Myths of Modern Capitalism by Joseph Heath

Increasingly, economists are becoming aware of this - there has been a significant move toward so-called behavioral economics within the profession. This approach, as the name suggests, pays a lot more attention to how people actually behave. Unfortunately, behavioral economists have yet to generate anything with the explanatory and predictive power of “the model” that is taught in Economics 101, and so the latter continues to exercise its intoxicating (and sometimes toxic) influence on the minds of the young... from Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism by Joseph Heath

Camden Market, London (2014-05-22)

Comment:

I spent most of my professional life teaching Organizational Behaviour to business students. Invariably, several of my office neighbours, up and down the hallway, were economists. My conversations with these colleagues lead me to the conclusion that, conceptually, they led a charmed life. Meanwhile, my Organizational Behaviour colleagues, steeped in models adapted from Social Psychology, Anthropology, Political Science, and Economics lived in a complex world.

Our models were many. Rarely would one model or theory account for observed behaviour. Rarely could one theoretical framework prove adequate to the task of predicting behaviour. Our world was complicated by a multitude of contingencies. Our students were stopped short if their case analyses didn't start with "it depends."

Meanwhile, the economists had a relatively simple model (confounded by a profusion of mathematics); monetary incentives.

If only life were that simple!

The End of Faith by Sam Harris

Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago... From "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris

Santa Maria chuch in Obidos, Portugal (2014-05-10)

Comment:

Cognitive Dissonance

What accounts for religious moderation? That is, why are not all believers fundamentalist believers? If believers believe, why don't they, or can't then, believe fully in whatever doctrine they subscribe to? The answer is simple for most people born into a reasonably "modern" society. If not by virtue of formal education, then surely by simple observation or even osmosis, much of what is presented in religious texts is nonsensical. It just cannot be.

Therefore, much of what is written is rejected or at least viewed with a sceptical eye. Clearly, cognitive dissonance turns thinking people away from fundamentalism.

Cognitive Dissonance accounts for religious moderation..

Niall Ferguson - on the consequences of the 1914 European war

Civilization: The West and the Rest - Niall Ferguson

The war that began in 1914 was not a war between a few quarrelling European states. It was a war between world empires. It was a war within Western civilization. And it was the first sign that the West carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. In this war, more than in any previous conflict, the West unleashed its killer applications against itself...

...war can also be a driver of human progress. As we have seen, the impressive advances of the Scientific Revolution were helped not hindered by the incessant feuding of the European states. The same was true of the clash of empires between 1914 and 1918. The slaughterhouse of the Western Front was like a vast and terrifying laboratory for medical science, producing significant advances in surgery, not to mention psychiatry...

The Co-Op in Sointula; a trading alternative...

In many ways, then, the Nazi Empire was the last, loathsome incarnation of a concept that by 1945 was obsolete. It had seemed plausible for centuries that the road to riches lay through the exploitation of foreign peoples and their land...

...in the course of the twentieth century it gradually became apparent that an industrial economy could get on perfectly well without colonies....

Comment:

Interesting premise.

However, perhaps much depends on how we perceive colonisation. Let's examine to what extent achievement of riches no longer relies on the exploitation of foreign peoples or lands. To the extent that Western nations strive to clean their environments by erecting acres of wind farms consisting of hundreds of wind turbines, so Chinese workers, mining rare earth minerals are exploited. Does it matter that this exploitation is not of the nature witnessed during colonial times? Does the Chinese miner know or care?

What we may be witnessing is the final demise of the Nation State. The coloniser is now the corporation, not the foreign power.