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Healthcare is bound to inflate in cost because of new procedures and longer lifespans. There may be a similar excuse for education, but I cannot put my finger on it at the moment.
There is more in quantity and diversity every year and more purposes (job roles) for education and duration has also expanded
As with so much of modern life, the state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward. That is what tax-funded monarchs did, what tithe-funded monks did, what prize-seeking naval captains did, what corrupt colonial nabobs did – and it is what today’s broadcasters, artists, scientists, civil servants and doctors do, almost to a man and woman.
In fact there are no fewer than twenty-three people who deserve the credit for inventing some version of the incandescent bulb before Edison,
Just as the light bulb was ‘ripe’ for discovery in 1870, so the search engine was ‘ripe’ for discovery in 1990. By the time Google came along in 1996, there were already lots of search engines: Archie, Veronica, Excite, Infoseek, Altavista, Galaxy, Webcrawler, Yahoo, Lycos, Looksmart … to name just the most prominent. Perhaps none was at the time as good as Google, but they would have got better.
we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, four of decimal fractions, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, three of logarithms, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. This is either redundancy on a grand scale, or a mighty coincidence.
The first is the equivalent of what biologists call convergent evolution – the appearance of the same solution to a particular problem in widely different places. Thus ancient Egyptians and ancient Australians both invented curved boomerangs without conferring.
It was not possible to imagine, let alone build, the computer of 2015 in 2005, let alone in 1965 – the intermediate steps were crucial.
To put it another way, the amount of computing power that you can buy for £100 has doubled every two years for a century.
‘ideas having sex’ explains why innovation has tended to happen in open societies indulging in enthusiastic free trade.
Just as a human body is the expression of information written in its DNA, and the fact that it is non-randomly arranged is an expression of ‘information’ – the opposite of entropy
Technology is in that sense a continuation of biological evolution – an imposition of informational order on a random world.
Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects.
it looks as if it may do the same for shale gas, thanks largely to the unpleasant sound of the word ‘fracking’.
Rather facile argument overlooking seismic and water table side effects
And if there is no stopping technology, perhaps there is no steering it either.
Edwin Mansfield of the University of Pennsylvania studied the development of forty-eight chemical, pharmaceutical, electronic and machine goods in New England in the 1970s, and found that on average it cost 65 per cent as much money, and 70 per cent as much time, to copy as to invent the products.
that science drives innovation, which drives commerce – is mostly wrong. It misunderstands where innovation comes from. Indeed, it generally gets it backwards.
‘a great part of the machines made use in manufactures … were originally the inventions of common workmen’, and many improvements had been made ‘by the ingenuity of the makers of the machines’.
In 2003, the OECD published a paper on ‘sources of growth in OECD countries’ between 1971 and 1998, finding to its explicit surprise that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None.
Innovation, then, is an emergent phenomenon. The policies that have been tried to get it going – patents, prizes, government funding of science – may sometimes help, but are generally splendidly unpredictable.
Not only did Spinoza see the mind as a product of the emotions and urges of the body, he pointed out that even those of us motivated by impulse think we act freely:
Gazzaniga gives a simple demonstration of why consciousness is a post-hoc story. Touch your finger to your nose and you will experience the sensation of touch simultaneously on the nose and the finger. Yet the neural perceptions must have arrived at the brain at different times: as the neuronal impulse propagates, the fingers are three feet away, the nose just three inches away from the brain. The brain waits for both signals to arrive and integrates them into a single experience before delivering them into consciousness.
his ‘astonishing hypothesis’, namely that ‘A person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behaviour of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.’
free will is an illusion because ‘thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control’.
the problem was that the new dogma substituted environmental determinism for genetic, and in doing so licensed just as much abuse of human rights.
Geneticists were beginning to notice that twins raised apart often had very similar intelligence and personality, while adopted children raised together were often very different.
Children’s personalities did tend to resemble those of their parents, but that could be because they shared their parents’ genes. That possibility had not been ruled out in all the experiments, merely assumed
Harris recounted a joke to make the point about confusing cause and effect in nature–nurture debates: ‘Johnny comes from a broken home.’ ‘I am not surprised – Johnny could break any home.’
Socialisation means learning how to fit in with other people of your own age. Children acquire their habits, their accents, their favoured language, and most of their culture from their peers.
And then in their teens they begin to assess their relative status within their peer group. In the case of men, this mostly means working out how tall, strong and domineering you are, and adjusting your ambitions and personality accordingly.
Women tend to decide their status based largely on relative attractiveness, and they judge their attractiveness based on how others seem to judge them.
As Harris says, the status system is ‘capable of producing personality differences that are unrelated to differences in genes’.
Because people wanted there to be something they could do about our actions and tendencies, they argued that there must be an agent to blame.
The trend towards medicalising the things that get in the way of learning – dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder and the like – is in effect an admission that things can be innate, genetic and organic, without being irreversible.
The longer you live, the more you express your own nature.
It is a meritocratic result, and presents us with a world in which people are resistant to being brainwashed because they are in charge of their own destinies.
economist Gregory Clark that elites regress inexorably to the mean over time. Despite sending their children to elite pre-schools, the richest of the rich in a city like New York can do little to make up for their children’s genetic mediocrity;
Gay people, and clever people and moody and cheerful people, could stop being told they were that way because of what had been done to them, and could relax in the knowledge that it was something that had emerged from inside them.
And then especially, we must nose into with sharp wits, What makes up the soul and what the nature of it is. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura,
Between 1818 and 1858 enrolment in private schools in England quadrupled. Education was already close to universal in Britain in 1870, though school years were short and provision was patchy by today’s standards. But that’s key – we cannot judge yesterday by today’s standards.
We so often fall into the trap of doing just this.
Private schools disproportionately supply the best candidates for Oxford and Cambridge, a state of affairs that either indicates that the rich are innately cleverer than the poor, which seems generally unlikely, or that private schools are providing a better education, which is a shocking indictment of the quality of state education.
In a free system the parent, the consumer, is the boss. Tooley found that private-school proprietors constantly monitor their teachers and follow up parents’ complaints.
Just as you do not have to listen to the local singer, but can hear Placido Domingo, so you do not have to be taught by the local teacher in the modern world. You can seek out the very best.
Children could learn to use computers without adult instruction. Crucially, they were not learning by themselves, but teaching each other: it was a collective, emergent phenomenon.
led to the concept of the ‘self-organised learning environment’, or SOLE. Mitra insists that three, four or five children share each computer, then poses them questions and leaves them to find out the answers.
Rarely, if ever, has the purpose of state education been to add to scholarship and generate knowledge. The purpose instead is to train an obedient citizenry, loyal to the nation, likely to deliver economic growth and brainwashed with the latest fashion in ideology.
It has been an assumption right across the political spectrum that better schools, better universities, better vocational education and better training will deliver a more prosperous society.
The countries with the most education simply do not show greater productivity growth than the ones with less.
Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change, teachers are encouraged to teach to the exam rather than to the pupils’ or their own strengths, the textbooks are infused with instructions about what to think instead of how to think, teaching methods are more about instructing than learning, the possibilities of self-organised learning are neglected, government domination of schooling is accepted without question, and education spending is justified in terms of what it supposedly does for the country rather than the individual.
In all cases, cruelty as policy, based on faulty logic, sprang from a belief that those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak. Urgent ends justified horrible means.
Particulate inheritance and recessive genes made the idea of preventing the deterioration of the human race by selective breeding greatly more difficult and impractical. How were those in charge of breeding the human race supposed to spot the heterozygotes who carried but did not express some essence of imbecility or unfitness?
