The friends thou hast

See thou character, Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act;
Be thou familiar; but by no means vulgar:
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul, with hoops of steel:
But do not dull thy palm, with entertainment
Of each unhatch'd, unfledg'd, comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel: but being in
Bear't that th'opposed may beware of thee
.....
Give everyman thine ear; but few thy voice:
Take each man,s censure; but reserve thy judgment:
.....
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan off loses both itself and friend:

Hamlet, Act 1, Scen 3

Finding grounds

ln view of such possibilities the Russians are keenly sensitive to every wind that blows from Constantinople. Their army is once more changing its quarters for sanitary reasons. The hope of finding a perfect camping ground seems to lure it on like an ignis fatuus, for every good sanitary situation is nearer Constantinople than the last. lf the slightest disturbance occurs in the city the army will be upon us.

Henry O. Dwight, Turkish Life in War Time; New York, 1881

Resources for Freedom

Democracy has won in the world while losing the attachment of the people. This is not the fault of citizens grown careless of exercising their rights. 'The citizens are sophisticated, and their democracies are wanting.'(Stein Ringen, 2007)

There is a case for renewing democracy. The main burden of the argument concerns the way in which freedom can be ensured for those who live under its conditions - with negative liberty. Freedom must have resources to be free: to be free to do or choose a thing, but lack the means to do or choose, is not to be free. The provider of the means must generally be the state: the state has a great deal to do to ensure freedom. The classic liberals' difficulty with this - the more the state has to do, the larger it becomes and the greater its temptation to constrain liberty - is largely dismissed, usually tacitly.

The need to insure people against destitute old age through pension reform that will be at least state backed; to combat poverty through, first, an understanding that it cannot be tolerated in a wealthy society; to provide for increasingly better education - all these are needed to ensure real freedom. Family being a social unit, and thus one in whose continued existence the state should take an active hand.

Full freedom needs reason as well as resources. Where a political leadership removes from you your ability to act freely, a psychological dictatorship removes from you the ability to decide freely why to act.

Stein Ringen (Prof. Oxford Univ.); What Democracy is For, On freedom and moral government; Princeton, 2007
cited in FT, John Lloyd, 22 Oct, p. 8

Knowledge of Consequences

Letters, a profitable invention for continuing the memory of time past.
....whereby inventing Speech; Men register their thoughts; and declare them to one another for conversation.

The first author of Speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sights; for the Scripture goeth no further in this matter..........By this it appears that Reason is not as Sense, and Memorey, borne with us; nor gotten by Experience onely; as Prudence is; but attayned by lndustry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which are Names, to Assertions made by connexion of one of them to another, and so to syllogismes, which are the connexions of one Assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences of Names appertaining to the subject in hand and that is it, men call Science. And whereas Sense and Memory are but knowldege of Fact, which is a thing of past, and irrevocable; Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another....


Thomas Hobbes; Leviathan, The Matter, Forme and Power of A Common Wealth and Civill; Of Reason and Science, Chap V




From classical humanist to mechanical philosopher, Hobbes political commitment remained basically unchanged; it was a commitment to civil peace by whatever means and what ever allegiance this was to be obtained. He returned to England soon after the publication of Leviathan. There he lived out his last twenthy eight years, keeping quiet politically and being left for the most part undisturbed. The only disturbing flurry was in 1666, who, in the panic atmosphere after the Great Fire and Great Plague, a Bill against Atheism and Profaneness was introduced in the Commons, and the committee to which it was sent was empowered to receive information and report to the House on books tending to atheism, blasphemy, and profaneness, including by name - The book of Mr. Hobbes called Leviathan.

Hobbes had been struck by the deductive method of geometry and scientific ideas of his time, leading him to the general hypthesis that everything was to be explained in terms of motions.

The apparatus which was not, strictily speaking, self moving, but it was always in motion because other things always were impinging on it, made him desire or endeavour to maintain its motion, an innate impulsion to keep going, that is to say in fundamental form the impulsion to avoid death.

As in political science he was concerned with the motions of men in relation to each other, which motions were dependent on their wills, which could be expected to be a good deal more complex than whatever forces it was that moved them - to have a direct kind of knowldege about what moves us and our wills.

Hence, the first question a political science has to answer is, what makes a political society tick? and then resolving political society into the motions of its parts - individual human beings.

Men, Hobbes claimed, are moved by appetites and aversions. Appetites continually change, and are different in different men and of different strengths. Different men have within them more or less desire of Power, of Riches, of Knowledge, and of Honour; this difference of passions proceedeth partly from the different Constitution of the body and partly from different Education, but also from their differences of customes. (Leviathan, Chapter 8, p 35) His grand conclusion of human nature is Man's need for Power become a necessarily harmful thing.'

Significant tasks of governement

lt has been widely accepted that the role of the state has in reality become quite different from that put forward by Political Theory, which traditionally described the state as characterized by external independence and sovereignty within. By the end of the 20th century, this role has changed significantly.

Some speak of an erosion (Cerny 1996), decline (Schmidt 1995), crisis (Dunn 1995), retreat (Strange 1996) and even the end(Ohmae 1995) of the nation state. They point to the impotence of state governance of the economy in a world largely without borders and the futility of attempts at compensation through welfare state measures which will only serve to disadvantage the competitive position of domestic business.

On the other hand, there are authors who refute the hypothesis of the growing insignificance of the state and see not only a continuing significant task for the nation state, but one that may actually be growing. These authors talk about the revival of the nation state and of new tasks for it. In this perspective, the hypothesis of the withering nation state is seen as a myth: rather than losing importance, the nation state continues to be the crucial institution determining
the conditions under which the process of economic globalisation takes place.

Why different views? Conditions for state action are changing - that is not only agreed in the academic debate, but also the result of voluminous studies from international organisations (cf. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development 1995, World Bank 1997). But so far, the academic community has not been able to agree on a common view as to the direction of that change.

One study to confront predictions examined results from two recently concluded studies that deal with governance and state capacity in the financial sphere - the reason for that choice was that this was where pressure from globalisation is commonly perceived to be highest, making this policy area into an ideal and hard test case for theories of convergence that presently dominate the discourse about globalisation.

What is the conclusion? It was demonstrated that evidence from the policy area of banking regulation does not support the more sweeping claims at (policy and institutional) convergence often found in the literature on globalisation. While there is substantial (but imperfect) convergence in terms of regulatory content and policy, there is none in terms of the political processes and the institutional dimension.

Policy discourses in the field are only to a small degree characterized by the frame of international competitiveness, while more often national specific issues dominate the day-to-day legislative debates.

But does that mean that there is more support for the theories of divergence and path dependence? Again, some relevant qualifications have to be made.

When faced with the momentous changes in the policy field in the mid 1970s, countries did not primarily embark on the search for national specific solutions, but tried to coordinate their actions through the Basle Committee. Even if these negotiations took 15 years to reach a first agreement, they resulted in a common regulatory framework that often required substantial changes in national regulation.

With respect to the dimensions of politics and polity, however, the latter theoretical approaches are much better suited to explain the absence of change and the continuing divergence. Nationally specific institutional configurations, historically developed, produced incentives which favoured certain patterns of action and inaction and thus influenced the strategic choices of political and economic actors. Routines and patterns of interaction were developed and in turn created stability and lowered transaction costs.

If there was any change, it was triggered through national crises, not international developments, and different national contexts led to very different reactions.

National institutions, we can sum it up, function in a way as filters of globalisation. They deal with similar or even the same problems in their own specific ways, thereby producing different policy outcomes and dynamics in the various countries.



Source: Workshop on Theories of Regulation, Divergence or Convergence? Andreas Busch CEPES and St. Antony's College, University of Oxford


Dunn, John (ed.), 1995: Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?, Oxford u.a.: Blackwell.

Pierson, Paul, 2000: Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,
in: American Political Science Review 94 (2), pp. 251{267.

Quinn, Dennis, 1997: The Correlates of Change in International Financial Regulation,
in: American Political Science Review 91 (3), pp. 531{551.

Rogowski, Ronald, 1989: Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Aects Domestic Political
Alignments, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Shoneld, Andrew, 1965: Modern Capitalism. The Changing Balance of Public and
Private Power, London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press.

United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1995: States of Disarray: The
social eects of globalization, Genf: UNRISD.

Weiss, Linda, 1998: The Myth of the Powerless State, Ithaca (NY): Cornell University
Press.

World Bank, 1997: World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World,
New York: Oxford University Press.

Building a Memory

Building a memory that is remembered forever requires that memory traces be transformed into a robust, stable form that is resistant to disruption. This process of strengthening memories is known as consolidation1.

An influential model of motor memory consolidation proposes that stabilization merely requires the passage of time after initial training, but offline gains require a sleep period soon after training2. A study by Korman et al.3 confirms that offline gains do indeed require sleep after training, but also finds that sleep promotes the stabilization of memories. Notably, these results suggest that processes of stabilization and memory enhancement interact, raising a number of questions about the conceptualization of motor memory consolidation and its dependency on sleep.

The findings of this study are a clear-cut demonstration that sleep enforces the stabilization of motor memories against interfering inputs. According to the previous model2, stabilization (resistance to interference) depends only on the passage of time, whereas performance enhancements depend on sleep.

Whatever the underlying mechanisms, this evidence that sleep-dependent stabilization and enhancement interact3 raises the question of whether memory stabilization during sleep and wakefulness are equivalent. In arguing that sleep 'condenses' the time course of motor memory consolidation, the authors imply that sleep after training merely accelerates a process of stabilization that would otherwise occur identically during wakefulness. However, this is not necessarily the case. Although behavioral performance indicates that eventually the same degree of stabilization of motor memories is obtained in both sleep and waking conditions, the underlying mechanisms may differ. Waking stabilization could result from synaptic consolidation (strengthening connections in the neural circuits that were activated during training), whereas sleep-dependent stabilization could result from system-level consolidation, in which representations are repeatedly reactivated and gradually redistributed to different networks and brain regions1. As reactivation and redistribution of memory representations interfere with ongoing sensorimotor processing, system consolidation is bound to an offline mode of processing that might be most effectively established by sleep4.


Source: One memory, two ways to consolidate? Nature, Neuroscience, Vol 10, No 9, Sept 2007


1) Dudai, Y. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 55, 51–86 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ISI |
2) Walker, M.P. Behav. Brain Sci. 28, 51–64 (2005). | Article | PubMed | ISI |
3) Korman, M. et al. Nat. Neurosci. 10, 1206–1213 (2007). | Article |
4) Born, J., Rasch, B. & Gais, S. Neuroscientist 12, 410–424 (2006). | PubMed | ISI |

The Fifth Estate – Through the Network of Networks

The impact of the internet as a new form of social accountability and why it should be defined as ‘the Fifth Estate’ was the subject of an inaugural lecture by William Dutton, the Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University, on 15 October.

Professor Dutton’s lecture at the Examination Schools was entitled ‘Through the network (of networks)– the Fifth Estate’. He started by reminding his audience that the rise of the press and development of radio, television and other mass media has created an independent institution in many nations that had become known as the ‘Fourth Estate’, which has been central to pluralist democratic processes. Professor Dutton then went on to argue that the growing use of the internet and related information and communication technologies like the personal computer and the world wide web supported greater accountability not only in government and politics, but also in other sectors.

He said while optimists see the internet as tending to democratise access to information and undermine hierarchies, others contend that institutions will use the internet to enhance their control of existing institutional structures and organisational arrangements. But he pointed out that as well as institutions using the internet, it creates ‘platforms for new networks of individuals’ and ‘the basis for the pro-social networks that compose what I am calling the ‘Fifth Estate’. He provided examples: medical professionals who could share information with other professionals and patients anywhere in the world; or local government officials engaging with individuals on community websites – but also well beyond their constituencies.

Professor Dutton said: ‘The ability the internet affords individuals to network within and beyond institutional arenas in ways that can enhance and reinforce the “communicative power” of “networked individuals” is key. The interplay of change within and between such individual and institutional “ networks of networks” lies at the heart of what I am arguing is a distinctive and significant new Estate.’

Professor Dutton is Director of the University’s Oxford Internet Institute, which has been carrying out the Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS) every two years since 2003 to research the internet’s growing impacts in everyday life. Findings from this research, such as the huge increase in the use of the internet for accessing information between 2005 and 2007 led him to the Fifith Estate as a means of synthesizing people to a wide range of concrete trends, such as the internet becoming the first place people go to find information, both trival and of a serious nature. Professor Dutton argues the internet is being used by existing institutions to try and enhance what they do, but it is also a means of mobilising individuals as well as institutions to create local and global networks that can hold these institutions accountable for their actions.

The internet is a platform for networking individuals in ways that can challenge the influence of other more established bases of institutional authority, Professor Dutton says. For instance, he argues that it can be used to increase the accountability of the press, politicians, doctors and academics, by offering internet users alternative sources of information and opinion.

Professor Dutton believes that the vitality of the Fifth Estate rests less on new policy initiatives than on preventing over-regulation of the internet. The question remains, however, on how this is done. Professor Dutton concluded: ‘Questions about the governance of the Fifth Estate are likely to become more prominent as people realise that the internet is a social phenomenon with broad and substantial implications.’

A webcast of the lecture will soon be available on webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk .For more information on the Oxford Internet Surveys, go to www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/oxis/

Source: Oxford University Website News
www.ox.ac.uk

Where does virtue consist?

ln search of absolute measure of value one finds that the real value is Esteem Value rather than Exchange Value.





........Adam Smith rejected the argument that we distinguish between objects of approval and disapproval by virtue of our possession of a moral sense, where the latter is defined as a reflex sense; akin to our sense of beauty, shame or ridicule. Smith criticized this type of argument, largely on the ground that it is odd that anything akin to a moral sene - should hiterto have been so little taken notice of, as not to have got a name in any language.

A similar critical spirit is to be found in Smith's handling of what he took to be the second major question of moral philosophy; that concerning the problem of - where does virtue consist? The was an argument that virtue consists in benevolence; a position which Smith rejected on the ground that it gave prominence to the -milder- virtues, at the expense of the more demanding virtue of - self command.

Smith criticized the argument because of the denial that actions based on self love could ever be regarded as virtuous. Smith also rejected Hume's solution which grounded approval of an action on perception of its utility......- and that the sentiment of approbation always involves in it a sense of propriety quite distinct from the perception of utility.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nation

The importance of the analysis of the -circular flow- marks an enormous advance in economic theory (1), the first study of the whole organism.

(1) Cannan

Where the division of labour is thoroughly established, it is to be expected that each individual is in a sense dependent on his fellows, and that 'every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant.' Smith in fact regarded the division of labour as both the cause and consequences of exchange. He remarked that the institution is not the effect of 'human wisdom', but rather the consequence of man's proensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.


The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water, but it will scarce purchase anything. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use, but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it (Wealth of Nation, l iv 13; 131).


'lt is the responsibility of the government to ensure that the impediments to the 'obvious and simple' state of natural liberty were removed; a state which once attained would, inter alia, optimize the efficiency with which resources were allocated.'

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nation















http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/
10/this_week_in_comparative_advan.cfm

Choosing relevant variables

Scholars concerned with such(big) wars almost never examine events that threatened to become big wars but did not escalate beyond low levels of dispute. There is surprisingly little research about wars with dramatic consequences that were not themselves big events.

We cannot understand the causes of big wars without examining many crisis that had the potential to become big wars but were averted by reaching a negotiated settlement beforehand......... there is little historical research where war did not take place, while the threat was imminent, fear of just such a war prompted parties involved to grant concessions that might otherwise not have been given....ln such examples the selection effect is of a different type. Researchers are sampling on the dependent variable, the thing to be explained, and so are unwittingly biasing their inferences by failing to identify whether relationships are spurious or meaningful. That is, they are picking only cases where a particular outcome has occured, as opposed to choosing cases where a particular set of variables are relevant.


Arguments about bipolarity and multipolarity suffer from just such a selection bias, as does much writing on the rise or the decline of great powers.

Some researchers argue that decision makers are risk acceptant in the face of uncertainty and are more risk averse as uncertainty diminishes. Certain others argue that multipolar systems are stable and bipolar systems are unstable, implicitly asuming that decision makers are risk averse in the face of uncertainty, but become more risk prone as uncertainty diminishes. Historical and statistical research produces very mixed results, lending no strong support to neither hypothesis. .....Again, by turning a variable (response to uncertainty) into a constant, the accompanying investigations have selected out the cases that belie their hypotheses. That is, only cases in which policy makers have chosen in a particular way are examined.


Ngaire Woods, (1996) Explaining lnternational Relations Since 1945, OUP



Thin and thick narrative analysis: On the question of defining and analyzing political narratives


To explore how we can define the concept of political narrative, looking at implications in terms of analyzing political discourse. The examination of the various strategies used to define narrative, leads to the suggestion that, at least in the context of political narrative analysis, we need structural definitions that stress the barest minimum for terming a message a narrative. Basing on the proposed strategy to define narrative, it is suggested that narrative analysis should operate on two levels: the “thin” level and the “thick” level. The thin level relates to events and situations described in a discourse and their order of appearance in the text. “Thick level” of analysis, relates to everything included in the “narration” and the relation between the components of the thin narrative.

Source: Shenhav, Shaul R.1
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/nari
/2005/00000015/00000001/art00005

Options for Britain II

Governments always find it difficult to refresh themselves in power, as the legacy of their own decisions build up; and oppositions do not have the research capacity to do so. It is in these historical moments that outside thinking can have a decisive influence, helping to inform the public and key commentators, and to provide a source of ideas for incoming policy-makers to mine. Options for Britain II is planned to be that mine.

lain Mclean,http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/
publications/newswire/Newswire_MT07.pdf

Keep growing quietly

Unintended Social Outcomes

The theoretical economics of the wealth of nations rests upon two assumptions of a broadly sociological character: first, that man is found in the social state, and second, that man will be found within a particular type of social structure where ever the exchange economy prevails. Adam Smith demonstrated that economic advance has sociological consequences which are not always of a beneficent tendency having unintended social outcomes.

Research results

We know little of what happens to doctoral researchers shortly (or indeed some years) after their doctorate ?????? and especially little about what happens to international students (who have not been included in the analyses of the HESA -First Destination- Surveys).

We also know little about how alumni feel about their doctoral experience, what they think they learned, and whether it was worthwhile ????????

Nor do we know if and how they may subsequently disseminate any of the results of their research, though this is important in establishing the contribution of the doctorate to national research and development/knowledge transfer.

www.heacademy.ac.uk/.../research/literature_reviews/
postgrad_research_briefing_paper_for_organisations.pdf

Dominant Force

There are two forces at work in international politics: unity and diversity. On the one hand we have the institution of the state, conducting policy and forming alliances; its effect is to divide men into competitive and potentially hostile groups. At the other extreme we have the influence of technology, which obliges men to become increasingly interdependent. Which force will become dominant ????????

Charles O. Lerche, Jr., Principles of international politics, Oxford Univ. Press, 1956

Settling differences

Asia is an area of rising giants, failing states, and unresolved disputes, some of which have gone on for centuries. In this context, it’s unlikely that the Chinese, Indians, Japanese, and South Koreans will spend hundred of billions of dollars on new ships and not use them in another monumental clash. We can probably look forward to decades of Asian turbulence. In many respects, Asia today is the Europe of a hundred years ago. For this and other reasons, Asians will not dominate this century.

Source:www.adamsmith.org/blog


Turkey has confirmed that the Parliament could discuss a motion today that would authorise cross border military incursions into northern Iraq to hunt down Kurdish PKK separatists.

Source: bbc.co.uk


UN willing


lf there had been a will on the part of the UN - suppose it had decided to enforce dozens of disregarded resolutions - the US would have been given the job of doing so that would have also been the case if the UN, for example, had decided to do anything more than nothing about Bosnia, Rwanda, or Somalia. lt would have been the US that drew the job of providing the heavy transport planes, the enforcement on the ground, the military relief, and the rest of it. This is just to restate the problem in a different way....

One of the overwhelming and positive outcomes of the international disagreement over lraq has been to expose the hollowness of the UN, and to make it evident to everybody that no one can rely upon it, at any moment, in a physical or moral crisis.

Christopher Hitchens, American lnterventions, Society; Vol 44, No 1, Nov/Dec 2006



Microfinance - bottom up approach

The great thing about microfinance is that it is based on the philosophy of the hand-up rather than the handout. As I wrote for the GI: " Microfinance is not a top-down solution to poverty, it is a bottom-up approach that aims to empower the poor, harnessing their individual aspirations and abilities and creating an environment in which they can realize the true benefits of the market economy." That's why microfinance has been so successful where traditional aid has failed to make an impact.

http://www.kiva.org/




New Malaria Vaccine Is Shown to Work in Infants Under 1 Year Old, a Study Finds
Oct 18, New York Times

The world’s most promising malaria vaccine has been shown to work in infants less than a year old, the most vulnerable group, according to a study being published today.

The study, being published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, was small, comprising only 214 babies in Mozambique, and intended to show only that the vaccine was safe at such young ages. But it also indicated that the risk of catching malaria was reduced by 65 percent after the full course of three shots.

“We’re now a step closer to the realization of a vaccine that can protect African infants,” said Dr. Pedro Alonso, the University of Barcelona professor who leads clinical trials of the GlaxoSmithKline vaccine...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/health
/18vaccine.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Dubious Consensus

I agree with P.J. O'Rourke on this one. Here's what he said:


"I like legislative gridlock. What I hate is bipartisan consensus. Bipartisan consensus is like when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help."


Dr. Mark J. Perry
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/10/
trade-gridlock-would-be-lot-better.html

Management tips

Top mangement teams with concentrated power are more likely to initiate strategic change because change is a result of the preferences of the powerful few rather than a broad agreement ...........

The argument is that power concentration in a top management team leads to strategic change and change that breaks the organisational momentum. Power concentration plays a significant role in shaping group dynamics (Mannix 1993).

Studies carried out on both formal and informal power sources; while the formal power is constant, the focus was directed toward informal power stemming from social capital. An individual holds social capital to the extent that others feel obliged to act favourably to him or her as a result of prior interactions (Colean 1988). Social capital is built on the norm of reciprocity in exchanging favours, and thus can be accumulated when an individual with the ability to recognize opportunities to extend favours also has resources and motivation to do so. Exchange of favours is central in managerial work and career management, but all managers are not equally well positioned to accumulate and exploit social capital.....Length of tenure is thought to be a good indicator of social capital because executives with longer tenure have had more time and opportunities to develop interpersonal relationships (Pennings, 1994) and to build obligations by helping peers and promoting subordinates (Miller 1991).


Source: Organization Studies, Sage Publication, Vol 28, 2007, lssue 8, p 1203
www.egosnet.org/os









The principles of planning in England and Wales


Following a series of consultations, the most significant overhaul of the English and Welsh planning system for a decade became law in May 2004. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act made several key changes to the previous planning process, the affects of which are intended to:

- Make the planning system faster by simplifying the way decisions are made
- Enable local communities to get more involved in decision-making and the planning process
- Prioritise ‘sustainable development', which means maintaining economic growth, protecting the environment and using natural resources sensibly
- Make it easier for councils to free up land for regeneration through ‘compulsory purchase orders'

The most important change for campaigners is that the public now has a much more prominent role in setting the planning agenda and deciding what kind of place their area is to become.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/A1939944#principles

Educating trust

İt is useful for individuals to have some trust in each other's word. ln the absence of trust, it would become very costly to arrange for alternative sanctions and guarantees, and many opportunities deriving from mutually beneficial cooperation would have to be foregone. Lack of trust is indeed one of the causes of economic underdevelopment. A recognition of instrumental role of morality and the overlap of economics and practical ethics is under observation. Social morality and trust cannot simply be bought. Within limits it can be produced through education - a collective undertaking that requires a considerable ammount of real resources and time to become effective. Such education may be costly, but it is crucially important for keeping society together.