Author: Richard

Some weeks ago I wrote a piece where I asked how we could encourage rather than discourage children to ask powerful questions. Stumbling around the web I came across this impassioned piece, “Grazing the Net” by Jamie McKenzie. In it he says:
“Unfortunately, schools have traditionally neglected the development of student questioning. According to Hyman (1980), for every 38 teacher questions in a typical classroom there is but one student question. Schoolhouse research, sadly, has too often fallen into the “go find out about” category. Topical research (Go find out about Dolly Madison) requires little more than information gathering. We must move beyond this traditional search for answers to simple questions. Instead of asking elementary students to find out all they can about a particular state or nation, for example, we should be asking them to compare and contrast several states or cities for a purpose – sifting, sorting and weighing the information to gain insight, to make a decision or to solve a problem.”
In contrast to what he calls the traditional approach he argues that:
“… We must teach students to start with what Sizer calls “essential questions” – the kinds of probing inquiries which might extend over a month or a lifetime – questions worth asking, which touch upon basic human issues – investigations which might make a difference in the quality of life – studies which might cast light in dark corners, illuminating basic truths. And then we must teach them how to conduct a thorough research study. Questioning persists throughout all stages of such a study.”
And concludes:
“What is a “free range student?” It is simply a student fed on the wild grains and fragments available in the magical world made accessible by the Net. Just as some gourmets prefer free range chickens to their plump cousins raised on processed grains and feed heavily impregnated with hormones and chemicals, the theme of this article is the value of raising children to think, explore and make meaning of their worlds for themselves. No more second hand knowledge. No more sage on the stage. Students will learn to make sense out of nonsense and order out of chaos. They will ask essential questions and solve complex problems. They will join electronically with brothers and sisters around the globe to cast a spotlight on earth-threatening issues which deserve attention and action.”

My wild prediction for today is that the idea of a Universal Basic Income will become a hot political issue over the next ten years or so. As Philippe Van Parijs defines it, “By universal basic income I mean an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of society. The grant is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not.”
Although I have been interested in the idea of a UBI for some years, I arrived at today’s thought by a somewhat circuitous route. It began with a link in the excellent Crooked Timber to a piece by Jacob Hacker about the rise in the instability of family income in the USA. Hacker writes:
“…. what my evidence shows is deeply troubling. When I started out, I expected to see a rise in the instability of family income. But nothing prepared me for the sheer magnitude of the increase. At its peak in the mid-’90s, income instability was almost five times as great as it was in the early ’70s, and, although it dropped somewhat during the late ’90s (my data end in 1999), it has never fallen below twice its starting level. By comparison, permanent income differences across families have risen by a more modest, if still troubling, 50 percent over the same period.”
While the US may be a particularly extreme example, this sense of economic insecurity seems to be growing throughout the industrial democracies, with curious consequence of people becoming less rather than more engaged with the political process. This linked to the numerous other examples of people’s alienation from party politics, such as this piece recently featured on the BBC news site, leads me to believe that if we are to have functioning democracies something must change. What we have in the UK and USA where a Government only represents a small minority of potential voters looks like a recipe for social discord.
A UBI would give every voter a clear stake in society and a solid reason to participate in the political process. And curiously, although the UBI is very much a fringe concept at present, the fact that it has advocates from across the political spectrum leads me to believe that it is an idea that has got legs.

My good friend Ben Copsey (double REALbasic prize winner 2004) sent me this link to Paul Graham‘s essay on “Great Hackers”. One of the bits that particularly struck me comes quite late in the essay. This is where he talks about the importance of good taste in producing good work. As he says:
“Many people in this country think of taste as something elusive, or even frivolous. It is neither. To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company’s products. And if you have really good taste, you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of problem that good people like to work on.”
This led me on to looking at some of his other essays – all of them interesting – but the one I particularly liked was “Taste for makers”. Personally, I think Graham gets too hung up on the issue of whether taste is subjective or objective, but where I do agree strongly is his concluding argument that the cultivation of good taste is a requirement for doing great work:
“Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you’ll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don’t ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

I guess most of us have an America inside our head. Actually it’s probably it’s more complicated than that. Most of us have several contradictory Americas in our heads struggling for supremacy at any particular moment in time. The America that has often inspired me was summoned up in an entry in Bruce Sterling’s blog a few days ago. Taking a quote from Kurt Andersen, in an essay about Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, Sterling writes:
“It goes like this:
‘But when I look at the body of Michael’s work — and for that matter, at Michael himself — the common threads I see are most of the admirable American virtues. By which I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, the virtues embodied by (for instance) Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain and Charles and Ray Eames: industry, populism, pragmatism, playfulness, honesty, unpretentiousness, a sense of humor, a light touch, an appreciation of pleasure, a basic frugality, a rejection of cant, a cheerful magpie mongrelism, a balance between city-on-a-hill conviction and big-tent laissez-faire tolerance.’
There’s a lot to what Andersen says here. That’s precisely the kind of virtuous America that I want to be American in. What a great place. I wonder what happened to it, and what one has to do to get it back.”
Curiously, I rediscovered someone who seems to have the answer to Sterling’s questions yesterday. Michael Moorcock, a legendary Notting Hill figure in the Sixties, is now living in Austin, Texas – Stirling’s home time. In a very long interview, as an activist taxpayer without a vote, Moorcock does a brilliant dissection of the American psyche – well worth putting aside some time to read.

Back around the time of the Madrid bombings I wrote a short piece where I argued that we had more to fear from the responses to the fear of terrorism than from terrorism itself. I was pleased to see that Steven Johnson has taken up a similar theme. As he says in the conclusion to his piece:
“To be clear: terrorism is a threat to us, and our politicians and law enforcement officials should be focused on ridding the world of those threats as effectively as they can. But those leaders should also be focused on giving us a sense of proportion. By any reasonable statistical measure, ordinary Americans are safe from terrorism. It would be nice, for once, to have our leaders remind us of that.”
Well worth a read.
Harvey Molotch, whose book, “Where Stuff Comes From”, I have been urging all my friends to read has also ventured into this territory. In a long essay written with Noah McClain “Dealing with Urban Terror” (PDF) where they thoughtfully explore some of the things that could be done to deal with this problem they conclude:
“Authorities charged with addressing the September attacks have proclaimed an endless war against the perpetrators, harkening back to the most regressive traditions of dealing with crime and disorder, domestic and foreign. We know from this past history that fear of crime – to take the crucial precedent – leads to major policy consequence, including race and class effects. Fear of terrorist crime in the US now escalates to global consequence, including abuse of human rights and the potential for cycles of turmoil around the world. With some analytic and empirical help it may be possible to transmute an understandable public anxiety into outcomes that increase rather than curtail social enfranchisement, protect civil liberties, and add some safety. We need more knowledge about how cities, including those in the rich centers of the world, work in the context of terror – both for the sake of better policies as well as more informed and effective populations.”

My friend Alex McKie is engaged in an interesting adventure. She is travelling around the UK asking people to send her their three wishes for the future on a postcard – you can also do it on-line. What I found particularly intriguing is that so far she has found that people seem to think that it is OK for children and the young to make wishes, but for the more mature it is somehow illegitimate. Of course, this may change as she continues her journeys, but it seems to ring true. If it is the big question is why.
Anyway you can follow Alex’s adventures and find out how to make your wishes here on Alex’s 3 Wishes for the Future website.

Harvey Molotch gets network thinking. More than that, he does it. In his book, “Where Stuff Comes From”, he shows, with brilliant simplicity, the complex web of interactions that lie behind creation and production of the everyday stuff that surrounds us. This is a book that every thinking designer should read. Actually, it?s a book that anyone who cares about the world we live in should read. Sensible, humane and thoughtful, it brightened up my day.

I’m not a great sports fan, but I do sometimes watch some of the big events on TV. To my great surprise I found myself watching quite a lot of the matches in the European Cup, that end a couple of weeks ago. What fascinated me was the progress of the Greek team. As the tournament went on the Greeks, who started at 150 to 1 against winning the Cup, beat team after team, that had players that were more skilful and talented than the Greeks. The reason the commentators claimed was that the Greeks, German manager, was tactically more acute than his opponents. You could say that the Greeks victory was a triumph of intelligence over talent.
This reminded me of a Wimbledon final many years ago when Arthur Ashe beat the supposedly invincible Jimmy Connors. Curiously, the Guardian revived an account of the match a few days ago. I can remember watching the match and puzzling over its meaning. At the time I was trying to understand the nature of creativity, intelligence and learning – a quest that continues to this day – and thinking about “the Intelligence of the tennis player” took me to some places I hadn’t been before.
Reflecting on this again, I realised, that while there is a kind of intellectual pleasure in watching the triumph of intelligence over talent, the problem is that it is a bit dull. For the non-sports fan like myself what is missing is that sense of transcendental magic that one gets from seeing a super talented athlete, like Muhammad Ali or Maradona, perform.

I have always been fascinated by the way that people use technologies for their own purposes, often in ways unimagined by their creators. So I was please to find this one to add to my collection. Paul Skidmore of Demos reports:
“I came across an interesting spin on the idea of smart mobs while I was in New Zealand. Groups of casual workers who are employed picking fruit in areas like Hawke’s Bay use mobile phones to gain leverage over employers. They will text each other the wage that different growers are offering per basket that day, and then go and work for whoever is paying best, leaving other growers in the lurch. It goes to show that even in industries like horticulture, technology can still have a very disruptive impact on ways of working.”

As the Baby Boomers get hoist on their own petard for their promotion of the cult of youth, Simon Caulkin provides a nice counter in a sidebar to a piece explaining how accountants are failing to measure what is important. In the sidebar he describes how B&Q, the DIY stores company, discovered the value of employing older workers:
“As with many companies, its distinctive qualities were initially the result of an accident: growing fast in the late 1980s, it had to spread its recruitment net to the over-50s. It discovered that the necessity of employing older workers could be a virtue. As a result of a deeper skills base and wider experience, it found that its Macclesfield store, staffed entirely by over-50s, was outperforming others in profits, sales, customer service, short-term absenteeism and shrinkage.
Of the company’s 37,000 workforce, 21 per cent are aged 50 or more and 7 per cent are over 60. B&Q even boasts two employees in their nineties.
The company amplified its knowledge advantage by setting up a corporate university. In a self-reinforcing spiral, it transpired that over-50s were adept learners too – not just about products but also about the wider brand. When, in response to uncomfortable questioning at an AGM, the company launched sustainable sourcing and an ethical trading policy for its timber, over-50s were quick to become persuasive company advocates.”