Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
We know of periods in the history of many nations in which profound upheavals in cultural processes led to a surge of the merely talented into leading positions in communities, schools, academies, and governments. Highly talented people sat in all sorts of posts, but they were people who wanted to rule without being able to serve.
The Glass Bead Game
Hermann Hesse
Given the role of Britain, the United States and various European countries in facilitating illicit flows by building and maintaining the global tax haven system, and in light of the role that the WTO plays in making it difficult for customs officials to clamp down on mispricing, it seems a bit strange that rich countries appear in corruption-free yellow on the Transparency International map.
Actual studies of how poor people engage with the cash economy, how- ever, reveal a very different sort of relation between money and social re- lationships, one in which money, meaning, and mutuality are entangled rather than antagonistic. To make sense of this entanglement, we need to rethink the relation between “the cash nexus” and various forms of social connection and mutuality. And this rethinking will entail challenging a whole series of conventional oppositions (interest versus obligation, feel- ing versus calculation, altruism versus selfishness, etc.) that ground the traditional Left’s phobic antipathy (as I am increasingly inclined to call it) toward both cash payments and market exchanges.
Give a Man a Fish
James Ferguson
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