"As we look over the country today we see two classes of people. The excessively rich and the abject poor, and between them is a gulf ever deepening, ever widening, and the ranks of the poor are continually being recruited from a third class, the well-to-do, which class is rapidly disappearing...

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

This paper proposes three tasks. It briefly delineates the character of the civilizing mission and the interests it served, especially the colonization of Asia and Africa. In addition, the claims of the civilizing mission and the neoclassical theory of trade are tested empirically by comparing...

Besides the theoretical approach, the paper also includes an research conducted with students of the Faculty of Jornalism and Communication at the University of Bucarest. The main objective of this research was to determine the extent to which the media fiction (television series for youth)...

Since value and utility are the highest profile abstractions that underlie an epoch’s intellectual climate and ethical principles, their evolution reflects the transformation of socioeconomic conditions and institutions. The “Classical Phase” flourished during the first global system,...

In Part One of this paper we use the harmonic analogy of a musical octave to analyze mathematic ratios of U.S. real GNP. These ratios are generated by bringing together figures for U.S. real GNP over intervals of time – “spreads of years” – as numerator and denominator in a single...

In the physical world the “identity” of something is taken generally as a given; an apple is an apple; this apple is this apple. When dealing with planetary structure and extension into space, however, the problem of the planet’s “identity” in the surrounding cosmos is writ large. What...

Amartya Sen (1933-) is one of the greatest scholars who studied the relationship between ethics and economics and was held the Nobel Economics Prize thanks to this. At the awarding of the Nobel prize, while talking about his studies, the motive was: “...has been highly instrumental in...

This article shows some important aspects of a worldwide, historical phenomenon: the globalization of commerce and art which started in the second half of the sixteenth century and had the American, Asian and European territories of the Hispanic Monarchy as main protagonist during the Early...

This set of three volumes argues that the mind – human consciousness – may be measured by considering mathematically the aggregate of that consciousness, i.e. social history. From this beginning theme of discussion three questions must arise. 1. How might this measurement be made? 2. Of what...