South Korea’s Strategic Options amid the US–China Strategic Competition Under the Biden Administration

South Korea has so far maintained a “double hedging” strategy—that is, the United States for security, China for economy—in managing its relations with the United States and China. Both Washington and Beijing are recently increasing their pressures on Seoul to join their side, respectively. South Korea needs to re-evaluate its current strategy and adopt a more practical strategy based upon rational calculation of national interests rather than upon political leaders’ ideological beliefs or domestic political considerations.

Religion and Moral Economy

Religious stances toward moral economy have long provided important resources for critical reflection on economic life. When religious institutions seek to build alternatives to existing economic systems and financial practices, however, they also encounter a range of problems. In contrast to many secular critiques of economics, religious ones tend to be explicit about both their moral directives and the ontological assumptions on which they are grounded and give rise to distinctive economic habits and financial institutions. For this reason, their ethnographic study sheds light on a range of more general anthropological questions about the sources of value, the limits of rational calculation, the morality of debt, the meaning of inequality, economic justice, and the legitimate purposes of an economy.

Kunyima Method Validity in Sesame Seeds Oil Extraction "Democratic Republic of Congo"

Background: The very rich vegetable patrimony of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) demands a local abundant production of its fruits, roots and seeds by means of appropriate technology to relieve somewhat the problem of population health because indeed those fruits, seeds, roots and leaves are reputed to have very excellent virtues in various fields such as medicine, pharmacology, cosmetic products, food and so forth. Prior to this work papers have been published on Gourd seeds oil and Moringa seeds oil extractions in order to size a continuous stirrer pilot tank of extraction. KUNYIMA method has been successfully used and is still successfully used in this present article concerning sesame (Sesamum indicum L.) seeds oil extraction in dilute medium. Aim and Objective: In this paper it can be seen the reasoning leading to KUNYIMA method is relevant and can be used to size commercial tank giving thus home rational technology. Methodology: The Soxhlet extraction of oil from sesame (Sesamum indicum L.) seeds has been performed in dilute medium using petroleum ether as solvent. Results: The obtained results are satisfactory and are perfectly in agreement with the proposed model. Commercial tank construction on rational calculation is now possible. Conclusion: KUNYIMA method once more is valid and allows to calculate the sizing factor needful to determine the reactor optimal volume.

TRUST, FRIENDS, AND INVESTMENT IN LATE VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Why people trust is a question that has preoccupied scholars across many disciplines. Historical explorations of trust abound, but we know relatively little about the workings of trust in the history of investment. Despite becoming increasingly mediated and institutionalized in the nineteenth century, the market for stocks and shares remained local and embedded in personal relations to a significant extent. This created a complex trust environment in which old and new forms of trust co-existed. Investors sought information from the press, but they also relied upon friends to help them navigate the market. Rather than studying trust in the aggregate, this article argues that focusing on the particular allows us to appreciate trust as an emotional and ultimately imaginative process depending as much on affective stories as rational calculation. To this end, it takes the case of a Bath clergyman and workhouse schools inspector, James Clutterbuck, who solicited investments from a wide network of friends and colleagues in the 1880s and 1890s. By capturing the complex interplay of friendship, emotions, and narrative in the formation of trust, the article offers a window onto everyday financial life in late Victorian provincial England.

Crime and Punishment: Adam Smith’s Theory of Sentimental Law and Economics

For Adam Smith a crime is not the result of a rational calculation of loss and gain, but the consequence of envy and a vain desire to parade wealth to attract the approbation of others, combined with a natural systematic bias in overestimating the probability of success. Similarly, Smith does not conceive of legal sanctions as a rational deterrent, but as deriving from the feeling of resentment. While the prevailing approach of the eighteenth century is a rational explanation of crime and a utilitarian use of punishment, Adam Smith instead builds his theory of criminal behavior and legal prosecution consistently on the sentiments. A well-functioning legal system is thus an unintended consequence of our desire to bring justice to the individual person, not the result of a rational calculation to promote the public good, just like a well-functioning economic system is the unintended consequence of our desire to better our own condition, not the result of a rational calculation to promote public good.

Д. ЛУКАЧ: ТОЧКА ЗРЕНИЯ ТОТАЛЬНОСТИ КАК ДЕКОНСТРУКЦИЯ КАПИТАЛИЗМА

it is represented the Lukacs’ conception of revolution totality as deconstruction of capitalism. Lukacs shows, based on the Marx conception of surplus value, that the calculation of the social required working time as a standard for evaluation of labour on production is the basis of rational calculation and the result is the reduction of the time category to the space category. It means that the amount of working time becomes equivalent to the amount of goods produced, that is the source of the odjectification of human consciousness and social relations as a whole. Thus, the laws of production become objective, “natural” character, extending to all spheres of society, while hiding the truth that the capitalist system based on the violence. Irrationality is an integral part of the development of capitalism, and it exists as “displaced”, whereas rationality as an ideological form of capitalism demonstrated and rooted in the culture and life of society. Capitalist irrationality is that man is unable to see the totality of capitalism and the artificial role assigned to him in this system, which sets the prerequisites for the formation of the ideology of capitalism. The inability to take a holistic view of reality, that is, to understand it as a specific totality, is the basis of capitalist ideology, where there is always a place of accident that makes itself known in unforeseen crises and failures of the system. Lukach problems a special type of cultural subject, who being between rationality and irrationality of capitalism, is able to realize its violent nature and undermine the foundations of capitalist culture. The class consciousness of the proletariat opens up an opportunity to take the point of view of totality, i.e. to see the world as a whole, rather than as an isolated, fragmented, random series of singularities. Having realized itself as a class, the proletariat, being the subject-object of history, is able to combine the practice of revolution and the theory of philosophy as a condition of radical changes.

Understanding complexity of administrative reform

Purpose This paper aims to examine the complexity of administrative reform and its implications. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on an extensive review of the literature. Findings The most conspicuous fashion might be new public management (NPM) and its successor, post-NPM. However, recent reforms which involve complexity created the challenge of “rational calculation” in terms of an understanding of administrative reform. The authors observe that the measure of coordination in a response to fragmentation increases complexity and the rationale behind that reform is based on the instrumental rationality. This hinders real meaning of administrative reform, thereby failing to provide lessons for the future administration. Whether market-based reform or neo-Weberian model of reform, the thing should be considered is the condition under which the reform works. Originality/value This paper reaffirms the importance of the political-bureaucratic system which has multi-functional nature and competing institutional values when the different recipes for reform are imported into different context and a compatibility test by leaders.

Ethical Pluralism in Economics

Traditional approaches to understanding morality, through evaluating outcomes, analyzing rules, principles, and duty, and adhering to notions of virtue and character, offer competing but also complementary ways of framing conduct in a social setting. Ethical pluralism is the claim that all three methods are, to some degree, useful to positive economics because each provides distinctive insights into human behavior. Each is also useful in normative economics because a single framework has limitations that are solved by introducing elements from the others. The neoclassical economic approach, concerned ostensibly with outcome goals, must consider how economic agents are motivated by duty and virtue ethics considerations. Adam Smith’s virtue ethics, for example, arise from moral sentiments, not rational calculation. In considering the morality of efficiency, a Paretian approach derives ultimately from Kantian considerations, and the Kaldor-Hicks approach relies on background conditions of human rights and other non-outcome based elements.