This year the
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2013 was
awarded jointly to Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert J. Shiller "for
their empirical analysis of asset prices".
In other words the
Nobel Prize for economy this year went for 3 guys, who worked to predict the
bubbles of the financial markets.
The fun is, that 3
guys shared the prize and they do not agree about what they say… http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/business/3-american-professors-awarded-nobel-in-economic-sciences.html?_r=0
My other problem
is, what we were already talking about – the majority of economists are
“corrupted” – for example Mr. Fama is sitting in the board of an investment
company… http://www.dfaus.com/firm/academics.html
The company is
handling about 300 billions of assetsJ). So it comes one more question – does Mr. Fama needs the money from
the Nobel Prize… I am sure not…
Mr. Peter Hansen
looks like a true scholar and Mr. Shiller sold his index many years ago, so
probably made more than enough out of that, no matter, that his index being criticised all the time…
I am not sure, if
this were the best candidates for the Noble prize, but in fact they also admit
to make mistakes (I mean the Noble Prize Committee)…
One thing we can
learn from this…. For the next year we need to choose 3 professors, one, who
claim he knows how far a balloon can be blown up, another who denies this and a
third one, who can create a mathematic model for this…
So please do not
give up, and start to blow balloons!
Do you remember
your first balloon? Was it on the street or at home at your first birthday
party?
Children love
balloons. I got my first balloon (at least the one I remember) at a 1st
of May Labor Day celebration around 1965.
And I was very
happy with that; until some bad boy half an hour later blew it up for me, even
he wounded my hand… I got scared… Really scared – after this I did not want to
have a balloon for sometimes…
So the governments
are – that is why they pay money for those who pretend to be able to predict
those dangerous balloons…
Do you remember
when did you first time tried to blow a balloon?
Do you remember
when your child first learned to do it? Or does your child knows at all how to
do it?
We spoke so much
about economy, but without talking about about the basic segment of it,
the FAMILY,
we will not understand anything.
the FAMILY,
we will not understand anything.
So let’s speak
about the family…
I have searched
hard and found a very few definitions of it. And frankly speaking I cannot
agree with any of those…
“The family is the natural and
fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and
the State” (United Nations, 1948).
“Society’s definition of ‘family’ is
rapidly expanding and has come to include single parents, biracial couples,
blended families, unrelated individuals living cooperatively, and homosexual
couples, among others. Unfortunately, family policy has been slow to catch up
to changing trends in modern lifestyles” (Crawford, 1999, p. 271).
“Ultimately, I define ‘family’ as the
smallest, organized, durable network of kin and non-kin who interact daily,
providing domestic needs of children and assuring their survival” (Stack, 1996,
p. 31).
“…an employee’s spouse and dependent,
unmarried children under age 19 (age 23 or 25 if a full-time student and
dependent upon the employee for support)” (Abbott, 2002, p. 3).
“Society’s definition of a family has
expanded to include ‘single parents, biracial couples, blended families,
unrelated individuals living cooperatively, and homosexual couples, among
others’” (Crawford, 1999; Kenyon et al., 2003, p. 571).
“Most uses of the word family in
research indicate that it was often defined as ‘spouse and children’ or ‘kin in
the household’. Thus ‘family’ as defined in economics, sociology, and
psychology often was a combination of the notions of household and kin… An
exception to this standard definition of family is in clinical and counseling
psychology, where family includes one’s family of origin (parents and siblings)
in addition to spouse and children” (Patterson, 1996; Rothausen, 1999, p. 818).
“There are diverse types of families,
many of which include people related by marriage or biology, or adoption, as
well as people related through affection, obligation, dependence, or
cooperation (Rothausen, 1999, p. 820).”
“We define family as any group of
people related either biologically, emotionally, or legally. That is, the group
of people that the patient defines as significant for his or her well-being”
(McDaniel et al., 2005, p. 2).
“A family consists of two or more
people, one of whom is the householder, related by birth, marriage, or adoption
and residing in the same housing unit. A household consists of all people who
occupy a housing unit regardless of relationship. A household may consist of a
person living alone or multiple unrelated individuals or families living
together” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005).
“…the National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH) adopted the definition of a ‘network of mutual commitment’
Make
sure you read all for yourself and really try to compare to what you yourself
think about the family.
One
matter is positive, that the UN chart wants to protect it (I mean the family),
however this sentence was created at 1948 and obviously no one paid any
attention to it. The other worrying matter is, that it is mixed most of the
time with the “household”…
The
official statistics can only deal with individuals or with family consisting of
1or 2 same or different sex people raising 1-2-3….xxx children. So called
“households” – and our current economic research know nothing about the family,
even some pretend to…
I
have seen and experienced several cultures in this world. What was common in
the way they consider what is a family?
-
Biologically
linked people considered being a family; No matter they live or not under one
roof, whether they are one or multiple household.
-
I
have heard saying “close” family or “close” relatives and “far ones”… Those
close ones usually close by biological link and should not be close by
distance;
-
What
is going on, if you establish a more close relationship with another person or
marry him or her? I usually take the rule:
If A = B and B=C than A=C – that is the neutral approach;
Means, that if we love each other as a new
couple, than our families will also join each other and we suppose, that our
families also will love each other or in other words our union creates the
union of our families;
In
the reality this should be a local custom into which family integrates the new
couple;
-
the
couple can stay 100% independent (the so called “modern approach”)
-
the
couple stays in the girls family or boys family house; This can be a question
of finance or living space, not a question of the tradition;
-
In
Europe in general this is not regulated by any current custom – in the past the
bride supposed to go to the groom’s home or to a new house built by his family ;
-
In
Asia it is a general rule that the bride goes to the groom’s house. In fact the
bride “integrates” to the grooms family.
Why is this so important?
For
thousands of years even before the last Ice Age the human being was living in
family formation; In fact any highly developed mammal lives in family
formation;
This
kind of organization proved to be the most efficient for the survival of the
human kind as well.
It
is not a mistake, that all the main religions support the family “model” and
only that;
Our
last chance to preserve some of the family “traditions” is about now. It is not
a moral issue – it is entirely an economic matter. But this is the matter of
our own survival as human beings.
Today
the family tradition is strong, but started to melt down in Asia, Middle East
and Latin America. In Europe and North America in majority of places the family
already “melted down”. There are some rural areas, where people keep the family
traditions, but in most of the cases the families, in their traditional meaning,
even in the most traditional European areas like Greece, Italy, and Spain are
gone…
In
the past the wealth of the family identified its position in the society. The
wealth could be raised not only by the achievements of the individuals in the
family, but also by the size.
A
century ago the family meant a 3-4 generation union of people living mostly in
one household and their relatives living in the same or nearby settlements
(villages or towns);
There
was several type of families in the past – the integrating ones, the followers
and the ones melted down.
Families
with strong leadership in general were integrating – they were the ones
collecting in themselves other families by marriages and friendships;
You
can easily follow these trends if you check some remained family trees. Even
those kept till now were from royals or noble families, still, you can follow
the development or decline of each family…
In
case such a “strong” family would start to decline, there were usually one or
more followers, who would be able to take the place of the declining family.
This worked like Darwin’s evolution model, till recently, than…
The
industrial revolution melted down this model. And the globalization. In our
time the free flow of resources and money requires free flow of labor. Or at
least a relatively mobile labor to satisfy the demand of the flow of the
resources and money. And it requires the INDIVIDUAL…
The
same globalization created the consumer society. While in the production and
services the efficiency is the main factor of the survival, until then on the
consumption side the waste is the preferable behavior.
The
traditional family waste far less and they are far more efficient than the new
type of “consumer family” or the individual.
A
recent study of TESCO chain revealed, that it is a huge amount of food wasted
during the sales and consumption process… http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tesco-vows-to-act-after-study-confirms-huge-food-waste-8893015.html
Up
to 30% of food is wasted right in the families!
It
is evident, that in a large family any resource is used with much better
efficiency, than in a small family.
Clothing,
home appliances, furniture, housing, car and also the food. In fact we can state
that from the economic point of view a large family is far more efficient, than
a small family.
Is
it good for raising the children? Yes – and I think it is not needed to
specifically prove. Children raised in big families are better off in the life,
than those raised within the 4 walls alone…
Large
family model is a natural shield against most of the challenges of the modern
society. Also a “bulletproof armour” against major local and global disasters;
And
some would say, but in a 3-4 generation family you lose your “privacy”…. Yes,
the privacy… One of the main terms of the consumer society.
You
can see in any American film – the child closing down his or her room and
playing the computer alone, the father is sitting in the garage and the mother
is drinking in the kitchen.
There
is a fundamental misunderstanding!
The
Human Being is social, it needs interaction with others! It does not like to
sit alone in a room! For sure, if it sits alone in a room, it will consume more
food and alcohol, buy more computers, play more online games and need to visit
its shrink more often.
Our todays challenge, that the children instinctively searching for
community to interact with – if there is no family, they will try to find it
somewhere else, or create it.
If you are lucky, than in sports, or some community activity, like a
dancing group, some other self organized group or if you are not lucky, than
your child will end up in a nice street gang or in another source of happiness,
the drugs.
And if you really have no luck, then your child will become a MONSTER. Just
like Anders Breivik. People with no proper interaction with the society can
naturally become monsters. And those monsters are out there.
Sorry I chose a shot from Psycho.. As this looks much more friendly than that Breivik guy..
There were tons of books written about the psychological advantages to
raise children in large multi-generation families.
They learn the basic human values, like humanity, solidarity, charity,
interaction with different sex individuals, hierarchy, authority, leadership
and they naturally learn the ECONOMY!
I will not repeat it now in details…
A recent survey in the US found, that 1 of 50 children in the US are
homeless. Or yearly they have 1.5 million children on the street. http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/03/10/homeless.children/
It looks like not good right?
I am sure most of you have seen the trilogy of the Godfather or at least
the first movie. I love in there Marlon Brando. Did you ever think, why you
like that film?
Why you feel sympathetic to those gangsters?
Simple, you see a big nice, unified family!
Did you ever think why the entire underground world, from Italian, Latino, through Japanese, Irish till Chinese mafia all of them using for the
organizational model the family?
Simple – it is the most stable, must protective and most efficient way to
commit crimes.
Do you think the family model is good for them, but not good for your
life?
If you still have a grand-grandma or someone close to 100 years old in
the family, just visit them, take a paper to make notes, or just record what
she or he speaks. Ask them about their childhood and how their family looked
like.
Listen and record carefully… Especially the structure of the family, the
internal rules and the behavior, their activities.
Do not forget, this is the last chance for your children!
Your parents already know nothing about – they are the victims of the
modern global society and the brainwash done on them in the school and the
public media. You yourself are the second generation of the brainwashed. So you
also far from knowing anything…
Or watch carefully the Godfather… A nice lesson how to organize a family… Just please use that knowledge for legal purposes only!
