Polly Toynbee draws attention to some American research:

A key ingredient in determining future social class is language – the basic tool for thought, argument, reasoning and making sense of a confusing world. There is only a short time during the first three years that the brain absorbs language, the concepts it embodies and the culture implied.

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is one of the most thorough studies ever conducted. Three groups of children were tape-recorded throughout their first years – welfare families, working-class families and professional families. With painstaking care, researchers counted then extrapolated all the words a child would hear and speak in every encounter and interaction with its parent or care-giver. When they analysed the hours of recordings, the sharp class differences in the three groups’ early experiences were startling.

By the age of four, a professional’s child will have had 50m words addressed to it, a working-class child 30m and a welfare child just 12m. Consider this: they found the professional child at the age of three had a bigger vocabulary than the parent of the welfare child. The way children were spoken to was also measured, how much they were listened to, explained things, given choices and in what tone of voice. So at the age of three the professional child has had 700,000 encouragements addressed to it and only some 80,000 discouragements. But the welfare child will only ever have been encouraged 60,000 times in its life, suffering twice as many discouragements, with the working-class child between the two…

There is no room here to do justice to this epic analysis, but no one could fail to be convinced by it: it confirms what we all secretly know already. The educated are better at communicating with their children than the uneducated – and the child is branded for life. When the children in the study were measured at aged nine to 10, the authors, with an uncharacteristic slip from their stern academic terminology, conclude: “We were awestruck at how well our measures of accomplishments at three predicted language skill at nine to 10.”

Polly Toynbee takes a lot of flak on the more conservative side of the UK blogosphere for her writing on issues of this sort. I’d be interested to know what her many critics make of these findings.

This article by Laith Kubba exhibits some of that balance which the Guardian very much lost in its approach to Iraq:

Since the end of the war on May 1, Iraq has taken many strides towards normalcy and self-governance. Iraqis now enjoy freedom of expression and association, more representation at local level, better health services and higher incomes.

The country has also passed three crucial milestones. After months of wrangling, the US-run Coalition Provincial Authority committed itself to ending the occupation and handing Iraq’s sovereignty to an interim national assembly by the end of June; second, international donors pledged over $30bn to help rebuild Iraq; and third, Saddam has been arrested and his two sons killed.

Yet, such progress is overshadowed by rising political violence and lack of security. Only an inclusive political process can get the Sunni tribes plugged into the future of Iraq and out of the growing insurgency. Meanwhile, Iraq must rebuild its institutions – in particular, its police, intelligence and army. This can only be achieved by a national government and a legitimate political process.

In connection with the latter, Kubba goes on to argue:

Elections by June 30 are rejected on three grounds: that there is insufficient time to register voters; that there are threats of violence; and that a rushed election would risk bringing in former regime leaders, militants and religious extremists. However, direct elections, even if rushed and imperfect, would offer Iraq a more legitimate and representative transitional assembly than that which would result from the November agreement.

Read the rest.

Just in:

If there is life on other planets, an Australian team of astronomers has just found the region in our Milky Way galaxy where it is most likely to exist.

See also here and here.

Tim Blair tries to enlist Test match cricket on the side of the ‘free-wheeling, unrestricted’ market. The five-day game’s greater attraction by comparison with one-day cricket, he argues, is due to the many ‘regulations involved in the one-day game, all of them designed to level competition and cripple advantage’. Test cricket better sums up the spirit of contemporary Australia.

I agree with Tim about two things. The one-day game is a dull, impoverished thing compared with the glory that is Test cricket; and ‘[s]port mirrors society’ – a thesis presented with much power in C.L.R. James’s great book Beyond A Boundary. As to the central proposition about cricket and the free market, however, I would argue the toss about this were it not for the fact that it looks like Tim may have his tongue stuck firmly in his cheek. I would say: how come only one-day regulations get to be equated by him with restrictions on the market, whereas five-day regulations… just disappear into the background?

But instead of developing that argument, I’ll simply say: ‘Pull the other one!’ Test cricket can’t be so reduced. For all that it reflects the wider society in which it is played – as with the Barmy Army, worse luck – it’s one of the triumphs of the human spirit. Yeah and, like Tim says, ‘a lot of fun to watch’.

(Via Natalie Solent.)

Bill Murray talking to Geoffrey Macnab:

I always like to say to people who want to be rich and famous, try being rich first… See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside about being rich other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour-job.

I’ve just filled in the Are You A Blogaholic? questionnaire (via James Joyner at Outside the Beltway). Here is my result:

YOUR SCORE: 64.0% – 64.0 points out of 100
AVG SCORE: 42.9% – 42.9 points out of 100

8841 people have taken this silly test so far.
897 people have scored higher than you.
7596 people have scored lower than you.
348 people made the same grade as you.

What does this mean? 64 points is in the 51 through 80 [percent]. You are a dedicated weblogger. You post frequently because you enjoy weblogging a lot, yet you still manage to have a social life. You’re the best kind of weblogger. Way to go!

Thanks for the thumbs up, but blogging occupies too much of my head. I need to do something about it.

Chris Brooke grew up in London, studied at Balliol College, Oxford, migrated to Harvard for postgraduate work and then returned to Oxford, where he now teaches Politics at Magdalen College. His PhD thesis discussed some arguments about Stoicism in early modern Europe; he’s now beginning work on a book about Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On the web he’s been involved in The Voice of the Turtle since 1998 and has blogged at The Virtual Stoa on and off since May 2001.

Why do you blog? > When I returned to Oxford in 2000 after five years in Boston, I found that my friends were either lightly scattered across North America, or concentrated in London, and I thought that scribbling on a blog might be a good way of communicating with several of them at once. Then the habit formed, and I became just another random blogger serving up bits and pieces of headjunk on a semi-regular basis.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Widening my circle of interesting people with whom to exchange email.

What are your favourite blogs? > The three I look at most often – which is a good indicator – are Crooked Timber (having Chris Bertram, Daniel Davies and Kieran Healy on the same blog is something special), Matthew Yglesias and (yes) the normblog.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > It’s less embarrassing to confess to admiring the dead, so I’ll run with Pierre Bayle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, less straightforwardly, Augustine of Hippo.

What are you reading at the moment? > I’ve just finished Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, on a long plane ride, and am about to go back to Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, which I’m currently half way through.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Right now, Johnny Cash and Sergio Leone.

What is the best novel you’ve ever read? > Ulysses.

What is your favourite poem? > I’ll stick with the Joyce theme and go for Chamber Music XIII. It’s not the greatest poem in the world, but personal associations mean that it can still provoke tears of joy, and not many poems do that.

What is your favourite movie? > I once saw Napoléon vu par Abel Gance at the Barbican. Five or six extraordinary hours on three screens with live orchestral accompaniment – cinema doesn’t get better than that.

What is your favourite song? > Probably a toss-up between Schubert, ‘Der Lindenbaum’, and ‘Wild Rover’ (Trad.), depending on my mood.

Who is your favourite composer? > Giuseppe Verdi.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you’ve ever changed your mind? > I broadly supported the NATO war over Kosovo while it was going on, but later decided that I was wrong to have done so.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > The substantial liberalisation of immigration and asylum policy.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > No. But then, speaking as someone happily married to somebody with the same kind of barking leftist opinions as my own, I probably would say that, wouldn’t I?

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Being able to make people laugh in a life-affirming way.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Golf.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you’d do differently? > I wouldn’t have taken a second semester of statistical methods in graduate school for starters.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > New York City.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Drinking beer with friends.

What talent would you most like to have? > Singing.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Monty Python’s Flying Circus has sunk too deeply into my soul over too many years to allow me to choose anything else.

Which English Premiership football team do you support, and which baseball team? > Baseball: The Boston Red Sox. Football: I almost came out as a Newcastle United supporter last year, but the first time I confessed this developing preference to friends, they pointed out that earlier that day Bobby Robson had signed Lee Bowyer, and that rather put a dampener on things.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > See Brian Weatherson’s answer to this question from an earlier normblog profile. [‘A Red Sox World Series win. Oh wait, you said realistic. Well, we all can dream.’ – Ed.]

What animal would you most like to be? > Some great ape or other.

[Previous profiles: Ophelia Benson (Nov 7); Chris Bertram (Sep 26); Alan Brain (Oct 10); Francois Brutsch (Dec 5); Jackie D (Oct 17); Harry Hatchet (Oct 24); Saddam Hussein (Nov 14); Jeff Jarvis (Dec 26); Oliver Kamm (Nov 21); Sheila O’Malley (Dec 19); Natalie Solent (Nov 28); Roger L. Simon (Oct 31); Michael J. Totten (Oct 3); Brian Weatherson (Dec 12). The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature.]

Michael Bywater, in a review from the Independent and just in passing, writes:

This is… a good time to publish a book on faking and inauthenticity. The fundamentals of democracy, liberty and fair dealing have never been so consistently and soupily dissembled. Our liberties are being constrained under the guise of increasing them; following Saddam’s capture we are being fed, behind the transparently phony rhetoric of high purpose, the oldest logical error of all time, the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. In this case, that means they got Hussein because the “war” was, and is, a just one.

Where to start here?

OK, maybe with the scare-quotes round ‘war’. Wasn’t the ‘war’ a war – just like that? I mean, quite as much as Bywater’s review is a review rather than a ‘review’?

Then, despite all the arguments either way about the legitimacy or otherwise of that war, was there ever any doubt, once it started, that getting Saddam was part of the declared ‘regime change’ purpose? They tried to get him on the first night, after all. What have post and propter got to do with anything?

Then, ‘transparently phony rhetoric of high purpose’ – a suggestion about it. Many of the war’s opponents just represent this as phony because they’re unable to allow that there might have been justifications on the other side, even though they themselves remained unpersuaded by these. But think about how many such people regard themselves as liberals. The would-be liberalism of some of them is able even to encompass a sympathetic understanding of terrorists. But not another authentic viewpoint that they can respect about the war. Odd.

Finally, ‘under the guise of increasing them [our liberties]’. One can argue about what constraints on liberty are justifiable in the circumstances, but once this has been said, isn’t the ‘guise’ here rather an aim: the aim of protecting liberties? Isn’t there an intention to protect ordinary people from being blown to pieces, or maimed, or disabled, or afflicted in some other ghastly way – for I take it Michael Bywater’s allusion – with ‘constrained’ – is to the war (or, as he would probably prefer again, ‘war’) against terror? So, is this a guise? Shouldn’t it be a ‘guise’, because there is a genuine threat? Or isn’t there?

It’s a difficult business, authenticity; and scare-quotes, too.

Some people are humiliated by a medical examination, others by obtaining ‘nul points’ in the Eurovision song contest. According to this report by Matt Wells, the Beeb is out ‘to expunge Eurovision shame’. Expunge. I like it. It sounds very expungey.

Some posts to start your year with if you haven’t already seen them. This one, at Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day, introduced me to a blog I didn’t previously know about and came upon thanks to Anne Cunningham. Then, Oliver Kamm has a couple of new mini-essays – All Gas and Gaiters, and Marching with Stalinists – both of which I recommend. And, via Jackie D, I was sent to this post by James Lileks.