The Demise of College Textbooks

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7 of 19

Things That Will Soon Disappear Forever

College Textbooks

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By the end of this decade, digital formats for tablets and e-readers will displace physical books for assigned reading on college campuses, The Kiplinger Letter is forecasting. K–12 schools won’t be far behind, though they’ll mostly stick with larger computers as their platform of choice.

Digital texts figure to yield more bang for the buck than today’s textbooks. Interactive software will test younger pupils’ mastery of basic skills such as arithmetic and create customized lesson plans based on their responses. Older students will be able to take digital notes and even simulate chemistry experiments when bricks-and-mortar labs aren’t handy.

This is a mixed bag for publishers. They’ll sell more digital licenses of semester- or yearlong usage of electronic textbooks as their customers can’t turn to the used-book marketplace anymore. On the other hand, schools are seeking free online, open-source databases of information and collaborating with other institutions and districts to develop their own content on digital models, cutting out traditional educational publishers such as Pearson (PSO), McGraw-Hill and Scholastic (SCHL).

Mentally Owning Books

Shane Parrish

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Entrepreneur. Trying to understand how the world works. farnamstreetblog.com @farnamstreet

Feb 15

Mentally Owning a Book

Reading is one of the key ways we learn new things. And while it’s easy to pick a book up and turn the pages, it’s harder to actually understand and apply the lessons.

Let me break down a few points that will help you get the most out of reading after you finish a book.

First, if you’re talking about non-fiction or reading to learn, you should be taking notes while you read. I do this in the margins of the book and in the front and back covers. Sometimes I’ll also pull out a sheet of paper and do it there (this is called the Feynman Technique and could be the most helpful thing you learn to cement knowledge). However you do it, you need to keep yourself engaged and not read passively. This is how you improve on the awful reading retention most people have.

Second, when you finish a book, put it down altogether for at least a week. Get a little distance from the material, so it feels fresh when you return.

Third, pick it back up. Go back through all of your notes if you feel it was a “good, but not great” book.

But if it was better than “good”, re-read the whole thing or at the very least, re-read all the parts you thought were spectacular.

Arthur Schopenhauer put it this way:

Any kind of important book should immediately be read twice, partly because one grasps the matter in its entirety the second time, and only really understands the beginning when the end is known; and partly because in reading it the second time one’s temper and mood are different, so that one gets another impression; it may be that one sees the matter in another light.

I have found myself agreeing with Schopenhauer more and more over the years.

The book doesn’t change after the first read, but you certainly do.

Once you’ve read it once, you have a mental structure of the book built, a blueprint of its contents; now read it again, and fill in the structure. But only do this with truly excellent books; life isn’t long enough to do this with every book.

Don’t forget to take notes the second time through as well, while you read.

Finally, when you’re finished, if you’ve taken notes inside the book, use the front or back pages to create yourself a little index of the most important stuff you found. (Do this by flipping through your marginalia.) This will make for easy reference later on, and force you to think about what you found important.

Another strategy is to write your notes up either physically or on your computer and save them away in a file. I know people who have hundreds of these files, immediately searchable and easily reviewable.

What’s the point of all this? To become an engaged, skeptical, learned reader who doesn’t just own books physically, but mentally. This takes more time than most people are willing to invest, but if you want to be different, you have to learn how to act differently. That’s the whole idea behind Farnam Street.

Good luck!

Opinions

Something is not right

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis speaks at a press conference. (Shawn Thew/European Pressphoto Agency)

By Ruth Marcus Columnist May 26 at 7:59 PM 

In the middle of one night

Miss Clavel turned on the light

And said, “Something is not right!”

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— “Madeline,” by Ludwig
Bemelmans, 1939

 Play Video 2:01

Gianforte apologizes for assaulting reporter

Republican businessman Greg Gianforte won Montana's House seat a day after being charged with attacking a Guardian reporter. He gave an apology during his acceptance speech. (AP)

Many of us these days find ourselves channeling our inner Miss Clavel. 

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, for one. In Dexter Filkins’s profile of Mattis for the New Yorker, the most striking moment comes when Mattis is asked what worries him most in his new role. Filkins expected to hear about the Islamic State, or Russia, or the defense budget.

Instead, Mattis went to a deeper, more unsettling problem: “The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.” 

Something is not right. If anything, Mattis’s diagnosis seems understated. This national distemper, the sour, angry mood infecting the body politic, was evident before Montana congressional candidate Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter for daring to ask a question; then had his campaign lie about it; then failed to apologize — until after he won the election. 

It was evident before Gianforte’s current allies and future colleagues were muted, to put it mildly, in the face of his audio-taped assault. “We all make mistakes,” said Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Republicans’ campaign arm. This was not a mistake; it was an assault on a reporter doing his constitutionally protected job.

Something is not right — and Gianforte’s attack is simply a well-documented illustration of this larger ill. The events of a single week serve to underscore the gravity of the malady.

Something is not right when the grieving parents of murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich are forced to suffer the further injury of seeing their son’s death hijacked for political purpose, baselessly linked to WikiLeaked DNC emails.

Something is not right when President Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, marvels, after traveling with the president to Saudi Arabia, that “there was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard.” Note to Ross: The absence of protest is not good news — it is evidence of the absence of democracy.

Something is not right when Trump’s housing secretary, Ben Carson, asserts that “poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind. You take somebody that has the right mind-set, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.” As if the poor have only themselves to blame for their condition. How can this man be entrusted with the task of ensuring affordable housing when he seems to believe that the inability to pay for housing stems from lack of will and moral backbone? 

This is not simply about disagreeing with Trump’s ideology, such as it is, or even with more orthodox Republican views. It is about the increasing distrust of the other, whether a refugee or a political opponent, and the emergence of a fundamental mean-spiritedness inconsistent with American values. 

About those American values: Something is not right when, as the Congressional Budget Office found, the House Republican health-care bill would result in 23 million more Americans without health coverage, inflicting the greatest harm on the oldest, sickest and least well-off. 

Something is not right when Trump proposes a budget that would slash funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the program launched by President George W. Bush in 2003 that has saved nearly 12 million lives in Africa and elsewhere by providing antiretroviral drugs. Trump’s budget would cut the program by nearly one-fifth — and result in the deaths of at least 1 million people, according to researchers. 

And that is just one particularly poignant example. Something is not right when Trump’s budget would cut food stamps and housing vouchers for needy families; health care for poor children — this on top of cuts already envisioned in the health-care bill — heating assistance for the low-income elderly; and job training programs to help the very Americans whose interests Trump vowed to champion.

Something is really not right when all this is done to help pay for trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the richest Americans. When it is built on an edifice of fairy-tale growth projections exacerbated by fraudulent accounting, double-counting savings from this supposed growth. 

We are all Miss Clavel now, or should be.

Thomas E. Ricks - Churchill and Orwell (Book Review)

This book is a dual biography of two of the most influential people of the 20th Century.  I'll be taking notes as I read.  If the Great Man version has any validity, it certainly applies to Winston Churchill.  Orwell's influence is literary, but oh how influential his body of work has been.

The author dedicates the book to all those who seek to preserve our freedoms.  We need these kind of people as much as ever these days.

The Great Man theory of history isn't much respected today, but it has merit.  The author points out a traffic accident in NYC in 1931 in which Winston Churchill could have been killed.  Could there have been a 20th Century as we know it today without Churchill?  P. 1

One day in the 1950's one of Churchill's grandson's found his way into Churchill's study and asked Grandpa if he were the greatest man in the world.  He answered, "Yes, and now bugger off."  P. 4

Churchill was a "troublesome" boy, an indifferent student, and did not appear that he was on his way to amounting to much as a child.  He did not go to college.  His father took little notice of him, and his mother was too much in society to bother with him.  P. 6

Despite his less than exemplary record as a student, Churchill learned how to write and was a lifelong lover of the English language.  P. 8

His father writes him a devastating letter in August of 1893 putting him down brutally.  P. 9

With his father's death, a fuse seems to have been lit in Winston.  P. 10

It is a mistake to read too many books when quite young.  P. 10

He did not attend a university.  He was an autodidact.  P. 10

Greatly influenced by Gibbon.  P. 10-11

Intoxicated by language using four or five words with the same meaning.  P. 11

As an autodidact there were many gaps in his knowledge.  He knew what he knew, but did not know what he did not know.  P. 12

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.  P. 13

Escape in Africa.  P. 16

Nothing quite correct in breeding, character, and temperament.  P. 17

Marrying Clementine perhaps the wisest choice in his life.  P. 19

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in India in June of 1903.  P. 23

He was a liberal working as a "policeman" in Burma.  P. 27

The oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong.  P. 31

Orwell was living in a time when the wealthy could ignore the plights of those living around them.  (What has changed).  P. 32

Orwell was always very sensitive to odor.  P. 35

His book "Down and Out" is about how the struggle to get by grinds people down day by day.  P. 36

Orwell wrote his bad books early and saved the best for last.  P. 38

"To see what is front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."  P. 40

The 30's created a sense that a new Dark Age was coming.  P. 45

Orwell wondered whether the British ruling class was wicked or stupid.  P. 48

Eventually the jig was up, and Germany and Great Britain were in a life and death struggle.  P. 63

Hemingway: Boozy, preoccupied with image rather than reality.  P. 75

History is facts according to what really happened rather than what happened according to a party line.  P. 78

Churchill became "Churchill" at the beginning of his time becoming PM in May of 1940.  The acme of his career was the first 7 months when he found his enduring place of history in saving Britain in the famed Battle of Britain.  P. 84

His party did not warm to him at first when he succeeded his disgraced predecessor.  P. 91

Churchill danced a big after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor as he knew the war would be won.  P. 148

He achieved his two great war aims: to keep Britain going and to bring the US into the war.  P. 149

One of the great subtexts of this book and the war was the relationship between Churchill and FDR.  In retrospect it would seem like a good relationship was meant to be, but like a marriage, the two had to learn to work together and they went thru ups and downs.  P. 160

British condescension toward Americans.  Snobby British!  P. 162

Should I read "Animal Farm" again?  P. 174

"The struggle to see things as they are is perhaps the fundamental driver of Western Civilization.  There is a long but direct line from Aristotle and Archimedes to Locke, Hume, Mill, and Darwin, and from there through Orwell and Churchill to the "Letter from Birmingham City Jail."  It is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it,  and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter."  P. 269-270

Against Choices

As a simple-minded soul I do not like multiple choices. Two choices max. Pick A or B. The blue one or the green one. This one or that one. Would that life was always this simple.

David Ross

Finished second in Dancing with the Stars.  He went much further than I ever thought he would.

Trump's Cruelty

Steep cuts in Trump’s budget proposal don’t sit well with many in GOP

The president's proposal to cut federal spending by more than $3.6 trillion over the next decade — including deep reductions for programs that help the poor — drew praise from some fiscally conservative lawmakers. But most Republicans flatly rejected the plan.

Creepy Day

Just for fun I think I'll act creepy today. If you see me today know that it's just an act. I am really not creepy; eccentric and weird maybe, but not creepy. It's all for your entertainment. (Actually it's for MY entertainment)
I am due to see my periodontist today. Wish I had some of them red neck teeth with gaps. Walk in with them on. Big smile.
"Hi Dr. Kent! How you today?"
Wish I had thought of it in time.

The End of May

The end of May comes and the full-blown Trump nightmare continues.  Will he eventually be impeached?

Scandal Summers

I remember the Watergate hearings and the scandal summers of 1973 and '74.  Now we will have the Trump scandal summer of 2017.

Historians and Economists on Slavery

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“It’s Time for Historians of Slavery to Listen to Economists” by Dr. Keri Leigh Merritt

Home > Uncategorized > “It’s Time for Historians of Slavery to Listen to Economists” by Dr. Keri Leigh Merritt

It’s Time for Historians of Slavery to Listen to Economists

By Dr. Keri Leigh Merritt

Due to the extremely alarming rise of Donald Trump, the American public is once again questioning the political beliefs and actions of lower-class whites. Often considered to be voting against their own self-interests by supporting elite white politicians, the nation’s poorest whites are generally stereotyped as uneducated, uncouth fools whose beliefs are dictated by an insidious form of racism. Yet poor white support for this aristocratic class has not always been so unwavering. Indeed, during the late antebellum period in the plantation Deep South, class tensions between whites were rife; and as conflicting views over slavery mounted, a deep distrust – and at times, hatred – divided the rich and the impoverished.

By simply acknowledging that whites have not always aligned in solidarity against black Americans, several persistent falsities regarding Southern history are revealed. Perhaps the most important myth to dismantle, however, is the myth of white unity over slavery. Poor whites consistently supported slaveholder policies, and even fought for the Confederacy, the argument goes, because they greatly admired the slaveholders and aspired to own slaves themselves. To be sure, there was certainly near-universal consensus among Southern whites regarding racism, but support for slavery varied significantly, especially among members of lower economic classes. Instead, the vast majority of poor whites recognized the near-impossibility of eventually owning slaves.

One of the main reasons this myth continues unchallenged is due to the disconnect between historians and economists. Especially over the last decade or so economists have produced some incredibly significant work concerning the nineteenth century South, yet their work goes virtually unheeded by many in the historical profession.

For instance, a recent paper written by a team of three economists confirms with quantitative data what several historians have been arguing for years. Using a dataset of nearly four million whites in Confederate states, the economists concluded that slaveholders were more likely to fight for the South than non-slaveholders. “Although in general wealthier individuals are less likely to fight in such conflicts,” they wrote, “when their wealth is tied to existing institutions that civil conflict threatens, they may in fact be more likely to fight.”[1]

Historian Joseph Glatthaar’s research had previously confirmed the strong ties between Confederate volunteers and their involvement in slavery. In 1861, he found, almost half of all the South’s enlistees “either lived with slaveholders or were slave owners themselves.” And the non-slaveholding volunteers sold crops to, worked for, or rented land from slave owners – a direct connection to slavery was unambiguously clear.[2]

Writing more than fifty years before Glatthaar, Hugh Bailey examined the antithesis of this slavery-induced patriotism. Studying Confederate disloyalty in Alabama, he contended that even in the Deep South, non-slaveholders held strong Unionist and anti-Confederate sympathies. “It has long been recognized that disloyalty to the Confederacy became widespread” in much of northern Alabama, he penned, an area which “remained a cancer in the side of the Confederacy for the remainder of the war.” Victoria Bynum and a few other historians have made similar arguments about the deep divide among whites over slavery and secession. Having these scholars’ theories confirmed with economic data is more important than ever in this current era of non-factual “truths” and propagandistic lies.[3]

Still, the most important recent paper by economists concerning the nineteenth century South is probably Samuel Williamson and Louis Cain’s “Measuring Slavery in 2011 Dollars” – a brilliant piece of work that many historians of American slavery tend to overlook. By truly explaining Southern wealth distribution and the price of slaves, these economists help dispel the misconception that every non-slaveholder, no matter how impoverished, believed that one day they could enter the ranks of the master class.[4]

In short, Williamson and Cain established that by the later antebellum period, purchasing a slave was far outside of the realm of possibilities for poorer whites. By using different measures of economic value, they arrived at a much more accurate analysis of the capital it required to become a slaveholder. Arguing that both economic status and economic power influenced the cost of slaves, Williamson and Cain wrote that “Even if they have not been elected to power, the wealthy often have disproportionate influence on those who do…[and] Slaveholders as a group had considerable economic power.” Therefore, while the average “real price” of a slave in 1860 was $20,000 in modern terms, that number is not an accurate indicator of how much capital a non-slaveholder needed to enter into the ranks of the slaveholding oligarchy.

Instead, by using a “comparable value” based on three measures of worth, Williamson and Cain took into consideration (1) labor or income value, (2) economic status, and (3) real price. They found a three-fold increase in slave prices following the long depression that started with the Panic of 1837 and ended around 1843. Using this new valuation process, they calculated that the average price of a slave in 1850 ($400) would be $82,000 in 2011. As the price of slaves rose throughout the decade, and slave ownership became even more concentrated, on the eve of secession the “purchase of a single slave represented as much as $130,000 and more in today’s prices.” This astonishing fact – that in 1860 it took about $130,000 to purchase a single slave – combined with the reality that less affluent white southerners had no access to loans, finally puts the slaveholder-aspiration illusion to rest. “Potentially all slaveholders ranked in the top one percent,” Williamson and Cain concluded, “if economic power is used as the standard of comparison.”[5]

By accepting that the idea of white unity over black slavery and the Confederacy is nothing more than myth, important nuance is added to the narrative of Southern history. While the consequences of slavery were certainly far more severe and sustained for black Americans, it is important to recognize that the socio-economic repercussions of slavery also greatly affected lower-class whites. The work of economists continues to demonstrate the extent to which racially-based slavery left the entire region impoverished, and historians will be well-served to incorporate that research into their own scholarship. Indeed, just a few years ago economist Rodrigo Soares and his team found that the “historical use of slavery is significantly correlated with current levels of inequality,” convincingly demonstrating that even today slavery’s legacy is undeniably visible in the economic circumstances – and thus the material well-being – of all non-elite southerners, both black and white.[6]

Keri Leigh Merritt works as an independent scholar in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research focuses on race and class in U.S. history. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. She has also co-edited a book on southern labor history with Matthew Hild (Reviving Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power, forthcoming), and is currently conducting research for two additional books. One is on radical black resistance during the Reconstruction era, while the second examines the changing role of law enforcement in the mid-nineteenth century South. It will ultimately link the rise of professional police forces in the Deep South to the end of slavery.

[1] A.B. Hall, C. Huff, and S. Kuriwaki, “When Wealth Encourages Individuals to Fight: Evidence From the American Civil War,” online at https://connordhuff.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/hhk_civil_war1.pdf; the authors examined “a randomized land lottery in 19th century Georgia,” concluding that ”Households of lottery winners owned more slaves in 1850 and were more likely to have sons who fought in the Confederate Army.”

[2] Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Defeat (New York: The Free Press, 2008), 20.

[3] Hugh C. Bailey, “Disloyalty in Early Confederate Alabama,” Journal of Southern History 23, No. 4 (Nov. 1957): 522-523; Victoria E. Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies (Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 2010).

[4] Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain. “Measuring Slavery in 2011 Dollars.” Paper on MeasuringWorth.com.

[5] Ibid. Williamson and Cain also showed that “the holder of 10 slaves likely ranks in the top one percent of the distribution [of total estate], if economic status is used as the standard of comparison.” Wealth grew by about 30 percent during the decade of the 1850s, but in the South, non-slave wealth grew at 25 percent, while slave wealth grew at 40 percent. By 1860, the top 1 percent of white southerners held 27 percent of total estate, while the bottom 50 percent held 1 percent. Only 0.11 percent held more than 100 slaves, and “Those who owned over 500 slaves had a measure of economic power that compares to billionaires today.”

[6] Rodrigo R. Soares et. al., “A Note on Slavery and the Roots of Inequality,” Journal of Comparative Economics 40, (2012): 578. “The correlation between slavery and inequality,” they reported, “survives the inclusion of variables controlling for development, geographic characteristics, institutional quality, and provision of public goods…[and holds true] still today.”

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 May 17, 2017 at 10:48 AM

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 civil war, confederacy, keri leigh merritt, plantations, slavery

 Michael Landis