“The Case Against Education” by Bryan Caplan

Caplan makes the case that education, and particularly higher education, does not teach students relevant facts and skills, but, instead, is merely a signal to employers about a latent set of characteristics that prospective employees already possess. The mystery is why it takes years of education and the capstone of a degree to reveal these skills to employers who are hiring. After all, the earnings premium for college grads is over seventy percent and even for high school graduates it is thirty percent higher than for dropouts. Caplan is adamant this does not primarily reflect added skills and knowledge acquired during these years of extra education. His answer is signaling. “Even if what a student learned in school is utterly useless, employers will happily pay extra if their scholastic achievement provides information about their productivity.” By successfully completing the rigors of high school and college a potential employee reveals preexisting traits that are not easy to tease out by any other means. 

Prospective employers are using “statistical discrimination”: “true-on-average stereotypes to save time and money.” Education reveals more than an IQ test or SAT score alone. Furthermore, requiring IQ tests for employment has been deemed discriminatory and, therefore, illegal by American courts. In any case, “education signals not just intelligence, but conscientiousness- the student’s discipline, work ethic, commitment to quality, and so forth…. Education also signals conformity- the worker’s grasp of and submission to social expectations.” That is because “in our society, educational achievement is social expectation.” It is a bit of a Catch-22, but as long as the prevailing culture stresses the importance of a college degree those who want to appear most employable will strive to get that societal marker. Agreeing with societal norms and not rocking the boat are as important to today’s employer as any other skill. In fact, it is the package of intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity whose components are equally important. A weakness is any one aspect of this trifecta suggests some sort of deviance from the socially acceptable norms even if more than compensated in the other two fields. 

Why does education have to take so long if it is just trying to tease out preexisting traits? Tyler Cowen suggests, “the signal must be costly and grueling, otherwise it fails to sort out the best job candidates.” Caplan adds, “since easy-to-fake traits like conscientiousness and conformity are valuable, education has to take years. Signaling is a war of attrition.” Caplan does not dispute that there is some additional learning and human capital growth that takes place in college. He just posits that the mix skews predominantly towards signaling. He asks why so few students take advantage of sitting in on classes for free at elite universities. Anyone could get a free Ivy league education by simply sitting in the back of the lecture hall or asking the professor to audit their classes, except in the end they would not receive a diploma for their efforts, of course. Caplan also solves the mystery of why college students tend to be ecstatic when a professor cancels class. It is not just their high time preference. “When you skip class, your relative performance suffers. When your teacher cancels class, everyone learns less, leaving your relative performance unimpaired.” This does not make sense if the goal of college was to build human capital, but makes perfect sense from a signaling model.

Caplan goes on to dispel some of the human capital model myths about education. He measures and gives statistics for “fade out”, the fact that humans poorly retain facts and skills that they do not use regularly. He dispels the myth of transfer learning- most students cannot easily transfer skills between similar problem scenarios, especially if there is a time delay, any sort of distraction in between tasks, different teachers asking similar questions, and, especially, if a classroom problem is applied to the real world. He also refutes the idea of “learning to learn.” In fact, students learn specific facts better than general concepts and strategies (albeit still poorly). He posits, “when someone insists their product has big, hard-to-see benefits, you should be dubious by default- especially when the easy-to-see benefits are small.” Finally, Caplan discusses the sheepskin effect- that graduation pays so much more than any other normal year of education. “High school graduation has a big spike: twelfth grade pays more than grades 9, 10, and 11 combined. In percentage terms, the average study finds graduation year is worth 3.4 regular years. College graduation has a huge spike: senior year of college pays over twice as much as freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. In percentage terms, the average study finds graduation year is worth 6.7 regular years.”

Caplan’s book is so persuasive because of the plethora of charts, tables, and graphs he employs to back up his assertions. He also discusses in detail such issues as college choice, major/career selection, completion probability, ability bias, government’s role, malemployment, licensing, employer learning, vocational learning, assortive mating, and education spending.

His book is a strong rebuke to those who think that higher education serves to build human capital. He does not dispute that it does build some, but questions how cost effective the current educational system is and whether a college education is even an appropriate goal for most students in society, as opposed to a select few. The mix between human capital and signaling is critically important for policy discussions. “If human capital is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, education is a path to individual and national prosperity: education makes the pie bigger, so every worker can enjoy a bigger slice…. According to the pure signaling model, education raises income by making you look more productive. A worker gets more education; their productivity stays the same, but their income goes up. A nation gets more education; its productivity and income stay the same.” Of course the truth is somewhere in between these two poles. “At the global level, a typical year of personal education seems to raise personal income by 8-12%. A typical year of national education, in contrast, seems to raise national income by only 1-3%.” Caplan roughly estimates the mix at 20% human capital and 80% signaling, but is willing to quibble on the details as long as we admit that education is predominantly signaling. He suggests moving towards a world of credential deflation that, he posits, will not have the effect of actually deskilling the American worker.

“Gomorrah” by Roberto Saviano

Saviano has been accused of fictionalizing history. His prose does read more like a story than a history and his books are not footnoted or sourced, with “Gomorrah” not even including a basic index for reference. However, in the underworld societies that he details sometimes fact and fiction do blend into one overarching narrative. Where does the truth end and myth begin? The fact that after publishing “Gomorrah” he was forced into hiding by the Camorra testifies to the fact that he must have gotten some things right. The fact that Italian mobsters deal in drugs, prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets is no revelation. Where Saviano excels is both in revealing the depth of this corruption, but also in the details that can only be exposed by going undercover, working within the Camorra’s world to see how individual lives are shaped and destroyed by an empire that seemingly feeds itself and outlasts any one individual. The Italian mafia clans, in fact, refer to themselves as part of the “System”. As one Chinese business partner involved in the illegal smuggling of textiles destined to be falsely labeled “Made in Italy” puts it, “Euro, dollar, yuan. Here’s my triad.” Indeed, Saviano exposes just how international the Naples mob’s reach actually has become: a modern day illicit multinational corporation that preys on the world famous fashion houses of Armani and Valentino as much as the corner drug pusher or pimp. Perhaps the most chilling account of the Camorra’s exploits are how deeply woven they have become in the legal rackets of clothing, cement, and waste disposal.

“The Therapy of Desire” by Martha Nussbaum

Nussbaum compares and contrasts the three schools of Hellenistic philosophy, Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Stoicism, with each other and also with Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies. The “therapy” referred to in the book title is an acknowledgement that all three schools viewed the role of philosophy as helping in the everyday life of the person/patient. As the doctor helps to heal the body, so would philosophy help to heal the mind. “They saw the philosopher as a compassionate physician whose arts could heal many pervasive types of human suffering. They practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual technique dedicated to the display of cleverness but as an immersed and worldly art of grappling with human misery… For all three, philosophy is above all the art of human life… Philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing [eudaimon] life by arguments and reasonings.” Therefore, philosophy must be achievable and practical for every man, unlike for Aristotle and Plato who viewed it as only the purview of an elite. 

Epicurus believed that “the central cause of human misery is the disturbance produced by the seemingly “boundless” demands of desire, which will not let us have any rest or stable satisfaction.” Life is insatiable. But the one true end for life is pleasure. As Diogenes Laertius recounts Epicurus saying, “as proof for the fact that pleasure is the end, he points to the fact that animals, as soon as they are born, are well contented with pleasure and fight against pain, naturally and apart from discourse. For we flee pain by our very own natural feelings.” Epicurus makes the point that feelings precede any kind of logical reasoning. Cicero reports, “so [Epicurus] denies that there is need for argument [ratione] or dialectical reasoning [disputatione] to show that pleasure is to be pursued and pain avoided. He thinks these things are perceived by the senses [sentire], the way we perceive that fire is hot, that snow is white, that honey is sweet. None of these things needs to be supported by fancy arguments.” The senses are the only things reliable and all error comes from (false) beliefs. As such, Epicurus denies the reliability in the mores and institutions of culture and society. The only truth is in one’s own body. Reason is not an end, but it can be a means. “A tutored use of reason can help the adult to avoid these pains.” The societal ends that he most stresses to avoid are a hope for immortality, money, fame, and luxuries, because these are truly insatiable desires. “Frugal meals deliver a pleasure that is equal to that of an expensive diet, when once all the pain of need is removed; and bread and water give the very summit of pleasure, when a needy person takes them in.” On death he states, “the correct recognition that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding on an infinite time, but by removing the longing for immortality.” Elsewhere he flirts with reincarnation describing the cycle of life, “there is need of matter, so that future generations may grow. They too, having lived out their lives, will follow you. Generations before this perished just like you, and will perish again. Thus one thing will never stop arising from another. Life is nobody’s private property, but is everyone’s to use.” The Epicureans were atomists, they believed every bit of matter could be reduced to atoms at heart and therefore nothing was created or destroyed, but just transformed. Epicurus was also the first western philosopher to deal with the unconscious- that the real desires and problems in life often reside below the surface and deep within the mind. The Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius also suggested being leery of love. ““They believe that a wise man will not fall in love,” Diogenes tells us, “Nor do they believe that love is something sent by the gods.” Epicurus’ definition of eros was, apparently, “An intense desire for intercourse, accompanied by agony and distraction.”” However, later Lucretius tempers this view. He states that, despite the risks of passion, a life worth living is a life shared by another. “Attachment to marriage and the family leads Lucretius to defend as valuable a way of life that does not seem to be the one best suited for individual ataraxia [freedom from distress and worry], since it includes many risks and possibilities for loss and grief.” The Epicurean belief in the gods is complicated. They were certainly opposed to organized religion. “Religious belief is bad, Lucretius persistently argues, because it is superstitious and irrational, built upon false and groundless beliefs about the gods and the soul. It is also bad because it makes people dependent on priests, rather than on their own judgement.” Epicureans looked upon both anger and gratitude as equally bad flipsides to the same coin. They believed in self-sufficiency and both were expressions of outward emotion. “The wise man, the Letter to Herodotus informs us, will avoid being in any condition of weakness or need toward his fellow humans.”

The Skeptics felt that “the disease is not one of false belief; belief itself is the illness- belief as a commitment, a source of concern, care, and vulnerability.” Sextus Empericus defines his own Skepticism as “an ability to set up an opposition of appearances and thoughts, in any way at all, an ability from which we come, through the equal force of the opposing statements and states of affairs, first into suspension, and after that into freedom from disturbance.” The goal is to, no matter the belief, set up oppositions among impressions and beliefs. “The Skeptic does not express objections to natural and necessary bodily pain. What, after all, is the point of having objections to something that we cannot help?… Pain is part of nature; the real disease is the setting oneself up against nature, the theorizing about pain that sooner or later compounds pain.” The Skeptic does not try to change his life, but come to terms with it. “The Skeptic gives up all commitments that take him beyond the way life actually goes; he has no theory that makes him fight the ordinary.” It is better to act without any fixed beliefs. Humans should “go on using their faculties. The world strikes them now this way, now that; they are influenced by their desires, their cognitive activities, even their memories. But they do not bother inquiring into truth or sorting things out.” Skeptics criticized the other philosophies, “to say that one should avoid this as base, but incline to this as nobler, is the way of men who are not undoing disturbance, but are simply changing its position… so that the philosopher’s discourse creates a new disease in place of the old one… not freeing the pupil from pursuit, but only shifting her over to a different pursuit.” It is change without a cure. Life, for Skeptics, is all subjective. “For, strictly speaking, he can have neither a committed view as to what eudaimonia [human flourishing] is, nor a committed causal belief as to what does or does not secure it… Skeptical argument opposes only that which has been asserted and believed- and the Skeptic tells us that he asserts nothing.” The Skeptic’s life is unnatural and he knows it. “Pyrrho talks of “altogether divesting ourselves of the human being”; Sextus describes the Skeptic as a eunuch with respect to rational desires. This is revealing talk: for it concedes, perhaps, that even if what we have left is a part of our natural constitution, what we have cut off or purged away is also a part of what it is to be naturally human.” The traits Skeptics admire are calmness, gentleness, tolerance, and non-conformity.

Stoics believe in individual reason above all else. Reason has not only instrumental, but intrinsic worth. For Seneca the whole point of philosophy is “that you should make yourself better every day.” This is not easy because, as Epictetus relates, the starting point of philosophy is “our awareness of weakness and incapacity in respect of the most important things.” It is, nonetheless, a worthwhile endeavor because, Seneca again, “no one can live happily, or even tolerably, without the study of wisdom.” As such, philosophy is the domain of every man and woman, no matter their birth. “The guiding principle of Stoicism is respect for humanity wherever it is found.” All the evil in the world is due to false beliefs and mistaken impressions, not original sin. Therefore, it is the intent not the action that truly matters. “To become a fully virtuous act, an action must be done as the wise person would do it, with the thoughts and feelings appropriate to virtue… For, like Epicureanism, Stoicism views the soul as a spacious and deep place, a place with many lofty aspirations but also many secrets, a place of both effort and evasion. Much that goes on in it escapes the notice not only of the world at large, not only, even, of the teacher, but also of the person himself… The self must acknowledge itself; only this brings peace and freedom. But this requires assiduous daily litigation, in a darkened room, as the soul, in the absence of external light, turns its vision on itself.” The Stoics consider philosophy by thinking and then by doing it. It is fine to read books and quote others, but unless you are actually practicing philosophy in your daily life you are not making it your own. Seneca declaimed, “I have not sold myself as a slave to anybody; I bear no master’s name. I have much confidence in the judgement of great men, but I claim something for my own judgement also.” Stoicism is fundamentally inward looking. Stoics, too, feel that the wise man must be completely self-sufficient. The only thing important in life is virtue and that is completely unaffected by external contingencies. Wealth and honor, but also courage, justice, and equanimity are worthless in and of themselves. But virtue is not static: it is an internal striving and straining. Where Stoics really differ from the Epicureans is the passions. Stoics wish to remove all passion from life completely. Seneca writes, “it is often asked whether it is better to have moderate passions or none. Our people drive out the passions altogether; the Peripatetics [Aristotelians] moderate them.” Stoics seek to maintain a passive stance towards the outside world to remain unaffected by any external whims. Again, Seneca affirms, “he retreats into himself and lives with himself. [His highest good] seeks no equipment from outside. It is cultivated at home, and is entirely developed from within him. He begins to be the subject of fortune, the minute he looks for some part of himself outdoors.” Life is a continual struggle for this mastery of internal virtue. Seneca explains, “evils that are continuous and prolific require slow patient resistance- not in order that they should cease, but in order that they should fail to conquer.” But there is no excuse for not living a life of virtue. A life which is not lived everyday for the philosophical ideal is not a life worth living. Controversially, Seneca extolls the benefits of suicide as opposed to a compromised life, “do you see that precipice? That way you can descend to liberty. Do you see that sea, that river, that well? Liberty sits there in the depths. Do you see that tree, stunted, blighted, barren? Liberty hangs from its branches. Do you see your throat, your gullet, your heart? They are escape routes from slavery. Are the exits I show you too difficult, requiring too much courage and strength? Do you ask what is the straight road to liberty? Any vein in your body.” Seneca practiced what he preached. After he was implicated in a plot to assassinate his pupil Nero, he slit his own wrists rather than beg for forgiveness.

Epicureanism and Stoicism, particularly, share some features not present in Aristotelian philosophy- preeminent among them that existing desires, intuitions, and preferences are socially formed, but they might not be ideal or reliable to the good life. The Skeptics “see a remarkable fact: that the philosophical pursuit of truth, praised by the Platonist tradition as the most stable and risk-free life of all, is actually not so free from danger- for it makes our good depend on the way reality is outside ourselves, and on the ability of a finite mind to grasp that reality.” All three Hellenistic schools held in common, however, that the student of philosophy was like a medical patient- in need of a cure. Their philosophies were therapeutic and practical- intended to teach a man how to live a better life.

“The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933” by Amos Elon

In 1743 a Jew entering Berlin had to pay the same tax as a head of cattle or pig. Jews could not own real estate, practice most professions, or even live inside the city walls without a permit from the government. Many Jews were itinerant salesmen, scavengers, beggars, or thieves. There was a small elite of court Jews: bankers, minters, and industrialists who were given dispensations to live outside the ghettos of the major German cities. Even then, their wives and children were often forced to leave their homes (and their cities) when the family patriarch passed away. In most towns, Jews were forbidden to build a communal synagogue. Yet almost all Jews were literate, even if mainly only in a bastardized Hebrew.

Moses Mendelsohn was not the first Jew to break through this glass ceiling, but he was the most impressive of the 18th century. Although Frederick II never warmed to him, he was well received by Goethe and other German intellectuals. He tried to be a German and a Jew, to bridge two worlds that had been kept apart by both sides. His goal was to inculcate the younger Jewish aristocracy with German literature and culture. He set off two trends that he had never intended. The first was the fight for Jewish emancipation (or equal rights) within Germany. The second was that the younger Jewish generation, especially the wealthiest, became so enmeshed in German culture that many converted to the Christian faith, chief among them most of Mendelson’s own children. In the age of rationalism and the enlightenment, faith was secondary to reason anyhow. This would have tragic consequences in the age of Romanticism, which spawned vehement nationalism. A Jew, even one who renounced his faith, was still an outsider to the Aryan masses. He could not escape his birth (even up to three generations after conversion). Where the anti-Judaism of the previous generation was a fear of the unknown of the other, the Romantic hatred of German Jews came from an increased intimacy and socializing. It was a reaction to Jews trying to become too German.

Some German Jews did become zionists, refusing to integrate into the Volk (or perhaps understanding better than most that they would always be excluded), while most others pressed on for greater emancipation. There were sporadic anti-Jewish riots over the decades, but nothing comparable to the pogroms in Russia. German Jews from Alsace, annexed after the Franco-Prussian War, thanked their lucky stars when the Dreyfus Affair highlighted the brutal Jewish discrimination still within France. Yet, the term anti-semite was coined in Germany near the turn of the century and Jews were still almost completely barred from serving as officers in the Kaiser’s Army and were strictly limited as professors in German universities.

World War I was to prove a turning point, as Jews across the political and economic spectrum dropped their cosmopolitanism in support of the Kaiser. Previous pacifists, democratic socialists, communists, republicans, and zionists were all swayed to the nationalist hysteria. Jews even returned from Palestine to fight in the Kaiser’s army. As the war dragged to its bitter end, however, most Jews became disillusioned as they were made into the scapegoats of the German defeat, culminating with an Army census that implied that most Jews were war profiteers, serving behind the front lines, when, in fact, 80% of Jews had served at the front. The final chapter of the book is, appropriately, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party as the Weimar Republic collapses. Astoundingly, this also was a period of great integration of Jews into the highest echelons of society in politics, industry, and the arts. This, indeed, was the pity of it all.

“Ants Among Elephants” by Sujatha Gidla

This is a quasi-biography of K.G. Satyamurthy, the renowned poet and Communist organizer from Andhra, India, written by his niece. The family are dalits or untouchables. As such, this book also serves as a window into the lives of untouchables and the caste system in general in post-colonial India. One sees how untouchables are still discriminated against both in the rural villages and the modern cities. One out of every six Indians is born an untouchable. Gidla’s family was well-educated, not unusual for untouchables, many of whom converted to Christianity during the colonial period and, therefore, were taught in missionary schools. Despite being practicing Christians, untouchables never can escape their caste, which is considered a social institution as opposed to a religious one. They are forced to live outside the village proper or segregated in urban ghettos, must kowtow to any caste Hindu of whom they cross paths, must eat from separate bowls, and drink from separate wells. Even untouchables with money or doctorates do not escape these indignities. Often those most brutal to untouchables were not the highest caste Brahmins, but those from the lowest castes, such as ditch diggers and barbers. Even within the untouchables there are subcastes such as the “malas’, who were servants, and the “madigas” who hauled away dead animal carcasses to make leather goods. Perhaps the vilest tradition was “vetti”, where every untouchable family had to give up its first born son, as soon as he learned to walk and talk, to the “dora”, the local landlord, as his household slave. This was not an ancient tradition, but was instituted, with British acquiescence, in the late 19th century. Untouchables generally despised Indian leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru, who supported the traditions of the caste system. Their hero was Ambedkar, a fellow untouchable, who fought for equal rights both socially and politically. Under this oppressive background, the Communist Party grew. Its first slogan was, “land to the tiller!” K.G. Satyamurthy, known as Satyam, joined the Party while studying at A.C. College. He was also enamored by the traditional poems in his native Telugu langauage, as well as contemporary poets such as Sri Sri. His motto from college was “write like Sri Sri. Fight like Lenin. A pen and a gun.” Satyam would end up organizing students in universities across his state, as well as railway workers, dung collectors, and field laborers over the years. Eventually, he was forced underground, hiding in the forests, not able to see his own wife, children, or the rest of his family for many decades. Before his marriage, he had warned his wife that his life’s work might require this fate. As Satyam put it, “only revolution is truth. Everything else may come or go.”

“The Case for the Enlightenment” by John Robertson

This book is at once a narrow comparative case study between Scotland and Naples in the 18th century and a broader look at the Enlightenment’s ideas and its movement across Europe. Robertson begins by making the case for a single “the Enlightenment”, as opposed to multiple “enlightenments”, which took place in distinct geographies or involved just specialized fields of study such as philosophy or literature. He makes the case that what unified the Enlightenment thinkers was not just a resort to reason, but a skepticism about the world and a “deliberate attempt to join mental and moral philosophy into a single science.” The key to this was a Europe-wide Republic of Letters, promoted by Erasmus, which was a network of correspondence and exchange of notes, manuscripts, specimens, antiquities, and books that from its inception, while certainly not excluding clergy, was founded on lay principles. 

Scotland and Naples shared the commonality of being “courtless kingdoms”, ruled from England and Hapsburg Spain respectively. The citizenry, led by their nobles, revolted form time to time and at other periods acquiesced to foreign rule. During this time the ideas of Epicurus, Democritus, Lucretius, the Stoics, Pyrrho, Grotius, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, and Locke were being circulated around Europe. Against this free-thinking trend, the Papacy in Italy and the Presbyterians in Scotland were fighting a rearguard action for orthodoxy, often imprisoning or executing supposed heretics. Following the long death of Charles II, the Spanish succession crisis would have a large intellectual impact on both kingdoms. For Naples, it was the more obvious decision of who would be their new king and how their government might modernize. For Scotland, King William and Queen Anne’s own impending deaths without heir were to weigh heavily on the Act of Settlement and eventual Act of Union in 1707. Both Naples and Scotland were fully coopted into empires and became “kingdoms governed as provinces.” This meant that their interests were often disregarded, wealth left their lands through taxation and absentee landlords, trade and commercial development was ignored, and  formal government was locally absent or removed. In the while, international commerce was supplanting feudal landholding as the foundation and wealth of the monarchies of Europe. These combustable times bred thinkers willing to challenge the old ways. 

For Naples, the preeminent proto-Enlightenment thinker was Giambattista Vico. He was far from a heretic. In fact, most of his writings, while espousing quasi-Epicurean strains, tried to explicitly refute Hobbes and Bayle, particularly the latter’s assertion that a community of atheists could be virtuous. His work sought to uphold “the idea of providence in a world fluctuating between the ‘chance’ of Epicurus and the ‘necessity’ of Descartes.” When studying the nature of man Vico wanted to consider him as he was, not as we might wish him to be. “Legislation considers man as he is in order to make good use of him in society. Thus out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three great vices found across the human race, it creates the military, merchant, and governing classes which provide the strength, wealth, and wisdom of states; out of vices which could destroy mankind, in the other words, it makes civil happiness.” Whereas Machiavelli had written for the prince, Vico meant for his work to be widely circulated amongst the literate classes. It was not a manual for a leader, but a study for the benefit of society at large. Vico laid the groundwork for later explicit studies of the political economy of a particular country, as well as for nations in general. 

In Scotland, it was David Hume who would lead scholarship into the Enlightenment. In his Treaty of Human Nature he would state that his subject was “the science of man.” His was a theory from induction- observation and experience taking precedence from a priori reasoning. He also believed that reason was a slave to the passions, which were the first to stimulate man. Still, he tempered his Epicureanism by stating that sympathy for other men led to a moralization of the base passions. “Moral distinctions, therefore, must be derived from a ‘moral sense’. That is, they must be felt, and take the form of ‘moral sentiments’.” Justice, Hume believed, was not a natural virtue, but an artificial one that man had come accustomed to accept through experience. “It may not always be in an individual’s immediate or direct interest to behave justly towards his fellows; but this does not alter the fact that justice, and hence society, are in every individual’s interest.” Besides sympathy for his fellow man, Hume believed that man in society relied most on custom. Custom was what caused sentiments to first develop and to eventually become regarded as natural in society. Natural laws derived from custom. Although Vico and Hume did not communicate directly, they were engaged in debate with the same authors: Bayle, Descartes, Hobbes, as well as the older Hellene philosophers. “Vico possessed a keen sense of the power of the passions, and of their origin in the physical senses; he acknowledged the force of the Epicurean account of human nature. But he sought to offset this by an Augustinian morality by which, as a result of the Fall, sin was equated with indulgence of the passions, and virtue with restraint…. Hume maintained that many of our moral sentiments derive naturally from our passions, as we find them to be ‘useful and agreeable’. In adopting the useful and agreeable as the standard of morality, Hume was endorsing and elaborating the Epicurean theory of Bayle, but repudiating the Augustinian residue still present in Mandeville, who (like Vico in this respect) had persisted in identifying virtue with a strict idea of self-denial.” For Hume morality did not tame the passions, but was in accordance with basic human nature. Through sympathy and custom, moral sentiments in society would channel the passions to create a just nation. 

What Hume and Vico shared was a conception of the world where man had constructed the social structures in which he lived and by tinkering and reforming these structures could create a more perfect life here on Earth. Man was responsible for his life while on this Earth. That tradition was the founding of modern thought and The Enlightenment.

“Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee

This is an epic about four generations of a Korean family who were forced to immigrate from Busan to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The story starts in 1910 and ends in 1989. Eventually, the family moves to the Korean ghetto in Osaka, where they struggle to find work and food to survive World War II. As Koreans and as Christians, they were doubly discriminated against by the Japanese. Throughout the novel, there are hardships and deaths as well as births and love affairs, as each generation grows up and makes their own way through a foreign society. Much of the book is about what it is like to be an immigrant in a place that does not want you and where you are constantly treated as sub-human. There is the struggle to survive and even thrive in a place where you know you are not wanted. Lee manages to make this tragic tale hopeful at the same time. As one reads on one cannot help but root for this family and feel for every gut wrenching blow that they must endure and overcome. The characters are complicated, never clearly good nor bad, and they often struggle to make the right decisions in life. Chance often intervenes, for better or for worse, just when the winds of fate look to be blowing a certain way. Through the lens of one Korean family struggling to survive in Japan, Lee depicts the dilemma many immigrants feel about no longer having any place to call home.

“The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered” by Erwin Dekker

Dekker correctly emphasizes that Austrian Economics is better thought of as the study of the social sciences more broadly: the study of human action and, specifically, the study of human interaction and exchange with one another- praxeology and catallactics. There were various "circles" who met regularly during the fin de siecle and inter-war eras in the many cafes of Vienna. They would argue, drink, and even sing songs, but most often they debated about the bigger questions of what made civilization tick- culture, history, institutions, and traditions. The stars of what became labeled the "Austrian School" tradition were Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter. While differing in economics widely, what largely connected them was their methodological individualism, their radical subjectivity, and their use of marginal analysis in evaluating the economy. While maintaining that economics was a value-free (social)-science, they exposited that markets were the best means of conveying dispersed information widely, through the price system. Markets contained both civilizing and restraining urges by creating a space for the communal interaction of goods and ideas. The lasting contribution of the students from Vienna was to approach economics with humility, that knowledge is too immense, too dispersed, and too diverse to be accumulated by any one man, and thus it is best for the economist to think of himself as a constant learner of partial knowledge and fragments of ideas, rather than a scientist, teacher, or technocrat. Furthermore, economics cannot be studied without studying “the stuff in between”: language, law, tradition, and history- the things that make up a culture and create a civilization.