Rather guiltily I was nursing a sense of schadenfreude when England were 2-0 behind against Croatia on Wednesday. And I was not at all anxious ahead of the earlier Israel v Russia match, which Russia had to lose (apparently unlikely, but it did happen) for England to stand a chance of qualifying for the 2008 European Championships (ie by beating Croatia). So England are out, and the manager Steve McClaren has been kicked into touch.

I don’t follow football so closely to judge whether this a fair comment on McClaren, and wish him no ill. In any event, as the Croatia game wore on, my nationalism was asserting itself, hoping for a reversal of the reversal. It came and went, England clawed back two goals and all too inevitably, it seemed, conceded a third.

But the reason for my mixed emotions was that I was secretly hoping that if McClaren went, the job would go to Aston Villa manager Martin O’Neill, even though he’s ruled himself out today, it appears. The reason for my enthusiasm was simple. He once quoted William Goldman’s famous line: Continue reading ‘nobody knows anything (football version)’

A lot of people have been getting worked up recently about income inequality. If you read the financial press you are regularly bombarded with advertisements for the management of what is being termed “sudden wealth”: more people are winning life’s lottery. But in English-speaking countries one source of emergent income inequality that needs to be watched arises from the difficulty of learning the English language, even for native speakers.

The Guardian today has a report on another experiment that is improving literacy rates using synthetic phonics, similar to the Direct Instruction or DISTAR method which has achieved controversial success in the US. Although not all literacy authorities accept the research demonstrating that synthetic phonics is a superior method of learning to read, it is now government policy to promote it. And it seems to be filtering through, albeit quite slowly.

The path-dependent nature of illiteracy should not be underestimated. The report highlights Continue reading ‘why the rich get richer – read all about it’

If you live in a competitive family and are a middle child, the news that first-born children are the cleverest is not good. A study conducted at the University of Oslo, and reported in the New Scientist, states that first-borns have an average 2.3 point IQ advantage over their dopey siblings.

I’ve never fancied IQ as a real measure of intelligence. And 2.3 points difference I could probably make up with better nutrition and all this flaxseed oil I’m consuming.

But then that is sort of the point that the Norwegian research is making. That some of the difference in intelligence within families is social, not genetic. It probably results from the fact that parents have more time for the first-born. The older children have been progressively more exposed to the sophisticated vocabulary of the parents. It suggests more powerfully that we should not overstate — as too many people prefer to these days — nature over the complex circumstances of individual nurture, which can produce heavily path-dependent outcomes.

The Knackered parenting experience would bear that out. Continue reading ‘curse of the second-born’