CBD suggests that the answer is in aesthetic education (and its life-long learning form: cultural participation) - which are the way to educate emotional intelligence and breed skills for handling our emotions in times of uncertainty and shocks (see Tubadji, 2021; Tubadji and Huang, 2023). That is why every chapter of the new CBD book finishes with a paragraph regarding its relevance to aesthetic education.

ACEI 2025 is a dynamic and curious academic society that seeks to innovate and expand the domain of its inquiry. CBD suggests that bridging cultural economics and economics of culture is the natural and very needed new domain that ACEI can contribute seriously towards. I have identified about 50 people thinking within this novel domain participating at ACEI 2025 and will be contacting them to invite them for collaboration along these lines. You are my long sought family! Your take and expertise is much needed. Lets get together and make the adventure worthwhile, like those who built the road up to here!

On the practitioners side - the book launch panel contributor Hanna van Gent, Municipality of Rotterdam, told us how much policy makers are proactively thinking in the same direction. They need that support from us - it is urgent to know how culture can help local social cohesion. They have paved the road with excellent examples for data collection. We owe them support for rigorous evidence-based policy-making as cultural economists that can help to unpack the mechanisms through which aesthetic education breeds this so needed social cohesion (see Tubadji et al. 2025). CBD shows the way through the crucial rebalancing of the Cultural Entropy of the local cultural milieu - but there is so much more to unpack in this relation! It is a feast for our minds that can feed the starving world with the knowledge of loving each other. Let's do it!

Million thanks to those thanks to whom I have not been walking alone for years - Prof. Martijn Burger, Head of Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organisation & President of the Association for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS) and the one and only Dr. Masood Gheasi - one of the most flexible minds and talented quantitative scholars I have had the pleasure to encounter and work with - two wonderful friends, who also spoke at the book launch, and who are a joy because of being true intellectual spirits that are curious, humble and wide-eyed in front of the miracle of discovering the socio-economic world for real, at our best, with a genuine, rigorous search of the WHYs.

References

Frey, B., & Briviba, A. (2023). Two types of cultural economics. Int’l Review of Economics, 70(1), 1-9.

Tubadji, A. et al. (2025) PASCAL Briefing Paper 30 - Aesthetic Education and Learning Cities, International PASCAL Observatory & CARDALL, https://cradall.org/content/pascal-briefing-paper-30-aesthetic-education-and-learning-cities 

Tubadji, A., & Huang, H. (2023). Emotion, cultural valuation of being human and AI services. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 71, 7257-7269. 

Tubadji, A. (2021). Culture and mental health resilience in times of COVID-19. Journal of Population Economics, 34(4), 1219-1259. 

Tubadji, A., et al. (2014). Introduction to cultural research approaches. Int’l Journal of Manpower, 35(1/2), 2-10.

p.s. Rotterdam is a fantastic city - did you notice the archetypal figure of a reading girl statue from the streets of Rotterdam down there?

Acknowledgements: This CBD event was made possible thanks to the financial support by the UKRI-funded Impact Acceleration Fund of Swansea University. The author would like to particularly thank Professor Louisa Huxtable-Thomas for her unequivocal support and guidance, which make a positive difference.

Join the conversation: #CultureBasedDevelopment #CBDParadigm #CulturalEntropy #CulturalEconomics #AestheticEducation #CultureMatters #PolicyInnovation #HumanFlourishing