The End of the Age of Friedman
by J. Bradford Delong

Harvard professor Dani Rodrik - perhaps the finest political economist of my generation - recently reported on his blog that a colleague has been declaring the past three decades “the Age of Milton Friedman.” According to this view, the coming to power of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping led to an enormous upward leap in human liberty and prosperity. I say yes - and no - to this proposition.
Friedman adhered throughout his life to five basic principles:
1. Strongly anti-inflationary monetary policy.
2. A government that understood that it was the people’s agent and not a dispenser of favors and benefits.
3. A government that kept its nose out of people’s economic business.
4. A government that kept its nose out of people’s private lives.
5. An enthusiastic and optimistic belief in what free discussion and political democracy could do to convince peoples to adopt principles (1) through (4).
Measured against these principles, Reagan failed on (2) and (4) and adopted (1) only by default - Paul Volcker’s anti-inflation policy in the 1980’s dismayed many of Reagan’s close aides. Thatcher failed on (4). And Deng - while a vast improvement over his predecessors Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao - failed on all five, with the possible exception of (3). We do not know what Deng’s desired set of economic arrangements for a system of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was, and, in all likelihood, he did not know, either.
But I say yes in part to the “Age of Friedman” proposition, because only Friedman’s set of principles self-confidently proposed both to explain the world and to tell us how to change it. Still, I would build up a counterbalancing set of principles, because I believe that Friedman’s principles do not, ultimately, deliver what they promise.
My principles would start from the observation that market economies and free and democratic societies are built atop a very old foundation of human sociability, communication, and interdependence. That foundation had a hard enough time functioning when human societies had 60 members - eight orders of magnitude less than our current global society’s six billion.
So my principles would then be developed from Karl Polanyi’s old observation that the logic of market exchange puts considerable pressure on that underlying foundation. The market for labor compels people to move to where they can earn the most, at the price of potentially creating strangers in strange lands.
The market for consumer goods makes human status rankings the product of responsiveness to market forces rather than the result of social norms and views about justice.
This critique of the market is, of course, one-sided. After all, other arrangements for allocating labor appear to involve more domination and alienation than the labor market, which offers people opportunities, not constraints. Similarly, “social norms” and “views about distributive justice” usually turn out to favor whomever has the biggest spear or can convince others that obedience to the powerful is obedience to God. Market arrangements have a larger meritocratic component than the alternatives, and they encourage positive-sum entrepreneurship, making it easier to do well by doing good.
Nevertheless, the distribution of economic welfare produced by the market economy does not fit anyone’s conception of the just or the best. Rightly or wrongly, we have more confidence in the correctness and appropriateness of political decisions made by democratically-elected representatives than of decisions implicitly made as the unanticipated consequences of market processes.
We also believe that government should play a powerful role in managing the market to avoid large depressions, redistributing income to produce higher social welfare, and preventing pointless industrial structuring produced by the fads and fashions that sweep the minds of financiers.
Indeed, there is a conservative argument for social-democratic principles. Post-WWII social democracy produced the wealthiest and most just societies the world has ever seen. You can complain that redistribution and industrial policy were economically inefficient, but not that they were unpopular. It seems a safe bet that the stable politics of the post-WWII era owe a great deal to the coexistence of rapidly growing, dynamic market economies and social democratic policies.
Friedman would respond that, given the state of the world in 1975, a move in the direction of his principles was a big improvement. When I think of Jimmy Carter’s energy policy, Arthur Scargill at the head of the British mineworkers’ union, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, I have a hard time disagreeing with Friedman about the world in the mid-1970’s.

But there I would draw the line: while movement in Friedman’s direction was by and large positive over the past generation, the gains to be had from further movement in that direction are far less certain.

J.Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a former Assistant US treasury Secretary

The moral vulnerability of markets
By Robert Skidelsky
First Published: March 13, 2008

Today, there seems to be no coherent alternative to capitalism, yet anti-market feelings are alive and well, expressed for example in the moralistic backlash against globalization. Because no social system can survive for long without a moral basis, the issues posed by anti-globalization campaigners are urgent — all the more so in the midst of the current economic crisis.
It is hard to deny some moral value to the market. After all, we attach moral value to processes as well as outcomes, as in the phrase “the end does not justify the means.” It is morally better to have our goods supplied by free labor than by slaves, and to choose our goods rather than have them chosen for us by the state. The fact that the market system is more efficient at creating wealth and satisfying wants than any other system is an additional bonus.
Moral criticisms of the market focus on its tendency to favor a morally deficient character type, to privilege disagreeable motives, and to promote undesirable outcomes. Capitalism is also held to lack a principle of justice.
Consider character. It has often been claimed that capitalism rewards the qualities of self-restraint, hard-work, inventiveness, thrift, and prudence. On the other hand, it crowds out virtues that have no economic utility, like heroism, honor, generosity, and pity. (Heroism survives, in part, in the romanticized idea of the “heroic entrepreneur.”)
The problem is not just the moral inadequacy of the economic virtues, but their disappearance. Hard work and inventiveness are still rewarded, but self-restraint, thrift, and prudence surely started to vanish with the first credit card. In the affluent West, everyone borrows to consume as much as possible. America and Britain are drowning in debt.
Adam Smith wrote that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of production.” But consumption is not an ethical aim. It is not positively good to have five cars rather than one. You need to consume in order to live, and to consume more than you strictly need in order to live well. This is the ethical justification for economic development. From the ethical point of view, consumption is a means to goodness, and the market system is the most efficient engine for lifting people out of poverty: it is doing so at a prodigious rate in China and India.
But this does not tell us at what point consumption tips us into a bad life. If people want more pornography or more drugs, the market allows them to consume these goods to the point of self-destruction. It oversupplies some goods that are morally harmful, and undersupplies goods that are morally beneficial. For quality of life, we have to rely on morals, not markets.
No doubt it is unfair to blame the market for bad moral choices. People can decide when to stop consuming or what they want to consume. But the market system relies on a particular motive for action — Keynes called it “love of money” — which tends to undermine traditional moral teaching. The paradox of capitalism is that it converts avarice, greed, and envy into virtues.

We are told that capitalism discovers wants that people did not realize they had and thus moves humanity forward. But it is truer to say that the market economy is sustained by the stimulation of greed and envy through advertising. In a world of ubiquitous advertising, there is no natural limit to the hunger for goods and services.
The final moral issue is capitalism’s lack of a principle of justice. In a perfectly competitive market, with full information, models of the market show that all the factors of production receive rewards equal to their marginal products, i.e. all are paid what they are worth. The full competition and information requirements ensure that all contracts are uncoerced (there is no monopoly power) and all expectations are fulfilled, i.e., people get what they want. Justice in distribution is supposedly secured by justice in exchange.
But no actually existing capitalist market system spontaneously generates justice in exchange. There is always some monopoly power, insiders have more information than outsiders, ignorance and uncertainty are pervasive, and expectations are frequently disappointed. Justice in exchange has to be supplied from outside the market.
Moreover, the endowments that people bring with them to the market include not just their own innate qualities, but their starting positions, which are radically unequal. That is why the liberal theory of justice demands at a minimum equality of opportunity: the attempt — as far as is compatible with personal liberty — to eliminate all those differences in life chances arising from unequal starting points. As a result, we rely on the state to provide social goods like education, housing, and health care.
Finally, the claim that everyone is — under ideal conditions — paid what they are worth is an economic, not a moral, valuation. It does not conform to our moral intuition that a CEO should not be paid 500 times the average wage of his workers, or to our belief that if someone’s market-clearing wage is too low to support life, he should not be allowed to starve to death. As our societies have become richer, we have come to believe that everyone is entitled to a minimum standard, whether in work or sickness or unemployment, which allows for a continuing level of comfort and flourishing. The market system does not guarantee this.
While the market today has no serious challenger, it is morally vulnerable. It has become dangerously dependent on economic success, so that any large-scale economic failure will expose the shallowness of its moral claims. The solution is not to abolish markets, but to re-moralize wants. The simplest way of doing this is to restrict advertising. This would prune the role of greed and envy in the operation of markets, and create room for the flourishing of other motives.

Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University, author of a prize-winning biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes, and a board member of the Moscow School of Political Studies.

Q. Quotes

1. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning – Winston Churchill (1874-1965), of the victory in Africa, Speech at the mansion house , 10 Nov, 1942.

2. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity…It is part of nature- Johnny Speight (1922-1998), Social Statics

3. I don’t care who writes the nation’s laws- or crafts its advanced treaties-if I can write its economic books- Paul A. Samuelson (1915-) Author of Economics: An introductory Analysis ,1948, the largest selling economics textbook in history.

4. If the Treasury was to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again…there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community…would probably become a good deal larger than it actually is – John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), The General theory of Employment

5. If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Lecture noted down by Sarah Yule, quoted in her Borrowings.

6. People who don’t want anything worry me. The price isn’t right- Harold L. Lindsay and Russell Crouse, The State of the Union (film), 1948, spoken by Adolphe Menjou

7. I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life –Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), on seeing the first Reformed Parliament

8. Perhaps the most central characteristic of authentic leadership is the relinquishing of the impulse to dominate others – David Cooper (1931-?), Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry

9. Economics is our contemporary theology, regardless of how we spend Sunday- James Hillman, “Opening the Book,” Kinds of power: A guide to its intelligent uses ,1995.

10. You don’t go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul- Sam Keen (1931-), Jerry Brown radio interview, KPFA, Berkeley

Why is the pulpit non-committal?
(Pulpit is a platform or rasied structure in a mosque from which the preacher delivers the sermons)

By Nasser Yousaf

THE people of the Frontier Province in Pakistan can do little more to further establish their sincere Islamic credentials. Throughout the length and breadth of the province the mosques are overflowing with the faithful. Come time for the evening prayer and the bustling Saddar Road in Peshawar ceases to exist; shoppers and shopkeepers from all around convert the road into a makeshift mosque.

Men are sporting beards in large numbers as one keeps bumping into hordes of them at every step. No women on the streets or at university campuses in the province have ever been spotted in skirts and those few who wear jeans do so with long flowing shirts. Similarly, women driving cars keep to their cultural ethos in the most profound sense of the word. Little is needed to substantiate the Pakhtuns’ way of adherence to the month of fasting. The severity of fasting in the Frontier is such that the rest of the country lightly refers to Ramazan as the headache of the Pathans. There are no nightclubs, pubs or casinos anywhere and life comes to a halt when the night is still pretty young.

But this does not seem to be enough in the eyes of those currently at war with the defenceless people of the Frontier. The puritans’ brigade killed 12 innocent people on Aug 12, 2008, in a suicide attack in Peshawar and then called it a fidayeen (holy warriors) onslaught against forces presumably inimical to their cause. Two veiled women and a minor girl on their way to a wedding, two persons on bicycles and some lower-ranking officials of the air force were among the targets.

Before this, the militants twice targeted the 500 KV power tower on the outskirts of Peshawar in the infamous summer heat of the plains. As a result power supply to the provincial capital and scores of other districts remained suspended for days causing untold miseries to the sick and old.

Perhaps the militants did not know that a majority of cancer patients being treated at various reputed hospitals of the country hail from the Frontier or else their think tank would have reconsidered their plans.

The ongoing frenzy in the province might be sending very confused signals to the outside world. Those not familiar with the area might be imputing this fracas to a battle between the Islamists and non-Muslims. The record says otherwise: Muslims constitute 99.4 per cent of the population of the Frontier.

This leaves little room for people of other faiths to figure on the map. Nevertheless the census report does put the Christians and Ahmadis way down at less than one per cent while Hindus are so few that they easily evade even telescopic review. What is the issue at stake then? With the holy month of fasting to begin next week, why has Bajaur Agency been exorcised of most of its 900,000 inhabitants? The pulpit was supposed to shield the faithful but it is keeping mum or has it also been silenced into submission?

Friday prayers hardly get ignored when, in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Quran, Muslims stop working and find themselves mosque-bound as if by instinct. Several mosques in the Frontier have built separate enclosures for women. Children invariably make it to the mosques, adding an aura of special festivity to the congregational prayer in the true spirit of the ritual. The preacher leads the congregation, according to his own sweet will, reinforced by his easy access to the loudspeaker that now forms a part of his dress code through his buttonhole.

Garrulous preachers are what no administration would like to have in its jurisdiction but yet they are there occupying the pulpits till death do them part. A candidate being interviewed for the civil service was once asked why it was considered ominous to have the Eid festival on a Friday. After the interviewee drew a blank, the suave examiner explained that the issue was not one of superstition but one that concerned the management of two congregations gone awry on the same day as the enormity of the occasion entailed great cost for the government of the time. This in a nutshell shows the importance of the Friday sermon. But why is the preacher turning a blind eye to the melee in his own ranks?

No doubt, it is the presence of hundreds of worshippers listening to him in rapt attention that lends vanity to the tone of the preacher sitting on a higher pedestal. A politician spends a fortune on assembling a crowd of a few hundreds and then trying to keep it in good humour. On the other hand, preachers have facile access to an audience of more than 20m every Friday in Pakistan. People make it to the mosques without anybody’s persuasion or prodding. But the preacher seems to be oblivious of the added responsibilities that the enviable position bestows on him. He can thus be heard busying himself with inanities.

In a mosque in one neighbourhood, the preacher vents his spleen on those who according to him are throwing away their fortunes in the laps of dancing girls, a euphemism for a term that the preacher would have preferred. The sermon is relayed to all houses down the street on airwaves as the preacher repeats the charge more vociferously. This happened on a Friday when a woman fleeing from the battlefields of Bajaur Agency gave birth to a child on the roadside. The preacher then invoked curses on the enemies of Islam not knowing that salvation was one prayer away: the prayer that the pulpit may be restored to its conceived status in Islam.

courtesy Dawn, printed on August 30, 2008

Q. Quotes

1. God has two dwellings: one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart – Izaak Walton

2. God is really one another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things -Pablo Picasso(1881-1973) quoted in Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, Pt I.

3. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid – Arthur Miller (1915-)

4. Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy- F.Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940). “The Note-Books” (E), The Cracked Up, ed. Edmund Wilson, 1945

5. Yes, as I have already told you, here they hang a man first and try him afterwards – B.Poquelin, called Moliere (1622-1673)

6. If you give me six lines written by the most honest man.. I will find something in them to hang him – Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) [Attr. in various forms and to other authors]

7. In the last analysis, it is our conceptions of death which decides ours answers to all the questions that life puts to us – Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961) Diaries

8. It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word – Andrew Johnson

William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$51.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007, and employs more than 78,000 people in 105 countries and regions.
On June 15, 2006, Microsoft announced that effective July 2008 Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After July 2008 Gates will continue to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.
In his junior year, Gates left Harvard University to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates' foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.
Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of approximately $7.1 billion on research and development in the 2007 fiscal year.

Education for the future

by Bill Gates

Historically, if we wanted to understand what someone's income level was, all we had to do was ask what country they were from.

In the future, this will no longer be true. Instead, we'll ask what level of education they have achieved. This is because information and communications technology is opening up enormous opportunities for many more people to participate in the global economy, no matter where they may live. Soon, the prospects of a highly educated young person in India or almost any other emerging economy will match those of a young person in Europe or the United States, and opportunity will depend not on where you live, but what you know.

This change means education is the most important investment that governments make. To thrive in this new world, developed and developing countries alike need to focus on building the creative and productive capacities of their workforce. In an increasingly globalised economy, knowledge and skills are the key differentiators of nations as well as individuals. India is a great example of the power of this approach. An emphasis on education has been the catalyst for the rise of an information technology industry that has created new opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people and established India as an important global centre for innovation.

Today, powerful new tools are making it easier than ever to disseminate knowledge and expand educational opportunities. I applied to study at Harvard University nearly 35 years ago. I was attracted partly by the chance to hear great lectures from Harvard's brilliant faculty. Now, universities offer online lectures, discussion groups, examinations, and degrees to students all over the world. Technology is making higher education - and economic opportunity - available to more people, regard-less of their location.

Likewise in primary and secondary schools, educators are integrating technology tools into the curriculum so they can access classroom materials that will enable them to improve educational quality and teach the relevant skills that are the foundation for success in today's world.

I have seen how software can help millions of people be more productive and creative. I believe that software can also play a critical role in helping societies address their most difficult challenges. Software and technology innovation can help strengthen healthcare, protect the environment, improve education, and extend social and economic opportunities. Because information technology and education are so critical to creating economic opportunities, Microsoft is deeply committed to improving technology access and fostering innovative teaching and learning methods. In developing countries and in less prosperous communities where we do business, we believe in equipping students with the practical skills they need to thrive in today's knowledge economy.

To achieve these goals, in 2003 we launched a five-year, $250 million initiative called Microsoft Partners in Learning. Since then, we've worked closely with educators, government policymakers and community leaders in more than 100 countries. To date, Partners in Learning programmes have reached more than 3.6 million teachers and school leaders, and more than 76 million students.

In India, Partners in Learning has supported Project Shiksha, a programme designed to increase computer literacy by providing training for students and teachers, supporting the development of IT curriculum, and offering scholarships to top teachers and students.

Working with government officials and educators across India, we have helped provide training for more than 200,000 teachers and over 10 million students since Project Shiksha was launched in 2003.

Currently, an information technology curri-culum developed by us is being introduced in teacher training colleges across the state of Maharashtra with a goal of providing technology skills training to more than 100,000 student teachers. In the next three years or so they'll have the skills and knowledge to incorporate technology into their classrooms in meaningful ways after they graduate.

We are deeply committed to supporting programmes like Project Shiksha that can help deliver the benefits and opportunities that technology and quality education can provide to ever-greater numbers of young people. As a result, in late January, we have renewed Partners in Learning by making a second five-year investment that will bring total spending in the programme to nearly $500 million globally. Our plan is to intensify our focus on the needs, interests and dreams of young people, who hold the keys to the economic and social future of every nation. Our goal is to expand programmes to help transform education in order to reach more than 250 million students and teachers across the world during the next five years.

Computers and the internet have changed our world, but their ultimate impact will be far greater than anything we have seen so far. In the future, as technology continues to advance, it will play even more important roles in education, business, government, the economy and society. By working with educators to help improve student learning, we seek to make sure that more of the world's people have opportunities to enjoy the full benefits of technology, regardless of where they were born.

courtesy The Times of India and Daily Times, Lahore

Steve Jobs has revolutionized the computer, hardware, software, animation and music industries. Steve Jobs’ insistence of innovating always has cost him millions of dollars but has created a cult like following for his products.

Looking for love

by Steve Jobs

I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started?

Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologise for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story”, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

So keep looking. Don’t settle.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Steve Jobs is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc., which he co-founded in 1976, and industry leader in innovation. Jobs also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, which has created eight of the most successful animated films of all time winning 20 Academy Awards. Jobs’ history in business has contributed greatly to the myths of the quirky, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasising the importance of design while understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following. Considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries, Jobs was listed by Forbes magazine as the Most Powerful Businessman of 2007. Above is an excerpt from Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University

Jimmy Wales

Internet entrepreneur. Born Jimmy Donal Wales on August 24, 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama. Educated by his mother and grandmother in their “one-room schoolhouse,” Wales attended the private Randolph School before receiving his Bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University, his Master's in finance from the University of Alabama and taking Ph.D. finance courses at Indiana University.From 1994 to 2000, Wales worked as the Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trader in Chicago. During this time, he also became interested in the Internet and founded an adult-oriented search portal called Bomis.

In 2001, Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia, a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia in 2001. The name Wikipedia is a combination of “encyclopedia” and “wiki,” which is an online tool for collaborative authoring. Two years later, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization to support Wikipedia and other wiki projects. Though Wales initially used his own money to fund Wikimedia, by the end of 2005 it was run entirely on grants and donations. By the end of 2006, Wikipedia had more than 5 million articles in many languages, including more than 1.4 million in the English-language version.

Richard Baraniuk

Richard G. Baraniuk grew up in Winnipeg, Canada and received the B.Sc. degree in 1987 from the University of Manitoba, the M.Sc. degree in 1988 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Ph.D. degree in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in Electrical Engineering. In 1986, he was a research engineer with Omron Tateisi Electronics in Kyoto, Japan. While at the University of Illinois, he held a joint appointment with the CERL Sound Group and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. After spending 1992-1993 at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, he joined Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he is currently the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Engineering and a sporadic DJ for KTRU. He spent sabbaticals at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Télécommunications in Paris in 2001 and Ecole Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne in Switzerland in 2002.

Signal processing

Dr. Baraniuk's research interests lie in the areas of signal and image processing and include compressive sensing (compressed sensing), sensor networks, and pattern recognition and learning. In a bygone era he has worked in multiscale natural image modeling using hidden Markov models and time-frequency analysis. Some recent press on the single-pixel, compressive sensing camera is available here. His research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, AFRL, ARO, DOE, EPA, NATO, the Texas Instruments Leadership University Program, and several companies.
He has been a Guest Editor of special issues for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on "Signal Processing and Networks" in 2002 and "Compressive Sampling" in 2008 and for the Proceedings of the IEEE on "Educational Technology" in 2008. He is currently an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks and Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis. He served as Co-Technical Program Chair for IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop in 2007 and has served on several other conference technical program committees including IPSN, ICIP, ICASSP, and SPIE.

Connexions

In 1999, Dr. Baraniuk launched Connexions, a non-profit publishing project that aims to bring textbooks and learning materials into the Internet Age. Connexions makes high-quality educational content available to anyone, anywhere, anytime for free on the web and at very low cost in print by inviting authors, educators, and learners worldwide to "create, rip, mix, and burn" textbooks, courses, and learning materials from its global open-access repository. Each month, Connexions' free educational materials are used by over 850,000 people from over 200 countries. Connexions is also the open-access content engine for the newly revived Rice University Press. His career apogee was probably opening for Peter Gabriel at TED 2006 (talk). His signal processing materials in Connexions have been viewed over 2.7 million times (as of May 2008). Since 2002, Connexions has been supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, NSF, Rice University, and several friends of Rice. Some recent press on Connexions is available here, including a CNN.com article, NY Times Editorial, and op-ed piece

Honors

Dr. Baraniuk received a NATO postdoctoral fellowship from NSERC in 1992, the National Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1994, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 1995, the Rosenbaum Fellowship from the Isaac Newton Institute of Cambridge University in 1998, the C. Holmes MacDonald National Outstanding Teaching Award from Eta Kappa Nu in 1999, the Charles Duncan Junior Faculty Achievement Award from Rice in 2000, the University of Illinois ECE Young Alumni Achievement Award in 2000, the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching at Rice in 2001, 2003, and 2006, the Hershel M. Rich Invention Award from Rice in 2007, the Wavelet Pioneer Award from SPIE in 2008, and the Internet Pioneer Award from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in 2008. He was selected as one of Edutopia Magazine's Daring Dozen educators in 2007. Connexions received the Tech Museum Laureate Award from the Tech Museum of Innovation in 2006. His work with Kevin Kelly on the Rice single-pixel compressive camera was selected by MIT Technology Review Magazine as a TR10 Top 10 Emerging Technology in 2007. He was co-author on a paper with Matthew Crouse and Robert Nowak that won the IEEE Signal Processing Society Junior Paper Award in 2001 and another with Vinay Ribeiro and Rolf Riedi that won the Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) Workshop Best Student Paper Award in 2003. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001 and a Plus Member of AAA in 1986.

Open Education

Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn. Together, we can all help transform the way the world develops, disseminates, and uses knowledge

As the founders of two of the world’s largest open-source media platforms — Wikipedia and Conn-exions — we have both been accused of being dreamers. Independe-ntly, we became infected with the idea of creating a Web platform that would enable anyone to contribute their knowledge to free and open learning reso-urces. Jimmy started with his popularly generated encyclopaedia. Rich developed a platform for authors, teachers, and students to create, remix, and share courses and textbooks.
Almost everybody dismissed these dreams. Now, with the support of untold legions — from Nobel Laureates to junior high school kids from East Timor to East Los Angeles — Wikipedia and Connexions have spread around the globe and today are organic, growing information bases used by hundreds of millions of people.
We want to infect you with the dream that anyone can become part of a new movement with the potential to change the world of education. This movement can redefine forever how knowledge is created and used.
Today, some community college students have to quit school because their textbooks cost more than their tuition; and today, some third graders have to share math texts because there aren’t enough to go around. But imagine a world where textbooks and other learning materials are available to everyone for free over the Web and at low cost in print.
Today, language barriers prevent many immigrant parents from helping their children with their homework because the texts are only in English. But imagine a world where textbooks are adapted to many learning styles and translated into myriad languages.
Today, Pluto remains on the list of planets in science textbooks, and who knows how long it will take for it to be removed. But imagine a world where textbooks are continually updated and corrected by a legion of contributors.
Such a world was just a dream a decade ago. But now the puzzle pieces of the Open Education movement have come together, so that anyone, anywhere can write, assemble, customise, and publish their own open course or textbook. Open licenses make the materials legal to use and remix. Technical innovations like XML and print-on-demand make delivering the output technically feasible and inexpensive.
The new development and distribution models promoted by the Open Education movement represent a natural and inevitable evolution of the educational publishing industry. It parallels the evolution of the software industry (towards Linux and other open-source software); the music industry (recall the band Radiohead’s recent “pay what you like” digital download); and scholarly publishing (the United States government recently mandated online public access to all research funded by the National Institutes of Health — $28.9 billion this year).
The exciting thing about Open Education is that free access is just the beginning. Open Education promises to turn the current textbook production pipeline into a vast dynamic knowledge ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse, and improvement. Open Education promises to provide children with learning materials tailored to their individual needs, in contrast to today’s “off the rack” materials, together with quicker feedback loops that match learning outcomes more directly with content development and improvement. And Open Education promises new approaches to collaborative learning that leverage social interaction among students and teachers worldwide.
Late last year in Cape Town, we joined delegates from around the world to reach a consensus on Open Education’s ideals and approaches, and we committed ourselves to them in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which was officially released on January 22. (See www.capetowndeclaration.org)
Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn. Together, we can all help transform the way the world develops, disseminates, and uses knowledge. Together, we can help make the dream of Open Education a reality. —DT-PS
Jimmy Wales is founder of Wikipedia and Wikia. Richard Baraniuk, founder of Connexions, is a professor of engineering at Rice University
courtesy Dawn, Karachi

Preparing kids for life

By Chris Arnot

THE moment when Dr Peter Clough realised there’s more to performance than ability came on a bleak rugby league field. He was playing for Bradford University in northern England, and found himself up against a large and fearsome-looking winger who calmly announced that he was going to kill him.

“I believed him because, although I had fast hands for rugby, I lacked confidence,” admits the stocky figure who is now head of psychology at the University of Hull.

We’re on our way from Hull station to a nearby coffee bar. Clough is walking with a jauntiness that suggests confidence is no longer an issue. The painful lessons he learned on the sports field are what he’s now trying to pass on to those who find themselves in the less bruising but equally intimidating environment of the examination hall.

“Life’s tough; deal with it,” is his motto. Or, to put it another way, those who can train themselves to work well under pressure are more likely to do well in exams than intelligent students who are not good at coping with stress.

The term “mental toughness” is more associated with the world of professional sport than education. Indeed, I find myself inquiring whether this Clough is by any chance related to Brian, who knew a thing or two about psychology when it came to preparing footballers for the fray. He grins and shakes his head before conceding: “We would have had similar views, me and Brian.”

And that would appear to go for politics as well as psychology: Clough describes himself as “left of centre”, something of a surprise from a man who seems determined to challenge some liberal orthodoxies.

“I don’t buy into the theory that today’s schoolchildren are more stressed than previous generations,” he says.

Nor does he believe that there’s too much testing. “I’m a great believer in tests. It’s how the results are used that’s the problem. There’s an obsession with league tables [in the UK]. But I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with expecting children to sit down and answer questions about what they’re supposed to have learned.”

Clough is 48. There must have been fewer formal tests when he was at school in the 60s and 70s? “The same level of formalised teaching wasn’t there,” he agrees. “But I remember having to read out homework in front of the rest of the class while the teacher rubbished it.”

Clough insists: “What I’m not advocating is bullying or harassment. And I do accept that some people need help and intervention to boost their self-esteem. Children who are screwed up clinically and have behavioural issues are outside my area of expertise.”

As a chartered sports and occupational psychologist, however, Clough believes that he’s well placed to offer advice to those who underperform simply because they lack confidence.

He accepts that some secondary school teachers “doing one of the most stressful jobs there is” might be a bit suspicious of “academics like me coming in and telling them how to do their job”. Still, at least five schools in the north of England have allowed researchers from his department to talk to children about dealing with pressure.

Clough was brought up in a working-class area of Leeds; his father was a postman. He has little sympathy with those who blame their background for their lack of success.

“If they’ve had abusive parents, that’s different,” he says. But poverty is not a sufficient excuse. If you’re from a poor background, there will be fewer opportunities, but people have to take responsibility for their lives. There’s always a moment in life when the door of opportunity opens slightly. My job is to train people to put their foot in it.”

Paradoxically, perhaps, he also believes that children have to be allowed to fail if they are ultimately going to succeed. “Most people learn from their mistakes and bounce back, vowing not to make the same errors again,” he says. “In my view, there are too many safety nets in schools, such as the option to re-sit exams. It means that young people are less tough than previous generations, and less able to cope with life at university.”— courtesy The Guardian, London and Dawn, Karachi

Q.Quotes

1 .For we must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world – John Winthrop, discourse written on board the Arabella, 1630, as Pilgrim Fathers approached America, (1588-1649)

2. What will God say to us, if some of us go to him without the others? – Charles Peguy , quoted in W.Neil, Concise Dictionary of religious Quotations, (1873-1914)

3. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God-none of the servants. In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in this world – Henry David Thorea (1817-1862) Letter to Harrison Blake, 27 March 1848

4. I think it would be a good idea – Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) when asked by an interviewer what he thought of Western Civilization

5. The pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders – Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

6. Death said: ‘The good is one thing, the pleasant the other: these two, have different objects, chain a man. It is well with him who clings to the good; he who chooses the pleasant misses his end.’ Upanishads (7 cent B.C) Katha Upanshid

7. I cannot help it;-in spite of myself, infinity torments me - Alfred De Musset (1810-1857)

8. Learn to think imperially – Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) British Colony secretary. Speech Guildhall, London, 19 January 1904

9. In the coming world, they will not ask me: “Why are you not Moses?” They will ask me: “Why were you not Zusya?” Zusya (?-1800) Before his death. In Martin Buber “Zusya of Hanipol,” tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, tr. Olga Marx, 1947

10. The secret of success in [education] is pace, and the secret of pace is concentration. But, in respect to precise knowledge, the watch-word is pace, pace, pace. Get your knowledge quickly, and then use it. If you can use it, you will retain it. – Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), The Aims of education and other essays, 3, 1929.

11. There is always room at the top – Daniel Webster (1782-1852) When advised not to become a lawyer, since the profession was overcrowded

12. Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough – Gustave Flaubert

13.It’s a damn poor mind that you can think of only one way to spell a word- Andrew Johnson

14. Education cannot be for students in any authentic way, if it is not of and by them – William H. Schubert (1944-) John Dewey Society president. “The Activist Library: A Symposium”, Nation 21 September 1992

15. The sum total of excellence is good sense and method. When these have passed into the instinctive readiness of habit, when the wheel revolves so rapidly that we cannot see it revolve at all, then we call the combination genius. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1722-1834). In Lord Acton, appendix (70) to essays on Freedom and Power, ed. Gertrude Himmerlfarb. 1949

16. Imagination is a very high sort of seeing – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) . “The Poet”, Essays: Second Series , 1844

Sir Arthur Clarke, a graduate of King's College, London, was the author of numerous works of science and science-fiction, including his well-known collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was Chancellor of the International Space University and Chancellor of the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, where he had lived for 30 years. Clarke passed away on March 19, 2008.

The following essay was published June, 05 1998 , in Science magazine

Presidents, Experts and Asteroids

Sir Arthur Clarke

For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.(Late 20th-century folklore)

For more than a century science and its occasionally ugly sister technology have been the chief driving forces shaping our world. They decide the kinds of futures that are possible. Human wisdom must decide which are desirable.
It is truly appalling, therefore, that so few of our politicians have any scientific or engineering background. Yet while some scientific training should be a requisite for anyone making policy decisions, it is clearly not sufficient. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, two U.S. presidents with engineering backgrounds, were probably as perplexed as anyone when faced with making policy decisions involving science or technology.
Even the wisest and best science-educated of politicians may have difficulty making good decisions when, as is often the case, "experts" disagree. There are some hilarious examples of this in the history of science--for example, Lord Kelvin's declaration that x-rays must be a hoax, and Ernest Rutherford's even more famous dismissal of atomic energy as "moonshine."
Politicians now are wrestling with the matter of human cloning, perhaps the most notable controversy now facing science and society. Any developments that concern biology--especially human biology--are liable to arouse passions, as witnessed in the debates over abortion, euthanasia, and evolution. I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind? And, although I do not necessarily agree with the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin's advocacy of evolution as a major proof of the glory of God, de Chardin's attitude is both logical and inspiring. A creator who laid the foundations for the entire future at the beginning of time is far more awesome than a clumsy tinkerer who constantly modifies his creations and throws away entire species in the process. Even the Vatican, while firm in its declaration that the human soul is divinely created and not subject to process, has stated that the theory of physical evolution is more than just a hypothesis (1996).
Science and society can also clash in the area of military security. I was involved in the debate over the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, a.k.a. Star Wars) from its inception 15 years ago this spring. My attitude then, as now, was that although it might be possible to construct local defense systems at vast expense that would let through "only" a few percent of ballistic missiles, the much-touted idea of a national umbrella was nonsense. Luis Alvarez (winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in physics), perhaps the greatest experimental physicist of this century, remarked to me that the advocates of such schemes were "Very bright guys, with no common sense."
Now, looking into my often cloudy crystal ball, I suspect that a total defense might indeed be possible in a century or so, but the technology required would produce, as a by-product, weapons so terrible that no one would need any longer bother with anything as primitive as ballistic missiles.
If I might hazard another prediction, I suspect that President Reagan's 1983 "Star Wars" speech outlining his idea of an umbrella defense system consisting of armed space satellites to protect America against attacks by nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, will one day be regarded as a work of political genius. However shaky SDI's technological foundations, it may well have contributed to the ending of the Cold War. Yet its technology may come to be useful in ways unanticipated at its inception. The projected SDI armory of lasers and interceptors could one day be used to save not only the United States, but indeed the entire human race from the threat of comets and asteroids.
The scientific establishment has only slowly understood that the history of this planet, and perhaps of civilization itself, has been modified in important ways by physical impacts from space. We have come a long way since President Jefferson remarked, "I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors lied, than that stones fell from the sky," for now we know that mountains can indeed fall from the sky. And here we have perhaps the most perfect example of the quotation that opens this essay. Volumes of statistics have been amassed on either side of the question: How much effort should be devoted to a danger that is probably remote, but that may sterilize our planet? In my estimation we need to embark on serious study on the probability of comet or asteroid impactors on the planet Earth. The cost would be quite trivial, and the results should be of great astronomical value, based on our experience of comet Shoemaker-Levy's impact on Jupiter. And what a tragedy Gene Shoemaker's untimely death was! Gene, some of whose ashes are now on the moon, would have been amused by the embarrassment that his unusual internment caused at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Even more controversial than the threat of asteroid impacts is what I would call perhaps one of the greatest scandals in the history of science, the cold fusion caper. Like almost everyone else, I was surprised when Pons and Fleischmann announced that they had achieved fusion in the laboratory; and surprise changed to disappointment when I learned that most of those who had rushed to confirm these results were unable to replicate them. Wondering first how two world-class scientists could have fooled themselves, I then forgot the whole matter for a year or so, until more and more reports surfaced, from many countries, of anomalous energy production in various devices (some of them apparently having nothing to do with fusion). Agreeing with Carl Sagan's principle that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs" (spoken in connection with UFOs and alien visitors), I remained interested, but skeptical.
Now I have little doubt that anomalous energy is being produced by several devices, some of which are on the market with a money back guarantee, while others are covered by patents. The literature on the subject is now enormous, and my confidence that "new energy" is real slowly climbed to the 90th percentile and has now reached the 99% level. A Fellow of the Royal Society, also originally a skeptic, writes: "There is now strong evidence for nuclear reactions in condensed matter at low temperature." The problem, he adds, is that "there is no theoretical basis for these claims, or rather there are too many conflicting theories."
Yet recall that the steam engine had been around for quite a while before Carnot explained exactly how it worked. The challenge now is to see which of the various competing devices is most reliable. My guess is that large-scale industrial application will begin around the turn of the century--at which point one can imagine the end of the fossil-fuel-nuclear age, making concerns about global warming irrelevant, as oil-and-coal-burning systems are phased out.
Global warming is another area where politicians cannot be blamed for being confused. Although most scientists agree that warming is occurring, some, such as Fred Singer, who headed the U.S. meteorological satellite program, do not. We may need global warming, after all, as the current interglacial period draws to a close. As Will Durant said many years ago, "Civilization is an interlude between ice ages."* If this is true, the cry in the next millennium may be "Spare that old power station--we need more CO2!"
Finally, another of my dubious predictions: Pons and Fleischmann will be the only scientists ever to win both the Nobel and the Ig Noble Prizes.

-courtesy Science Magazine

Letter to Russell —Will Durant

Dear Earl Russell,

Will you interrupt your busy life for a moment, and play the game of philosophy with me?

I am attempting to face, in my next book, a question that our generation, perhaps more than most, seems always ready to ask, and never able to answer — what is the meaning or worth of human life? Heretofore this question has been dealt with chiefly by theorists, from Ikhnaton and Lao-tse to Bergson and Spengler. The result has been a species of intellectual suicide: thought, by its very development, seems to have destroyed the value and significance of life. The growth and spread of knowledge, for which so many reformers and idealists prayed, appears to bring to its devotees — and, by contagion, to many others — a disillusionment which has almost broken the spirit of our race.

Astronomers have told us that human affairs constitute but a moment in the trajectory of a star; geologists have told us that civilization is a precarious interlude between ice ages; biologists have told us that all life is war, a struggle for existence among individuals, groups, nations, alliances, and species; historians have told us that ‘progress’ is a delusion, whose glory ends in inevitable decay; psychologists have told us that the will and the self are the helpless instruments of heredity and environment, and that the once incorruptible soul is only a transient incandescence of the brain. The Industrial Revolution has destroyed the home, and the discovery of contraceptives is destroying the family, the old morality, and perhaps (through the sterility of the intelligent) the race. Love is analysed into a physical congestion, and marriage becomes a temporary physiological convenience slightly superior to promiscuity. Democracy has disintegrated into such corruption as only Milo’s Rome knew; and our youthful dreams of a socialist utopia disappear as we see, day after day, the inexhaustible acquisitiveness of men. Every invention strengthens the strong and weakens the weak; every new mechanism displaces men, and multiplies the horrors of war. God, who was once the consolation of our brief life, and our refuge in bereavement and suffering, has apparently vanished from the scene; no telescope, no microscope discovers him. Life has become, in that total perspective which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured; nothing is certain in it except defeat and death — a sleep from which, it seems, there is no awakening.

We are driven to conclude that the greatest mistake in human history was the discovery of truth. It has not made us free, except from delusions that comforted us, and restraints that preserved us; it has not made us happy, for truth is not beautiful, and did not deserve to be so passionately chased. As we look upon it now we wonder why we hurried so to find it. For it appears to have taken from us every reason for existing, except for the moment’s pleasure and tomorrow’s trivial hope.

This is the pass to which science and philosophy have brought us. I, who have loved philosophy for many years, turn from it now back to life itself, and ask you, as one who has lived as well as thought, to help me understand. Perhaps the verdict of those who have lived is different from that of those who have merely thought. Spare me a moment to tell me what meaning life has for you, what help — if any — religion gives you, what keeps you going, what are the sources of your inspiration and energy, what is the goal or motive-force of your toil; where you find your consolations and your happiness, where in the last resort your treasure lies. Write briefly if you must; write at leisure and at length if you possibly can; for every word from you will be precious to me.

Sincerely,

Will Durant

William James Durant (November 5, 1885 — November 7, 1981) was an American philosopher, historian, and writer. He is best known for writing, with his wife Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, an 11-volume work written between 1935 and 1975. The Durants were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom 1977- courtesy , Daily Times, Lahore, Pakistan

Giammaria Ortes — Italo Calvino

Once upon a time there was a man who wanted to calculate everything: pleasures, pains, virtues, vices, truths, errors. This man was convinced that he could establish an algebraic formula and a system of numerical quantification for every aspect of human feeling and action. He fought against the chaos of existence and the indeterminacy of thought with the weapon of ‘geometrical precision’, a weapon, in other words, derived from an intellectual style which was all clear oppositions and irrefutable logical consequences. The desire for pleasure and the fear of force were for him the only certain premises from which to embark on a journey towards knowledge of the human condition: only by this route could he succeed in establishing that even qualities such as justice and self-denial had some solid foundation.

The world was a mechanism containing ruthless forces: ‘The true worth of opinions is wealth since it is wealth that changes hands and buys up opinions’; ‘Man is basically a trunk of bones held together by tendons, muscles and other membranes.’ Predictably, the author of these maxims lived in the eighteenth century. From the machine-man of La Mettrie to the triumph of the cruel pleasures of Nature in de Sade, the spirit of that century knew no half-measures in its rejection of any providential vision of man and the world. It is also predictable that he lived in Venice: in its slow decline the Serenissima felt itself more and more caught up in the crushing contest between the great powers, and obsessed by profits and increasing losses in its trade; and more and more immersed in its hedonism, its gaming halls, its theatres and carnivals. What other place could have provided greater stiumulus to a man who wanted to calculate everything? He felt a vocation to devise a system to win at the card-game ‘faraone’, to calculate the right quantity of passion in a melodrama, and even to discourse on the interference of government in the economy of the private individual and on the wealth and poverty of nations.

But the man in question was not a libertine in learning like Helvetius, nor a libertine in practice like Casanova: he was not even a reformer battling on behalf of Enlightenment values, like his Milanese contemporaries.... Giammaria Ortes, for that was his name, was a dry, irritable priest, who wielded the spiky carapace of his logic against the premonitions of the upheaval pervading Europe and rumbling even among the foundations of his native Venice. He was a pessimist like Hobbes, loved paradoxes as much as Mandeville, was peremptory in his argumentation, and dry and acerbic in style. Reading him, we are left without a shadow of doubt about his position as one of the most unmisty-eyed champions of Reason with a capital R. Indeed we have to make a real effort to accept the other details supplied by biographers and experts of his entire oeuvre, particularly as regards his intransigence on matters religious and his substantial conservatism...And this should be a lesson to us never to trust received notions and clichés, such as the traditional view that the eighteenth century was dominated by the clash between a religious spirit heavy with sentiment and a cold, unbelieving rationality: reality is always much more nuanced, same elements continually combining in a whole range of different assortments. Behind the most mechanical and mathematical vision of human nature can easily lie a Catholic pessimism about earthly matters; precise, crystalline forms emerge from the dust and take shape before returning to dust again.

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923, and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. His books include Marchovaldo, Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, If on a winter’s night a traveller and Mr Palomar. In 1973, he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. Above is an extract from his essay on Giammaria Ortes, featured in his book Why read the classics

Q. Quotes

1.You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher: but I don’t know how. Cheerfulness was always breaking in- Oliver Edwards (1711-1791) Quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 17th April 1778

2.I think it’s the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone – President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) at a dinner for Nobel Prizewinners, 29 April 1962

3.There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided – Charles Baron De Montesquieu (1689-1755) (lettres persanes, 59)

4.In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle was alive today, he’d have a talk show- Timothy Leary- (1920-1996), in Evening Standard (British Newspaper), 8th February 1989

5.A little philosophy inclineth Man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion – Francis Bacon (1561-1626). “of Atheism”, Essays 1625

6.God will pardon me, it is His trade -Heineich Heine (1797-1856) last words

7.When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes – W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

8.Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they do is the same as what they most want to do – W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

9.In Germany, the Nazis came for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant so I didn’t speak up. Then they came for me… By that time there was no one to speak up for anyone – Martin Niemoller (1892-1984)

10.The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries – Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

11.Many quite sensible people believe that the Marxian class war will be a war to end war. If it ever comes, they too will be disillusioned-if any of them survive. – Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

12.In the secret of my heart I am in perpetual quarrel with God that he should allow such things to go on – Mohandis K. Gandhi (1869-1958) Referring to the death and destruction he anticipated at the start of the World War II, September 1939 , In Louis Fischer , The life of Mahatma Gandhi , 37 , 1950

13.I fired [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three quarter of them would be in jail – Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) said in an interview, quoted in Merle Miller, Plain Speaking, 24

In Marx’s shadow again. REASON(S)

J Bradford Delong

A century and a half ago, Karl Marx both gloomily and exuberantly predicted that the modern capitalism he saw evolving would prove incapable of producing an acceptable distribution of income. Wealth would grow, Marx argued, but would benefit the few, not the many: the forest of upraised arms looking for work would grow thicker and thicker, while the arms themselves would grow thinner and thinner. This injustice would provoke revolt and revolution, producing a new, better, fairer, more prosperous, and far more egalitarian system.

Ever since, mainstream economists have earned their bread and butter patiently explaining why Marx was wrong. Yes, the initial dis-equilibrium shock of the industrial revolution was and is associated with rapidly rising inequality as opportunities are opened to aggressiveness and enterprise, and as the market prices commanded by key scarce skills rise sky-high.

But this was — or was supposed to be — transient. A technologically stagnant agricultural society is bound to be an extremely unequal one: by force and fraud, the upper class push the peasants’ standards of living down to subsistence and take the surplus as the rent on the land they control. The high rents paid to noble landlords increase their wealth and power by giving them the resources to keep the peasants down and widen the surplus — for, after all, they cannot make more land.

By contrast, mainstream economists argued, a technologically advancing industrial society was bound to be different. First, the key resources that command high prices and thus produce wealth are not fixed, like land, but are variable: the skills of craft workers and engineers, the energy and experience of entrepreneurs, and machines and buildings are all things that can be multiplied. As a result, high prices for scarce resources lead not to zero- or negative-sum political games of transfer but to positive-sum economic games of training more craft workers and engineers, mentoring more entrepreneurs and managers, and investing in more machines and buildings.

Second, democratic politics balances the market. Government educates and invests, increasing the supply and reducing the premium earned by skilled workers, and lowering the rate of return on physical capital. It also provides social insurance by taxing the prosperous and redistributing benefits to the less fortunate. Economist Simon Kuznets proposed the existence of a sharp rise in inequality upon industrialisation, followed by a decline to social-democratic levels.

But, over the past generation, confidence in the “Kuznets curve” has faded. Social-democratic governments have been on the defensive against those who claim that redistributing wealth exacts too high a cost on economic growth, and unable to convince voters to fund yet another massive expansion of higher education.

On the private supply side, higher returns have not called forth more investment in people. America’s college-to-high-school wage premium may now be 100 percent, yet this generation of white, native-born American males may well wind up getting no more education than their immediate predecessors. And increasing rewards for those at the increasingly sharp peak of the income distribution have not called forth enough enterprising market competition to erode that peak.

The consequence has been a loss of morale among those of us who trusted market forces and social-democratic governments to prove Marx wrong about income distribution in the long run — and a search for new and different tools of economic management.

Increasingly, pillars of the establishment are sounding like shrill critics. Consider Martin Wolf, a columnist at The Financial Times. Wolf recently excoriated the world’s big banks as an industry with an extraordinary “talent for privatising gains and socialising losses...[and] get[ting]...self-righteously angry when public officials...fail to come at once to their rescue when they get into (well-deserved) trouble...[T]he conflicts of interest created by large financial institutions are far harder to manage than in any other industry.”

Wolf then announced his “fear that the combination of the fragility of the financial system with the huge rewards it generates for insiders will destroy something even more important — the political legitimacy of the market economy itself...”

For Wolf, the solution is to require that such bankers receive their pay in instalments over the decade after which they have done their work. That way, shareholders and investors could properly judge whether the advice given and the investments made were in fact sound in the long run rather than just reflecting the enthusiasm of the moment.

But Wolf’s solution is not enough, for the problem is not confined to high finance. The problem is a broader failure of market competition to give rise to alternative providers and underbid the fortunes demanded for their work by our current generation of mercantile princes.

-DT-PSJ Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a former Assistant US Treasury Secretary

The end of history?

Jean-Paul Fitoussi

Some academic works, for reasons that are at least partly obscure, leave a persistent trace in intellectual history. Such is the case with John Maynard Keynes’s paper “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”

The importance of Keynes’s paper consisted not so much in how he answered the questions he posed, but in the nature of the questions themselves. Could the very functioning of the capitalist system bring an end to the problem of scarcity — and hence to capitalism itself? What might people’s lives in such an era reasonably be expected to look like?

Keynes began to examine these questions with the calculus of compound interest and its spectacular outcome when applied to long periods. At a 2% rate of growth, any figure, including GDP, will increase 7.5-fold in a century. So, would the problem of scarcity — which underlies all economics — be resolved by such an increase?

For Keynes, the answer was a straightforward yes, because such an increase would allow the satiation of what he calls “absolute needs.” True, Keynes was well aware that relative needs — “keeping up with the Joneses” — will never be satiated, but he thought that these needs would become of second-order importance, so remote from the search for the good life that seeking to satisfy them would be recognised as a form of neurosis. According to Keynes, we would instead progressively learn how “to devote our further energies to non-economic purpose.”

But here arithmetic ends and the complexity of human nature begins. How are we to define “absolute needs”? Are they independent of time and place? Were they the same at the beginning of the twentieth century as they are now?

This is where Keynes’s thesis runs into trouble. As soon as we abandon the fiction that economic agents are Robinson Crusoes, absolute needs turn out to be indistinguishable from relative needs, because the goods that satisfy our needs change. For example, life expectancy has increased over time thanks to the progress of medicine and hygiene and to the increased quality and diversity of goods (for example, safer food). The demand for better goods (and services) to meet our needs seems to be boundless, driving science and innovation.

Keynes may have relied so heavily on such a simplistic characterisation of human needs to make his point “that the economic problem is not...the permanent problem of the human race.” While this view may be exaggerated, for believers in economic and social progress, it is not entirely wrong. At the very least, scarcity need not be a question of life and death. All that is required is an increase in the standard of living and social cohesion — the refusal to endanger the lives of the poorest through a lack of redistribution. Nevertheless, scarcity would remain, because there is no such a thing as a stationary state in which all needs are satisfied and mankind ceases to hope for a better future.

But Keynes’s emphatic tone suggests that he believed in his own taxonomy of needs. What he found most detestable was capitalism as an end in itself. Capitalism is an efficient means, but pure communism is the only moral end of any economic system. At that point, “[t]he love of money as a possession...will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

For Keynes, only those who will be able to sublimate their non-satisfied relative needs into a higher ideal would find their way in the new paradise. “We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”

Keynes seemed to be extolling a kind of elite communism. Of course, in a world of abundance, one may hope that the class of elites will become ever larger. But, while every economist should try to answer the question of the ends of the economic system and of its possible end, Keynes’s understanding of human needs embodied a highly idiosyncratic combination of arrogance and naïveté. It is not surprising that it didn’t survive.

DT-PSJean-Paul Fitoussi is Professor of economics at Sciences-po and President of OFCE (Sciences-po Centre for Economic Research, Paris)

Time to ask Milton Friedman?

By Peter S. Goodman

Joblessness is growing. Millions of homes are sliding into foreclosure. The financial system continues to choke on the toxic leftovers of the mortgage crisis. The downward spiral of the economy is challenging a notion that has underpinned American economic policy for a quarter-century — the idea that prosperity springs from markets left free of government interference.

The modern-day godfather of that credo was Milton Friedman, who attributed the worst economic unraveling in American history to regulators, declaring in a 1976 essay “the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement.” Five years later, Ronald Reagan entered the White House, elevating Mr Friedman’s laissez-faire ideals into a veritable set of commandments. Taxes were cut, regulations slashed and public industries sold into private hands, all in the name of clearing government from the path to riches. As the economy expanded and inflation abated, Mr Friedman played the role of chief evangelist in the mission to let loose the animal instincts of the market.

But with market forces now seemingly gone feral, disenchantment with regulation has given way to demands for fresh oversight, placing Mr Friedman’s intellectual legacy under fresh scrutiny.

Just as the Depression remade government’s role in economic life, bringing jobs programs and an expanded welfare system, the current downturn has altered the balance. As Wall Street, Main Street and Pennsylvania Avenue seethe with recriminations, a bipartisan chorus has decided that unfettered markets are in need of fettering. Bailouts, stimulus spending and regulations dominate the conversation.

In short, the nation steeped in the thinking of a man who blamed government for the Depression now beseeches government to lift it to safety. If M. Friedman, who died in 2006, were still among us, he would surely be unhappy with this turn.

“What Milton Friedman said was that government should not interfere,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics Inc., a consulting group. “It didn’t work. We now are looking at one of the greatest real estate busts of all time. The free market is not geared to take care of the casualties, because there’s no profit motive. There’s no market incentive to deal with the unemployed or those who have lost their homes.”

To Mr. Friedman, such sentiments, when turned into policy, deprived the economy of the vibrancy of market forces.

Born in Brooklyn in 1912 to immigrant parents who worked briefly in sweatshops, Mr. Friedman retained a sense that America was a land of opportunity with ample rewards for the hard working.

His intellectual bent was forged as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a base for those who saw themselves as guardians of classical economics in a world then under the spell of woolly-headed revisionists.

The chief object of their scorn was John Maynard Keynes, and his message that government had to juice the economy with spending during times of duress. That notion dominated policy in the years after the Depression. Mr. Friedman would spend much of his career assailing it: He argued that government should simply manage the supply of money — to keep it growing with the economy — then step aside and let the market do its magic.

So firm was his regard for market forces, so deep his disdain for government, that Mr Friedman once said: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.”

This antagonism toward bureaucracy seemed to spring from Mr. Friedman’s conception of his country as a bastion of rugged individualism. During an interview on PBS in 2000, he noted that Adam Smith, the father of classical economics, published his canonical work, “The Wealth of Nations,” in 1776, “the same year as the American Revolution.”

He spoke in the interview of his concern at the end of World War II that socialism was gaining adherents because countries had been forced to organize collectively to produce armaments. “You came out of the war with the widespread belief that the war had demonstrated that central planning would work,” Mr. Friedman said. “The left, in particular, ... interpreted Russia as a successful experiment in central planning.”

Mr. Friedman’s brand of libertarianism rested on the assumption that economic and political freedoms were one and the same. It meshed with and fed the cold war thinking of his time, as the United States offered up capitalism as liberty itself in contrast to the authoritarian Soviet Union.

Among professional economists, Mr Friedman’s analytical mastery was near-universally admired.

His first breakthrough came in the 1950s with his idea that people’s savings and spending were not a function of psychological factors, but based on rational estimations of wealth.

His greatest contribution came the following decade, when Mr. Friedman dismantled the consensus view that inflation was a tolerable byproduct of high employment. He demonstrated that high inflation would eventually cost jobs, as businesses were discouraged to invest by the higher wages they had to pay.

“This triumph, more than anything else, confirmed Milton Friedman’s status as a great economist’s economist, whatever one may think of his other roles,” Paul Krugman, an economist (and a New York Times columnist) wrote last year in The New York Review of Books.

Mr. Friedman captured the era with a new formulation known as monetarism: that the government should gradually and predictably inject cash into the financial system, and then let the market figure out where it should go.

“Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites,” Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard economist and former Clinton administration Treasury secretary, wrote in an appreciation published in this newspaper when Mr. Friedman died. “He has had more influence on economic policy as it is practiced around the world today than any other modern figure.”

But the reviews for Mr. Friedman’s work grow mixed when the subject moves to his role as chief proselytizer in the drive to reduce the role of government in public life.

He laid out a blueprint in his 1962 book, “Capitalism and Freedom,” calling for the end of the military draft, the abolition of the licensing of doctors and the creation of “education vouchers” that parents could use to send children to private schools, injecting competition into public education.

Two years later, Mr. Friedman put those principles to work as an economic adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater, a Republican from Arizona. The campaign called for the abolition of government oversight of the energy, telephone and airline industries and the dismantling of the Social Security system and national parks.

Mr. Goldwater took a drubbing at the hands of Lyndon Johnson. Mr. Friedman would remain in the policy wilderness until the rise of President Reagan. Then, his notions about rolling back government took on the force of dogma.

This was so not only in the United States, but also throughout much of the world. As former Iron Curtain countries embraced free markets, they did so with Mr. Friedman’s books in hand. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank leaned heavily on his ideas in prescribing policies for countries from Asia to Latin America.

Q. Quotes

1. It doesn’t matter a jot if three-fourths of mankind perish! The only thing that matters is that, in the end, the remaining fourth should become communist – Lenin (1870-1924)

2. Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both – John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

3. If Karl (my son), instead of writing a lot about Capital, made a lot of Capital, it would have been much better – Henrietta Marx (19th Century)

4. All I know is that I am not a Marxist – Karl Marx (1818-1883)

5. A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap and human beings dear: indeed the word “riches” has no other meaning – R. H. Tawney (1880-1962)

6. I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expense, and my expense is equal to my wishes – Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

7. When I was a child, my mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the pope “Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso – Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

8. A simple and a proper function of government is just to make it easy for us to do good and difficult for us to do wrong – Jimmy Carter (1924-)

9. My experience in government is that when things are noncontroversial, beautifully coordinated, and all the rest, it must be that not much is going on – John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

10. If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door – Sarah Yule

11. In China the sovereign is worshipped as a god. That I think is how it ought to be – Napoleon (1769-1821) Talks of Napoleon at St. Helena

12. I believe the greatest asset a head of state can have is the ability to get a good night’s sleep – Harold Wilson (1916-1995)

13. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character – Martin Luther King Jun. (1929-1968)

14. If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand – Milton Friedman (1912-2006)