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A Mother’s Day reading list from Oxford World’s Classics

By Kirsty Doole

As Mother’s Day approaches in the United States, we decided to reflect on some of the mothers to be found between the pages of some of our classic books.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Mrs Bennet is surely one of the best-known mothers in English literature. She has five girls to raise, and is determined to make sure they marry well.  So, in one memorable scene when Elizabeth turns down a proposal from the perfectly respectable Mr Collins, she is beside herself and goes straight to her husband to make sure he demands that their daughter change her mind. However, it doesn’t go quite to plan:

‘Come here, child,’ cried her father as she appeared. ‘I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?’ Elizabeth replied that it was. ‘Very well–and this offer of marriage you have refused?’

‘I have, sir.’

‘Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs Bennet?’

‘Yes, or I will never see her again.’

‘An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.’

Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning, but Mrs Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her husband regarded the affair as she wished, was excessively disappointed.

Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott

Mrs March – or Marmee, as she is affectionately known by her daughters – is basically the perfect mother. She works, she helps charity, she contributes to the war effort, all at the same time as being a loving mother to her girls, not to mention keeping the house looking beautiful. She is strongly principled, supported by her rock-steady faith, and despite at one point admitting that she used to have a bit of a temper, never appears to be angry. Most strikingly for the time at which it was written, though, she ensures that her daughters get an education, and encourages them to make decisions for herself, rather than marrying at the earliest opportunity.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Hamlet and his Mother by Eugene Delacroix

Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, causes deep resentment in her son when she swiftly married his uncle Claudius after the death of Hamlet’s father. However, despite the fact that Hamlet sees her as a living example of the weakness of women, she continues to watch over him with affection and concern. The relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude has been the subject of much academic debate. One famous reading of the relationship was by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, who in the 1940s published a collection of essays on what he saw as Hamlet’s Oedipal impulses.

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In The Yellow Wall-Paper our narrator is a young mother suffering from depression. In a controversial course of treatment she is separated from her son and denied the opportunity to even read or write. She is forced to spend her time locked in a bedroom covered in yellow wallpaper, in which she starts to see a figure moving as her madness tragically develops.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Mrs Jellyby might be a relatively minor character in Dickens’ mammoth novel, but she is definitely memorable.  She has a husband and several children – most notably her daughter Caddy – but devotes her time to Africa’s needy. She spends all day writing letters and arguing for their cause, but all the time forgetting the saying “charity begins at home” and is blind to the fact that her own family is suffering badly from neglect.

Esther Waters by George Moore

Esther Waters is a young, working-class woman with strong religious beliefs who takes up a job as a kitchen-maid. She is seduced and abandoned, and forced to support herself and her illegitimate child in any way that she can. The novel depicts with extraordinary candour Esther’s struggles against prejudice and injustice, and the growth of her character as she determines to protect her son. James Joyce even called Esther Waters ‘the best novel of modern English life’.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Image credit: Hamlet and his Mother by Eugene Delacrois. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Casting a last spell: After Skeat and Bradley

By Anatoly Liberman

I think some sort of closure is needed after we have heard the arguments for and against spelling reform by two outstanding scholars. Should we do something about English spelling, and, if the answer is yes, what should we do? Conversely, if no, why no? Native speakers—let us call them native spellers—of English have long since stopped worrying: school is a place where they must spend twelve rather dull years (though occasionally spiced with proms, sports, and camping out) and survive multifarious bullying (note: bullying is bad, even illegal). Learning to spell is also bullying, but no law exists against it, and a spellchecker with its autocorrect is a nice palliative. There is no opprobrium in saying: “I am a terrible speller”; it even sounds coy. The only people who worry are foreigners. With regard to English, they have neither “competence” nor the wonderful thing called gut feeling, and they honestly try to memorize (memorise?) hundreds of words like hold ~shoulder, full ~ awful, awful ~ awesome, lame ~ claim, usable ~ feasible, and acknowledge ~ accredit. Our collective heart bleeds when we ponder the fate of undocumented aliens and the many difficulties any recent outsider has to overcome during the period of adjustment.

I am all for some version of spelling reform (to boost my case, I’ll capitalize the first letters: Spelling Reform), but my firm conviction is that, if something is going to be done about it, it will be done only out of compassion for our new and prospective citizens.

What can or should be done? Perhaps it will be useful to state a few trivial facts.

(1)   Given a multitude of English dialects, no system that depends on rendering sounds by the letters of the Roman alphabet will satisfy everybody; Bradley was quite right. We cannot achieve the neatness of Finnish. Some people distinguish between horse and hoarse in pronunciation; they, and only they, naturally, applaud the spelling -or- ~ -oar-. For most American speakers writer and rider are homophones, though professional phoneticians tell us that there is a difference. I wonder. If some difference existed, students would not be filling their papers with pearls like title (= tidal) wave, deep-seeded (= seated) prejudice, and even futile (= feudal) system (but you see: they never studied medieval history and have long since realized the futility of their endeavors to spell polysyllables correctly; no feud in this department). Also, there would not have been cartoons featuring tutors, tooters, and Tudors. Any spelling of words with t between vowels will “disenfranchise” somebody. Horse ~ hoarse, Plato ~ play dough, and the rest like them are minor irritants. The pronunciation of words like time and tame is much more confusing: time, tahm, toim for time and time for tame are real killers. Do you chinge trines at foiv(e) o’clock? Perhaps you should. Conclusion: in English, strictly phonetic spelling is a utopia. For pedagogical purposes some version of phonetic transcription may be useful, but this is as far as it goes.

(2)   With regard to spelling, etymological considerations should be of minimal importance. It is true that many centuries ago knock and gnaw had the sounds of k- and g-. Why is this relic to be honored? Many other words have also lost their initial consonants. For example, hn-, hl-, and hr- were legitimate onsets in Old English. Yet h- has been shed before n, r, and l, and we are much the better for the loss of h- in the written form of loud, nap, and rue. Or should we “hrather” have hloud, hnap, and hrue? Etymology takes us to the past, but a good deal of chaos characterized Middle and Early Modern English spelling. A look at any relatively old word in the OED will reveal a baffling multitude of spelling variants through history. People often say that they would like to keep etymological spelling for its sentimental value. What sentiment? What value? Those who love the history of English (a laudable passion) should enroll in courses on the older periods of their mother tongue: Beowulf, Chaucer, (H)occleve….

(3)   Every spelling reform partly destroys the link between the printed books of the past and the present. Yet anyone who will leaf through the literature published in the eighteenth century will notice that even our recent tradition has not been perfectly stable (also read Shakespeare’s texts brought out in the seventeenth century). Mild reforms have been implemented in several countries. In Russia, not all of them can even be called mild. Especially radical was the one associated with the events of 1917, but the project of that reform predated the Bolsheviks’ takeover of power. Several letters that no longer had any correspondence in the modern language disappeared. The rupture was serious, yet the change made sense, old books are not hard to understand, and today probably no one would plead for the return to the prerevolutionary norm. Sweden too went a long way toward bringing spelling and even grammar in line with everyday speech.

More recently, spelling has been modernized in Iceland and Germany. The timid German reform met with violent opposition; yet now everybody seems to be accustomed or resigned to the novelties. There is no reason why English spelling should remain untouchable. At least one experiment took place in the English-speaking world not too long ago. In the United States, -or replaced -our; centre and its ilk became center; the suffix -ize replaced -ise; words like moulder and smoulder (but not boulder or shoulder!) lost their u; practice and practise, along with defence and defense have lost the letter that distinguishes the verb from the noun (one has lost it s and the other its c); and so forth. English culture survived those measures.

(4)   This brings me to my main point. For any project of Spelling Reform (still capitalized) to be successful, it should be gradual and progress in several waves. The greatest offender is superfluous letters. The reformers who were active about a hundred years ago began with hav, giv, liv, ar (= have, give, are). This, I think, was a mistake. Such heavy-duty words should be left intact, at least for now. Society will not agree to “liv and make liv.” At first, only painless measurers should be suggested. Perhaps opponents will agree to get rid of the second l in full or to follow (folow?) some (!) American variants, seeing that, for instance, the difference between the suffixes -ize and -ise has little justification.

An etymological blog is not a proper forum for offering a ful(l)-fledged program. At this stage, it is more important to engage the public than to argue over details. As long as the reformers keep preaching to the converted (choir, quire), nothing will happen. At one time, I thought that influential politicians should be approached, but I was probably wrong. Politicians will always have to take care of more important things, like raising or cutting taxes, sending or not sending troops abroad, and getting reelected. The suggestion I have recently heard (“try to win over journalists and publishers”) sounds more practicable. After all, journalists write for newspapers, they wield the metaphorical pen, while publishers sell books. Are they interested? Will anyone contributing to numerous word colum(n)s respond to this post? Will dictionary makers take part in the discussion? Ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate, hasn’t the time come for you to join forces with the reformers? Writers of the world, unite!

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via email or RSS.

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Image credit: Image courtesy of Australian Postal History.

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Writing a graphic history: Mendoza the Jew

By Ronald Schechter

Let me begin with a confession. I used to be a snob when it came to comics. I learned to read circa 1970 and even though my first books were illustrated, there was something about the comic format – the words confined to speech and thought bubbles and the scenes subdivided into frames – that felt less than serious. The only time I remember being allowed to buy comic books was when I had just been to the doctor’s office. Comics were a reward and a comfort for putting up with a cold or the flu or an injection. They were to literature what ice cream was to cuisine. I know I wasn’t alone, and that there are cultural-historical reasons why the adults of my childhood were suspicious of comics. The form itself represented an independent youth culture with its hints of rebelliousness, idleness, sexuality and delinquency, even if I was only reading Richie Rich (an establishment comic if ever there was one) or Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

I would like to say that I came to appreciate the graphic form when I was living in Paris in the early 1990s and when imaginative, beautiful, and thought-provoking bandes-dessinées graced the shelves of serious bookstores on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. That would make me sound sophisticated and open-minded. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be true. I stayed away from that section of the bookstore and concentrated on imageless books, preferably thick in-octavo volumes with pages no larger than six by eight inches.

In the late 90s I was given Art Spiegelman’s Maus as a gift, but I left it on a shelf until my teenage son read it about a decade later and recommended it to me. I then read it and was moved, as many readers have been, but I had misgivings about a book that represented the Holocaust as a kind of fable with animals playing the roles. In retrospect I believe it was the form of the comic book itself that troubled me most. How could the memory of Holocaust victims be honored with something as profane as a comic book? Again, I was still in the thrall of a culture that had an irrational prejudice against illustrated stories divided into (usually) six frames per page and with text contained in speech and thought bubbles. A comic book was profane because, well, it was a comic book.

So when a representative at Oxford University Press for Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. gave me a copy of a “graphic history” called Abina and the Important Men, written by Trevor Getz and illustrated by Liz Clarke, I wasn’t necessarily the best candidate for adopting the book. I flipped through it and couldn’t help being gripped by the images of a young woman from the Gold Coast who had taken her employer to court in 1876 for illegally enslaving her, but I placed it on my shelf along with the many other books I had received from publishers. I would think about it, I told myself, but then stopped thinking about it. It wasn’t until I ran into my learned friend Mack Lundy that I thought about the book again. Mack said, “Have you seen a book called Abina and the Important Men? I just picked it up at the College bookstore yesterday and it’s amazing.” Mack is an IT specialist at my College library and is not required to read college history textbooks as part of his job, and he even wrote about the book on his Africa-themed blog. This made his endorsement of the book all the more persuasive.

It happened to be the time of year when I had to choose books to adopt for my courses the following semester, so I read Abina. “My students will love this,” I thought. (Imagine a college professor with this thought written out in a “thought bubble.”) There was something condescending in that thought. I could have chosen a real book to assign, the sort of book I would love, but as a favor to my students I would give them a break and assign a comic book.

As it turned out, Abina was quite challenging, even more challenging than many of the convential-form books I otherwise assign. This was not only because of the complex subject matter, involving such themes as global trade, imperialism, diplomacy, and human rights, but because it thematized the interpretive work historians do when making sense of historical evidence. In other words, it provided a lesson in historical methodology, something few undergraduate course books do. It accomplished this in two ways. First, it included the court transcript of Abina’s case. This gave students the opportunity to compare the primary source with the secondary source (in this case the graphic history). But the second way was inherent to the graphic form itself. The color pictures, the expressions on the faces, the gestures, the dialogue and the thoughts imputed to the characters made it very clear that the history being told was a work of the imagination.

Historians are sometimes reluctant to discuss the role of the imagination in the production of their work, especially when speaking to students who (it might be feared) could mistake imagination for wholesale invention. But students benefit from the knowledge that historians do not simply report what they find in the archives. They give it a form, choose some elements and leave others out, and tell a story. They do this even when they choose an analytical approach to exposition. The narrative aspect of history-writing is graphically clear in the graphic form.

Ronald Schechter is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and translator of Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing with Related Documents (Boston and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004). He is author of the graphic history Mendoza the Jew: Boxing, Manliness, and Nationalism, illustrated by Liz Clarke. His research interests include Jewish, French, British, and German history with a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Some highlights of the BPS conference 2014 Birmingham

By David Murphy and Susan Llewelyn

Psychology must be one of the most diverse disciplines there is; it encompasses understanding language development in infants, techniques to help sports competitors improve performance, the psychology of conflicts, therapy for mental health disorders, and selection techniques for business amongst many others. The BPS Annual Conference is probably the best chance to witness the breadth of the discipline each year in the United Kingdom.

Things to do at the conference

This year’s conference in Birmingham has some fantastic highlights. The session on psychology in the military is highly topical and has some leading figures in the world speaking such as Keynote speaker, Professor Simon Wessely. There is a great deal of research looking at aspects of parenting throughout the conference  as well as  sessions covering a range of areas including mental health, diet, managing physical illness and educational attainment among others. Professor Sergio Della Sala is a neuropsychologist who has a great ability to communicate information about brain functioning in an easily understandable and entertaining fashion; his talk is sure to be a high point.

However, sometimes at the BPS conference its worth just going with the flow and attending talks in areas that you aren’t very familiar with, you will hopefully find them very interesting, and they may well give you new ideas which could even be a turning point for your career to go off in a new direction, or help you think in a new way about your own area of research or study.

Things to do in Birmingham

Birmingham has a range of extraordinary heritage, so the Museum & Art Gallery should be top of the list for those wanting to fully appreciate the scope of the city’s history.

It is also thought that some of Birmingham’s sights and history inspired the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit fans among us might want to take the Tolkien Bus Tour the weekend after the conference.

We hope to see you at the conference this year, do come up and say hello if you are attending.

Susan Llewelyn is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Oxford University, and Senior Research Fellow, Harris Manchester College, Oxford.  David Murphy is the Joint Course Director of the University of Oxford Clinical Psychology Doctoral Training Programme. They are co-editors of What is Clinical Psychology? 

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Image Credit: St Martins church and Bullring -Birmingham -England (G-Man).  Public domain.

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Can we finally stop worrying about Europe?

By Richard S. Grossman

Because Europe accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s economic output, this question is important not only to Europeans, but to Africans, Asians, Americans (both North and South), and Australians as well. Those who forecast that the United States’s relatively anemic five-year-old recovery is poised to become stronger almost always include the caveat “unless, of course, Europe implodes.”

So, can we stop worrying about Europe?

Recent signs have been encouraging.

Consider the following graph, which shows the spread between the yields on the 10-year bonds of several European countries and those of the German government. Because the German government’s finances are relatively healthy—and Germany is thus viewed as being quite likely to pay back what it owes—it is able to borrow money more cheaply than most of its neighbors. For 10 years loans, the German government pays interest of about 1.5%, which is among the lowest rates in Europe.

Before the European sovereign debt crisis erupted 2009, spreads were not especially wide. In 2008, the Greek government paid between 0.25-0.75% more to borrow money for 10 years than the German government. When the sorry state of the Greek government’s finances became public, however, the spread between Greek and German yields soared to more than 20% and the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were called in to bail out the Greek government. Ireland, Portugal, and Spain also received rescue packages (as did Cyprus), while Italy appeared to be headed down the same road. Note the wide spreads between these governments’ borrowing costs and those of the fiscally virtuous Germans.

During the last year or so, Greek, Irish, Portuguese, and Spanish spreads have shrunk considerably — not to their pre-crisis levels, but far below their sky-high levels of 2010-2012 — suggesting that doubts about the sustainability of European governments’ debts is receding. The decline in spreads is due in part to the austerity measures adopted as a condition of the EU/IMF bailouts, which have improved the budget outlook among the fiscally weaker countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s April visit to Greece was widely seen as an effort to show support for fiscal austerity and economic restructuring adopted by the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.

Angela Merkel – Αντώνης Σαμαράς, 2012. Photo by Αντώνης Σαμαράς Πρωθυπουργός της Ελλάδας. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In other positive news, Markit’s European purchasing manager’s composite index for March (released on 23 April 2014), which is considered a proxy for economic output, rose to a nearly three-year high. The index shows a continuous expansion of business activity since last July and forecasts that a backlog of work will lead to further growth in May.

Despite these positive signs, Europe is not out of the woods.

Unemployment remains stubbornly high, due, in part, to austerity: over 25% in Greece and Spain; over 15% in Portugal and Cyprus; and over 10% in France, Ireland, Italy, and a number of other countries.

Although prices are rising slightly in the European Union on average, Greece, Spain, Portugal and a few other European countries are experiencing deflation. Moreover, overall inflation in the EU is below that in the United States, leading the euro to appreciate by between 2-3% against the dollar since the beginning of 2014 and putting a crimp in European exports. Further, Europe’s flirtation with deflation increases the real burden on debtors. During inflationary times, debtors are able to repay their debts in money that is losing its value; deflation forces debtors to repay in money that is gaining in value.

The European economy is improving. But several indicators show that plenty can still go wrong. So let’s not stop worrying yet.

Richard S. Grossman is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them and Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800. His homepage is RichardSGrossman.com, he blogs at UnsettledAccount.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @RSGrossman. You can also read his previous OUPblog posts.

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Image credit: Graph courtesy of Richard Grossman. Used with permission.

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Dante and the spin doctors

By Matthew Flinders

First it was football, now its politics. The transfer window seems to have opened and all the main political parties have recruited hard-hitting spin-doctors — or should I say ‘election gurus’ — in the hope of transforming their performance in the 2015 General Election. While some bemoan the influence of foreign hands on British politics and others ask why we aren’t producing our own world-class spin-doctors I can’t help but feel that the future of British politics looks bleak. The future is likely to be dominated by too much shouting, not enough listening.

Dante is a fifteen-year old African-American teenager with a big Afro hairstyle. He looks into the camera and with a timid voice tells the viewer ‘Bill de Blasio will be a Mayor for every New Yorker, no matter where they live or what they look like – and I’d say that even if he weren’t my dad’. This was the advert that transformed Bill de Blasio from a long-shot into a hot-shot and ultimately propelled him into office as the 109th and current Mayor of New York. De Blasio also benefitted from a well-timed sexting scandal and an electorate ready for change but there can be no doubting that the advert in which his son, Dante de Blasio, featured was a game changer. Time Magazine described it as “The Ad That Won the New York Mayor’s Race”, the Washington Post named it ‘Political Advert of 2013’ — “No single ad had a bigger impact on a race than this one”.

Such evidence of ‘poll propulsion’, ‘soft power’ and ‘data optimization’ has not gone without notice on this side of the Atlantic and a whole new wave of election gurus have been recruited to help each of the main three political parties (Nigel Farage, of course, would never recruit such blatant overseas talent, ahem). The Liberal Democrats have recruited Ryan Coetzee who played a leading role significantly increasing the Democratic Alliance’s share of the vote in South Africa. The Conservatives have appointed the Australian Lynton Crosby with his forensic focus on ‘touchstone issues’, while last month the Labour Party revealed they had hired one of President Obama’s key strategists, David Axelrod, to craft a sharp political message and re-brand Ed Miliband.

It was David Axelrod’s former Chicago firm — ‘AKPD Message and Media’ — that had made the Dante advert for Bill de Blasio.

Of course, such spin-doctors, advisers, and consultants have always and will always exist in politics. The existence of new forms of off-line and on-line communication demands that political parties constantly explore new techniques and opportunities to improve their standing but I cannot help feel that with the recruitment of such powerful electoral strategists we risk losing touch with what politics is really about. We risk widening the worrying gap that already exists between the governors and the governed. ‘Resilience’, it would appear, seems to be the buzzword of modern party politics as a General Election approaches. It is about who can promote a powerful narrative and deliver an aggressive onslaught; it is about a form of ‘attack politics’ in which a willingness to listen or compromise is derided as weakness, and weakness cannot be tolerated; it is a form of politics in which family and friends become political tools to be deployed in shrewd, cunning and carefully crafted ways.

But does turning to the masters of machine politics from Australia and America bring with it the risk that the campaign will become too polished, too professional, too perfect?

David Axelrod’s role in relation to Ed Miliband provides a case in point. Apparently opinion polls suggest that poor Ed is viewed as too ‘nerdy’ and more than a little bit ‘weird’. The strategists suggest that this ‘image problem’ is a weakness that must be addressed through a process of re-branding. The danger, of course, of course is that by knocking-off all Ed’s quirks and peculiarities you actually end up with just another production line professional politician. Personally, I quite like politicians that are a bit different, even weird. Isn’t that why people find Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage so annoyingly refreshing?

A really smart election strategist might dare to think a little differently; to turn the political world upside-down by focusing not on who can shout the loudest for the longest but on the art of listening. As Andrew Dobson’s brilliant new book — Listening for Democracy — underlines the art of good listening has become almost completely ignored in modern politics despite being prized in daily conversation. Were any of the foreign election gurus employed for their listening skills? No. And that’s the problem. That’s why the future feels so bleak.

Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield and also Visiting Distinguished Professor in Governance and Public Policy at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is the author of Defending Politics (2012).

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Image credit: Ed Miliband. UK Department of Energy. Crown Copyright via WikiCommons.

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Nursing: a life or death matter

By Mary Jo Kreitzer

Since 2005, more than 80% of Americans have rated nurses on a Gallup poll as having “high” or “very high” honesty and ethical standards. In fact, nurses have topped the list since 1999, the first year Gallup asked about them with the exception of 2001. (That year, Gallup included firefighters on a one-time basis, given their prominent role in 9/11 rescue efforts.) What many people don’t understand is that their nurse’s level of education is a life or death matter. In a study just published in Health Affairs, a nurse researcher found that a 10-point increase in the percentage of nurses holding a 4-year BSN degree within a hospital was associated with an average reduction of 2.12 deaths for every 1,000 patients. For more seriously ill patients, the average reduction in deaths was 7.47 per 1,000 patients.

For anybody who has experienced health care, these statistics aren’t surprising. Nurses are the glue that holds much of health care together. Nurse practitioners can effectively manage 80% of primary care with outcomes that equal or exceed physician care. Nurse anesthetists manage care during surgical procedures, nurse midwives deliver babies, and nurses provide care in homes, clinics, senior living centers, schools, and hospitals.

One of the things that excites me these days is that in all of these settings, more and more nurses are practicing integrative nursing – care that focuses on the whole person and uses integrative therapies and healing practices to manage symptoms, ease suffering, and improve quality of life. What does this mean? If you’re experiencing nausea because of your illness or the effects of treatments such as chemotherapy, you might be offered aromatherapy or acupressure before resorting to a drug that’s more expensive, may be less effective, and may cause side effects. If you’re anxious or having difficulty sleeping, you may be taught ways to breathe and relax or be encouraged to practice mindfulness meditation. Nurses practicing from an integrative perspective are eager to help you learn how to better manage your own health and wellbeing, not just deal with the crisis or problem you’re facing at the moment.

Integrative nursing is good for nurses as well as patients. I’ve observed that care settings that embrace integrative nursing are finding that nurses are attracted to work in their organizations, find their practice more fulfilling, and are more engaged and less likely to leave. For the past five years, I have co-led a new educational program at the University of Minnesota – a doctorate of nursing practice (DNP) program in integrative health and healing. This program prepares nurse leaders who work in clinical — as well as in community and corporate — settings. As the first program of its kind, it’s attracting students from around the United States.

Mary Jo Kreitzer is the Director of the Center for Spirituality & Healing, and a Professor for the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota. She is also a co-editor of Integrative Nursing, a title from the Weil Integrative Medicine Library.

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Image Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Eddie Harrison, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Superstition and self-governance

By Peter T. Leeson

Government is conventionally considered the source of citizens’ property security. And in the contemporary developed world, at least, often it is. In the historical world, however, often it was not. In eras bygone, in societies across the globe, governments didn’t exist—or weren’t strong enough to provide effective governance. Without governments to govern them, the members of such societies relied on self-governance.

Self-governance refers to privately supplied institutions of property protection—whether designed by individuals expressly for the purpose, such as the “codes” that pirates forged to govern their crews in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, or developed “spontaneously,” such as the system of customary law and adjudication that emerged to govern commerce between international traders in medieval Europe. Reliance on such institutions, especially in historical societies, is well known. Less widely recognized or understood is historical societies’ reliance on superstition—objectively false beliefs—to facilitate self-governance.

Consider the case of medieval monks. Today monks are known for turning the other cheek and blessing humanity with brotherly love. But for centuries they were known equally for fulminating their foes and casting calamitous curses at persons who crossed them. These curses were called “maledictions.”

Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, wealthy monastic communities in West Francia—a territory encompassing much of modern-day France—confronted great property insecurity. Under the Carolingian dynasty, a system of royal justice protected monks’ property. But in the 10th century that system broke down. As public authority degraded, petty fiefdoms emerged headed by strongmen accountable to no one but strongmen stronger than themselves. Because many monastic communities lacked military means of self-protection, their extensive properties laid unprotected, like sitting ducks, for strongmen interested in plundering them.

To cope with this threat to their property, monks resorted to maledictions. These curses’ particular forms varied, but their basic features were similar. Maledictions were (a) hurled publicly by men of the cloth (b) at the depredators of their property (c) under the ostensible authority of God and through His imprecatory power (or that of his agents, such as saints), (d) using the arsenal of holy execrations that litter the Bible.

Monastic fulminations threatened their targets with divine wrath while targets still inhabited this world:

“we curse them . . . unless they . . . give back what they unjustly took away . . . . May they be cursed in the head and the brain. May they be cursed in their eyes and their foreheads. May they be cursed in their ears and their noses. May they be cursed in fields and in pastures . . . . May they be cursed when sleeping and when awake, when going out and returning, when eating and drinking, when speaking and being silent. May they be cursed in all places at all times.”

They also threatened targets with punishment in the next world: “let him be excommunicated and cursed as well as damned forever with Judas the traitor and with the devil.”

It’s not hard to appreciate how the specter of being cursed with such maledictions affected the incentives of would-be monastic plunderers who believed in the power of monks’ “God damns.” In lieu of state-administered punishment for violating their property, monks’ maledictions promised supernaturally-administered punishment. By raising the cost of raiding their lands, this punishment reduced strongmen’s payoff of appropriation, which in turn reduced the likelihood that monastic communities would be plundered.

Malediction’s power to improve monks’ property security in this way depended critically on citizens’ superstition—their faith in monks’ ability to recruit God to punish them if they preyed on monks’ lands. Thus, in order to “work,” monastic maledictions couldn’t be just any kinds of curses. They had to be curses that were grounded in citizens’ existing beliefs and, equally important, couldn’t be falsified—i.e., couldn’t generate evidence of their bogusness that would undermine maledictions’ property protecting power by turning curse believers into non-believers.

By using Biblical curses, monks borrowed on the authority and sanction given holy imprecations by God Himself according to medieval Christian belief, which viewed this book as divine. And by rendering their curses maximally vague and encompassing—“May they be cursed [in all ways] in all places at all times”—monks ensured their maledictions could never “fail” and thus never produce evidence that cast doubt on their validity. After all, at some point in his life the target of a monastic curse was certain to befall some misfortune. Even if he didn’t, since maledictions also commonly cursed one in the afterlife, it was impossible to rule out the possibility that a curse unrealized so far would “come true” eventually.

Monastic malediction was a highly imperfect institution of private property protection. Like other superstition-based institutions of governance, its potential effectiveness was limited by the strength of the belief in the superstition in which it was grounded; and even in medieval Christendom, skepticism certainly existed. Still, medieval monks wouldn’t have resorted to hurling “God damns” at their predators unless they expected to improve their property security by doing so, and their continued willingness to just that when public authority was unavailable suggests their expectation was well founded. Superstition, it seems, facilitated monastic self-governance.

Peter T. Leeson is Professor of Economics and Law and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University. His new book, Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better than You Think, published by Cambridge University Press, and journal article “God Damn: The Law and Economics of Monastic Malediction,” published in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, study self-governance and the role that superstition plays in its operation.

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization is an interdisciplinary journal which promotes an understanding of many complex phenomena by examining such matters from a combined law, economics, and organization perspective.

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Image credit: Portrait of a Franciscan Friar, c. 1540–42, by Jacopo Bassano. Kimbell Art Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The Oracle of Omaha warns about public pension underfunding

By Edward Zelinsky

As the American public debated the legislation ultimately enacted into law as the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, no person was more influential than the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett. Much attention was given to billionaire Buffett’s complaint that his federal income tax bracket was lower than his secretary’s tax rate. President Obama invoked “the Buffett Rule” to bolster the President’s successful effort for the Act to raise income tax brackets for high income taxpayers.

In his most recent letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett issued another oracular pronouncement about America’s fiscal health. Buffett warned that many public pension plans are dangerously underfunded:

Local and state financial problems are accelerating, in large part because public entities promised pensions they couldn’t afford….[A] gigantic financial tapeworm…was born when promises were made that conflicted with a willingness to fund them….During the next decade, you will read a lot of news –- bad news – about public pension plans.

Many of those who heeded Buffett’s call for higher tax brackets for the wealthy ignore his current warning about the parlous financial condition of public pension plans. One of the problems of being an oracle is that your listeners will pick and choose which prophecies to follow.

Attached to Buffett’s most recent shareholders’ letter was a 1975 memo on pensions Buffett sent to Katharine Graham, then chair of The Washington Post Company. Buffett’s observations in this now released memo are as compelling today as they were forty years ago. It is easy to grant pension benefits payable in the future while failing to fund that pension promise today as “making promises never quite triggers the visceral response evoked by writing a check.” Typical defined benefit formulas, which gear pensions to an employee’s final salary before retirement, are particularly expensive for the employer to finance since higher final salaries will, at the end of an employee’s career, escalate his pension entitlement. It is tempting, but futile, to assume that the underfunding of defined benefit plans can be remedied by every plan continuously earning above average returns on pension assets: “yes, Virginia, maybe every football team can have a winning season this year.”

All of this explains why many of the nation’s public pension plans are today seriously underfunded: Elected officials promise pension benefits without properly funding them and rely on unrealistic assumptions about future rates of return to deny the reality of underfunding.

Buffett’s observations resonate with particular force in Connecticut where I live. Connecticut competes with Illinois for the distinction of being ground zero in the public pensions crisis. In this election year, neither the Governor nor the legislature will acknowledge that the Nutmeg State’s public pensions are seriously underfunded.

Consider in this context Buffett’s warning that pension plans should not assume that they will earn superior investment returns. Connecticut contends that its pension plans will earn 8% annually. Most other states make similarly optimistic assumptions. The National Association of State Retirement Administrators has recently determined that the average state public pension plan currently assumes that its investments will earn an annual rate of return of 7.72%.

More realistic assumptions about rates of return would expose the underfunding of public pensions described by Buffett. Under the Internal Revenue Code, private sector pensions this month must calculate their obligations to pay retirement benefits using interest rates ranging from 1.19% (for pension benefits payable soon) to 6.76% (for pension benefits payable furthest down the road). If Connecticut or any other state with similarly underfunded pensions assumed these more sobering rates of return (as they should), Buffett’s dire assessment of pension underfunding would be dramatically confirmed.

Equally instructive is the recent contract settlement brokered by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union (TWU). With much fanfare, Governor Cuomo announced that TWU workers will receive increased wages but that the MTA will not elevate fares to cover these increased wages. Only after the cheering stopped did we learn how this alchemy is to be accomplished: by reducing the MTA’s scheduled contributions for pensions and retiree health care costs. Governor Cuomo, the MTA, and the TWU have decided to underfund pensions for MTA workers. No doubt, they will justify this underfunding by predicting superior investment returns on the pension’s investments.

The Oracle of Omaha is, unfortunately, right. Many states and localities will soon have to choose whether to pay pensions promised to retired workers, or whether to put police on the streets and teachers into classrooms, or whether to increase taxes significantly to pay pensions and maintain public services.

It is regrettable that many who marched under Buffett’s banner when he favored higher taxes on the rich ignore his message about the troubled state of public pensions.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.

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Image credit: Pension pension or retirement concept with word on business office folder index. Photo by gunnar3000, iStockphoto.

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Catechetical session comparisons [infographic]

In his study, sociologist David Yamane found an interesting correlation between the type of catechetical sessions used in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults process (which an adult who wants to enter the Catholic Church undergoes) and the socioeconomic standing (SES). He found that the lower the SES of the parish, the more they rely on hierarchical and passive pedagogies such as question and answer and lecturing. The higher the SES, the more diversity in their teachings, with more focus on participatory and engaging pedagogies such as liturgy and prayer and discussion.

Download a jpg or pdf of the infographic.

David Yamane teaches sociology at Wake Forest University. His primary scholarly interest is the sociology of organized religion, particularly Roman Catholicism in the postwar United States. His publications include The Catholic Church in State Politics: Negotiating Prophetic Demands and Political Realities (2005), Real Stories of Christian Initiation: Lessons for and from the RCIA (2006), and Religion in Sociological Perspective (2011). He is author of Becoming Catholic: Finding Rome in the American Religious Landscape.

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