Oxford University Press's Blog, page 970
March 8, 2013
Why are Mexicans leaving farm work, and what does this mean for US farmers?
The Findings
Agriculture in North America traditionally has had its comparative advantage in having access to abundant low-skilled labor from Mexico. Around 70% of the United States hired farm workforce is Mexico-born, according to the National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS). Fruit, vegetable, and horticultural farms in the US have enjoyed an extended period of farm labor abundance with stable or decreasing real wages. However, new panel data reveal a declining long-term trend in the farm labor supply in rural Mexico. In coming years, US farmers will need to offer higher wages to induce new workers to migrate northward to US farm jobs.
The Evidence
Migration within Mexico and to the US increased in the years prior to the recession; however, with the onset of the recession there was a sharp decrease in migration to the US (see Figure 1). The combined shares of the workforce migrating to agriculture either within Mexico or to the US decreased between 2007 and 2010. In contrast, the percentage of the workforce working in the Mexican non-farmwork sector grew steadily.
Figure 1. Number of workers that migrate to each sector by survey round. Taylor, J.E., D. Charlton, and A. Yúnez-Naude. 2012. “The End of Farm Labor Abundance.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. 34(4):587-98.
Mexico is following the pattern of countries around the world: as its income rises, workers shift out of farm work into other sectors. Mexico’s per-capita income, adjusted for the cost of living, now exceeds $15,000 per year. Growth in Mexico’s non-agricultural employment began before the recession and persists now. As non-farm opportunities increase, the Mexican workforce will continue moving out of agriculture.
Why do we see decreases in the supply of Mexican farm labor?
The received wisdom in development economics is that the domestic supply of agricultural labor starts out being relatively elastic (i.e., abundant), but the farm labor supply shifts inward and becomes less elastic as countries’ per-capita incomes increase and people shift from farm to nonfarm jobs. In order to induce domestic workers to supply their labor to farm jobs, agricultural wages must rise apace with nonagricultural wages. This is all the more true if non-farm jobs bring non-pecuniary benefits compared to farm jobs and/or workers associate farm jobs with drudgery.
Tighter border enforcement and drug-related violence along the border may deter migration, but our analysis suggests that for US agriculture their main effect is largely secondary, reinforcing a negative trend in rural Mexicans’ willingness to do farmwork. For example, after the “great recession” in 2008, the share of Mexican immigrants working in agriculture decreased more than the share working in non-agriculture. The recession had a large negative impact on construction and service jobs in the non-farm sector while labor demand in the farm sector remained steady and commodity prices rose. If unemployed workers in the non-farm sector sought jobs on US farms during the recession, then one might expect the supply of agricultural labor to increase. Data show that some immigrants did shift from non-farm to farm work after the recession, but more shifted from farm to non-farm in the US. If the decrease in immigration in recent years were the result of increases in border patrol or drug-related violence, then the decrease in farm labor supply should be similar to the decrease in non-farm labor supply, but the data show the opposite.
US agriculture appears to be doubly adversely affected by the decline in the supply of immigrant labor and a shift in the Mexican labor supply away from farmwork.
Implications for US agriculture
A declining farm labor supply in rural Mexico and competition from Mexico’s farmers combine to raise the reservation wage of migrating to the United States—that is, the minimum US farm wage needed to induce new workers to migrate northward to farm jobs. US growers must look for substitute inputs to agricultural production as the supply of agricultural workers is declines.
Potential solutions for US farmers
One solution is to seek migrant workers from other countries with lower reservation wages. However, the US-Mexico situation is unique, with two countries at vastly different levels of income sharing a common border. Central American countries are small compared to Mexico and they too are changing. The cost of importing low-skilled labor increases progressively as one looks farther afield, say, to Asia. Consequently, importing agricultural labor into the US from more distant countries does not appear plausible.
Another solution is to invest in labor-saving agricultural technologies and transition away from labor-intensive crops. Under this scenario, capital improvements in farm production will increase the marginal product of farm labor, and US farms will change their labor-management practices, hiring fewer workers at higher wages. In the years 2007-2009, 23% of US farmworker families had income below the poverty line (Martin, 2012). Improvements in agricultural production technology are a necessary input to increase farm wages, allowing farmworker families to rise above the poverty line. Simultaneously, rising farm wages create an incentive for farmers to make the necessary investments to raise farmworker productivity.
J. Edward Taylor and Diane Charlton are the authors of “The End of Farm Labor Abundance” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, which is available to read for free for a limited time. Edward Taylor is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Director of the Center on Rural Economies of the Americas and Pacific Rim (REAP) at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches courses on international development economics and econometric methods. He is also co-editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and founder of the alternative textbook initiative, RebelText.org. Taylor has written extensively on the economy-wide impacts of agricultural and development policies and on immigration. He co-authored Village Economies: The Design, Estimation and Use of Villagewide Economic Models (Cambridge University Press) and Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millenium (Oxford University Press). He is listed in Who’s Who in Economics and has advised a number of foreign governments and international development agencies on matters related to economic development. Diane Charlton is a PhD student in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. Her areas of focus are agriculture and international development.
Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy aims to present high-quality research in a forum that is informative to a broad audience of agricultural and applied economists, including those both inside and outside academia, and those who are not specialists in the subject matter of the articles. In addition, AEPP publishes specially-commissioned featured articles focusing on the synthesis and integration of applied research and on future research agendas.
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Can women fight?
On 24 January 2013, Leon Panetta, the US Secretary of State for Defence, made an historic announcement: from 2016, combat roles would be open to female service personnel. For the first time, women would be allowed to serve in the infantry. Applauded in liberal quarters, the decision was widely seen as unproblematic since it merely ratified a de facto reality; women had been fighting on the front line since 2001 and especially after the Iraq invasion of 2003. A predictable conservative backlash has now begun however.
David Frum, a contributing editor of the Newsweek recently posted a long article on The Daily Beast which rejected Panetta’s ruling reaffirming women’s unsuitability for combat roles. Citing Kingsley Browne 2007, Co-ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn’t Fight the Nation’s Wars, Frum identifies four reasons why women cannot and should not fight: the physical and psychological differences between men and women, the inability of the military to enforce gender-neutral standards, heterosexual attraction, and the unique duty of the armed forces (to fight wars). Most women are too physically weak to perform as combat soldiers and they undermine the cohesiveness of all male groups. Even those women who are strong enough to serve in combat present a problem because the armed forces, focused on war-winning (not internal equality), are unable to apply gender-blind standards to women; they cannot treat them equally and tend to be too soft on them.
There is little question that Frum’s claim that most women are too physically weak to fight is true. Despite advances in female athletic performance, about one percent of the female population could serve as infantry soldiers. Yet, all his other claims are highly dubious and indeed self-referential.
It is simply not true that women’s presence inevitably undermines cohesion. In the highly professional armies which the western powers deploy today, cohesion no longer depends primarily on appeals to masculinity or to ethnicity which was typical in the citizen army of the twentieth century. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military units have unified their personnel not by the fact that they are all (typically white) men together as the US Army did in the Second World War but by reference to their professional competences. They are united by their common training and doctrine, which inculcates a set of collective drills which are performed more or less independently of personal relations. Indeed, in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan, due to availability, casualties and the requirements for specialists, patrols have often consisted of individuals who barely know each other. However, they have been able to operate together effectively by reference to common professional procedures learnt in training.
US Army (USA) Major (MAJ) Mary V. Krueger, 321st Civil Affair Battalion, assigned to the Surgeon Cell, for the Combined Joint Civil Military Task Force (CJCMOTF), applies an ointment to a rash on the face of a little boy from a local Kuchi Tribe, located in the city of Gardez, Afghanistan. Source: SFC Larry Johns, USA: US Department of Defence.
In this context, soldiers fighting on the front line have recorded the successful integration of women, often as specialists, into combat units. Something quite surprising happens when a competent women joins one of these male groups. The predicted collapse of cohesion has not happened. On the contrary, the female soldier has been accepted as a professional equal, respected like her peers for the expertise she brings. Moreover, in the close proximity of the patrol base, the question of sexual attraction often becomes irrelevant; female soldiers assume the status of a sister — or indeed honorary brother. In the United Kingdom, members of the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines, two elite infantry regiments, who might be expected to be most opposed to women, have in fact recorded their successful integration. Undoubtedly some women have failed on the frontline, just as some men have, but as long as women can do their job, they have been accepted by male soldiers. Moreover, against Frum’s presumptions that men will not be led by women, there are a number of cases in the Canadian Army where women have served as infantry officers or NCOs sometimes more successfully than their male peers.
It is empirically false to claim that women cannot serve on the frontline or that they necessarily undermine cohesion, then. It is also conveniently circular to suggest that the armed forces cannot and should not be asked to enforce gender-blind standards. This simply legitimates unthinking patriarchal presumptions assuming that what men have done and thought in the past is necessarily correct. Crucially, such a masculinist position misunderstands the nature of military effectiveness. It equates combat performance with masculinity. Yet, combat performance is not primarily determined by raw masculine courage, strength and bonding. Rather, on the mechanised battlefield, successful militaries require refined tactics developed through careful training and preparation, and they need to coordinate their units by means of established procedures and clear command relations.
U.S. Marine Cpl. Mary E. Walls (right), an ammunition technician, and linguist Sahar (left), both with a female engagement team, patrol with 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment in Musa Qa’leh, Afghanistan, 2010. Walls and other female engagement team members patrolled local compounds around the district center to establish relationships with local people and talk with the women of the area in support of the International Security Assistance Force. Source: Cpl. Lindsay L. Sayres, U.S. Marine Corps: US Department of Defense.
Masculinity has its place here certainly at the small group level — and most combat solders will perforce be men — but the organizational and tactical requirements of contemporary warfare far exceed the gender essentialism which Frum proposes. Indeed, as the armed forces reduce in size once again with the current round of defence cuts, their continued effectiveness will rely even more exclusively not on appeals to masculine solidarity, but on the contrary on intensified forms of professionalism. Collective performance will depend on competence and skill. The future success of the armed forces will rely on professionalism. Professionalism is not synonymous with masculinity.
Anthony King is Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter, and author of The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. He has written extensively on social theory, football, and the armed forces.
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Mary and Joan on International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day has grown since the 1900s to become a global occasion to inspire women and celebrate achievements. Perhaps two of the most inspirational female figures from history are the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc. We spoke with Marina Warner, author of the seminal titles, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism and Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, about these women and their historical and personal impact.
Where did your interest in the cult of the Virgin Mary come from?
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Why is Joan of Arc such a figure of heroism and inspiration?
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Marina Warner is a writer, historian, cultural critic, novelist, and Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. She is the author of Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism and Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary released in their second editions this month among other works. Marina Warner was created a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French in 2002, and a Commendatore by the Italians in 2005. She was awarded the Warburg Prize in Germany in 2004, and is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She is Professor of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and President of the British Comparative Literature Association. In 2005 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Oxford gave her an Honorary Doctorate in 2005.
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Bestsellers: a snapshot of an age
To celebrate World Book Day this week, we take a look at what John Sutherland thinks about why we read bestsellers and what they say about the age in which they were published, in his Very Short Introduction to Bestsellers.
By John Sutherland
Why read, or contemplate, with any degree of seriousness, less than ‘good’ (and sometimes downright bad) books – the Deepings of the literary world? Do they not belong in that category, contemptuously called in German, Wegwerfl iteratur? – ‘throw-away literature’? Why pick up what literary history so resolutely discards?
Any study of bestsellers confronts the same question as does the decaf, no-fat latte drinker in Starbucks: ‘Why bother?’ One justification, and the easiest demonstrated, is their (that is, bestsellers’) interesting peculiarity. Like other ephemera of past times, bestsellers (even Orwell despised Deeping) offer the charm of antiquarian quaintness. Where else would one encounter a line such as: ‘I say, you are a sport, pater’ [‘Son’ addressing ‘Sorrell’, on having been given a tenner ‘tip’ in Deeping’s Sorrell and Son]. And, so short is their lifespan, that today’s bestsellers become yesterday’s fiction almost as soon as one has read them.
Looking back through the lists is to uncover delightful cultural oddities. Consider, for example, the top-selling (#1) novel of 1923 in the United States, Black Oxen, by Gertrude Atherton. Recall too that the discriminating reader of that year had James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod to choose from.
Atherton’s title is taken from W. B. Yeats (‘The years like great black oxen tread the world’). The allusion signals grand literary pretension; pretension absurdly unmerited. None the less, the novel’s theme was, for the time, both topical and sensational – rejuvenation. For humans, that is, not cattle.
The narrative opens in a New York theatre. A brilliant young newspaperman, Lee Clavering (a member of the city’s elite ‘top 400’ families), is struck by a beautiful woman in the audience. Investigation reveals that she is facially identical with a young ‘belle’ of thirty years before, Mary Ogden. Miss Ogden married a Hungarian diplomat, Count Zattiany, and has never been heard of since. Speculation rages, but eventually the truth comes out: Ogden/Zattiany has been rejuvenated in Vienna by Dr Steinach’s new X-ray technique. By bombarding a woman’s ovaries at the period of menopause, the ageing process is reversible.
When news of the wonderful process hits the newspapers, ‘civil war threatens’. And luckless Clavering finds himself in love with a woman old enough to be his mother. On the other side, he himself is obsessively loved by a flapper, Janet Oglethorpe, young enough to be his daughter, who drinks illegal hooch and attends ‘petting parties’. The plot thickens, madly, thereafter.
It is nonsense – just as, medically, Steinach’s X-ray miracle was nonsense. In 1922 Atherton herself had received the Viennese doctor’s rejuvenation treatment. It seems, from publicity pictures to have done little for her beauty. But tosh fiction and quack science as it may be, Black Oxen fits, hand-in-glove, with its period. And no other period.
However absurd it seems to the modern reader, Atherton’s novel reflects, and dramatizes, contemporary anxiety about women’s freedoms; as definitively as did Bridget Jones’s Diary in the 1990s. The 1920s was the era of the ‘flapper’ – the perpetually young girl-woman. British women in this decade had, after long struggle, the vote – but only if they were over 30, after which the heyday in the female blood was conceived to have been sufficiently cooled to make
rational political decisions. The cult of Dionysian youth – the ‘be young forever or die now’ aspiration – is more respectably commemorated in another novel of 1923, Scott Fitzgerald’s Beautiful and Damned. It, too, made the bestseller lists, but much less spectacularly than Atherton: Fitzgerald was running a longer literary race.
Black Oxen, the top novel in the US in 1923, is inextricably ‘of ’ its period. It could have been published 15 years later (as was Aldous Huxley’s ‘elixir of life’ novel, After Many a Summer). But out of its immediate time-and-place frame, Black Oxen would have no more ‘worked’ than a fish out of water. Nor would it, in other days, have been what it was, ‘the book of the day’. The day made the book, as much as events of the day made newspaper headlines in 1923.
This hand-in-glove quality is inextricably linked with the ephemerality of bestsellerism. A #1 novel may be seen as a successful literary experiment – as short-lived as a camera flash, and as capable of freezing, vividly, its historical moment. If (to paraphrase Coleridge) one saw Jonathan Livingston Seagull (‘Jesus tripping’) wandering wild in Arabia, one would shout: ‘hippy seventies!’ (with the possible addition ‘dude!’). If Bulldog Drummond blundered, dinner-jacketed, into one’s living room, his ‘man’ Denny in close attendance with pint tankard, furled brolly, and pistol, one would recognize the clubland thug as a time traveller from the early 1920s.
The great literary work may be, as Jonson said of Shakespeare, ‘not for an age but for all time’. The reverse is, typically, the case with the ‘best’ bestsellers. They are snapshots of the age.
John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London and the author of Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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March 7, 2013
P.A.J. Waddington on jury service
Fortunately, I have escaped the obligation of performing jury service, but I know many who have been less fortunate. The stories they tell of their experience hardly fosters confidence in this institution that enjoys such a position of unquestioned pre-eminence in the Common Law criminal trial. They tell of ignorant, utterly disengaged, deeply prejudiced people, often more anxious to escape the confines of the court and resume their lives than committed to doing justice. So, it came as no surprise to learn of the collapse of the trial of Vicky Pryce on charges of perverting the course of justice in the case of her former husband, Chris Huhne.
Yet, no system can be expected to free from failure, especially one that relies so heavily on the actions, attitudes, and beliefs of ordinary people thrown together to perform an extraordinary duty. That people feel somewhat bemused by the instruction to find guilt only when the evidence is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is hardly contemptible. How much doubt can reasonably be entertained? Was an accused identified by several witnesses at the scene and unknown twin of the defendant? Could be! Who knows? That doesn’t strike me as a ‘reasonable doubt’, but perhaps I demand too much. From where should this doubt arise from? Should it only be the doubts advanced by the defence in court? What about the doubts that jurors feel about the trustworthiness of the witnesses they have seen? What if the defence fails to raise doubts about the likelihood of a chain of circumstantial evidence, which seems utterly obvious to the Professor of Logic who finds herself in the jury box?
Systems have weaknesses and sometimes fail. We can draw too many conclusions from solitary incidents. As natural scientists are prone to remind those of us in the social sciences: “Anecdotes can never constitute ‘data’!” So we should not fixate on Vicky Pryce’s trial, but look for a more rigorous analysis. However, a former Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, persuaded Parliament to enact legislation, the Contempt of Court Act 1981, section 8 of which stipulates that “it is a contempt of court to obtain, disclose or solicit any particulars of statements made, opinions expressed, arguments advanced or votes cast by members of a jury in the course of their deliberations in any legal proceedings.” Lord Hailsham was explicit in his wish to put jury deliberation beyond the scope of inquiring journalists and researchers. In other words, it is better to cloud the institutions of justice in ignorance than to allow even the most carefully managed research to reveal its workings.
All was not quite lost, because some researchers set up ‘mock juries’ who heard evidence and then came to a decision under the watchful eye of researchers. Of course, it is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate the jury’s perspective on the conduct of the trial; the demands that can be made on research participants is inevitably less than the compulsion under which a jury serves. However Professor Vanessa Munro and her collaborators, using this approach, recently completed research into how people reasoned about the guilt of men accused of rape. The results were fascinating and deserve greater prominence in public debate on the jury system. The researchers found that people viewed the evidence through the lens of their own unquestioned assumptions of how sexual intercourse normally occurs. They also impose upon victims responsibilities (such as evidence of physical resistance) that are now accepted as utterly unrealistic and were immune to the warnings to avoid such preconceptions issued by judges.
For me, what was really interesting was that the participants in this research were relying on their common sense, which is exactly what apologists for the jury system applaud. It seems to me whilst alternatives to the jury system are no more appealing, it would be better for us recognize that it is the least worst option, not the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the criminal trial, and begin the search for something rather better.
Professor J Waddington, BSc, MA, PhD is Professor of Social Policy, Director of the History and Governance Research Institute, The University of Wolverhampton. He is a general editor for Policing.
A leading policy and practice publication aimed at senior police officers, policy makers, and academics, Policing contains in-depth comment and critical analysis on a wide range of topics including current ACPO policy, police reform, political and legal developments, training and education, specialist operations, accountability, and human rights.
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Image credit: Symbol of law and justice in the empty courtroom, law and justice concept. Photo by VladimirCetinski, iStockphoto.
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Controlling the fable-makers
Along with Plato, Aristotle (384–322 bc) was one of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, and in the view of many he was the greatest philosopher of all time. Aristotle lived and taught in Athens for most of his career. He began as a pupil of Plato, and for some time acted as tutor to Alexander the Great. He left writings on a prodigious variety of subjects, covering the whole field of knowledge from biology and astronomy to rhetoric and literary criticism, from political theory to the most abstract reaches of philosophy. His Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written and is a founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism. We present a brief extract from Republic, Books Two and Three.
‘We must begin by controlling the fable-makers, and admit only the good fables they compose, not the bad. We shall then persuade nurses and mothers to tell children the admitted fables, and mould their minds with fable much more than they now mould their bodies with the hand. Most of the tales they tell now will have to be thrown out.’
‘Which?’
‘If we look at the big fables, we shall also see the little ones. Big and little need to be of the same type and have the same effect. Don’t you agree?’
‘Yes: but I don’t see what you mean by the big ones.’
‘Those that Hesiod and Homer told, and the other poets. For it’s the poets who told men, and still tell them, the false stories they themselves compose.’
‘What stories? And what fault do you find with them?’
‘The fault one must find, first and foremost, especially when someone tells falsehoods wrongly.’
‘But what is it?’
‘Making bad verbal likenesses of gods and heroes — just like a painter making a picture unlike the object he wants to paint.’
‘Well, it’s certainly right to find fault with that sort of thing. But just what do we mean?’
‘To begin with, the greatest falsehood, involving the greatest issues, was wrongly told by the person who said that Ouranos did what Hesiod said he did, and that Kronos took his revenge upon him. What Kronos did and what happened to him at his son’s hands is something I should not want to be told without precaution to the young and foolish, even if it had been true. If possible, it should have been veiled in silence; but if there had been great need to tell it, it should have been made a secret, for as small an audience as possible — and they should have had to sacrifice not a pig, but some expensive and inaccessible victim, so that as few people as possible should hear the tale.’
‘These stories are indeed difficult.’
‘They are not to be repeated in our city, Adimantus. Nor is it to be said in a young man’s hearing that if he committed the most outrageous crimes, or chastised an erring father by the direst means, he would be doing nothing remarkable, but only what the first and greatest of the gods have done.’
‘I don’t myself think that these are suitable stories.’
‘It’s the same with all the tales of how gods war, plot, and fight against gods— not that they’re true anyway— if our future city-guardians are to believe that readiness to hate one another is the greatest scandal. Still less must they be told elaborate fables of battles of giants, and all the other various hostilities of gods and heroes towards their kith and kin. If we are somehow to convince them that no citizen has ever been the enemy of another, nor is it right that he should be, then that is the lesson that older men and women must impress on the children from the start, the lesson (more or less) that poets too must be forced to impress on the adult population. Hera tied up by her son, Hephaestus thrown out by his father because he was proposing to defend his mother against a beating, Homer’s battles of gods — all this is inadmissible, whether it was composed allegorically or not. Young people can’t distinguish the allegorical from the non-allegorical, and what enters the mind at that age tends to become indelible and irremovable. Hence the prime need to make sure that what they first hear is devised as well as possible for the implanting of virtue.’
‘That makes sense. But if we were to be asked what these things are, what the stories are, what should we say?’
‘You and I, Adimantus, are not poets, at the moment: we are founders of a city. Founders have to know the patterns within which poets are to be made to construct fables, and beyond which they must not be allowed to go, but they don’t have to make up fables themselves.’
‘True enough: but just what are the patterns for an account of the gods?’
‘Something like this, I fancy. God must always be represented as he is, whether in epic or in lyric or in tragedy.’
‘Yes indeed.’
‘Now God is in truth good and must be so described.’
‘Of course.’
‘And nothing good is harmful, is it?’
‘No.’
‘Does the non-harmful harm?’
‘No.’
‘And does what doesn’t harm do any evil?’
‘No.’
‘And what does no evil is cause of no evil?’
‘Of course.’
‘Now again. The good is useful?’
‘Yes.’
‘Therefore the cause of felicity?’
‘Yes.’
‘The good therefore is not the cause of everything, but only of what is well.’
‘Certainly.’
‘God, therefore, being good, cannot be responsible for everything, as is the common opinion, but only of some things in human life. There is much for which he bears no responsibility. Our blessings are far fewer than our troubles, and while none but God is responsible for the blessings, we must seek other causes for the troubles.’
‘That seems perfectly right.’
‘We must therefore not allow Homer or any other poet to make foolish mistakes about the gods.” [ … ]
Aristotle is important in the early history of Western linguistics both for his general contributions to logic, rhetoric, and poetics and for a specific classification of speech units. Sir Anthony Kenny is a distinguished philosopher whose books include The Aristotelian Ethics (1978), Aristotle’s Theory of the Will (1979), and Aristotle on the Perfect Life (1992). His most recent book is A New History of Western Philosophy (2010). For Oxford World’s Classics he has translated Aristotle’s Poetics and Eudemian Ethics.
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.
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Diary of a string time teacher
A friend once asked if I ever get bored teaching the violin and doing the same thing year after year. He was surprised when I said “It’s anything but dull and boring!” I have always enjoyed the unique character and style of each student, and it’s a privilege as a teacher to see them develop over the years.
Today began in a Junior School with pupils from beginners to Grade 3. The beginners are a lively and enthusiastic bunch eager to show off what they have achieved in their week’s practice. We sing “Jelly on a plate” and play it both pizz. and arco. I’m delighted that bow-holds are shaping up well and we have a lot of fun with a bowing song where we place the bow on our head, nose, and chin. Stickers all round if they manage to keep thumbs bent and curly little fingers on top of the stick.
For those students who are working towards an examination I hear the scale/arpeggio rota for that day. Pupils at all levels find chunking up the technical requirements into a 3 or 4 day rota an effective way to cover the examination syllabus. We try to get variety into the scale practice playing them as rounds, duets, and with different violin and piano accompaniments. I get pupils to draw a small face by each scale depending on how well they think it’s going: a smiley face when they feel it’s secure and can be played without hesitation, a straight line mouth if it’s nearly there but needs a bit more work, and an upside down smile if it’s unsure and hesitant. It’s satisfying for all to see the upside down smiles become proper smiles over the term.
A lot of my non-teaching time is taken up by writing projects and answering emails from our website. Contact with other teachers and hearing of their experiences is a lovely aspect of writing music books.
The late afternoon session is a return to teaching and a rewarding lesson playing “Remembrances” from Schindler’s List with a 6th former preparing for Grade 8. Last year she watched the film as part of her GCSE RE lessons and this gives us a good starting point for the interpretation of this emotional music. Finding these cross-curricular links greatly enriches the learning process. We discuss the bow’s point of contact on the string and work on tone production. From “Jelly on a plate” in the morning to John Williams in the afternoon — who could ever say it was boring!
Kathy Blackwell studied music at Edinburgh University and continued with post-graduate studies in music at the University of Oxford. Kathy is a string teacher with many years’ experience of teaching violin and viola. She was a strings consultant for the ABRSM Music Medals, and a contributor to the accompanying book All together! Teaching Music in groups (ABRSM, 2004). She has worked for Music Services and privately and her teaching experience has led her to co-author Fiddle Time, Viola Time, Cello Time, and String Time with her husband, David.
This article first appeared in the ESTA magazine. ESTA is the largest branch of the European String Teachers Association with a growing membership with substantial benefits for teachers which include: public liability insurance, legal advice, publications for teachers and young string players as well as events and repertoire suggestions.
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Descartes’ dogs
It is well known in the history of psychology that Descartes was an early thinker on what we would now call classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning, which he referred to as “reflex”. Most authors writing on the subject cite two of his works and one letter to make the connection clear: his Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method), 1637; Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul), the last of Descartes’ published work, completed in 1649; and finally his letter to William Cavendish, 1st duke of Newcastle, Friday, 23 November 1646.
However, another much earlier epistolary reference seems generally to be missed: his letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, dated 18 March 1630. What is particularly interesting in this earlier letter to Mersenne is Descartes association of sound (in this case the sound produced by a violin) to the ‘reflex’ response of dogs. As a precursor to Pavlov, and the Pavlovian dogs experiment, it is interesting to see Descartes constructing what is a remarkably parallel experimental test — albeit, in Descartes case and as far as we know, a thought experiment only.
“Secondly, what makes some people want to dance may make others want to cry. This is because it evokes ideas in our memory: for instance those who have in the past enjoyed dancing to a certain tune feel a fresh wish to dance the moment they hear a similar one; on the other hand, if someone had never heard a galliard without some affliction befalling him, he would certainly grow sad when he heard it again. This is so certain that I reckon that if you whipped a dog five or six times to the sound of a violin, it would begin to howl and run away as soon as it heard that music again . . . .”
– René Descartes to Marin Mersenne: Monday, 8 March 1630.
It is striking just how similar Descartes’ theory on ‘reflex’ is to Pavlov’s theory of ‘conditioning’. Just as in Pavlov’s conditioning experiment, performed two hundred and seventy one years after Descartes’ letter outlines his theory of ‘reflex’, the two stimuli necessary for conditioning, the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli, are paired causing the ‘planned conditional response’. In Descartes’ letter, the planned conditional response is fear. In Pavlov’s experiments, the planned conditional response is the saliva elicited by hunger.
Further, in both examples, the conditioned stimulus is linked to sound. For instance, Descartes’ stipulates that if “you whipped a dog five or six times to the sound of a violin, it would begin to howl and run away as soon as it heard that music again”. Pavlov’s experiment nearly three hundred years later also requires an audio-based stimulus to cause the planned conditional response. For Pavlov’s dogs, the sound of the ringing bell would come to represent feeding time and would cause the dogs to salivate in anticipation of sating their hunger. For all animal lovers it is fortunate that Descartes’ experiment remained a theory, discussed in letters to friends, while Pavlov carried out the conditioning experiment in practice.
One of the great advantages of analysing a complete corpus of letters is that it provides the broader matrix of thoughts and exchanges between a range of thinkers as they formulated their theories using their own system of social networking. This small example of a shared experimental construct between Descartes and Pavlov does not provide an entirely new perspective or discovery missed by previous generations but it does provide nuance and depth of structure to our narrative of the history of psychology. Indeed, it suggests that further explorations, with the aid of search facilities across a wide collection of correspondences, may greatly enrich our understanding of the past and how we think of these things in the present.
Robert V. McNamee is Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project. Daniel Parker is Publicity Assistant for Electronic Enlightenment.
With 60,647 letters and documents and 7,476 correspondents as of October 2012, Electronic Enlightenment is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. Students and the general public alike can search the Electronic Enlightenment site according to period, location, historical event or historical figure. The Electronic Enlightenment Project is centred on recreating what might be thought of as the world’s first great social network, the exchange of letters before the development of other, rapid means of communication.
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Image credits: Puppy photo by Bodina. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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March 6, 2013
The Harlem Shake and English etymology
American schools dance nonstop. A wild display of “flailing arms and wriggling torsos,” known as the Harlem Shake, is the latest addition to our civilization. High school “kids” writhe eel-like on the floor, chairs, and tables, fall, sometimes break arms and legs, and have fun, which is the unassailable backbone of our educational system. At some places, teachers and principals dance with the kids and thus double the amount of fun. Elsewhere, administrators take measures against this activity (for fear of self-mutilation) and are severely criticized for impinging on their students’ freedom. Englishmen never will be slaves. Neither will Americans. As a student of history, I am familiar with Greek maenads (those were so-called mountain dancers killing strong animals with their hands and eating their victims’ raw flesh, women inspired to ecstatic frenzy by Dionysus) and with medieval dancing manias. I would be happy to offer an essay titled “Today We Are All Greeks” or “Hippety Hop to St. Vitus.” However, this blog is about etymology, not about events or mores. That is why I decided to write a post on the word dance. In Romance philology, its obscurity is second only to that of French aller “go” and trouver “find,” if obscurity can be measured by the number of publications that produce lots of data without definitive results. Engl. dance is of course from French. The question is how the corresponding verb and noun appeared in the Romance languages.
Latin provides no help because no similar word meaning “dance” turned up in it. The difficulty in reconstructing the etymon of any word for “dance” consists in that dancing is associated with various types of movement: shaking, twisting, whirling, walking around in a group, stamping, or jumping. It can but does not always accompany merriment and jubilation. For instance, Latin salire meant “dance,” while its frequentative form saltare meant “leap” (compare Engl. saltation and somersault). Some of the older Germanic verbs for “dance” were Old Engl. tumbian (still recognizable from tumble; it migrated to the Romance speaking lands, and in French it ended up as tomber “to fall”), hoppian (obviously, today’s hop), and sealtian, a borrowing of saltare. In other lands, “dance” merged with “play”: so in Old High Germen (spilan, Modern German spielen) and Gothic (laikan, as opposed to Old Icelandic leika “play”). Lacan, the Old English cognate of laikan, survived in dialects and is often believed to be the source of lark “frolic.” Considering that “dance” is invariably a metaphorical sense, the search for the original meaning looks like wandering in a desert.
To complicate matters, the word for “dance,” as we have already seen, may be borrowed. The Goths, whose Germanic language we know only from a fourth-century translation of the Bible, had laikan but, not content with that piece of native vocabulary, appropriated its Slavic synonym (hence Gothic plinsjan). Since dance is current in both Germanic and Romance, it must have arisen in one area and spread to the other. As could be expected, two schools exist. One posits the way from Germanic to Romance, the other from Romance to Germanic. While dealing with loanwords, especially when they reflect customs and material culture, it is always important to ask why they were taken over. Some dances are “popular,” the enjoyment of common people; others accompany religious festivals, secret rites, and all kinds of ceremonies. Perhaps laikan belonged to the first group, while plinsjan, because of its foreign provenance (or provenience, as they said in the nineteenth century), sounded more dignified (mere guesswork). Many good dictionaries say that the Romance offshoots of Latin ballare “to dance” (a very late borrowing of a Greek verb; compare Engl. ball, from French) belonged to the more solemn sphere, while dansare (assuming there was such a verb) tended to be popular, but some recent investigations do not confirm this conclusion. This leaves us ignorant of the circumstances in which one culture took over dance from the other.
Here are the Latin words that have been proposed as the etymons of dansare, the reconstructed progenitor of Old French dance (note that c in it was pronounced as ts, in distinction from s, as in Modern French danse). Densare “thicken, close up” (compare Engl. dense); *demptiare (the asterisk designates a form not attested in texts), the putative source of demerere “to deserve”; *dentiare “supply with teeth,” derived from dens “tooth” (pure fiction); *de-ante-are “to step forward”; *dantia, a noun formed from dare “give”; cadentia, from cadere “to fall,” and rotantiare “walk in circles” (rota “wheel”; compare Engl. rotate). Even an unprofessional look at that list will tell us how little any of the words in it makes the impression of a convincing etymon of dansare. Rotantiare provides the best semantic match, but great phonetic leaps are needed for it to yield the desired form, while de-ante-are is supported only by the existence of two or even one similar form (ab-ante-are, as in French avancier “advance”).
Before examining the Germanic hypothesis, a short interlude is in order. It would be wonderful if we could forget all the asterisked forms and explain dance as a sound imitative word. The siren of onomatopoeia tempts us most when we deal with obscure verbs of movement, such as dandle and dangle, to cite two of them beginning with the letter d. Hensleigh Wedgwood (the most influential predecessor of Walter W. Skeat), who generously assigned sound symbolic origins to the words of various languages, said that dance “undoubtedly” arose with the sense “stamp.” I cannot resist the temptation to repeat for the umpteenth time that, whenever an etymologist says undoubtedly or certainly about a difficult word, he (and she) is probably wrong. Wedgwood cited Swedish dunsa “fall heavily” and a few other Scandinavian verbs that go back to the word for “noise,” as does Engl. din. But we do not know whether our story began with stamping and stomping, especially because later dance, whatever its antecedents, did designate an entertainment of courtly culture. We are not told how and from where the Germanic verb spread to Romance. Old Engl. dynian and its West Germanic cognates meant only “roar, rumble.” Their Scandinavian siblings also mainly refer to a loud noise. Apparently, Wedgwood did not show us the way.
The most favored Germanic etymon of dansare has been Old High German danson “pull.” The sense is again uninspiring, and, as noted, after n we need a consonant that sounded like ts, not like s. Numerous old dictionaries gave danson in the entries on dance. They should not be trusted; at least they should not be trusted unconditionally. Germanic confronts us with another difficulty. The German for “dance” is tanzen. Engl. d corresponds to German t only in very old words, for example Engl. do ~ German tun. But neither the Romance nor the Germanic forms for dance predate the twelfth and the thirteenth century. At that time, we could have expected German danzen. I will not go into detail and only state that the explanation of the d ~ t trouble given in German dictionaries carries little conviction. However, the idea that tanzen is a truly ancient word is even less persuasive.
I am sorry that at the end of the way we have only a series of riddles. Even with regard to the Romance area the traditional view that the word spread to Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese from French may be wrong. We have dealt with the noun and the verb, without making distinctions between them, but it remains unclear which came first. Intuitively, it seems that dance is a Romance rather than a Germanic word. Yet one cannot help wondering why its root proved to be so evasive. Also, intuition is an unsafe guide to etymology. The moral of the story is that dancing the Harlem Shake takes at least as much energy as finding the etymon of the word dance.
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 here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
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Image credit: Furious maenad. She holds a thyrsus in her right hand and with her left hand shakes a panther in the air. A whistling snake is rolled up over her head like a diadem. Tondo of an Attic white-ground kylix, 490–480 BC. From Vulci. Brygos Painter. Staatliche Antikensammlungen. Beazley, ARV2, 371, 15. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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Even small government incentives can help tackle entrenched social problems
As the federal bureaucracy continues to struggle with philosophical issues of the appropriate role of government, many Americans feel that our political parties are incapable of providing credible solutions to the nation’s burgeoning societal and economic problems.
Those who advocate for expanding or at least maintaining government programs to address entrenched social problems and inequities must contend with an escalating national debt and a resultant conservative backlash over out-of-control government spending. At the same time, many are increasingly dissatisfied with underwriting government programs either because they increase taxes, are perceived as creating dependence rather than autonomy, or both. Clearly there is a need for a new middle ground that can help reconcile the polarities that threaten to cripple our nation.
In the near future, the overwhelming budgetary crisis will constrain our ability to address intransigent national problems. The roots of this disaster began when presidential and legislative decisions led to an expansion in defense spending, while at the same time reducing taxes. In addition, the recent banking and housing crisis reduced revenues and caused a sharp rise in spending on safety-net programs. A further challenge stems from Medicare and Medicaid expenditures, which have long been rising dramatically and are expected to continue to do so over the next few decades as millions of baby boomers retire, creating unprecedented federal budget problems.
Yet there are ways for society to address critical social and health care concerns without massive government outlays, and precedent exists for government leveraging small investments to motivate significant social change. For example, a significant and pervasive health and economic challenge facing America is alcohol and substance abuse. Approximately 22 million Americans meet diagnostic criteria for drug and alcohol dependence, including 18 million just for alcohol abuse disorders. Annual costs of alcohol abuse alone are estimated at $235 billion dollars in direct treatment and lost productivity.
For many substance abusers, treatment begins in a detoxification program, with a time-limited therapeutic program typically following. However, these programs are becoming shorter and less effective as funding has decreased. For many addicted persons, basic detoxification does not lead to sustained recovery. Instead, these individuals repeatedly cycle through social service delivery and criminal justice programs, driving up costs without any sustainable benefit. The missing element for many patients is a supportive, cohesive setting following treatment for substance abuse. A society that returns its most vulnerable members back into socially high-risk settings upon discharge from treatment can expect to be plagued by an ever-expanding array of social problems.
How then can the average person address these types of social problems when the government and other large institutions have failed?
Oxford House is the largest successful communal-living, self-help alcohol and drug abuse recovery program in the nation, with a network of recovery homes in almost every state. These houses are governed, operated, and paid for by the people who live in them. There is no external, professional staff. With over 10,000 residents across the country, Oxford House exemplifies a grass roots effort to transform our society’s way of dealing with addiction. It expands upon the Alcoholics Anonymous approach by providing former addicts a place to live and a 24/7 support network. In some states, Oxford House residents can borrow $4,000 in government loans to cover the first month’s rent and security deposit, which has to be paid back over two years. One study showed that Oxford House residents had less substance abuse, were less likely to commit crimes, and found better jobs than those in traditional aftercare.
The productivity and incarceration-reduction benefits yielded an estimated $613,000 in savings in a recent study. These findings suggest that there are significant societal benefits for these types of lower cost, non-medical, community-based care options for those battling addiction.
The Oxford House movement has continually evolved through experimentation and trial and error for more than three decades. This is compatible with evidence-based practices that focus on incrementally improving outcomes. Similarly, successful companies use this process to create great products: not with one brilliant idea, but a core product with a succession of improvements.
This broadening self-help movement demonstrates what is possible when people are given the power and responsibility to make their own decisions. Yet, these benefits are not readily available to the homeless, those with chronic health conditions, or those who are released from addiction treatment facilities, prisons, or mental institutions. These individuals often have no voice and are excluded from the basic rights that would empower them to affect their own recovery.
They need supportive, recovery-based environments where they can participate in society and, most importantly, retain some dignity. Those involved in the Oxford House movement and others such as Alcoholics Anonymous are providing democratic environments to the disenfranchised in neighborhoods and communities throughout our country. History has shown that it often takes a grassroots initiative to radically challenge the system or status quo, and this approach can greatly ease the financial burden of addressing major problems facing our nation.
Leonard A. Jason, professor of clinical and community psychology at DePaul University and director of the Center for Community Research, is the author of Principles of Social Change published by Oxford University Press. He has investigated the self-help recovery movement for the last 20 years.
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