Peter RuddFiled under: brave new world | Tags: business, Jill Lepore, remorselessness, startups, The Disruption Machine, The New Yorker, venture capital
Is business to do good and do well, follow rules, keep obligations, listen to your conscience, be loyal, have a sense of commonweal, think long term, be thoughtful?
Or is it a terrifying place, with a devastating pace, where people are reckless, ruthless, predatory, and thieving, are remorseless, think only of short term gains, have no regrets, are disruptive? Schumpeter’s gale.
It’s a choice. Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.
From Jill Lepore, The New Yorker:
The upstarts who work at startups don’t often stay at any one place for very long. (Three out of four startups fail. More than nine out of ten never earn a return.) They work a year here, a few months there—zany hours everywhere. They wear jeans and sneakers and ride scooters and share offices and sprawl on couches like Great Danes. Their coffee machines look like dollhouse-size factories.
They are told that they should be reckless and ruthless. Their investors, if they’re like Josh Linkner, tell them that the world is a terrifying place, moving at a devastating pace. “Today I run a venture capital firm and back the next generation of innovators who are, as I was throughout my earlier career, dead-focused on eating your lunch,” Linkner writes. His job appears to be to convince a generation of people who want to do good and do well to learn, instead, remorselessness. Forget rules, obligations, your conscience, loyalty, a sense of the commonweal. If you start a business and it succeeds, Linkner advises, sell it and take the cash. Don’t look back. Never pause. Disrupt or be disrupted.
The Disruption Machine, Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
Filed under: brave new world, the sweet life | Tags: capitalism, Common Core, democracy, Educating For The Status Quo, education, Shawn Gude
An inquiring mind, one that challenges authority, and has a mentoring relationship with teachers
vs
A soft compliant mind.
The Common Core debate is important not simply because of the standards’ immediate effects on pupils, but because it offers us an opportunity to ask the biggest questions about our education system: What should be the guiding ethos of public education in a democratic society? What are we preparing students for, other than participation in economic life? And how should schooling be structured to reflect democratic values?
The short answers: Incredulity, not docility, is the trait to inculcate, along with a citizenry disposed to questioning received wisdom and orthodoxy and a less hierarchical teacher-student relationship. In each instance, the Common Core is an impediment.
Participation is a necessary component of freedom
vs
Memorization of facts will make us dutiful.
From a democracy standpoint, there’s much to question here. First, the virtual omission of civic education, an area already treated as an afterthought in many public schools. The civic education we do have tends to be sanitized, fact-heavy regurgitation that casts democratic participation more as a duty than as a vehicle for emancipation.
Filed under: departure lounge, the sweet life | Tags: Arthur C. Brooks, Love People Not Pleasure
Alain Laboile
Between friendship and fame pick friendship:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
Love People, Not Pleasure, Arthur C. Brooks
Filed under: the sweet life | Tags: boredom, division of labour, How to Be Free, Tom Hodgkinson, work
Here’s a case for finding enjoyable autonomous work. It’s probably impossible to find it for 100% of your day / week / year / life, but maybe 50% or 40% or maybe much less. Anyway whatever the number you are lucky enough to achieve, increasing the proportion should help to decrease boredom.
Boredom was invented in 1760. That is the year, according to academic Lars Svendsen in his excellent study A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), that the word was first used in English. The other great invention of the time was the Spinning Jenny, which heralded the start of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, boredom arrives with the division of labour and the transformation of enjoyable autonomous work into tedious slave-work.
Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Free, p 18
coromandal 