No country likes to look poverty full in the face, but in America there is a special reluctance to do do. Since the Puritans, Americans have associated wealth with blessing and poverty with curse. According to capitalist ideology, poverty is less a social problem than a series of individual failures. A prosperous middle class showed, …
Any normal person or business gets a quotation, or estimate, for work needing to be done. There is a definite contract, however informal, between supplier and customer, often allowing some flexibility in the final price. But the customer knows roughly what he will have to pay. Governments, however, seem to sign open-ended contracts, so open-ended …
Continue reading ‘Whatever happened to fixed price contracts?’ »
Privatization has proved a boon to rich contractors who are also donors to right-wing political parties, both in the United States and Britain. As a result, a small group of contractors and privatised monopolies have profited at the expense of the taxpayer, and have regularly proved to be incompetent. Now we witness another scandal – …
Lord Stern, professor at the London School of Economics, warns that the world could be heading for a major economic crisis as stock markets inflate an investment bubble in fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars. The so-called “carbon bubble” is the result of an over-valuation of oil, coal and gas reserves held …
A quarter of people who join a gym put on weight after doing so, almost certainly because they reward themselves with sweet treats or extra large meals afterwards. A survey of 1,000 gym users found that only 25% had lost weight since joining; while 49% said their weight had stayed the same. Around 35% said …
Organisations in the United States such as the Club for Growth and Heritage Foundation are still peddling the idea that the way to get growth in the economy is to reduce taxes on the rich. The latter will, we are told, then invest. Excuse me, but we have now had tax reduction for the rich …
Pacific Academy in British Colombia, describes itself as “unabashedly Christian to the core” and gives enrolment priority to students whose families regularly attend a Pentecostal church or have experienced glossolalia, also known as speaking in tongues. Parents who want to enrol their children at Pacific Academy must sign a family statement agreeing with Scripture teachings …
Continue reading ‘Can Pentacostalist schools provide a modern education?’ »
War, he sung, is toil and trouble, Honour but an empty bubble, Never ending, still beginning, Fighting still, and still destroying; If the world be worth thy winning, Think, oh think it worth enjoying, Lovely Thais sits beside thee, Take the good the Gods provide thee. War he sung. . . da capo From Dryden’s …
Continue reading ‘An Epicurean contribution from Dryden and Handel’ »
Letter: “I am appalled that your style guide author David Marsh advocates dispensing with elements of grammar that have been sacrosanct among the educated classes for centuries. His disregard for rules on split infinitives, the subjunctive tense or ending a sentence with a preposition made my blood boil. Is the grammar of today’s schoolchildren, already …
An official smartphone app designed to help Azerbaijanis keep track of the presidential election in early October caused embarrassment to President Ilham Aliyev when it released voting figures giving details of his massive victory 24 hours before polling day. In the event, Aliyev extended his family’s decades-long grip on power by winning 84.6% of the …
Continue reading ‘Making elections shorter and more predictable’ »
To keep their mental faculties intact, older people should take up video gaming. Research in the US has shown that playing fast-paced multi-tasking games boosts the cognitive abilities of older adults – and the effect is long-lasting. For the study, volunteers aged between 60 and 80 were asked to play a car-racing game that involved …
Recently, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, professor Andrew Hamilton, said the he should be able to charge more for tuition and pointed out that it costs £16,000 a year to educate a student at the university. £16,000? That’s $24,000. If it costs the latter to educate a student at Oxford, which still provides small group …
Continue reading ‘Why is higher education so ridiculously expensive?’ »
In England 70% of health spending goes on the 15 million people who suffer from one or more long-term conditions. The twin challenges of people living longer and with unhealthier lifestyles, such as smoking, alcohol and obesity, mean that this number is set to increase dramatically. Since few of these people will ever get better, …
Continue reading ‘Bringing personal care into modern medicine’ »
The US educational system assumes that most children come from middle class families, where the parents are literate, read to their children, give ample support and believe in education. But poor children start nursery school with vocabularies half as large as more privileged children, so all the testing in the world will not make the …
London has become a city state, divorced in many ways from the rest of the country. In the New York Times Sunday Review of October 13th Michael Goldfarb says that property in a London has become a “global reserve currency”. Well put! Every year, regardless of the world economy, property prices in Central London have …
