Outside our kitchen window is what we had always assumed was an abandoned nest-box. Recently, though, we noticed several things: (i) our two cats were taking an inordinate interest in it, (ii) adult birds were flying missions to and from the box and (iii) an extraordinarily courageous wagtail was distracting the cats by hopping about on the lawn and generally tormenting them by flying overhead.

Naturally we fretted about the fate of the birds, and for two days kept the cats indoors, much to their chagrin. Then this morning my wife saw this little chap on the roof of our study. He had just flown for the first time and had alighted to savour his new freedom (and perhaps also to recover from the shock). He looked at her impassively as she took his portrait.

I was a TV critic for 13 years (1982-87 on the Listener, now sadly defunct; 1987-95 on the Observer, still going strong), so I feel I’ve paid my dues to the medium. I still watch TV occasionally, but rarely while it’s being broadcast (which is why, for me, the BBC iPlayer was such a great innovation). It’s “my schedule, not the scheduler’s schedule” now. And because I watch TV on devices other than ‘television sets’ I’ve paid very little attention to how the consumer market has developed over the last decade or so.

But the the other day I found myself walking through the local branch of John Lewis while en route to somewhere else and I found myself in the audio-visual department, where I was surrounded by gigantic screens. And then I was struck by the irony of what’s happening. All over the country, developers are building new apartments consisting of ever-smaller rooms, while at the same time manufacturers are building ever-bigger flat-screen TVs. If these two trends continue then we are on course for an interesting collision.

And then I stumbled on this nice piece by Douglas Coupland, in which he writes

big-screen TVs are ugly. In the history of human technology, there have been few inventions whose intrinsic ugliness and brutality of form defy all notions of beauty and defeat everything we call “home”.

Trying to put a big screen in a domestic space and have it look natural is almost impossible, like having a 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith inserted into your life – a monolith that has total disregard for your humanity or taste. The black minimalist box on your wall negates your framed wedding photos, your cornices, your art collection, your potted plants. The only environment it looks passably OK in is a modern house built after 2008 that factors in the bizarre scale of big screens – and even then, when you see one passably installed, you feel like you’ve walked into Muammer Gaddafi’s bedroom.

Yep.

Nice cartoon in the New Yorker. Shows a journalist frantically typing and saying to a bemused colleague: “I’m listing my deadlines by due date so I can miss them in chronological order.”

The economist Diane Coyle has an interesting article on the need to reform the way undergraduate economics is taught. This is a theme that she has been writing about ever since the 2008 crash. In her article she points to some cracks that are appearing in the hitherto impenetrable facade of the profession’s establishment — as evidenced by some interesting new initiatives by university teachers. Wendy Carlin’s intriguing project, for example, carries the subtitle: “teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened”.

“Even a relatively minimal interpretation implies a substantial amount of change in many undergraduate economics programmes,” writes Coyle.

In many universities, the core curriculum settled into a predictable rut. This interacted with two factors: (i) incentives for academic research to focus on technical increments to knowledge – contributions aimed solely at professional peers, and (ii) rising teaching loads and student numbers stemming from pressures on university finances.

Despite the great interest in reform among economists teaching undergraduate courses, change will take some time as these various barriers are overcome.

There is probably the widest agreement about changes such as:

Re-introducing elements of economic history into core modules;
* Incorporating some issues on the frontiers of research into undergraduate teaching;
* Encouraging inter-disciplinary interest; and
* Ensuring students are taught key skills such as data handling and good communication.

I was particularly struck by her point about the factors explaining the “rut” into which undergraduate economics teaching had fallen. For several decades (perhaps longer) the ‘mathematisation’ of economics had led to the fossilisation of the profession round a Kuhnian paradigm which yielded lots of interesting intellectual puzzles but was effectively detached from the real world of finance, globalisation, computerised trading, neoliberal ideology and other phenomena. The result was the evolution of a profession that is effectively coalesced round a pathological paradigm — i.e. one that has little to do with the real-world domain to which it purportedly applies (see “The Dismal (and dangerous) Science” and Richard Posner’s strictures).

And therein lies an interesting unintended consequence — the way in which successive generations of undergraduates have been lured astray by something that all elite universities sell as their USP – the promise that kids will be taught by academics who are research leaders in their fields.

Those universities have been as good as their word. The result is that generations of kids in elite institutions have been stuffed with the fantasies emanating from the dominant, research-led economics paradigm. As my friend Geoff Harcourt pointed out in his letter to the Queen (see here again), apologists for the paradigm do not consider

“how the preference for mathematical technique over real-world substance diverted many economists from looking at the vital whole. It fails to reflect upon the drive to specialise in narrow areas of inquiry, to the detriment of any synthetic vision. For example, it does not consider the typical omission of psychology, philosophy or economic history from the current education of economists in prestigious institutions. It mentions neither the highly questionable belief in universal ‘rationality’ nor the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ — both widely promoted by mainstream economists. It also fails to consider how economists have also been ‘charmed by the market’ and how simplistic and reckless market solutions have been widely and vigorously promoted by many economists.

What has been scarce is a professional wisdom informed by a rich knowledge of psychology, institutional structures and historic precedents. This insufficiency has been apparent among those economists giving advice to governments, banks, businesses and policy institutes. Non-quantified warnings about the potential instability of the global financial system should have been given much more attention.

We believe that the narrow training of economists — which concentrates on mathematical techniques and the building of empirically uncontrolled formal models — has been a major reason for this failure in our profession. This defect is enhanced by the pursuit of mathematical technique for its own sake in many leading academic journals and departments of economics.”

The big question, of course, is whether the arguments advanced by Diane Coyle, Geoff Harcourt and other perceptive critics will lead to any substantive change in the way mainstream economics is taught. Anyone familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s analysis, who has seen the intellectual and organisational grip that paradigms exert on academic disciplines, or read John Cassidy’s account of denial in the profession, is bound to be sceptical. Some people would sooner die than admit that they have been wrong. And they include many academics.

On Tuesday evening we went to a wonderful Bach recital by the current Humanitas Professor of Music, the pianist Angela Hewitt, who took “The Art of Bach” as the theme for her professorship. She performed The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080), which Bach composed during the last years of his life and did not live to complete. It took well over an hour of sustained concentration, and she stopped exactly where Bach did, in a way that was intensely moving, and had some members of the audience in tears.

Also interesting to see that she had the score on an iPad and had two Bluetooth pedals for noiseless page-turning.

The other intriguing aspect of the performance was the instrument she played — a Fazioli Concert Grand, a truly fabulous piano, with a price tag to match. As the musician sitting next to us observed, it costs as much as the apartment you’d have to buy to accommodate it.

I’ve been reading Stefan Collini’s edition of Leavis’s Richmond Lecture, which is terrific (the edition, I mean) because Collini brings out what’s important in the lecture – and what was obscured by Leavis’s vitriolic abuse of Snow. I’m thinking particularly of the passage where he discusses Snow’s literary reputation and says “as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is”.

Given that at the time Snow was regarded as a serious novelist by the chattering classes, this full-on assault shocked people. It led me to dig out my copy of Snow’s novel, The Masters, which is based around the vicious academic (and personal) politics involved in electing a new Master of a supposedly fictional Cambridge college (which is closely modelled on Snow’s own college – Christ’s — in the mid- to late 1930s. I had read the novel as a teenager and been naïvely impressed by it at the time – not least because of the glimpse it purported to give of what went on inside the magic circle of Oxbridge colleges. In the light of Leavis’s assault what, I wondered, would it look like now?

Well, it’s terrible – wooden and stodgy. None of the characters really live – I was reminded of the jibe that someone once made about Snow: that he did not so much create characters as take facsimiles of them out to lunch in his club.

So as a work of fiction, The Masters, fails to make the grade. Where it does succeed, however, is as a piece of amateur anthropology because it presents what I guess is a pretty accurate picture of what Christ’s — and Cambridge — was like in the 1930s. The college then was rather small, and the Fellowship was tiny – 13 fellows and a Master. And dons (i.e. academics) were so much better paid then: in the novel one of the Fellows owns a house on Chaucer Road; and another has a substantial pile on the Madingley Road, near the Observatory. No academic nowadays could afford a house in either location. That privilege is reserved for hedge-fund managers, corporate lawyers and CEOs of tech companies.

Interestingly, after concluding his story, Snow adds a factual appendix which provides a rather good – and very interesting – history of the evolution of the Oxbridge college system. It would provide a usefully concise answer to the tourist’s legendary question (addressed to a Cambridge academic): “Excuse me sir, but where exactly is the University?” (To which the time-honoured answer is: “You know, that’s a very good question.”)

LATER: Sean French emails to say: “That anecdote about the tourist in Cambridge is used (about Oxford) by Gilbert Ryle in ‘The Concept of Mind’ to demonstrate the concept of a category error. There is something very, very donnish about the idea that to understand the mind, you need to have a grasp of the Oxbridge college system. Redbrick philosophers need not apply!”

Lovely cartoon in the current New Yorker. Shows the reception desk of the Flat Earth Society. Behind the receptionist are clocks labelled New York, London, Paris, Beijing and Tokyo — all showing the time as 10:10!