Archives for July 2011

If you’ve been listening to any news lately, you know that Financial Armageddon looms if the politicians in D.C. don’t suddenly agree to a plan to raise the debt ceiling. Pretty much everybody agrees that such a thing is unthinkable. The only problem is that it happened 32 years ago — and it wasn’t a big deal.

If you own U.S. government debt, it’s a big deal whether you get paid of not. The security of knowing that the government is going to pay you is the reason so many people (and governments) lend so much to the feds. But in 1979, the government faced a somewhat similar crisis that led to lack of money to pay bondholders for awhile. And what happened? Not much.

Politicians and media like to scare you. Politicians like to scare you because scared people are motivated to support them on whatever crusade they’re on this week. Media like to scare you because it keeps you watching.

(If you really want to learn how the budget process is supposed to work — though I can’t imagine why you would — this week’s episode of the excellent EconTalk podcast covers it in more detail than normal people will care.)

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As a tool of control, there’s perhaps nothing more effective than questioning a person’s patriotism. In every group that I’m aware of, people are taught from a very early age that they have the duty to love the nation and obey its leaders and customs. This sets people up to be duped.

Nobody would accuse Hermann Goering of having been a pacifist or a peace-loving man. In fact, he was a dedicated Nazi who was the vile and contemptible head of the German air forces during Hitler’s invasions of his European neighbors.

After the war — while on trial for his actions as part of the war — Goering was candid during interviews with Gustave Gilbert, a U.S. psychologist who was also an intelligence officer. Gilbert published a book called “Nuremberg Diary” in 1961 based on his interviews with the Nazis who talked with him privately as a confidant during the trial. Here’s an excerpt from the book about a conversation with Goering:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” [Gilbert] pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

When I first read an edited version of this quote some time ago, I thought it must be made up by someone trying to make the case that the wars the United States is currently engaged in are wrong. After all, if you could make the case that even the Nazis knew that war is driven by a political class manipulating the people, you’ve made your case. It turned out, though, that the story was completely true.

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Is it a good thing or a bad thing for students to master difficult material and move on to greater challenges? It depends on whether your goal is to educate children or to run a diploma factory churning out sheep.

It’s no secret that the U.S. school system does a lousy job with kids outside the norm. With kids who aren’t too bright and aren’t too dumb, the system can open their heads and pour in a basic, homogenized, dumbed-down version of an education.

But heaven forbid someone is different — especially if that person is particularly bright. And what if someone comes up with a way to accelerate kids’ learning in a certain area, say, math? Well, that’s a threat to the system, because the system is designed to move the cattle through a certain process at a certain speed in a certain order to produce predictably mediocre results.

A California man, Salman Khan, developed a system that’s become something of an online marvel. His Khan Academy is available for kids (and others) who want to learn math and advance rapidly — and it’s free. It lets students quickly advance beyond their peers who are using traditional systems. But according to a new article at Wired magazine, this scares some teachers:

Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”

These teachers claim that they wouldn’t know what to do with students who were learning so rapidly in math, but are stuck at lower grade levels in subjects in which they’re getting conventional instruction. But that’s exactly backwards. The question isn’t how to dumb this excellent system down. The question is why it took an outside non-educator to develop a system that blows away what the education bureaucracy can design — and why we aren’t finding ways to achieve the same sort of results in other subjects, instead of trying to put the brakes on what works.

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