tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-351435132008-05-12T15:40:57.673-07:00Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-27870654280322113882008-04-14T09:11:00.000-07:002008-04-14T09:42:36.028-07:00

In academia there is an adage that says disputes among professors are bitter precisely because the stakes are so small. The statement has been attributed to various people, including Henry Kissinger and Woodrow Wilson. In print the more general conception is known as Issawi’s law of social motion, specifically: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-5693479973784528092008-03-16T16:03:00.000-07:002008-03-19T09:37:59.960-07:00

In my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism I treat favorably a number of ideas from philosopher John Dewey, which may come as a surprise to admirers of Ayn Rand. The key to understanding why I do so is to see Dewey as an Aristotelian who rejects intrinsicism without resorting to skepticism or subjectivism. During his years at Columbia University, Dewey came under the influence of Aristotelian

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-41819823928894529942008-02-21T06:06:00.000-08:002008-02-21T07:28:11.570-08:00

Socialism, and more broadly collectivism, as Ayn Rand pointed out, died as a moral ideal in 1945. As a practical ideal, socialism died with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet socialism and the principle that government might is required to make right is still with us. How can that be? Answer: epistemological errors of Enlightenment thinkers, specifically their failure to identify the

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-59336532346626167682008-01-25T09:22:00.000-08:002008-01-25T09:51:34.617-08:00

A favorite pastime of today’s teachers, especially college professors, is the trashing of their students. “My students are terrible,” is the common complaint. “They can’t write, they can’t calculate, and they can’t think. They are woefully ignorant! They just don’t measure up to the standards of the good old days when I was a student.” And those “good old days,” depending on the age of the

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-29211195825133819682007-12-26T08:31:00.001-08:002007-12-26T09:05:34.733-08:00

Sound judgment means sensible—i.e., rational or considered, not impulsive—decision making. Many parents and teachers value this process as a primary skill that children and students should possess upon reaching adulthood. In contrast, independent judgment, which presupposes sensible decision making, is not often cited as a valued goal of either education or adulthood, yet this is the personality

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-40075063584601371272007-11-26T14:09:00.000-08:002007-11-27T16:15:59.526-08:00

This lament is often heard today about medicine and education, among other fields. Business, however, is the last thing medicine and education have been turned into. Bureaus of the government would be a more accurate description. Why the confusion between bureaucracy and business? The simplest answer is that most people do not understand the difference between the two. A bureaucracy, as Ludwig

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-70956034892145806982007-10-24T07:18:00.000-07:002007-10-24T08:36:02.505-07:00

In a previous post, I argued that academic peer review is a gatekeeping process brought about by the post-World War II growth of government involvement in research and scholarship. Though it may control quality in a narrow, conventional sense, one significant consequence of this process is the suppression of innovation. The present post takes a look at the underlying ethics and epistemology of

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-35280401118420206062007-09-26T19:06:00.000-07:002007-09-26T19:35:22.707-07:00

No, not the card game. I occasionally use this phrase—he or she needs to go fish—as metaphor for what some so-called problem children in elementary schools should be allowed to do. My source for the phrase is Daniel Greenberg’s Sudbury Valley School (1, 2, 3), which is located on a ten-acre estate in Massachusetts. One of the essential features of the school is that the children, ages four to

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-64430037021554852462007-08-30T10:48:00.000-07:002007-08-30T11:42:12.397-07:00

Why is BS’ing admired, almost to the point of being “cuddly and warm,” as philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it, whereas lying is considered morally repugnant? Frankfurt examined BS in his 2005 monograph On Bullshit (BS) and distinguished it from lying. The liar, Frankfurt argued, is focused on facts so he or she may state the opposite, but the BS’er is an entertainer or artist who uses words and

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-40540104465913364352007-07-27T06:26:00.000-07:002007-07-27T08:19:39.632-07:00

As a young man I accepted the wisdom of doctors and their prescriptions without question, never bothering to learn the names of the drugs they ordered. After reading Jerome Groopman’s book How Doctors Think, I am not so sure I want to go back to a doctor! The ten to fifteen percent error rate in diagnosis and similar percentage in the misreading of x-rays and MRIs does not give one confidence in

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-47728766843560047822007-06-26T05:38:00.000-07:002007-11-20T13:43:21.033-08:00

Three recent posts produced several questions and comments. Follow the Government Intervention. In “The Market Gives Privilege to No One” I stated that certain groups of professionals do not usually work weekends and that the computer industry’s “24/7” indicates the ultimate in free-market service. “But I work weekends,” protested one doctor and one professor and shock was expressed that I was

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-27828682752916748452007-05-21T09:37:00.000-07:002007-05-21T15:06:49.647-07:00

In marketing the most effective way to introduce new products is the free sample. In 1978 Lever Brothers spent $15 million ($47.55 million in today’s currency) delivering a free sample of Signal Mouthwash to two-thirds of all US households. The strategy was a success and the product remained on the market well into the 1990s. The significance of the free sample is product trial; it gets the

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-15581678097148143232007-05-03T15:35:00.000-07:002007-05-04T08:39:45.371-07:00

“Superlatives belong to the marketplace,” says David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy and Mather advertising agency, not in “serious advertisement; they lead readers to discount the realism of every claim.” The same could be said about praise given to others: superlatives should come from the recipient of the compliment. What Ogilvy means is that describing what a product can do for the customer,

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-69566398386154973802007-04-11T12:31:00.000-07:002007-04-11T16:12:40.077-07:00

In product development there are two kinds of errors. A “go” error occurs when the green light is given to a product that eventually fails. The Edsel, a $250 million write-off by the Ford Motor Company in 1959, is one example. The “drop” error occurs when an idea that could have been highly profitable is eliminated from further consideration. How do we know that the idea could have been

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-54140973581381511582007-03-13T08:42:00.000-07:002007-04-10T12:42:20.851-07:00

“Bankers’ hours” is an old phrase that actually reflects monopolistic privilege. The 10AM to 3PM that banks formerly were open to serve customers was made possible by government regulation and the consequent lack of competition to force bankers to be more available when customers needed them. With modest deregulation (and the electronic bookkeeping that deregulation encouraged) banks today are

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-61411270003504585352007-02-15T17:39:00.000-08:002007-04-10T12:39:47.777-07:00

I admit that I have not heard this question in precisely that form. After the hardcover edition of my book In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism was published, I did hear the question this way: Why does advertising need to be defended? As advertising is the point man and product of capitalism, the two questions are intimately related. The

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-77664806972439167922007-01-21T07:31:00.000-08:002007-05-02T16:32:21.997-07:00

Education and social critic Alfie Kohn is an exhaustive researcher and engaging writer. I have not read all of his eleven original books, but I do highly recommend these two: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes and Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. The titles and subtitles make clear his

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35143513.post-53643471198006733282007-01-01T06:46:00.001-08:002007-05-04T09:00:13.661-07:00

Starting a new blog—and especially since the paperback edition of my book defending advertising has just been published—I suppose I should begin with a post about advertising. So let me deal with a question that frequently arises: “What about subliminal advertising?,” to which I typically respond, “What about it? It doesn’t exist!” That’s the short answer. Some elaboration is required. The term

Jerry Kirkpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15361738222191730052noreply@blogger.com