Where’s best?

Its first-ever ranking of American colleges, at The Economist.

It provides, with the linked graphic, an explanation of methodology.

"The Economist’s first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere. Thanks to the scorecard, the first number is easily accessible. The second, however, can only be estimated. To calculate this figure, we ran the scorecard’s earnings data through a multiple regression analysis, a common method of measuring the relationships between variables."

Porridge in the Panopticon

Great Cooks of the Western World?

Glen Newey reviews Jeremy Bentham’s Prison Cooking: A Collection of Utilitarian Recipes at London Review of Books.

VW, Enron and the Root of Evil

Beaumont Vance at Risk & Insurance,

"In both cases, there was a strong message from the top: Failure is not an option. While this sounds like a very worthy and American credo, one worthy of being put into book form as a motivation to all people seeking blinding success in business, it is actually a hallmark of corporate fraud.

"When senior leadership says, 'failure is not an option,' what they often mean is 'anyone not reporting success will be fired.'"

Reinventing the company

'Entrepreneurs are redesigning the basic building block of capitalism' editorializes The Economist.

"The central difference lies in ownership: whereas nobody is sure who owns public companies, startups go to great lengths to define who owns what. Early in a company’s life, the founders and first recruits own a majority stake—and they incentivise people with ownership stakes or performance-related rewards. That has always been true for startups, but today the rights and responsibilities are meticulously defined in contracts drawn up by lawyers. This aligns interests and creates a culture of hard work and camaraderie. Because they are private rather than public, they measure how they are doing using performance indicators (such as how many products they have produced) rather than elaborate accounting standards."

And a related article, Reinventing the deal, says 'America’s startups are changing what it means to own a company'.

"Working this way is not easy. Conflicts between the parties arise all the time, over valuations and much else. But it allows such firms to reach pools of capital that an old-fashioned family business would not have got its hands on."

UCLA Dept of Classics Newsletter Winter 2015

This issue includes Faculty Bookshelf, and, in 'New Directions', Discovering the Romans in the Digital Age, by Professor Chris Johanson.

ALL Conference Schedule - final

Now available at the Alliance for Liberal Learning for the November 6th-7th conference.

From the Center: Adler on human nature, and on Mechanics

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on human nature, nurture, and culture, continued
• Adler on mechanics as one of the Great Ideas

Here at the blog, we added Noet Blog to the Books and Ideas Blogroll in the sidebar.

'Great Books of the Western World' online from Noet

Noet is offering a pre-publication sale of an online edition of Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990) with many intriguing features. While we do not have experience with this product, it appears likely to be of potential interest to many of our readers.

"New: Great Books of the Western World

"The Great Books of the Western World gives you 60 volumes containing 517 works written by 130 authors.

"These texts capture the major ideas, stories, and discoveries that shaped Western culture. From Homer to Hemingway, Aquinas to Nietzsche, and Galileo to Einstein, the classic conversations spanning history now continue in your digital library.

"Gain insight into these conversations with the Syntopicon, a guide to the 102 major ideas that define the Western tradition. It includes an extensive introduction to each of the 102 ideas and lists every place they’re referenced in the Great Books library. With Noet, you can jump from an idea or sub-idea in the Syntopicon right to the source with one click.

"Reserve yours for 80% off. Hurry! This special deal ends October 21!"

There's a link to Learn More.

Trump and the Culture of Political Correctness

James Kalb at Chronicles,

"Domination of public life by p.c. elites has thus made it impossible for ordinary people to assert their complaints publicly in an acceptable way, so their objections can easily be shrugged off as the outbursts of ignorant bigots who will, in any event, soon become demographically irrelevant.

"The approach has worked, but it exacerbates people’s sense that something is being put over on them, that they are being deprived of the world that was theirs by those who hold them in contempt and wish them no good. The result is that the people would very much like to have a champion willing to make their cause his own. The champion doesn’t have to be particularly noble, thoughtful, or good; he just has to put a few of their more obvious points forward in a way that can’t be ignored."

(via The University Bookman)

Dr. Peter Redpath on metaphysics - podcast

Dr. Peter Redpath discussed metaphysics with hosts Marc Tuttle and Tim O'Donnell on this podcast of The Catholic Cave.

Borges booklist

You want lists? HERE'S a list: Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library http://t.co/V7v8sKDGU2 via @openculture

— Peter Ginna (@DoctorSyntax) October 14, 2015

From the Center: Adler on justice, and on nature; Hutchins on education;

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on justice and fairness
• Adler on human nature, nurture, and culture
• Robert Hutchins on ideals in education

The Very Great Alexander von Humboldt

Nathaniel Rich reviews The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, by Andrea Wulf, and After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, by Jedediah Purdy, at The New York Review of Books.

ALL announces Conference breakout sessions

The Alliance for Liberal Learning (ALL) has posted a draft of the complete schedule of its inaugural Annual Conference, to be held November 6th and 7th in Chicago.

How Much Is A Leader's Integrity Worth?

Travis Bradberry at LinkedIn Pulse

From the Center: Adler on matter; all about relativism

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on matter as one of the Great Ideas
• Everything you ever wanted to know about relativism...

P.S.

• Adler on how to mark a book
• Katherine Byrne on the care of books