Author: Zarina

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Notes on Freedom: Part 5

Last week we talked about capitalism and its alternatives, based on the Earn a Living video series and the first part of a documentary on anarchism, both produced by ARTE, a French-German cultural/intellectual TV channel.

Topics

  • We started by discussing Universal Basic Income: from the nationwide, randomised pilot in Finland, which just completed its first year, it doesn’t appear to stimulate employment, but it does seem to make people happier, which might not be a bad outcome. See an article about it here.
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Notes on Freedom: Part 2

This week we met to talk about economic freedom, based on the following documents:

  • An essay by Hayek on the use of knowledge in society, and how this determines that decentralized, market-based pricing, rather than a centrally planned economy, is the best economic system
  • The first part of the Trap, a documentary by Adam Curtis on how politicians used post-war economic ideas like game theory to build a more stable world order based on individualism and mutually assured destruction
  • A blog post, also by Adam Curtis, which argues that most think tanks are a right-wing invention to manipulate the public opinion into perpetuating the economic and political status quo, thus stifling the development of alternative systems and ideas

We began the discussion with individual freedom and collective freedom:

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