Shifting the paradigm, changing the mindset

Video: entrevista com George Cooper, 'Economics is a broken science': Dr George Cooper on his new book Money, Blood and Revolution.

"In a series of disarmingly simple arguments financial market analyst George Cooper challenges the core principles of today's economic orthodoxy and explains how we have created an economy that is inherently unstable and crisis prone. With great skill, he examines the very foundations of today's economic philosophy and adds a compelling analysis of the forces behind economic crisis. His goal is nothing less than preventing the seemingly endless procession of damaging boom-bust cycles, unsustainable economic bubbles, crippling credit crunches, and debilitating inflation. His direct, conscientious, and honest approach will captivate any reader and is an invaluable aid in understanding today's economy."

Aqui.

RIP Hugh Hefner

A revista Playboy, não serviu apenas para alimentar os sonhos [legítimos] mais 'selvagens' [wild] do género masculino da época.

Não vou, obviamente, referir-me a Hugh Hefner à luz da mais comum e divulgada perspectiva machista e reforçadora dos valores do patriarcado, que tem corrido nas redes sociais desde a notícia da sua morte, pois essa perspectiva é redutora e desrespeitadora no que toca a mulheres e homens e, portanto, não posso nem a quero subscrever, mesmo que seja capaz de me rir de todas as anedotas e notícias e comentários 'divertidos' que por aqui proliferam.

A acção de Hugh Hefner [também] teve um impacto positivo na cultura ocidental, na medida em que ajudou a dar voz a questões ligadas aos direitos de minorias e contribuiu para que questões ligadas `sexualidade e à emancipação das mulheres pudessem ser debatidas abertamente.

da relevância da liberdade

A sentence that still shocks me when I think about it [civil war in Lebanon] was voiced by one of my grandfather's friends, a wealthy Aleppine merchant who fled the Baath regime. When my grandfather asked his friend during the Lebanese war why he did not go back to Aleppo, his answer was categorical: "We people of Aleppo prefer war to prison." I thought that he meant that they were going to put him in jail, but then I realized that by "prison" he meant the loss of political and economic freedoms.
Economic life, too, seems to prefer war to prison. Lebanon and Northern Syria had very similar wealth per individual (what economists call gross Domestic Product) about a century ago – and had identical cultures, language, ethnicities, food, and even jokes. Everything was the same except for the rule of the "modernizing" Baath Party in Syria compared to the totally benign state in Lebanon. In spite of a civil war that decimated the population, causing an acute brain drain and setting wealth back by several decades, in addition to every possible form of chaos that rocked the place, today Lebanon has considerably higher standard of living – between three and six times the wealth of Syria.
Nor did the point escape Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: "It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues... A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom.
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile

Proud to be weird

Sobre Ralph Steadman

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

Documentário sobre Hunter Stockton Thompson

Aqui.

Antifragile

"Consider this in terms of economic and institutional life. If nature ran the economy, it would not continuously bail out its living members to make them live forever. Nor would it have permanent administrations and forecasting departments that try to outsmart the future – it would not let the scam artists of the United States Office of Management and Budget make such mistakes of epistemic arrogance.
If one looks at history as a complex system similar to nature, then, like nature, it won't let a single empire dominate the planet forever – even if every superpower from the Babylonians to the Egyptians to the Persians to the Romans to modern America has believed in permanence of its domination and managed to produce historians to theorize to that effect. Systems subjected to randomness – and unpredictability – build a mechanism beyond the robust to opportunistically reinvent themselves each generation, with continuous change of population and species.
[...] Let us look at how evolution benefits from randomness and volatility (in some dose, of course). The more noise and disturbances in the system, up to a point, barring those extreme shocks that lead to extinction of a species, the more effect of reproduction of the fittest and that of random mutations will play a role in defining the properties of the next generation. Say an organism produces ten offspring. If the environment is perfectly stable, all ten will be able to reproduce. But if there is instability, pushing aside five of these descendants (likely to be on average weaker than their surviving siblings), then those that evolution considers (on balance) tha better ones will reproduce, making the gene undergo some fitness. Likewise, if there is variability among the offspring, thanks to occasional random spontaneous mutation, a sort of copying mistake in the genetic code, then the best should reproduce, increasing the fitness of the species. So evolution benefits from randomness by two different routes: randomness in the mutations, and randomness in the environment – both act in a similar way to cause changes in the traits of the surviving next generations."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile