Listener 20 November 2000
Keywords Growth & Innovation; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Social Policy
Nineteenth century economists tended to focus on material output, assessing how well off someone was by the amount they could consume. That notion dominates today’s economics. Pushed, an economist might say it is better to have more material goods than less or, perhaps more humbly, that economics was only good at analyzing materialism, so all the other things which make up human happiness are assumed as given, or that they correlate with material consumption. To acknowledge so would, of course, downgrade the importance of economics, and of economists, which might be no bad thing.
Paper to Forum on the Future of Universities, University of Canterbury, 17 November 1999.
Keywords: Education;
“They measure knowledge by bulk, as it lies in a rude block, without symmetry, without design.”(1)
The Idea of a University(2)
If this independent scholar may begin with a quotation from another independent scholar, albeit a much more eminent one. John Stuart Mill wrote in his Utilitarianism:
“It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparisons knows both sides.”(3)
Listener 6 November 1999.
Keywords Health
Most of us are aware of Multiple Sclerosis victims in wheelchairs or with walking sticks. In fact the disease may have affected the sufferer up to two decades earlier, initially with a loss of muscular coordination – perhaps at first vision, then isolated numbness, to a progressing weakness in the legs. It does not much affect life expectation, nor does it affect intellect. The sufferers know that they will experience an increasing loss of muscular control.
