Adam Smith, Dionysian?

V&R loves Roger Caillois!  His work on games adds to the reflections of Huizinga (V&R Chapter 6), which I think analytically potent.   Whilst Huizinga dwells on the attributes an activity must have to be a game, Caillois thinks about the classification of games.  He identifies four: competition, chance, mimickry, and vertigo.  These categories, respectively,…

Banking billions through subsidiarity

Discussed at V&R Chapter 3 are the basic principles of Catholic Social Thought (CST), including the moral principle of subsidiarity.   Don Quijote is a Japanese retail chain whose business plan is built on each shop having subsidiarity (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-17/the-cult-japanese-retailer-making-billions-breaking-all-the-rules).  All hiring and management is local to ensure that the shops act like barometers to tastes…

Ideology & fashion

A recent opinion piece at BoF argues that rapidification is necessary to bridge the gap between sluggish production and intensified consumer expectation: “Speed, tightly and newly coupled with data science, enables opportunity across each tier and partner of the supply chain” (https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/opinion/op-ed-fashion-needs-a-new-business-model-speed-is-the-answer).   V&R Chapter 2 discusses Pope Francis’s critique of this ideology of technoscience…