But what if science is fundamentally incapable of explaining our own existence as thinking things? What if it proves impossible to fit human beings neatly into the world of subatomic particles and laws of motion that science describes? In Mind and Cosmos (Oxford University Press), the prominent philosopher Thomas Nagel’s latest book, he argues that science alone will never be able to explain a reality that includes human beings. What is needed is a new way of looking at and explaining reality; one which makes mind and value as fundamental as atoms and evolution. For most philosophers, and many people in general, this is a radical departure from the way we understand things. Nagel, according to his critics, has completely lost it. Linking to one particularly damning review in The Nation, Steven Pinker tweeted, “What has gotten into Thomas Nagel? Two philosophers expose the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.”more from Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson at Prospect Magazine here.
2012年10月31日星期三
THOMAS NAGEL IS NOT CRAZY
2012年10月30日星期二
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MIND GAMES: WHY EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW ABOUT YOURSELF IS WRONG
From The Independent:
The Misconception: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.
The Truth: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.
More here.
2012年10月29日星期一
HOW DID MILK HELP FOUND WESTERN CIVILIZATION?
Benjamin Phelan in Slate:
To repurpose a handy metaphor, let's call two of the first Homo sapiens Adam and Eve. By the time they welcomed their firstborn, that rascal Cain, into the world, 2 million centuries of evolution had established how his infancy would play out. For the first few years of his life, he would take his nourishment from Eve's breast. Once he reached about 4 or 5 years old, his body would begin to slow its production of lactase, the enzyme that allows mammals to digest the lactose in milk. Thereafter, nursing or drinking another animal's milk would have given the little hell-raiser stomach cramps and potentially life-threatening diarrhea; in the absence of lactase, lactose simply rots in the guts. With Cain weaned, Abel could claim more of his mother's attention and all of her milk. This kept a lid on sibling rivalry—though it didn't quell the animus between these particular sibs—while allowing women to bear more young. The pattern was the same for all mammals: At the end of infancy, we became lactose-intolerant for life.
Two hundred thousand years later, around 10,000 B.C., this began to change. A genetic mutation appeared, somewhere near modern-day Turkey, that jammed the lactase-production gene permanently in the “on” position. The original mutant was probably a male who passed the gene on to his children. People carrying the mutation could drink milk their entire lives. Genomic analyses have shown that within a few thousand years, at a rate that evolutionary biologists had thought impossibly rapid, this mutation spread throughout Eurasia, to Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, India and all points in between, stopping only at the Himalayas. Independently, other mutations for lactose tolerance arose in Africa and the Middle East, though not in the Americas, Australia, or the Far East.
In an evolutionary eye-blink, 80 percent of Europeans became milk-drinkers; in somepopulations, the proportion is close to 100 percent. (Though globally, lactose intolerance is the norm; around two-thirds of humans cannot drink milk in adulthood.) The speed of this transformation is one of the weirder mysteries in the story of human evolution, more so because it's not clear why anybody needed the mutation to begin with.
ANDREW GELMAN ON HOW AMERICANS VOTE
A Five Books interview:
I notice from your blog as well that one of the stereotypes that you are keen on debunking is this idea that working-class people in America vote conservative. A number of people have gone to some lengths to try to explain this phenomenon, but you seem to think it’s a bit of a red herring.
Somehow people on the left and on the right find it difficult to understand. On the left, people think that 100% of working-class people should vote for the left, so anything less than 100% makes them feel that there is something that went wrong. They just cannot understand how this could be. On the right, you get the opposite. It’s considered a validation – they want to believe that these more virtuous people are voting for them. But even in the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, a lot of low-income people voted Republican. There was no magic golden age in which lower-income working-class people were uniformly Democrat. It was always various subgroups of the population.
How many of the poor did vote for the Democrats, say, in the last election?
Of the lowest third of the population about 60% voted for the Democrats.
What if you narrow it down to blue-collar workers though? Don’t the majority of them vote conservative?
Then you have to ask, what does that exactly mean? Someone could make $100,000 a year and be blue collar. Conversely, if you’re a woman cleaning bedpans and making very little money, you’re not blue collar. Cleaning bedpans is not considered blue-collar work. There is the way that, firstly, blue collar conveys some sort of moral superiority, and secondly that it just happens to exclude a lot of the female workforce, who are more likely to be Democrats. If you take only blue collar – which is mostly male – and don’t even restrict for income and then you go beyond that to only include whites, you’re chipping away at various groups that support the Democrats, without noticing what’s happening. It sounds very innocuous to talk about blue-collar whites, but you’re selecting a subgroup among this social class which is particularly conservative, and then making some claims about them.
BRAINS PLUS BRAWN
Daniel Lieberman in Edge:
Another good example of this would be the Piltdown hoax. The Piltdown forgery was a fossil that was discovered in the early 1900s, in a pit in southern England. This fossil consisted of a modern human skull that had been stained and made to look really old, and an orangutan jaw whose teeth had been filed it down and broken up, all thrown into a pit with a bunch of fake stone tools. It was exactly what Edwardian scientists were looking for, because it was an ape-like face with a big human brain, and also it evolved in England, so it proved that humans evolved in England, which of course made sense to any Victorian or Edwardian. It also fit with the prevailing idea at the time of Elliot Smith, that brains led the way in human evolution because, if you think about what makes us so different from other creatures, people always thought it's our brains. We have these big, enormous, large, fantastic brains that enable us to invent railways and income tax and insurance companies and all those other wonderful inventions that made the Industrial Revolution work.
More here.
2012年10月27日星期六
商业情报战的秘密世界
埃蒙·贾维斯 2012年10月26日
华盛顿
突然间，中国的间谍活动引发了华盛顿高度担忧。
上个月，白宫阻止了一家中国公司在俄勒冈州一敏感海军基地附近经营风电场。接着，美国众议院情报委员会(House Intelligence Committee)表示，中国两家电信公司正在制造可能用来监视美国的设备。而国防部长利昂·E·帕内塔(Leon E. Panetta)则对商界领袖们说，美国面临着“网络版珍珠港袭击”。这袭击可能来自于恐怖主义团体，也可能来自像中国这样的国家。而最后，在周一的总统辩论中，米特·罗姆尼(Mitt Romney)警告众人，中国人正在“盗窃我们的知识产权、专利、设计、技术，并入侵我们的电脑”。
THE HISTORY OF SPACES
The first history we write is a history of races. Our tribe’s myth is here, yours is over there, our race is called “the people” and blessed by the gods, and yours, well, not so blessed. Next comes the history of faces: history as the epic acts of bosses and chiefs, pharaohs and emirs, kings and Popes and sultans in conflict, where the past is essentially the chronicle of who wears the crown first and who wears it next. Then comes the history of places, where the ingathering of people and classes in a single city or state makes a historical whole bigger than any one face within it. Modern history is mostly place history, of an ambitious kind: what all the little faces were doing while the big faces were looking at each other. Modern place history has produced scholarly masterpieces, like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s “Montaillou,” the densely inhabited tale of one region in France in medieval times, and a lot of collective social history “from below.” (It has also produced great pop writing: Robert Hughes on Barcelona, Peter Ackroyd on London.) But beyond, or beneath, these histories is the history of spaces: the history of terrains and territories, a history where plains and rivers and harbors shape the social place that sits above them or around them.more from Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker here.
YOUR BRAIN ON PSEUDOSCIENCE: THE RISE OF POPULAR NEUROBOLLOCKS
Steven Poole in New Statesman:
[A] new branch of the neuroscienceexplains everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix “neuro” to whatever you are talking about. Thus, “neuroeconomics” is the latest in a long line of rhetorical attempts to sell the dismal science as a hard one; “molecular gastronomy” has now been trumped in the scientised gluttony stakes by “neurogastronomy”; students of Republican and Democratic brains are doing “neuropolitics”; literature academics practise “neurocriticism”. There is “neurotheology”, “neuromagic” (according to Sleights of Mind, an amusing book about how conjurors exploit perceptual bias) and even “neuromarketing”. Hoping it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon, I have decided to announce that I, too, am skilled in the newly minted fields of neuroprocrastination and neuroflâneurship.
Illumination is promised on a personal as well as a political level by the junk enlightenment of the popular brain industry. How can I become more creative? How can I make better decisions? How can I be happier? Or thinner? Never fear: brain research has the answers. It is self-help armoured in hard science. Life advice is the hook for nearly all such books. (Some cram the hard sell right into the title – such as John B Arden’s Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life.) Quite consistently, heir recommendations boil down to a kind of neo- Stoicism, drizzled with brain-juice. In a selfcongratulatory egalitarian age, you can no longer tell people to improve themselves morally. So self-improvement is couched in instrumental, scientifically approved terms.
2012年10月26日星期五
男人和女人不可能“只是朋友”
男人和女人不可能“只是朋友”。研究人员询问了男女参与者关于异性朋友的看法，结果得到了不同的答案。相对于女性，男性很难对异性做到“只是朋友一场”。结果不只是证实了性饥渴男性和天真女性的刻板印象，它还直接证明了两个人可以以完全不同的方式体验完全相同的友谊。男人似乎从本应柏拉图式的异性友谊中看到了无数罗曼蒂克的机会，而女性却从完全不同的方向相信友谊是柏拉图式的。男性比女性更可能将性吸引力列为异性友谊的好处，其中年轻的男性是女性的4倍，而年长的男性是女性的10倍。男性看起来渴望要从柏拉图式的异性友谊中得到更多东西。
DNA-SWAP TECHNOLOGY ALMOST READY FOR FERTILITY CLINIC
From Nature:
Just as they did with the monkeys, Mitalipov and his colleagues removed the nucleus from an unfertilized egg, leaving behind all of that cell’s mitochondria, and injected it into another unfertilized egg that had had its nucleus removed. They then fertilized the egg in vitro. In the previous experiment, the team proved in convincing fashion that the fertilized monkey eggs were good — by implanting them in uteri, where they produced four healthy offspring. To evaluate the results with human cells, the researchers had to settle for developing the embryos to the blastocyst stage — a ball of about 100 cells. They used cells from the blastocysts to produce embryonic cell lines, and then carrying out various tests on them. The cells looked like those from normal embryos, but with mitochondria exclusively from the donor.
More here.
THE THEORY GENERATION
If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost touch with them, or having never really read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of finding the very same books.more from Nicholas Dames at n+1 here.
J. M. COETZEE AND ETHICS
Eileen John reviews Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
Some of these essays explicitly set aside the literary context in which Coetzee typically works, and might be charged with avoiding complexities raised by that context, and many readers will not be so interested in establishing the ethical views of Coetzee the person. But to the extent that Coetzee or his works have been criticized for being ethically "hands-off" or evasive, I found these essays to be useful. I take one of the achievements of the novels to be that they carry a sturdy ethical burden -- e.g., in van Heerden's terms, the need for kindness and respect for human and other animals, and for states and laws that support "the emergence of good people" (60) -- in the midst of disorienting probing of what ethical demands rest on and of what it takes to be moved by those demands. Assuming the ethically sturdy impact is there, I would have liked to see someone engage more directly with how the novels pull that off while also having a philosophically disorienting or de-stabilizing impact.An excerpt from the book can be found here.
One route into the disorienting and probing impact, and into the significance of the literary mode, is via the claims made by one of Coetzee's prominent characters, Elizabeth Costello, who is herself a novelist by profession. She speaks for the ethical centrality of opening our hearts and using sympathetic imagination to think our way into the being of another. Costello casts this sympathetic openness as allied, plausibly enough, with poetry and the imaginative work of fiction, rather than with the discursive reasoning of philosophy. Contributors to the volume take these claims in many directions, illustrating Coetzee's intense and complex questioning of sympathy, reason, and ethical life. Crary finds in Coetzee's work an exploration of a wider conception of rationality, in which emotional sensitivity is needed to reach a "just and accurate grasp" of our lives, and which can include literary speech in an "inventory of rational discursive forms" (265). Woessner finds rather an inventory of protagonists exposing the inability of rationality "to help us live our lives," the cumulative result being a "post- or even pre-philosophical ethics of compassion," critiquing reason "for the sake of moral life" (225-6, 223). Meanwhile, Geiger argues that in Coetzee's work the power of sympathetic imagination emerges as ethically equivocal: "we are as likely to be inhabited by good as by evil" (162). He also does not think Coetzee allows a clear distinction between poetic and philosophical language to be drawn -- "For what alternative is there to the language of comparison and the abstraction of universals?"
MOTHERING HYPES
Sady Doyle reviews Jessica Valenti's Why Have Kids?, in In These Times:
Valenti’s empathy for mothers is matched by her impatience for platitudes about motherhood. Half of the book is headed “Lies” and questions such sacred cows as “children make you happy” (studies show that parenting decreases satisfaction with life) and the idea that being a full-time parent is “the hardest job in the world.” (If it’s so difficult and so all-important, Valenti wonders, why aren’t more men volunteering to prove themselves by undertaking it? And why isn’t it paid?)
These myths not only saddle women with unfair guilt, Valenti argues, but also prevent progressive mobilization around the work of parenthood itself.
“It seems to me that a lot of the political ambivalence around parenting issues come from this idea that the parenting is a reward in and of itself,” she writes to me in an email. “That we don’t need things like subsidized child care or paid leave because our kids are ‘our problem’ and besides, they’re such a joy anyway, what do we have to complain about!? It’s a way to maintain the status quo.
“But the truth is,” she continues, “that parenting is really hard. It isn’t always rewarding. And it doesn’t always bring you joy. That’s OK! Who said it was kids’ job to make you happy? I think if we’re more honest about the struggles of parenting and what parenting really looks like, we can be more upfront about what we need to make everyday parenting easier.”
Valenti suggests a few commonsense solutions, many of which have been promoted by feminists and progressives for some time: paid parenting, extended maternal leave, a community-based approach to raising children rather than a strictly individualistic, Mom-or-nothing focus. But, she admitted in our conversation, “We just haven’t had much luck mobilizing women around the issue. I see great feminists and feminist organizations doing work on motherhood, but it doesn’t get the same attention that something like abortion rights or violence against women does.”
2012年10月25日星期四
科学家辞职抗议法庭对地震专家的判决
意大利法官Marco Billi本周一判决7名科学家和专家6年徒刑，因为他们未能正确对致命地震发出警报。本周二，判决引发的寒蝉效应促使意大利重大风险评估委员会多名成员辞职。科学家表示法庭的判决让他们再也无法平静而有效地工作。国际科学界谴责这个判决，认为预测地震是不可能的。即便是依靠传感器系统来发现早于大地震的地表震波的早期警告系统，也只能为有安置传感器的地区的居民提供10到60秒的提前通知。对判决结果，甚至检方公诉人都表示感到意外，公诉人Fabio Picuti说，他没有发疯，他知道科学家无法预测地震，他本请求法庭判处地震专家4年徒刑，表示必须阅读法官的判决理由了解原因。根据意大利法律，法官必须在3个月内公布他的判决理由。
生食物不足以支持我们的大脑
如果想要增强脑力，吃生食物将是一场灾难。为了摄取到足够能量，人类每天将需要用9小时以上的时间花在吃未处理的生食物上面。研究论文发表在PNAS上，烹饪是人类大脑的关键。人类的脑神经细胞是其它灵长类动物的三倍——人类平均有860亿脑神经细胞，相比之下，大猩猩是330亿，黑猩猩是280亿。更多的神经元带给我们很多好处，但也需要我们付出代价，大脑的能量消耗占人类休息代谢率（RMR）——指在不活动的情况下身体所需的能量——的20%，而其它灵长类动物只占9%。研究人员计算出为了支持大脑活动，各种灵长类动物每天花多少时间吃生食物以摄入足够的热量。他们的结果是：大猩猩8.8小时，猩猩7.8小时，黑猩猩7.3小时，而智人——即现代人类——需要9.3小时。
HOW MUCH IS BEING ATTRACTIVE WORTH?
From Smithsonian:
Hamermesh is the acknowledged father of pulchronomics, or the economic study of beauty. It can be a perilous undertaking. He once enraged an audience of young Mormon women, many of whom aspired to stay home with future children, by explaining that homemakers tend to be homelier than their working-girl peers. (Since beautiful women tend to be paid more, they have more incentive to stay in the work force, he says.) “I see no reason to mince words,” says the 69-year-old, who rates himself a solid 3 on the 1-to-5 looks scale that he most often uses in his research. The pursuit of good looks drives several mammoth industries—in 2010, Americans spent $845 million on face-lifts alone—but few economists focused on beauty’s financial power until the mid-1990s, when Hamermesh and his colleague, Jeff Biddle of Michigan State University, became the first scholars to track the effect of appearance on earnings potential for a large sample of adults. Like many other desirable commodities, “beauty is scarce,” Hamermesh says, “and that scarcity commands a price.”
More here.
追问增长根源：也谈林毅夫假说
追问增长根源：也谈林毅夫假说
FT中文网特约撰稿人刘海影：林氏假说推理严密、境界宏大，但这一假说在理论上或有盲区，而其允诺的以投资为基础的8%增长前景，可能导出误导性的政策建议。
卖“好评”，电子出版时代的好生意
卖“好评”，电子出版时代的好生意
报道 12:23
电子商务的车轮是靠“好评”前进的，电子出版时代书评也可以在线购买，这些书评只谈论书的优点，而非缺点；可能是由一个从未读过书的人写就；它们的出发点是市场营销。
2012年10月23日星期二
WHY CAN’T WE TALK TO THE ANIMALS?
Ben Ambridge at the blog of the Welcome Trust:
However, a few species have actually passed this test. On the comprehension front, we have Phoenix and Akeakamai, two dolphins studied at the University of Hawaii, who were taught a language in which the ‘words’ were different whistle sounds played by the trainer (and chosen to approximate dolphins’ own calls). The dolphins understood that, for example, “put the pipe on the hoop” and “put the hoop on the pipe” meant different things and were able to respond accordingly, even when the exact sentence hadn’t been presented before. Some apes, such as Kanzi, a bonobo raised in Atlanta, have passed a similar test although debate continues as to whether or not they can combine words – in this case hand signs – in their own communication (watch the 2011 film Project Nim to see this controversy played out).
The finding that some species do seem to appreciate the powerful combinatorial properties of language serves only to deepen the mystery. If these animals are so smart, why aren’t they explaining what it’s like to be a chimpanzee, or at least politely asking to be let out of the cage? Tomasello’s answer is that what they just don’t seem to get is that language is fundamentally cooperative, almost altruistic, in nature. You understand that, if I say something to you (“Look, there’s your boss”), I’m doing so because I believe you will find it useful or interesting. Tomasello’s big idea is that this idea of doing something for the benefit of someone else is completely alien to other species.
More here.
中国经济如何转型？
中欧陆家嘴国际金融研究院执行副院长 刘胜军 为英国《金融时报》中文网撰稿
原文发表于：FT中文网
原文发表于：FT中文网
中共十八大将在11月8日召开，引发全球瞩目。
此次会议之所以倍受关注，盖源于以下几点因素：其一，中国经济规模已跃居世界第二，在美国去杠杆化、欧洲陷入漫长债务危机的背景下，中国7％以上的 增长堪称世界经济的希望之火；其二，十八大之前中国经历了重庆唱红打黑的“折腾”，社会认知出现分歧，未来中国经济和社会发展的方向需要进一步的“顶层设 计”；其三，经历了过去十年“超
……
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从郑和下西洋看“李约瑟悖论”
从郑和下西洋看“李约瑟悖论”天则经济研究所客座研究员王军：与英国比较，明朝的中国缺少两个发生工业革命的要件，一是特权阶层压制商人阶层形成与崛起，二是贸易活动受限妨碍市场成长。
2012年10月22日星期一
MEASURING INEQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
From The Economist:
Economists also gauge equality of opportunity by measuring disparities in children’s access to basic services that will influence their prospects, such as education or running water. The World Bank is developing indices which adjust overall access to such services by a measure of the inequality in that access. South Africa, for instance, has the same overall rate of access to sanitation as Nicaragua. But once you adjust for race disparities, its “Human Opportunity Index” for sanitation is much lower.
More here.
SCIENTISTS READ DREAMS
From Nature:
“We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams,” says Kamitani. “By analysing the brain activity during the nine seconds before we woke the subjects, we could predict whether a man is in the dream or not, for instance, with an accuracy of 75–80%.”
More here.
THE INNER LIFE OF QUARKS
Don Lincoln in Scientific American:
The Standard Model leaves other questions unanswered as well, such as: Why do we have four forces and not some other number? And why are there two types of fundamental particles rather than just a single one that handles everything?
These are intriguing problems. Nevertheless, for a long time now a different puzzle has captured my attention and that of many other physicists. The Standard Model views quarks and leptons as indivisible. Astoundingly, though, various clues imply that they are instead built of still smaller components.
More here.
TRICK OR TRUTH?
J. Hoberman in the New York Review of Books:
Is photography a way of documenting the world that has an inherent “truth-claim” on the real? Or is it, as Steichen suggested, essentially graphic, a technique for creating a certain kind of image? “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” an exhibition now up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (later traveling to the National Gallery and Houston’s Museum of Fine Art), makes a vigorous case for understanding the medium as Steichen did. The argument is amplified in the accompanying catalogue written by curator Mia Fineman, who, in effect, proposes a new truth-claim of her own: “Photography’s veracity has less to do with essential qualities of the medium than with what people think and say about it.”
According to Fineman, photography has been artificially enhanced almost from its advent in 1839. “Especially in the early days of the medium, producing a realistic-looking photograph often required a healthy dose of artful trickery,” she writes. Moreover, the familiar insistence on photographic objectivity is itself something that derives from the early twentieth-century emergence of photojournalism and social documentary—and also, we might add, of motion pictures. In that sense, photography is pre-modern as well as postmodern.
More here.
科学家将梦与照片对应起来
科学家知道如何解开你所做的梦了。日本神经学家神谷之康（Yukiyasu Kamitani）领导的团队利用功能性神经造影扫描三位正在睡觉的志愿者的大脑，同时用脑电图记录脑电波。当探测到某种脑电图模式之后，研究人员唤醒志愿者问他们做了什么梦，然后让他们继续睡觉。研究人员总共收集了200个做梦记录。大多数梦和日常生活有关，但还有些梦非同寻常，例如梦到和大明星交谈。研究人员根据志愿者的口头报告对梦进行分类，如汽车，男性，女性和计算机。他们挑选出代表每个类别的照片，记录志愿者在观看这些照片的大脑活动，将清醒时的脑电波模式和睡觉的脑电波模式进行比较。最后，当志愿者再次做梦时，研究人员能以75%到80%的准确率识别出做梦的内容。
Scenarios of Singapore's future
The three scenarios from IPS are based on three key factors: people’s trust in the Government, how success is valued, and resources given to the elite and others.
Scenario 1: SingaStore.com
- In a nutshell: Singapore is "the store and more" - pro-growth and pro-business
- Trust level: High
The public trusts the government, which puts economic growth as a high priority to ensure there are better-paying jobs for Singaporeans.
- Government control: Some
The government organises businesses and community groups, and gives huge incentives for scientific, business, creative and sporting efforts that contribute to economic growth.
- Business sentiments: Good
Multinational corporations and businesses operate actively in emerging technologies, boosting growth.
- Fiscal position: Strong
Income taxes are progressive and tax revenues remain healthy.
- Social cohesion: Uncertain
There are people with great wealth but income inequality is also high. The working poor receive state vouchers and enjoy surplus-sharing schemes, while cases of poor people who make good keep the Singapore Dream alive.
- Critics say: How socially sustainable is this model? And how do you keep people hopeful that their lives will improve?
Scenario 2: SingaGives.gov
- In a nutshell: Low but inclusive growth through greater welfarism
- Trust level: High
The public trusts a government that gives all citizens an equal right to cheap and heavily subsidised health care, education and housing.
- Government control: Strong
Providers of public goods are nationalised, so prices can be controlled.
- Business sentiments: Wary
Shaken by political changes, foreign businesses adopt a wait-and-see attitude about making more investments.
- Fiscal position: Weaker
A larger slice of investment returns on national reserves is used to fund public services and social support.
- Social cohesion: Strong
Services are made world-class and highly subsidised for locals, while strong social safety nets for unemployment and retirement remain accessible to both the rich and the poor.
- Critics say: What if new social investments do not bring quality growth? How will it be fiscally sustainable? And what risks will the erosion of reserves open the country to?
Scenario 3: WikiCity.sg
- In a nutshell: Like online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which has no one editor and is managed by the community, Singaporeans enjoy the full expression of their identities and potential without a strong central government.
- Trust level: Low
A coalition government runs the country after years of corrupt and incompetent governance, but it is mired in political gridlock.
- Government control: Weak in most areas
Citizens believe the state should take care of only foreign and trade relations, defence, and law and order, and leave the rest to the community.
- Business sentiments: Mixed
Multinational corporations left Singapore during the political transition, but top Singaporeans abroad return home to invest in promising enterprises.
- Fiscal position: Changed
Tax burdens and regulations are kept light.
- Social cohesion: Changed
Citizens rely heavily on community self-help, forming communities around businesses, professions and other social causes that set up organisations - such as hospitals and schools - to meet the needs of their members and the public.
- Critics say: How politically sustainable is this model? Will it be
2012年10月20日星期六
FUTURE JOBS DEPEND ON A SCIENCE-BASED ECONOMY
From Scientific American:
President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney ought to be talking about how to use programs like this to bring about the kind of success that Germany has achieved. The German government encourages a close partnership between technical universities and industrial manufacturers; it supports centers where scientists and engineers pursue fundamental research in close proximity to industrial colleagues investigating more applied technologies. German battery makers, for instance, work with technical universities on nanotechnology, while textile makers contribute to research in carbon fibers for composite fabrics. Could there be a grander vision for harnessing U.S. research talent in this way? On this, both candidates have been silent.
More here.
校应不应该强迫学生学习他们不擅长的必修课
如果你的孩子不擅长某些课程，但这些课程恰恰又是必修课，学校应不应该强迫孩子去学习？一位非营利组织的执行官David Bernstein在《华盛顿邮报》上发表评论认为，学校不能强迫他的儿子学化学。他调查发现，标准化课程始于1892年，当时由十位学者组成的委员会推荐将化学等课程作为每个学生的必修课。Bernstein指出，化学并不比其他学科能带给学生更多有用的技能，一位实验物理学家说，高中阶段的化学学习主要是记忆，大多数人都是学完即忘。他表示，经济学上有一个概念叫机会成本，指的是用一种选择代替另一种选择时所作出的牺牲。如果学校强迫学生学习他们不感兴趣的课程，而不是他们感兴趣的科目如公开演讲，政治学，创意写作，或HTML编码，学生和社会将会丧失更多重要的机会。
2012年10月19日星期五
In search of the Singapore dream
You have seen a lot, in your years in corporate and social environments. How has Singapore changed? (Singapore) is nothing but a piece of rock. We have to create the wealth we hope to have. Hard decisions have to be made to keep the economy ticking away. We have been successful at that. Problem is, we have been successful in a hurry. We became independent in 1965 and realised we had no real competition. China was still Communist, Vietnam still embroiled in war. Thailand had just started industrialising, and Indonesia was facing challenges. In a...
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