutors were never punished.

Nuremberg not only dispatched justice swiftly, it also created a historical narrative that has survived. Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor and the driving force behind the trials, told President Harry S. Truman that he had assembled more than five million pages of evidence. The files of the SS alone needed six freight cars to carry them. Subsequently the tribunal published 11 volumes of documents and 20 volumes devoted to the proceedings alone.

whatever the arguments about justice, “from the point of view of the historian the Nuremberg trials were an absolutely unqualified wonder.” Nuremberg was essential in creating memory and senses of responsibility, in Germany itself and far beyond.

there are no absolute truths; law is argument

In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one’s lot in a capitalist system.

compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework. Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.

In the United States, segments of the academic community seem to have reversed the relationship between pro-capitalism and income redistribution on the one hand, and racism and intolerance on the other. Those who support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior. The academic assumption that anti-capitalism and opposition to income redistribution reflect an orientation toward social dominance seems unwarranted.

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were famous life-long tinkerers, who discovered new ways of doing things by constantly improvising, experimenting, failing, and retesting.  Above all they were voraciously inquisitive learners.

Hal Gregersen of globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products.

they learned to follow their curiosity

For a glimpse of your mosaic, type your name into Spokeo.com. Prepare to see estimates of your age, home value, marital status, phone number and your home address, even a photo of your front door. Spokeo, one of several services like this online, will encourage you to pay $15 or more, for a full report with details on income, hobbies and online social networks.

To begin with, phones glow. It is a very normal impulse to stare at something in your hand that is emitting light.

the screen offers a data stream of many people, as opposed to the individual you happen to be near. Your e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and other online social groups all offer a data stream of many individuals, and you can choose the most interesting one, unlike the human rain delay you may be stuck with at a party.

there is also a specific kind of narcissism that the social Web engenders. By grooming and updating your various avatars, you are making sure you remain at the popular kid’s table. One of the more seductive data points in real-time media is what people think of you. The metrics of followers and retweets beget a kind of always-on day trading in the unstable currency of the self.

It’s  impossible to simultaneously take in and process all of the visual stimuli in our immediate environment.  Attempting to do so typically overwhelms the visual cortex which shuts down our higher level cognitive functioning and activates our more primal emotional brain. Or in layperson’s terms, we get flustered and cranky.

Highly disorganized (i.e. cluttered) environments compromise our cognitive functioning by overactivating the centers of the brain that manage visual processing.

This is an argument to which the left-wing has a great deal of recourse whenever anyone suggests that people have a right to keep what they earn from voluntary transactions.  You can only make money in the context of society, and so society has a right to regulate your transactions, and seize the proceeds, in any way that society sees fit.

the argument applies just as well to our sex lives or our political beliefs: they take place in the context of all sorts of government protections

Does this mean that the government (or our employers) may properly restrict our sexual behavior to that of which a majority of our neighbors approve?

"Since I was twenty," Drucker wrote at eighty-two, "writing has been the foundation of everything I have been doing." From the first he showed a mastery of modern English prose. He has that rarest quality in a writer of non-fiction—a voice, a characteristic way of saying.

Economic Man limns a crisis of belief in capitalism (and socialism), the causes of which have yet to be ameliorated. Ignoring its specifically European causes, Drucker focuses on the civilizational causes of fascism. We live in that same civilization.

Drucker asserted in the book that Economic Man's promise—that a society built around the market (the major social institution of the nineteenth century) could achieve "freedom and justice through economic development"—had failed, and that this had "destroyed the belief in capitalism as a social system." The Great War and the Depression made this crisis of belief a reality for millions. "These catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable laws.

Where her children were involved, Ann was eas­ily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.

“If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama remembers her saying, “you’re going to need some values.” When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. “She talked about disciplining Barry, including spanking him for things where he richly deserved a spanking,” said Don Johnston, who worked with Ann in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling with her in Indonesia and living in the same house. Saman said that when Barry failed to finish homework sent from Hawaii by his grandmother, Ann “would call him into his room and would spank him with his father’s military belt.”

“We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant,” Maya told me. “We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. . . . If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, ‘How would you feel?’ Sort of compelling us ever toward empathy and those kinds of things and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily.”

for decades now, the central banks of the world have been giving policymakers a false signal that sovereign debt is cheap and limitless. Functioning like monetary roach motels, central banks have become a place where Treasury bonds go in but never come out — thereby causing bond prices to be far higher and interest yields much lower than would obtain in a market that wasn’t rigged.

With the central banks no longer ready to buy, the Treasury market will once again be driven by real investors — many of them likely to demand higher interest rates owing to the heightened fiscal risks recently highlighted by Standard & Poor’s.

Indeed, the Fed and currency-pegging central banks in East Asia and the Persian Gulf have absorbed nearly all of Uncle Sam’s multitrillion-dollar spree of debt issuance. Moreover, about $4.6 trillion, or more than half of all debt held by the public, is now sequestered in central banks — paid for with printing-press money.

The standards, to go into effect in 2014, will replace a hodgepodge of state guidelines that have become the Achilles’ heel of the No Child Left Behind law. Many states, including New York, lowered standards in a push to meet the law’s requirement that all students reach grade level, as measured by each state, in English and math.

The new standards give specific goals that, by the end of the 12th grade, should prepare students for college work. Book reports will ask students to analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be graded partly on how persuasively students express their ideas. History papers will require reading from multiple sources; the goal is to get students to see how beliefs and biases can influence the way different people describe the same events.

There are guidelines for what students are expected to do in each grade, but it is still up to districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer points of the curriculum, like what books to read. There is no national body responsible for seeing that the standards are carried out, because of fears of giving too much control of education to the federal government. So far, only a few other large cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, have begun to apply the standards in the classroom. And depending on how No Child Left Behind is refashioned, it may still be left to each state to measure its own success.

the data explosion is also an enormous opportunity. In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset — the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity.

Is there any real evidence of a “data payoff” across the corporate world? It has taken a while, but new research led by Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests that the beginnings are now visible.

studied 179 large companies. Those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology, the researchers said.

one thing struck me about the conversation, which inevitably comes through any time smart people gather to discuss the Civil War. The conceded common ground was the following--The Civil War was a tragedy.

I'm sure that while Jews feel fairly horrible that the Holocaust happened, very few of them consider the fighting it took in order to liberate the death camps, "tragic." The Holocaust is tragic. Ending the Holocaust is not.

It's really simple for me. One group of Americans attempted to raise a country on property in Negroes. Another group of Americans, many of them Negroes themselves, stopped them. As surely as we lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of the English, I lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of slaveholders.

the basic argument is rather simple: that the health and nutrition of pregnant mothers and their children contribute to the strength and longevity of the next generation. If babies are deprived of sufficient nutrition in the womb and early in life, they will be more fragile and more vulnerable to diseases later on. These weakened adults will, in turn, produce weaker offspring in a self-reinforcing spiral.

Technology rescued humankind from centuries of physical maladies and malnutrition, Mr. Fogel argues. Before the 19th century, most people were caught in an endless cycle of subsistence farming. A colonial-era farmer, for example, worked about 78 hours during a five-and-a-half-day week. People needed more food to grow and gain strength, but they were unable to produce more food without being stronger.

“In many parts of the world, including the United States in the 20th century, medical advances appear to be at least as important as improvements in nutritional intake,”

The true crime of the torture regime is not, it seems to me, the horror that it perpetrates on our prisoners - as terrible as that certainly is. The true crime is what it does to all the military and civilians exposed to it and the weakening of the surface commitment to human rights that keeps a society like ours civil and democratic. 

Why can’t people who seem to have so much simply be satisfied with what they have, without feeling the need to risk breaking the law to get even more?

“These people all did think they could get away with it,” Stewart said. “And in some of the cases, they came very close. Martha Stewart came the closest to getting away with it … [and] they’ve all done things that they’ve gotten away with before.

Secondly … these people are surrounded by what I would call ‘enablers.’ They are surrounded by coworkers, people who report to them, people they’ve benefited, people who depend on them for money. And all of these other people show, in my view, a shameless willingness to sit there and be lied to and nod and smile and say, ‘Oh, yes, you’re right. You know, absolutely. Whatever you say.’ They’re never challenged.”

How the hell are we ever going to pay for our kids to go to college, when we'll still be paying off our own educations? If you don't think people my age (I'm 27) are worried about that kind of thing, then you haven't talked to them recently. I think this tension between the idea that "I'm different, I'm better!" and the grim economic realities we're facing is going to be the defining crisis of my generation.

"IQ tests are measuring much more than just raw intelligence--they also measure how badly subjects want to succeed both on the test and later in life":

the team found that higher motivation accounted for a significant amount of the differences in IQ scores and also in how well IQ predicted later success in life. For example, differences in motivation levels accounted for up to 84% of the differences between the boys in how many years of school they had completed or whether they had been able to find a job.

for the left, it reveals how individual motivation, i.e. effort, is actually a core part of an individual's success. It's not random.

The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition.

national standards are seen as a way to ensure that children in all states will have access to a similar education — and that financially strapped state governments do not have to spend limited resources on developing their own standards and tests.

This time, the standards were developed by the states themselves, not the federal government. Last year, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers convened English and math experts to put together benchmarks for each grade.