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Innovation harbour
A brick, you can buy in a store. A special kind of brick has to be custom-made. But if you need a thousand bricks, you contact a wholesaler to buy them in bulk, and if you need a million bricks it might be a better idea to place an order directly with the factory. But…
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Unemployment or job shortage?
It might seem obvious to take on a job that doesn’t suit you all that well if you’re unemployed, but in that situation there will often be discouraging practical issues, or we could be dealing with a legal economist calculating to so-and-so-many decimals that working a job for four days a week is less lucrative…
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Certainty
A society on the move, both localising and globalising, where companies are looking for new economic models and where individuals aren’t sure whether what they learned in 2012 is still true in 2013. Politics coerced by the illusions of the day into serving the illusions of the day, media joining in happily. It all makes…
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ICT: From simplification to complication
For a long time, ICT seemed to be the solution to the increasing complexity of the world, to the increasing complexity of the questions and that of the answers, the yearly increase by 100% of information on the internet, the total information overload; ring binders and address books were replaced by digital systems, and without…
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Column: From Enlightment to Aggravation
There are more of us here now than ever before. We are tearing down national borders and language barriers; information, knowledge and ideas are now stored forever. We live to be older, maybe even wiser, and thanks to social media, we can be part of it from a very young age on: nobody needs to…
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Solidarity
Last week, Dutch politicians Pechtold and Krol proposed a motion to make the job market a nicer place for people over 50. Nicer at whose expense, though? A brief look in the Oxford English Dictionary will tell you that solidarity is a two-way street, but this word is increasingly being used to refer to a…