Surprising? Yes, it is indeed the United States of Northern America who are playing a leading in the care sector — of course, one may have to look exactly at the definitions of “care” and “leadership”. Check yourself here for the
And do not forget to watch the embedded film.
May be the brother from Kenya knows it, admiring the Chinese:
They are clever. Loosing no time, just looking around and implementing …. – that is what they do.
Sure, his reflections on his home country are interesting – and the endless trust of both of them:
You surely need a bishop to perform …
is somewhat perplexing.
— Sitting with the back to us: a father with his son …. – I have to admit that the permanent rattling of the computer game they are playing, implementing shooting at, racing after, hunting for virtuality makes me a bit irascible …, nothing alluring about it ….
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The day after the symposium was the day of … – well, it was not really holiday. It was about other meetings – the many ambassadors that participated in the symposium had been now “replaced” by the individual ambassadors: instead of meeting the ambassadors as collaborators, it was now meeting the ambassadors. One could think: they represent their country; but they also may represent themselves – just having a job, living in another country than that of their origin and somewhat “merging images and expectations” – at least in some cases. If one would not know the mechanisms that are behind of being sent on mission into the different countries one could occasionally get the impression ambassadors come to the country that they see “as their own”, the country in which they would really like to live … . Perhaps it is about extremely privileged people who are able to live up to the Aristotelean “vision” that
[t]he ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
[t]he current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person.(Evangelii Gaudium, 2013)
those who come too late are castigated by history
(Mikhail Gorbachev)
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The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person.
(Evangelii Gaudium, 2013)
The market pattern, on the other hand, being related to a peculiar motive of its own, the motive of truck or barter, is capable of creating a specific institution, namely, the market. Ultimately, that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system. The vital importance of the economic factor to the existence of society precludes any other result. For once the economic system is organized in separate institutions, based on specific motives and conferring a special status, society must be shaped in such a manner as to allow that system to function according to its own laws. This is the meaning of the familiar assertion that a market economy can function only in a market society.(Polanyi, Karl, 1944: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time; Boston: Beacon Press, 1957: 57)
[n]ineteenth century civilization alone [that] was economic in a different and distinctive sense, for it chose to base itself on a motive only rarely acknowledged as valid in the history of human societies, and certainly never before raised to the level of a justification of action and behavior in everyday life, namely, gain. The self-regulating market system was uniquely derived from this principle.(ibid., 30)
… back in the Middle Kingdom since a week, enjoying teaching learning to “walk economics”. Special fun the workshops – teaching without income (no extra pay), and learning without points (a course, the students take without points etc.).
Sometimes it is really like looking into the eyes of small children who see something amazing for the first time in their life (like a “summer child”, seeing the first snow) – so much more satisfying than looking at the faces of “adult colleagues” who only see what they supposedly know, struggling with maintaining that knowledge, and the jobs in which it is founded. – It is so nice to be witness, and it is so nice to accept again being student, opening the eyes like a small child and exploring together what I seem to know and of which I detect so much that is new.
I would not say renaissance, and increasingly hesitate to celebrate The Renaissance. There is still at least the one fact that needs to be considered: much of what had been ‘detected’ and ‘invented’, was known a long time before and just forgotten. Look for the work of Archimedes – and all those things that had been forgotten. No, the world was not flat in the earlier years – only some people made human kind believe it is flat. And so we find them today again, suggesting in ‘A Brief History of the Twenty-Firts Century’ that ‘The World is Flat’. Namesakes by accident? The one Friedman believes everybody can access everything; the other Friedman emphasing already earlier the Power of the Market.
May be journalistic masterpieces, surely not more than Sunday’s prayers, eye washing, pleading now from all sides for a moral economy, instead of clearly analysing the economy and demanding rights.
My be I can move the rights part on tomorrow when going to Juzizhou island for a meeting.
But after the contributions last week in Poland – the one on security, the other on precarity I remembered the song
by Giorgio Gaber. Much to think about. And and after workshops with my Chinese students the last two days, I may immediately revise, considering that we are not a lost generation but we still and more than ever can move forward, we only have to be aware that we should not save this “endangered race” of the past; instead we should think more about the future as it is given in the presence, actually this is what I talked about, right?
The two last days made another time clear to me: “we” should not blame “them”. Instead we still can and have to work together to make the future happen instead of continuing to allow that it is “exported to Panama“. Also here it is not “them” who export, but all of us allowing the structures to “make things happen” – again and again. – Also something for the discussion the week after next, in Havana.
Yes, writing “quick comments” is admittedly always dangerous, hastily arriving at wrong conclusions. Still, there is occasionally a huge temptation, and it may be justified as such writing possibly provokes …, well, some really important and not so hasty thoughts, easily overlooked when it comes to detailed analysis of …, well detailed analysis.
Reference at presence is a European Commission’s press release, titled
How digital is your country? New figures show action needed to unlock Europe’s potential
It presents results of the recent study of the DESI.
What is the DESI?
The Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) is an online tool to measure the progress of EU Member States towards a digital economy and society. As such, it brings together a set of relevant indicators on Europe’s current digital policy mix.
If I am not mistaken, it fundamentally solves one fear of the past. People were afraid of the development, as they did not want to be “just a number”. We do not have to fear anymore that this may be coming up in the future. It is already the case.
And it also allows us to understand the attitude of those people in the glass palaces towards migration and migrants: Numbers cannot simply decide independently to enter an equation. Only the magician with numbers is The Lord, able and allowed to present the formula …, the white hair and long beard now appearing as netting of bits speeding through fiber glass.
Yes, summits have to be reached – erected like the towers of fortresses. Would it not be an alternative to start with action to reach true global cooperation?
Sure, but I am still wondering if our brain is fast enough to cope with the improvement of obtaining information, barely allowing for the time needed to think about it. – Since some years now I am introducing in my lectures a unit under the heading “slow reading”, the aim of which is UNDERSTANDING.
It may not be much more than a side note, it may be that it actually is more: Apparently there is a paradoxical constellation in China where the language is strongly characterised by characters (instead of letters) and sound/pronouncation. The computer keyboard requires to write first by using letters, and moving from there to “choosing characters”. The consequence seems to be the emergence of a new form of analphabetism.
Two of the issues, if you want: major reference points, in mainstream economics are scarcity and comparative advantage. Well, there is no reason to question the empirical data:
65% of European internet users shop online, but only 16% of SMEs sell online – and less than half of those sell online across borders (7.5%).
However, instead of aiming on change there could be another suggestion: SMEs may claim to move towards comparative advantage: offering something special instead of mass web-products, offer excellent individual advise, offering products that are even individually produced, or produced by individuals working together in cooperatives, and seeing the consumer as co-producer …
Underused? If so, the conclusio may be that there is still hope and people still have more sense than those who govern them.
As said in the beginning, there are problems with such ad-hoc readings – there is much ore to it, including coproducing in particular due to the internet-use etc. – part of it I will deal with next month, when working briefly in Havana. But the problem of blasphemy is not necessarily the heretic; it may well be the self-acclamation of gods who forget that their suggested prayers are mere phantoms as long as their only purpose is … the bubble of their own believe system, the believe system of an old society of which we may say with Shakespeare:
Sure, talking about the believe system of an old society may end in a paradox: it easily lacks the opportunity to get a really good caffellatte.
PS: I hope my students anywhere do not read this blog-entry – as I am required to push them towards the global top, so to say: migrants with global access rights.
I sogni ci aiutano a cambiare la realtà.
Well, as much as this trip was about some work, it waS also about these things we usually call ‘pleasure’. So, in the meantime I went to the theatre, a play based on Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli. In my opinion the performance was not really great – btw, a problem I have more and more, be it in the theatre, the opera or in galleries: some ‘forced innovation’, some spasmodic efforts to be innovative, too often ending in just being ‘artificially loud’. Still, the play itself ended by rejecting this in some way …, being a kind of dramatic as well, basically suggesting:
Don’t have dreams, life is about ‘just getting along’, things being ‘OK’, not anything more, not anything special … having dreams is about moving towards failure. So, just accept, without dreams – Then things are ‘OK’.
Never heard the ‘OK-option’ in such a pejorative, negative, rejecting way. – Why I said it had been a confirmation of rejecting the spasmodic efforts to be innovative? Simply because any change, any innovation has to be sound, radical – as such it is in need of being genuine. In arts as much as in ‘real life’.
Mustang confirmed this – in such a frightening way confronting us with the difficulty we overlook too often. A simple plot:
And still, what we overlook is our own limitation, maintaining traditions, claiming the rights of self-determination, while forgetting that this can easily (surely not necessarily) result in oppression, localism and clientelism etc. Can we find a way that is really about moving forward and respecting the traditions? Or is it about two distinct, incompatible array, standing side by side?
You should sleep nine hours without dreams. Then you have the day for dreams. (Herbert Marcuse)
it seems like the wide spaces as we find them in so many paintings of Gauguin and the subdivision, the we know from the later paintings of van Gogh: two impressionists, two friends, and one misunderstanding ….
Apparently two sides, poles without connection. Standing against the alternative of a permanent struggle. The dreams we have – and should have beyond the brothers’ OK-option have to look for a sound foundation in the fact that
It is never possible to return to the point of departure – it does not exist anymore (Shumona Sinha).
And with this we have to acknowledge the most difficult point: we do not exist anymore, we also changed, and even if we think, we did not change: ultimately we did.
Another time we see the meaning of the words we find in the first volume of The Capital, chapter 31, dealing with the Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
“Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.” (T. J. Dunning, l. c., pp. 35, 36.)
It is not about the genesis though, it also and even more so about maintaining the role of capital in general, paradoxically pushing you to produce and tighten the rope that may one day be seen hanging down the gibbet, when walking up the last stairs. Or is there another way to interpret the following
Saudis Use European Arms for ‘Human Rights Violations’
Is it too cynical to demand that the profits should be at least used to accommodate the refugees?
It is just appalling to see that, what we sometimes hope to be exaggerations, is brute reality.
La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.Le Lys Rouge [The Red Lily] (1894)
difficulty Chinese students face, particularly in the arts and social sciences, is in adopting the critical thinking that the Quality Assurance Agency insists master’s level courses must inculcate
centre on China’s Confucian cultural tradition
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
Albert Einstein
I uploaded a series of presentations given to students of economics at 中南林业科技大学班戈学院/Bangor College CSUFT in Changsha, Hunan Province in China.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
COMMEDIA DELLA VITA OR PÁNTA RÊI'S FIRM GROUND 