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Will the Free Market or Command Economy lead the future?

business-world  publicdomainvectors.org Also Published on Medium;s Data Driven Investor. A couple of weeks a go I received a request to review an economic development research paper. One is not supposed to talk about a paper that  has not been published and so I will reveal only that the invitation came from an international organization and the subject of research concerns the microeconomic sector in another country. My task in reviewing the paper was merely to say whether it met the standards of research and not to weigh in on its ideology, which I can do here, as long as I keep the paper anonymous. I rejected the paper for publication because it did not meet any of the standards  listed in the reviewer instructions for a research paper. I categorize the paper as a policy advocacy paper pretending to be a research paper. I wondered if it was a test to see If I can recognize the difference between a real research paper and a fake one in this era of fake everything.

A New Industrial Evolution

Contemplating A Brave New World One of a Kind Prototype of the Emperor Penguin designed by Weston & Brenda Andersen T he reality of the world radically changing through an act of nature is difficult to comprehend even as we are living through it. We are adapted to our norms but they are shifting under our feet. How do we move forward when our norms are no longer our anchors? Political actors call for Governor’s to reopen the economy or resign, as if, reopening will bring about a return to a former normal. Reopening the economy will not cast a spell and bring back normal. In Boothbay Maine, where I live, the primary industry is hospitality, one of the hardest hit industries. Most do not want to risk their lives and those of their loved ones by exposing themselves to a virus which is still mutating and we still know little about. Wooden Mermaid Sculpture outside of house at Ocean Point, Maine The demand for re-opening eludes the calling for the reinvention of o

Can progress come about without individualization?

The middle sector is the artist’s focal point in this sculpture from the Bronze Age, raised from below and burdened from above -  Public Domain \ Published on Mediim's Data Driven Investor as Were Itinerant Craftsmen Free Agents During the Bronze Age and Why Does it Matter? The middle sector is the artist’s focal point in this sculpture from the Bronze Age, raised from below and burdened from above -  Public Domain Prior to the 1930’s when Australian archaeologist, V Gordon Childe, presented his theory about the metal smiths of the Bronze Age and their concomitant relationship to the power elite, archaeologists considered craft making merely as a result of economics. Childe identified the powerful role that prestige goods played in the early development of craft specialization and connected the emergence of craft specialists with an itinerant metallurgist culture in prehistoric Europe. A debate emerged around the social and political role that specialized craft prod

Were Bronze Age Specialized Makers, Freemen or Slaves?

Centralization vs Decentralization in the Bronze Age In 2004 anthropologist Edward M. Schortman  and Patricia Urban published  Modeling the Roles of Craft Production in Ancient Political Economies ,  a research paper discussing trends in an active archeology debate over the role of craft production during the Bronze Age. Modeling the Roles of Craft Production in Ancient Political Economies  is an interesting read, particularly because it likewise describes contemporary social organization, or perhaps, better said, what was contemporary, yesterday, but is now rapidly unravelling and no one yet knows where it is going. Contrasts between the centrally managed Sumerian culture and a European egalitarian class of itinerant makers can be applied to contemporary political organization, vulnerable to change, in a world responding to coronavirus. Sumerian Votive Figure Ancient Mesopotamia   Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Before the 1930's when  V. Gordon Childe’ began investi