Texts for non-guided reading

Text 1

DEVELOPING WORLD. IS GLOBALIZATION GOOD?

J. Riggs

1. The antiglobalists are on the warpath. From the disruption on the November 1999 World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Seattle, to attacks on McDonald’s restaurants and protests about the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the UNCTAD X meeting in Bangkok in February 2000, it seems that those groups and individuals who oppose the global economy have had a good last 18 months. Their argument is that global integration as fostered by the North (sometimes called the neoliberal establishment) harms the interests of poor people and poor countries (and the environment). Organisations like the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO disagree. The two opposing views are illustrated in these quotes:

2. More and more people are suffering from poverty, including [those] in the most affluent societies, while humanity produces considerable amounts of wealth. Neo - liberal globalization accentuates these inequalities (Focus on Trade, 2000, No. 52, August).

The rapid integration of the global economy in recent decades springs from the widespread recognition that economies invariably achieve more working with each other  exchanging goods, capital, and ideas  than acting alone (World Bank Report, 1996).

What is globalisation?

3. Globalisation is the process by which it is being made easier for companies and other organisations to operate internationally. Deregulation and improved forms of communication have enabled this to happen. There are, for example, benefits for transnational companies (TNCs) in locating labourintensive parts of their business, such as manufacturing, in countries where labour is cheap, which usually means the less developed world. Profits, however, tend to go to the countries in the North where TNCs have their headquarters.

What are the issues?

4. Beneath the relatively simple question “has global integration had a positive or negative effect on economic fortunes and the environment?” are a host of more complex questions. Just some of these are:

− How have the effects (positive or negative) been distributed across the globe, especially between developed and developing countries?

− Have positive effects at the national level (e.g. in terms of economic growth) been translated into real improvements in income and well-being for ordinary people, and especially the poor?

− What is the picture over time?

− Have economic “benefits” been accompanied by environmental and social costs?

− How clear are the links between trade liberalisation and global integration on the one hand and economic growth and poverty alleviation on the other?

Global integration and poor countries

5. Globalisation has seen a massive increase in global wealth. World real GDP grew from US $2 trillion in 1965 to US $28 trillion in 1995 or, on a per capita basis, from US $614 to US $4,908. But at the same time there has been a widening in the gap between a wealthy elite of countries and a mass of poor countries. Only a few developing countries, largely those of east Asia, have been able to begin the task of ‘catching up’ with the developed world. The evidence shows that  relatively  the gap between the rich and the poor world has widened over the last 40 years. In fact, richer countries have been growing faster than poorer countries for the last 150 years.

Global integration and poor people

6. A slightly different argument is that, although globalisation and trade liberalisation may foster economic growth, this growth is unequally distributed between groups in society.

The evidence seems to support this argument. At the same time as the world has become richer, the number of people living in poverty has increased  to around 1.2 billion on the basis of the World Bank’s definition, which is those living on US $1 a day or less. (If this was raised to US $2 a day then the number of poor would increase to 2.8 billion, almost half the world’s population.)

This increase in the number of poor is partly linked to the rise in the world’s population, but also to the distribution of increased income. Between 1960 and 1994, the ratio of the income of the richest 20% of the world and the poorest 20% increased from 30:1 to 78:1. Between 1987 and 1993 the number of people living on less than US $1 a day increased in all the world’s major regions with the exception of east Asia and the Pacific (and the Asian economic crisis is likely to put an end even to this). Furthermore, the proportion of the population living on less than US $1 a day increased in Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Where to go?

7. The challenge is to make sense of the complex and changing links between international economic integration, poverty and inequality. Is there a direct causal link between poverty and globalisation?

Currently, the anti-globalists are on a wave. However, it is worth asking whether they are any more representative of the wishes of poor countries and poor people than the organisations, such as the WTO, the IMF and World Bank, that they criticise. They are, often, more secretive, less accountable and less democratic.

Text 2

A FEATURE ARTICLE

D. Davy

1. Why does English have no phrase like Bon appetit? Has it ever occurred to you that there is no simple way of expressing your hope that someone will enjoy what he is about to eat? If you are entertaining, and say to your guest as you put his dinner before him I hope you like it, then he will probably think one of two things: either that there is an element of doubt about the meal, or that there is an element of doubt about him!  that the food is perhaps unusual, and he will not be enough of a gastronomic sophisticate to appreciate it. You can be certain of one thing  he will not interpret I hope you like it in the same way that the Frenchman interprets Bon appetit  as a wish that focuses itself on the eater, and not on what is to be eaten. Those opposed to English cooking will no doubt explain the lack by pointing to the quality of food in this country; it’s so bad, they will say, that no one ever really believes that it could be enjoyed. Hence, no need for a phrase that enjoins enjoyment! But surely not even English food can be as bad as all that.

2. Anyway, it’s not only a matter of food. Have you ever felt the need for a simple, universal and socially neutral expression to use when drinking with someone? The Spaniard has his Salud, the German his Prosit, Swedes say Skaal, and the Frenchman, simply and sincerely A votre sante. But what about the unfortunate English? For most of them, Good health is impossibly old-fashioned and stuffy. It may be all right for lawyers and stockbrokers, doctors and dons, or for crusty colonels inside the four walls of a club; but in the boozer down the Old Kent Road it just sounds out of place. It is true that there is a whole string of vaguely possible alternatives that range from the mildly jocular through the awkward to the phrase-book bizarre; and if you listen carefully you may just hear people still saying Here’s the skin off your nose, Down the hatch or All the best as they sink their pints or sip their sherries. But mostly they take refuge nowadays in Cheerio or its truncated version Cheers. And even here, for some people there is a sneaking suspicion that the term is not quite right. That it is somehow a shade too breezy, and comes most easily from someone addicted to tweeds and the phrase Old chap.

3. Even when taking our leave it seems we English are victims of some strange deficiencies in our valedictory vocabulary. The standard term Goodbye is both too formal and too final. It may be just the job for ushering someone out of your life altogether; but most leave-takings  for better or worse  are temporary affairs. Perhaps in an attempt to escape implications of finality, many people now say Bye bye instead; others try to make this particularly nauseating bit of baby-talk more acceptable by shortening it to Bye. And in place of those many leave-takings which so easily accommodate the idea of another meeting  Au revour, Auf wiedersehen, Arrivederci, and so on,  we have, alas, only such sad colloquialisms as So long and I’ll be seeing you.

4. These examples by no means exhaust the areas in which the English language doesn’t exactly help social contact. They have been called linguistic gaps and tend to turn up in some way or another in most languages. But according to Mr. Daniel Kane − lecturer at the University of Chester − there seem to be more of them in English than in other languages. At the moment Mr.Kane is seeking funds to finance a small research project into the problem. He wants first of all to question a large number of people about their feelings on the matter. “After all, I must be certain that the man in the street is aware of these gaps in the same way that I think I am,” says Mr. Kane. And then he proposes to compare English with several other languages in his respect, and “look for possible sociological reasons” for the difference he finds.

sophisticated — having learnt the ways of the world and having natural simplicity; showing this.

boozer — a) a person who boozes (drinks alcohol, especially habitually); b) a pub

a feature article — a distinctive article in a newspaper or a magazine.

Text 3

THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS!

T. Carlson

Go Ahead, Hurt My Feelings!

1 How important is self-esteem? Several years ago, the state-sponsored California Task Force on Self-Esteem decided to find out. Researchers viewed the literally thousands of available studies on the subject. In the end, says author Maureen Stout, here’s what they found: “There is little or no correlation between high self-esteem and a reduction in teen pregnancy, drug use, violence in schools.”

2. In other words, telling kids that they’re wonderful and terrific may make them feel good. But there’s no evidence it makes kids behave better or achieve anything.

3. You’d think this fact  that a central assumption of American life is false - would make headlines, forcing legislators and educators to rethink their position on self-esteem. You would be wrong. The doctrine of self-esteem has, if anything, hardened into a national orthodoxy. In the 21st century America, hurting a person’s self-esteem is more than rude. It’s considered morally wrong.

4. In some places, it’s virtually illegal, or at least actionable. One night last fall, four seventh-graders at Ridgefield Academy in Connecticut broke into their school using a stolen key. The boys swiped food from the cafeteria, stole from the band room, threw eggs at a school bus and left a kitchen knife lying on school grounds. The following day they bragged about what they had done. A few days later, they were expelled.

5. In a way, the boys were fortunate the school did not press charges. Far from being grateful, however, the parents of the one boy were outraged at the treatment of their son, claiming  among other things  that he had been “harassed” and “deflamed.” They sued, seeking monetary damages for treatment that caused their son “feelings of unworthiness” and left his “self-worth impugned.” In a society in which self-esteem is the highest value, the reaction made sense: The boys may have committed a crime against their school, but the school hurt their feelings. Hence, the boys were the real victims.

6. Will this sort of lawsuits multiply? When it’s an issue of self-esteem, some schools don’t want to take any chances. In Rhode Island, officials at Barrington High School determined that it would be wrong to bar a student from the school’s track team, even though the boy is confined to a wheelchair. Last spring he competed with able-bodied runners in the 100 meter dash.

7. The feelings of police are ever vigilant, and you can see why. There’s hardly an event in American life that couldn’t make someone feel uncomfortable. Holidays are the worst. Residents of a housing project in Portland, Maine, were told to remove all celebratory decorations from public areas of the building around the month of December. Why? Because signs proclaiming “Happy Holidays” might make some people feel excluded. School bus drivers in Maine have been banned from leading Christmas carols on the same grounds.

8. And it’s not just religious holidays that threaten to hurt feelings. Celebrations of Valentine’s Day, an obvious emotional minefield, have been banned by some schools. In Manhattan, the Rodeph Sholom Day School went so far as to eliminate Mother’s Day. Not everybody, it turns out, has a mother at home. Some have two fathers. In light of this, school administrators explained in a letter to parents, Mother’s Day “may not be a positive experience.”

9. Entirely true. Not all of life’s experience are positive. Many are down-right unpleasant, even painful, and always have been. What’s new is the attempt to prohibit those experiences. An article several years ago in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, for instance, argued that many traditional children’s games − dodge ball, kickball, musical chairs, red rover, tag and duck, duck, goose, to name a few − are competitive, exclusionary, and therefore bad for a child’s self-esteem. You can guess what happened next. (In case you can’t, ask a school-age child when he last played kickball, or if he has even heard of it.)

10. What’s wrong with this? It’s misleading, for one thing. You can spare a child the supposed agonies of duck, duck, goose, but you can’t change the fundamentally hierarchical nature of the world. Real life is ranked: The smartest, hardest working and most talented come in first. It’s called meritocracy, and it’s not so much an ideal, as an expression of the way things really are. Pretending a person has accomplished something may increase that person’s self-esteem, but it doesn’t mean he has accomplished anything. This is one of those lessons best learned young.

11. In the early 1990s, researchers decided to test the effects of self-esteem by measuring how high school students perceived their own academic ability. Students were asked to agree or disagree with the statement “I am good at mathematics.”

12. As it turned out, the more highly students thought of their ability, the less ability they had, and vice versa. Kids in Washington, D.C., ranked first in the country in self-esteem  fully 28 percent considered themselves quite skilled in math  but came in second to last in actual performance. Students in North Dakota, meanwhile, came in first on math tests, but ranked at the bottom in self-esteem. In other words, years of self-love propaganda succeeded only in producing self-deluded kids. Surprised? You must be an educator.

Text 4

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

C.L Wrenn

1. The English language is spoken or read by the largest number of people in the world, for historical, political, and economic reasons; but it may also be true that it owes something of its wide appeal to qualities and characteristics inherent in itself. What are these characteristic features which outstand in making the English language what it is, which give it its individuality and make it of this worldwide significance?

2. First and most important is its extraordinary receptive and adaptable heterogeneousness  the varied ease and readiness with which it has taken to itself material from almost everywhere in the world and has made the new elements of language its own. English, which when the Anglo-Saxons first conquered England in the fifth and sixth centuries was almost a “pure” or unmixed language  which could make new words for new ideas from its own compounded elements and had hardly any foreign words  has become the most “mixed” of languages, having received throughout its history all kinds of foreign elements with ease and assimilated them all to its own character. Though its copiousness of vocabulary is outstanding, it is its amazing variety and heterogeneousness which is even more striking: and this general receptiveness of new elements has contributed to making it a suitable and attractive vehicle in so many parts of the world.

3. A second outstanding characteristic of English is its simplicity of inflection  the ease with which it indicates the relationship of words in a sentence with only the minimum of change in their shapes or variation of endings. There are languages, such as Chinese, that have surpassed English in the reduction of the language in the matter of inflections to what looks like just a series of fixed monosyllabic roots: but among European languages, taken as a whole, English has gone as far as any language in reducing the inflections it once had to a minimum. A natural consequence of this simplifying of inflection by reducing, however, is that since the relationship of words to each other is no longer made clear by their endings, this must be done in other ways.

4. A third quality of English, therefore, is its relatively fixed word order. An inflected language like Latin or Russian can afford to be fairly free in the arrangement of its words, since the inflections show clearly the proper relationship in the sentence, and ambiguity is unlikely. But in a language which does not change the forms of its words according to their relationship in the sentence-significance, the order of the words is likely to be relatively fixed; and a fixed word order in relation to meaning in the sentence takes the place of the freedom made possible by the system of inflections.

5. Another consequence, fourthly, of the loss or reduction to the minimum of the inflections which English once had, is the growth of the use of periphrases or roundabout ways of saying things, and of the use of prepositions to take the place of the lost inflections. The English simplified verb uses periphrases and compound tenses made with auxiliary verbs to replace the more elaborate system of tenses that once existed (though tenses had already become fairly simple before the Anglo-Saxons came to England). Similarly, English, which once had nearly as many case endings as Latin, has come to use prepositions instead of these, as can easily be seen if one translates any piece of Latin into English.

6. A fifth quality of English  though this, like the loss of inflections and its consequences, is shared with some other languages  is the development of new varieties of intonation to express shades of meaning which were formerly indicated by varying the shapes of words. This is perhaps somewhat comparable (though only in a small way) to the vast use of intonation in Chinese as a method of expressing meaning in sentences which would otherwise seem like series of unvarying monosyllabic roots. Consider, for instance, the wonderful variety of shades of meaning we may put into the use of the word do, merely by varying the intonation  that is, the pitch and intensity, the tone of the voice.

7. Not all the above qualities are in themselves necessarily good, nor have they all contributed to the general success of English. But it seems probable that of them all it is the adaptable receptiveness and the simplicity of inflection that have done most in this regard. On the other hand, the very copiousness and heterogeneousness of English leads to vagueness or lack of clarity. Its resources are too vast for all but the well educated to use to full advantage; and such phenomena as “pidgin English”, “Journalese” jargon, woolliness of expression and slatternly speech and writing, are everywhere likely to be met with. It may fairly be said that English is among the easiest languages to speak badly, but the most difficult to use well.

Text 5

THE MARKS OF AN EDUCATED MAN

N.M. Butler

1. A question often asked is: “What are the marks of an educated man?” It is plain that one may gain no inconsiderable body of learning in some special field of knowledge without at the same time acquiring those habits and traits which are the marks of an educated gentleman. A reasonable amount of learning must of course accompany an education, but, after all, that amount need not be so very great in any one field. An education will make its mark and find its evidences in certain traits, characteristics, and capacities which have to be acquired by patient endeavor, by following good example, and by receiving wise discipline and sound instruction.

2. These traits or characteristics may be variously described and classified, but among them there are five that should always stand out clearly enough to be seen of all men.

3. The first of these is correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue. The quite shocking slovenliness and vulgarity of much of the spoken English, as well as not a little of the written English, which one hears and sees proves beyond peradventure that year of attendance upon schools and colleges that are thought to be respectable have produced no impression. When one hears English well spoken, with pure diction, correct pronunciation, and an almost unconscious choice of the right word, he recognizes it at once. How much easier he finds it to imitate English of the other sort!

4. A second and indispensable trait of the educated man is refined and gentle manners, which are themselves the expression of fixed habits of thought and action. “Manners maketh the man”, wrote William of Wykeham over his gates at Winchester and at Oxford. He pointed to a great truth. When manners are superficial, artificial, and forced, no matter what their form, they are bad manners. When, however, they are natural expression of fixed habits of thought and action, and when they reveal a refined and cultivated nature, they are good manners. There are certain things that gentlemen do not do, and they do not do them simply because they are bad manners. The gentleman instinctively knows the difference between those things which he may and should do and those things which he may not and should not do.

5. A third trait of the educated man is the power and habit of reflection. Human beings for the most part live wholly on the surface of life. They do not look beneath that surface or far beyond the present moment and that part of the future which is quickly to follow it. They do not read those works of prose and poetry which have become classic because they reveal power and habit of reflection and induce that power and habit in others. When one reflects long enough to ask the question how?, he is on the way to knowing something about science. When he reflects long enough to ask the question why?, he may, if he persists, even become a philosopher.

6. A fourth trait of the educated man is power of growth. He continues to grow and develop from birth to his dying day. His interests expand, his contacts multiply, his knowledge increases, and his reflection becomes deeper and wider. It would appear to be true that not many human beings, even those who have had a school and college education, continue to grow after they are twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. By that time it is usual to settle down to life on a level of more or less contented intellectual interest and activity. The whole present-day movement for adult education is a systematic and definite attempt to keep human beings growing long after they have left school and college, and, therefore, to help educate them.

7. A fifth trait of the educated man is his possession of efficiency, or the power to do. The mere visionary dreamer, however charming or however wise, lacks something which an education requires. The power to do may be exercised in any one of the thousand ways, but when it clearly shows itself, that is evidence that the period of discipline of study and of companionship with parents and teachers has not been in vain.

8. Given these five characteristics, one has the outline of an educated man. That outline may be filled in by scholarship, by literary power, by mechanical skills, by professional and political leadership. So long as the framework or outline is there, the content may be pretty much what you will, assuming, of course, that the fundamental elements of the great tradition which is civilization, and its outstanding records and achievements in human personality, in letters, in science, in the fine arts, and in human institutions, are all present.

Text 6

TEN MONEY NOTES

K. Jackson

Papa! What’s money?

Ch. Dickens. Dombey and Son

Definitions

1. Children can get away with asking what money is, but the question sounds silly when put by an adult. For most of us, the meaning of ‘money’ is obvious enough: it’s the notes and coins in our pockets, the figures in our bank accounts, the stuff that we never have in sufficient quantity. Mr. Dombey tells his young son that money is “Guineas, shillings, half-pence” and while those particular units of currency may be defunct today, the reply still sounds quite sensible.

2. It’s not good enough for little Paul, who persists: ‘Oh yes, I know what they are... I don’t mean that, Papa. I mean what’s money after all?’ Paul’s question is not practical; it echoes the ones asked by philosophers from Aristotle and Xenophon to Nietzsche and George Simmel, who would all have been dissatisfied with the textbook definition of money (more complete than Mr. Dombey’s, though not more imaginative) as a measure of value, a medium of exchange and a store of wealth.

3. Far from being self-evident, the nature of money is hard to pin down, and it is only because it features so prominently in our everyday lives that we tend to overlook its essential mystery. Something of that mystery remains in the hundreds of similies it has inspired. There are anatomical ones: in Leviathan, for instance, Hobbes likens money to blood, circulating around the commonwealth as blood courses around the body. Cicero saw money as the ‘sinews of war’, Edward Leigh (an early economist) as the sinews of government, and Sir William Petty (another such) as “the Fat of the Body-politick”: “too much doth as often hinder its agility, as too little makes it sick”.

4. Money has been likened to oil (Hume), a cushion (Carl Sandburg), a bridge (Marshall McLuhan), a vehicle (Henry Ford, who knew about vehicles). More abstractly, it has been identified with liberty (Swift), happiness (Shopenhauer), ritual (Mary Douglas), art (Butler), thought (Spengler) and time (George Gissing, angrily inverting Ben Franklin’s admonition that Time is Money). Money has an extraordinary ability to stimulate metaphors, partly because it is itself  in the phrase of the American poet Dana Gioia “the one true metaphor, the one commodity that can be translated into all else”. Marx, among other moralists, was both dazzled and horrified by the capacity of money to turn goods into services, services into goods, and itself into anything under the sun.

5. Despite money’s protean nature, however, a lot of people persist in believing that it should stay much the same and are dismayed when it doesn’t.

Bubbles and crashes

But there’s no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It’s the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about anyone else, and they respect them more. It’s all very well. I don’t complain of it.

(William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham)

6. It is hardest to be philosophical about money when everyone around you is obsessed by it. Even genius is not immune to collective greed. Sir Isaac Newton  who besides his work in physics, alchemy and Biblical commentary was also Master of the Royal Mint  was briefly possessed by the spirit of Gordon Gekko. In 1720, shortly before the end of that episode of speculative mania known as the South Sea Bubble, Newton decided that the shares he had bought had appreciated quite sufficiently. He sold them. But the market continued its steep climb, and Newton succumbed to greed. He bought again, at an inflated price. Then the Bubble burst. According to legend, Newton’s rueful judgement on the whole episode was that he could predict the movements of celestial bodies but not the follies of men.

7. One thing you can predict about such bubbles is that they will always recur, even though everyone knows that every bubble eventually bursts. At about the same time as the South Sea episode, France was going through a financial lunacy of its own, the so-called Mississippi Bubble. Stocks in a fanciful scheme for developing the Louisiana wilderness rose so rapidly that, in 1719, an investment of a few thousand livres yielded millions in a matter of weeks. (This was the year in which the word millionaire was born.) The Bubble ended in July 1720, with a crowd storming the Banque Royale in Paris, demanding hard money in return for their securities; fifteen people were crushed to death. Washington Irving wrote a vivid history of the event, and his phrase for that period just before the inevitable crash has an agreeable irony: A Time of Unexampled Prosperity.

8. You did not need much wit to notice that the prosperity of the 1980s really was unexampled. Electric money flowed round the planet in unprecedented quantities; fortunes were made with stupefying rapidity. And even though capitalism took some nasty stumbles, such as Black Monday and the savings-and-loans fiasco, it still emerged enough of a winner by the end of the decade to gloat over the fall of its biggest rival, communism. No one was untouched by the convulsions of the market. Those outside the feeding frenzy might have been appalled, might, in fact, have been shocked into an awareness of the raw, amoral power of lucre for the very first time; but they could not deny that money was more powerful − and, therefore, more seductive − than ever before.

9. “Could this delusion always last, the life of the merchant would indeed be a golden dream; but it is as short as it is brilliant,” Washington Irving wrote. The golden dreamers of the eighties woke up to global recession. Britain has fudged and panicked its way out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and Eastern Europe has found that a capitalist omelette, like the old communist kind, also requires the breaking of eggs.

10. But if money doesn’t look quite so dazzling now as it did in the years leading up to the crash of 1987, it is hard to point to any promising new contenders. If only by default, money is still what Heine called it: “the God of this world”.

Black Monday (19 October, 1987) when in New York and other financial centres of the world there took place a sharp decline in the state of the market that caused a stock exchange collapse.

Text 7