nouswork

Far from running out of funds, this looks like a government with money to burn. While the poor and middle struggle to survive the crisis that George Osborne bewails, he’s giving away our money to those who need it least. So let’s support him when he calls for cuts, but demand that he directs them at the welfare state he’s running for corporations and billionaires, which is turning this crisis into a calamity.

The capture of so much wealth by the executive class performs no useful function. What the very rich appear to value is relative income. If executives were all paid 5% of current levels, competition between them (a questionable virtue anyway) would be no less fierce. As the immensely rich HL Hunt commented several decades ago, “money is just a way of keeping score.

just four decades ago, Finland’s academic record was a mess. In the 1970s, though, the government did something extraordinary to combat lax education: It mandated that every teacher earn a master’s degree, even agreeing to foot the bills for the extra schooling. Teaching’s prestige skyrocketed; becoming a teacher in Finland is now as tough as becoming a lawyer. Only one in 10 primary school applicants makes the cut! Today, the rest of the world is scrambling to follow Finland’s example as its hyper-educated population continues to boost the country’s productivity.

What did God breathe? Words of wisdom. Words of wisdom that lead to salvation. Words of wisdom that lead to salvation through faith in Christ. If we read and find only words of science or dogma or ethics or history, the Bible has not yet become for us the living and active and inspired word of God.

I think that we should look more to Cain than to Adam if we want to understand the phenomenology of original sin. Surely the fundamental primal feeling of human beings is not that I have done something wrong but that someone has done something wrong to me – and that I am owed. Hence our rebellion against grace and the challenge of a truly disinterested faith.

At present we all participate in a game of unreality. We go through a process of discernment of vocation which is for the order of deacon and priest but, in fact, everyone really knows we are trying to find people who can be leaders of our churches. We are looking for vicars. If that is not the case then we ought to be honest and say so and challenge the perceptions of those in our churches for whom it does seem to be the case

When properly accredited experts say things that the powerful want to hear, their word becomes a kind of gospel. It is immune to serious challenge unless it is shown to be grossly inept. Even when it is debunked, the people who own and run the world carry on doing what they want, confident that another plausible-sounding justification will surface soon. Meanwhile, the self-declared champions of reason and truth are too busy worrying about flying horses to notice

Moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be.

The idea that being under pressure helps to focus attention and makes us better at cognitive tasks has been around for almosta century. But Aschbacher’s study is a first step to showing how it can sometimes make us physically healthier as well – although exactly what is going on at the cellular level to explain the result is still unclear.

what happens to wages without powerful unions. They go down. They go inexorably down. Governments try to ratchet them up, but are not bold enough, and their solutions are weak. They end up subsidizing wages which nobody can live on. We all chip in to pay the wages that employers should be paying, and inequalities widen. We subsidise corporate superprofits. Minimum wages, not high enough to begin with, are subverted underhandedly or frozen openly in times of crisis.

Lesson one: there is no such thing as a successful Thatcherite policy. There is just a policy whose failures are not yet apparent