Reviews and News:
Jeremy Carl reviews Jeffrey Sachs’s new book on sustainable development: “As likely to be seen with Bono in Africa as in a college classroom, Jeffrey Sachs achieved tenure in Harvard’s economics department at 28 before founding the Earth Institute at Columbia University. In the late 1980s and early ’90s he advised, with a decidedly mixed record, nations making the transition away from Communist central planning. Today Sachs directs the Millennium Villages Project, an experiment in “sustainable development” that provides massive doses of targeted aid to poor villages. Its many setbacks were the subject of journalist Nina Munk’s The Idealist (2013), which portrays Sachs as hubristic and closed-minded, refusing to learn from others or his own mistakes. In The Age of Sustainable Development, Sachs seeks to combine his earlier interests in development economics with his more recent environmentalism. The goal is an intellectually rigorous concept of ‘sustainable development.’ Unfortunately, his effort reveals more than the author intends: sustainable development as defined by Sachs is an amalgam of academically fashionable but empirically unsupported notions and preferences.”
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Israel’s forgotten founding novelist: “It has been half a century since Shmuel Yosef Agnon won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet he is one of those laureates for whom the prize has not translated into universal fame. Like Claude Simon (France) or Camilo José Cela (Spain), Agnon remains largely the possession of his original audience. In his case, however, defining that original audience is a difficult matter. Agnon wrote in Hebrew—he is the only Hebrew writer to win the Nobel—and he lived in Israel, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, where his house now stands as a museum. But although Israeli readers can read Agnon in the original, today even they may have a hard time with his books. According to Jeffrey Saks—a rabbi and the editor of a new series of editions of Agnon’s work in English, published by Toby Press—this is because Agnon assumed that Hebrew speakers would always be familiar with Judaism: its ‘rituals, phrases [and] concepts,’ as well as with the many strata of the three-thousand-year-old Hebrew literary tradition. But, Saks observes, ‘this may no longer be the case,’ with the result that ‘Agnon and the other Hebrew classics get whittled away each year from school curricula and chain-store bookshelves.'”
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Bruce Fleming reviews Stanley Fish’s new book, Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn’t Work in Politics, The Bedroom, The Courtroom, and The Classroom: “Be warned: there is nothing in this book that tells the reader how to win arguments. Or even that can tell you which arguments will win. Instead, it’s a light version of the younger academic Fish, whose point then was that people will never agree about the book they have read, and who now wants us to see that we will never win the arguments we want so dearly to win.”
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What Korea can teach us about manufacturing: “Our newly minted president-elect has promised us that he will undertake major policy changes in these two areas and it behooves us to take a hard look at both. Mr. Trump has promised to revive classic manufacturing prosperity with a revolutionary boom in the classic manufacturing jobs that it used to require. At the same time he also has urged all of our foreign ally-client-competitor states to stop being freeloaders of our military and economic subsidies and to start paying their fair share of world security costs…Frank Ahrens’ experiences raise the question whether either of these Trumpian policy planks is achievable or should be.”
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Remembering the milkman: “For our generation milkmen are an exercise in nostalgia. It seems incredible that a novelty song about one could reach the top of the charts, but then it seems incredible that the job existed in the first place. In the late 1960s there were 40,000 milkmen in this country: the figure now is a tenth of that. Before the milkie disappears completely, Andrew Ward — who rattled the pints himself — has documented the once-familiar creature and his world.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Public Discourse, Gerard V. Bradley argues that the Common Core has been a disaster:
“Pyrotechnics about unsecured e-mails, groping, pay-to-play, and multiple personality disorders suffocated what was—early in the 2016 election cycle—an essential discussion about the most far-reaching reform of K-12 schooling in our country’s history. ‘Common Core’ is the latest, and by far the most comprehensive, plan for national educational standards. Developed by a select group of consultants and bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, Common Core was aggressively promoted by the Obama administration beginning in 2010. Within eighteen months, forty-six states adopted it, 90 percent of them egged on by a chance to snag federal dollars in the form of ‘Race to the Top’ funds.
“President-elect Donald Trump regularly denounced Common Core on the primary campaign trail, beginning with his speech to CPAC in 2015. This also gave him an opportunity to browbeat Jeb Bush, a fervent early supporter of this educational overhaul. Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Common Core was limited to lamenting its ‘poor implementation’; about the revision’s basic soundness and desirability, she expressed no doubt. Had she prevailed last Tuesday, Common Core would have been safe in the hands of Clinton constituencies who brought it to life, especially the public education establishment and the business oligarchs who want shovel-ready workers. The grassroots rebellion against Common Core (which ‘paused’ its implementation in 2013 or triggered reassessment of it in a few states) would have been squeezed from the top down. Those rebels must refocus President Trump’s attention upon Common Core and persuade him to ignite a national movement to roll it back.
“The stated objective of Common Core is to produce ‘college- and career-ready’ high school graduates. Yet even its proponents concede that it only prepares students for community-college level work. In truth, Common Core is a dramatic reduction of the nature and purpose of education to mere workforce preparation.”
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Image of the Day: Supermoon around the world
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Poem: Carolyn Oliver, “Iphigenia Leaving Tauris”
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