AN ECONOMIC FOCUS BRINGS A DIFFERENT STORY

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.

Louis XIV travels 

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

Harald Wolff 

How history should be understood, going from most to least important

# # #

One result

of ignoring that necessity:

"We were naïve,"

the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces

in Afghanistan said..."

Harald Wolff 

"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).

 Etc.

# # #

The economic example these pages use shows how

traditional African and French societies

resisted the unregulated search for gain

that would destroy them.

*     *    *
Next:
A very brief summary