Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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With some short-term relief work in Asia/Africa and long stint in Telecom, Thang also earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he earned a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Tag: Adam Smith

  • Impending Incident

    The North-East is once again bracing for a gathering storm. Climate change and the prolonged cold front. Satellite tracking has improved weather forecast substantially. Other things in life seem less certain e.g. financial market and food/fuel prices. The Queen of England was reported as saying “how come no one saw this coming?” (in the context of this past Recession).…

  • Unseen hands

    that manipulate interest rates, oil price, appropriate and earmark budgets for the commons. Adam Smith must be talking about the abstract “invisible hand” of a free market, while in reality, we all feel there are levers behind the scene with successive hands, tinkling and adjusting. Some are automated, by self-improving algorithms. One example of the…

  • Start thinking

    This is the last of the Trilogy: Start seeing, start hearing and start thinking. It’s the hardest, because the end product of thinking is acting. Acting means change. Change brings dissonance and discomfort. Our faculty is quite limited: we are conditioned to respond in Pavlovian way. Group think. Similar to   Adam Smith’s unseen hand…

  • Chicago’s former self

    I finished the epilogue to “the Devil in the White City” longing for more. That’s how good the read was. The architects and builders reached out to the sky, and in Ferris’ case, taking the people up with him for an amusement ride in 1893. The Fair (DreamLand) later inspired DisneyLand. But not all was…

  • deja vu

    Yesterday I reposted “Invisible Man“.  Today, it’s about “invisible hand“. There is an invisible hand that definitely plays with events in history, and this Adam-Smith-like hand seems to run out of tricks every 40 years or so, so it seems. In Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley Press), we learn that history seems to recycle itself every 40 years…