The Greatest Compression (Video 5 minutes) The Greatest Compression Economists occasionally use the phrase, “The Great Compression” to describe the leveling of income inequality during the period 1914-1950. That covers the World Wars, the great depression of the 1930s, and the effects of Communist revolutions. A historian that summarizes this in remarkable detail is Walter […]
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, by Walter Scheidel In this book, Walter Scheidel displays an overwhelming grasp of history, his field of study. His conclusion is that wealth, income, and status inequalities have always been with us, and they won’t go away because […]
Learning Groups Teleconference Series Beginning Monday, Nov. 19, 2018 8 pm Eastern Standard Time; dial 203-408-3665; that’s it! We are starting a teleconference series. The first one will be Monday, November 19, 2018, starting at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time, lasting one hour. To join all you have to do is dial 203-408-3665 at that hour. […]
Untold Stories of Diapers (Video 8 minutes) Disposable Diapers Deep in Doo-Doo Disposable diapers are one of the hardest items to recycle. Almost all go to landfill. How did we wind up in this mess? How It Began In the summer of 1961, I was a young junior engineer for Union Carbide Polymers Division. Proctor […]
Schools Done the W. Edwards Deming Way? After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, by Andrea Gabor Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at the Baruch School, CUNY. Having published in The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Business Week, and The New York Times, she is well grounded […]
Or What’s Objectivity in Journalism, Science, and Life? The ending of Propaganda Blitz, reviewed previously, digs deep into objectivity in journalism. What is it? To answer this question, the authors, David Edwards and David Cromwell, cite ancient philosophers, mainly Oriental ones. They conclude that commercially funded journalism is trapped in the box of business rationality. […]
Tribe of the Whole (7 minute video) Or, Toward a Better Learning Civilization Imagine transforming into something very different, like a werewolf. That we can imagine. Now, imagine living very differently in a completely changed world. That’s more complex. Every detail of life changes. We can only imagine them from analogies to our past. The […]
Fuzz: Implying by Not Talking Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality, by David Edwards and David Cromwell Neither Edwards nor Cromwell are practicing journalists. One was a teacher, the other a scientist. Perhaps that qualifies them to be objective media critics. That’s what they do through a British website called Media Lens that I’d […]
Keeping Up Appearances Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giriharadas This new book is stirring a mini-storm in the world of non-profits, provoked by a guy who has inhabited the institutions he criticizes, Anand Giriharadas. He refers to business thinking as a pattern of logic of business he calls […]
Predicament of Mankind (Video 7 minutes) The Predicament of Mankind: Searching for Causality by Doc Hall Many more issues threaten the environment than climate change, although that one exacerbates all others, and it dominates environmental reporting. The enormity of the social upheaval to mitigate these threats boggles the mind, and imagining Armageddon is depressing. Most […]
Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization by Paul Raskin Paul Raskin is the founding president of the Tellus Institute, a Boston “think tank” that began an initiative called The Great Transition in 2002. That initiative is a vision of how an ecologically threatened world could transition to a sustainable economy. This book […]
No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies, by William T. Vollmann William T. Vollmann (Bill) is a prize-winning professional writer, noted for being adventurous researching his books. For his first, he embedded with the Mujadin fighting the Soviets invading Afghanistan. He follows a story wherever curiosity takes him. This book is no different. It […]
