Market Crises versus Market Ajustments

A major cause of the current financial crisis, it is said, is the "depressed" real estate market. But "depressed" implies that real estate prices are too low. One could also easily say -- and many people did say -- that real estate prices were "inflated." On the whole, it is a good thing that the price of residential housing has declined -- and let's hope that efforts to pump up prices to their previous "inflated" levels fail.

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The Philosophy Teacher

Jonathan Mahler, "The Thinker," NYTimes (Sept. 19, 2008):

After class, [Professor Kelly] Jolley and I walked across Auburn’s mostly deserted campus and into town for lunch. It was oppressively hot and humid; Jolley wore a fraying straw boater to keep the sun off his face. Over pizza and iced tea, I asked him if he ever wondered whether his style of teaching might be inappropriate for a large state school like Auburn — if the cost of his approach is that he’s teaching to the few rather than the many. “My view is that you really fall into a trap when you start allowing what you believe about your students to dictate how you teach your discipline,” he answered. “Too often these days we end up setting up our courses in light of what we believe about our students and we end up not teaching them. At best, we end up housebreaking them.”

[snip, snip]

In Jolley’s ideal world, every student would catch the philosophy flame, but he knows this will never happen. He says that philosophy requires a certain rare and innate ability — the ability to step outside yourself and observe your own mind in the act of thinking. In this respect, Jolley recognizes that his detractors have a point when they criticize his approach to teaching. “It’s aristocratic in the sense that any selection based on talent is aristocratic,” he told me. “I know it offends everyone’s sense of democracy, this idea that everyone’s equal, but we all know that’s just not true.”

Perhaps the dispute between Jolley and his critics boils down to how you define great teachers. You typically think about them as being devoted, above all, to their students. Jolley says his first priority is to philosophy itself. “I care about the discipline of philosophy more than the academic fate of any individual student — and I think I should,” he said. “Otherwise I’m just a baby sitter who occasionally breaks into syllogism.”

Jolley's notion that his philosophical endeavors in the classroom ought to be pitched to the best students rather than to average students is perhaps questionable. But his commitment to rigor is admirable. I, any event, admire his courage and his quite-literal idealism.

One has the sense or hope that Prof. Jolley thinks the "best" students are the most inquisitive. And with that thesis it is hard to disagree.

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One Trillion for Wall Steet but Not One Farthing for Social Security or Medicare?

Social Security is going bankrupt (it is said) and we can't continue down that path!

Medicare is going bankrupt (it is said) and we can't continue down that path!

Wall Street is going bankrupt (it is a fact) and we can't continue down that path. Throw the Street a trillion dollars! That'll fix things. But ... Social Security ... Medicare? Well...we can't afford such profligacy, now can we?

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The Nature of Visibility

The weather forecaster just said that it is a beautiful day and that "visibility is as far as the eye can see."

Well, gee, that's an interesting proposition. Or not?

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