Deep Thought – 15.11.09

“Socially engineering the bottom billion”

The Western world has the responsibility to transfer its best practices to the governance structure of developing countries in order to deliver stability.

Economic Systems – Comparison between Feudal and Capitalist

While reading Neagu Djuvara’s great book “Thoctomer”, I felt intrigued to sketch a brief comparison between the two great economic systems that the Western civilization has used during its existence.

Europe without Lisbon

Let’s imagine a Europe without Lisbon. Let’s imagine a world without Europe.

How the Age of Networking Came to Being

On the economic side, in the recent past a revolution took place. As business processes became ever more complex and markets increased their level of competition, outsourcing seamed the best way to adapt the old-fashioned institutions into becoming more efficient.

World-Systems Theory Or How Did It All Happen

As the theory of relativity has shattered Newton’s discovered principles into a small space-time capsule in which they were relevant, and as philosophy constantly renders religion as useful mainly in the cultural field by dismantling its axiological monopoly, so does the world-system theory exercise a huge paradigm change in the fields of economics, history and politics.

And, as all good things in this world, it’s not mainstream.

On The Importance of Know-How Transfer

Hayek wrote in 1945 an essay on the use of knowledge in society. He has in this essay separated knowledge from know-how and insisted on the importance of the latter.

Starting from his assumptions, I am trying to argue why in the long run B2B consultancy services will become mainstream in Eastern Europe, instead of international MBAs and trans-European university programs, as is the case today.

Limiting Common Good in Southern Europe

Amoral familism: social action persistently oriented to the economic interests of the nuclear family.

This cultural phenomenon explains the mindset of how the Mafia, widespread corruption and widespread poverty became synonymous with Southern Europe.

Relevant words

Here’s a cloud of the most relevant words used in this blog.

Created with: Wordle

Towards The New Cultural “Triad”

Currently, we can say without any doubt that Western non-technical knowledge is mostly (if not solely) applicable to and useful for Western societies. By analyzing the distinct social pattern of the world’s macro-regional cultural entities, this conclusion becomes more than obvious.

For this, I have chosen to take a brief look upon , what I consider to be, the major cultural groups today: Western (mostly US and the EU), Islamic (the Middle East and Northern Africa) and Asian (with focus on Japan and China). These three entities are the “triad” of the modern economic and political context and represent the cultural basis upon which social integration structures will come to develop.

Insular Cities – Bucharest Case Study

Although cities are the main propellers of the world’s economies, it is becoming more and more obvious that their pattern of evolution is changing.

Such is the case of Bucharest, a relatively large city for Eastern Europe. With its almost 2 million inhabitants, it is one of the most economically developed places in the region. It alone produced more than 16 percent of Romania’s GDP in 2006, thus having a better GDP/capita (PPS) than other Western regions of the EU, such as Campania in Italy – the region around Naples -.