Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinat...
Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material succ...
It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men’s theories such as the idea of presch...
The widely mis-interpreted 1998 'meltdown' of East Asia was a financial symptom of the renewed reality: In fact, it was the first round the world recession again to begin in East Asia and spread from there to the West, instead of vice versa. That mar...
Nuclear deterrence will remain a vital aspect of security. or Nuclear deterrence will have a smaller role in future security. Sources are split in their assessment of the importance of nuclear weapons and the validity of traditional nuclear deterrenc...
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main ca...
It’s time to step back and reexamine our hatred and let wrath subside. Are we striking out against the real problems: ignorance, fear, want, greed, and political disenfranchisement or just trying to find the most immediate scapegoat on which to lay...
Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and scienc...
Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to peo...
We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 millio...
How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools...
Science has marched forward. But civilization’s values remain rooted in philosophies, religious traditions, and ethical frameworks devised many centuries ago. Even our economic system, capitalism, is half a millennium old. The first stock exchange ...
There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two – predictable calories f...
When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before...We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We...
Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system ...
Ra's al Ghul: Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time. Bruce Wayne: You attacked Gotham before? Ra's al Ghul: Of course. Over the ages, our weapons have ...
What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And mean...
The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skil...
In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth a...
Whenever a state or an individual cited 'insufficient funds' as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth. During periods of so-called eco...
As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me: You get famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people's means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normal...
