From James Barham:
Human Nature Watch 6: Ritalin Gone Wrong:
Two days ago, in “Human Nature Watch 5: Is Depression Good for You?,” I reported on a surprisingly level-headed and humane article in The New York Times challenging our newspaper of record’s standard Darwinian-reductionist line on human nature.
Today, I am delighted to report on another recent article that speaks sensibly about medicine and human behavioral problems. I hesitate to announce a new trend on the strength of a couple of articles. But if trend there is, I welcome it wholeheartedly.
Perhaps we should all write letters to the Editor to encourage whoever it was who decided to buck the dominant reductionist narrative line at the Gray Lady by publishing these two excellent pieces.
The new article is called “Ritalin Gone Wrong” … (Jan. 29) More.
Some of us wouldn’t waste much time on the Gray Lady down, but exposing the “drug store” approach to failure in school is overdue.
and
Morals and Money: Seems celeb economist Paul Krugman is not pleased with a new book on social inequality.
The Nobel Prize–winning economist and regular New York Times op-ed columnist is intensely irritated by all the attention accorded by the press and the punditocracy to Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart (Crown Forum, 2012).
Today, Krugman pushed back against Murray in a column whose title, “Money and Morals,” I have adapted for mine.
Murray’s controversial thesis, you will recall, is that the widening income inequality in America is the result of an even more yawning gap in moral values between managerial-class and working-class Americans.
Murray’s new book is a stunning synthesis of studies showing that poorly educated, low-income, white Americans have fallen into a social pathology consisting of falling educational levels, declining marriage rates, sky-high illegitimacy rates, waxing criminality, waning industriousness, and—to cap it all—rapid secularization.
Their upper- and middle-class counterparts have avoided most of these plagues, or else—as in the case of the divorce rate—fallen prey to them to a lesser degree. …
More. Not only is Krugman not pleased, but no one will be – if they need to make a living off the problem.
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