This blog post examines how biotechnology and genetic modification are altering human capabilities and identity, questioning whether enhanced humans can still be considered ‘Homo sapiens’. Entering the 21st century, our lives have undergone truly profound changes. Advances in medical technology have already ushered us into the era of 100-year lifespans. Through genetic mapping—the process...
In this blog post, we explore how the economic theory of perfect competition operates in virtual worlds, using an in-game auction house as an intriguing case study. I happened to take an introductory economics course during my college years. It was an opportunity to learn about the broad concepts of economics and various theories. Although economics initially felt somewhat difficult and...
This blog post examines the legal and social issues surrounding non-compete agreements, balancing the ongoing conflict between workers’ freedom and corporate interests, and summarizes the core of the current debate. A non-compete agreement is a contract clause that restricts one party from engaging in business activities that compete with the other party. The most typical example is...
This blog post examines the structure by which money is created as debt and the logic behind bank lending. It calmly explores why financial crises recur and how debt underpins capitalism. No Debt, No Money Money is ‘debt’. For banks to create money, they must go through the process of ‘lending’. In other words, money takes the form of ‘debt’ and is distributed to many people. This means...
This blog post examines how consumption stimulates the emotion of anxiety, and how that anxiety, combined with marketing, leads to overspending and addictive consumption through case studies. We’ll explore the underlying psychological mechanisms together. Overconsumption begins with buying unnecessary things Now, let’s think about this a little more calmly. What kind of...
This blog post revisits the structure of wealth and anxiety created by capitalism, examining whether a capitalism where the people are the masters—beyond the market and government—is possible, and exploring its conditions from the perspectives of welfare and ethics. Warm Capitalism We have long observed capitalism’s many faces. We’ve seen how capitalism, born with Adam Smith...
In this blog post, following Karl Marx’s Capital, we examine the structure of labor value and surplus value, calmly tracing the operating principles of capitalism where poverty persists despite hard work. Marx’s Life and Materialist Dialectics The free market system Adam Smith described gradually took on the form of capitalism throughout the 19th century. However, the suffering...
This blog post examines how women’s consumption is linked to emotions, relationships, and anxiety, making them a core marketing target, while calmly analyzing how capitalism designs consumer psychology. The Crown Jewel of Marketing: Women’s Marketing What about adults? In adult marketing, the most crucial target is women. ‘Women’s marketing’ is even called the crown jewel...
This blog post explores how Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has impacted modern science and our daily lives. Discover how its revolutionary concepts of time and space transformed technology and ways of thinking. The theory of relativity is divided into the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity. Relativity is not merely a set of physical laws; it...
This blog post delves deeply into whether AI is truly a being capable of ‘thinking’ like humans, or if it is just a machine that imitates intelligence. What is AI? It’s easy to see that AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. AI is often interpreted as systems that mimic knowledge of human behavior to act accordingly. For example, AlphaGo, which defeated Lee Sedol at Go, or the...