Neolithic Boyz

There are lots of reasons why I’m not making a living blogging, and one of them is that I often insist on, and even enjoy, setting the expectations of my readers in brutally honest fashion. Therefore:

  1. This post is a lengthy (3,000 words; reading time 8-15 minutes, not including the links) review of three books.
  2. Two of them are obviously related and are the sort of thing that most ChicagoBoyz readers greatly enjoy, judging by what gets blogged and commented on here.
  3. The third book, however, may appear to have been dragged in from a not-so-parallel universe by The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
  4. Anyone who finds another instance of these three being reviewed together gets the usual payment I offer for meeting a challenge (barbecue of your choice).
  5. If this entire post turns out to be value-added to a majority of its readership, I will have a miracle to my credit. Blessed Saint Leibowitz, pray for us.
  6. Just to discourage you further — as I have remarked elsewhere, when reviewing books, I pretty obviously don’t know what I’m doing, and as one authorial subject of an earlier effort remarked, my suggestions are of, shall we say, limited value in a market lacking a large segment of people with a mindset closely resembling mine.
  7. (Parlor game: if everyone shared your tastes, which sectors of the economy would collapse, and which would boom? Discuss.)

Well, then, to business: the first two books are Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn and Lee Silver’s Challenging Nature. The third is a surprise (OK, so I do occasionally pull a punch). Read on, if you dare …

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The AP: Unbelievable

Here’s a well written fisking of Associated Press CEO Tom Curley’s dishonest apologia for both the AP itself and for the AP’s notorious terrorist-photographer Bilal Hussein, who is in US custody after being caught with a bunch of terrorists and acting like a terrorist.

My first thought when I read this kind of thing is: How stupid do MSM executives think the rest of us are? But of course it’s beyond that point now. The fact that a lot of us have come to assume that MSM reports on partisan topics should be considered bogus until proven otherwise is no longer news. It’s a shame that it’s come to that. Or maybe the shameful thing is how long many of us believed that journalism had been transformed by degreed experts into a prestige profession — one far removed from the antics of The Front Page. But J-schools don’t change human nature, and incentives to cut corners and misuse positions of trust for personal and political gain will always be with us. At least now we have the Internet to help expose some of the worst abuses and provide alternative sources of information.

Heading for Calais: A Chicagoboy sets off via the Northwest Passage to give Jacques and Dominique a piece of his mind.

(Want to join him? Maybe these people can help.)

UPDATE: Wise guys. I’ll give you a sea monster.

UPDATE 2: It’s an Al-berg!

Education Arbitrage

I think this is the coolest thing I’ve seen to hit the slow as morass world of education. Jonathan coined the phrase in response: “education arbitrage.” What a fantastic idea.

BOSTON (Reuters) – Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour — in India.

“It’s made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before,” said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.

Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 “e-tutors” mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.

Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English — a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.

“I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks’ coffee,” Robison said. “We did our own form of summer school all summer.”

Jonathan and Lex said it better than I can:

Jonathan: Agreed. The real story is that it potentially undercuts the entire
govt-schools system. If you have kids going from failure to excellent
performance based on a couple of hours’ tutoring per day, how much better
would they perform if they spent four or six hours every day with their
online tutors and blew off their schools entirely? That’s what parents will
be thinking. The teachers’ unions are going to try to make this kind of
tutoring illegal or so larded up with mandated bulls*** that it won’t be
effective. I don’t think the unions can succeed, however.

Yippee. Education arbitrage.

Lex: EDUCATION ARBITRAGE!

Those bast***s in the real, existing, Brezhnevite system we have here are going to EAT DEATH at long last.

This is the beginning of the market wedge that will split the whole rotten system apart.

I hope I hope I hope.

I hope that’s the reception TutorVista continues to get as it catches. Check out their website here. Outsourcing hits education, disintermediation with a vengence…

Nisbett – Geography of Thought

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Nisbett, Richard E., The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … And Why, Free Press, 2003, 263 pp.

Previous posts for this blog has drawn on history, political science, technology trends, and a bit of economics. Only occasionally does an Anglosphere discussion turn to the biological or social sciences.

Some time ago, I put forward a proposal that the central unique attribute of the Anglosphere (its “secret weapon”) was its (inadvertent) ideal social structure for optimizing communal decision-making – the so-called “wisdom of crowds” effect. This proposed advantage is a matter of degree, drawing as it does on a universal capacity of humans in groups. Differences, however, even small ones, can have a big impact.
In the course of preparing materials for a website on medical decision-making for patients, I stumbled on a book with additional significance for the debate about the underlying nature of the Anglosphere. This book takes the biggest of “big picture” overviews of human cognition and perception.

Geography of Thought, by eminent U Mich social psychologist Richard Nisbett is a plain-language summary of years of social psychology research that suggest there are profound and substantial differences between the way Asian and Western cultures (and individuals) perceive the world.

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