Although I do not yet know what my extended essay will be about, I already know which direction it will go in, and who has led me there.
Mr. E.F. Schumacher. This man is brilliant. His book "Small Is Beautiful" is very insightful, and can possibly help us explain many of the problems we see today.
As for the Extended Essay, I am particularly interested in two of the ideas that he puts forward.
These are found in pretty much all of the chapters, in one way or another. These are the ideas of;
- Development Economics; finding the correct way to develop a Third World country. This idea is explored very deeply in "Two Million Villages", "The Problem Of Unemployment In India", and others (on which these two chapters are based). I find very interesting the idea of intermediate technology, which leads me to the next point of interest:
- Technology. It seems to be the most important thing in the world right now. Even at SAS, we recently had the tech-fest. It isn't all bad, I mean, the reason why I am blogging is because of technology. However, in his chapter "Buddhist Economics" he explores the quality of modesty, stating something to the effect of "there are always societies who say they need more, but there is no society who takes a step back and says, 'we have enough'". Then there is the idea of more social technology in the accordingly titled "Technology With A Human Face".
What both of these ideas have in common is that they take a look at the situation of the moment, agree that it is undesirable (maybe not in the case of technology, but that's a different matter), and call into question the methods used, which have for so long been assumed correct.
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Marco, I like where you're going here, this is an area of economic thought that is underdeveloped, and could use some insight from an enthusiastic student like yourself. Let's look at Schumaker's book together sometime. Have you finished it? He proposes a new paradigm for corporate structure at some point, having firms owned by employees instead of shareholders... which may lead to a different market structure where firms look after the well being of society to more of a degree than the status quo where only the profits of shareholders are considered (cost minimization) leading to the externalizing of as many costs as possible.
Anyway, glad to see you're excited about this! Mr. W
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