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For millennia, human economic systems have evolved under one fundamental premise—scarcity. Scarcity exists when human wants for goods and services exceed the limited supply for them. Scarcity has been the cause of wars, mass migration, capital markets, and every aspect of how civilization has developed. Scarcity is an assumption made by all theories of economics. Economics is a social science concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The field is concerned with how individuals, businesses, governments, and nations make choices about how to allocate resources. A fundamental assumption of economics is that society’s wants are unlimited, but all resources are limited. Economic models are theories about how to produce, distribute, and consume these scarce resources efficiently.
Ai 2041
Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari
In the book Change, the therapist authors (Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, and Richard Fisch) discuss the case of a rebellious teenager, suspended from school by the principal because he was caught dealing drugs. He was still to do his homework at home but was forbidden to be on campus. This would put a big dent in his drug-dealing business. The boy burned with the desire to get vengeance. The mother consulted a therapist, who told her to do the following: explain to the son that the principal believed only students who attended class in person could do well. In the principal’s mind, by keeping the boy away from school he was ensuring he would fail. If he did better by working at home than in class, this would embarrass the principal. Better to not try too hard this semester and get on the good side of the principal by proving him right. Of course, such advice was designed to play into his emotions. Now he desired nothing more than to embarrass the principal and so threw himself into his homework with great energy, the goal of the therapist all along. In essence, the idea is not to counter people’s strong emotions but to move with them and find a way to channel them in a productive direction.
The Laws of Human Nature
Robert Greene
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