Greed is the Beginning of Everything - Tomas Sedlacek

 In a SPIEGEL interview, Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek discusses morality in the current crisis and why he believes an economic policy that only pursues growth will always lead to debt. Those who don't know how to handle it, he argues, end up in a medieval debtor's prison, as the Greeks are experiencing today.

SPIEGEL: It's easy to increase consumption, but decreasing it is much more difficult to do. Doesn't the uneven distribution of wealth also propel the wheel of desire, based on the motto that I want what others have?

Sedláček: Yes, the social ladder becomes sticky on the way down. The view of economists is that each individual seeks to maximize his benefit. The only problem with this is that we cannot precisely define what the optimal benefit is for us. We don't know what we want. That's why we need comparisons, examples and suggestion. Try imagining an object of your desire, a beautiful woman, for example. It doesn't work as an abstract idea, because the imagined image in your head is volatile. You need a photo, a description, a model. Someone has to tell you what you think is so great that you find it irresistible -- society, neighbors and colleagues, but also the advertising and entertainment industry, ads, films and books. All desires that exceed our basic biological needs are determined by culture. We want to live as if we were actors portraying ourselves.

Thanks to Kai for the article

Don Draper in 1977?

via Vulture

Can This Bring Long-Term Prespective? - Football365's article on Fabrice Muamba

"Saturday night. We were all shocked.

As the news about Fabrice Muamba's condition broke, it was a natural reaction for many people to say how this situation really 'puts everything into perspective'; that in the face of such an awful thing, football and all its business simply does not matter. And they were right. Here was a matter of life and death; there is no bigger, more profound struggle...

...If Fabrice Muamba's collapse did really 'put things into perspective' and if those words are profoundly felt, all these problems could evaporate. They do not need to exist. A better world is possible.

Perhaps we need a graphic reminder that we are all human and that more unites us than divides us. And if Saturday's events illustrated anything, it was precisely that. After a season of, at times, bitter rancour let's hope this moment of darkness ends up illuminating a new path."

- From Football 365 "Can This Bring Long Term Perspective"?

Calvin and Hobbes explains the Economic Crisis

"Moral Ideas" - C.S Lewis

"If 'good' or 'better' are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each people, then of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than each other. Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring, For the same reason it is useless to compare the moral ideas of one age with those of another: progress and decadence are alike meaningless words."

- C.S Lewis

The Hitchens Brothers Agreement

"My brother and I agree on this: that independence of mind is immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if we are disliked for doing so."

- Peter Hitchens, brother to the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, writing in the Daily Mail

Soccer according to Hank Hill

"Why do you have to hate what you don't understand?"

Objectivism - Ayn Rand

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

- Ayn Rand, in an appendix to Atlas Shrugged

New vs. Old Tolerance - D.A Carson

How does what you call the old tolerance differ from the new?

"The old tolerance presupposed another system of thought already in place—Christianity, communism, Naziism, Buddhism, secularism—whatever. The issue then became how much deviation from that system could be tolerated before coercive force is applied. To the extent that one allowed deviation, one was tolerant; correspondingly, where one judges that deviation has gone too far (e.g., almost everyone agrees, even today, that pedophilia goes beyond the pale), then coercive force—in short, intolerance—is a virtue. It was quite possible to disagree strongly with what a person was saying, but still tolerate the opinion that was perceived to be aberrant, on the ground that it was better for society to allow such opinions than to coerce silence from those articulating them.

But invariably, tolerance has its limits. The new tolerance (1) tends to insist that those who merely disagree with others, at least in several spheres, are intolerant, even if no coercive force is applied; (2) tends to make such tolerance the supreme good, independently of surrounding systems of thought; and (3) tends to be remarkably blind in regard to its own intolerant condemnation of everyone who disagrees with its own definition of tolerance. The result is that in many domains, in many discussions, the question is rarely "Is this true?" but "Is anyone offended?" Rigorous discussion of content soon shuts down; truth is demoted; various forms of class warfare are encouraged; in some domains it becomes wrong (supreme irony) to say that anyone is wrong."

- D.A Carson, in an interview with John Starke