Category Archives: geopolitical theory

china & the economy

http://www.artefactgroup.com/blog/2010/01/consumerism-in-the-wild-wild-east-what-to-know-about-designing-for-china/ This article – as enlightening and fascinating as it is – still seems to harbor a prejudice of the Aristotelian (i.e. black vs. white, with no in-betweens) worldview: it labors to convince us that China’s rapid economic growth and … Continue reading

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Action vs Reflection

I’m so glad for the intellectual revolutions of the 60s and 70s. The earlier generation dealt with tearing the structure down the ground and then rejecting what remained of it inside themselves. It is clear that they were generally right … Continue reading

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invasive species

Henry King (of Doblin) makes a widely-recognized observation that the recession will lead to innovation. He takes it one small step farther: as the economy picks up again, we’ll see emerging new business models and unexpected fast-growing players in many … Continue reading

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droughts and margins

Droughts kill societies. Along with using up resources, the straight out vagaries of nature are not amenable to our long-term goals. It’s not always our own human nature that drives the death of society – although in this light these … Continue reading

Posted in economics, geopolitical theory, government, planning | Comments Off

open source bank

the title on an article from wired.com today gave me the impression that someone was going to create a p2p bank – a financial trading/loan mechanism hosted and owned by thousands of loosely affiliated individuals, with no central control or … Continue reading

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consumerism

Watched “The Reader” yesterday and realized that our irresponsible consumerism is enabled/created by the same sort of dysfunctional social system that allowed the Nazis and the SS to kill millions of innocent people.

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Bottom, Middle, Top of the pyramid

A project I worked on last semester parallels work that is being done at google.org – my project for Larry Keeley’s class (dqe1.com/files/juncture-proposal.pdf) focused on creating an ‘opportunity engine’ that connects various NGOs like Kiva, Grammeen Bank, and Heifer Intl. … Continue reading

Posted in business, economics, geopolitical theory, research, school | Comments Off

Government Structure

Reading “Sciences of the Artificial” by Herbert Simon a few weeks ago, I was struck by his distinction between normative and descriptive computer models. Basically, normative models explain how things should be, as when we say, “Governments provide the greatest … Continue reading

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