"History suggests that once a country crosses the threshold of negative population growth, there is little that its government can do to reverse it." This line is an excerpt from a 2023 NYT article: Can China Reverse Its Population Decline? Just Ask Sweden. Another 2023 quote: "The negative population growth trend cannot be reversed, but behavior and expectations...
Learning-Teaching
“Life is not easy, faith and hope keeps me going”
15 Mar, 2023
Last Tuesday, an old friend said the following in our conversation: "life is not easy, faith and hope keeps me going". I suppose her words contain universal wisdom. Her words (also) relate to 1 Corinthians 13-13: "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." Got Questions states the following conclusion on the difference...
Is it better being alone than being with the wrong one?
14 Mar, 2023
I heard the phrase above ("it's better being alone than being with with wrong one") in Cold Feet, a series rated 8.2 in IMDb. This phrase has quite some hits on the internet. Nevertheless, a recent scientific study disagrees: "Even an unhappy marriage is better for you than being alone" (Times-2023). This remarkable difference may well relate to the difference...
Do we fear to embrace Hope?
8 Mar, 2023
A macro perspective will teach us that "life is better today than it has ever been before" (eg, Steven Pinker-2018). A micro focus will teach us that our life is governed by a polycrisis (eg, Bloomberg-2022). When both views are valid then why do most people make a choice for the micro view? Hence, my question: do we fear to embrace Hope? Something similar...
From permissive to intolerant societies (and back)
7 Mar, 2023
Being born in 1960, I was a teenager in the 1970s. If any society was permissive then it was back then. Nowadays, intolerance seems to be the driving force in (Western) societies. It's an example of Isaac Newton's third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction (source). In the 1970s, Labour-Left was a dominant political force that...
The one per cent are not as clever as they think (FT)
4 Mar, 2023
Financial Times title: The one per cent are not as clever as they think FT subtitle: The brainiest people and the biggest-earners are two largely separate groups says new research By: Simon Kuper Date: 16 February 2023 “I used to know an investment banker who went around saying he was writing a novel. Obviously, this was self-marketing, but he also genuinely...
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