I remember how it was -- JR
The Finnish example
In considering the article below, some caution is needed. One should, for instance, not mistake the initial results from a policy change for the final effects. Finland was for some time a world leader in education results on the PISA criteria but it has slipped back to sixth place recently
There are also ways in which Finns are different. Psychologically, they are famously taciturn for intstance. That may help Finns to minimize conflict
Sociologically, all Finns are clearly aware of their heroic struggles with the Soviets. That clearly fosters a sense of brotherhood among them -- something very conducive to acceptance of socialist policies
So what works well in Finland might not transfer well to other societies
The leader of the nation ranked as the happiest in the world arrives in Australia on Thursday, and it presents a great opportunity.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will meet his Finnish counterpart, Sanna Marin, on Friday and will surely be interested to learn more about Finland’s success and how it might apply to Australia.
Finland has led moves towards emphasising wellbeing in economic decisions, of the kind that Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has commenced since Labor took office in May.
Finland is famous for its well-resourced schooling and equality in education funding. This contrasts with the considerable inequalities that remain in Australian school funding almost a decade after the Gonski review’s call for change. Those recommendations lie dormant.
Finnish experience shows that equality between schools – a mutual striving for all schools to be good schools – is the best way to lift a nation’s educational excellence. That collective striving relies on valuing, trusting and fairly rewarding the teachers in those schools.
People will obviously be happier if allowed to pursue what they really want to do with their lives, rather than be pushed into an occupation their parents or others deem to be of suitable status. Encouraging those who choose different vocational paths from a professional career, for instance, contributes to Finland’s happiness. Being in a trade such as a plumber, electrician or carpenter is more valued than here.
Students in Finland are encouraged to follow their natural curiosity. We learn most effectively through trial and error. In Australia, there is too great a requirement for competitive high-stakes testing. This leads to the recitation of pre-prepared “right answers”. It causes anxiety for young people, but it also fails to foster creativity and innovation.
Finland has a remarkable history of innovation, due in part to its strong investment in research and development, which has helped it establish niches of design and production excellence for export. The best-known example is the Nokia company, which dominated global mobile phone production for more than a decade. Australia can learn from this approach to rectify our own underinvestment.
Gender equality is also advanced in Finland. Prime Minister Marin has spearheaded initiatives to increase paternity leave. Last year, paid parental leave in Finland was extended to 14 months, of which almost seven months is allocated for fathers. While some of that paternity leave can be transferred to mothers, most has to be taken by fathers for the family to gain the full entitlement. This “use it or lose it” minimum requirement is the only proven way to lift men’s role in caring for their children.
The new Australian government has made a welcome decision to extend paid parental leave to six months. However, it still needs to demonstrate how fathers will be encouraged to actually take that leave. That will support more mothers to return full-time to the workforce. The proportion of women in full-time jobs in Australia is 20 percentage points below Finland.
Finland is also the least corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International. It stands at equal No. 1 on that index, alongside Denmark and Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand, who Sanna Marin met on Wednesday. Australia languishes at No. 18, underlining the need for the National Anti-Corruption Commission being legislated in our federal parliament this week.
Finland has consistently pursued social democratic policies, the kind that Australia needs to revive if it is to boost its happiness, educational achievement and gender equality. Marin’s visit should provoke us to ponder the question: Do we want to become even more like America, or be more like Finland? We are poised between those two poles on so many indicators.
Measurements have shown, for instance, that an American with tertiary-educated parents is almost seven times more likely to enter tertiary education than a fellow citizen whose parents had no post-school education. In England, the difference is six times and in Australia, it is four times. In Finland, however, you are almost no more likely to get a tertiary education simply because your parents did. Finland has thus created extraordinary intergenerational opportunities for people from less privileged family backgrounds, based on genuine merit.
Australia can learn from this to further realise the full talents of our people to achieve what they want according to their interests and abilities. Our success, indeed our happiness, need not be determined by inherited advantage.
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Stanford is investigating its OWN president - a 'world leader in the study of brain development' - over allegations papers he co-authored contain multiple photoshopped images and manipulated data
Stanford's president in under investigation over allegations papers he co-authored contain doctored data and images.
The school announced the probe Tuesday and said it would be investigating allegations of scientific misconduct involving the university's head staffer, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
The declaration came after posts on an online forum challenged the authenticity of multiple images published in papers coauthored by the Tessier-Lavigne, who assumed the position of president in 2016.
The postings were then reported by the Stanford Daily, the university newspaper, on Tuesday - along with several other allegations of suspected manipulations in Tessier-Lavigne's work.
Tessier-Lavigne, described by Stanford as a 'world leader in the study of brain development and repair,' has had a lucrative tenure at the school, adding $12.1billion to its endowment and reversing an unpopular plan to nix its 11 sports teams.
After the allegations were aired, prominent science research publisher the European Microbiology Organization Journal said it would also be investigating the staffer, saying it was 'looking into' discrepancies in a research paper he penned in 2018.
The papers in question were also funded by taxpayers in the form of government grants, raising serious questions about the staffer's integrity.
A prominent biologist familiar with Tessier-Lavigne's work has since come out to say that several scientific papers written by the president contained 'a lot of visible errors,' and content 'suggestive (of) an intention to mislead.'
Elisabeth Bik, a nationally recognized expert in image analysis and research integrity, told the East Bay Times upon analyzing the paper that 'one cannot really say that all the problems that we found are pointing towards misconduct.'
She added: 'But there definitely are some problems - and they're real,'
Experts who reviewed Tessier-Lavigne's research at the request of The Daily agreed with Bik's analysis, pointed out that three papers in prominent research journals Science and Nature also contained 'serious problems.'
Scientific misconduct researchers who reviewed the papers, The Daily claimed, contained images that had been 'photoshopped,' as well as manipulated data.
On Tuesday evening in a statement, Tessier-Lavigne said he welcomed the review and would cooperate with school officials.
'Scientific integrity is of the utmost importance both to the university and to me personally,' he said. 'I support this process and will fully cooperate with it, and I appreciate the oversight by the Board of Trustees.'
Initially, a Stanford spokesperson, rebuffed the school paper's story, asserting Tessier-Lavigne 'was not involved in any way in the generation or presentation of the panels that have been queried' in two of the aforementioned four papers.
Speaking to The Daily, spokesperson Dee Mostofi said that the issues present in the other two 'do not affect the data, results or interpretation of the papers.'
Bik told the Daily Tuesday that she did 'not agree with (the) statement that these issues have no bearing on the data or the results.'
Later that evening, the school appeared to walk back those claims, announcing that they would in fact open an investigation into the staffer, joining the European Microbiology Organization Journal in doing so.
One of the pieces under scrutiny was published in the journal, while the other three were found in 'Science' and 'Nature.' Two of those papers featured Tessier-Lavigne as the lead author.
Allegations of scientific misconduct regarding those papers repeatedly appeared on the online forum PubPeer, where users critique the contents of respected science journals over the last seven years, the Daily’s investigation found.
Stanford University spokespeople did not immediately respond to a DailyMail.com request for comment Thursday.
Tessier-Lavigne, a native of Ontario, Canada, spent his early career researching degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s before transitioning to more administrative roles
Prior of his tenure at Stanford, he served as the president of Rockefeller University in New York City.
The contested research was conducted prior to his 2016 recruitment from New York to Stanford, with most centered on the study of the development of neural connections in the brain.
It was not immediately clear how long the investigations into Tessier-Lavigne would take. Both are currently underway.
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Have the Anticapitalists Reached Harvard Business School?
Social justice joins discounted cash flows on the syllabus as essential knowledge for aspiring corporate leaders
At Harvard Business School, inside a seminar room with a smattering of button-down shirts and puffy fall jackets, a group of future corporate managers were talking about capitalism. What makes capitalism truly and purely capitalism? What are its essential components? Property rights. Financial markets.
“Maybe this is almost so foundational that it’s too much to put on the board — but scarcity?” said Andrew Gibbs, 32, a second-year student who came to Harvard by way of the military. “Would it be capitalism if people were comfortable?”
Prof. Debora Spar, who teaches the widely sought-after course “Capitalism and the State,” turned to Mr. Gibbs with the eye glimmer of an instructor who knows the conversation is about to get heated. “Would you go so far as to say a necessary condition for capitalism is scarcity, which is going to drive inequality?”
Mr. Gibbs paused, contemplating. “I would say so.”
On the blackboard it went: Capitalism. Scarcity. Inequality.
Every year, some 250,000 young people step off the treadmill of their jobs, many in consulting and private equity, to chase skills and credentials that will turbocharge their future roles in consulting and private equity — by going to business school. They study accounting and negotiation. They learn about D.C.F.s (discounted cash flows) and the three C’s (company, customers and competitors). They emerge with the ability to at least feign intimate knowledge of the godfather of shareholder primacy, referred to in one classroom as “our buddy Milton Friedman.”
But today’s business school students are also learning about corporate social obligations and how to rethink capitalism, a curriculum shift at elite institutions that reflects a change in corporate culture as a whole. Political leaders on the left and right are calling for business leaders to reconsider their societal responsibilities. On the left, they argue that business needs to play some role in confronting daunting global threats — a warming planet, fragile democracy. On the right, they chastise executives for distracting from profits by talking politics.
The corporate phenomenon of socially responsible investing, or E.S.G., has become a point of contention — as well as a $40 trillion industry. Elon Musk called it a “scam” after the S&P 500 removed Tesla from its Environmental, Social and Governance index last spring. Mike Pence, the former vice president, recently urged states to “rein in” E.S.G. BlackRock issued a letter in September trying to stave off critics by noting, essentially, that the investment firm’s focus on the environment wasn’t detracting from its core purpose: making money.
Meanwhile, many workers have spent recent years demanding that their employers take a more decisive stance on social issues like racial injustice and abortion.
Top-ranked business schools are stepping into the political arena. Harvard started its Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society last month. Nearly half of the Yale School of Management’s core curriculum is devoted to E.S.G. Next fall, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania will start offering M.B.A. majors in diversity, equity and inclusion and in environmental, social and governance factors for business.
What happens at Harvard, Wharton and other elite campuses offers a small glimpse of the changes in the corporate realm. But at the same time, their graduates tend to have outsize influence on business, shaping the values and policies of the companies they may one day run.
Business schools are not generally known for their radicalism, but their students and faculty are grappling, sometimes ambivalently, with fast-changing expectations of business’s role in society. Most students are frank about the prestigious jobs they want, with hefty salaries attached. Now, though, they’re facing sharper questions from classmates about how to balance their ambitions with some sense of responsibility to the public good.
“We’re at Harvard Business School — it’s a bastion of capitalism,” said Ethan Rouen, who teaches the Harvard class “Reimagining Capitalism.” “I will say, though, that if you look at the courses being offered, the institutes being created and speakers we bring on campus, there is a huge demand both from the faculty and the students for rethinking the obligation of the corporation to society.”
Inside classrooms, the range of views on corporate political engagement has broadened in recent years, according to people across leading business schools. Assumptions long woven into the syllabus are open for questioning: the wisdom of maximizing profits, the idea that America’s version of capitalism is functioning properly.
“There’s a conscious shift happening with professors wanting us to question: Is profit the only thing corporations should care about? How should businesses use their influence?” said Chinedum Egbosimba, 27, who studied engineering and then worked at Bain & Company before winding up at Harvard Business School and in Ms. Spar’s class.
“The classic school of thinking that businesses should only make money is very much alive,” he continued. “But many of my classmates look at the world we have today and say, ‘Yeah, there’s clearly some things about this system we need to fix.’”
At Harvard, in “Capitalism and the State,” colloquially known as CATS, Ms. Spar asked her students to flip their name cards sideways if they felt globalization was ultimately a good system. She paced excitedly, cheetah-print shoes roving the classroom floor.
After some mumbling and paper shuffling, about 80 percent of the students flipped their placards, signaling a thumbs-up on globalization. Mr. Egbosimba disagreed. Leaning forward in his back-row seat, he asked his classmates to rethink the view that had given rise to the world as they knew it — the International Monetary Fund, Hyatt hotels around the world and McDonald’s golden arches at every airport.
“I’m from the global south, the old colonies of the West,” said Mr. Egbosimba, who grew up in Nigeria. “Maybe there’s some version of this idea that could have led to acceptance and peace, but it’s not the one we built. As a victim of it, I can say that with confidence.”
His classmate Alan Xie, 28, piped up in agreement. “The distrust of elites connected to capitalism undermines the whole globalization project,” he said. “We’ve actually imported illiberalism as a result of having nice stuff.”
Still, most of their classmates remained in favor of a globalized economy. Ms. Spar summed up their arguments succinctly: “We’ve got growth. We’ve got nice stuff,” she said. “It worked.”
To which Rachel Orol, 29, seated in the front row, replied: “It worked for us.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/business/business-school-social-justice.html
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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