Lesson 4

Agenda
• Reflections and follow-up
• Essay: “Globalisation privileges the rich more than the poor.”
How far is this true?
• Essay: ‘In today’s globalised world, there are more issues that
divide rather than unite us.’ What are your views?
• The first-aid station: Agreement and tenses
• Content: The globalisation of terrorism
RE: Navigating our global future
• Benot Galarneau: Largely scoped and great but Mr Goldin misses
the trauma our lack of preparation to oil peak will cause. In
the next 20 years, this is the single factor that will affect the
most our civilization.
• Martin Hoskin: Actually, I doubt it to be frank. The price of oil will
rise, cars will get more efficient, the price of oil will rise and
cars will get even more efficient. Gradually the gasoline
engine will be replaced and the price of oil will fall. The
markets send clear signals and the technology responds. The
problem with oil is that the signals were not clear enough -
but that is changing.
• Stefan van Oeckel: Jevons paradox proves actually the opposite
is true, the more efficient cars will get, the price of the fuel
will decrease but the demand will then increase... so more
efficiency is only speeding up the process of running out on
cheap oil. and that is what we have seen since the extraction
of oil... if you'd look at the graphs, you'd see a Gauss-curve,
peaking probably around 2006 - 2008. this is not a hypotheses
but pure fact. the signals were clear back in 1950 when
Hubbert had already made clear his theory.
RE: Navigating our global future
• Second response thread.
• Ragna Birko: "An individual for the first time in the history of
humanity will have the capacity by 2030 to destroy the
planet, to wreck everything, through the creation for example
of a bio-pathogen."

That alone was worth the seven minutes as a wake up call but
I am afraid we won't have to wait for 2030, that threat exists
now. I wish his talk had been longer.
• Kathri Satarasinghe: Well, the capability to wreck everything
exists now and will be more prevalent tomorrow. We need to
genuinely address the issues of global inequality. In today's
world people still die of hunger and world bank, IMF etc.
practice policies that are protectionist to the rich countries. If
we the voters become much more engaged through existing
systems we can change the representatives in any
organisation. I suggest the following.
A) Get rich quickly. Retire early.
B)Pay a lot of time to discuss TED like issues with your or
others children if you can, to raise awareness. They are our
future.
C) Do voluntary work to make the world a better place and to
talk to different sort of people outside your network. If
possible, help third world projects. We can even have an
alternate global support net work of ideas if we try.
D) Be ethical through your conduct. 
I did not mean to be prescriptive. Only tried to achieve clarity.
RE: how ideas trump crises
• Greig Oldford: TED is about innovations and new ideas. In my
opinion, this talk introduces nothing new at all. Let's talk
about natural limits to growth, about when growth is good but
also when it is a destructive force, about the inverse
relationship between GDP and self-reported happiness, or the
positive relationship between GDP and natural disasters.
Maybe we could discuss some of the externalities of
globalization, like the subversion of local cultures with western
monoculture, or the dangers of economic under-
diversification. Start to address these weakness with
innovative solutions and you might turn this 14 minute yawn
into a real TED talk.
• Alex Tabarrok: Many of the things in your comment are simply wrong.
The relationship between GDP and self-reported happiness is
positive. Anyone can Google this. Here is a map from the NYTimes

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/16/business/20080
416_LEONHARDT_GRAPHIC.html

more here

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16leonhardt.html?
_r=2&oref=slogin

It's also not clear what you mean by a positive relationship

between GDP and natural disasters. Do you think that God
punishes rich countries by creating more natural disasters? That
would be strange. Moreover, it is clearly true that an earthquake
in a poor country like China, for example, will kill many more
people than the same quake in CA. Wealth protects.

Now growth certainly has negative effects and I could have given
a talk about those but why would you want to hear about
something you evidently already know?
• Owen Richardson: Hello Alex, very cool of you to be participating
in the discussion of your own talk! 

I had a similar, "Okay, tell me something I don't know"

response to the beginning of the video. 
Cynicism is already well on its way out of fashion among the
cutting edge (and TEDsters are cutting edge). It's always
great to have another reality-check optimizing talk to show to
ones lagging, cynical friends, yes, but what news can you give
ME?

but I watched on, and was rewarded. For instance, I liked

getting the idea on the effect bigger markets will have on the
pace of R&D. Sure, I VAGUELY thought about that before, but
I'd never used that as a distinct perspective, so that's cool.

Another great thing was all the graphs and figures. Someone
needs to clip the part of the talk on the great depression and
projections and post it on youtube.
• Owen Richardson: But one thing that DOES bother me is
censorship and abuse of human rights in China. As they
become richer and more important in the world, the
opportunity for outside influence to ameliorate those
problems gets lost.

We all know how the Olympic committee basically said, 'ok,

clean up your human rights act and we'll give you the games'.
China cleaned nothing up, in fact trampled human rights IN
PREPARING for the games... was there any official response at
all? I'm unaware.

I feel like maybe we should be standing up to China now while

we can.

Yes, the world helps China to light its candle and we all get
more light... but will China naturally mature in the process into
a political entity that's not going to go around burning it's own
people and the rest of the world with that candle?
• Alex Tabarrok: Thanks Owen. It's possible that we will have less
influence on China as it gets richer but let's face it we never
had much influence on China when it was communist and
poor. More important I think is that the Chinese people will
have more influence on the Chinese government as they
become richer. In fact, there is some evidence that richer
countries tend to become more democratic over time, South
Korea is a good example.

Our most important influence is soft power. Chinese students

learn a lot when they come to the United States, not just
engineering. Consider that the notion of gay pride is just now
beginning to enter China. Amazing. None of this is meant to
excuse China or to suggest that we have but to wait and
everything will turn out rosy but I do think that our best hope
is internal developments in China which we can best support
by example and with soft diplomacy.
In your talk, you called China "the world's
greatest anti-poverty program of the last
few decades." Could you elaborate on
that?
• With the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiao Ping, China
began to grow at tremendous rates -- 10 percent per year.
Without any foreign aid to speak of, this "program" raised
hundreds of millions of people out of the very worst kind of
poverty. China in 1979 had among the highest poverty rates in
the world. Its economic growth has brought several hundred
million people from making less than a dollar a day out of that
starvation-level poverty. Remember that, during the Great
Leap Forward 30 to 40 million people starved in China.
Why is there so much fear about
the rise of nations like China?
• Under Communism, China and the Soviet Union -- with their
nuclear weapons and their anti-trade, anti-Western ideology --
certainly were threats. But with their integration into the
world economy as trade has increased, that threat has
declined.
• Cordell Hull, U.S. Secretary of State under Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, is said to have remarked, "When goods don't cross
borders, armies will." Free trade unites the world and reduces
the threats from other nations. It doesn't eliminate it, but we
have much less to fear from a rich, prosperous China than we
do from a poor, starving China.
At The first-aid station with the
grammar doctor…
• Subject-Verb agreement
• Basic principle: Singular subjects, singular verbs. Plural subjects,
plural verbs.
1. Indefinite pronouns
• Anyone, everyone, someone, no one, nobody
• Singular or plural?
• Exceptions: countable vs. uncountable
• Consider this: How about “none”?
• None of you claims/claim responsibility for this incident?
2. Some other indefinite pronouns
• Everyone, everybody, each
• Each of the students is/are responsible for doing his or her work
in the library.
3. Phrases
• Together with, as well as, along with ARE NOT the same as and.
• The mayor as well as his brothers is/are going to prison.
• The mayor and his brothers is/are going to jail.
4. Pronouns
• Neither and either
• Singular or plural?
5. Conjunction
• nor and or is not equal to and
• Singular or plural?
• Determining factor: proximity
6. non-subjects
• There and here
• Determining factor: verb
7. Singular subjects
• This is quite a no-brainer, isn’t it? :P
8. Modifiers
• The mayor, who has been convicted along with his four brothers
on four counts of various crimes but who also seems, like a
cat, to have several political lives, is/are finally going to jail.
9. nouns
• Weird nouns
• Glasses, pants, pliers, scissors, etc. Singular or plural?
• When are they singular?
10. Exceptional words ending in -s
• News, measles, etc.
• Singular or plural?
• Assets, earnings, etc.
• Singular or plural?
11. Fractional expressions
• Half of, a part of, a percentage of, a majority of, etc.
• Singular or plural?
• As like all, any, more, most and some
• An expression: “more than one”
12. Sentence compounds
• When you have a positive and a negative subject (one plural, one
singular), which one should your verb agree with?
• The department members but not the chair has/have decided
not to teach on Valentine’s day.
• It is not the faculty members but the president who
decides/decide this issue.
• It was the speaker, not his ideas, that has/have provoked the
students to riot.
Tenses: a diagram
Simple present
• Use?
• To show same-time action,
• To show earlier action
• To show a period of time extending from some point in the past
to the present
• To show action to come
Simple past
• Use?
• To show another completed past action
• To show an earlier action
• To state a general truth
future
• Use?
• To show action happening at the same time
• To show an earlier action
• To show future action earlier thanthe action of the independent
clause
Present perfect or past perfect
• Use?
• For any purpose
Future perfect
• Use?
• For any purpose
Quiz!
• http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/verbs29practicetest.htm
Essay: “Globalisation privileges the rich
more than the poor.” How far is this true?
• Time to mark!
Essay: “In today’s globalised world, there
are more issues that dive rather than
unite us.” What are your views?
• Time to mark!
Comprehension paper agenda
• Summary
• Your homework
• Comprehension
Summary type – how & why
• Question: Summarise in your own words as far as possible
the most striking contrasts and contradictions the writer sees
in Gandhi’s character and experience. Use material from
paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8. Write about 140 words, using
your own words as far as possible.
• Task: I remember what you did in our last lesson…
• MrGandhi, dead these thirty-four years, defied definition in his
life, and even more so now. In a multi-racial, multi-faith,
multi-political society, growing by millions every year, he was
unique in that he was almost certainly the only individual
Indian who claimed to speak for them all, even, at times, for
his opponents, the British, whom he challenged continually
and from whom he could not shake off his reluctant respect
and sometimes even, perversely, affection. The British
responded by alternately consoling him, consulting him,
throwing him into jail, letting him out, mocking him one day,
and saluting him the next. The British were used to rebels, but
to Gandhi's dying day they never knew what to make of such
a good bad man. Anyhow, Gandhi outlasted them, though
only just.
• Gandhi's life was deliberate and calculated simplicity - almost, it
might be said, a simplicity of intricate complication - which
surrounded itself with paradox. He spent most of his lifetime
seeking and working and fasting for the independence of his
nation. When at long last that Independence celebration
came, M.K. Gandhi was not there. Freedom had come as he
had wished; after all those years the plan had gone wrong. It
had come to a divided nation, to a quarrelling Congress, to a
land he had striven to unite that had broken asunder, where
the top half had turned into a schism called Pakistan.
• It is repetitive, even banal, to keep using this word, ‘unique’. Yet
Gandhi - without trying or affectation, yet with a keen and
calculated sense of theatre was sui generis*. No revolutionary
of the past had ever so exploited the power of powerlessness,
and discovered how passive resistance could flummox an
imperialism built on physical force, that was accustomed to
being attacked, but not suborned. How does an army deal
with ‘passive resistance’? How does it subdue an unarmed
opposition? How does a railway operate when men invite the
trains to run over silent people prostrate on the line? There
was no way - that was how Gandhi won the war he never
fought.
• Gandhi promoted the “hartal”, a protest by public stopping of all
activity, a spiritual strike. This came to its inevitable head in
April 1919 in Amritsar in Punjab, where the British General
Dyer broke up a meeting by firing on it without warning, killing
379 Indians and wounding another thousand or so. The
British thought they had saved India from revolution. What in
fact they had achieved was to ensure, before too long, the
dissolution of the British Empire.
• It was the punctuation mark of Gandhi’s career. He who had
advocated cooperation with the British now said that
“cooperation in any shape or form with this satanic
government is sinful”. There ensued the political technique
unique to India – civil disobedience, passive resistance, the
war without battles, the fighting without force, the ultimately
irresistible power of the negative. A chronology of the
Mahatma Gandhi freedom fight would be tedious and
repetitive – the enormous meetings, the near-adulation, the
near-diffident imprisonments by the baffled British who could
never understand a political opponent more tranquil and
intelligent than they, the fasts unto death that always stopped
just in time, the “naked fakir” as Winston Churchill called him,
conferring, in his dhoti, with viceroys and statesmen; all that
is on a hundred records.
• The politician Gandhi’s trump was to unite the masses and the
classes into a national movement. The masses would follow
the classes because Gandhi was held to be a good Hindu, the
“Great Soul”; the classes accepted his primitivism and
Hinduism because they knew the vegetarianism, the
dhotiloincloth, the hand spinning, were his passport to the
people. Most important of all, they knew that Gandhi could
outclass the British in debate, in tactics, and above all, in
making them feel uneasy in morality. So the big battalion lost
out to the naked fakir. Then when the final triumph of
Independence came, it was empty. It was not one Free India,
it was two: a partitioned Pakistan was his final sadness.
Mohandas Gandhi did not attend the celebration of his life’s
desire, because there was bloodshed in Bengal, and where
there was conflict, the pacifist had to be.
• There is a legend that everyone in this world remembers exactly
where he or she was when the news came of the
assassination of President Kennedy. It is true for me: I heard a
radio in a house at Chelsea at 9 p.m.; just ten hours later, I
was in Houston, Texas, in time to see Oswald die.
• When Mahatma Gandhi was shot, I was no longer in India, I had
come off a railway train at Sherborne in Dorset, where I was
taking a son to school. Sherborne is a very, very long way
from New Delhi and the house of MrBirla, the last place
Gandhi ever saw. At the barrier, the Dorset collector took my
ticket. He said that he had heard the news on the BBC radio.
“They made quite an item of it. He must have been an
important old geezer. I wonder who he was.”