2/4/2018 Intermission




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wars and Religion

Image
Wars and Religion               I would like to claim that religion is closely related to wars. There have been many religious wars in history. Even wars that are not directly related to religion are sometimes indirectly related to it in the sense that strategies are chosen by religious criteria as in the case of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition, inhuman acts in wars are often overlooked because churchmen or other moral leaders are silent about them for religious reasons as in the case of Nazi’s Holocaust.               Take here an example of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East opened after WWII. It was actually a ‘cultural war’ between Japan and victorious or Christian countries. It was obviously illegal because it applied ex-post facto law, but there were virtually no Western churchmen or jurists who opposed ...
Read more

What USA did to Japan

Image
What USA did to Japan               As I wrote before, USA instigated Japan to start the Japan-US war through several economic sanctions including the oil embargoes in 1940 and 1941, which could be considered a virtual war declaration on Japan at that time. It was aware of the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand by listening in to the communications of the Japanese Navy. This was why aircraft carriers Enterprise and Lexington and newly built escort vessels were not at the harbor and only old warships were moored there. In spite of these facts, USA insisted that Japan had carried out a sneaky attack. There are many wars including the Vietnam War that were started without a declaration.               USA dropped countless incendiary bombs over Tokyo on the 10 th of March 1941 and killed more than a hundred thousand civilians. It dropped atomic bombs on Hirosh...
Read more

The Nature of Economics (5)

Image
The Nature of Economics (5) We see here a good example for the fact that the values researchers possess affect their choice of the topic and method of research generating bias in ‘scientific works.’ 　 Researchers who want to support individualism do not analyze firms or households seriously. They simply introduce exogenously given production functions and utility functions. Economists tend to ignore or distort social aspects that are inconvenient to build models with conclusions they like. It is really hard to establish social sciences that are value-free. Researchers need to recognize this. On the other hand, a unified theoretical model may be formed to explain the cultural difference mentioned in the example given in the above third reason. It may be done by introducing a measure of the degree of cooperativeness as an exogenous variable. In such a model different types of equilibrium may arise for different values of the measure. If we can endogenize the variable for that m...
Read more