Master in International Markets
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Master in International Markets |
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Antonio
Quesada Office hours can be requested at aqa@urv.cat |
Classroom A2.2
· 3 October 2019 - 23 January 2020 Thursday 17:00-19:00 · Group selfie?
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 Sessions and lecture notesSession 1. Globalization waves, myths and views | flat/broken world | global inequality | Rodrik's trilemma Session 2. Just some questions Session 3. Your proposal | Political events in Catalonia (Us vs them · Bremmer's J curve · Hirschman's exit-voice-loyalty · The Wayward Pines trilemma · A model of non-unilateral secession · The trolley problem: are all political decisions trolley problems?) "A good idea is meaningless without the courage to act." Madam Secretary S3 E17 "Are you a bastard? Because for you have a chance against Rhodes, you need to be. Even though there will be lawyers, there are no fucking rules - not if you want to win. You will have to crawl through a river of shit and risk bleeding out a hundred yards short of victory. You have to be prepared to do things that lie entirely outside the bonds of conventional morality." Billions S2 E2 "You win or you lose. Negotiations are for cowards." (Spanish traditional elite mentality?) Session 4. Issues pending from session 3 Session 5. Nobel Prizes · Sturgeon's law · Omnibus trilemma · A paradox of globalization in a model inspired by Bremmer's J curve · Dark side of globalization: is it all collapsing? Session 6. Issues pending from session 5, stockpile of trilemmas (the classroom trilemma included), poverty trap Session 7. A paradox of globalization in two simple models: a country may become less globalized even if it has a preference for globalization and the rest of the world becomes more globalized | Questions Session 8. More globalization models, strike by Spanish women footballers, Yes Prime Minister, markets free thanks to governments, inequality by different government protection, Superclass, Uninhabitable Earth, US debt clock Linda McQuaig, Neil Brooks (2013): The trouble with billionaires (chapter 2 explains why pornography is the only true free market)  'Por qué hay más psicópatas en la política y los negocios' (in Spanish) | eldiario.es 19/11/2019Session 9. More globalization models, more trilemmas | Feminist parties (Many thanks to Vanessa, for saving the day: 'those who can, do; those who can't, teach') Session 10. More globalization models, more trilemmas (the Puigdemont trilemma: fixed borders - democracy - social peace), the challenges of globalization in the news, how does your ideal globalization future looks like?, problems unsolvable at the national scale and problems not yet solved at a national scale (that globalization magnifies) Session 11. More on everything: models, trilemmas, evaluation options, your topics... Session 12 (19 Dec 2019). 'Challenges of globalization' in one lesson | Q&A Court of Justice of the European Union | Judgment in Case C-502/19 Junqueras Vies (press release, full text) Session 13 (9 Jan 2020). Finance-business-government · Inequality-development model · Model based on the savings macroeconomic identity Session 14 (16 Jan 2020). A metaphor: world = car driven by a self-appointed driver, who is drunk and drives, looking backwards, as fast as he can. Illustration. The Tarragona chemical plant explosion: a local globalization effect? (Rule of international corporations) (14 Jan 2020)  'The world in 2020: ten issues that will shape de global agenda' | CIDOB 16 Dec 2019 Session 15 (23 Jan 2020). The Gloria storm hits Catalonia: a regional globalization effect? (Environmental damage) | Carbon emissions 1850-2008 (M Berners-Lee & D Clark, 2013, The burning question) | Coronavirus outbreak in China | WEF 2020 | Competition-based vs cooperation-based globalization: collapse, deglobalization or coordinated globalization? | Final trilemma: achieve social goals - at the lowest social cost - preserving privileges for a few 
Ebro river delta: before 1 2 and after 1 2 · Comparison (the sea eats 5 metres of land per year)Terres de l'Ebre (the lands of the Ebro, south of Tarragona): invisible, peripheral territory subject to predation/extraction by the centre (Barcelona urban area)? Concentric Catalonia: centre (Barcelona), middle (Girona, Tarragona-Reus), periphery (Lleida, the Ebro lands, Pyrenees)? The trilemma comfortable life - avoiding economic costs - avoiding existencial risks (some 40% of the world's population lives within 100 km of the coast) | Apply solution - avoid costs - preserve privileges Daniel Susskind (2020): A world without work. Technology, automation, and how we should respond Zygmunt Bauman (1998): Globalization. The human consequences (either you become fully, truly global or you become localized and thus deprived - the question is whether there is room for all to become global) Zygmunt Bauman (2013): Does the richness of the few benefit us all? Kristen A. Hite; John L. Seitz (2016): Global issues. An introduction, 5th edition Miscellany (final version · 343 pages · 18 MB) 1. Debates 2. Development, convergence, divergence 3. Economico-ideological agendas 4. Inequality 5. Ecological impact 6. Technology 7. Geopolitics and the rise of China 8. Capitalism 9. Finance 10. Democracy and politics 11. Culture 12. Challenges 13. Future 
'Identity,
immortality, happiness: Pick two' (S Edelman, 2018) | Five stages of grief What
does the world actually look like? The
human face of globalization:
are
people becoming physically more alike? The
Ferengi rules of acquisition How do you represent the world? List of countries by GDP sector composition Globalization waves
(Geoffrey G. Jones, 2019, 'Origins and development of global business' in The Routledge companion to the makers of global business) On your topic 9 ('Methods elites use to hold onto power')David Rothkopf (2009): Superclass. The global power elite and the world they are making ("my researchers and I identified just over 6,000 people who qualify") How to become a member of the superclass: 'Be borne a man', 'Be a baby boomer', 'Trace your cultural roots to Europe', 'Attend an elite university', 'Go into business or finance', 'Have an institutional power base', 'Be rich', 'Be lucky' Linda McQuaig · Neil Brooks (2013): The trouble with billionaires. How the super-rich hijacked the world... Diana B. Henriques (2011): Bernie Madoff, the wizard of lies. Inside the infamous $65 billion swindle Sam Dagher (2019): Assad or we burn the country " 'There’s no other way to govern our society except with the shoe over people’s heads,' a thirty-year-old Bashar told a private gathering in the summer of 1995." "How to stay in power. “How has this brutal dynasty survived for this long (...) and why has it gotten away with murder each time? The Assad clan has embedded itself in the fabric of Syrian society and unscrupulously manipulated class and religion fissures to empower itself, effectively co-opting Syria’s national identity (…) The Assads have been masterful in exploiting the divisions and bloody power struggles endemic throughout the Middle East. Further, both father and son relied on big lies to win the support of large segments of the Syrian population. But all lies eventually wear off or are exposed. The Assads knew this. Deception was not enough. There had to be fear and terror maintained and applied by a sprawling and web-like internal security and intelligence apparatus, known as the mukhabarat, that monitored and controlled every facet of public and private life in Syria. But another crucial constant emerges throughout this story: the Assads could not have survived if it were not for the way Western powers, democracies that profess to defend universal liberal values like human rights and freedom, have engaged with this turbulent and strategic corner of the world." Harris Sultan (2018): Why I left Islam "Thirteen countries in the world currently punish atheism with death. All are Muslim-majority. Even in countries where the government doesn’t get you, the mob will." "As I have explained how religion is not a necessity for human civilisation, I will now argue how necessary it is to get rid of it. Religion stops you from evolving your thoughts (...) Religion stops this discussion and forces you to stick to beliefs deemed correct and makes you fight against progress." Michael White (2002): The Pope and the heretic. The true story of Giordano Bruno "The procedure which the Church uses today is not that which the Apostles used: for they converted the people with preaching and the example of a good life, but now whoever does not wish to be a Catholic must endure punishment and pain, for force is used and not love; the world cannot go on like this, for there is nothing but ignorance and no religion which is good. —Giordano Bruno" On your topic 3 ('Ecological consequences. Sustainability (and solutions)')David Wallace-Wells (2019): The uninhabitable Earth. Life after warming "... more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades." "... with one exception -Australia- countries with lower GDPs will warm the most." "... mining it (Bitcoin) consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world's solar panels combined." On your topic 5 ('Ethical dilemmas of globalization')Jean Ziegler (2010): Why the world still goes hungry "Every five seconds, a child under the age of ten dies of hunger (...) In its current state, the global agricultural system would, in fact, without any difficulty, be capable of feeding 12 billion people." "The three horsemenn of the apocalypse of organized hunger are the WTO, the IMF, and, to a lesser extent, the World Bank." Jonathan Bloom (2011): American wasteland "Every day, America wastes enough food to fill the Rose Bowl (...) the 90,000-seat football stadium in Pasadena, California." "As a nation, we grow and raise more than 590 billion pounds of food each year (...) And depending on whom you ask, we squander between a quarter and a half of all the food produced in the United States." "... the average American creates almost 5 pounds of trash per day." (2,2679 kg) On your topic 4 ('Trends') Tim Wu (2018): The curse of bigness "If we learned one thing from the Gilded Age, it should have been this: The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public." "Today, as in the 1910s, two essential economic facts characterize the industrialized world. The first is the reemergence of an outrageous divide between the rich and the poor. This trend is most stark in the United States, where the top 1 percent today earn 23.8 percent of the national income and control an astonishing 38.6 percent of national wealth. The second is a return to concentrated economies—that is, industries dominated by fewer and larger companies." A.K. Cronin (2020): Open technological innovation is arming tomorrow’s terrorists "... while we’ve become aware that intelligence services may be listening to your phone calls and tracking your emails, and that Apple, Facebook, Google, and other corporations are mining our data and selling it to advertisers, the potential uses of the new technologies for violence are less discussed. Is anyone protecting you from having your Internet-connected Jeep Cherokee hacked and accelerated into a wall?" " The changes will also involve the redistribution of relative power between states and nonstate actors, who will surprise traditional militaries and police forces with innovative uses of the technologies." Aaron Doyle, Randy Lippert, David Lyon (2012): Eyes everywhere. The global growth of camera surveillance "Today there are eyes everywhere, and it took just one generation. In thirty years camera surveillance grew from an unknown, non-issue to a frequently taken-forgranted ‘necessity’ on the street, in shopping malls, office buildings and factories, in transit stations and airports (…) The paradox is that for all the millions of cameras and billions spent, there is a lack of convincing evidence that they ‘work’." Kathryn Sikkink (2017): Evidence for hope. Making human rights work in the 21st century "A 2015 survey of 18,000 people in seventeen countries asked, 'All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither better nor worse?' In only two countries—China and Indonesia—did a majority of people think the world is either getting better or staying about the same. In the fifteen other countries, very low percentages of people thought the world was getting better—in the United States only six percent and in Germany only four percent." Michael Greger (2019): How not to diet | Nestle and obesity: leanwashing?"Over the last century, obesity appears to have jumped tenfold, from as few as one in thirty people to now one in three, but it wasn’t a steady rise. Something seems to have happened around the late 1970s, and not just in the United States." "What happened in the 1970s was a revolution in the food industry. In the 1960s, most food was prepared and cooked in the home. The average housewife spent hours a day cooking and cleaning up after meals (the husband averaged nine minutes). But then a profound transformation took place. Technological advances in food preservation and packaging enabled manufacturers to mass prepare and distribute food for ready consumption." "The food industry exploits our innate biological vulnerabilities by stripping down crops into almost pure calories—straight sugar, oil (which is pretty much pure fat), and white flour (which is mostly refined starch)." Roger Bootle (2019): The AI economy. Work, wealth and welfare in the age of the robot "The conflicting views about our fate in a robot-and AI-dominated future can be pithily summarized as follows: • Nothing different. • Radically bad. • Radically good. • Catastrophic. • The key to eternal life." Gerald Bast, Elias G. Carayannis, David F. J. Campbell (2019): The future of education and labor "Due to an increased and increasing automatization (robotic manufacturing) and digitalization and a more widespread and increased use of AI (artificial intelligence and logarithms), the character of labor and work in more general will change dramatically in the near future." "Something dramatic is going to happen within the next 30 years. There will be manufacturing but no manufacturers. There will be sale. But no salespersons. There will be mobility. But no drivers. There will be banking. But no banks. There will be public administration. But no civil servants. The implications of this fourth industrial revolution will for the first time reach deep into the supposedly well-educated middle classes." "The role of university teachers will dramatically change from giving lectures for a large number of students toward facilitating and stimulating critical reflections on information and data and their interrelations (...) Exams will not asses how students succeed in acquiring existing knowledge – which is stored in books or data bases – but if and how they are able to find new or adapt existing processes and strategies for totally new problems and challenges (...) The university of the future will be an institution that is actively devoted to lifelong learning." "At the university of the future, in addition to highly specialized research areas there will be cross-discipline, thematically focused research structuresconcen-trating on 'global and regional challenges.' (...) In the future more students than todaywill be enrolled at a university but the profile of the programs and thus the profile of the graduates will be different. Alongside traditional curricula with specialized content for a small number of students, universities will offer interdisciplinary and inter-university programs for a large number of students, gaining knowledge that is adaptable to change and general knowledge about principles, mechanisms, and potentials for synergetic power in science, technology, and philosophy: • Critical thinking • Skills in cross-discipline communication and cooperation • Handling ambiguity and uncertainty • Thinking in unusual contexts • Imagination and intuition • Artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and quantum physics • Mechanisms of politics and economics in the digital age • Philosophy understood as ways of knowing and meaning in a world driven by the new technological revolution • Global challenges, like climate change, migration, human rights, aging society, and new forms of labor." "Along the Fourth Industrial Revolution, fuelled by the recent technological revolution, we need an educational revolution. This revolution has to be a revolution driven by creativity and social intelligence." On your topic 8 ('Labor exploitation') Guy Standing (2014): A precariat charter. From denizens to citizens Guy Standing (2011): The precariat. The new dangerous class "There is a danger that, unless the precariat is understood, its emergence could lead society towards a politics of inferno." "We need to wake up to the global precariat urgently. There is a lot of anger out there and a lot of anxiety." "Unless the inequalities wilfully neglected by most governments in the past two decades are radically redressed, the pain and repercussions could become explosive. The global market economy may eventually raise living standards everywhere (...) but it is surely only ideologues who can deny that it has brought economic insecurity to many, many millions. The precariat is in the front ranks." Seth Donnelly (2020): The lie of global prosperity. How neoliberals distort data to mask poverty and exploitation Hugh D. Hindman (2009): The world of child labor. An historical and regional survey "Child labor is a problem of immense social and economic proportions throughout the developing world. While there are encouraging trends in a number of nations—Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Vietnam, to name a few—child labor rates remain persistently high in much of the world (...) there is one important new feature of today’s global child labor situation—a genuine global movement is under way to do away with it (...) If child labor is a global problem, then it deserves global treatment." "... child labor is, in every instance, a highly localized phenomenon—located in specific places and at specific times, and conditioned and shaped by local circumstances." "The Chinese government does not publish data on child labor—indeed, labor statistics are treated as state secrets." L. Lindio-McGovern et al. (2016): Globalization and Third World women "Neoliberal globalization is not a neutral process, it is gendered, and has exacerbated domestic and global social inequalities." "The regional inequality in the South exacerbated under neoliberal globalization is not entirely isolated or delinked from the social construction of inequalities within the richer capitalist countries that comprise the global North." "... neoliberal globalization impairs local Third World economies and human rights deteriorate as governments contain political activism." AI Now Institute Report 2019 New Eastern Outlook 'How exactly did the US lose the trade war with China?' 'China's African swine fever now global threat' 'Libra: Facebook wants to control your money' 'Climate and the money trail' | World Meteorological Organization 'The global syndemic of obesity, undernutrition and climate change' | The Lancet 'What will replace the globalization model?' | The Washington Post 'Three models of globalization' | Thomas Beebee 17 Apr 2015 'World Bank warns of global debt crisis' | The Guardian 8 Jan 2020 'The plastics pipeline' | Yale Environment 360 19 Dec 2019 China labor watch It's time for independence (Scotland) Center for research on direct democracy 20 years of The Bologna process | The Bologna Plan in Spain: good idea poorly implemented (in Spanish) 'Too big to fail? Tech's decade of scale and impunity ' (Spanish version from eldiario.es) US-Iran tensions after the killing of General Qasem Soleimani | BBC.com 9 Jan 2020 Average faces 1 2 3 |
Evaluation Option 1. Essay on a topic related to the course. Based on a specific reference (one/two books, chapters of books, articles...). It has to contain some original contribution. Invest in quality, not quantity. As professional as possible. To be delivered before the 30th of January (the sooner, the better). Option 2. Describe the basic contents, and the organization, of a 'Challenges of globalization' course if you were entrusted to teach it. Option 3. Summarize and organize the main ideas in the miscellany. Option 4. Take an exam (of the multiple choice questions type) on the facts, main concepts, definitions, hypotheses, results... in the miscellany. Option 5. Identify the main globalization issues/challenges and provide a justified answer for each (or explain the pros and cons of the different views on each). Option 6. Make an oral presentation of your work on any of the options above or below. Option 7. Make enough (if possible, relevant and interesting) questions in class and/or challenge the instructor's analysis/replies to queries during the lecture. Option 8. Collect cartoons illustrating the most significant globalization issues. Option 9. Write an essay on how your country affects, and is affected, by globalization (economically, politically, socially, technologically, financially, culturally...) Option 10. Find a new trilemma relevant for the course and motivate it convincingly Option 11. Analyze critically wikipedia's globalization article (pdf version here) Option 12. Discuss in detail whether, in your opinion, the trilemma suggested in session 9 (involving free markets, personal freedoms & rights, and social protection) holds. Option 13. Is protest and repression everywhere the new normal? Map the phenomenon worldwide by consider at least the following 2019 cases: Catalonia (2019 Catalan protests), Hong Kong (Hong Kong protests), Chile (Chilean protests), Colombia, Bolivia (Bolivian protests), Peru, Venezuela (Venezuelan protests), Lebanon (Lebanese Revolt), Iran, Iraq (Iraqi protests), Algeria (Algerian protests), Indonesia (Indonesian protests and riots), Russia (Moscow protests), France (gilets jaunes). 'Do today's global protests have anything in common?' | BBC news 11 Nov 2019(Causes: inequality, corruption, political freedom, climate change) How to respond in a time of crisis in four stages (Yes Primer Minister, S1 E6, 'A victory for democracy') Stage 1 - 'We say nothing is going to happen.' Stage 2 - 'It may happen, but we should do nothing.' Stage 3 - 'Maybe we should do something, but there is nothing we can do.' Stage 4 - 'Maybe there was something we could have done, but it is too late now.' Option 14. Review your classmates' essays Option 15. Collect recent globally significant news and connect them with 'the challenges of globalization' (like the NATO summit and fragile egos, national strike in France against the reform of the pension system, UN Climate Conference COP25, Chile feminist song, 'A rapist in your way', the Hong Kong protests, humanitarian crises -Yemen, Syria, DR Congo, South Sudan, corn of Africa-, environmental migrants, Australia fires...) Option 16. Describe your ideal global future (along several dimensions: economic, financial, technological, social, political, cultural, linguistic, ideological, geopolitical, ecological...) and explain how (and whether) this future could be reached from the present state of the world Option 17. Discuss critically the topics covered in the 29th of November issue of The Economist strongly related to the course (inequality, nuclear weapons, post-Merkel world, discrimination against women...) Option 18. Write an essay entitled 'The challenges of globalization', ranking and explaining those challenges and suggesting ways to deal with them. Option 19. The movie Blade Runner (1982) was set in November 2019. Write an essay identifying in what aspects the movie has proved right and in which ones wrong. Option 20. Pick a Youtube speech or documentary related to globalization and discuss its main messages critically, preferably in connection with the topics covered in the course (some examples: 'My name is Greta... and I want you to panic', 'The money deluge: how the rich get richer', a Chomsky lecture in May 2018, Daniel Ellsberg on 'Confessions of a nuclear war planner', Vangelis' tribute to Stephen Hawking: 'Seize the moment. Act now (...) We must become global citizens (...) It can be done'). Option 21. Write an essay on the following rises: rise of the robots, rise of China, rise of global temperatures, rise of unemployment and jobless society, rise of inequality, rise of the old, rise of global corporations and global private powers, rise of populism, rise of authoritarianism, rise of the precariat, rise of the drone, rise of the digital age, the rise of Greta Tintin. Option 22. Write an essay on the reasons to be a global optimists and the reasons to be a global pessimist. Give as well a motivated answer to the question 'Can we survive globalization?' Option 23. Reflect on the claim that neoliberalism is (like) a religion. Option 24. Select at least 50 items you own or use. For each item, identify the country where it has been made. Draw some lesson from the results. Option 25. List al least 30 questions related to globalization and motivate their importance, interest or relevance. Option 26. Extract some relevant, interesting, useful... global lesson from the data in Gapminder and/or World mapper. Option 27. Your proposal. Bonus. To boost your final mark, you could answer the following questions: (i) what have you liked most from the course? (ii) what least? (iii) and from the website? (iv) why? (v) any suggestions on what to add, remove or change from the course and website? Links
Seven challenges
to globalization | World Economic
Forum GDP per capita 0 1 2 ARG vs US Dow Jones 1928-2019 1986-2019 2008-2019 2016-2019 2018-2019 Cartoons · More cartoons Global wealth report
(Credit Suisse Research Institute) Global wealth report 2019 | Global wealth databook 2019 'Environmentalists have lost their way' · Paul Kingsnorth American citizen + Catalan pro-independence flag = charges of terrorism, jihadism and human trafficking = expulsion from Spain (in Catalan) The Belt and Road portal | The new Silk Road (P Frankopan, 2018, The new SIlk Roads) Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences 2019: Banerjee · Duflo · Kremer US debt clock: a global time bomb? This explains everything: Murphy's law 'The truth and reality of China's social credit system' | euobserver.com 'It's not thanks to capitalism that we're living longer, but progressive politics' | Jason Hickel | The Guardian 22 Nov 2019 ('Democracy, unions, healthcare and education: these are the forces that matter') 'Education, not income, the best predictor of a long life' | iiasa 16 Apr /2018 Greenhouse gas concentrations reach another high | 25 Nov 2019 It's all lost? European Parliament declares climate emergency | 28 Nov 2019 Garbage patches | Pacific trash vortex | Planetary boundaries
Gapminder International Energy Agency | Greenhouse gas emissions | Carbon dioxide emissions | CO2 emissions · Map | ccma.cat/324 (in Catalan) 4 Dec 2019 'Outdated borders are strangling liberal democracy' | Carles Puigdemont nytimes 3 Dec 2019 Risks 2020 | Deutsche Bank 13 Nov 2019 Limits to freedom? 'Sacha Baron Cohen rips Facebook and other social media giants' The Doomsday Clock ( Wikipedia, 2019 DC Statement) | The Petrov day (26 Sept) 'Nine times the world was at the brink of a nuclear war' On maps: What does 'the world' look
like? | Mapping globalization
World mapper: Old New site | Population | Poverty | Absolute poverty | Trade surplus (China) | Living with more than $200 per day in 2002 (W Scheidel, 2019, Failure of empire and the road to prosperity) ReadingsJason Hickel (2017): The divide. A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions 'Education and health: Redrawing the Preston curve' 2018, Wolfgang Lutz · Endale Kebede, Population and Development Review Frances Radai (2019): Economic woman. Gendering inequality in the age of capital Noam Chomsky (2017): Optimism over despair. Capitalism, empire, and social change "- What explains the supremacy of market-centric rule and predatory finance in an era that has experienced the most destructive crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression? - (Chomsky) The basic explanation is the usual one: it is all working quite well for the rich and powerful." Johan Norberg (2016): Progress. 10 reasons to look forward to the future Hans Rosling et al. (2018): Ten reasons we're wrong about the world and why things are better than you think Rudyard Griffiths; ed. (2019): China and the West: McMaster and Pillsbury vs. Mahbubani and Wang. The Munk debates "... the paradox we have in the world today is that China is not a democracy and America is, but it’s a democracy that is a bigger threat to the liberal international order than a non-democracy." "If you ask the Chinese people what, in their opinion, have been the best thirty years for their country in the past 3,000 years, since Chinese history began, they will say the last thirty years." Juan Pablo Cardenal · Heriberto Araújo (2013): China’s silent army. The pioneers, traders, fixers and workers who are remaking the world in Beijing’s image "China’s expansion is inexorable, has a global scope and is driven by the depression in the West." Borja Moya (2019): Data dictatorships. The arms race to hack humankind Data & inequality "The reason we shouldn’t worry about the future of jobs is because labor is no longer what feeds the capitalist model. Today what feeds surveillance capitalism is every aspect of every human’s experience." “One of the biggest realizations of the twenty-first century is to acknowledge that there isn’t a big difference between governments, corporations and organizations.Because in today’s world, whoever controls data has the power to shape not just the world, but life itself.” Colin R. Turner (2016): Into the open economy. Everything you know about the world is about to change "... problems of the world (...): • Perpetuation of economic growth – requiring ever more resources – coupled with population expansion on a planet with finite resources. • Relentless and permanent destruction of natural habitat to maintain industry and agriculture, at the expense of biodiversity. • Vast income and social inequality. • Unemployment and the erosion of the labour market through automation and artificial intelligence systems. • Irresponsible behaviour, waste and inefficiency caused through the prioritisation of profit, i.e. what's good for others or the environment is either left to chance or must be enforced through regulation. • Waste of resources and under-achievement through short-sighted production methods, i.e. it's more profitable to sell something inferior repeatedly than to build something that lasts. • Inter-personal and community disconnection, i.e. trading and competition promote personal isolation. When you break it down, integral to each one of these problems is our market system, or to be more precise: our primary methods of distributing resources and conducting society, namely: trade and governance." Tom Slee (2015): Against the sharing economy "... the Sharing Economy is extending a harsh and deregulated free market into previously protected areas of our lives." "... there are at least two visions of the Sharing Economy: the first is the communitarian and co-operative vision focused on small-scale personal exchanges. The second is the disruptive, globe-straddling ambition of companies with billions of dollars to spend challenging democratically made laws around the world, acquiring competitors in search of scale, and (in Uber’s case) researching new technologies to render its work force obsolete. If the former vision can be called 'what’s mine is yours,' I think of the latter as 'what’s yours is mine.'" Daniel J Levitin (2019): A field guide to lies "We’ve created more human-made information in the past five years than in all of human history before then. Unfortunately, found alongside things that are true is an enormous number of things that are not." "Statistics are not facts. They are interpretations." Anne-Sophie Fernandez et al. (2019): The Routledge companion to coopetition strategies “There is only room for one tiger on a mountain.” —Chinese proverb 'Optimism is the opium of the people.' 'Happiness is the longing for repetition.' 'Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches'. —Milan Kundera 'Did anybody ever consider that cannibalism would resolve both overpopulation – and world hunger?' —Jonathan Swift (read Swift's 'A modest proposal') 'The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.' —Isaac Asimov 'Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.' 'Humor is reason gone mad.' 'Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.' 'Whatever it is, I’m against it.' —Groucho Carlo Maria Cipolla's laws of human stupidity (Wikipedia, link, book)
2D:4D ratio John T. Manning (2002): Digit ratio. A pointer to fertility, behavior, and health Sturgeon's law 'Every business is dirty' —Hell on wheels, S5 E9 'War is an inherently unstable interaction of three things: intense emotion, politics and luck.' —The expanse, S3 E5 'It is not because we do not care about the consequences that we do unconscious things. We care as much as anyone else. It is that we cannot see them until it is too late. We only see those consequences when they are in front of our noses." —Money heist ('La casa de papel') E11 'I lied to the world (...) We were following orders (...) We're on a dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They're practically what defines us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes. Lies." —Chernobyl, E5 'To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our research for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we chose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants. It doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask, 'What is the cost of lies?'.' —Chernobyl, E5 'What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags? Stories. There is nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.' —Game of Thrones, S8 E6 '– Was it right? What I did? – What we did. – It doesn't feel right. – Ask me again in 10 years.' —Game of Thrones, S8 E6 'To waste time is a grievous sin. And if there is one thing I've learned in 52 years of public service, it is that there is no problem so complex, nor crisis so grave, that it cannot be satisfactorily resolved within 20 minutes.' —The Crown S1 E3 |