This is David Schmidtz on “The Meanings of Life”

In Philosophical Explanations, Nozick says the question of life’s meaning is so important to us and leaves us feeling so vulnerable that,

we camouflage our vulnerability with jokes about seeking for the meaning or purpose of life: A person travels for many days to the Himalayas to seek the word of an Indian holy man meditating in an isolated cave. Tired from his journey, but eager and expectant that his quest is about to reach fulfillment, he asks the sage, “What is the meaning of life?” After a long pause, the sage opens his eyes and says, “Life is a fountain.” “What do you mean life is a fountain?” barks the questioner. “I have just traveled thousands of miles to hear your words, and all you have to tell me is that? That’s ridiculous.” The sage then looks up from the floor of the cave and says, “You mean it’s not a fountain?”

In a variant of the story, he replies, “So it’s not a fountain.” The sage feels none of the angst that led the seeker to the cave. So, who’s missing something: sage or seeker? The story suggests a contrast of attitudes. I’ll call them Existentialist and Zen, meaning only to gesture at the traditions these names evoke. The Existentialist attitude is that life’s meaning, or lack thereof, is of momentous import. We seek meaning. If we don’t get it, we choose between stoicism and despair. The Zen attitude is that meaning isn’t something to be sought. Meaning comes to us, or not. If it comes, we accept it. If not, we accept that too. To some degree, we choose how much meaning we need. Perhaps the sage achieves peace by learning not to need meaning. Perhaps that’s what we’re meant to learn from the sage’s seemingly meaningless remark that life is a fountain.

The Existentialist insight, in part, is that meaning is something we give to life. We do not find meaning so much as throw ourselves at it. The Zen insight, in part, is that worrying about meaning may itself make life less meaningful than it might have been. Part of the virtue of the Zen attitude lies in learning to not need to be busy: learning there is joy and meaning and peace in simply being mindful, not needing to change or be changed. Let the moment mean what it will.

Este viernes 12 de Febrero inicia el XX Diplomado en Análsis Político Estratégico del CIDE, coordinado por Carlos Elizondo Mayer-Serra y Julio Ríos Figueroa.  Como coordinador de ediciones pasadas de este Diplomado,  hago extensiva la invitación a que lo consideren.

Más información aquí.

Bryan Caplan, over at EconLog, cites an interesting discussion on the role of education and productivity, as featured in Arnold King and Nick Schulz recent book From Poverty to Prosperity. The authors interview William Lewis:

AK & NS: One finding that might surprise some people is that the education level of the labor force isn’t nearly as important for the overall economic performance of a nation as commonly thought… How did you reach that conclusion?

William Lewis: … [W]e got the first hint of this when we were studying Japan back in the early 1990s…  There were many disparaging comments made in the U.S., and maybe even stronger ones made abroad (especially in Japan), about how the U.S. labor force was getting what it deserved because it was lazy, uneducated, and maybe even dumb.  But of course, the Japanese – the capable, competent Japanese manufacturing companies – showed that this notion was wrong by coming here, building their own factories, managing American labor, and taking a lot of other local inputs and coming within five percent of reproducing their home country productivity.
[…]
The great bulk of the evidence about education came from competent multinational corporations of any nationality, who showed that they could go virtually anywhere in the world and take the local workforce and train it to come close to home country productivity.  The clinching evidence [came when] we looked at some other industries.  We compared the construction industry in the U.S. with construction in Brazil and found that in Houston, the U.S. industry was using Mexican agriculture workers who were illiterate and didn’t speak English.  They were not any different than the agricultural workers who were building similar high rises in Sao Paolo, say.  And yet they were working at four times the productivity.
…Uneducated people can be trained on the job to accomplish quite high skill levels and quite high levels of productivity.  And that’s good news, because if the World Bank and everybody else had to wait until we revamped the educational institutions of all of the poor countries and then put a cohort or two of workers through it, we are talking about another fifty years before anything happens.  That’s not acceptable and it’s not necessary, thank God.

From The New York Times (1-jan-2010):

Why Twitter will endure

“What could anyone possibly find useful in this cacophony of short-burst communication?

Well, that depends on whom you ask, but more importantly whom you follow. On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.

Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.”

I guess that means that all of us should keep typing one-liners to give twitter critical mass and, eventually, more substance: nobody really cares, but that is the point!

This image includes a non random selection of my facebook status comments during 2009 (you can find the FB app   under “my year in status”).  Egocentric, yes but a bit therapeutic, too.

This is from The Brookings Institution–(check the links to the conference papers below!)  The conference brought together a great group of micro and macroeconomists.

What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small

Bill Easterly and Jessica Cohen of Brookings recently convened a conference with leading development experts to explore one of the most vexing issues of global development: what do we really know about what works and what doesn’t when fighting global poverty? The conference focused on the ongoing debate over which paths to development really maximize results: a big-picture approach focusing on the role of institutions, macroeconomic policies, growth strategies and other country-level factors; or a more grassroots approach focusing on particular microeconomic interventions such as conditional cash transfers, bed nets, teaching materials and other micro-level improvements in service delivery on the ground.

CONFERENCE PAPERS:

• The New Development Economics: We Shall Experiment, But How Shall We Learn?
  Author: Dani Rodrik (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government)
  Discussants: Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard University) & Martin Ravallion (World Bank)
• Breaking Out of the Pocket: Do Health Interventions Work? Which and in What Sense?
  Authors: Simon Johnson (International Monetary Fund) & Peter Boone (London School of Economics, Centre for Economic Performance)
  Discussants: Anne Case (Princeton University) & Jessica Cohen (Brookings Institution)
• Pricing and Access: Lessons from Randomized Evaluations in Education and Health
  Author: Michael Kremer (Harvard University and the Brookings Institution)
  Discussants: David Weil (Brown University) & Paul Romer (Stanford University)
• The Policy Irrelevance of the Economics of Education: Is ‘Normative as Positive’ Just Useless, or is it Worse?
  Author: Lant Pritchett (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government)
  Discussants: Ben Olken (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) & Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development)
• High Bandwidth Economic Policies: Strategies To Speed Up Productive Transformation
  Author: Ricardo Haussman (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government)
  Discussants: Nava Ashraf (Harvard University Business School) & Ross Levine (Brown University)
• Big Answers For Big Questions: The Illusions of Macroeconomics
  Author: Abhijit Banerjee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
  Discussants: Peter Klenow (Stanford University) & William Easterly (NYU and Brookings Institution)

In a very interesting piece on the fallacy of taking “the normative model of education as a true positive model” (NAP), Lant Pritchett cites Pigou:

“It is not sufficient to contrast the imperfect adjustments of unfettered enterprise with the best adjustment economists in their studies can imagine. For we cannot expect that any State authority will attain, or will even wholeheartedly seek, that ideal. Such authorities are liable alike to ignorance, to sectional pressure, and the personal corruption by private interest.”

The whole piece is here:

The Policy Irrelevance of the Economics of Education: Is ‘Normative as Positive’ Just Useless, or is it Worse?
Lant Pritchett (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government).