Bretton Woods international monetary system Essay

Bretton Woods international monetary system - Essay Example This paper outlines the main features of the Bretton Woods international monetary system, that had effectively replaced the gold standard system. The conference at Bretton Woods was held in the year 1944. The delegates present during the conference were from 44 countries. The conference led to the creation of a new monetary system commonly referred to as the Bretton Woods system. The new system was supposed to be more effective in governing the financial and economic relations among the greatest economies in the world. Judging by the economic disasters that were experienced in the 1930s a new monetary system was considered to be a necessity. Due to the failure of the gold standard during the World War II there was a breakdown in international economic cooperation with each and every country devolving their economic policies. This is believed to have further fuelled the growth of the great depression. As a result of the Bretton Woods system each member country was expected to adopt a monetary policy that ensured that the exchange rates of their currency remain at a certain value. In such fixed rates, there was evidently an increase in the ease of undertaking international commercial transactions. In order to see to it that the Bretton Woods system was successful the delegates decided that they would establish two financial institutions. One of the two institutions was the International Monetary Fund . The other institution that was brought into existence was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development

A Perfect Education :: Teaching Education

A Perfect Education There are many ideas as to what constitutes an ideal education. A number of factors come together to make an ideal education. Parents have to be concerned with the education of their children. Teachers must be completely devoted to their students' educations. Students must have faith in their teachers and the education which they are receiving. Students, parents and teachers are the key elements in a model education. A good relationship among the three parties is essential to a good education. Parents are an important ingredient to the perfect education. Parents who aren't involved in their children's education only impede the efforts made by teachers and students to create a good education. These parents are oftentimes uninterested with their children's education as a whole. To achieve perfection in the educational system, parents have to take an active role in that education. Parents who don't include themselves in their children's education aren't always informed about the student's progress, aren't aware of the current curriculum, and don't have any idea of the student's strengths and weaknesses in school. An involved parent is informed and sometimes included in the decision-making process. Parents who take an active role are kept informed of the progress made by their children. The parents know the curriculum and assist the children with their nightly studies, and can discuss their children's feelings about education. Devoted teachers are extremely important to a perfect education. The teacher is just about the most important of the three parties necessary to create a model education. Teachers have the responsibility of forming good relationships with both students and parents. Teachers must also be able to effectively communicate with both parents and students in order to ensure that there are no misconceptions or confusions about the children's educations. A good teacher is aware of any special needs that certain children may have and is able to help those children adjust to the curriculum accordingly. Although it may seem obvious, teachers need to be patient and empathetic when dealing with his or her students. The vast majority of teachers already possess these qualities. Many students, however, have complained of teachers that appear to have "no time" for their students. Teachers with an unenthusiastic attitude relay a negative feeling back to their students and that can create problems in the classroom. As mentioned earlier though, people usually won't become teachers if they are uninterested in providing an excellent education to their students.

Human Beings are More Alike than Different

â€Å"Human beings are more alike than different.† This is a statement that may be argued by many people. Personally I agree with this statement because even thought, all of us are unique individuals, but the purpose of our existence is the same.Humans are greedy, greed is a feeling where we want more than what most people have in the world. People are this way because of society and the world in general. People all want money, we cannot do much unless we have money.People choose to be greedy and keep money because they feel as if they earn it they have to keep it. Some people fake their divorce to get money from the government and even fake their income so they can get free medical care, food stamps.Humans are selfish, if there is one thing that we love the most in this world would be ourselves. We are no different from each other, we become selfish without seeing or knowing it because we always want to believe we're right at all costs. After we are born, we cry for our needs to be known, we cry to have attention.Slowly we learned to live with others and accommodate others but at times of crisis, our instincts tell us to save ourselves first. We judge and gossip others, even whole societies or whole other countries, on too little information or on media reports.Humans all want freedom, we all want freedom because everything we do has to do with freedom. Nothing could be done right without freedom, without freedom, we would be forced do to do things we do not want to do, and no way to change it at all. Consequently it is indeed that â€Å"human beings are more alike than different. †

Hard Determinism

Hard determinism is a philosophical position that consists of two main claims: Determinism is true.Free will is an illusion. The distinction between â€Å"hard determinism† and â€Å"soft determinism† was first made by the American philosopher William James (1842-1910). Both positions insist on the truth of determinism: that is, they both assert that every event, including every human action, is the necessary result of prior causes operating according to the laws of nature. But whereas soft determinists claim that this is compatible with our having free will, hard determinists deny this. While soft determinism is a form of compatibilism, hard determinism is a form of incompatibilism. Arguments for hard determinism Why would anyone want to deny that human beings have free will? The main argument is simple. Ever since the scientific revolution, led by the discoveries of people like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, science has largely presupposed that we live in a deterministic universe. The principle of sufficient reason asserts that every event has a complete explanation. We may not know what that explanation is, but we assume that everything that happens can be explained. Moreover, the explanation will consist of identifying the relevant causes and laws of nature that brought about the event in question. To say that every event is determined by prior causes and the operation of laws of nature means that it was bound to happen, given those prior conditions. If we could rewind the universe to a few seconds before the event and play the sequence through again, we’d get the same result. Lightning would strike in exactly the same spot; the car would break down at exactly the same time; the goalkeeper would save the penalty in exactly the same way; you would choose exactly the same item from the restaurant’s menu. The course of events is predetermined and therefore, at least in principle, predictable. One of the best-known statements of this doctrine was given by the French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace (11749-1827).  He wrote: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. Science cannot really prove that determinism is true. After all, we often do encounter events for which we don’t have an explanation. But when this happens, we don’t assume that we are witnessing an uncaused event; rather, we just assume that we haven’t discovered the cause yet. But the remarkable success of science, and especially its predictive power, is a powerful reason for supposing that determinism is true. For with one notable exception–quantum mechanics (about which see below) the history of modern science has been a history of the success of deterministic thinking as we have succeeded in making increasingly accurate predictions about everything, from what we see in the sky to how our bodies react to particular chemical substances. Hard determinists look at this record of successful prediction and conclude that the assumption it rests on–every event is causally determined–is well-established and allows for no exceptions. That means that human decisions and actions are as predetermined as any other event. So the common belief that we enjoy a special sort of autonomy, or self-determination, because we can exercise a mysterious power we call â€Å"free will,† is an illusion. An understandable illusion, perhaps, since it makes us feel that we are importantly different from the rest of nature; but an illusion all the same. What about quantum mechanics? Determinism as an all-encompassing view of things received a severe blow in the 1920s with the development of quantum mechanics, a branch of physics dealing with the behavior of subatomic particles. According to the widely accepted model proposed by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, the subatomic world contains some indeterminacy.  For instance, sometimes an electron jumps from one orbit around its atom’s nucleus to another orbit, and this is understood to be an event without a cause.  Similarly, atoms will sometimes emit radioactive particles, but this, too, is viewed as an event without a cause. Consequently, such events cannot be predicted. We can say that there is, say, a 90% probability that something will happen, meaning that nine times out of ten, a specific set of conditions will produce that happening. But the reason we can’t be more precise is not because we are lacking a relevant piece of information; it is just that a degree of indeterminacy is built int o nature. The discovery of quantum indeterminacy was one of the most surprising discoveries in the history of science, and it has never been universally accepted.  Einstein, for one, could not countenance it, and still today there are physicists who believe that the indeterminacy is only apparent, that eventually a new model will be developed which reinstates a thoroughly deterministic point of view.  At present, though, quantum indeterminacy is generally accepted for much the same sort of reason that determinism is accepted outside quantum mechanics: the science that presupposes it is phenomenally successful. Quantum mechanics may have dented the prestige of determinism as a universal doctrine, but that doesn’t mean it has salvaged the idea of free will. There are still plenty of hard determinists around. This is because when it comes to macro objects like human beings and human brains, and with macro events such as human actions, the effects of quantum indeterminacy is thought to be negligible to non-existent. All that is needed to rule out free will in this realm  is what is sometimes called â€Å"near determinism.† This is what it sounds like–the view that determinism holds throughout most of nature.  Yes, there may be some subatomic indeterminacy. But what is merely probabilistic at the subatomic level still translates into deterministic necessity when we are talking about the behavior of larger objects. What about the feeling that we have free will? For most people, the strongest objection to hard determinism has always been the fact that when we choose to act in a certain way, it feels as if our choice is free: that is, it feels as if we are in control and exercising a power of self-determination. This is true whether we are making life-altering choices such as deciding to get married, or trivial choices such as opting for apple pie rather than cheesecake. How strong is this objection?  It is certainly convincing to many people. Samuel Johnson probably spoke for many when he said, â€Å"We know our will is free, and there’s an end to it!†Ã‚  But the history of philosophy and science contains many examples of claims that seem obviously true to common sense but turn out to be false. After all, it feels as if the earth is still while the sun moves around it; it seems as if material objects are dense and solid when in fact they consist mainly of empty space. So the appeal to subjective impressions, to how things feel is problematic. On the other hand, one could argue that the case of free will is different from these other examples of common sense being wrong. We can accommodate the scientific truth about the solar system or the nature of material objects fairly easily. But it’s hard to imagine living a normal life without believing that you are responsible for your actions. The idea that we are responsible for what we do underlies our willingness to praise and blame, reward and punish, take pride in what we do or feel remorse. Our whole moral belief system and our legal system seem to rest on this idea of individual responsibility. This points to a further problem with hard determinism. If every event is causally determined by forces beyond our control, then this must include the event of the determinist concluding that determinism is true. But this admission seems to undermine the whole idea of arriving at our beliefs through a process of rational reflection. It also seems to render pointless the whole business of debating issues like free will and determinism, since it is already predetermined who will hold what view. Someone making this objection doesn’t have to deny that all our thought processes have correlated physical processes going on in the brain. But there is still something odd about treating one’s beliefs as the necessary effect of these brain processes rather than as the result of reflection. On these grounds, some critics view hard determinism as self-refuting. Related links Soft determinism Indeterminism and free will Fatalism