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Rising Tides Sink All Cities
A rising tide lifts all boats… this is the collective bargain, the “social contract” so to speak, which justifies the world most of us live in today. That bargain is not only ending, but the very foundations on which it could be proposed are swiftly evaporating. A new report even questions whether humanity will survive…
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Letting Go of the Conquest of Nature- Why New Barons of Industry Won’t Save Us
How do you fix an economic crisis? It’s an interesting question. On its face, it seems like the thing we need to leave to seasoned economists, shrewd businesspeople and well-studied policymakers. Surely the advice of the IMF and the World Bank have guided many a country out of crisis, business-led decisionmaking has provided efficient outcomes,…
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Finding the Sociobasis
At the end of Book 16 of the Analects of Confucius, a passage describes how a lord’s wife refers to herself, how she is to be referred to by her subjects, and by subjects abroad.[1] Due to its direct and ritual-focussed nature, apparently many commentators have taken this section as a later addition, taken from…
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State Functions and Taxation
The difference between a mafia state and a constructive state is what they do with taxes, whether collected in cash, kind, or labour. A mafia state uses their force to coerce the taxed populace into labour which enriches them further, with three main aims: The production of luxury goods The reproduction of elite sources of…
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Revisiting the Present
Let’s set the scene. Over the past few centuries, the productive capability of humanity, which we can call our power over nature, has increased dramatically. The traditions grasping the societies that led this advance, and which can (to a certain extent if not entirely) be credited with its emergence and continuation, have spread throughout the…
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Redemption of Functionalism
It seems that many criticisms of functionalism rest on ideas that it is extremely “conservative” or assumes the benevolence of extant institutions. Whether past examples of functionalism are actually guilty of these aside, functionalism as a concept is definitely not defeated by such criticisms, as the targets are nowhere near essential to it. I feel the…
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Underlying Philosophies
Is philosophy useful in understanding and predicting the way human society works? Is there any point in generalising about the way people act, or does this erase too many important details? Is there even such thing as a “logic” by which people work, or is that all tacked on after the fact, created by people…
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