Editor's picks: Education and human values
Ian Morris is non-committal about the likely outcome of the struggle between the egalitarian and the privileged in this world (18 April, p 28).
Underneath the hierarchical values of agrarian society there was always the egalitarian hunter/gatherer nature. To overcome it the liars, cheats and bullies that ruled over us had to spin many a nonsense.
Education brought about the rise of the middle class 鈥� necessary for production and the wealth of countries to grow. It has also worked a permanent change that alongside new means of recording and transmission means we won’t be so easily bamboozled again.
Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, UK
Editor's picks: Education and human values
I was astonished by the parallels between Morris’s historical account and the present political landscape in the US. Democratic-leaning friends are frequently baffled by the fact that many working-class Americans support Republican policies that would seem to be against their own best interests. “Perhaps they don’t think of themselves as poor,” they joke, “but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires?” Could they rather hold, in Morris’s terms, the “farming values” of approval of a strong hierarchy and acceptance of economic inequality? Do Democratic voters hold “fossil-fuel values”?
Waterford, Virginia, US
Why trickle-down doesn't follow
I would like to suggest reasons for the failure of “trickle-down” economics that Ha-Joon Chang describes (25 April, p 28). The rich put most of their excess income (which is most of their income) into the stock market and into businesses that are already earning a profit. No jobs are created if two investors trade money for shares of stock. Given a tax break, the excess money just goes to a bigger portfolio and more stuff owned; it doesn’t change the risk sums for the rich.
A higher income tax changes that risk calculation, because in all fiscal systems money spent on expanding a business is tax-deductible. Thus if income tax is high the rich are better off reinvesting excess revenue in actual job creation by trying to grow their businesses, advertise them and compete for customers.
Higher income tax does not necessarily result in greater government income: it can just be the reason for the rich to reinvest. Thus the opposite of trickle-down is true; the higher the income tax, the more attractive job creation is.
San Antonio, Texas, US
Why trickle-down doesn't follow
The survival of the concept of “trickle-down economics”, in the face of all the evidence, testifies to the power of vested interests. Herbert Hoover, US Republican president from 1929 to 1933, cut taxes for the wealthy. In 1931, after the 1929 stock market crash, he embarked on major programmes to stimulate the economy, such as the Hoover dam. To help pay for them he reversed the tax cuts.
Against the background of the Great Depression, he lost the 1932 election to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. American humorist Will Rogers commented that this election “was lost four and five and six years ago, not this year. They didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickled down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”
London, UK
<b>Weekly social</b>
“I, for one, welcome our new carbon nanotube spider overlords!”
@welbournd to reports of spiders spinning enhanced silk (9 May, p 18)
Neanderthals didn't need pots
Your article on Neanderthal chefs spicing up their diet had an intriguing final sentence: “we’ve never found a Neanderthal pot” (18 April, p 14). In New Zealand Maoris boil or steam their food without pots, either by placing it in woven flax baskets and immersing these in hot pools, or by wrapping it in leaves and steaming in earth ovens.
It avoids having to wash dishes.
Upper Hutt, New Zealand
Dogs of the old Stone Age
The puts a nice minimum age on the domestication of dogs that Pat Shipman describes (14 March, p 26). In it there are footprints of a teenager with wolf-dog footprints running in parallel. Since these run side-by-side and are not overlapping, it is reasonable to suppose they were simultaneous and thus a sign of friendship, not predation. The rockfall that sealed the cave is dated 21,500 years ago.
Shipman links domestication of the wolf to the demise of the Neanderthals. The youngest well-dated Neanderthal site is 39,000 years old, while the Chauvet paintings are dated just 3000 years later.
The proximity of these dates might be coincidence. But it may be that the wolf-dog that finished off the Neanderthals was by then so domesticated that humans could use it to keep bears out of caves 鈥� and could now experiment with art.
Vallon Pont d’Arc, France
The seductive appeal of toxins
The discovery that nectar toxins are attractive to bees is not totally surprising (25 April, p 42). We’re all attracted to toxins. Fruit toxins and vegetable toxins are part of the “5 a day” that health authorities recommend. They are a key part of the aromas that our noses have evolved to identify as “delicious”.
Plant defences against pathogens and parasites evolved long before sophisticated animal life forms emerged. So instead of manufacturing antimicrobials ourselves, we obtain them when we eat health-enhancing fruits and vegetables. True, they are poisons, but Paracelsus’s adage that it is “the dose makes the poison” applies.
Hastings, East Sussex, UK
The varieties of colour blindness
Veronique Greenwood’s article on colour vision reminded me of something that has puzzled me for a long time (18 April, p 40). I take a camera when scuba diving. If I leave the “white balance” set for daylight, then the deeper I go the more the colours recorded by the camera diverge from what I see. At 15 metres everything in the photos looks green; at 30 metres it is all blue and brown. Yet to my eye the colours look relatively normal. If I reset the white balance of the camera at depth using a white card, then it “sees” colour much as my eye does.
I conclude that my brain does a sophisticated job of adjusting white balance. But, given that the human brain-eye system did not evolve to see things 30 metres below the sea, how can my brain “know” what the “right” balance of red, green and blue is? Perhaps the number of opsin types in our eyes is less important than the processing running behind them?
Jomtien, Thailand
The varieties of colour blindness
I have been told that I am red-green deficient yet I cannot detect any number in the right hand panel of your Ishihara test for colour blindness, which apparently I should be able to do. More curious still, I cannot reveal any number by using software.
Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, UK
The varieties of colour blindness
鈥� We now discover that the Ishihara test in question was supplied to us on its side, which may have affected the effect. None of us were able to spot this. Also, the other three readers who wrote to say they could not see the number may have sub-types of red-green colour blindness that produce different responses to the Ishihara test.
Radicalising depression
Kamaldeep Bhui’s valuable article identifies depression as one of the very few common factors among those expressing extremist sympathies (11 April, p 24).
He is completely correct to debunk the conventional wisdom that religious zeal, social deprivation or political grievances are motives. A UK Security Service report demonstrated no ability to profile terrorists along these lines, showing that such simplistic notions are confined to populist politicians and the populist press.
A difficulty is that since depression affects a high proportion of the population, whereas violent extremists are, by their actions, outliers from the normal distribution of the population, depression offers little to guide counter-extremist activity. It does mesh well with my own work, published on the Countering Extremism pages of .
Wimbledon, Surrey, UK
All roads lead to ruin for wildlife
Curtis Abraham describes the risks of redrawing borders of wildlife reserves (18 April, p 26) and William Laurance the role of roads bringing in poachers (also on p 26). But simply building a road through a forest effectively divides it into two.
So if the whole forest was just big enough to support, say, tigers, neither half is: the tigers will eventually die out. The loss of one species leads to the loss of others until a new, less diverse, equilibrium is reached.
The road itself will bring about extinctions, before considering the human interference which it brings. The absolute size of the habitat or biotope is crucial.
Blagnac, France
The very first weather station
You say that Mount Washington has since 1870 hosted “the world’s first mountaintop weather station” (11 April, p 22). But the was opened on 1 January 1781 and thus predates the US example by 89 years.
Friedberg, Germany
Information is not wisdom
Your report on Google’s plan to rank its search results by “facts the web unanimously agrees on” (28 February, p 24) and the subsequent letters (14 March) remind me of a comment by the author and broadcaster Clive James.
Interviewed on ABC Radio, he acknowledged that he used the internet extensively. Asked his opinion of its facilities, I recall him replying: “For information the internet is unsurpassed; but for knowledge…?”
Linden Park, South Australia