1. How to fail metaphysics at the University of Hawaii.
3. Martin Feldstein is skeptical about the stimulus bill.
4. Jeremy Stein and Jeffrey Liebman to the Obama administration.
5. Kidney donation doesn't seem to lower lifespan.
6. Our epistemological depression.
To fail metaphysics, don’t you have to look into the soul of the student next to you?
It would be great if all courses came with disclaimers like that.
Tyler I would love to read your take on Jim Powell’s article about the 1920-1921 depression. Can we learn anything to help for the 1920-1921 depression?
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MWI2OWUyOWE2NmZjMmQ2ZTg5YzIzZjczY2I2Mzg2N2Q=
Not-So-Great Depression
How Warren G. Harding got us out of it.
By Jim Powell
Which U.S. president ranks as America’s greatest depression fighter?
Not the fabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt, since unemployment averaged 17 percent through the New Deal period (1933–1940). What banished high unemployment was the conscription of 12 million men into the armed forces during World War II. FDR actually prolonged high unemployment: he tripled taxes; he signed laws that made it more expensive for employers to hire people, made discounting illegal, and authorized the destruction of food; and he launched costly infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority that became a drag on states receiving TVA-subsidized electricity.
America’s greatest depression fighter was Warren Gamaliel Harding. An Ohio senator when he was elected president in 1920, he followed the much praised Woodrow Wilson — who had brought America into World War I, built up huge federal bureaucracies, imprisoned dissenters, and incurred $25 billion of debt.
Harding inherited Wilson’s mess — in particular, a post–World War I depression that was almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933 that FDR would later inherit. The estimated gross national product plunged 24 percent from $91.5 billion in 1920 to $69.6 billion in 1921. The number of unemployed people jumped from 2.1 million to 4.9 million.
(continued at the link above†¦)
That Metaphysics teacher is obviously a Cancer, or maybe a Leo.
So we’re going ghost-hunting right?
Regarding “Our epistemological depression,” I couldn’t help thinking the author doesn’t understand the meaning of either ‘dielectic’ or ‘epistimology’ (despite providing the definition of the latter). Then I see that he’s a ‘history professor at The Catholic University of America.’ That explains a lot.
Superheater yes I did. You too?
I read you to find clever things like the HI metaphysics course. The question is who do you read to find clever things like that?
Robert Bell: the answer appears to be, approximately, “everyone”.
When I have talked about metaphysics in the past, I don’t know how many times I have used the phrase “Borders’ Metaphysics” to describe what I was not talking about. Apparently that phrase is not just used by me.
Well given that the etymology of metaphysical makes it sort of a synonym for “supernatural” it’s not surprising that it is used in that sense.
spencer if you look at my post again, everything below the link is from the link. Jim Powell is presenting the numbers not me.
Floccina– the numbers are still wrong.
The 1920-21 recession was a severe recession, but anyone who knows any economic history knows that it was not at all comparable to the Great Depression.
Yes, unemployment in 1921 was 4.9 Million. But that was an 11% unemployment rate as compared to over 25% in 1933. Did you know that the unemployment rate was 10.8%
in the second year of the Reagan administration — it is the peak Post WW II unemployment rate. The 1920-21 recession was much more like the 1981-82 recession, not the depression.
MY question is why do you not question such misleading data and pass it on without a single question. If the US had had another recession almost as severe as the Great Depression don’t you think you would have heard about it?
When somebody starts talking about an event that is completely outside the scale of everything you have ever heard about don’t you think you should question it rather than passing the bad information along?
“I am teaching this course the way the American
Philosophical Association affirms is the academically responsible way to teach
Metaphysics.” What a sad little statement.
It would be fun to take the course and then toe the line by writing papers about free will that rely upon highly speculative theories of physics or religion. At what point does the professor’s skepticism shut down metaphysical debate?
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