Advancing Psychological Education for All
The increased diversity of financial products and instruments is matched by increased access to them. Thus the United States of America has seen what John C. Duca, a research vice president in the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, refers to as “the democratization of America’s capital markets.” In the past, if they needed capital to … Continue reading
The super-symbolic economy makes obsolete not only our concepts of unemployment, but our concepts of work as well. To understand it, and the power struggle that it triggers, we will even need a fresh vocabulary. Thus, the division of the economy into such sectors as “agriculture,” “manufacturing,” and “services” today obscures, rather than clarifies. Today’s … Continue reading
The intangibles we attach to tangible property are still rapidly multiplying. Every day there are more legal precedents, more real-estate records, more transactional data and the like. Each piece of tangible property, therefore, contains a higher component of untouchability. In advanced economies the degree of intangibility in society’s property base is spiraling upward. What is … Continue reading
It may be—I do not say that it is—but it may be that it is as unreasonable to require a ghost to appear in an atmosphere of cold skepticism as to require a photograph to be developed in a blaze of sunlight. There is a stairway in the Winchester mansion that appears to lead to … Continue reading
Not all social innovators share a taste for democracy, civility, and nonviolence. Fanatics—religious, political, and just plain psychotic—can also set up shop as social entrepreneurs. Indeed, some terrorist organizations run schools and hospitals on the side to justify and disguise their fund-raising. And of course, as with all human behaviour, even the best-intentioned entrepreneurialism can … Continue reading
Deep changes in the money system cannot occur without threatening entrenched institutions that have, until now, enjoyed positions of extraordinary power. At one level the substitution of electronic money for paper money is a direct threat, for example, to the very existence of banks as we know them. Banking will not retain its position as … Continue reading
Soren Viggo, a pharmacist in South Sacramento, California, makes more than $100,000 a year and owns his own homes. However, Mr. Vigo, age 30, struggles to afford the basic necessities, including groceries, utilities, insurance, and gasoline. “When you are used to spending a couple of dollars per gallon on gasoline, and the prices nearly quadruple, … Continue reading
Once upon a time, wealth was elemental. One had it or one did not have it. It was solid. It was material. And it was easy to understand that wealth gave power, and power wealth. It was simple because both were based on land. Land was the most important capital of all. Land was finite—meaning … Continue reading
Dramatic as they seemed at the time, the upheavals wrought by Milken were only part of a much larger revolution. For today’s changes in the control and channeling of capital—still one of the changes in the entire economy. In Morgan’s time, and throughout the heyday of Wall Street power, the mass production of millions of … Continue reading
Speculation is bound to pursue a wealthy, extremely beautiful, celibate recluse, who has lost those who mean the most to her and is haunted by spirits of the damned. Many wild rumors circulated about Sarah Winchester during her residence in Santa Clara Valley—her opulent estate was even known locally as “The Spirit House”—and some say … Continue reading
A mental disorder has been taking place, reflecting not only individual psychological strain but also the broader social and environmental forces that shape mental health.…
People often assume that sharing a physical environment means sharing a psychological or social reality. Yet this is one of the great illusions of modern…
Surely it could not be alive in there. And yet something stirred — not with the vulgar animation of breath, but with the slow, drifting…
“When the spirit resigns itself to sorrow, it is not the world that conquers us, but we who abandon the field.” What we are describing…
Randolph Harris II International Institute 