quinta-feira, 31 de março de 2016

A herança da probreza

O capitalismo não criou a pobreza: ele a herdou

O século XIX, muitas pessoas acreditam, foi uma era na história americana em que os trabalhadores eram forçados a trabalhar pesado em “fábricas de suor”, 28 horas por dia, recebendo salários de fome. Foi somente quando os governos interviram – de forma direta, em nome dos trabalhadores, ou indiretamente, pelo fortalecimento dos sindicatos – que as condições melhoraram.
Os fatos contam uma história diferente, que revela o poder incomparável do capitalismo para melhorar a vida humana.
Lembre-se do contexto histórico. Como Ayn Rand observou, “o capitalismo não criou a pobreza: ele a herdou”. Por grande parte da história humana, a vasta maioria da população estava mergulhada na pobreza. Com muita frequência, o cidadão médio vivia em condição inimaginavelmente miserável. Foi somente no século XIX, no Ocidente, que as massas começaram a desfrutar de prosperidade.

Mobilidade social e desigualdade

MOBILIDADE SOCIAL#

Mede quanto a renda dos filhos é impactada pela renda dos pais

DESIGUALDADE#

Mede quanto a renda é concentrada. Quanto mais alto o valor, maior a desigualdade. Veja comparação entre 20 países analisados no estudo:

MOBILIDADE X DESIGUALDADE#

A tendência é que em países muito desiguais, como o Brasil, haja também pouca mobilidade. Ou seja, se a diferença entre ricos e pobres é alta, a chance de se mudar de classe social é baixa.
Mobilidade social
MENOR
MOBILIDADE
0,8
Tendência
0,7
Peru
China
0,6
Brasil
Chile
Grã-Bretanha
Itália
0,5
Argentina
EUA
Paquistão
Suíça
França
Espanha
0,4
Japão
Alemanha
0,3
Suécia
Austrália
0,2
Finlândia
Canadá
Noruega
Dinamarca
MAIS DESIGUALDADE
0,1
0,2
0,3
0,4
0,5
0,6
Desigualdade

POR QUE ISSO OCORRE#

 Mais

Prisão sem clientes

quarta-feira, 30 de março de 2016

Ensino clássico


Mitologia da medicina

Snowball in a Blizzard: A Physician's Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine 1st Edition


There’s a running joke among radiologists: finding a tumor in a mammogram is akin to finding a snowball in a blizzard. A bit of medical gallows humor, this simile illustrates the difficulties of finding signals (the snowball) against a background of noise (the blizzard). Doctors are faced with similar difficulties every day when sifting through piles of data from blood tests to X-rays to endless lists of patient symptoms.

Diagnoses are often just educated guesses, and prognoses less certain still. There is a significant amount of uncertainty in the daily practice of medicine, resulting in confusion and potentially deadly complications. Dr. Steven Hatch argues that instead of ignoring this uncertainty, we should embrace it. By digging deeply into a number of rancorous controversies, from breast cancer screening to blood pressure management, Hatch shows us how medicine can fail—sometimes spectacularly—when patients and doctors alike place too much faith in modern medical technology. The key to good health might lie in the ability to recognize the hype created by so many medical reports, sense when to push a physician for more testing, or resist a physician’s enthusiasm when unnecessary tests or treatments are being offered.

Both humbling and empowering, Snowball in a Blizzard lays bare the inescapable murkiness that permeates the theory and practice of modern medicine. Essential reading for physicians and patients alike, this book shows how, by recognizing rather than denying that uncertainty, we can all make better health decisions.
Mais

Educação dual

It's in relation to this answer found in another question: Ricardo Pereira's answer to What are some remarkable facts about Switzerland?
Could someone expand on this? What's the education system like? Is there any balance disturbance between technical and professional work?

Reto Fuchs
Reto FuchsBorn and raised in Switzerland
500 Views • Upvoted by Camille Fankhauser27 year-old Swiss citizen, born and raised in Switzerland.

The Swiss education system is very different from most other countries (similar systems are in place in Germany and Austria). As you would expect, there is pre-school/kindergarten, primary (6 years) and lower secondary (3 years); this is the mandatory part. Afterwards, there are basically two options:
(1) you go to a 3-4 year apprenticeship - Switzerland has the the highest percentage of people in apprenticeships; about 70% of Swiss teenagers are trained and educated in this model. The apprenticeship includes a significant amount of formal education; an apprentice spends about half his time at the company he works for and half at school. Apprentices get paid a monthly salary of about CHF 800 - 1000. This is often referred to as the 'dual education system', see also 
Dual Education: Europe's Secret Recipe?
 . The apprenticeship is the one piece in the education system which is most often misunderstood and underestimated. It offers a lot of advantages as compared to a purely academic education:
- applicable know-how through on the job training
- strong work ethic
- real life problem solving skill
- much lower youth unemployment rate in Switzerland compared to other countries
Many of the apprenticeship-qualified professionals will later attend a university of applied sciences or another type of higher vocational education.
(2) you go to a 'Matura' school. Matura is a Latin term for the high-school exit exam ('maturity diploma') which is the entry ticket for universities.
The major difference is really on the upper secondary level where it's basically either Matura school or apprenticeship, as well as on the tertiary level (ranging from no tertiary education at all  to Ph.D.).
So, to answer your title question, we would need to answer another question: in the Swiss system, what is really the equivalent to 'college education'? As stated above, about 70% of young people go on an apprenticeship. The rest pursues a purely academic education path - which is probably where the number of 20-25% of college education is coming from.

domingo, 27 de março de 2016

As origins do fascismo

Precursors and Origins of Italian Fascism


D’Amato traces the ideological and historical roots of Italian fascism.
Much of the meaning contained in the word fascism has been lost in its constant and lazy employment as a general term of abuse. Charges of fascism are shrieked quite without thought to the word’s history or to the record of the actual political and economic system it denotes. This is regrettable, because fascism and its legacy are still very much alive and well—not only as a blanket epithet, but as an operable ideology and philosophy. To achieve a thorough understanding of fascism, it is necessary to embark on an examination of the first and truest fascism, the Italian fascism of Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party. Indeed, a substantial body of the scholarship on fascism argues compellingly that only Italian fascism is entitled to be designated “fascism.” Whenever we contemplate fascism, then, we should account for the fascist project as it emerged and expressed itself in Italy, in the first half of the twentieth century. Even as it offered a critique of existing socialism, it is important to recall that Italian fascism was distinctly and self-consciously socialist, its policy content and character as a movement emerging from the constellation of socialist organizations active in Italy in the early twentieth century. It is simply impossible to understand the advent of fascism without first undertaking a thorough examination of the context provided by the tenor of the Italian radical left in the years before it. There is, therefore, a remarkable irony in the fact that the word fascism is now almost universally associated with the political right. Perhaps this association shows, if anything at all, the glaring inadequacy of the common left-right political spectrum, which reveals itself again and again as unable to meaningfully address the subtleties of political ideology and philosophy.1
The story of Mussolini’s socialist pedigree begins with his father, a blacksmith by trade and a committed socialist and atheist who had been influenced by the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin. Mussolini was thus reared on socialism and became active in radical politics early in his life, honing his ideas and becoming a formidable intellectual.

sábado, 26 de março de 2016

Mitologia do terrorismo


Os 50 piores livros de século 21

The Fifty Worst Books
03/25/10
A particular sort of list is now sweeping through the blogosphere: “ten books that have influenced your view of the world.”Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution seems to have started things off; many others have followed, as Ross Douthat of theNew York Times points out. The lists make for fun and fascinating reading, reflecting an eclectic range of influences.
But these lists, as Douthat writes, are not of “best” books. Can such a catalog be created? ISI asked this very question when it set out to assess the fifty best—and fifty worst—books of the twentieth century. First Principles is happy to present the results, which were originally published in the Fall 2009 issue of The Intercollegiate Review.
First let’s tackle the worst. Coming next week: the best.
The Fifty WORST Books of the Century
Margaret Mead
1. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
So amusing did the natives find the white woman’s prurient questions that they told her the wildest tales—and she believed them! Mead misled a generation into believing that the fantasies of sexual progressives were an historical reality on an island far, far away.
2. Beatrice & Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935)
An idea whose time has come . . . and gone, thank God.
3. Alfred Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
So mesmerized were Americans by the authority of Science, with a capital S, that it took forty years for anyone to wonder how data is gathered on the sexual responses of children as young as five. A pervert’s attempt to demonstrate that perversion is “statistically” normal.
4. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Dumbed-down Heidegger and a seeming praise of kinkiness became the Bible of the sixties and early postmodernism.
5. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)
Dewey convinced a generation of intellectuals that education isn’t about anything; it’s just a method, a process for producing democrats and scientists who would lead us into a future that “works.” Democracy and Science (both pure means) were thereby transformed into the moral ends of our century, and America’s well-meaning but corrupting educationist establishment was born.
. . . and the rest of the worst
Theodor W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
Don’t want to be bothered to engage the arguments of your conservative political opponents? Just demonstrate “scientifically” that all their political beliefs are the result of a psychological disorder.
Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1935)
Beard reduces support for the U.S. Constitution to a conspiracy among the Founding Fathers to protect their economic interests. Forrest McDonald’s We the People provides the corrective.
Martin Bernal, Black Athena (1987)
All of Western philosophical and scientific thought was stolen from Africa and a conspiracy ensued to conceal the theft for more than three millennia. Provocative, but where’s the evidence?
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Our Selves (1976)
Or, Our Bodies, Our Liberal Selves. A textbook example of the modern impulse to elevate the body and its urges, libidinal and otherwise, above soul and spirit.
Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm (1979)
Chomsky’s anti-anti-communism was so intense that he was driven to deny the genocide perpetrated by Cambodian communists—stipulating, of course, that even if the charges against the Khmer Rouge were true, massacres were at least understandable, perhaps even justified.
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968)
A rapist and murderer whose denunciation of The Man brought him the admiration of guilt-stricken white liberals.
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968)
What this scientist proclaimed as an inevitable “fact”—that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in the 1970s—turned out entirely “evitable.”
Harvey Cox, The Secular City (1965)
Celebrated the liberation that accompanied modern urban life at the precise moment when such liberation came to mean the freedom to be mugged, raped, and murdered. Argued that “death of god” theology was the inevitable and permanent future for modern man just before the contemporary boom in “spirituality.”
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1919)
A pernicious book that celebrates the growth of the welfare state and champions the unlikely prospect of “achieving Jeffersonian ends through Hamiltonian means.”
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1936)
Everything you always wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask—and rightly so. The first influential book to take a wholly clinical view of human sexuality divorced from values, morals, and emotions.
Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (1989)
Fish likes to ask his predecessors and critics, “How stupid can you be?” Well . . .
The Affluent Society
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)
Made Americans dissatisfied with the ineradicable fact of poverty. Led to foolish public policies that produced the hell that was the 1960s.
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966–69)
Writing glib, cliché-ridden verbiage about the virtues of irreligion, Gay matches the sophistry of the dimmest lumières.
Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (1976)
The self-absorbed, unrepentant, and generously fabricated memoir of an American Stalinist.
Alger Hiss, Recollections of a Life (1988)
Hiss draws attention to his essential mediocrity in this sad tale of a life led largely to conceal a lie, a lie in which thousands felt compelled to participate.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
Huxley paved the way to the ruin of countless lives by writing up his experience with mescaline as a sort of primordial homecoming and lending his all-too considerable prestige to the claimed benefits of hallucinogenic drugs.
Philip Johnson & Henry Russell Hitchcock, The International Style (1966)
Build ugly buildings, wear funny glasses, make lots of money, and justify it all by writing a book.
John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1956)
Should have been called, Profiles in Ghost-Writing.
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)
This book did for Big Government what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did for the tse-tse fly.
Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Leary always said it was a mistake to take things too seriously. This book proves he was right at least once in his life.
Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (1968)
Fact or fiction? Not even Mailer knew for sure.
Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words (1993)
“Sticks and stones can break my bones but names will never hurt me.” Not according to Catharine MacKinnon. This book provides the foundation for some of the most ridiculous developments in recent American law.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979)
Bored with the real Gospels and real Christianity, professors of religion were thrilled to find out how important—not to mention feminist and pre-Socratic—these fragments were.
Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (1907)
This favorite of East Coast busybodies gave crucial middlebrow intellectual support to the proposition of an income tax. Called for a general willingness among Americans “to bestow without conditions and to be taxed for public and far-reaching ends.” Thanks a lot, Simon Patten.
The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times, Based on Investigative Reporting by Neil Sheehan (1971)
Publicizing the blunderings of “the Best and the Brightest” did nothing but undermine the new president’s—Nixon’s—statesmanlike efforts to salvage the mess in Vietnam bequeathed to him by JFK and LBJ.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1950)
Popper “shows” that he is smarter and more open-minded than Plato or Hegel. That kind of thinking is one of the main obstacles to open-mindedness in our time.
Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)
“[The Church] should therefore strengthen the existing communistic institutions and aid the evolution of society from the present temporary stage of individualism to a higher form of communism.” Eek!
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
The hollow soul of liberalism elaborated with a technical apparatus that would have made a medieval Schoolman blush.
Ten Days That Shook the World
John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)
—and after that, Reed went home and the Bolsheviks struck the set.
Charles Reich, The Greening of America (1970)
Out of blue jeans, marijuana, free love, and the monumental egoism of a generation that refused to grow up, a Yale Law School professor concocted an adolescent fantasy: Consciousness III. Groovy, man.
Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1942)
The notion that sitting in one of Reich’s orgone boxes would lead both to a happy individual and to a healthy and free society was only one indication of Reich’s absurdity. If only the real thing had worked as well as Woody Allen’s orgasmatron.
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961)
Rogers disconnected human feelings from nature, disconnected the human and the spiritual from both real religion and the rigor of science, and ruined countless Roman Catholic religious orders in the process. Made B. F. Skinner look good.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)
The best, and therefore worst, exposition of American philosophical pragmatism. Had devastating effects on the study not only of philosophy but also of literature.
Jerry Rubin, Do It! (1970)
The Bible of the lazy and the crazy.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (1936)
Known to be harmful to your spiritual health.
Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920)
This founder of Planned Parenthood published Adolf Hitler’s eugenics guru in her magazine in the early 1930s. That Women and the New Race sprang from Sanger is no surprise.
Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (1982)
Amidst much amateur philosophical rumination, Schell proposed a syllogism: Nuclear war necessarily means the extinction of the human race. No human value (such as political liberty) can justify such an act. Therefore, unilateral disarmament is morally mandatory. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan’s vigorous confrontation with the Soviets ended the Cold War and saved us from the fear of Armageddon.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945)
Whig History sees past ages striving bravely to become . . . us. In Schlesinger’s Boddhisatva history, every age has a liberal Enlightened One who comes to battle the conservatives.
B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)
Swallowing whole the superstitions of modern scientism, this psychologist was convinced that the human psyche was nothing but a superstition.
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966)
Don’t think. Just feel.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1964)
The book that ruined social history. In over 800 pages, Thompson recasts the story of English working folk into a simplistic Marxist romance. This would become the cookie cutter for a generation’s worth of bland dissertations and predictable monographs.
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952)
Believing in modern meaninglessness more than in “the God of theism,” this theologian preached Courage (self-assertion “in spite of”) rather than Faith. But would the Romans have even bothered to throw him to the lions?
H. G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy (1928)
Wells emerges as the comically earnest would-be John the Baptist for a new religion of temporal salvation to be ushered in by a vanguard embracing “the supreme duty of subordinating the personal life to the creation of a world directorate.” Oh, my.
Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (1913)
According to H. L. Mencken, a book for “the tender-minded in general.” He staggered to behold “the whole Wilsonian buncombe . . . its ideational hollowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy dependence on greasy and meaningless words, its frequent descents into mere sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Malcolm X (with the assistance of Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
“By any means necessary”? No, violence was not, and is not, the answer.