So if we believe that students learn best by interacting in the classroom, why don’t university teaching rooms have these chairs?

Lovely Benjamin Wallace piece sending up the contemporary craze for high-minded talkfests.

The appeal is complex. For would-be world-savers enthralled by “the power of ideas,” these conferences are a stand-in for “a time when governments did shit, like put people on the moon,” per one curator. For even die-hard technologists, interacting via disembodied avatars gets old, and occasional 3-D mingling is refreshing. For a certain prosperous tier of the citizenry, the conferences serve as a higher-brow Learning Annex. But most simply, these events are about establishing and reinforcing new hierarchies. In a culture where social rank is ever more fluid, an entrepreneur who overnight goes from sleeping under his desk to IPO-ing into a billionaire needs a way to express his new status, stat. “We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” as Andrew Zolli, PopTech’s executive director, puts it.

Thus the rise of a cohort of speakers and attendees who migrate along the same elite social-intellectual trade routes. Throw in Sundance and SXSW and Burning Man, and you get what Michael Hirschorn has called “the clusterfuckoisie,” tweeting at each other as they shuttle between events. This is so exactly the sort of thing that David Brooks lives to break down into one of his fictive comic-sociological characters that, in his latest book, The Social Animal, he describes Davos parties as “rings of interesting and insecure people desperately seeking entry into the realm of the placid and self-satisfied.” But Brooks is himself a leading citizen of the realm, having spoken at TED and, regularly, the Aspen Ideas Festival. For public intellectuals with books and brands to promote, the new conferences are force multipliers, unpaid gigs that offer intangible yields. “Obviously it’s not the money,” Brooks says. “For me, it’s the chance to get out of my political-pundit circle and meet people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. There are psychic rewards.”

Hmmm… Is it significant, I wonder, that in last year’s The Muppets movie, Scooter is updated to be a Google employee and TED attendee?

I’ve just finished Adam Sisman’s magnificent biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper. It seems to me to be a model of its kind – knowledgeable, properly referenced, sympathetic without being sycophantic and extremely readable. And it caused me to revise my opinion of its subject. I’ve always been interested by Trevor-Roper, partly because I’ve been fascinated by history since I was a kid (it was a toss-up whether I would read history or engineering when I first went to university) and by historians (some of my best friends are practitioners of that craft). But I was particularly intrigued by T-R because of his literary style — which was waspish and mischievous to a degree rare even among historians. (Reading their observations of one another’s failings always reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s observation that “the only virtue schoolboys demand from one another is humility”.)

It’s not surprising that Waugh came to mind. For one thing, he hated T-R because of his hostility to Catholicism. But Waugh also had the same kind of wickedly sarcastic prose style. Witness his observation when an acquaintance announced in White’s one day that surgeons had operated on Randolph Churchill (an authentic Grade One monster if ever there was one) to remove a tumour that had then been found to be benign. “Ah”, said Waugh, “the wonders of medical science: to have found the only part of Randolph that was not malignant — and to have removed it!.”

T-R shared another characteristic with Waugh in that both combined acute snobbery with assiduous social climbing: they both came from middle-class backgrounds and envied folks with what they regarded as better pedigrees. (When someone once tried to cheer Waugh up by reminding him that one of his ancestors had been ennobled in an act of political patronage, he responded that he would like to have been descended from a “useless peer”.)

Since Waugh was a deeply unpleasant person, I had always assumed that Roper must also have been similarly obnoxious. That impression was reinforced by reading his collected letters to Bernard Berenson, which are often hilarious, but also riddled with revolting sycophancy towards the old fraud.

Adam Sisman’s book has made me revise that impression. He reveals that T-R seems to have had a real gift for friendship, that he could be very loyal, principled and courageous at times and that he was generous with his time and support for his students and protégés. Sisman also illuminates one of the great mysteries of T-R’s life, which is how someone who was so gifted never managed to produce the magnum opus that most people expected of him. The answer seems to be that he allowed himself constantly to be diverted by interesting journalistic projects, most of which stemmed from the fact that, early in his career, he had written a masterly, definitive account of the last days of Hitler. As an academic who has often been similarly distracted by journalism, I rather empathised with that predicament!

The Last Days of Hitler is a wonderful piece of factual journalism, which I would recommend to anyone aspiring to practice that grisly trade. Since most of us never produce anything as good as that, T-R can be forgiven a lot. But in a way the most illuminating part of Sisman’s book comes towards the end, when he deals with T-R’s time as Master of Peterhouse and his catastrophic error of judgement in authenticating the “Hitler diaries”. I know something of his time at Peterhouse, but hadn’t fully realised how courageous and effective he was in dealing with what was, at that time, the nastiest nest of donnish vipers in Oxbridge. No doubt some of Sisman’s chronicle had to be toned down because of the libel laws, so we can look forward to an unexpurgated second edition when the last of the aforementioned vipers has passed to his reward in Hell.

I was unexpectedly moved by the Hitler Diaries fiasco as recounted by Sisman. It was, of course, a catastrophe for T-R, and a mighty boon for all those who had, over the years, had to endure the sharp end of his wit. But what is impressive in retrospect is the courageous way he shouldered the blame and the ridicule — in sharp contrast to Murdoch and his minions who mostly tried to dodge their responsibility for the error. It’s not often that a book makes one change one’s mind. But this one did.

The seminar, originally uploaded by jjn1.

David Howarth, the former MP for Cambridge (and one of the few Members of Parliament to emerge with honour from the expenses scandal), at a CSaP seminar on Friday. He’s now resumed his academic career after standing down at the last election. His successor as MP, Julian Huppert, was an academic until he was elected.

Sitting next to me at last week’s lecture by Simon Hampton of Google was David Cleevely who in addition to being a successful entrepreneur is also the Founding Director of the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy. At one point, Simon put up a slide showing the percentage of GDP contributed by the Internet in a wide range of European countries. As the animation flashed by David whispered to me: “wonder if there’s a correlation between those percentages and bond yields?” After the lecture, he cycled off purposefully into the gathering gloom. I suspected that he was Up To Something.

He was. Yesterday he and his son Matthew (who’s currently doing a PhD at Imperial College Business School) published this chart on their blog.

They plotted 10-year governmental bond rates against the Boston Consulting Group’s measure of “e-intensity” for countries in the Eurozone group.

Member states which have not had the capacity to adopt and develop the internet and ecommerce are those with skyrocketing risk premiums on their governments’ debt. These states form a distinct group: Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Greece (which is literally off the scale) – all with high debt premiums and an e-Intensity score of well under 100.

There are two other groups: those with high e-Intensity and low government bond rates such as Germany, Denmark and the UK, and a middle group (Belgium, Austria and France) with lower e-Intensity (100-120) and raised bond rates of 3-4%.

David and Matthew see two possible (and possibly non-exclusive) explanations for this:

1. Low e-Intensity indicates underlying structural problems: countries with high e-Intensity are those which have invested in modern processes, improved productivity and benefit from strong institutions. These are the countries that have lower borrowing costs, as they are best placed to grow their economies in the future.

and/or

2. e-Intensity (or what it represents) is a fundamental capability: countries which use the internet intensively can respond more flexibly to shocks and crises, instead of being weighed down by cumbersome 20th century processes and institutions.

So…

if you can get a country to invest in, use, and compete on the internet, then you must have either eliminated or minimised any underlying structural problems, or created a flexible and robust economy, or both.

Policymakers, please note.