قاهرتـــــهم
31/10/2009, 02:11 AM
سسسسسسسسسسسسسسلام
وششششلونكم يا اعضاااء منتديااات عرووس
ان شاء الله تزقحوون..؟
تكفووووون جاااايتكم اليوم محتااااجه اوي اوي
دكتووورنا معطينا 4 مقالات ويقول سووا منها 4 برقرافات
بس انا يااادوبني داخله قسسم الانجليزي ومو فاهمه شي..
الله يرضى عليكم ابي احد يساااعدني والله لا ادعي له بصلاتي.. http://forums.al3almi.net/images/smilies/biggrin.gifhttp://forums.al3almi.net/images/smilies/biggrin.gif
هذ1 المقال الأول
the new intolerance
Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted that "a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise - the term is not too strong - a senescent Europe". And according to Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a "bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties", Muslims are already "conquering Europe's cities, street by street". So what if Muslims account for only 3% to 4% of the EU's total population of 493 million? In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It? - which was ... commended as "morally serious" by the New York Times and has beguiled some liberal opinion-makers as well as rightwing blowhards -- [Caldwell claims that] "advanced" cultures "have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to 'primitive' ones".
...Caldwell stops short of speculating what Europe would or should do to atone for its folly of nurturing a perfidious minority. The Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, whom Martin Amis has hailed as a "great sayer of the unsayable", does not hesitate to spell it out in his bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It:
In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out - as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em.
Bruce Bawer, whose book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, suggests that European officials, who are "in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday", "could start rescuing Europe tomorrow". There are now even politicians ready to do the "unsayable". The Dutch MP Geert Wilders, whose party was one of the big rightwing winners of June's elections to the European Parliament, proposes expelling millions of Muslims from Europe. A separate ministry for this purpose is advocated by Austria's extreme-right parties, which gained an unprecedented 29% of the popular vote last year...
Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. So what explains the rash of bestsellers with histrionic titles - While Europe Slept, America Alone, The Last Days of Europe? None of their mostly neocon American authors was previously known for their knowledge of Muslim societies; all of them suffer the handicaps of what the philosopher Charles Taylor, in his introduction to a new collection of scholarly essays entitled Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, calls "block thinking", which "fuses a very varied reality into one indissoluble unity". Certainly, the idea of a monolithic "Islam" in Europe appears an especially pitiable bogey when you regard the varying national origins, linguistic and legal backgrounds, and cultural and religious practices of European Muslims. Many so-called Muslims from secularised Turkey or syncretistic Sindh and Java would be condemned as apostates in Saudi Arabia, whose fundamentalist Wahhabism informs most western visions of Islam....
A more thoughtful conservative than Caldwell could have examined valuably how neoliberal capitalism, while enriching Europe's translational elites, has frayed the continent's old cultures and solidarities. In Europe, as in India and China, globalisation has provoked great anxieties about inequality and unemployment, fuelling new xenophobic nationalisms and backlashes against ethnic and religious minorities. The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger that "minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties".
...In actuality, the everyday choices of most Muslims in Europe are dictated more by their experience of globalised economies and cultures than their readings in the Qu'ran or sharia. Along with their Hindu and Sikh peers, many Muslims in Europe suffer from the usual pathologies of traditional rural communities transitioning to urban secular cultures: the encounter with social and economic individualism inevitably provokes a crisis of control in nuclear families, as well as such ills as forced marriage, the poor treatment of women and militant sectarianism. However, in practice, millions of Muslims, many of them with bitter experiences of authoritarian states, coexist frictionlessly and gratefully with regimes committed to democracy, freedom of religion and equality before the law.
..Liberal spaces within Europe have brought many more Muslim women out of their old confinements. Benhabib asserts that these women, who "struggle at first to retain their traditional and given identities against the pressures of the state", then go on to engage and contest their Islamic traditions. As Europe's own passage from tradition showed, this necessary reconfiguration is not the work of a day. It requires the practices and institutions of European citizenship to grow more rather than less flexible.....
Writing in 1937 about the minority then most despised in Europe, Joseph Roth predicted that "Jews will only attain complete equality, and the dignity of external freedom, once their 'host nations' have attained their own inner freedom, as well as the dignity conferred by sympathy for the plight of others". This proved to be too much to ask of Europe in 1937. But the moral challenge has not gone away - civilisation remains an ideal rather than an irreversible achievement - and the dangers of leaving it unmet are incalculable.
وهذ1 المقال الثاني
the uncertainty factor
At research seminars, people don't take Keynesian theorising seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another." So declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, writing in 1980. At the time, Lucas was arguably the world's most influential macroeconomist; the influence of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose theory of recessions dominated economic policy for a generation after the Second World War, seemed to be virtually at an end.
But Keynes, it turns out, is having the last giggle. Lucas's "rational expectations" theory of booms and slumps has shown itself to be completely useless in the current world crisis. Not only does it offer no guide for action, but it more or less asserts that market economies cannot possibly experience the kind of problems they are, in fact, experiencing. Keynesian economics, on the other hand, which was created precisely to make sense of times like these, looks better than ever.
But while Keynesianism is experiencing a revival, there are major questions about just what needs to be revived. Many economists agree that their field went off track, that in some important ways it lost touch with reality, and that a return to some of the ideas Keynes laid out more than 70 years ago is part of the cure for what ails us. But there is much less agreement about what, exactly, needs to change in the way we think about matters economic.
In this book, Robert Skidelsky, the great biographer of Keynes, searches for clues in the original work of "the master". The book is part critique of the current state of economics, part biographical sketch (it's worth your time just for Chapter 3, "The Lives of Keynes"), part programme for the future.
It also offers a brief but compelling account of the anti-Keynesian counter-revolution, the movement that began with Milton Friedman and reached its apex with Lucas's whispers and giggles. Skidelsky's book is an important contribution at a time of soul-searching, a must read even if one doesn't fully accept its conclusions.
As you might guess, I do, in fact, have some questions about Skidelsky's conclusions, though not so much about how we got here as about what we do next. And those questions, in turn, centre on a long-running dispute over what Keynesian economics are really about.
In Part I of his 1936 masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes asserted that the core of his theory was the rejection of Say's Law, the doctrine that said that income is automatically spent. If it were true, Say's Law would imply that all the things we usually talk about when trying to assess the economy's direction, like the state of consumer or investor confidence, are irrelevant; one way or another, people will spend all the income coming in. Keynes showed, however, that Say's Law isn't true, because in a monetary economy people can try to accumulate cash rather than real goods. And when everyone is trying to accumulate cash at the same time, which is what happened worldwide after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the result is an end to demand, which produces a severe recession.
Some of those who consider themselves Keynesians, myself included, agree with what Keynes said in The General Theory, and consider the rejection of Say's Law the core issue. On this view, Keynesian economics is primarily a theory designed to explain how market economies can remain persistently depressed.
But there's an alternative interpretation of what Keynes was all about, one offered by Keynes himself in an article published in 1937, a year after The General Theory. Here, Keynes suggested that the core of his insight lay in the acknowledgement that there is uncertainty in the world – uncertainty that cannot be reduced to statistical probabilities, what the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld called "unknown unknowns". This irreducible uncertainty, he argued, lies behind panics and bouts of exuberance and primarily accounts for the instability of market economies.
In this book, Skidelsky puts himself in the camp of those who argue, in effect, that Keynes 1937, not Keynes 1936, is the man to listen to – that Keynesianism is, or should be, essentially about uncertainty and how it leads to economic instability. And from this he draws some radical conclusions.
Most strikingly, Skidelsky declares that the traditional division between microeconomics and macroeconomics, which is based on whether one focuses on individual markets or on the overall economy, is all wrong; macroeconomics should be defined as the field that studies those areas of economic life in which irreducible uncertainty, uncertainty that cannot be tamed with statistics, dominates. He goes so far as to call for a complete division of postgraduate studies: departments of macroeconomics should not even teach microeconomics, or vice versa, because macroeconomists must be protected "from the encroachment of the methods and habits of mind of microeconomics".
How far should we be willing to follow Skidelsky in this? I think we must trust the biographer in his assessment of Keynes himself; Skidelsky argues persuasively that Keynes spent much of his life deeply focused upon, even obsessed with, the question of how one acts in the face of uncertainty, which is why Keynes 1937 comes closer to the essence of the great man's own thinking.
That's not the same thing, however, as saying that Keynes was right – even about his own contribution. Surely it's possible to make the case for a less profound reconstruction of economics than Skidelsky advocates. I'd point out that behavioural economists, who drop the assumption of perfect rationality but don't seem much concerned by the essential unknowability of the future, have done relatively well at making sense of this crisis; I'd also point out that current disputes over economic policy, above all about the usefulness of government spending to promote employment, seem to be primarily about Say's Law – that is, Keynes 1936.
No matter. You don't have to agree with everything Skidelsky says to find this a wonderfully stimulating book, one that reflects the author's unparalleled erudition. We're living in the second Age of Keynes – and Robert Skidelsky is still the guide of choice.
• Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for economics last year.
وهذ1 المقال الثالث
a new world the globe , london
Twenty years ago, Trevor Griffiths was commissioned by Richard Attenborough to write a movie about the visionary English radical, Thomas Paine. Sadly, the film was never made. But Griffiths has now adapted his magnificent screenplay for the stage. The resulting three-hour play, even if it occasionally reveals its origins, is a moving and informative tribute to the man Michael Foot once called "the greatest exile ever to leave these shores".
Exile is very much Griffiths's theme. The Thetford-born Paine is seen as a restless traveller whose writings on liberty, justice and freedom had an inspirational impact on both the American and French revolutions. Journeying to Philadelphia in 1774, he finds himself enmeshed in the struggle of the 13 colonies to free themselves from British rule, but he becomes disillusioned when victory licenses the rich and powerful. Arriving in Paris in 1790 full of rational optimism about a revolution based on human brotherhood, Paine is horrified when it descends into the bloodbath of the Terror. Yet, although outlawed in England and imprisoned in Paris, Paine dies in the US still believing in the possibility of beneficent revolution.
Griffiths steers us through a welter of great events: everything from Washington's military triumph to Danton's political downfall. Through it all he presents us with a wonderfully clear, unsentimental portrait of Paine himself: a mulish innocent with little sense of realpolitik, a writer driven by passion rather than profit, and a born educator who takes an enslaved African boy under his wing on his arrival in Philadelphia.
Griffiths has the priceless ability to show the power of Paine's ideas and to make history come alive. Commissioned by Washington to come up with a rushed pamphlet on the American Crisis, Paine asks "Will it do, General?" to which Washington replies "It will do, sir." Behind the simple language lies a tide of emotion and belief.
The corresponding virtue of Dominic Dromgoole's fine production is that it never loses sight of the individuals beneath the epic events. John Light shines out strong and clear as a doggedly uncompromising Paine who never loses his faith in reason and the potential for revolution. And there is first-rate support from Keith Bartlett as the jovial narrator Benjamin Franklin, Jamie Parker as a laconic Jefferson and Alix Riemer as Paine's French translator, helpmate and lover, who stuck with him to the last. Adorned with rousing songs by Stephen Warbeck, this is an intelligent historical spectacle packed with contemporary resonance.
وهذ1 المقال الرابع
the medium but not the subject
At Maastricht University in the Netherlands, student societies have started to hold their weekly meetings in English. Their lecturers are doing the same.
Another Dutch university, in Groningen some 330km north, has decided to print its newspaper in English at least three times a year.
English, it seems, is everywhere on campus in the Netherlands, with Sweden also joining the trend. This is nowhere more apparent than in lecture theatres and classrooms.
At least 4,200 degrees are now taught only in English in European countries outside the UK and Ireland, a study for the Academic Cooperation Association found last year. That is triple the number reported seven years ago, Bernd Waechter and Friedhelm Maiworm, the study’s authors, say.
Almost all these “English medium” degrees are based in the Netherlands or Scandinavia with few to report – so far – in southern Europe, Francophone Belgium, Austria or Russia, although Spain’s private sector is moving in the direction of its Nordic peers.
About 80% of these English-medium degrees are at master’s level, but undergraduate programmes are on the rise. The courses aren’t just in business-related subjects or the sciences – even general literary theory is served up only in English at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Anders Flodström, chancellor for Swedish universities, predicts that all university education in Sweden will be delivered in English within the next 10 to 15 years. It’s fast going that way. The vast majority of Sweden’s 500-plus English-medium master’s degrees have only been developed in the last couple of years.
Why the rush? It’s not just because of the global dominance of English in academia. Nor is it, in most cases, a financial decision by universities eager to charge higher fees from international students. Most of the students on English-medium courses come from Europe. In the Netherlands they pay the same as Dutch students, while in Sweden, higher education is free for all.
It’s partly to do with the Bologna Process, under which some European countries have signed up to a European Higher Education Area within which academic degree standards are comparable and compatible.
But the driving factor is prestige. André Gerrits, professor of European studies at the University of Amsterdam, says: “Switching to English is a precondition for having a more international student body. Increasing foreign staff and students is a precondition for being accepted as a place of international learning.”
This is all very well for university leaders tucked up in their offices anticipating their institutions’ rise up university league tables. But how are students and staff helped to make the switch from learning or teaching in their mother tongue to processing or communicating complex ideas in a second language? There is potential for much to go awry.
Students at the University of Groningen have complained that professors who crack jokes during their lectures in Dutch turn dull when they give the same class in English.
Research by John Airey, a lecturer in scientific literacy at the University of Kalmar in Sweden, shows non-English students are less willing to ask and answer questions when lectures are in English. Those who take notes spend most of their time focused on the process of writing in English, rather than understanding what they are writing. In some cases, lectures become sessions for mechanical note-taking.
Marcel Duits, a master’s student at Rotterdam School of Management, says: “The university assumes that in our first year we have sufficient English to be able to read and understand course literature. This is generally the case, but it doesn’t say anything about our ability to speak fluently. Courses would help tremendously.”
Universities are starting to realise that, at least as far as their students are concerned, they should be providing assistance. English for Academic Purposes courses, designed to help students use language appropriate for university study, are springing up, although are not yet common.
However, says Robert Wilkinson of Maastricht University, “students expect these courses to have a link with their studies”. The reality is that often they don’t, and students have to pay either a contribution or the full fee for a course that may be held at a language institute off campus.
Universities have until recently assumed that lecturers’ English will be up to the task, given that they publish and read their international colleagues’ work in English, but more formal testing regimes are being introduced.
Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands now asks its staff to sit both a computer-based and oral English test unless they have a high score in internationally recognised English-language qualifications or a UK or US passport. Those that don’t pass, don’t teach in English.
The University of Groningen is going the same way as Delft, while the University of Utrecht says that in the future, lecturers on its English-medium courses will have to have the Base Qualification for Teaching, a qualification in teaching English.
There are dissenting voices. Wilkinson says asking lecturers to sit tests or have extra qualifications is “probably impractical”. Marianne Schouten, public relations manager of the Rotterdam School of Management, says tests and courses are unnecessary. “We expect our lecturers to be capable of lecturing in English,” she says. “English is taught from the age of 12 in the Netherlands, so it really is a second language to most people.”
Airey, who teaches English language courses for lecturers, admits that those who attend are probably not the ones who need to improve their English. And in any case, he says, “the pedagogical awareness of the lecturer is much more important than their language capability. A good student-centred lecturer will be good whatever the language.”
English support for students and staff is, for now, mainly still a matter of choice. But how much longer can this be the case if these universities’ dreams of a truly international staff and student body are realised?
بليييييييييييز محتااجه ساعدوني اقل شي ابي اودي له براقراف واحد او اثنين..
وششششلونكم يا اعضاااء منتديااات عرووس
ان شاء الله تزقحوون..؟
تكفووووون جاااايتكم اليوم محتااااجه اوي اوي
دكتووورنا معطينا 4 مقالات ويقول سووا منها 4 برقرافات
بس انا يااادوبني داخله قسسم الانجليزي ومو فاهمه شي..
الله يرضى عليكم ابي احد يساااعدني والله لا ادعي له بصلاتي.. http://forums.al3almi.net/images/smilies/biggrin.gifhttp://forums.al3almi.net/images/smilies/biggrin.gif
هذ1 المقال الأول
the new intolerance
Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted that "a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise - the term is not too strong - a senescent Europe". And according to Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a "bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties", Muslims are already "conquering Europe's cities, street by street". So what if Muslims account for only 3% to 4% of the EU's total population of 493 million? In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It? - which was ... commended as "morally serious" by the New York Times and has beguiled some liberal opinion-makers as well as rightwing blowhards -- [Caldwell claims that] "advanced" cultures "have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to 'primitive' ones".
...Caldwell stops short of speculating what Europe would or should do to atone for its folly of nurturing a perfidious minority. The Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, whom Martin Amis has hailed as a "great sayer of the unsayable", does not hesitate to spell it out in his bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It:
In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out - as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em.
Bruce Bawer, whose book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, suggests that European officials, who are "in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday", "could start rescuing Europe tomorrow". There are now even politicians ready to do the "unsayable". The Dutch MP Geert Wilders, whose party was one of the big rightwing winners of June's elections to the European Parliament, proposes expelling millions of Muslims from Europe. A separate ministry for this purpose is advocated by Austria's extreme-right parties, which gained an unprecedented 29% of the popular vote last year...
Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. So what explains the rash of bestsellers with histrionic titles - While Europe Slept, America Alone, The Last Days of Europe? None of their mostly neocon American authors was previously known for their knowledge of Muslim societies; all of them suffer the handicaps of what the philosopher Charles Taylor, in his introduction to a new collection of scholarly essays entitled Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, calls "block thinking", which "fuses a very varied reality into one indissoluble unity". Certainly, the idea of a monolithic "Islam" in Europe appears an especially pitiable bogey when you regard the varying national origins, linguistic and legal backgrounds, and cultural and religious practices of European Muslims. Many so-called Muslims from secularised Turkey or syncretistic Sindh and Java would be condemned as apostates in Saudi Arabia, whose fundamentalist Wahhabism informs most western visions of Islam....
A more thoughtful conservative than Caldwell could have examined valuably how neoliberal capitalism, while enriching Europe's translational elites, has frayed the continent's old cultures and solidarities. In Europe, as in India and China, globalisation has provoked great anxieties about inequality and unemployment, fuelling new xenophobic nationalisms and backlashes against ethnic and religious minorities. The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger that "minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties".
...In actuality, the everyday choices of most Muslims in Europe are dictated more by their experience of globalised economies and cultures than their readings in the Qu'ran or sharia. Along with their Hindu and Sikh peers, many Muslims in Europe suffer from the usual pathologies of traditional rural communities transitioning to urban secular cultures: the encounter with social and economic individualism inevitably provokes a crisis of control in nuclear families, as well as such ills as forced marriage, the poor treatment of women and militant sectarianism. However, in practice, millions of Muslims, many of them with bitter experiences of authoritarian states, coexist frictionlessly and gratefully with regimes committed to democracy, freedom of religion and equality before the law.
..Liberal spaces within Europe have brought many more Muslim women out of their old confinements. Benhabib asserts that these women, who "struggle at first to retain their traditional and given identities against the pressures of the state", then go on to engage and contest their Islamic traditions. As Europe's own passage from tradition showed, this necessary reconfiguration is not the work of a day. It requires the practices and institutions of European citizenship to grow more rather than less flexible.....
Writing in 1937 about the minority then most despised in Europe, Joseph Roth predicted that "Jews will only attain complete equality, and the dignity of external freedom, once their 'host nations' have attained their own inner freedom, as well as the dignity conferred by sympathy for the plight of others". This proved to be too much to ask of Europe in 1937. But the moral challenge has not gone away - civilisation remains an ideal rather than an irreversible achievement - and the dangers of leaving it unmet are incalculable.
وهذ1 المقال الثاني
the uncertainty factor
At research seminars, people don't take Keynesian theorising seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another." So declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, writing in 1980. At the time, Lucas was arguably the world's most influential macroeconomist; the influence of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose theory of recessions dominated economic policy for a generation after the Second World War, seemed to be virtually at an end.
But Keynes, it turns out, is having the last giggle. Lucas's "rational expectations" theory of booms and slumps has shown itself to be completely useless in the current world crisis. Not only does it offer no guide for action, but it more or less asserts that market economies cannot possibly experience the kind of problems they are, in fact, experiencing. Keynesian economics, on the other hand, which was created precisely to make sense of times like these, looks better than ever.
But while Keynesianism is experiencing a revival, there are major questions about just what needs to be revived. Many economists agree that their field went off track, that in some important ways it lost touch with reality, and that a return to some of the ideas Keynes laid out more than 70 years ago is part of the cure for what ails us. But there is much less agreement about what, exactly, needs to change in the way we think about matters economic.
In this book, Robert Skidelsky, the great biographer of Keynes, searches for clues in the original work of "the master". The book is part critique of the current state of economics, part biographical sketch (it's worth your time just for Chapter 3, "The Lives of Keynes"), part programme for the future.
It also offers a brief but compelling account of the anti-Keynesian counter-revolution, the movement that began with Milton Friedman and reached its apex with Lucas's whispers and giggles. Skidelsky's book is an important contribution at a time of soul-searching, a must read even if one doesn't fully accept its conclusions.
As you might guess, I do, in fact, have some questions about Skidelsky's conclusions, though not so much about how we got here as about what we do next. And those questions, in turn, centre on a long-running dispute over what Keynesian economics are really about.
In Part I of his 1936 masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes asserted that the core of his theory was the rejection of Say's Law, the doctrine that said that income is automatically spent. If it were true, Say's Law would imply that all the things we usually talk about when trying to assess the economy's direction, like the state of consumer or investor confidence, are irrelevant; one way or another, people will spend all the income coming in. Keynes showed, however, that Say's Law isn't true, because in a monetary economy people can try to accumulate cash rather than real goods. And when everyone is trying to accumulate cash at the same time, which is what happened worldwide after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the result is an end to demand, which produces a severe recession.
Some of those who consider themselves Keynesians, myself included, agree with what Keynes said in The General Theory, and consider the rejection of Say's Law the core issue. On this view, Keynesian economics is primarily a theory designed to explain how market economies can remain persistently depressed.
But there's an alternative interpretation of what Keynes was all about, one offered by Keynes himself in an article published in 1937, a year after The General Theory. Here, Keynes suggested that the core of his insight lay in the acknowledgement that there is uncertainty in the world – uncertainty that cannot be reduced to statistical probabilities, what the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld called "unknown unknowns". This irreducible uncertainty, he argued, lies behind panics and bouts of exuberance and primarily accounts for the instability of market economies.
In this book, Skidelsky puts himself in the camp of those who argue, in effect, that Keynes 1937, not Keynes 1936, is the man to listen to – that Keynesianism is, or should be, essentially about uncertainty and how it leads to economic instability. And from this he draws some radical conclusions.
Most strikingly, Skidelsky declares that the traditional division between microeconomics and macroeconomics, which is based on whether one focuses on individual markets or on the overall economy, is all wrong; macroeconomics should be defined as the field that studies those areas of economic life in which irreducible uncertainty, uncertainty that cannot be tamed with statistics, dominates. He goes so far as to call for a complete division of postgraduate studies: departments of macroeconomics should not even teach microeconomics, or vice versa, because macroeconomists must be protected "from the encroachment of the methods and habits of mind of microeconomics".
How far should we be willing to follow Skidelsky in this? I think we must trust the biographer in his assessment of Keynes himself; Skidelsky argues persuasively that Keynes spent much of his life deeply focused upon, even obsessed with, the question of how one acts in the face of uncertainty, which is why Keynes 1937 comes closer to the essence of the great man's own thinking.
That's not the same thing, however, as saying that Keynes was right – even about his own contribution. Surely it's possible to make the case for a less profound reconstruction of economics than Skidelsky advocates. I'd point out that behavioural economists, who drop the assumption of perfect rationality but don't seem much concerned by the essential unknowability of the future, have done relatively well at making sense of this crisis; I'd also point out that current disputes over economic policy, above all about the usefulness of government spending to promote employment, seem to be primarily about Say's Law – that is, Keynes 1936.
No matter. You don't have to agree with everything Skidelsky says to find this a wonderfully stimulating book, one that reflects the author's unparalleled erudition. We're living in the second Age of Keynes – and Robert Skidelsky is still the guide of choice.
• Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for economics last year.
وهذ1 المقال الثالث
a new world the globe , london
Twenty years ago, Trevor Griffiths was commissioned by Richard Attenborough to write a movie about the visionary English radical, Thomas Paine. Sadly, the film was never made. But Griffiths has now adapted his magnificent screenplay for the stage. The resulting three-hour play, even if it occasionally reveals its origins, is a moving and informative tribute to the man Michael Foot once called "the greatest exile ever to leave these shores".
Exile is very much Griffiths's theme. The Thetford-born Paine is seen as a restless traveller whose writings on liberty, justice and freedom had an inspirational impact on both the American and French revolutions. Journeying to Philadelphia in 1774, he finds himself enmeshed in the struggle of the 13 colonies to free themselves from British rule, but he becomes disillusioned when victory licenses the rich and powerful. Arriving in Paris in 1790 full of rational optimism about a revolution based on human brotherhood, Paine is horrified when it descends into the bloodbath of the Terror. Yet, although outlawed in England and imprisoned in Paris, Paine dies in the US still believing in the possibility of beneficent revolution.
Griffiths steers us through a welter of great events: everything from Washington's military triumph to Danton's political downfall. Through it all he presents us with a wonderfully clear, unsentimental portrait of Paine himself: a mulish innocent with little sense of realpolitik, a writer driven by passion rather than profit, and a born educator who takes an enslaved African boy under his wing on his arrival in Philadelphia.
Griffiths has the priceless ability to show the power of Paine's ideas and to make history come alive. Commissioned by Washington to come up with a rushed pamphlet on the American Crisis, Paine asks "Will it do, General?" to which Washington replies "It will do, sir." Behind the simple language lies a tide of emotion and belief.
The corresponding virtue of Dominic Dromgoole's fine production is that it never loses sight of the individuals beneath the epic events. John Light shines out strong and clear as a doggedly uncompromising Paine who never loses his faith in reason and the potential for revolution. And there is first-rate support from Keith Bartlett as the jovial narrator Benjamin Franklin, Jamie Parker as a laconic Jefferson and Alix Riemer as Paine's French translator, helpmate and lover, who stuck with him to the last. Adorned with rousing songs by Stephen Warbeck, this is an intelligent historical spectacle packed with contemporary resonance.
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the medium but not the subject
At Maastricht University in the Netherlands, student societies have started to hold their weekly meetings in English. Their lecturers are doing the same.
Another Dutch university, in Groningen some 330km north, has decided to print its newspaper in English at least three times a year.
English, it seems, is everywhere on campus in the Netherlands, with Sweden also joining the trend. This is nowhere more apparent than in lecture theatres and classrooms.
At least 4,200 degrees are now taught only in English in European countries outside the UK and Ireland, a study for the Academic Cooperation Association found last year. That is triple the number reported seven years ago, Bernd Waechter and Friedhelm Maiworm, the study’s authors, say.
Almost all these “English medium” degrees are based in the Netherlands or Scandinavia with few to report – so far – in southern Europe, Francophone Belgium, Austria or Russia, although Spain’s private sector is moving in the direction of its Nordic peers.
About 80% of these English-medium degrees are at master’s level, but undergraduate programmes are on the rise. The courses aren’t just in business-related subjects or the sciences – even general literary theory is served up only in English at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Anders Flodström, chancellor for Swedish universities, predicts that all university education in Sweden will be delivered in English within the next 10 to 15 years. It’s fast going that way. The vast majority of Sweden’s 500-plus English-medium master’s degrees have only been developed in the last couple of years.
Why the rush? It’s not just because of the global dominance of English in academia. Nor is it, in most cases, a financial decision by universities eager to charge higher fees from international students. Most of the students on English-medium courses come from Europe. In the Netherlands they pay the same as Dutch students, while in Sweden, higher education is free for all.
It’s partly to do with the Bologna Process, under which some European countries have signed up to a European Higher Education Area within which academic degree standards are comparable and compatible.
But the driving factor is prestige. André Gerrits, professor of European studies at the University of Amsterdam, says: “Switching to English is a precondition for having a more international student body. Increasing foreign staff and students is a precondition for being accepted as a place of international learning.”
This is all very well for university leaders tucked up in their offices anticipating their institutions’ rise up university league tables. But how are students and staff helped to make the switch from learning or teaching in their mother tongue to processing or communicating complex ideas in a second language? There is potential for much to go awry.
Students at the University of Groningen have complained that professors who crack jokes during their lectures in Dutch turn dull when they give the same class in English.
Research by John Airey, a lecturer in scientific literacy at the University of Kalmar in Sweden, shows non-English students are less willing to ask and answer questions when lectures are in English. Those who take notes spend most of their time focused on the process of writing in English, rather than understanding what they are writing. In some cases, lectures become sessions for mechanical note-taking.
Marcel Duits, a master’s student at Rotterdam School of Management, says: “The university assumes that in our first year we have sufficient English to be able to read and understand course literature. This is generally the case, but it doesn’t say anything about our ability to speak fluently. Courses would help tremendously.”
Universities are starting to realise that, at least as far as their students are concerned, they should be providing assistance. English for Academic Purposes courses, designed to help students use language appropriate for university study, are springing up, although are not yet common.
However, says Robert Wilkinson of Maastricht University, “students expect these courses to have a link with their studies”. The reality is that often they don’t, and students have to pay either a contribution or the full fee for a course that may be held at a language institute off campus.
Universities have until recently assumed that lecturers’ English will be up to the task, given that they publish and read their international colleagues’ work in English, but more formal testing regimes are being introduced.
Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands now asks its staff to sit both a computer-based and oral English test unless they have a high score in internationally recognised English-language qualifications or a UK or US passport. Those that don’t pass, don’t teach in English.
The University of Groningen is going the same way as Delft, while the University of Utrecht says that in the future, lecturers on its English-medium courses will have to have the Base Qualification for Teaching, a qualification in teaching English.
There are dissenting voices. Wilkinson says asking lecturers to sit tests or have extra qualifications is “probably impractical”. Marianne Schouten, public relations manager of the Rotterdam School of Management, says tests and courses are unnecessary. “We expect our lecturers to be capable of lecturing in English,” she says. “English is taught from the age of 12 in the Netherlands, so it really is a second language to most people.”
Airey, who teaches English language courses for lecturers, admits that those who attend are probably not the ones who need to improve their English. And in any case, he says, “the pedagogical awareness of the lecturer is much more important than their language capability. A good student-centred lecturer will be good whatever the language.”
English support for students and staff is, for now, mainly still a matter of choice. But how much longer can this be the case if these universities’ dreams of a truly international staff and student body are realised?
بليييييييييييز محتااجه ساعدوني اقل شي ابي اودي له براقراف واحد او اثنين..