Category: ideas

The Bohemian lifestyle, romanticized in Victorian times, has been absorbed into the mainstream. “We have to recognise that many of our present assumptions about life have originated from people who, sometimes in very small ways but motivated by revolutionary ideals, hope and defiance of convention, challenged the establishment 100 years ago. In a way, we’re all Bohemians now. We can conduct relationships with people from any social class without fear of ostracism, while deploring oppressive, stratified societies.”

Complexity theory is “the ultimate of interdisciplinary fields.” It “has blossomed into a broad movement of scientists searching for universal patterns that occur at all levels of nature and society when local interactions give rise to new collective behaviors. They want to know, for example, how millions of amoebas swarm into a self-directed slime mold, how a trillion-celled organism develops from a single egg, and how markets arise from the interactions of individual human beings. Complexity theorists want to reproduce these patterns with computer models, in order to gain a kind of insight that equations or statistics supposedly cannot match. What’s more, they want to see both the forest and the trees, by viewing big patterns through the local rules of interaction that produce them.”

“The return of cities can only be explained in the context of the rise of the creative age – a long wave of change affecting every sector of the economy, in which competitiveness and wealth have become increasingly determined by the capacity for innovation and creativity. The contrast with the industrial age could not be sharper…”

Samuel Huntington argues that “if peoples and countries with similar cultures (that is, values, traditions, religions) are coming together, then countries made up of different cultures are in danger of coming apart. He argues in ‘Who Are We?’ that multiculturalism, diversity and bilingualism in the United States are strengthening racial, ethnic and other ‘subnational identities’ at the expense of an overarching national identity, while global business ties, global communications and global concerns (about matters like the environment and women’s rights) are increasingly promoting ‘transnational’ identities among American elites. As a result, Mr. Huntington suggests, the United States is not only undergoing a profound identity crisis, but it may eventually find its very existence threatened.”

The laws that govern who owns ideas and creative products are being rewritten as big corporations struggle to shore up business models that are under attack in the digital age. So shouldn’t we be having a broad cultural debate about what the new world will look like?

“The “mutation rate” in names is higher for girls than for boys. Parents, in other words, are more liable to be inventive when choosing a name for a baby girl. The researchers have found that for every 10,000 daughters born in America there is an average of 2.3 new names. For sons, the figure is 1.6. One possibility is that in a society where family names are inherited patrilineally, parents feel constrained by tradition when it comes to choosing first names for their sons. As a result, boys often end up with the names of their ancestors. But when those same parents come to choose names for their daughters, they feel less constrained and more able to choose based on style and beauty.”

“Years ago, with a very few exceptions, tutoring was for students who were floundering or failing. Today it is a booming industry, fueled by parental angst over the college admissions process, that helps not only children who are struggling, but also gilds the lily, moving “B+” students to “A” students, giving extra support to students enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement courses and propelling children with high test scores into the very top percentiles.”

So you’ve got a great idea. Where did it come from? Did you come up with it all on your own, right out of thin air? Probably not, says sociologist Ronald Burt. In fact, most ideas are not entirely original, but are merely examples of people finding a use for thoughts and facts, the significance of which may have eluded other individuals. In other words, a mundane fact which has no real use to one set of people may spark great creativity in another social or professional setting. According to Burt, this is all evidence that social structure can stifle creative thinking, and has become known as the study of “structural holes.”

“There is too much needless complexity in the world. Technology, which was supposed to make our lives easier, has taken a wrong turn. In 20 years we’ve gone from the simplicity of MacPaint to Photoshop. While the first fostered a creative explosion, the second gave birth to an industry of how-to books and classes. And such complexity is commonplace. Despite the lip service paid to “ease of use,” “plug and play,” and “one-click shopping,” simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, and it is time to break free from technology’s intimidating complexity.”

There is a widely-held assumption that “wider, more universal education will act as a leveller of social opportunities. The assumption has thus far proved wrong. Comprehensive education, which should be considered a success on many other grounds, did not dent relative social immobility. Better-off kids still did better, either within the comprehensives or in the private sector.”