Take Your Time to Grow: A Field Experiment on the Hiring of Youths

We investigate the effect of spells of no formal employment of young Germans on their chances of entering the labor market through an apprenticeship. We also study whether the potential negative effects of such spells can be mitigated by publicly provided training measures. In a field experiment, the fictitious applications of three young women were sent to firms advertising apprenticeships for the position of office manager. One application was from a fresh school-leaver and two from applicants who had been out of school for two years, where one of them had participated in a training measure. We find that applicants who have been out of school for two years and have participated in the training are more successful than older applicants without additional training. We do not find a significant difference between older applicants with or without training and fresh school leavers. Our findings show that training measures increase the attractiveness of applicants and that the potential stigma of spells of no formal employment after school are compensated by informal work experience or age or a combination of both.

The Poetry and Music of Science

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.