Little more than a series of jottings

Little more than a series of jottings

Like all animals we act with reference to the future. But unlike other animals, we are self-conscious; we are aware that ordinary life is an unintelligible sequence of actions. Thus, we alone are also equipped to look to an ordering principle which will give intelligibility in mere sequence. For Aristotle, that principle is virtue.

Dutch disease

In economics, the Dutch disease is a concept that purportedly explains the apparent relationship between the increase in exploitation of natural resources and a decline in the manufacturing sector. The claimed mechanism is that an increase in revenues from natural resources (or inflows of foreign aid) will make a given nation’s currency stronger compared to that of other nations (manifest in an exchange rate), resulting in the nation’s other exports becoming more expensive for other countries to buy, making the manufacturing sector less competitive. While it most often refers to natural resource discovery, it can also refer to “any development that results in a large inflow of foreign currency, including a sharp surge in natural resource prices, foreign assistance, and foreign direct investment”.

The term was coined in 1977 by The Economist to describe the decline of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of a large natural gas field in 1959.

(Source: Wikipedia)