Joseph Clarke:

Tracing the parallel histories of the American megachurch and the corporate-organizational complex.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Peter Drucker:

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."

William Whyte:

The fault is not in organization, in short; it is in our worship of it. It is in our vain quest for a utopian equilibrium, which would be horrible if it ever did come to pass; it is in the soft-minded denial that there is a conflict between the individual and society. There must always be, and it is the price of being an individual that he must face these conflicts. He cannot evade them, and in seeking an ethic that offers a spurious peace of mind, thus does he tyrannize himself.

Paul Graham:

If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them.

Paul Bloom on Robert Wright:

God has mellowed.

Infrastructure for Souls

As the sharp, stabbing pain, fear, and panic associated with rapid and visible blood loss is superseded by a panoply of chronic ailments and a general sense of unwellness, Robert Skidelsky reviews Martin Wolf's "Fixing Global Finance":

After the collapse of the dot-com boom in 2000, the US became a much less desirable place for direct foreign investment. So East Asian countries, especially China, started to buy US Treasury bonds.

In short, it was via their impact on the financing of the federal deficit that Chinese savings made it possible for the US consumer to go on a spending spree.

The fact is that the present system has suited the United States -- specifically the power holders in the United States -- just as much as it has those in China. The phrase "it has enabled the Americans to live beyond their means" is too vague to be useful. One needs to ask: which Americans? Certainly many middle- and low-income American households have been given opportunities to borrow beyond their means.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Decius:

Sometimes the market drives off a cliff.

John Lanchester:

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

I get the strong impression, talking to people, that the penny hasn't fully dropped.

Recently:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Louis Kahn:

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.

The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission

Briefly, he has posited that our intellectual abilities are divided among at least eight abilities: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. The appealing elements of the theory are numerous.

It's "cool," to start with: The list-like format has great attraction for introductory psychology and education classes. It also seems to jibe well with the common observation that individuals have particular talents. More important, especially for education, it implicitly (although perhaps unintentionally on Gardner's part) promises that each child has strengths as well as weaknesses. With eight separate intelligences, the odds seem good that every child will be intelligent in one of those realms. After all, it's not called the theory of multiple stupidities.

Gardner's Theory of multiple intelligences almost certainly has a grain of truth. It is similar to the fact that the human body contains multiple types of fluids that need to be in good balance. The problem is that the fluids regulating the human body are not simply blood, bile, phlegm, and black bile as posited by medieval scholars who simply observed that people contained these loose categories of ooze.

Similarly, visual-spacial, verbal-linguistic, etc... are patterns that are evidently on the surface of learning, but I WILL EAT MY DIRTIEST, SMELLIEST OLD HAT if nature was to give up such a critical secret of human cognition so easily. I will go on record as strongly conjecturing that the neurotypical system of human learning is *at least* as complicated as the enzymatic chemistry that goes on in human cells.

On the other hand, one can rate the overall effectiveness of a system, and some systems are more effective. Part of me really doesn't want to believe that it is genetic, but one cannot ignore data.

I don't think that this invalidates meritocracy, however. I would rather work with a scientific researcher who is plain dumb but has placed 10,000 hours of hard work studying the subject and can collaborate than an incredibly clever individual who refuses to seriously study the literature and is arrogantly lacking in reflective criticism. I will also guarantee that the former will have a greater impact nine times out of ten.

RE: Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius

Rory Stewart:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. This misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions.

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban. But the Taliban are very unlikely to take over Afghanistan as a whole.

My First Dictionary:

Today's word is disillusioned.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

From the archive:

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Graeme Wood:

“Is the boy a Talib?” I asked. “Future Talib,” he said.

Elizabeth Rubin, from the Korengal Valley:

It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

Nora Johnson, from 1961:

An Englishman said to me recently, "You Americans live on a much higher plane of expectancy than we do. You constantly work toward some impossible goal of happiness and perfection, and you unfortunately don't have our ability just to give up. Really, it's much easier to accept the fact that some things can't be solved." He is right; we never accept it, and we kill ourselves trying.

Rory Stewart, from today:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

The Irresistible Illusion

John Lanchester:

If I had to pick a single fact which summed up the cultural gap between the City of London and the rest of the country, it would be that one. I have yet to meet a single person not employed in financial services who was aware of it; I wasn't aware of it myself. I think if I had been, there are two questions I would have wanted answered: how did that happen? And is it a good thing?

This is one of those points of stock-market logic which seems surreal, nonsensical and wholly counter-intuitive to civilians, but which to market participants is as familiar as beans on toast.

Sometimes, when you eat chili-hot food, the first few mouthfuls tell you nothing other than that the food contains chili. It takes a moment or two to detect the presence of other flavors. Bank bail-outs and collapses are a bit like that.

Most of us have had a few drinks at a party and done something embarrassing, usually along the lines of I've-always-fancied-you-isn't-it-time-we-did-something-about-it, but let's take comfort in the following truth: none of us has ever done anything as embarrassing as buying HBOS.

That feeling you get when you've eaten something, and a few minutes later you think, oh-oh, I think that my dinner just said that was a case not of adieu but au revoir? That would be AIG.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

It's Finished