Hey blog,
I did say I would try and post something at least once in a week… Well that’s not it, is it?
I’ve just finished listening to the Daniel N Robinson’s brilliant lectures on “The Great Ideas of Philosophy” and I needed something entertaining for changers. Hence Bill Bryson. Again. This time, I’m listening to “I’m a Stranger Here Myself“, and it is just as funny and instructive as my previous hearings by the same author.
I stumbled upon a couple of thoughts about the notion of GDP, definitely worth meditating upon:
“We are treating the planet as a business in liquidation”, by the ecological economist Herman Daly.
“By the curious standard of the GDP, the Nation’s economic hero is a terminal cancer patient who is going through a costly divorce”, by 3 anonymous economists. Detailed analysis available here.
I’m currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. I know I will have to read it at least 3 times before I get the whole idea and even then, I’m not quite sure I will get it straight.
It’s the kind of book that totally changes the way you view and understand the world when you’ve read it. I’ll comment once I’m actually done with it.
Just wanted to quote a few lines, before I forget, which will probably change the way I view and understand my own little self:
(…) Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say “I don’t know.” He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean that he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will call an epistemocracy. The major modern epistemocrat is Montaigne. (…)
Now, that really speaks to me! And it sounds smarter than “shy”, “introverted” or “unsociable”…
Published by alan on December 14, 2007
in books.
I’ve just finished reading the “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” by Naomi Klein… Wow!
It has been a continuous effort keeping the book open. Descriptions of torture procedures and other psychological shocks are simply unbearable, but it was definitely worth reading the entire book.
Instinctively, I had always felt that something had gone wrong at the end of the cold war. Today’s unbalanced capitalism has nothing to do with the keynesianist model we knew until then, but I did not have the intellectual and cultural tools to understand the whole phenomenon.
Naomi Klein’s demonstration of the ideological links behind Pinochet’s Chile, the war in Iraq, Israel, and even the hijacking of natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina in New-Orleans for instance) are stunning! The Shock Doctrine or how a few super-rich become even wealthier by pillaging public wealth and promoting destruction and fear.
What a wonderful world…
