Colleagues: While the NSF principally focuses on short range crisis issues, I believe it is worthwhile to sometimes step back and look at concerns that transcend today’s focus. Especially when it comes from those who have a life’s worth of experience to back it up!
Today, this thoughtful piece that I received today from Dr. Wim Houwink, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday. As many of you know, Wim grew up in the Netherlands, joined the Dutch resistance in WWII and was captured by the Nazis, sent to the Dachau concentration camp, but survived. He later fought with the Czechs against the Soviet occupation in 1948, lost but escaped. Later he obtained a PhD, taught economics at UNR, and for much of the past 30 years has been teaching in China. Read….and think! Ty
Hi Ty:
A Happy New Year of the Rabbit!
It is easy for me to predict that this year–the Year of the Rabbit–will be better than the year of the Tiger!
It can hardly be worse than the year of the Tiger. Just think of the amount of violence, scandals, and unnecessary killings in the year of the Tiger, and especially, think of all the scandals that were not discovered.
It occurs to me that the moral standards in the US and in China alike, in the world in general have been sinking to intolerably low levels. I think that in part that is because while we have for many years enjoyed an increase in our freedom. Perhaps we have enjoyed too much freedom and not enough responsibility.
That freedom is an important aspect of life goes without saying. But freedom without responsibility leads to chaos, while responsibility without freedom leads to stagnation. It is the lack of acceptance of responsibility that is the cause of much of the decline in our world.
Another factor, it seems to me, is that so many people these days think short-term instead of long-term. In the short-term our value judgments collide with each other much more than in the long-term. In the long-term it pays for the rich to share with the poor: hatred, crime, violence, terrorism would decrease. It pays for the CEO to pay good wages, and share profits. Thus the goodwill of the company would go up, the laborers would feel happy, the quality of the product would increase, the efficiency would increase.
In the short-term, it would pay for the CEO to produce an inferior product, and through clever advertising his/her company would make a handsome profit. That the company would go bankrupt after a short period of time, that its workers would become unemployed, and the state of the society’s “happiness” would decline would be of little import to the company leadership. Nor, perhaps, would he/she care that this betrayal of values would lead to more hatred, crime, violence, or terrorism.
Also, think about the violence taking place on the spur of the moment. If people would think for a minute before getting engaged in violence, violence would surely go down.
What to do about the above? If young people at school would learn the benefits of long-term thinking, that would be a good beginning.
At present, I am working on that with respect to the undergraduate program taught entirely in English that my university in Beijing is offering to foreign students for about a half to a third of the cost of studying in the USA. AND those students would learn Chinese!
There are more optimistic things taking place: more and more parents are beginning to educate their own children – including teaching them the difference between right and wrong, teaching them value judgments. That is important. I cannot help thinking that if in physics value judgments would have been taught, that atom bomb might never have been built.
Then think of all the communities in which people try to be “green” in one way or another; of all the groups of people discussing how they can change the world for the better. If all those people could be united via the internet, what a powerful political group you would have!
The young generation in various countries have recently shown that they are a force to be taken into consideration: just think of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan,Yemen, and other countries where the political atmosphere is yeasting.
What the young generation seems to be fighting for is more freedom, no corruption, no dictatorships.
I think that when globalization will have been competed things will improve: all the people will then be living in the same economic boat. Just think of the rapid economic growth in many African countries.
It is therefore with a great deal of optimism that again I wish you a Happy
New Year of the Rabbit.
Wim Houwink
February 2, 2011
Reno, NV