Political Fights Start with Ideology

There’s a book that discusses a fundamental difference that typically arises in a political dispute. The book is titled A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles and was written by Thomas Sowell

Release date: June 5, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0465002056 | ISBN-13: 978-0465002054 | Edition: Revised

"In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. He describes how these two radically opposed views have manifested themselves in the political controversies of the past two centuries, including such contemporary issues as welfare reform, social justice, and crime. Updated to include sweeping political changes since its first publication in 1987, this revised edition of A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks."

--from Amazon.com

Two reviews from Amazon.com customers:

5.0 out of 5 stars
Not as Simple as It Seems June 18, 2009 By Aretae VINE VOICE

On reading the entire block of 60-odd reviews, I find that more than half of them, even while admiring Sowell's evenhandedness, misstate the carefulness of the book's positions. In the an attempt to pay tribute to the brilliance of this (rather dense, historical & philosophical ) book, I'll try to correct this.

This book presents two visions of the world. However, contrary to most of the reviewers, the difference is not about Liberals vs. Conservatives. It is about the difference between two visions of the world, and each of the visions is found in most parties in the political spectrum.

The two visions are metaphysical, pre-scientific points of view regarding how the world works. In one view (Unconstrained), people can drive change, intentions matter, and this could improve the world. In the other view (Constrained), people will always be (somewhat) bad, only results and processes matter, and improvements always involve tradeoffs.

Sowell first acknowledges that no vision is purely Constrained or Unconstrained. And then he explicitly does not connect the dots to (modern, US) liberal vs. conservative visions. And he doesn't do so for the basic reason that it really isn't that simple.

Instead of attempting to place "Conservative" vs. "Liberal" positions on top of Sowell's 2 visions, let us look instead at every issue, and determine whether our own individual intuitions are that (a) it is a problem, and that (b) human beings can solve or meliorate, via coordinated political action, this paricular problem without creating other (potentially worse) problems. This is the issue. And the arguments for or against most actions can come from both positions.

Examples from the War in Iraq.

Against (Constrained): The military cannot solve a complex social problem.
Against (Unconstrained): War is evil. Don't start one.
For (Constrained): There will be horrible tradeoffs, but war is better than the (worse) other options of not warring.
For (Unconstrained): Saddam is a blight upon Iraq, they will be better without him.

I have attempted to point out that not all conservative positions are constrained, and not all liberal positions are unconstrained. Rather, different people have different understandings of the world, and these often lead to different conclusions. Using Sowell's brilliant dichotomy, people may improve their understanding of the issues facing the world, though hopefully not replace entirely any other charitable understandings.

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5.0 out of 5 stars
Opened My Eyes
By Clifford S. Morton Decenber 23, 2008

I had just finished reading Michael Dyson's "Is Bill Cosby Right?". Then I read this book of Sowell's. African Americans, including myself, have rejected Sowell out of hand because he does not line up with the orthodoxy of Dyson or the typical civil rights perspective. This is because I did not realize how thoroughly Sowell understands the issues and the philosophies behind it and the opposite views. You just do not realize his grasps on things if you go by what people say or get turned off by one of his articles in the newspaper. Not only does he understand Dyson's position, he opened my eyes to the "other side's" position in a way that made me a believer. Now I know why he says what he says in his other books and they make real sense. I am buying copies of this book for other African Americans I know and am encouraging my young adult children to read it too. If you have never read Sowell, this is the place to start.

http://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393563395&sr=1-1&keywords=A+Conflict+of+Visions

Blight Free GM Potatoes

John Innes Center News, February 17,2014
Research by our colleagues in The Sainsbury Lab www.tsl.ac.uk

In a three-year GM research trial, scientists boosted resistance of potatoes to late blight, their most important disease, without deploying fungicides.

The findings, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and The Gatsby Foundation, will be published in ‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B’ on 17 February.

In 2012, the third year of the trial, the potatoes experienced ideal conditions for late blight. The scientists did not inoculate any plants but waited for races circulating in the UK to blow in.

Non-transgenic Desiree plants were 100% infected by early August while all GM plants remained fully resistant to the end of the experiment. There was also a difference in yield, with tubers from each block of 16 plants weighing 6-13 kg while the non-GM tubers weighed 1.6-5 kg per block.

The trial was conducted with Desiree potatoes to address the challenge of building resistance to blight in potato varieties with popular consumer and processing characteristics.

The introduced gene, from a South American wild relative of potato, triggers the plant’s natural defence mechanisms by enabling it to recognise the pathogen. Cultivated potatoes possess around 750 resistance genes but in most varieties, late blight is able to elude them.

"Breeding from wild relatives is laborious and slow and by the time a gene is successfully introduced into a cultivated variety, the late blight pathogen may already have evolved the ability to overcome it," said Professor Jonathan Jones from The Sainsbury Laboratory.

\"With new insights into both the pathogen and its potato host, we can use GM technology to tip the evolutionary balance in favour of potatoes and against late blight."

In northern Europe, farmers typically spray a potato crop 10-15 times, or up to 25 times in a bad year. Scientists hope to replace chemical control with genetic control, though farmers might be advised to spray even resistant varieties at the end of a season, depending on conditions.

The Sainsbury Laboratory is continuing to identify multiple blight resistance genes that will difficult for blight to simultaneously overcome. Their research will also allow resistance genes to be prioritized that will be more difficult for the pathogen to evade.

In a new BBSRC-funded industrial partnership award with American company Simplot and the James Hutton Institute, the TSL researchers will continue to identify and experiment with multiple resistance genes.

By combining understanding of resistance genes with knowledge of the pathogen, they hope to develop Desiree and Maris Piper varieties that can completely thwart attacks from late blight.
  http://news.jic.ac.uk/2014/02/gm-spuds-beat-blight/

Nick Leeson -- Master of Fraud

Nicholas "Nick" William Leeson (born 25 February 1967) is a former derivatives broker whose fraudulent, unauthorized speculative trading caused the spectacular collapse of Barings Bank, the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank, for which he was sentenced to prison. Since leaving prison in 1999 he became, and subsequently resigned as, the CEO of Irish football club Galway United and is active on the keynote / after-dinner speaking circuit where he advises companies about risk and corporate responsibility.

In 2013 he appeared in Celebrity Apprentice Ireland on TV3.

Early Life
Leeson was born in Watford, where he attended Parmiter’s School. After finishing school in 1985 his first job was as a clerk with a private bank, Coutts. He then moved to Morgan Stanley in 1987 for two years, and then to Barings in 1989.

Career
In 1992, he was appointed general manager of a new operation in futures markets on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX). Barings had held a seat on SIMEX for some time, but did not activate it until Leeson was sent over. Leeson was sent to Singapore after he was denied a broker's licence in the United Kingdom because of fraud on his application. Neither Leeson nor Barings disclosed this denial when Leeson applied for his licence in Singapore.

In October 1994, Leeson was arrested in Singapore for an incident involving mooning.

From 1992, Leeson made unauthorized speculative trades that at first made large profits for Barings: £10 million, which accounted for 10% of Barings' annual income. He earned a bonus of £130,000 on his salary of £50,000 for that year.

However, his luck soon went sour and he used one of Barings' error accounts (accounts used to correct mistakes made in trading) to hide his losses. The account was numbered 88888 – 8 being a number considered to be very lucky in Chinese numerology. Leeson claims that this account was first used to hide an error made by one of his colleagues; rather than buy 20 contracts as the customer had ordered, she had sold them, costing Barings £20,000.

However, Leeson used this account to cover further bad trades. He insists that he never used the account for his own gain, but in 1996 The New York Times quoted "British press reports" as claiming that investigators had located approximately $35 million in various bank accounts tied to him.

Management at Barings Bank also allowed Leeson to remain Chief Trader while also being responsible for settling his trades, jobs usually done by two different people. This made it much simpler for him to hide his losses from his superiors.

Downfall
By the end of 1992, the account's losses exceeded £2 million, which ballooned to £208 million by the end of 1994.

The beginning of the end occurred on 16 January 1995, when Leeson placed a short straddle in the Singapore and Tokyo stock exchanges, essentially betting that the Japanese stock market would not move significantly overnight. However, the Kobe earthquake hit early in the morning on 17 January, sending Asian markets, and Leeson's trading positions, into a tailspin. Leeson attempted to recoup his losses by making a series of increasingly risky new trades (using a Long-Long Future Arbitrage), this time betting that the Nikkei Stock Average would make a rapid recovery. However, the recovery failed to materialize.

Leeson left a note reading "I'm Sorry" and fled Singapore on 23 February. Losses eventually reached £827 million (US$ 1.4 billion), twice the bank's available trading capital. After a failed bailout attempt, Barings was declared insolvent on 26 February.

After fleeing to Malaysia, Thailand, and finally Germany, Leeson was arrested in Frankfurt and extradited back to Singapore on 20 November 1995, though his wife Lisa was allowed to return to England. While he had authorisation for the 16 January short straddle, he was charged with fraud for deceiving his superiors about the riskiness of his activities and the scale of his losses. Several observers have placed much of the blame on the bank's own deficient internal auditing and risk management practices.
Indeed, the Singapore authorities' report on the collapse was scathingly critical of Barings management, claiming that senior officials knew or should have known about the "five eights" account.
Leeson pleaded guilty to two counts of "deceiving the bank's auditors and of cheating the Singapore exchange", including forging documents. Sentenced to six and a half years in Changi Prison in Singapore, he was released from prison in 1999, having been diagnosed with colon cancer, which he survived despite grim forecasts at the time.

While in prison, in 1996, Leeson published an autobiography, Rogue Trader, detailing his acts. A review in the financial columns of the New York Times stated, "This is a dreary book, written by a young man very taken with himself, but it ought to be read by banking managers and auditors everywhere." In 1999, the book was made into a film of the same name starring Ewan McGregor and Anna Friel.

The events also form the subject matter of a 1996 documentary film made by Adam Curtis, titled 25 Million Pounds.

Aftermath
Nick Leeson's first wife Lisa divorced him while he was in prison. He married Leona Tormay, in 2003 and they now live in Barna, County Galway, in the west of Ireland. He is a regular guest on the after-dinner and keynote speaking circuit and occasional guest lecturer at the nearby National University of Ireland. He was appointed Commercial Manager of Galway United Football Club in April 2005, rising to the position of General Manager in late November 2005. By July 2007 he had become the club's CEO but in February 2011, Leeson resigned his position. Leeson remains as a member of the board of directors of the club, but no longer has any role in the day to day operation of the club. He still deals in the stock markets, but only with his own money.

In June 2005, Leeson released a new book, Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress. It picks up his story where Rogue Trader left off, including in-depth conversations with psychologist Ivan Tyrrell asserting that the prolonged periods of severe stress that affected Leeson's mental and physical health have parallels in many other people's lives.

Publications
Leeson, Nick; Whitley, Edward (March 1996). Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and
Shook the Financial World. ISBN 0-316-51856-5.

Leeson, Nick; Tyrrell, Ivan (July 2005). Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress. ISB0-7535-1075-8.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson

Moral Mazes -- Secret Corporate Rules

Moral Mazes

(ISBN 0-19-506080-6), named the "Most Outstanding Business and Management Book" of 1988 by the Association of American Publishers, is a 1988 book from sociologist Robert Jackall that documents an investigation into the world of corporate managers in the United States. In the introduction, Jackall writes that he "went into these organizations to study how bureaucracy - the prevailing organizational form of our society - shapes moral consciousness" (Moral Mazes, page 2). He finishes the introduction by writing that the book is "an interpretive sociological account of how managers think the world works."
Based on several years of fieldwork conducting interviews with managers in several large corporations in the early 1980s, Jackall describes the social construction of reality within large corporations in America. Jackall argues that bureaucracy as implemented in the large American corporations he investigated "regularizes people's experiences of time and indeed routinizes their lives by engaging them on a daily basis in rational, socially approved, purposive action; it brings them into daily proximity with and subordination to authority, creating in the process upward-looking stances that have decisive social and psychological consequences; it places a premium on a functionally rational, pragmatic habit of mind that seeks specific goals; and it creates subtle measures of prestige and an elaborate status hierarchy that, in addition to fostering an intense competition for status, also makes the rules, procedures, social contexts, and protocol of an organization paramount psychological and behavioral guides." (Moral Mazes, page 4).

Jackall first starts with a history of American business specifically looking at changes in organizational structure during the creation of large corporations in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution changing American industry. The changes in American industry indicated a need for a professional management class which in turn began to change the organizational culture of American business emphasizing rational decisions centered on money based measures such as profit and loss (see also rational choice theory).

Next Jackall describes the results of his interviews of managers at various levels of the organizations which allowed him to conduct his research. These organizations, not named, are large and medium sized companies. The qualitative data collected by the interviews covers approximately four years, beginning in 1980, documenting a number of changes in management within the corporations, a number of business decisions made, and the effect of those changes and decisions on the managers at various levels of the companies.

Perhaps the most important finding is that successful managers are dexterous symbol manipulators. Successful managers provide a public face and may be categorized as providing emotional labor as one of their major activities. They must be able to work well with others and to sublimate their emotional and psychological needs to the demands of others. The very ambiguity of their work and its assessment leads to the feeling on the part of the managers Jackall interviewed that "instead of ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self-promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats" (Moral Mazes, page 1).
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes

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From Amazon.com about the 20^th Anniversary edition of Moral Mazes:
　

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Some books have the rare fortune to become ever more relevant, more useful, and more interesting twenty years after they were written. This books fortune involves a kind of misfortune, because the phenomena that Moral Mazes analyzes are deplorable, and we would wish that the book were no longer relevant. Originally published in 1989, Moral Mazes has been supplemented for this second edition with a long analysis of how the 'organized irresponsibility' Jackall analyzed in the 1980s has become the key to understanding our current Great Recession. ... I can think of no single book that has more opened up my sense of how to do philosophy in the last year."--Philosophical Practice

"An interesting, unorthodox, and provocative book.... Better than any other I have seen, [Jackall's] study reveals the normative reality of the manager's world."-Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., Yale Journal on Regulation

"Reformers who want to change the corporation, first must understand it. Robert Jackall's carefully researched analysis of the 'bureaucratic ethos' is one place to
begin."--Ethikos

"A finely honed tour of an odyssey of moral transformation, in which the actors themselves remain largely unaware of the nature of their journey. It is a brilliant work."--Troy Duster, New York University

About the Author

Robert Jackall is the Willmott Family Third Century Professor of Sociology & Public Affairs, Williams College; author of Image Makers: Advertising, Public Relations, and the Ethos of Advocacy (Chicago, 2000), Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders & the Forces of Order (Harvard, 1997), and Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives (Harvard, 2005).

Two customer reviews:on Amazon.com:

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Objective, sad, but true
May 5, 2002 By D J
"Moral Mazes" is an extensive, award-winning and highly accurate sociological portrait of life in the modern corporation, an academic precursor, so to speak, of the "Dilbert" cartoon strip. Unlike many other writers on this topic, Jackall doesn't resort to Marxist rants, but rather, compares modern corporate culture to the "Protestant" work ethic most Americans are raised into.

Jackall's inquiry, based on in-depth interviews with managers themselves, is broad in scope, and it is hard to generalize. Within about 200 pages, he covers the social circles of the corporation, cronyism, bad decisionmaking and public relations, to name a few. He discovers that corporations, at the upper levels at least, resemble a king's court more than a meritocratic organization. The essential work of a manager is not "management" or "leadership," but constantly making the right friends and adopting the correct posture. Anyone who has worked in such a setting, or knows people in such a field, will be able to relate instantly, although it can be argued that Jackall did not need to spend years of ethnographic research to reach this conclusion.

This book is not for everyone, as Jackall must conclude that "ethics" as practiced by managers is nothing more than "survival" and ambition for one's own "advantage." While such a diagnosis may seem harsh, it is difficult to rationally explain recent events in the marketplace, such as the Enron scandal, without concluding that corporate executives have a moral compass that differs from that of the everyday person.

Contrary to what a layman may think, Jackall makes no moral judgments of his own, although readers most certainly will. The title itself can be misinterpreted by people not familiar with sociology. The "morals" Jackall discusses are not ethics (which he attacks in his intro), but Durkheim's "occupational morality." While he does study corporations, he calls the focus of this study the "bureaucratic ethos" (not "corporate ethos"). Anyone who's read history (or the local newspaper) already knows bureaucracy can create its own rules, from governments (i.e., the Nazis and the Holocaust) to religions (i.e., Catholicism and child molesters).

Surprisingly, by portraying executives' lives as frought with anxiety, guilt, "senseless" work and no reliable means to measure their self worth, Jackall may cause an intelligent reader to actually feel sorry for them. Reading though his interviews with executives, there's little question that many executives began to regard him as a "Father Confessor" to admit their deeds.

At the same time, Jackall offers an alternative theory for why the American work ethic has all but vanished: if people are promoted based soley on their manipulative social skills, why would anyone want to subscribe to the old work ethic?

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thoroughly depressing but an absolute must read
October 6, 1998 By A Customer
This book ought to be required reading for all MBA candidates and would be corporate middle managers as an intro into the sad and dysfunctional but real corporate world. In numerous scenes that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has worked at a Fortune 200 firm the book recounts numerous instances of failed and misdirected management. Depressing because it reveals the underbelly of corporate America and capitalism but readable in its accurate portrayal. Occasionally at times slow (particularly towards the end when he presumably is tired of writing) it does a clinical autopsy on management. Like watching a train wreck you are compelled to keep reading even as you realize the denouement. If you think that ignorance is bliss - give this a miss - on the other hand, if you are a frustrated idealist and need proof that in order for evil to overcome good, good only has to do nothing, it is worth the investment. An excellent primer on why we need ethics courses but more importantly ethical actions.

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Mazes-World-Corporate-Managers/dp/0199729883/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393301099&sr=1-1&keywords=Moral+Mazes

The Period: A punctuation war?!

Is the Period Becoming an Expression of Anger?
Jason Mick (Blog) - November 26, 2013

In the text area, a familiar puncuation mark is taking on a new meaning

The digital age of instant communications has dramatically affected the English language by changing its grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. Then again the English language has survived and thrived due in part to its shameless flexibility, which historically led it to liberally borrow from other language and accept unusual new creative linguistic constructs.

The New Republic is a news site that focuses primarily on espousing neoliberal political views, but it also offers a bit of interesting technology coverage at times. Story editor Ben Crair has actually offered up a rather interesting piece on how the period has become a long desired piece of punctuation – the "irony mark".

A 2007 study by The American University found that at the time students add sentence ending punctuation (i.e. '!', '?', and '.') 39 percent of the time in texts and 45 percent of the time in online chats. The punctuation at the end of the last sentence of the text -- the so-called "transmission-ending punctuation" occurred especially infrequently. It was found in only 29 percent for texts and 35 percent for IMs.
　
Part of English language speakers' trend of shortening words -- noted by other peer-reviewed research -- and dropping punctuation in the digital age is out of necessity. Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, traditional SMS was limited to 160 characters.

But it is still somewhat odd to observe how in an age where punctuation is being mothballed by so many, that digital denizens are increasing the period ('.') to express sarcasm, frustration, and/or anger.

Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Mr. Blair:

Not long ago, my 17-year-old son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end.

In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all. In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’

But lest the humble dot feel demeaned, it still has many friendlier usages, such as it symbolic use in internet domain names and "..." which strangely has the reverse affect as a single '.' when ending the sentence -- inviting the conversation to continue.

http://www.dailytech.com/Is+The+Period+Becoming+an+Expression+of+Anger/article33829.htm

Found: A Very Wobbly Planet

By Dr. Tony Phillips, NASA

NASA, Feb. 4, 2014: Imagine living on a planet with seasons so erratic you would hardly know whether to wear Bermuda shorts or a heavy overcoat. That is the situation on a weird, wobbly world found by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope.

The planet, designated Kepler-413b, precesses, or wobbles, wildly on its spin axis, much like a child's top. The tilt of the planet's spin axis can vary by as much as 30 degrees over 11 years, leading to rapid and erratic changes in seasons. In contrast, Earth's rotational precession is a relatively tame 23.5 degrees over 26,000 years. Researchers are amazed that this far-off planet is precessing on a human timescale.

Kepler 413-b is located 2,300 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. It circles a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars every 66 days. The planet's orbit around the binary stars appears to wobble, too, because the plane of its orbit is tilted 2.5 degrees with respect to the plane of the star pair's orbit. As seen from Earth, the wobbling orbit moves up and down continuously.

Kepler finds planets by measuring the dimming of starlight when a planet passes in front of its parent sun--or, in this case, suns because the planet circles a pair of stars. Normally, planets transit like clockwork. Astronomers using Kepler discovered the wobbling when they found an unusual pattern of transiting for Kepler-413b.

"Looking at the Kepler data over the course of 1,500 days, we saw three transits in the first 180 days -- one transit every 66 days -- then we had 800 days with no transits at all. After that, we saw five more transits in a row," said Veselin Kostov, the principal investigator on the observation. Kostov is affiliated with the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. "[The next transit visible from Earth is not predicted to occur until 2020.]"

Astronomers are still trying to explain why this planet is out of alignment with its stars. There could be other planetary bodies in the system that tilted the orbit. Or, it could be that a third star nearby that is a visual companion may actually be gravitationally bound to the system and exerting an influence.

"Presumably there are planets out there like this one that we're not seeing because we're in the unfavorable period," said Peter McCullough, a team member with the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University. "And that's one of the things that Veselin is researching: Is there a silent majority of things that we're not seeing?"

Even with its changing seasons, Kepler-413b is too warm for life as we know it. Because it orbits so close to the stars, its temperatures are too high for liquid water to exist, making it uninhabitable. It also is a super Neptune -- a giant gas planet with a mass about 65 times that of Earth -- so there is no surface on which to stand.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/04feb_wobble/

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on Emerson, and American transcendentalism.

                                                       Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1795

Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated by some that he suffered from bipolar disorder, a condition not identified during his lifetime. Coleridge suffered from poor health that may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these concerns with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.

Poetry
Despite not enjoying the name recognition or popular acclaim that Wordsworth or Shelley have had,
Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilizing common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge’s originality. As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic.

Coleridge's philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A.O. Lovejoy and I.A. Richards.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan
Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man" (again, usually rendered as "sadder but wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by The Rime: "He prayeth best, who loveth best;/ All things great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us;/ He made and loveth all." Christabel is known for its musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale.

                                                        Rime of the Ancient Mariner
                                                          Illustration by Gustav Dore

Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have an additional "Romantic" aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge