Cuttings: February 2017

A Woman’s Work by Harriet Harman: a life confronting sexism - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "The depths of her struggle with maternal guilt will surprise some. Pregnant when a byelection unexpectedly cropped up in the seat she hadn’t expected to fight so early, Harman had two more children while rising up the opposition ranks. She writes beautifully of her longing to be with her babies, and the nagging feeling that because she wasn’t part of the school gate crowd she must be doing it all wrong.... But to admit she was struggling would have damaged her, so she pushed on, pretending to be coping well.... There is a telling anecdote about how, having promised to take her son for a half-term treat, she declined a last-minute request to cover for a colleague in parliament. Summoned by her then boss, Robin Cook, to explain herself, she didn’t dare admit the truth and simply refused to say where she’d been – at which point he instantly forgave her, assuming she must be sneaking around having an illicit affair. Bunking off to see the children would have been unforgivable but going awol for sex simply made you one of the gang."

The education gap and its implications - blog post by John Naughton. "In October last year, my colleague David Runciman wrote a sobering piece in the Guardian under the headline 'How the education gap is tearing politics apart'. His starting point was an observation in The Atlantic in March 2015 that the best single predictor of Trump support in the Republican primary was the absence of a college degree. ... Turning then to Brexit, David observed that: 'Voters with postgraduate qualifications split 75 to 25 in favour of remain. Meanwhile, among those who left school without any qualifications, the vote was almost exactly reversed: 73 to 27 for leave.' ... This is really sobering stuff. It shows, in a picture, why a failure to invest in education and tackle educational underachievement eventually imposes massive social costs (possibly including the breakdown of democracy). It’s not rocket science, either. In an information economy, people who are poorly educated are always going to find it hard to find employment. And when they do it will be in precarious, exploitative, under-paid jobs. No wonder they voted the way they did — for the first charlatan who came along and said he could fix it."

How to overcome bias - article by Tom Stafford in The Guardian Mindhacks blog. "One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe.... Once you learn about this mental habit – called confirmation bias – you start seeing it everywhere.... How we should to protect our decisions from confirmation bias depends on why, psychologically, confirmation bias happens.... For their follow-up study [on confirmation bias], [Charles] Lord and colleagues re-ran the biased assimilation experiment, but testing two types of instructions for assimilating evidence about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent for murder. The motivational instructions told participants to be 'as objective and unbiased as possible', to consider themselves 'as a judge or juror asked to weigh all of the evidence in a fair and impartial manner'. The alternative, cognition-focused,instructions were silent on the desired outcome of the participants’ consideration, instead focusing only on the strategy to employ: 'Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue.' So, for example, if presented with a piece of research that suggested the death penalty lowered murder rates, the participants were asked to analyse the study’s methodology and imagine the results pointed the opposite way. They called this the 'consider the opposite'' strategy, and the results were striking. Instructed to be fair and impartial, participants showed the exact same biases when weighing the evidence as in the original experiment.... The 'consider the opposite' participants, on the other hand, completely overcame the biased assimilation effect – they weren’t driven to rate the studies which agreed with their preconceptions as better than the ones that disagreed, and didn’t become more extreme in their views regardless of which evidence they read. The finding is good news for our faith in human nature."

Do we still need Doctor Who? Time travel in the internet age - article by James Gleick in The Guardian, based on his book Time Travel. "In his 77th year, Wells tried to recall how his ideas for the novel had come to him. He couldn’t. He needed a time machine for his own consciousness. 'I have been trying, for a day or so, to reconstruct the state of my brain as it was about 1878 or 9 ... I find it impossible to disentangle ... The old ideas and impressions were made over in accordance with new material, they were used to make up the new equipment.' Yet if ever a story was kicking to be born, it was The Time Machine. The object of Wells’s interest, bordering on obsession, was the future, that shadowy, inaccessible place. 'So with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity,' says the Time Traveller."

The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts, by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins - review by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "In the autumn of 2011, as the world’s financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames.... Yet the bushfires those teenagers saw raging each night on the news got barely a mention in the seminars they sat through, they say: the biggest economic catastrophe of our times 'wasn’t mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn’t seem to have any relevance to understanding it', they write in The Econocracy. 'We were memorising and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple-choice exams.' ... After a year of being force-fed irrelevancies, say the students, they formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, with a sympathetic lecturer giving them evening classes on the events and perspectives they weren’t being taught. They lobbied teachers for new modules, and when that didn’t work, they mobilised hundreds of undergraduates to express their disappointment in the influential National Student Survey. The economics department ended up with the lowest score of any at the university: the professors had been told by their pupils that they could do better."

Édouard Louis: ‘For my family, a book was a kind of assault’ - article by Édouard Louis in The Guardian. "My parents have never read a book in their lives; there wasn’t a single book in our house. For us, a book was a kind of assault: it represented a life we would never have, the life of people who pursue an education, who have time to read, who have gone to university and had an easier time of it than us. ... Culture, the education system, books had all given us a feeling of rejection: in return, we rejected them. If culture paid us no attention, we would have our revenge. We despised it. It should never be said that the working classes reject culture, but rather that culture rejects the working classes, who reject it in turn. It should never be said that the working classes are violent, but rather that the working classes suffer from violence on a daily basis, and because of that they reproduce this violence by, for example, voting for the Front National. The domination comes first; those in positions of dominance are always responsible. I am more aware than some of the violence that literature can represent, because at a certain point in my life, I made use of that violence to hurt the people around me. Thanks to a series of accidents and failures, I made it into a lycée and then to university. I was the first person in my family to do this. During the week I would board at school or stay with friends, so I would only spend weekends with my parents. As soon as I walked into the house, I would sit on the sofa with a book, one that, most of the time, I would only be pretending to read. I wanted to let my family know that I wasn’t like them, that I no longer belonged to the same world as them, and I knew that a book would be the most violent instrument I could use to do that."

An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump’s Mental State - letter by Allen Frances to The New York Times, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder. Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither). Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers. His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological."

Parallel lives: how the Brexit vote revealed Britain's divided culture - article by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. " 'We all need to remember, every day more and more, that in the last resort there is no such thing as the "common man",' Richard Hoggart wrote, seven years before the birth of Nigel Farage. 'If we do not, we may in the end have allowed individual decision to slip away in our dutiful democratic identification of ourselves with a hypothetical figure whose main value is to those who will mislead us.' Hoggart, who died in 2014 at the age of 95, spent his extraordinarily productive working life urging us to watch out for men such as Farage and Donald Trump: 'mass persuaders' whose cynicism and self-interest knew no bounds. The Uses of Literacy, published 60 years ago next month, was his second and by far his most famous book. In it, Hoggart argued that collective engagement in a project of civic literacy would grow naturally out of the increasing education of the working classes, and that knowledge really would translate into power. And in some ways his hopeful prediction came true. From the 1960s onwards thousands of young people entered higher education, catering to the first mass cohorts of grammar school children, and then, in the 1990s, furnishing nearly half of under-25s with a degree. But what of the other half? This tacit segregation was laid bare by analysis of how people voted in the 2016 referendum. Statistically at least, if you were born before the era of mass higher education, and held few or no qualifications, you voted to leave. If you were under 40 – the biggest waves of university expansion happened after 1992 – and held a degree, you voted to remain.... it was tempting to view “leave” and “remain” voters as opposing factions in a culture war. Mail readers versus Guardian types; town dwellers versus city dwellers; pub-goers versus tapas-eaters. Tempting, yes, but too easy. Britain’s cultural divide is an expression of another, more pernicious divide that has been growing for decades, that of social class."

The World of Mr Casaubon by Colin Kidd: in defence of George Eliot’s pedant - review by Rosemary Hill in The Guardian. "Ever since their discovery of the Americas, Europeans had readjusted their ideas about history and the nature of creation. In an age in which religion and politics were synonymous, all social order depended on the Christian system of belief – so each new discovery had to be accommodated to fit the evidence of different peoples’ faiths into a single absolute truth. The Flood, widely believed to have been a real historical event, had left unharmed only Noah’s family, who had gone out and populated the Earth. Perhaps, in the process, the truths of the Old Testament, which prefigured the birth of Christ, had taken on different local forms, though proceeding from one source. This quest for a spiritual equivalent of the Unified Field Theory lasted for centuries and took many forms. Indeed, as Colin Kidd implies in his deft guided tour of some of the more labyrinthine byways of intellectual history, it is with us still. Kidd uses Mr Casaubon, the pedant of Middlemarch, whose purblind quest for the key to all mythologies sucks the life out of his young wife, Dorothea, as a pivotal figure. From different moments in the novel, Kidd shows that Casaubon was less out of touch or, by the lights of his time, deluded than George Eliot makes him appear. As a novelist and apologist for her own free-thinking views, she necessarily played down the size and complexity of the field in which he laboured. Kidd, however, comes neither to bury nor to praise a fictional character but aims to understand mythography. By an exercise of historical imagination he rescues this tale of red herrings and blind alleys from the condescension of posterity."

The echoes of HG Wells - letter to Guardian Review, 18 February 2017, by Will Prentice, British Library Sound Archive. "In later life HG Wells may not have remembered the inspiration behind his conception of time travel in 1878 or 79 ('Quantum Leaps', 11 February), but it probably had its origins in Edison's phonograph, demonstrated in London in February 1878. Edison's invention recorded and reproduced sound, and therefore time, several years before film. The ability to immerse oneself in a moment in the past was utterly new. Wells's story of technology that can juxtapose moments in time resonated nicely with this new idea. Wells himself captured moments in time featuring his own voice, and sent them hurtling into the far distant future. So far they have reached 2017, and can be heard at the British Library."