Participants |
شریکان، مشارکین، شرکا |
Collaboration, cooperation, who we are, how we organize ourselves into groups to get things done. Distribution of rights and responsibility. Social marketing. Roles we adopt: individuals, firms, families, households, government, joint ventures. Free riders, rent-seekers. Public Choice. Prisoner's Dilemma. The human footprint.
If you know who the players are, and what their motivation is, you get a better sense of the dynamics of the planning game.
An idea whose time has come, in light of all the paranoia and ill will that continues to surround foreign relations in this region.
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"The Pirate Party" of Sweden is growing in popularity. Its platform: "to reform copyright law, abolish the patent system, and strengthen the right to privacy."
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Here's a whirlwind tour of "
Greater Iran" - regions that have significant Iranian cultural influence.
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The concept of "government failure" arose in the 1980s. It is not concerned with criticism of government regulations. Rather, it seeks to describe "government failure" along similar lines as the idea of "market failure."
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It's not how much rent you pay for your apartment. Rent-seeking, in the words of The "
Economist" is:
Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. Trying to make more money without producing more for customers.
"The Cake", here, of course, refers to collective resources or benefits.
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In
Public Finance, we read that
Views of how government should function in the economic sphere are influenced by ideological views concerning the relationship between the individual and the state. Political philosophers have distinguished two major approaches [Organic and Mechanistic].
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Any statement that begins with "Iranians..." is going to be a generalization, and therefore, not true. "Iranians like poetry." "Iranians don't like to wait in lines." "Iranians are devious." And so forth. These statements can't be true, because you will always find some Iranians who don't fit the statement. Some Iranians don't like poetry, some love lines, some are guileless, and so forth. We're all individuals.
Despite this logic, the "Iranians..." conversations won't stop. Do we have these conversations because we actually think we know
all Iranians based on our limited encounters with our family, friends and neighbors? Do we really
want to know what "Iranians" are like? Or do we want to create a model of what they should be like?
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Peter Carlson of
The Washington Post writes about "
Local Man". What is the Persian newspaper equivalent of "Local Man"? What has he been up to?
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Nowruz 2009, US President
Barak Obama wished Iranians a happy Now Ruz.
He also gave Iranian leaders some "choices". A move that will, no doubt, inspire an immediate "Tu quoque" reflex and be dismissed.
What is "tu quoque", how does it kill conversation, and how might a Foreign Policy Museum on the Washington Mall change that? Let's explore.
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My Mom sent me a link to this website featuring
historic postcards from America. "Take a look at the
aftermath of the Collinwood school fire (March 4, 1908)," she said. "We were just talking about it."
This website triggers a few planning issues:
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In his book, "
Seeing like a State", James C. Scott describes the mechanism at the heart of a state's (government's) tendency to sedenterize (settle) nomads as "the state's attempt to make a society legible." He further develops the thesis that
legibility is "a central problem of statecraft."
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Here is a draft
vision statement for a hypothetical good government. It is cobbled together from other vision statements out there:
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Here is a draft
vision statement for "Institutional Frameworks":
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َAt last! A translation of
Kent Keith's "Paradoxical Commandments" in Persian! Translated with the collaboration of Dr. Razani and Ms. Javadpour.
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آدمیزاد غیر منطقی، دلیل گریز و خود محورند - به هر حال دوستشان بدار
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A 4 month ordeal results in a driver's license that needs to be renewed in a year. Why?
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چهار ماه طول میکشه که یک گواهینامه یک ساله گیرت آید. چرا؟
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"
It's all good," they say. All. Good. TYPO!
The letter "F" needs to assume it's proper place in this sentence. To chew up the "g" and spit it out.
"It's all good." »
Fgood. » "
It's all FOOD."
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A study used personal cell phone signals to track the movements of 100,000 Europeans. ُAmong the findings: most people rarely leave the vicinity of their home or office, remain within a 20 mile radius, visit the same places, and are usually found in the same spot at the same time.
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