Sunday Posts

At the heart of the modern education system, there are assumptions about a global division of labour. The education system that we have today, came about in the nineteenth century, arising from Liberalism, Industrialism and Empire. The modern Education system was a great Liberal project, above all. Its ideals were different from that of the Eighteenth century: Productivity, rather than Civility, was its stated purpose; Consumption, rather than self-restraint, was its point; and at a time when the aristocratic privileges could no longer be taken for granted, it promoted the Jeffersonian 'natural aristocracy of men'. Not all Eighteenth Century ideas were dead and gone, however. One distinction, between Liberal and Servile education, very much shaped the educational imagination in the Nineteenth. The idea of distinct education systems for intellectual and practical pursuits were now formalised: The great century of invention extended the chasm between intellectual and man...

I write this post mainly as a record and a response to a debate that I participated in last week. The question we were concerned with is the well-known one, why did Western Europe, and particularly England, took the lead in the industrial age. The debate was drawn along the lines of the arguments of David Landes, who argued about the primacy of culture (positing Max Weber's 'Protestant Ethic' at the core of his argument), and that of people like Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz, who argues that the the 'Western' hegemony is contingent (that it has come about following a number of chance advantages, geographical and historical) and perhaps cyclical.  To me, the 'contingency' argument has more appeal. This is not just because of my general view of life - that contingency plays a huge role - or because that would be more consistent with a Darwinian world view. For that matter, such an argument would also be consistent with the idea of 'conjun...

Indeed, I have borrowed the title from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's classic study, because we are living through a time when the race has entered a new phase, showing up in all its splendour with anxious hinges and critical turns. It's time to decide and act, and every step counts. Of course, technology is not autonomous and we are indeed the 'driver in the driverless car', and the choices we make today will decide whether technologies will tear apart our society, as some fear, or, if it would unleash the next cycle of prosperity. The optimists have empirical evidence, indeed. They cite - and this is what Goldin and Katz were primarily looking at - Industrial Revolution. Despite all the early fears of job losses and social unrest, the technological progress eventually ended up unleashing a new era of prosperity. The prosperity took time to build, and there were many social unrests along the way: Malthus came along to make us think people can be surpluses and...