Dear Friends,

This blog shares reflections that inspire further CBD thinking. It seeks to provide food for thought about culture-driven processes and events, which might be worth serious research exploration with the application of the CBD paradigm or alternative approaches. If you have any desire for a cooperation in research along the lines of the proposed ideas in this blog, you are welcome to contact me. I would be happy if these blog posts turn out to be a fruitful point of departure for new research papers or new research projects cooperation. May the CBD inspiration touch on you too! Enjoy!

For the YouTube channel go here: https://www.youtube.com/@annie_CBD 

Warm greetings, Annie

Often, we hear the buzz words: culture & institutions. CBD has long debated the link between the two. But here I would like to highlight another dimension - the difference between the macro and micro cosmos of culture. In essence, New Cultural Economics, Institutional Economics and institutions themselves are about the macro-cosmos of culture. CBD instead is about the micro-cosmos of culture and its functioning. To make my point clear, let me use the example of religion. Religion is clearly a significant element of culture. New Cultural Economics would be interested in how different religious belongings per se predict certain outcomes, institutional economics or political economy may be interested in how the religious institutions as organisations function and extract rents. CBD instead will be interested in why people believe in religions and how this belief affects their socio-economic behaviour and choices.

Agglomeration theories and urban economics per se have demonstrated that while cities, as Max Weber has claimed, are the biggest invention of humanity in many ways, still they do not grow to infinity in size. The agglomeration forces, especially the ones that create frictions and congestion costs de facto ensure that agglomeration is not boundless. The ever lasting entropic expansion of the power of a city is curbed by the local cultural capital that creates the fictions and congestion. The entropy of culture seems to limit the entropy of city growth and agglomeration. What is the optimal size of a city and how does it relate to the entropy of culture?

For CBD, human behaviour is defined as a function of mental health, which in itself is a product of nature, nurture and culture in place and time. Artificial intelligence can do many things, and can simulate many things, but: (i) it is non-nature (only simulation of it), has its own susceptibility to its own nurture for which the end-users-people have very little awareness being too busy to feel small before the awe of AI's potentials (i.a. AI's nurture is the data it was trained on and teh type of model behind it) and (iii) does not understand the essence of culture (can only mimic and replicate partiality in programmers-prompted-seclusive ways but cannot understand human morality because our sympathic muscle misses in AI's 'body').  These deep differences between the sources of mental health in humans and the disconnect with such in AI, in the context of a growingly AI-dependent-everyday existence for people is likely to not only change human behaviour but to affect people's mental health. Could the touch with nature - the ultimate touch with reality and the traditional hero of sacred myths and spirituality in human history - can provide what is missing in an AI-world? Can a Culture of valuing and reconnecting with the natural GREEN save the human mind?