To: Talli Somekh <talli@seyza.com>
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: trained dependency
References: <200411010336.iA13af6p023128@xl2.seyza.com>
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	<2982EA60-2C38-11D9-8C6F-000393CFE6B8@spy.net>
	<4186917E.3030209@melon.dk> <20041101232959.GA25080@hezmatt.org>
	<87ekjcswdn.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <418765A9.2040206@diku.dk>
	<878y9kpfcm.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
	<200411022006.iA2K6Q1n036262@xl2.seyza.com>
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	<87actzvpnb.fsf@cenderis.demon.co.uk>
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	<BB5FDA3C-2D79-11D9-8298-000A959B67D6@seyza.com>
Organization: The XEmacs Project
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 02:35:29 +0900
In-Reply-To: <BB5FDA3C-2D79-11D9-8298-000A959B67D6@seyza.com> (Talli
	Somekh's message of "Wed, 3 Nov 2004 04:21:24 -0500")
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Cc: arch <gnu-arch-users@gnu.org>, Zenaan Harkness <zen@cashpoolcomps.com>
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>>>>> "Talli" == Talli Somekh <talli@seyza.com> writes:

    Talli> i think that would probably be an impossible number

I think all the numbers given by Zenaan are impossible.  The US has
historically kept rather poor statistics.  Compared to the Chinese and
Japanese, for sure, but even compared to the Roman Empire!  I'm pretty
sure the numbers he quotes are either made up or actually pertain to
small idiosyncratic samples.  The only numbers before 1900 that can be
considered at all reliable for the whole US are from the Censuses.
[[BTW, http://www.ipums.umn.edu/ is a wonderful resource.  Even if you
aren't interested in the numbers, it's interesting (to me, anyway) to
browse the data definitions and find out just what those nosy
busybodies were asking people!]]

To give you one example, I'm pretty sure that compulsory education in
the Great State that gave us Senator Edward Kennedy goes back to
before the Revolution, not "1850 at the point of a gun".  The point is
that there was huge variation among the states; you can't extrapolate
from one state's data to the whole country.  But remember, until 1910
the U.S. simply couldn't afford to keep any statistics!

Don't get me wrong, I'm just criticizing the numbers.  Admittedly,
that inability to do statistics honestly doesn't speak well for home
schooling advocates, but in general I support anything that provides
competition both within the public school system and between public
schools and alternative forms.  And that most definitely includes home
schooling.

On the black humorous side, while I don't know of anybody who was home
schooled who is/was imprisoned, I do know that when I was in high
school some local people got suspended sentences for violating the New
York laws.  Their kids could not read anything but the Bible---but for
the Bible they didn't even need a physical copy!  :-)

    Talli> i wouldn't be surprised if the entire literacy level of the
    Talli> United States were not 80% /today/.

Actually, it depends on how you define literacy.  According to
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108121.html, it was estimated at 97%
in 1979.  My guess is that the survey was done by the World Health
Organization; I'm sure there are more recent numbers from the US
government and various others.  Could be worse; the WHO has not been
able to confirm that there are any literate people in Japan---the
Japanese won't let the WHO do a survey.  I conclude that the WHO
produces good objective numbers.  ;-)

See also http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/IALS.html, which looks to be
methodologically clean and is dated 1994-1998, but is hard to
interpret because it's multivariate 5-level scale.  If you want to
_really_ figure out what's going on, I would suggest taking the
numbers for each level for a few representative countries and graphing
them as cumulative distributions.

    Talli> so, in effect, the marginal worth of a slave may very well
    Talli> have been /greater/ than the marginal cost of a nonslave
    Talli> (Stephen Turnbull, feel free to critique me on this.)

Well, I can't.  I can however recommend _Time On The Cross_ by (IIRC)
Robert Fogel and Stanley Engermann, which was the first honest attempt
to evaluate the economic impact of slavery.  The conclusion was that
slavery was economically efficient for the masters, which shocked a
lot of people.  They also concluded that humane treatment of slaves
was economically efficient.  (That doesn't mean that slavery was a
good thing or even that abrupt abolition wasn't worth fighting a war
over, just that the large scale horror stories were not created by the
economics, just by human cussedness.  It also doesn't mean that rape
and other individual abuses weren't common; they were, and of course
they were enabled by slavery.  However, by and large profitable
slaveowners were humane slaveowners---I know, that's an oxymoron,
don't take me so literally---you know what I mean!)  So I would guess
you're in the ballpark.

I read a little of the followup in the professional literature, but
_Time_ was sufficiently controversial (there was a serious taboo on
such research) that you can probably read good reviews and critiques
in the popular literature (eg, the Atlantic Monthly and the like).

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.


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