The official blog of Stathis Kassios for Business, Media, Economics & Arts

Here's an interesting excerpt from one of my favorite books ''Think and Grow Rich'' by Napoleon Hill. I only realized the significance of the excerpt below, while reading through the related chapter for how we are mentally and physically affected as humans by what we think, feel, read. Amidst the Covid19 era, this book, chapter and paragraph are very contemporary. '' During the flu epidemic which  broke out during the world war, the mayor of New York City took drastic steps to check the damage which people were doing themselves through the inherent fear of ill health. He called in the newspaper men and said to them, Gentlemen, I feel it necessary to ask you not to publish any scare headlines concerning the flu epidemic. The newspapers quit publishing stories about the flu and within one month the epidemic had been successfully checked.'' You can buy the book ''Think and Grow Rich'' here:  https://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Landmar...

Malthusian forces were sufficiently strong and widespread to explain the economic stagnation from the dark ages to the industrial revolution. Read the full article HERE via voxeu.org

My current read is ''The Price of Inequality'' written by Joseph E. Stiglitz (winner of the Nobel prize for Economics). I am sharing some excerpts from the book that I believe will provide some food for thought on global markets, their impact on local economies and why there is so much inequality  nowadays between rich and poor people,  stemming from bad government policies or market regulations that favor the top 1%. ''The theory that came to dominate, begininning in the second half of the nineteenth century-and still does-was called ''marginal productivity theory'';those with higher productivities earned higher incomes that reflected their greater contribution to society. Competitive markets, working through the laws of supply and demand, determine the value of each individual's contributions. If someone has a scarce and valuable skill, the market will reward him amply, because of his greater contribution to output. If he has no ski...

''Food not only constitutes the principal part of the riches of the world, but it is the abundance of food which gives the principal part of their value to many other sorts of riches.The poor inhabitants of Cuba & St. Domingo, when they were first discovered by the Spaniards, used to wear little bits of gold as ornaments in their hair and other parts of their dress.They seemed to value them as we would do any little pebbles of somewhat more than ordinary beauty, and to consider them as just worth the picking up, but not worth the refusing to any body who asked them . They gave them to their new guests at the first request, without seeming to think that they had made them any very valuable present. They were astonished to observe the rage of the Spaniards to obtain them; and had no notion that there could anywhere be a country in which many people had the disposal of so great a superfluity of food, so scanty always among themselves, that for a very small quantity of those g...