Monday, November 04, 2013

Links, Novemer 4th

Lant Pritchett's new book on education The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning. From the blurb "Despite great progress around the world in getting more kids into schools, too many leave without even the most basic skills. In India's rural Andhra Pradesh, for instance, only about one in twenty children in fifth grade can perform basic arithmetic.
The problem is that schooling is not the same as learning. InThe Rebirth of Education, Lant Pritchett uses two metaphors from nature to explain why. The first draws on Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom's book about the difference between centralized and decentralized organizations, The Starfish and the Spider. Schools systems tend be centralized and suffer from the limitations inherent in top-down designs. The second metaphor is the concept of isomorphic mimicry. Pritchett argues that many developing countries superficially imitate systems that were successful in other nations — much as a nonpoisonous snake mimics the look of a poisonous one."
Dan Little reviews Veblen The Theory of Business Enterprise. One quote from Veblen "Broadly, this class of business men, in so far as they have no ulterior strategic ends to serve, have an interest in making the disturbances of the system large and frequent, since it is in the conjunctures of change that their gain emerges."

Big finance is a problem, not an industry to be nurtured (If the link does not work google the title)

Reshma passed away and the song which first brought her public attention

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