Suppose that somebody’s got a nice long life. He lives 90 years. Now, imagine that, instead, he lives only 50 years. That’s clearly worse for him. And if we accept the modest existence requirement, we can indeed say that, because, after all, whether you live 50 years or 90 years, you did exist at some time or another. So the fact that you lost the 40 years you otherwise would have had is bad for you. But now imagine that instead of living 50 years, the person lives only 10 years. That’s worse still. Imagine he dies after one year. That’s worse still. An hour? Worse still. Finally, imagine I bring it about that he never exists at all. Oh, that’s fine.
Wait. How can that be fine? But that’s the implication of accepting the modest existence requirement. If I shorten the life someone would have had so completely that he never gets born at all (or, more precisely, never comes into existence at all), then he doesn’t satisfy the requirement of having existed at some time or another. So, although we were making things worse and worse as we shortened the life, when we finally snipped out that last little fraction of a second, it turns out we didn’t make things worse at all. Now we haven’t done anything objectionable. That, it seems, is what you’ve got to say if you accept the modest existence requirement.
You make a lot of references to old economic thinkers like Smith, Keynes and so on. However, if you look at the current economic research that is published in the journals and taught at universities, the history of economic thought does not play a big role anymore…
Yes, absolutely. The history of economic thought has been woefully neglected by the profession in the last decades. This has been one of the major mistakes of the profession. One of the earliest reminders that we are going in the wrong direction has come from Kenneth Arrow about 30 years ago when he said: These days, I get surprised when I find the students don’t seem to know any economics that was written 25 or 30 years ago.
Is there any hope that this trend can be reversed?
Yes, I’m quite optimistic in this regard. I get the impression that this seems to be getting corrected right now. I’m particularly delighted that the corrective has come to a great extent from student interest. I’m very struck by the fact that at the university where I teach – Harvard – the demand for more history of economic thought has mostly come from students. As a result there is a lot more attempt by the department of economics as well as history and government to look for the history of political economy. Last year, along with my wife Emma Rothschild, I offered a course on Adam Smith’s philosophy and political economy. It drew a lot of interest and we got some of the finest students at Harvard.
Abstract: Many games today feature virtual money of some sort, whether a “hard currency” sold for real money or a “soft currency” earned through play. The question that this lecture answers is, how do you design money? Not how do players obtain money, nor how do they spend it – but how do you design the money itself. Economists have identified around a dozen attributes of a good money – the kind of money that makes an economy efficient. These attributes make a great guideline for designing serious digital currencies. But in game design, we don’t always want things to be efficient – we might want them to be challenging and fun instead. In this lecture, we therefore turn the economists’ advice on its head and come up with a guideline for designing “bad money”! Both historical and virtual examples are included.
A team from the the Warwick MBA won the Marks & Spencer Sustainable Retailing Challenge 2012. Demonstrating their commitment to responsible leadership, the Warwick MBA team is unique in being a team of distance learners.
All four team members live and work thousands of miles apart from each other. They demonstrate a shared vision and an innovative approach to collaborative work. John McGinty, Lyn Clinton, Agnes Mwagiru, and Craig Green joined us for a chat about their success.
Online higher education is always associated with access, but what happens when online delivery itself is a barrier? In May 2011, the U.S. Department of Education released additional guidance on the applicability of a prior “Dear Colleague” letter concerning accessibility and new technology in K-12 and postsecondary education. The “Dear Colleague” responded to successful complaints, brought by the National Federation for the Blind (NFB) and others, against a number of universities and other education organizations relating to either inaccessibility of specific devices, such as e-readers, or inaccessibility across a host of technologies. The May 2011 guidance emphasized that online courses and programs, and associated online services, must be accessible to students, faculty and staff with disabilities, consistent with the Americans With Disabilities Act (1990). This also applies to pilot programs used to evaluate a new tool or technology, and to schools and programs that currently do not enroll any disabled students.
This guidance appeared amid a host of other federal regulation pertaining to online delivery, such as state authorization, the credit hour rule and Gainful Employment under the “Program Integrity” banner. Many schools were taken up with these developments, and may have missed the full implications of the accessibility guidance. A late 2010 survey from WCET found that at many schools online learning is decentralized to the point that the average institution may be vulnerable to legal challenge around accessibility.
As the online higher education market grows more competitive, and various vendors and technologies tout alleged pedagogical and experiential enhancements, schools are looking for ways to stand out and improve educational value. As schools seek to make online delivery more interactive and media-rich, accessibility may be the unwitting victim. It is not clear that schools are adequately taking into account accessibility requirements, nor that in such a fast-moving space “good practice” is straightforward or stable.
Our Panelists:
Part I: Understanding the Law – Online Higher Education and Accessibility
Tuesday, April 10, 2-3:30 pm ET
Alex Cohen – PhD candidate at the LeBow College of Business at Drexel University, Graduate of the online Master of Science in Hospitality Management Program at Drexel University
Daniel F. Goldstein – Brown, Goldstein & Levy, LLP
Kelly Hermann – Director, Office of College-wide Disability Services, Empire State College, SUNY
Mark A. Riccobono – Executive Director, Jernigan Institute, National Federation of the Blind
Howard A. Rosenblum – CEO, National Association of the Deaf
To register for this Roundtable, please click here
Part II: Working Towards Good Practice- Integrating Accessibility into Mainstream and Next Generation Online Higher Education
Wednesday, April 18, 2-3:30 pm ET
William Welsh – Director, Office for Disability Services, The Pennsylvania State University
Cheryl Pruitt – Director, Accessible Technology Initiative, California State University Chancellor’s Office
Gaeir Dietrich – Director, High Tech Center Training Unit, California Community Colleges
Kristen Betts - Director, Online & Blended Learning, Armstrong Atlantic State University
Daniel Veit – Student in the online Master of Science in Higher Education Program at Drexel University, Transition Specialist for the Texas School for the Deaf
To register for this Roundtable, please click here
Miller and Gazzaniga have also started to study the right hemisphere’s role in moral reasoning. It is the kind of higher-level function for which the left hemisphere was assumed to be king. But in the past few years, imaging studies have shown that the right hemisphere is heavily involved in the processing of others’ emotions, intentions and beliefs — what many scientists have come to understand as the ‘theory of mind’6. To Miller, the field of enquiry perfectly illustrates the value of split-brain studies because answers can’t be found by way of imaging tools alone.
In work that began in 2009, the researchers presented two split-brain patients with a series of stories, each of which involved either accidental or intentional harm. The aim was to find out whether the patients felt that someone who intends to poison his boss but fails because he mistakes sugar for rat poison, is on equal moral ground with someone who accidentally kills his boss by mistaking rat poison for sugar7. (Most people conclude that the former is more morally reprehensible.) The researchers read the stories aloud, which meant that the input was directed to the left hemisphere, and asked for verbal responses, so that the left hemisphere, guided by the interpreter mechanism, would also create and deliver the response. So could the split-brain patients make a conventional moral judgement using just that side of the brain?
No. The patients reasoned that both scenarios were morally equal. The results suggest that both sides of the cortex are necessary for this type of reasoning task.
But this finding presents an additional puzzle, because relatives and friends of split-brain patients do not notice unusual reasoning or theory-of-mind deficits. Miller’s team speculates that, in everyday life, other reasoning mechanisms may compensate for disconnection effects that are exposed in the lab. It’s an idea that he plans to test in the future.
Stories about aging have traditionally focused on the need for graceful accommodation. The recommended solution to diminishing vigor and impending death was resignation, coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and in relationships. Given that nothing could be done to prevent or retard aging, this focus made sense. Rather than fretting about the inevitable, one could aim for peace of mind.
Today we face a different situation. While we still lack effective means for slowing the aging process, we can identify research directions which might lead to the development of such means in the near future. So ‘deathist’ stories and ideologies, which counsel passive acceptance, are no longer harmless sources of consolation: they are fatal barriers to urgently-needed action.
A British man, Tony Nicklinson, wants to die. In 2005, Mr Nicklinson suffered a stroke that has left him with “locked-in syndrome”. This syndrome is, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “a rare neurological disorder characterized by complete paralysis of voluntary muscles in all parts of the body except for those that control eye movement.” Mr Nicklinson is only able to communicate through a perspex board, which interprets his blinking. He wishes now to end his life “lawfully”, because he considers it “dull, miserable, demeaning, undignified and intolerable”. He is, therefore, seeking protection for any doctor that aids him in suicide. At the moment, the case is proceeding after a ruling from a High Court Judge.
Who else, rather than Mr Nicklinson, should decide how he should live or, indeed, whether he should live at all, when he is capable of communicating and contemplating this choice? It is true that we ought do all we can to provide him with reasons to live, since this amounts to giving more information with which he can make a more informed decision: the more information one has, the better decision it will be. This is not coercion but making available more evidence so that Mr Nicklinson is able to exercise his autonomy.
