It was hard to decide which part of this article to excerpt: the hilarious bombast of the opening or the all-too-prescient middle sections about the waning of everyday amateur musicianship in an age of recorded performance: "And what is the result? The child becomes indifferent to practice, for when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely, and with him a host of vocal and instrumental teachers, who will be without field or calling." Nah, I'll go with the opening. This is, after all, the guy whose fortunes rose on mass-music-publishing, who recoiled and reinvented the tuba so that you could march with it.

discipline, music, recording, sound, technology and change

Nate:

Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land. And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time.

On a matter upon which I feel so deeply, and which I consider so far-reaching, I am quite willing to be reckoned an alarmist, admittedly swayed in part by personal interest, as well as by the impending harm to American musical art. I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.

Introducing television to an area can shift the horizons of the possible radically and quickly, especially for women. It's worth noting that both the positive and negative consequences recorded in this study were by and large unintended and unforeseen.

brazil, soap operas, south america, technology and change, tv

Nate:

Cable and satellite television may be having an even bigger impact on fertility in rural India. As in Brazil, popular programming there includes soaps that focus on urban life. Many women on these serials work outside the home, run businesses, and control money. In addition, soap characters are typically well-educated and have few children. And they prove to be extraordinarily powerful role models: Simply giving a village access to cable TV, research by scholars Robert Jensen and Emily Oster has found, has the same effect on fertility rates as increasing by five years the length of time girls stay in school.

The soaps in Brazil and India provided images of women who were empowered to make decisions affecting not only childbirth, but a range of household activities. The introduction of cable or satellite services in a village, Jensen and Oster found, goes along with higher girls’ school enrollment rates and increased female autonomy. Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn’t just birthrates that changed as Globo’s signal spread—divorce rates went up, too.

John McWhorter is a tack-sharp writer who is always provocative, and rarely more so than in this piece, which argues that language death is not such a bad thing. As Lamin Sanneh and others have shown, Christian mission has been the main engine of language preservation, and I don't think that we can be quite as sanguine as McWhorter about languages dying out. Such diversity is arguably a crucial part of fulfilling the human call to "be fruitful and multiply." McWhorter mentions the Babel story dismissively as a literal depiction of the source of linguistic diversity (although it is remarkable that historical linguistics has failed to find any common source for language's wide and wild variety), but an equally important message of that story is that when "the whole earth had one language and one speech," the result was totalitarian ambition and rebellion against the divine mandate to fill the earth (with all the cultural diversity that would entail). Still, well worth reading.

cultural worlds, globalization, language

Andy:

At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.

The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.

As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one?

I recall having a strong sense of Lego nomenclature as well, though I'm hazy on the details. I should go out to the storage bins in the garage to root around and see if the touch of plastic can retrieve any specific terms. Meanwhile, Language Log's Geoff Pullum sums up this delightful article well: "It's about the deep-seatedness of children's need to have names for all the things they deal with — and the lack of any necessity for there to be pre-existing names in the language they happen to have learned."

children, cultural worlds, families, language, names, play, words

Nate:

Then, when another seven-year-old came round for tea after school one day, I overheard the two of them, busy in the spaceship construction yard that used to be our living room, get into a linguistic thicket.

“Can you see any clippy bits?” my son asked his friend. The friend was flummoxed. “Do you mean handy bits?” he asked, pointing.

“Yes,” replied my boy. “Clippy bits.”

Of course! This language of Lego isn’t just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words?

A fascinating look at the birth and life of policies and institutions, and of their surprising multigenerational effects.

africa, colonialism, cultural worlds, government, horizons of the possible, nigeria, taxes

Nate:

In colonial Nigeria in the last years of the 19th century, a strange quirk of history led the British rulers to draw an arbitrary boundary line along the 7?10? N line of latitude, separating the population into two separate administrative districts.

Below the line, the colonial government raised money by levying taxes on imported alcohol and other goods that came through Southern Protectorate’s sea ports. Above the line, the administrators of the landlocked Northern Protectorate had no sea ports, and instead raised money through direct taxes. In the areas near the border, this took the form of a simple poll tax, where tax officials collected from each citizen the equivalent of between $4 and $20 in today’s dollars.

Could this seemingly minor difference—created over a century ago by a long-defunct colonial administration, and long ago erased by subsequent administrative divisions—possibly still matter today?

Yes, it could, according to Daniel Berger, a PhD student in politics at NYU.  Berger’s paper, Taxes, Institutions and Local Governance: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Colonial Nigeria, finds that the “simple act of having to collect taxes caused governments to be forced to build the capacity which can now provide basic government services.” As a result, governance today is “significantly better” in areas just above the line than in those just below it.

Count me a fan of the "microlending" site Kiva. But count me equally a fan of this remarkable essay about Kiva, which explores the paradoxes, if not contradictions, of the secret to Kiva's success: marketing as personal exchanges what in fact are wholesale microfinance transactions. To put it more plainly: when you "sponsor" someone on Kiva (or through World Vision, Compassion International, or any number of other sponsorship organizations) you are not doing what you think you are doing. Instead, the organization is leveraging your deep human need for connection to another human being to help you do what you actually should be doing: investing in whole communities. The whole essay (yes, it's actually a blog post, but its sobriety, fairness, and insight deserve to be called something better than a blog post) is incredibly important reading, along with the dialogue that has ensued since its publication on 2 October (including today's New York Times article which alerted me to it). There is much to ponder here for culture makers of all kinds—or to use the terms Roodman himself uses, for both playwrights and critics.

changing the world, development, fundraising, microfinance, poverty

Andy:

n Kiva’s defense, its behavior is emblematic of fund-raising in microfinance and charity generally, and is ultimately traceable to human foibles. People donate in part because it makes them feel good. Giving the beneficiary a face and constructing a story for her in which the donor helps write the next chapter opens purses.

Our sensitivity to stories and faces distorts how we give, thus what charities do and how they sell themselves. What if the best way to help in some places is to support communities rather than individuals? To make roads rather than make loans? To contribute to a disaster preparedness fund rather than just respond to the latest earthquake? And how far should nonprofits go in misrepresenting what they do in order to fund it? It is not an easy question: what if honesty reduces funding?

The big lesson is that the charities we observe, the ones whose pitches reach our retinas, are survivors of a Darwinian selection process driven by our own minds. An actual eBay venture called MicroPlace competes with Kiva; but MicroPlace is more up-front about the real deal. Its page for sample borrower Filadelfo Sotelo invites you to “invest in the organization that helped Filadelfo Sotelo: Fondo de Desarrollo Local” (FDL). This honesty is probably one reason MicroPlace has badly lagged Kiva. Who wants to click on the FDL icon when you can click on a human face?