In preparation
* Take the "households" of several hundred cradle-rockers, doctors, priests (...) set up for each prince and princess at birth. So rooted was the custom that rather than cut down on the households of his four last daughters, Louis XV had them raised in a convent.
BLOOK 1 SHOWED
HOW NOTICING OMISSIONS
AND ATTENTIVE OBSERVATION
CONTREDICT HOW PARIS IS USUALLY SEEN.
BLOOK 2 SHOWS
THAT GRASPING HOW SOCIETIES WORK
TRANSFORMS THE MEANING OF EVENTS:
UNDERLYING ECONOMIES AND THEIR EVOLUTIONS
ARE AT EXPLANATIONS' HEART
# # #
One result
of ignoring that necessity:
"We were naïve,"
the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces
in Afghanistan said..."
"We didn't realize that Afghan corruption was inevitable, and when the officials we backed took the pay of schoolteachers and soldiers we lost the peoples' support."
-- General John Nicolson, talk at the American University in Paris, September 27, 2019
If the decision-makers had asked themselves how Afghan feudal society worked they would have known that imposing their ways was impossible.
# # #
Setting ideologies, habits and beliefs
in their economic contexts
brings noticing whose interests they serve:
An hour of that approach
would vaccinate against...
- Racism ("divide and conquer").
- Patriarchy (if women cannot get abortions men retain control).
- Gullibility (ads).
# # #
The economic example these pages use shows how
traditional African and French societies
resisted the unregulated search for gain
that would destroy them.
