México en el siglo XIX, Tocqueville y Aguilar Rivera

Acabo de releer (tercera lectura) “Cartas mexicanas de Alexis de Tocqueville”. Es un libro brillante. Original, imaginativo, informado, sólido –por ejemplo, el Tocqueville en México de Aguilar Rivera, congruentemente, tiene una dosis de incongruencia-, reflexivo, útil, irónico, disfrutable. Y bien escrito a la manera tocquevilliana. Brillante.

Jorge Hernández Tinajero refuta a Heriberto Yépez

(O, el politólogo y serio activista civil acaba con un nuevo “todólogo” reciente estrella mediática)...

Las sandeces de Yépez: http://impreso.milenio.com/node/8944816

Los argumentos de Jorge: http://jorgecalamar.blogspot.com/2011/04/algunas-aclaraciones-que-no-quiso-m.html

Cory Doctorow sobre educación y mercados

"Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision [provide] collectively.
Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because many of the social goods that arise from education—socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning—are not goods or services demanded by a market, but rather they are the underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace as well as establishing and maintaining good governance.

There is a long and wide body of evidence that people with wide, solid educational foundations that transcend mere vocational skills produce societies that are more prosperous, more transparent, healthier, more democratic—that attain, in short, all the things we hope markets will attain for us.
… But functional democracies require that all people—not just those who are already wealthy—are given the foundational knowledge that allows them to prosper and participate in the full range of social activities that make nations great".


Palabras que constituyen un caso a favor de la mezcla social de una buena educación (más que de cualquier educación por sí misma) y, oh fuerzas del mal supremo, la aceptación de la existencia de mercados. Ahora bien, la educación es buena (y a veces es mejor) pero no basta, es necesaria pero no suficiente…