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Saquatch	2 votes - 40 %
Escaped chimp	0 votes - 0 %
Mangey bear	2 votes - 40 %
Human in costume	0 votes - 0 %
Fake	1 vote - 20 %

5 Total Votes

She studied sculpture at St Martin's College | 17 comments (17 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

I object! by sasquatchan (4.00 / 3) #1 Mon Apr 21, 2008 at 01:49:05 PM EST

None of the above.

: We all love you, sas by greyrat (4.00 / 2) #2 Mon Apr 21, 2008 at 04:26:32 PM EST

but when walking in the woodlands, I'm going to be thinking horse, not zebra . . . or something like that.
~
There is no correlation or causation amongst intelligence, power, talent and wealth.
Khanyou
[ Parent ]

Subject matter of the book sounds interesting by nebbish (4.00 / 1) #3 Mon Apr 21, 2008 at 06:08:27 PM EST

I think the analysis would really get on my nerves though, it doesn't sound very well thought through.

Do you think you'll be going to the new botanical illustration gallery at Kew? I'm quite looking forward to going down in the summer. I love Kew anyway though.

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It's political correctness gone mad!

: Ought to go to Kew sometime by TheophileEscargot (4.00 / 1) #6 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 03:04:44 AM EST

Haven't been there in ages.
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"Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days."-Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

What worries me about that free speech article by Rogerborg (4.00 / 1) #4 Mon Apr 21, 2008 at 06:09:23 PM EST

Is that the hippy that wrote it appears to believe that "nobody could possibly sympathise" with a beardy ranty Peacelamist. Well, not more than 1 in 6 or thereabouts anyway.

Apropos your title, you haven't heard Common People until you've heard SHATNER doing it.

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Metus amatores matrum compescit, non clementia.

: I have the album [nt] by TheophileEscargot (4.00 / 1) #7 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 03:06:23 AM EST

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"Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days."-Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

honestly by dev trash (4.00 / 1) #5 Mon Apr 21, 2008 at 07:36:17 PM EST

Not all of use from PA, think that a mangey bear is the yeti.

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Click

The nuclear family by lm (2.50 / 2) #8 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 06:44:00 AM EST

In The Byzantine Economy the authors argue that the nuclear family was one of the reasons why the Byzantine society was so stable for so long. Among other things, a nuclear family inhibits the growth of economic disparity by preventing the accumulation of wealth by a single economic unit, the extended family.

But that was a different time and place. I can see how during a time when labor is devalued due to the invention of machinery, an extended family living as a single economic unit would make far more sense.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic

He more attributes it to increased prosperity by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #10 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 01:35:37 PM EST

Michael Anderson in his studies of industrial Lancashire, the heartland of the Industrial Revolution, suggests that this startling increase in parents and grandparents living together occurred for strictly economic reasons. For the first time, parents who both worked at the mill were earning enough to feed the grandparents; in return the grandparents could act as childminders for them or their neighbours and perhaps perform a few odd jobs as well. Moreover, the children could remain at home longer than in rural pre-industrial England because their earnings would contribute towards the household expenses -- whereas in the country, there would be enough work on the farm for only a small minority to stay at home until they married. Despite its barbarities and deprivations, one thing that the Industrial Revolution did not do was break up families.

I'm a little suspicious though: at times he almost seems to be portraying the 19th century as a kind of golden age before the nanny state came in and wrecked everything.
--
"Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days."-Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

Increased prosperity is certainly involved by lm (2.50 / 2) #12 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 04:56:24 PM EST

But it seems to me that the causal relationship is reversed. Extended families pooling resources will increase the prosperity of the family as a whole relative to the extended family living as nuclear families.

It also seems to me that such a decision (to move the extended family back together) is the most rational at times of fiscal crises. At least, this scenario played out in the US Great Depression and subsequent recessions. When times get tough, adult children (and sometimes grandchildren) move back in with mom and dad to whether out the storm. But I'll allow that such a decision with regards to family living may look attractive during times of prosperity for this or that reason.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

: Hmmm by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #15 Wed Apr 23, 2008 at 01:37:10 AM EST

I would guess in periods of depression there would be two factors at play.
On the one hand, you don't want to support non-earners, so there would be a pressure to send childen out to get jobs somewhere else.
On the other hand, the number of jobs available in such a period decreases. So that might create a pressure for forced non-earners to move back with the parents and reduce their living costs.
I'm not sure which effect would dominate: had a quick Google but couldn't find much empirical evidence.
--
"Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days."-Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

Mao meets Oakshott by Scrymarch (4.00 / 2) #9 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 11:57:01 AM EST

There was an excellent review of that book a few years ago in the LRB. I haven't got round to the book itself though.

For the most part, it isn’t bad commentary. If the broadsheets were badly written, if the sermonisers and pundits couldn’t speak in coherent sentences, if you routinely turned the radio on to hear people not making any sense, it would all be much easier to dismiss. That, though, is not the problem with what passes for intellectual and political life in Britain. The problem with our public culture is not that it is low-grade: it is that it is fluent, clear, coherent, often vividly expressed, and more or less entirely free of fresh intellectual content. You can go whole weeks reading the broadsheet press without encountering a new idea; you can listen to hundreds of hours of broadcast debate and encounter nothing but received wisdoms.
[...]
It is in this context that Ferdinand Mount’s book Mind the Gap is so welcome. He has written an essay about class in which it is possible to disagree with almost every assertion and produce counter-examples for almost every fact, but which gives the strange, giddy-making sensation that there is a source of oxygen somewhere in the room.

_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}

It's an interesting review by TheophileEscargot (4.00 / 1) #11 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 01:37:54 PM EST

But I think all these inequality debates are a bit obsolete if they don't take into account the credit crunch and the possible recession.

It seems to me that the reason that inequality has grown recently is that we've had an exceptionally long, exceptionally strong economic boom period, in which the new wealth has gone to the upper and middle classes.

The question is how much this will be corrected by the recession part of the cycle.

So they've just announced they're going to shove up to 50 billion pounds into the mortgage market via the trouser pockets of the bankers. One thing that's not going to do is help the underclass at all. They don't own houses, and by raising property prices, it may make them worse off.

I think the interesting thing is how much of the inequality created by capitalism is going to be retained by government policy...
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"Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days."-Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

It's a fair point by Scrymarch (4.00 / 1) #13 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 07:49:21 PM EST

If you had money and a little sense over the last decade you had that money in the stockmarket and / or housing, and saw it shoot up like magic. If you were on the minimum wage around London I wouldn't be surprised if your costs chased your income pretty closely, mainly due to rent since non-luxury goods were kept cheap by China etc. Or you might have gone backwards on credit card debt. It was a kind of rich get richer, poor stay still economy.

Because so much of the intervention on both sides of the Atlantic this time around has been preemptive, it has also been extremely conservative in a small c way. This also goes for intergenerational equity. A true housing bust is going to be the best chance for younger people to get on the housing ladder. Its almost an extension of the problems with middle class / universal welfare in general. Great Depression did wonders for relative income inequality ...
_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}
[ Parent ]

Missed the link by Scrymarch (4.00 / 2) #14 Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 07:51:33 PM EST

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/lanc01_.html
_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}
[ Parent ]

: Fascinating review by Alan Crowe (4.00 / 1) #17 Wed Apr 23, 2008 at 01:15:19 PM EST

Mount has specific suggestions about what to do: basically, school vouchers and a massive building programme to get the Downers out of their housing estates. But that in itself won’t be enough, as Mount acknowledges in one of his engaging Mao-meets-Oakeshott moments: ‘Only a wholehearted, even reckless opening up of genuine, substantial power to the bottom classes is likely to improve either their self-esteem or the view which the managing classes take of them – which is what makes the managing classes so reluctant to effect any such transfer.’

I think people under-estimate the power of school vouchers as a reform. Grammar schools and secondary moderns were before my time, so I fear that my grasp of the history is a little shaky. However I think there are two stories, the visible and the invisible.

In the visible story 10% of children go to Grammar school and are made for life, while 90% go to secondary modern and are conveyed into the working class. So it is vital to get your child into the Grammar school, but there aren't enough places to go round. The system becomes deeply hated and is replaced by comprehensive schools.

There is something not right about this story. By 11 the divergences in children's academic aptitudes becomes a problem. Selecting the children into separate schools helps all of them, both those who would be bored and those who would be left behind by average schooling. So there is a price to be paid for comprehensivisation. Why where people so keen to pay it?

The invisible bit, where I not sure of my history, is the money. I think that Grammar schools got three times the money per pupil that secondary moderns got. Underneath "selection" lies the real issue: capitation.

School vouchers would have made this very visible. This would have altered the political debate out of all recognition.

[ Parent ]

Exhibit by ad hoc (2.00 / 0) #16 Wed Apr 23, 2008 at 09:37:34 AM EST

at the IWM
--
The three things that make a diamond also make a waffle.

She studied sculpture at St Martin's College | 17 comments (17 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback


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