1006G[REBORN FROM THE ASHES组]备考日记 by 正常点——任何的失败都有太多的必然

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

嗯，今天的文章基本没看懂，爱默生比王国维是强多了，说了这么多就是强调人要自我创造，都是他看了几遍不错的又非独创的诗的缘故，作孽啊！
好了，今天要刚刚回家，要休息去了，明天一早争取跑步去，然后回来争取看看单词，后面要时间要练练听力了，自勉一次，睡去了~~

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European holidays

This house believes that Europeans would be better off with fewer holidays and higher incomes

The moderator's(主持人，主席) opening remarks

Dec 22nd 2009 | John O'Sullivan

A few years ago, a group of academics gathered in Portovenere in Italy to discuss why Western Europe, though rich, was still far less prosperous than America. In 2000, the average income per head of the 15 rich countries in the European Union was around 70% of the level in America. That gap had scarcely changed in 30 years, even though productivity had increased much faster in Europe than in America. By the end of last century, Europe's workers could almost match America's in how much they produced in their factories or at their desks. The reason Europeans remained poorer is that they spent a lot less time at work than had a generation earlier. The economists gathered in Portovenere to ask why. The title of the conference was: "Are Europeans lazy? Or Americans crazy?"

This question lies at the heart of our present debate. There are many ways to account for the variations in hours worked between countries, including differences in the proportion of adults in work or in the length of the typical working week. The starkest（最严峻的） transatlantic（跨越大西洋的） divide（鸿沟） is in holiday time. In Europe six or seven weeks a year away from work is the norm, once public holidays are included. Americans, by contrast, are lucky if they can scrape four weeks vacation together.

So are Europeans poverty-stricken slackers or are they simply wise enough to enjoy the fruits of their labour as leisure time? Robert Gordon argues the former. It is all very well to have lots of holiday, he says, but leisure time is more enjoyable when you have money to throw around. His conjures up（联想到） a nightmarish vision of poor Europeans trudging wearily（跋涉） to cheap resorts that are overcrowded because everyone is forced to take the same five weeks off in August. Americans may be time-poor, he argues, but they can at least splash out on a nice vacation thanks to the extra hours of work they put in. He playfully implies that flush Americans would be wise to avoid a summer holiday in Europe, where everything is shut for weeks at a time.

His opponent, John de Graaf, thinks Europe makes the right choice by sacrificing income for leisure time. "Time affluence", he says, is more satisfying than "material affluence". He stresses the benefits of regular holidays in improved health, greater happiness and family togetherness. (By contrast Mr Gordon thinks long holidays only reveal "the tedium of European family life".) Americans are envious of the time off Europeans are allowed, says Mr de Graaf. They would be happier and more productive at work if they, too, had longer holidays.

The proposer's（提议人，申请人） opening remarks

Dec 22nd 2009 | Robert J. Gordon(Professor, Social Sciences, Northwestern University)

To engage in this debate in December 2009 requires that we play a fantasy game. Whether European vacations are too long is a side show to the main issue of digging the world out of its 2007-09 economic crisis. Right now, everyone everywhere is taking too much vacation, there is too much idleness, there are too many people whose most heartfelt wish is that they could replace their current idleness, their “long holiday”, with a steady full-time job.

We must debate as if we were in the summer of 2007, before the worldwide crisis started. Way back then, the unemployment rate was at the normal or "natural” level in both the United States and Europe, and we did not see millions forced into long involuntary holidays.

And for clarity we must ignore all the differences among European nations and pretend that there is a single composite（混合物） European nation made up of the countries in the pre-2004 EU-15.

To put the case in a nutshell（简而言之）, Europe makes itself poor by working many fewer hours per person than Americans. Low European work effort combines the impact of long vacations, high unemployment, low labour force participation and early retirement. Excessively long vacations are only the tip of the iceberg（冰山）. Even though Europeans are roughly 90% as productive as Americans, they devote so few hours to work that their income per head (i.e. their standard of living), is only about 68% of that in the United States. That 22 percentage point difference is by definition the result of lower hours per person in Europe compared with the United States. Short work hours per person provides the answer to the puzzle, "How could Europe be so productive but so poor?"

Long European holidays constitute just one of the five reasons why annual hours of work per person in Europe are so short. Those in Europe who have jobs not only work fewer weeks per year due to long vacation, but they work fewer hours per week when they are not on vacation. Forcing employees to work shorter hours as a way to create jobs is known as the "lump of labour fallacy" and dates back to Herbert Hoover. In France there are the "hours police" who snoop（窥探） on employees to make sure offices are empty at night.

The third reason is a high normal or natural rate of unemployment, as in the contrast between America's 4.5% and Europe's 7.5% in 2007. Fourth is a low level of labour force participation, especially among females in the Mediterranean countries (Greece, Italy, Spain). Fifth is early retirement, caused by a set of financial incentives embedded in state pension schemes that push Europeans into idleness and boredom at ages (57, 58) when most Americans are at their prime maximum earning ages. In fact the US retirement eligibility（资格） age for full Social Security benefits is gradually being raised from 65 to 67, reflecting increased life expectancy.

Because Europeans work shorter hours, they have only 70% of the real market income per person as Americans (adjusted for differences in prices across countries). As a result Europeans face their holidays from a position of poverty rather than abundance.

Those long European holidays are pitiful. They are inefficient, they hurt consumers and they reveal the tedium of European family life. And because Europeans are relatively poor, they cannot afford the frequent upscale vacations that many Americans take for granted.

Americans first learn about the lavish provision（奢华的规定） of European vacations when they read their guidebooks and find that one restaurant after another in Paris or Rome is "ferme en Aout". The big advantage of Europe from its own perspective is that, generally speaking, it takes its five-week vacations all at once. The big horror of Europe from an American perspective is that it takes its five-week vacations all at once.

The American mind recoils（反冲，畏缩） at the image of European five-week holidays, so many of them in August. These summer holidays typically take northern European families via train, car or Ryanair from their gloomy northern rain-plagued homes to the promise of sunny Spain, Corfu or Crete.

Because Europeans are poor, they cannot pay for decent vacation accommodation. They stay in trailer camps and jerry-built vacation hotels crammed together on the Spanish coast in foreign ghettos where sunburned tourists huddle together to avoid contact with the locals.

Worse yet, they are there for four or five weeks. This violates the basic economist instinct that there is a law of diminishing returns that applies to everything, especially being in the same small hotel room or rocky beach for a month with the same set of screaming children or nagging（唠叨） grandmothers.

In some European countries, families are plagued with children who just won’t grow up, especially in Italy where the typical 30-year-old male lives at home with mama and expects free food and laundry. Is this the kind of person with whom you would want to spend a five-week holiday? No wonder many European countries have much lower fertility rates than the United States: "Living at home with your family is the most effective method of contraception（避孕） ever invented."

Data showing that Americans take two-week vacations in contrast to five weeks in Europe are misleading. Americans are expert at juggling three-day holiday weekends and holidays that occur in the middle of the week into full-week vacations at the cost of only three or four days off.

Americans' multiple（众多的） one-week vacations in contrast to the European five-week August exodus are much more efficient. The city doesn’t close down, diminishing returns of being bored with your relatives does not set in, and because American incomes per head are about 45% higher than European, there is plenty of money for Americans to travel, and they do. Americans take a week in the summer at a nearby lake or seashore beach, a few days at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas to be with the relatives, and a week in winter to ski in the many resorts that are within driving distance of much of the population, not to mention the Utah and Colorado Rockies that are easily reachable by air.

The typical European five-week August vacation is inefficient, congested and boring. The typical short American vacation taken several times per year to different places with different people provides a higher payoff of leisure per day. The perennial law of diminishing returns never seemed more appropriate.

The opposition's opening remarks

Dec 22nd 2009 | John de Graaf (Executive director, Take Back Your Time)

I must say that when I first read this resolution I thought there was some mistake, that the real resolution must be: "This house believes that Americans get too little holiday time." Of course, in that case I would have argued in the affirmative（肯定）, and my sense is that Professor Gordon might have agreed with me.

In all honesty, my visits to Europe have made me very jealous of European holiday time. I have yet to talk to a European who wishes to see his or her vacation time reduced. This does not mean they want to see American vacations extended: I recall meeting a man from London in California's Yosemite National Park two summers ago. When I asked if he thought Americans got too little vacation, he quickly responded, "Oh, no! After all, I get five weeks off and I can come to this beautiful place and it's not even that crowded because the Americans are all chained to their bloody desks. I’d be having less fun if they had more vacation."

But this is not an argument about preference. The long holidays that Europeans take are justified, not simply because they enjoy those holidays, but because their access to holiday time brings benefits for their health, their family connections, their environment, their overall life satisfaction and even their hourly productivity.

Let us start with health. Vacation time is a hedge against coronary（冠状动脉） disease. Indeed, men who do not take regular vacations are some 32% more likely to suffer heart attacks than those who do, while for women the figure is even higher, at 50%. Women who do not take regular vacations are also two or three times more likely to suffer from depression than those who do. Dr Sarah Speck, a Seattle cardiologist, calls workplace stress “the new tobacco”. She suggests that taking regular blocks of time away from work may be nearly as good for your health as stopping smoking.

It is thus perhaps no accident that nearly all western European countries can boast longer life expectancies than the United States (while spending half as much on health care), or that a Los Angeles Times story reported that Europeans are only a little over half as likely as Americans to suffer from such chronic illnesses as heart disease and high blood pressure in old age. Meanwhile, Americans are also about twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. All together, these infirmities account for a lion’s share of the enormous health-care costs borne by Americans.

Further evidence for the positive impact of shorter working time, including vacation time, on health comes from new findings that American health has actually improved during the recession (while many workers have received extended furloughs), and that the shorter working hours associated with recessions regularly lead to health improvements, while periods of rapid economic growth are associated with poorer health outcomes. Moreover, a recent Greek study found that around the world, mortality rates are at their lowest in the periods of the year immediately after most people in a given country take their vacations. In simple terms, rather than being an economic drain, vacations may significantly decrease unproductive expenditures associated with poor health.

Vacations also improve family life and the welfare of children. Researchers have documented the degree to which many of children's strongest memories are of their vacations with their families. Vacations help bond families and often reintroduce romance into the lives of parents. They have even been shown to improve children's academic performance. Extended holiday time allows for more tourism—a benefit to many national economies—which, as a travel specialist, Rick Steves, points out, helps increase international understanding and connection, vital in these times of worldwide distrust.

Moreover, lengthy periods of time off improve life satisfaction. As even Forbes magazine pointed out, annual Gallup Polls have found the highest rates of happiness in such countries as Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands (with the world's shortest working hours) and Sweden, nations where attention is paid to work-life balance and of course where holiday time is lengthy. And psychologists such as Tim Kasser and Leaf Van Boven have found that for most citizens of the industrial North, time affluence, including ample vacation time, brings more long-term satisfaction than material affluence does.

Those who oppose long European vacations often do so in the name of greater economic growth. But ever higher growth rates are not sustainable in the long run. According to the Global Footprint Network, Americans, with their emphasis on material consumption rather than time off, have roughly twice the environmental impact of Europeans. A study by CEPR, a Washington DC think-tank, found that by reducing their working hours to European levels, including European-length holidays, Americans would cut their energy use and carbon outputs by 20-30%.

Even so, extended periods of time off such as Europeans enjoy are not a threat to productivity. In fact, an Air New Zealand study found that after two weeks off, workers experienced an extra hour of quality sleep each night and showed 30-40% faster reaction times on the job. A recent Harvard Business School study found that in one large company, workers who experimented with predictable and required time off actually produced more than their colleagues who worked longer hours. Their work was more focused and the quality of their communication with fellow workers improved dramatically.

Yet even if they produced a bit less, the tradeoff(权衡) would be worth it. Many of the great joys in life cannot be measured by the crude index of GDP, as even Nicolas Sarkozy has recently noted. Europeans have a high quality of life (as so many Americans observe) precisely because they take time to live, time for conversation, for good food and wine, for travel at bicycle speed, time for family and time for long and memorable holidays. They are right in not wanting to sacrifice these non-material joys for the stuff extra hours of work can buy. People in the United States have much to learn from them. And they might even want to consider taking longer holidays.

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

额。。我一边吃着沫沫给我的小鱿鱼一边看你的更新，觉得太惭愧了。。。我也终于要开始补作业了。。。

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

138# AdelineShen
话说我也是打打鱼，晒晒网！今后要努力啦！

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment:
The world has witnessed too many examples of American-style life, especially in the developing countries. Of course, no one has the right to estimate or criticize others way of life. However, no one can stop the inevitable trend of American-style to dominate the whole world. Computer enterprise in India, whose outstanding merits are high speed and convenience, is an absolute representative of American-style business and becomes a pillar industry. It is no exaggeration to say that the reason why India has burst on the international scene is its prominence in computer enterprise. On the other hand, Japan, as the second strongest country in the world stage, also grows in strength on the basis of American work tradition. Factually, American-style life's success is owing to its accordance with the marketrule of rapid development. So the European have to readjust their leisurely pace of living if they want to achieve as much wealth as the American.

错字： prominence owing

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受到金融危机的影响，美国各著名大学都开始思考高等教育存在的问题。哈佛商学院培养出了世界级的商业精英，这些精英创造的金融衍生品却给全世界带来了灾难。在市场经济、物质主义、拜金主义浪潮的席卷下，高等教育应该做些什么？哈佛大学认为，现在的精英们迫切地需要增强社会责任感，为此，哈佛在他本科生的核心课程里面增加了三门课，分别是：American History, Moral Science, Religion. 关于宗教学作为哈佛的核心课程之一，很多人都有所微词。哈佛是美国人文主义的发源地，而很多人不理解宗教跟人文主义之间的深层联系。美国人文主义之父Emerson做了一个重要的演讲——American Scholar,对宗教在社会意识形态中的地位产生了重大影响，是美国思想史上的一篇重要文献，堪称美国的人文主义宣言。他在演讲中指出：人，自己可以成为上帝对话的对象，不一定要经过教会，不一定要经过神父，每个人自己能够直接与上帝对话。把人从教会的控制中解脱出来。哈佛教授委员会的主席在接受媒体采访时说：一个人，教师或者学生，选择什么宗教信仰是他自己的事情，但是如果他不了解宗教，那么他离开哈佛的校门之后将没有办法面对宗教所产生的社会影响，所以我们无论如何要让他们在学校里掌握宗教对社会的意义这一类的问题意识，因为现在社会中宗教对社会生活的影响变得非常非常复杂，我们需要我们的学生有这方面的意识，有这方面的了解。

   
以上是一个哈佛文理学院的教授在给我们讲课的时候的一部分内容，我这两天在整理他的课堂录音，看到这一篇，觉得可以拿出来跟大家分享一下，希望大家能从这篇“宗教的人文主义宣言”中了解当今宗教在美国社会中的地位和作用。文章比较长，我截取了前面的部分，后面有文章来源，大家可以去看完整的，当做阅读文章看看。Enjoy it~! ^_^

The American Scholar
             Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commencement speeches are customarily routine, pedantic, mildly inspiring lectures filled with platitudes. " The American Scholar ", - a celebrated commencement address delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837 defied such pedestrian description.  Oliver Wendell Holmes called this speech America's " Intellectual Declaration of Independence "  In addition to being a call for literary independence from Europe, and from past traditions, the speech set out Emerson's blueprint for how aware humans should live their lives.   

The American Scholar

An Address Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837


MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments（议会） of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?

In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day—the AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character and his hopes.

It is one of those fables which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man,—present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.

In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student’s behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, “All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.” In life, too often the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.


I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of Nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is Nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,—so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays upward, downward, without centre, without circumference,—in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fibre（纤维） of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold, a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see that Nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of Nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study Nature,” become at last one maxim.


II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of the Past—in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth—learn the amount of this influence more conveniently—by considering their value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now it is quick thought. It can stand and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought that shall be as efficient in all respects to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation—the act of thought—is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: hence-forward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class who value books as such; not as related to Nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the school or art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward; the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead; man hopes; genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own sense of good and fair.

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let is receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years.

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When we can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must,—when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining,—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, “A fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful.”

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy,—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise when this poet, who lived in some past world two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preëstablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know that as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,—only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakespeare’s.

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,—to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.

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Comment:
This lecture notes contains too many colloquail languish that it is difficult for me to focus on its main subject without distaction. Hence, I have only learned something tiips from it. To begin with, the whole passage emphasizes that man should keep the habit of thinging independently, rather than becoming the parrot of famous predeccors. Creation just comes from independent thinking. At the same time, it encourages mankind to broaden their sight and read their professions from a higher state. To achieve this goal, it suggests that ought to approach the world more comprehensible and further. And reading, which we once thought to be the most important way of learning, needs to be re-estimated now.

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[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][02.02]

题材：法律与道德；适合题目：17，174，178，180，169 Law vs. Moralityby Tibor Machan Tibor Machan is an adjunct（兼职） scholar at the Cato Institute. Added to cato.org on March 21, 2002 This article appeared on cato.org on March 21, 2002. When the Enron case broke, many business bashers jumped at the chance（抓住机会） to blame deregulation（放松管制） for the mess. The same had occurred when California started to experience blackouts（灯火管制，灯火熄灭） and hikes in energy costs last year. Indeed, following some mild moves in the direction of a genuine free market in many parts of the globe and even here in the USA, a lot of well- positioned commentators（评论员） with clearly statist sentiments experienced near-panic. Indeed, there might be, after decades and decades of sliding toward broader and broader scope for government authority in our lives, some retreat of state power in the offing（在海面，在附近，即将发生）. This, obviously, couldn't be allowed. So, one way to attempt a reversal（逆转） of the rather mild trend toward privatization（私有化） and deregulation is to begin to blame everything on freedom. And one plausible spin（自旋） would be to declare that corporations are no different from rouge states, in need, therefore, of the heavy hand of benign government regulators. In the back of（在背后，支持，主使） some of these desperate efforts -- to stem any advance toward greater individual liberty in human community life -- is a lesson that might otherwise be missed. It is that when the state does gain widespread intrusive legal authority in the lives of the citizenry, the citizenry will begin to be guided not by its moral conscience and common sense but by the sole consideration of whether what people are doing is OK with the law-makers. Some corporations, for example, declare up front that they are not interested in business ethics -- which they take to vary from culture to culture -- but only in the law. (Which probably is what accounts for the prominence of legal departments at most corporate headquarters.) But the problem extends farther than business. Recently in Orange County, California, the American Red Cross sponsored an event at a privately owned hotel to which a group of high school students had been invited to sing. Having learned that the singers would belt out some songs that had religious content, the Red Cross folks decided to demand that these be removed from the program, probably figuring that such would be the PC and legally harmless thing to do these days. And as much as this outraged a great many people in the community and ultimately led the Red Cross to issue an apology, what transpired（蒸腾，蒸发，泄露） made some kind of perverse（乖张的，错误的，倔强的）sense. When activities are carried out or supervised by the legal authorities, the principle that no special favors must be extended is the rule. Under the law, everyone must be treated the same, without regard to religion, color, national origin, and other special attributes. It is this idea that animates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and, indeed, the rule of law itself. The reasoning behind this is rather straightforward. The law governs us all as human beings who live in human communities. So, it is only our common humanity that must come into play as far as the law is concerned, nothing special about us. If one must not kill, assault, kidnap or rob others, that applies simply by virtue of being human not because one hails from Japan or has dark skin pigmentation（色素沉着）. That is one reason why segregation, dictated（口述） by the laws of various Southern states, was so clearly unjust. That is why even when it would appear to make some sense, racial profiling（相貌） is a very dubious police practice. That is why sexual or ethnic discrimination by governments is to be forbidden. But there is a conflict between this unexceptional idea and the widening of the scope of government power. When we get away from the simple negative principles of a just human community -- don't kill, don't assault, don't rob, don't rape and such, meaning, basically, that we should all live together peacefully -- and start regimenting（严格控制，严格管制） the details of human life, people are no longer similar at all, quite the contrary. Maybe some should and some should not smoke. Maybe some should and some should not go to church. Maybe some should and others should not paint certain kinds of pictures or play certain sports or purchase SUVs or talk with the animals. Only at some very basic level are we all -- or virtually all of us -- alike. We become differentiated rather quickly as it concerns the details of our lives -- some are parents, some teachers, some tall, some women, some young, some athletes, some Roman Catholics, some Jews, some Moonies and some even agnostics or atheists. Well, in a community that respects -- and has made provisions（规定） for the protection of individual rights -- the diversity of human life has nearly free reign. Just look around America and this becomes evident! If now government tries to apply its principles of equal protection under the law to all the different areas of human activity that can arise in a highly diverse society, the task will be impossible and nearly totalitarian. If the American Red Cross acts, then, like a quasi-government, making its program suited to everyone equally, it will find itself unable to do anything even mildly special, let alone controversial. But if its programs are carried out for the general public, it could become concerned about whether to conform to the spirit if not the letter of the law. It may not have to but it may still consider it politically prudent to do this. This is how we begin to leave our common sense and try to make practices adjust to some artificial one-size-fits-all vision of community life that, in fact, fits no one at all. But once education, recreation and athletics -- to list but a few things people do in life -- become quasi-government affairs, they cannot be differentiated based on different needs of different segments and members of communities. They gradually become the same, or at least pretend to be such, so as to accommodate the now impossible ideal of the now highly intrusive rule of law. Not only will this generate completely artificial practices and bans but it will also take our minds off what is really important, namely, figuring out on our own how we should conduct ourselves in our lives. We now will be inclined to focus not on morality or ethics but on public policy and law. That is quite understandable, since when law and public policy are not heeded, severe consequences can ensue. We can be found to be law-breakers, which brings about costly sanctions. You smoke in a pub now and this means going to court, paying fines, putting your life on hold. You offend some group and spend years in court! The American Red Cross officials may perhaps not be fully forgiven for losing their common sense but it is at least understandable why they worried so much about being politically correct. With religious songs at an event open to the public, they would risk bringing down upon them the wrath（愤怒） of the American Civil Liberties Union if not immediately the local police. A society where laws have become the answer to all human problems, laws get completely confusing and many people begin to be concerned with nothing other than avoiding violating the law. Such a society is very likely to see ethics and morality slowly but surely recede from its midst.

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Comment：


I have never read a passage concerned about law and morality of such novelty. To my surprise, the author extends law-makers' standpoint to the dimension of equity and its ensuing consequences. It is said that individual diversity would diminish gradually resulting from the public request for absolute equity and the compelled law-makers, who dominate the detailed rule of law would behalf of their relevant social cast. Therefore, people have to pretend to live under equity and eliminate their specialized characters. In this circumstance, we come across a paradox that the statue is established on the basis of justice, however, absolute equity would destroy the law in return. It is similar to say that the extent of violence plays a key role in the implement of statue.

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[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][02.03]

嘿嘿，来补充点语言的背景知识吧～ Babelicious!Bigger languages are also simpler onesJan 25th 2010 | From The Economist online WHY do some languages drip with verb endings, declensions that showhow a noun is used, and other grammatical bits and pieces, while othersrely on word order and context? The former category tends to includelanguages spoken by small groups in isolated settings like the Amazonor New Guinea. The latter include such languages as English andMandarin. This fact has made scholars wonder if languages simplify as theyspread. Researchers have wondered if second-language learning of suchconquering languages as English have led them to shed grammaticalbaggage. Many features of grammar are, in linguistic terms,“overspecified”—meaning redundant. The “s” on the end of “the two boys”is overspecified, since “two” shows that more than one boy isconcerned. So, the theory goes, as adults learn languages, withabilities that have withered compared to children’s native acquisition,the dispensable bits are dispensed with. But some linguists have simplyassumed that all languages get simpler over time, or that few socialfactors correlate with complexity. Shutterstock As they describe in the Public Library of Science, GaryLupyan of the University of Pennsylvania and Rick Dale of theUniversity of Memphis set out to find some more solid evidence thatexpansion simplifies language. They took the 2,236 languages in theWorld Atlas of Language Structures and looked for correlations with thenumber of speakers of each language, the size of the area in which itis spoken, and the number of neighbouring languages. They looked forcorrelations with the languages’ inflectional morphology, meaning themostly obligatory prefixes, suffixes and other parts packed intoindividual words that carry specific meanings. They found clear evidence that big, spreading languages have fewerof these features. They have fewer case-markings on nouns. Verbs areless likely to vary with person, place, time and so forth. Mandarin,for example, has no obligatory past tense at all; an extra word cancome after the verb to indicate it happened in the past, or this can beleft to context. By contrast, Yagua, spoken in Peru, has an obligatoryfive-way distinction. Past-tense verbs must show whether the eventhappened a few hours ago, a day before, a week to a month ago, and soon. The number of speakers of each language correlated best withmorphological complexity, better than the area the language is spreadover or the number of neighbours. This makes sense because a languagewith a large population of speakers has probably already been learnedby many non-natives in the past. A language with many neighbours todaywould be, by this rationale, more likely to become simpler in thefuture, if the language spreads. Of course, languages in families sharecertain features, but Dr Lupyan and Dr Dale found that their resultswere significant even when language family and region were factoredout. This leaves the question of why languages would become complex atall. Dr Lupyan and Dr Dale offer several hypotheses. One involves thedifferent needs of child and adult learners. Complex morphology isespecially hard for adults to learn, but it may help children, as theredundancy reduces the need for non-linguistic factors forunderstanding. (Las casas blancas tells a Spanish-speakingchild three times that there are multiple white houses.) An alternativehypothesis is that complex morphology improves economy and clarity ofexpression, something that is desirable so long as it is not toodifficult to learn. A final possibility is simply that smaller languagegroups more faithfully transmit the grammar to their children,overspecification and all, even if it has no use. One thing is clear. Linguists have long known, despite theprejudices of those in rich societies, that “simple” people withprimitive technologies do not speak simple languages. By thedefinitions used here, the native languages of North America and SouthAmerica are the most complicated in the world, while Europe’s are thesimplest.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

每日五词]教你使用高级词汇（第二章）

Expedite Part of speech: vt & vi English: 1. Speed up the progress of; facilitate; 2. Process fast and efficiently; Chinese:加快进展，迅速完成 Context(This word is utilized to describe): Aid Earliness Haste Example: 1.In addition, FDAMA codified many of FDA’s initiatives and existing programs intended to expedite drug development and expand access to unapproved therapies. 2.The new code also introduced procedures to expedite certain business claims. 3.Citizens encountered long delays and frequent requests from judicial officials for small bribes in order to expedite cases. 4.The report further details the ease in which payments can be made to justice workers to postpone trials, expedite motions, alter evidence or issue rulings in a predetermined manner. Consummate Part of speech: vt English: Make perfect; bring to perfection Chinese: 使完美 （这个词做形容词意思就是perfect,当然还有一个动词意思，不过估计你们是用不上的：洞房...咳咳） Context(This word is utilized to describe): Completeness Completion Greatness Perfection Skill Example: 1.To impose his galleys upon these two dazzling children, or to consummate by himself his irremediable engulfment 2.With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it 3.While it may take a little longer than is customary in the U.S. to consummate a business relationship, the investment in time can pay off in long-lasting and mutually profitable alliances 4.She must live with him at the place stipulated in the contract, consummate the marriage, and not leave the home without his consent Pervasive Part of speech: adj English: 1. Spread throughout 2. Spreading throughout; Chinese:弥漫的，无处不在的 Context(This word is utilized to describe): References Content Services Themes Example： 1.Autism is classified as one of the pervasive developmental disorders. 2.Television is less pervasive but still is more influential than the print media. 3.Legal discrimination is not pervasive, apart from that experienced by women in certain areas, such as inheritance, which is governed by Shari'a. 4.Strongly held suspicion of evangelical denominations among the Orthodox populace is widespread and pervasive across the political spectrum and has resulted in discrimination. 5.The outcome of the elections was marred by fraud on all sides, including pervasive government intervention to support candidates from the ruling party. Inevitable Part of speech: adj English: 1. Incapable of being avoided or prevented 2. Invariably occurring or appearing; Chinese:无法避免的，必然发生的 Context(This word is utilized to describe): Certainty Necessity Example： 1.There are ends we don't desire, but they're inevitable, we have to face them 2.And of course, with the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth - the critic 3.Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine 4.It used to be only death and taxes were inevitable. Now, of course, there's shipping and handling, too. congruent Part of speech: adj English:Corresponding in character or kind. Chinese:符合的，一致的 （注意这个词没有harmonious的意思，更不能用在“和谐社会”上。很多词典把这个词说成“和谐的”的意思，本土用法是没有的） Context(This word is utilized to describe): No particular realm Example: 1.The evidence supporting a causal relationship between blood cholesterol levels and coronary heart disease comes from a wealth of congruent results of genetic, experimental pathologic, epidemiologic, and intervention studies. 2.Add the advantages of congruent time zones, a straightforward regulatory regime, and a common language, and doing business in Canada simply makes good sense.

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0203  comment

Comment：

I have never concerned about the complexity of languages could have influence on the social economic development. After all, no one would like to pay much attention to the morphology and grammatical baggage, especially for the foreign businessmen. Otherwise, it is said that smaller language groups show more enthusiasm and faithfulness on transmitting the specialized grammar to their children. It seems that this can also be regarded as a particular or even religious way to preserve their solidification through generations. That’s the reason why they fall over themselves for the resist against simplifying their traditional language. Factually, the rightness of conserving the endangered languages needs to be traced to the nature of language, while it is another topic out of this passage’s kernel which we have discussed before.

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Can Apple Out-Innovate Microsoft and Google?

Back to the Future

Apple is innovating like its old self once again. But can the company avoid repeating the mistakes that forced it to play catch-up in the '90s?



One of the great things about covering technology is that if you hang around long enough, you get to write the same stories all over again. In 1987, when I first started on the tech beat, desktop PCs were a big deal. Today the excitement has moved to mobile devices, also known as smart phones. Watching this new market unfold is a bit like seeing one of those movies where they've taken an old classic and remade it with new stars but the same script. (Click here to follow Dan Lyons).


Now, as then, a smaller device is displacing a bigger one. Now, as then, the platform remains somewhat primitive but is evolving rapidly. Hardware makers are trying to figure out which user interface works best. Software makers are dreaming up new ways to use machines that even their creators could not have imagined. Now, as then, a new ecosystem is arising, with disruptive technology creating new powerhouses and threatening the survival of market leaders.


The most striking Groundhog Day moment for me involves Apple. Back in 1984, Apple leapt way ahead in the PC market when it released the original Macintosh, the first popular computer to employ a graphical user interface. It took Microsoft six years to come up with something that could compare to the Mac, in the form of Windows 3.0. Six years! For all that time, Apple had the market to itself. Nevertheless, Windows took over the world and now holds more than 90 percent market share, while Apple squeaks（勉强通过，侥幸成功） by with less than 5 percent worldwide.


Cut to the mobile phone market, today. In June 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, a device that was so far beyond everything else in the market that even now, two and a half years later, nothing can beat it. To be sure, Nokia and Research in Motion still hold a greater share of the smart phone market than Apple does, but their aging software platforms look obsolete next to Apple's.


The question is, will Apple do with the iPhone what it did with the Mac? Will it leap out to a technological lead and then find a way to clutch（抓住） defeat from the jaws of victory? Or has Apple learned from its previous experience and figured out a way to turn its superior design and wonderful technology into market domination?
Probably Apple's biggest blunder with the Mac was refusing to let other companies license its software. (There was a time when Apple did license its software, but by then it had already lost out to Microsoft.) The thing is, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a control freak（有怪癖的人） who believes in keeping the software tightly coupled to the hardware. In his mind, this is the only way to guarantee that you'll give customers a terrific experience.


Microsoft took the opposite approach, letting any PC maker license the Windows operating system. There's a tradeoff here. Microsoft couldn't control the user's experience. But its decision led to greater diversity of machines, and lower prices. For most of the world, cheap machines that were "good enough" trumped Apple's pricier, perfectionist, control-freak approach.


Microsoft also encouraged developers of software applications to create programs for Windows, and gave them a huge audience they could sell to. The more apps the software guys created, the more appealing Windows became, so it was a self-reinforcing phenomenon, a virtuous circle.


With Apple and the iPhone, in some ways it's 1984 all over again. Just as with the Mac, Apple keeps the iPhone's hardware and software tightly coupled. Meanwhile, other companies are taking the old Microsoft approach, most notably Google, which has developed a smartphone operating system called Android that any phonemaker can use at no cost and customize any way they like. Android can do things that the iPhone can't, like run multiple applications at the same time.


Again, as with Windows PCs, with Android we're going to see a tradeoff（交易，折衷，权衡）: more diversity, lower prices (eventually), but perhaps a less predictable experience. No two Android–based devices will be completely alike. Also, it's still in the early days for Android, so your experience might be rockier than on the iPhone. One new device that has lots of technogeeks buzzing is the Droid, from Motorola, which just started shipping this month. The Droid has a touchscreen, like the iPhone, but it also has a real keyboard. And the Droid runs on the Verizon network, while the iPhone runs on the AT&T network, which isn't as good. And the Droid costs the same as the iPhone.


But here's where Apple has learned something from Microsoft, namely the power of having a huge ecosystem of software developers making programs for your platform. Apple has wisely encouraged people to create applications, or "apps," for the iPhone. There are now 100,000 apps available for the iPhone, 10 times more than for Android. So even if you think that the Droid is better than the iPhone, if you go for the Droid, you're giving up that wonderful ecosystem of iPhone apps.


But over time, a lot of iPhone apps will become available on Android, too. So Apple's advantage will diminish. Market research company Gartner predicts that by 2012, Android will have slightly more market share than the iPhone, thanks to a tidal（潮水的，如潮水般涨落的）
wave of Android-based devices that are expected to flood the market over the next few years. Rumor has it that Apple will expand its presence in the mobile-device market by introducing a tablet computer next year. But by going it alone, Apple will never keep up with the Android army. In smartphones, as in personal computers, Apple may ultimately become a niche（壁笼，市场定位，合适的位置） player once again, content to do a great job for a smaller audience. In tech, as in baseball, it's déjà vu all over again.

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0204  comment

It is well established that software system has been a special commodity ever since human beings began to exchange cargoes in the ancient times. To some extent, it violates the famous universal law of supply and demand. As known to all, the lesser merchandises exist in the market, the higher the price of them could surge up, especially when there is no like product. And history has witnessed this discipline coming to be truth. Unfortunately, the seemed omnipotent rule cannot serve to explain the perverse phenomenon of software market. It is a kind of goods that will prevail only when its users cover almost every corner of the world. The convenience it brings to mankind in communication may provide a reasonable answer to this queer circumstance. Suppose one applies a software system that no one else use or each individual applies significant different software systems, then we can conclude the trouble he would meet in his process of exchanging documents between interpersonal computers. In fact, it is a bit like that there is only one telephone in the world.

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[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][02.05&06]

本帖最后由 tequilawine 于 2010-2-5 13:52 编辑 Britain's “broken society” Through a glass darkly Crime, family break-up, drunks and drugs: the Conservatives—and apparently plenty of voters—think that Britain has a “broken society”. Does the claim stand up? Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition Philip Wolmuth/reportdigital.co.uk IT IS hard to believe that such appalling crimes could have been committed by anyone so young. Two boys in the north of England were subjected to a sadistic attack that caused parents across the country to shudder. The anguish of the children was awful enough. But in a grotesque twist, their tormentor was also a child, not yet even a teenager. The attacks had been carried out “solely for the pleasure and excitement” of it, the judge in the case said. What has society come to when such evil is found in those so young? That was in 1968. Mary Bell, the daughter of a Tyneside prostitute and supposedly the victim of repeated abuse herself, became Britain’s most famous child-killer when, just 11 years old, she was convicted of strangling two young boys. Now, a similar case is causing people to wonder again whether society has gone to the dogs. Two brothers from the South Yorkshire village of Edlington, aged ten and 11, were convicted on January 22nd of torturing and sexually abusing two younger boys in an ordeal that left one of them close to death. The case was highlighted by David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, who on the day the boys were sentenced launched a chapter of his Conservative Party’s election manifesto dedicated to dealing with what he calls Britain’s “broken society”. The Edlington case was not “just some isolated incident of evil”, Mr Cameron said. Connecting it to four other infamous examples of callous brutality, he declared that it raised “deep questions about what is going wrong in our society”. Britain is experiencing a social recession to match the economic one, he reckons. Those good old days in full Was Mary Bell’s Britain better than today’s version? An increasing number of people seem to think so. Opinion pollsters around the world find that people are usually gloomy about the future, perhaps because it is inherently more uncertain than the past. But Britons are getting even more downbeat. When Labour came to power in 1997, 40% of the population thought the country was becoming a worse place to live in. By 2007 that had risen to 60%. A year on, and a year into Gordon Brown’s spell as prime minister, the malcontents numbered 71%—and that was before the financial crash. There has been a “surge of nostalgia” for the good old days, says Ben Page, head of Ipsos-Mori, a polling firm. Chief among people’s worries is their security. Under Labour, fear of crime climbed until by 2007 it had become the issue that pollsters identified as the main complaint among voters. (Since then worries about the economy have eclipsed all else.) The heightened fears are a puzzle to criminologists, who point out that over the past 15 years Britain has experienced a steady, deep fall in crime. The statistics are notoriously hard to interpret, but according to the British Crime Survey, the Home Office’s most reliable measure though still far from perfect, crime overall has dropped by 45% since its peak in 1995. A big chunk of that fall is owing to reductions in vehicle theft and domestic burglary, for which alarm manufacturers and increased householder vigilance probably deserve as much credit as the police. But violent crime has fallen too. It is now almost half what it was in 1995, and no higher than in 1981 (see chart 1). Looking more carefully, the big fall in brutality has been in domestic violence, which has dropped by a staggering 70%. (No one is sure why; the best guess is that an improving economy has kept men out of the house and given women enough money to escape if they need to.) Violence at the hands of strangers—the prospect that probably drives fear of crime more than anything else—has fallen by far less, and in fact rose in the most recent reporting period. Robbery has not gone down as much as burglary, perhaps because personal security has not improved in line with domestic security. But it too has been falling. This sort of upbeat, wonkish analysis enrages those who insist that, for ordinary people, Britain is a more frightening place than it once was, whatever official statistics might say. In parts of the country, and some of the time, that is bound to be true. Until recently the Home Office crime survey did not interview under-16s. Nor does it weight serious crimes more heavily than mild ones, which means that a drop in bicycle theft could cancel out an increase in assaults. The Conservatives say that this has masked a rise in rare but serious crimes—particularly gun and knife crime. The evidence is mixed. Gun crime has in fact been pretty flat nationwide. Data on knife crime are poor, but some doctors say that they are dealing with more stabbings, and the number of murders involving “sharp instruments” (bottles as well as knives) has risen slightly. Murders using guns increased alarmingly during the first few years of Labour’s time in office, but have since dropped back down. Indeed, the day before Mr Cameron made his “broken society” pitch it was announced that the total number of homicides recorded by the police was at its lowest in 19 years. Children at risk One of the clearest long-term trends relates directly to the Edlington question. Parents have probably never been more worried about their offspring, but the truth is that children seem to be less at risk now than in the past. The number of killings of under-15s has “collapsed” since the 1970s, according to Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University. Professor Pritchard calculates that in 1974 Britain was the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world. By his reckoning it is now 17th, following a 70% drop in child homicides. To be on the safe side, he did the analysis again, including cases where the cause of death was undetermined; even then the number of cases had halved. He credits closer co-operation between police and social services, which kicked off in a big way in 1979. Children also seem to be committing fewer serious offences themselves. Martin Narey, a former Home Office big cheese who now runs Barnardo’s, a venerable children’s charity, points out that the number of under-16s being convicted of the gravest offences is at least a third lower than it was in the early 1990s. There are fewer Mary Bells about, not more. If the world outside the front door is safer than it used to be, what of the world within it? Families have certainly changed: most obviously, marriage has gone from being the norm to almost a minority pursuit, in line with most of Europe. The number of couples getting married has halved since the 1950s; within five years, the majority of British babies are expected to be born to unmarried parents. Britain’s divorce rate is among the highest in Europe—though it is also at its lowest since 1979. The marriage question has become an unexpected flashpoint of the election campaign, with the Conservatives vowing to promote it through a tax break for married couples and gay civil-partners, in contrast to Labour and the Liberal Democrats who refuse to favour marriage over unmarried cohabitation. Everyone agrees, however, that two nappy-changers are better than one. Here, Britain has a problem: single-parent families are about three times more common than they were in 1970, following a big rise in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time, parents have been getting older. The average age of first childbirth is now 28, driven up by people’s desire to settle down later. Teenage pregnancies have been falling too, though they remain among Europe’s highest. Despite a small uptick in 2007, the latest full year for which figures are available, rates of conception among 15- to 17-year-olds in England and Wales were almost 11% lower than in 1998, and among 13- to 15-year-olds they were almost 8% lower. Figures for the first three quarters of 2008 confirm the broadly falling trend. The real eye-opener is a long-term series including older teenagers. Conception among 15- to 19-year-olds has dropped by nearly a sixth since 1969 though there are more girls of that age (oddly, the number of pregnancies has started to rise again since 2003). And fewer still are becoming mothers, owing to a steep increase in abortions after they were made legal in 1967. Today, only half as many girls between 15 and 19 bear a child in their teens as when their grandmothers were that age (see chart 2). Getty Images An under-reported fracture in the way Britons live has been caused not by fecklessness but by wealth and good health. Far more people are living alone. There are twice as many lone pensioners as there were in 1961, because the elderly are living longer and can afford to keep their home when their partner dies. The number of younger people who live alone has more than trebled since then because singletons are postponing marriage and earn enough to have their own place until they couple up. More wealth means less need for sharing accommodation with flatmates, so despite a big increase in unmarried cohabiting, there has been an overall drop in the number of households containing unrelated adults. Social patterns may indeed have become more fractured, but the biggest changes have been made out of choice. The vice squad That may not produce a happier society. Britons make plenty of appalling decisions in other aspects of their lives, including binge-drinking and drug-taking. But some bad habits are being kicked. Smoking is falling, among adults and children, and Britain’s rate is now one of the rich world’s lowest (see chart 3). Alcohol consumption rose alarmingly towards the end of the 20th century, even as it fell in many other countries (see chart 4). But Britons over 15 still rank a sober tenth in the OECD, and there have recently been tentative signs of a decline in drinking by both adults and children. That is not the end of the matter: Britons’ penchant for less frequent but more sozzling drinking sessions than most others leads to public disorder and violence. And years of binge-drinking have left a lasting health problem in the form of increasing cirrhosis of the liver and the like. But things do seem to be looking up. Among teenagers an interesting trend is emerging: the number of young people who abstain completely from alcohol is rising, but those who do drink are guzzling more. Something similar is happening with the consumption of drugs. Over the past five years there has been a fall in overall drug abuse, driven mainly by declining interest in cannabis. But consumption of cocaine, a less common but more dangerous drug, has doubled, and it is now more popular in Britain than almost anywhere else in western Europe. It seems that while the majority are sobering up, a dedicated minority are partying on. Less crime, less killing, fewer teenage mums, far fewer fags, perhaps a bit less drink and drugs: why is it that the idea of “broken Britain” rings true with so many, when it seems far from reality? Partly, it is because people’s ideas about the state of society are simply inaccurate: the average voter reckons that four out of ten teenagers have children, for instance, whereas in fact perhaps three in a hundred do. Official statistics to the contrary are viewed with suspicion after successive governments have relentlessly massaged them. Another reason is that other countries sometimes seem to be dealing with their problems more quickly than Britain. It is galling to see Italy, say, cutting back fast on the booze. In America, too, voices of right-wing doom who once urged the righteous to set up firewalls against contagion from the Sodom and Gomorrah around them are now seeing heartening signs there of social “re-norming”. The view from Witney Yet Britons refuse to do the same, and for this their newspapers, which seldom look on the sunny side of life, are much to blame. “NAME THE DEVIL BOYS—WE MUST NOT LET THEM HIDE”, roared the Mail on Sunday on January 24th, quoting the parents of the Edlington victims. Newspapers were no less lurid a century ago. But there is one big change: a shift in readership from local papers to national ones. Mr Cameron’s comfortable Witney constituents are dropping the Oxford Mail in favour of national titles or the television, which report the most gruesome stories from across the country, not just the county. In this way local crises, such as an outbreak of teenage stabbings in London in 2007 and 2008, become national panics, causing fear even in regions where the problem does not exist. And bad news travels best: the fact that London’s teenage-murder rate quietly halved last year was not widely reported outside the capital. Britain has plenty of things to worry about; it would be absurd to suggest the contrary. But the big ones are not sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. There is a statistically small class of people, including a number of underskilled young whites and Caribbeans, who are being left behind in a general march toward the light. Many of those who were already at the bottom of the pile are finding it impossible to get out from under and join in. And this is serious. Household income rose by an average of 2% a year between 1996-97 and 2007-08, but on most measures it ended up more unequally distributed than at any time since at least 1961, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank. The proportion of young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs) changed little between the end of 2001 and the end of 2008 despite a (pre-recession) buoyant labour market and lots of government attempts to help them connect with a job. Though measured unemployment is relatively low, the number of those who do not look for work because of real or fancied incapacity is very high. At the root of it all is an education system that has long failed to educate the great mass of children usefully. It is showing its limitations more than ever now that manufacturing jobs for the unskilled are vanishing. For all the government fanfare about better-than-ever national exam results (partly achieved by grading fluffier subjects more sympathetically), in international tests the trend is downward. Data collected for the OECD’s PISA study in 2000 ranked British 15-year-olds eighth among member countries in maths, with a total point score, 529, that was well above the average. In 2006, with a below-average score of 495, they came joint 18th. So too with reading: British pupils were seventh in 2000 with 523 points but joint 13th in 2006 with 495. The 2009 data are unlikely to show a radical improvement. The most sobering aspect is the persistent gap in achievement between the very best and the very worst. Despite that, in 2007 Britain was educating a smaller proportion of its 15- to 19-year-olds than it did in 1995, on OECD figures. Of other member countries, only Portugal recorded a drop. Government can do a lot to improve education, partly by pushing supply-side reforms vigorously. New Labour started to do this, then flagged; the Tories, whipped ahead by Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, are now the ones with the forward-looking ideas about education. But what about the other things? Expectations that the state can improve social behaviour across the board have increased sharply. Take crime. Tim Newburn and Robert Reiner of the London School of Economics point out that, hard though it is to imagine now, crime was not widely considered a partisan issue until the 1970s. It crept into political debate then and gained prominence from Margaret Thatcher’s accusation during the 1979 election campaign that Labour was “soft” on crime. Responding to the Tory challenge, Labour increased sentence lengths and sent more petty criminals to jail, swelling the prison population by a third to 83,000. At the same time, the definition of crime has expanded. Labour has repeatedly vowed to squash not only crime but also “anti-social behaviour”, attempting to tackle it with measures such as the “ASBO”, a court order aimed at muzzling noisy neighbours and the like. Alan Johnson, the home secretary, has indicated that he intends to fight this year’s election focusing on the nuisance caused by anti-social youths, a target that a generation ago would have seemed a silly little thing for the national government to be worrying about. Hooded youths hanging around on street corners and their equivalents have always given people the jitters; it is only recently that the government has promised to banish them, and disappointed people when it discovered it could not. Ironically, some government policies have helped the more mobile poor up the ladder at the cost of concentrating deprivation more strongly than before. The sale of much council-owned social housing, for instance, gave ambitious working-class families the chance to move out of impoverished estates. But it has simultaneously turned those areas into zones of uniform, concentrated, workless deprivation of a sort that did not exist at the beginning of the 1980s, when more than a third of British homes were council-owned. It is in these small pockets that the social improvements of recent decades may have been felt least. Drinking is down overall, but a minority is drinking harder; most types of crime are down, but certain types of violence persist; total drug use has fallen, but some of the most harmful drugs are getting more popular. The evidence supporting the existence of a “broken society” is thin indeed: all the more reason to focus on those who languish outside mainstream society altogether.