Business | PerMondo

Four principles for the open world – Don Tapscott

20/01/2015 By Sabrina Leave a Comment

The technology revolution is opening the world.

Yesterday’s Internet was a platform for the presentation of content while the Internet of today is a platform for computation.

The Internet is a big global computer that we all share.

Humanity is building a machine, and this enables us to collaborate in new ways. Collaboration can occur on an astronomical basis. Now a new generation is opening up the world as well, a new generation that is the first generation to come of age in the digital age, to be bathed in bits. I call them the Net Generation.

The global economic crisis is opening up the world as wellContinue Reading

Freedom comes at a price – part III

05/12/2014 By Sabrina Leave a Comment

About socialism…

Economic socialism, such as what was conceived by Marx, is founded on two fundamental pillars:

1. Public property of the measures of production, work and capital.
2. Creation of a central planning organ (council of knowledge) that determines who, what, how much and when to produce.

Criticisms of socialism, theoretical impossibility and practice.

As they already explained in the 20’s and 30’s of the last century, the theories of the Austrian School of Economy, lead by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and more recently by Jesús Huerta de Soto and Hans-Hermann Hoppe amongst others, the communist type of socialism is not technically possible for the following reasons:

1. Socialism assumes that all the available information can be managed by a central authority (regardless of the number of managers) overlooking that today’s society is based on the use of widely dispersed knowledge that far exceed the capacity of any individual mind. It’s said, the total volume of information is so immense and continuously changing, it is technically impossible to conceive that you can get to know it and process it centrally with no governing body. Today, there is no human or machine capable of compiling, accumulating, processing and managing all the ever-changing information (likes, needs, market circumstances…) to successfully organise and coordinate the running of societyContinue Reading

Wrong thoughts about charity

14/10/2014 By Sabrina Leave a Comment

Dan Pallotta: The Way We Think About Charity Is Dead Wrong

The things we’ve been taught to think about charity and the nonprofit sector are actually undermining the causes we love and our profound yearning to change the world.

If we really want a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of this. However, what the nonprofit sector is doing doesn’t seem to be working; poverty and homelessness still exist and cures for cancer haven’t been found. This is because these social problems are massive in scale and our organisations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny. We have a different set of rules for the nonprofit sector than for the rest of the economic worldContinue Reading

The art of asking: Amanda Palmer

07/10/2014 By Sabrina Leave a Comment

I didn’t always make my living from music. After graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university my day job was being a self-employed living statue called the 8-Foot Bride. I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet and when someone came by and dropped in money I handed them a flower and some intense eye contact. If they didn’t take the flower, I threw them a gesture of sadness and longing as they walked awayContinue Reading

Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man

29/09/2014 By Sabrina Leave a Comment

After years of working in the advertising business it’s only just come to me that what we create (intangible value or perceived value) gets a bad rap. If we want to live in a world in the future with fewer material goods there are are two choices: to live in a poorer world or to live in a world where intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value as a substitute for using up labour or limited resources in the creation of thingsContinue Reading

Nigel Marsh – How to make work-life balance work

25/09/2014 By Sabrina Leave a Comment

I’d like you all to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence. That was the advice that St. Benedict gave his followers and the advice I decided to follow when I turned 40. Until then I had been working too much and neglecting the family. I decided to turn my life around and address the thorny issue of work-life balanceContinue Reading