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David Warren reviews The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, by Alison Gopnik.
…Gopnik’s may not be the best for the purpose, but is nevertheless among the most accessible books that show how recent empirical research into the behaviour of the littlest human folk has utterly demolished the assumptions and “theories” of such as Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget. …
…At the very least, Gopnik shows that human apprehension of an objective moral order — founded on the Golden Rule: to do as you would be done by — is innate. This sense of justice is present long before adults have had a decent chance to tamper with it, or to impose ideological blinders.
From a very young age, even before continuous memory has set, the babe is playing with hypotheticals and counterfactuals in a remarkably knowing way, and is in little doubt about the goodness or badness of his behaviour. That even a babe is capable of evil — of doing the bad in defiance of the good, in the absence of sufficient self-control — is made wonderfully apparent in Gopnik’s book, and many other empirical studies.
The importance of play, in the development of children, is seldom so well stressed as by Gopnik. The child’s empathy is also innate, and first appears, as if spontaneously, in the loving return of the gaze of his mother. It is developed through his imagination, in which he posits imaginary creatures, from invisible playmates to magical dragons. …
Caroline Glick has a fascinating article on what is really happening with US foreign policy in the Middle East. The first part of the article reports evidence that Obama’s message of Hope and Appeasement have not fazed terrorist groups.
…At the conference, Fatah’s supposedly feuding old guard and young guard were united in their refusal to reach an accommodation with Israel. Both old and young endorsed the use of terrorism against Israel. Both embraced the Aksa Martyrs Brigades terror group as a full-fledged Fatah organization.
Both demanded that all Jews be expelled from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem ahead of the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state.
Both claimed that any settlement with Israel be preceded by an Israeli withdrawal to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and by Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state through its acceptance of millions of foreign-born, hostile Arabs as immigrants within its truncated borders.
Both demanded that all terrorists be released from Israeli prisons as a precondition for “peace” talks with Israel.
Both accused Israel of murdering Yasser Arafat.
Both approved building a strategic alliance with Iran. …
The latest sales pitch for Obamacare is that preventive care will save money. Charles Krauthammer counters this economic fallacy.
…This inconvenient truth comes, once again, from the CBO. In an Aug. 7 letter to Rep. Nathan Deal, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf writes: “Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.”
How can that be? If you prevent somebody from getting a heart attack, aren’t you necessarily saving money? The fallacy here is confusing the individual with society. For the individual, catching something early generally reduces later spending for that condition. But, explains Elmendorf, we don’t know in advance which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case, “it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway.” And this costs society money that would not have been spent otherwise.
Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care. …
…This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be preventing illness. Of course we should. But in medicine, as in life, there is no free lunch. The idea that prevention is somehow intrinsically economically different from treatment — that treatment increases costs and prevention lowers them — is simply nonsense. Prevention is a wondrous good, but in the aggregate it costs society money. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the whole premise of medicine. …
Karl Rove looks at some of the tactics being used in the Obamacare campaign.
…For example, there’s a video being circulated online of Barack Obama telling the Illinois AFL-CIO in 2003, “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health-care program . . . we may not get there immediately” and then telling an SEIU Health Care Forum in 2007, “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out where we’ve got a much more portable system.”
The White House now insists that the president doesn’t want to enact a single-payer health-care system or eliminate private insurance. What’s more, a White House spokeswoman attacked the video, saying its compilers “Take a phrase here and there—they simply cherry-pick and put it together—and make it sound like he’s saying something that he didn’t really say.”
That’s laughable. Mr. Obama’s remarks are straightforward and indisputable. Rather than saying his views have changed as he has worked to create a national consensus, the administration denies what is obviously true. …
Thomas J. Sugrue in WSJ takes a look at the home ownership.
…Surveys show that Americans buy into our gauzy platitudes about the character-building qualities of home ownership—at least those who still own them. A February Pew survey reported that nine out of 10 homeowners viewed their homes as a “comfort” in their lives. But for millions of Americans at risk of foreclosure, the home has become something else altogether: the source of panic and despair. Those emotions were on full display last week, when an estimated 53,000 people packed the Save the Dream fair at Atlanta’s World Congress Center. Its planners, with the support of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, brought together struggling homeowners, housing counselors, and lenders, including industry giants Bank of America and Citigroup, to renegotiate at-risk mortgages. Georgia’s housing market has been devastated by the current economic crisis—338,411 homes in the Peachtree state went into foreclosure in May and June alone.
Atlanta represents the current housing crisis in microcosm. Since the second quarter of 2006, housing values across the United States have fallen by one third. Over a million homes were lost to foreclosure nationwide in 2008, as homeowners struggled to meet payments. The number of foreclosures reached an all-time record last month—when owners of one in every 355 houses in the country received default or auction notices or were seized by creditors. The collapse in confidence in securitized, high-risk mortgages has also devastated some of the nation’s largest banks and lenders. The home financing giant Fannie Mae alone held an estimated $230 billion in toxic assets. Even if there are signs of hope on the horizon (home prices ticked upward by 0.5% in May and new housing starts rose in June), analysts like Yale’s Robert Shiller expect that housing prices will remain level for the next five years. Many economists, like the Wharton School’s Joseph Gyourko, are beginning to make the case that public policies should encourage renting, or at least put it on a level playing field with home ownership. A June 2009 survey commissioned by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, found a deep-seated pessimism about home ownership, suggesting that even if renting doesn’t yet have cachet, it’s the only choice left for those who have been burned by the housing market. One third of respondents don’t believe that they will ever be able to own a home. And 42% of those who once purchased a home, but don’t own one now, believe that they’ll never own one again. …
The Economist reports on a different kind of space race, looking for another planet that might support life.
IN 1995, when Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva detected the first exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star other than the sun) he started a race that has gained pace ever since. Some 360 such planets have now been detected, but none is exactly equivalent to the Earth.
The closest so far is Gliese 581c, which was discovered in 2007 by Dr Mayor’s colleague, Stéphane Udry. It is both rocky and orbits its parent star at a distance where liquid water could reasonably be expected to exist. However, since its parent star is a red dwarf—a far smaller and fainter object than the sun—that orbit is, in fact, much smaller that the Earth’s around the sun. That, in turn, suggests Gliese 581c is likely to be tidally locked to its orbital period, so that one side of the planet always faces the star and the other never does. Having half a planet in permanent daylight and the other half in permanent darkness does not sound like a good recipe for life.
As astronomers heard this week at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Rio, two new missions—a French one launched in December 2006 and an American one launched on March 6th—are in the process of trying to add to the list. Dr Mayor told the meeting that the French mission, CoRoT, has now found 80 exoplanets. It does so by watching for small diminutions in the amount of light from a star as the planet in question passes in front of it, a phenomenon known technically as a transit. The details of all but seven of these transiting planets are still unpublished, but Dr Mayor gave the meeting a preview.