Tag Archives: people

The Value of Learning a Second Language

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What is the value of learning a second language aside from the obvious practical benefits : the fact that you can talk to people who don’t speak your first language, can read things which have not been translated, can politely talk to people who don’t find it easy to speak your first language and can read things in the original.

When I was in high school adults tried to convince me to try to learn a second language by claiming that it broadens the mind. They failed. Since then I have, more or less, learned Italian. What have I gained ?

My impression is that my mind reminds just about as narrow as it was before.

I asked Elisabetta Addis (the woman to whom I am married) what she gained from learning English. She said it was very useful, because by learning a second living language she learned that there is more than one way to structure concepts, that is that the structure of Italian is not the structure of truth, but is rather just one of many equally valid structures developed for historical reasons. I confessed that I have had the impression that Aristotle was not always totally clear on the distinction between his immense contributions to understanding Greek and to understanding thought and logic and would have confidently claimed that true though was only possible in Greek. I was as usual speaking from ignorance.

Trying to understand my different impression, she suggested that math is, for this purpose, like a second language (she learned English and math beyond a fairly elementary level simultaneously and imagine how fun that was).

I said that I suspect that part of the reason is that no one could possible mistake the structure of English for the structure of truth. Partly, of course, English spelling is totally arbitrary and makes no sense. Also English is not logical because it is part German and part French. For example to find if a claim is true one verifies it. Or steer meat is beef and sheep meat is mutton. That is, since English is a weird hybrid, English is its own second language.

If so, this is important, since the only people who have a choice about learning a second language or not are native English speakers.

My unassisted thoughts on the topic below the fold.
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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Paul Samuelson is very smart but not always polite. When praising John Kenneth Galbraith he wrote something like “it would be wonderful to write his obituary” which only meant that it was enjoyable to write a encominium on Galbraith and any other more literal interpretation would be incorrect, funny and amusing to Prof Galbraith. Among Prof. Samuelson’s words of praise were, more or less, the following “he understood that economics is to important to leave up to the economists” Which is my effort to recall a translation of Clemenceau.

So the question is: “If you could write an encominium on a famous person in the mass circulation comments to a post in “A Fistful of Euros” who would you praise?”

The question is not “Does Robert Waldmann count how many comments each post gets and treat the number as a measure of his success ?” However, if anyone would like to post the comments “yes”,”that’s obviious”, “what a twit” or “that’s really the most pathetic form of self gratification I have ever heard of,” I will count them all the same.

So who would I like to praise ? Too keep the list under control I praise only people who died after I was born

My Mom should be famous
My Dad is almost famous
George Orwell
Vaclaw Havel
Nelson Mandela
Martin Luther King Jr
Jorge Luis Borges
Alan Turing ?
Larry Summers needs some praise right now and I won’t lie or anything but he was very patient with me.
Brad DeLong
Andrei Shleifer
Michael Kinsley
Graham Walker has tenure at MIT so he is sortof famous
Reinhart Selton is the most humble noble laureate that I have every met and he actually takes teaching undergraduates seriously.
Omigod I forgot to mention what an absolutely wonderful guy Salvatore Luria is.
I’m an economist so I have to talk about Kenneth Arrow even though I wish I could be a bit original.
Bernard Kouchner really deserves a better fate
John McCain should not be electe president of the USA even if he is an admirable person.
Happy is the nation that needs no heroes. Less happy is the nation full of people like me who didn’t appreciate Jimmy Carter
Why the hell was Andrew Young such a bad “permanent” representative at the UN ?
Paul Kafka is the nicest winner of the LA Times best first novel prize that I know
Many admirable and famous people who I know who are not going to get totally pissed at me for not mentioning them.

Click if you have nothing better to do than to read the actual praise.
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Sometimes it’s who you don’t vote for that counts

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As many Fistful readers will be aware, it’s widely expected that there’ll be a General Election in the UK this May. Of course, because of the way our system works, no one can say for definite when it will be until the Prime Minister actually goes to the Queen and requests that she dissolve Parliament but all the signs on the Magic Political 8-Ball point to an election on 05/05/05 (for once, a date we can all agree on regardless of how you order days, months and years).

The UK remains the only country in the EU to use the First Past The Post electoral system which means that, thanks to the vagaries of the system, we can have electoral results that seem somewhat odd to an external observer. Since 1945, no party has won more than 50% of the national vote (the Conservatives came closest in 1955 and 1959) but only one election – in the February election of 1974 – has seen neither of the two main parties (Conservatives and Labour) achieve a majority of the seats in Parliament.
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the amateur anthropologist

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20 years ago I had an Idea. Maybe someone who knows something about the field can tell me what is wrong with it in 20 seconds (including maybe someone else had the idea 40 years ago).

This thought was stimulated by reading Structural Anthropology a collection of essays by Claude Levi-Strauss. There are two questions. One is why are some cultures monogynous and others polygynous ? The other is why do the Bororo divide their tiny villages into 3 endogamous clans ?

OK first question. Why in some cultures men can marry more than one woman and in others only one ? One possbile explanation is polygyny occurs when the gender ratio is many women for each man. This can happen if lots of men get killed by other men. So women share husbands or go single wasting their uteruses (the Moll Flanders problem described by Daniel Defoe some time ago).

Could be the explanation, but I would like to talk about another. Levi Strauss was very interested in a very simple mathematical model which pointed out that hunter gatherers typically live in tiny groups (have too to avoid killing off all the game within walking distance). Someone else (really some two else) calculated that these groups were about as small as could be sustained given risk that a generation would be all male or all female and thus the last (he didn’t explain this model very clearly and I didn’t look it up). OK see how much worse this problem is if monogynous. If people live in small groups and are mostly endogamous (must have some flow with other villages/bands to avoide inbreeding but I assume this is pretty low). If each man is allowed to get only one woman pregnant, the number of woman who reproduce each generation is the lesser of the number of woman and the number of men. If each man is allowed to get as many women pregnant as are available then the number of women who reproduce each generation is the number of women. Polygyny might be required in people who live in small mostly endogamous villages to deal with random fluctuations in the sex ratio.
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Who is Roberto Frimigoni ?

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Google thinks that means Roberto Formigoni and so do I. One year ago FreeRepublic.com
posted an effort to translate the list of people who got free (but not valueless) rights to buy oil from Iraq under the oil for food program. The list was published by an Ahmed Chalabi affiliated newspaper in Iraq. Chalabi to freerepublic is not exactly the most reliable sourcing. However I was interested that the
list included one Roberto Frimigoni, who does not, as far as anyone can tell actually exist.

8 months ago I guessed that Roberto Frimigoni was Roberto Formigoni president of Lombardy. A week ago confirmation was all over the papers.

So who is Roberto Formigoni ? He is the founder and leader of “communione e liberazione” a very devoutly catholic organisation which has a history of dubious financing. As such he became a rather prominent Christian Democratic politician. When the party collapsed he went with a splinter that was un-alligned then a sub-splinter allied with Silvio Berlusconi and finally a sub-sub-splinter allied with Silvio Berlusconi. In this capacity he was elected and re-elected president of Lombardy.

For some reason which I can’t understand, Formigoni uses every available opportunity to attack Rosy Bindi formerly health minister in the Prodi government. The obsession is particularly irritating, since he begins his attacks by saying that she divides the world into good people like her and bad people like her opponents. Aside from that, my most vivid memory of his service as president of Lombardy was when he said that Bindy was profiting from tragedy when she noted (correctly) that responsibility for inspecting a high preassur oxygen chamber which burned killing patients belonged the region. Formigoni insisted that the chamber had been inspected thoroughly. He had to revise his assertion when it was noted that the facility included two pressure chambers of which only one was licensed and that the thorough inspectior had failed to notice the second chamber (which is roughly the size of a beached wale).

In his capacity as a very devout catholic he followed the Pope in denouncing desert storm and then sanctions on Iraq. He was, in 1991, perhaps the most prominent and eloquent Italian opponent of Desert Storm over shadowing the Italian left which was divided and confusing Needless to say, like 80% of Italians he was opposed to Bush Jr’s invasion.

The sudden explosion of evidence and allegations against Formigoni is, for him, unfortunately timed since he is up for re-election in two months. My original post in Italian below the fold.
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On being a bad immigrant

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A piece over at Crooked Timber by D-squared caught my eye this morning. Although it is primarily about using the Internet to slag off your MP/MSP/MEP, this bit piqued my interest:

It’s very useful for sending letters to MPs who don’t have readily available email addresses but (for example) helped sort out a parking ticket for you a couple of years ago and you want to say thank you. Or for that matter, if you want to ask them not to start any more wars, introduce ID card schemes. Or to suggest to them that the government is unlikely to do any better picking winners among immigrants than it did among nationalised industries.

Following the link to the Evening Standard reveals that the UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke has beliefs about immigration that warm my heart.

This is all quite a propos for me, since I discovered last Thursday that the Belgian Office des ?trangers, in its infinite wisdom, accorded me a permanent resident’s visa last September (read: green card) without my even having to apply, but then neglected to inform me. I discovered this as I attempted to, in fact, apply for permanent resident status. I have to suppress an urge to laugh manically, crying: “The fools have no idea!” In light of the recent rise of anti-immigrant politics in many European countries – including Belgium – I have to confess to a certain temptation to make D-squared’s point myself by getting laid off from my job, never learning the local language, and sitting around collecting unemployment for years. That would teach them to pick and choose immigrants on the basis of salary, employment class and nation of origin. (Indeed, the first part is already done.)
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Sticking Up for Old Nazis

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File this one under “What are they thinking?”

The German newspaper whose web site really could be better organized reports today that the Foreign Ministry’s internal magazine no longer publishes obituaries for diplomats who, during their lifetime, were members of the Nazi party.

I’m not sure why this is controversial, but apparently the FAZ thinks it is front-page news. (Links are not practical, but search for “Fischers Gedenkpraxis.)
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The Torygraph Comes Through, or

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The Return of the ?berpimp?

In things German, I usually check the Daily Telegraph several times before believing what they write, much less quoting them. But this story falls into a particular category, known in journalistic jargon as “too good to check.” (Thanks, Atrios.)

Update: I think this is fiction, or at the very least “sexed up.” That hasn’t stopped the discussion from spreading. See notes at the end of the posting.
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Paul Johnson: carried away as with a flood

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The catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean gave many of us reason to crack open the dictionary and reacquaint ourselves with the term ‘theodicy’. Crooked Timber‘s Brian Weatherson, for example, saw in the catastrophe an opportunity to discuss the ‘problem of evil’ (i.e., given the manifest existence of evil in the world, is it not correct to say that God, if he exist, may be all-good, or all-powerful, but in any event cannot be both?).

Now that is is a very proper thing for a philosopher to discuss. As for me, though, I have never found the problem of evil very interesting, as it seems to presume that God plays a much more direct role in the day-to-day running of the world than I think he does.

But this is not the place to explore my unorthodox religious views. I wish instead to consider the religious views of Paul Johnson, which are presumably much more orthodox than my own and are at any rate, I think, far more offensive. For Johnson regards the tsunami from the perspective of classical theodicy, and concludes that it was a Good Thing.

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Sheffield a la mar

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I have to confess to having had a fairly sucky 2004. Most of the causes are personal, and frankly not very interesting. But, as an example, my plan to spend the holiday season in Tunisia was abruptly cancelled because my wife got chicken pox. So, needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to 2005.

The wife got over her pox just a few days before Christmas, leaving us scrambling to find a vacation that both fit our respective work calendars, didn’t cost too much, and wasn’t booked solid. Consequently, I found myself at Zaventem airport at four in the morning on Christmas day fighting a miserable crowd so I could spend a week at Benidorm, Valencia, Spain.

I can’t claim I wasn’t warned. I did know that Benidorm – and the rest of the Costa Blanca – is something of a joke in the Dutch speaking part of Europe. After a week there, I still haven’t been in Spain. As far as I can tell, thanks to daily discount charter service between Sheffield and Alicante, the Costa Blanca is simply a warm, low-tax part of Yorkshire.
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