Miljenko's Blog

Recent political developments revived debates of inequality and how "the rich are getting richer" and in those discussions a fundamental point of difference has been completely missed which is that rich people do not care about money more than people who have less of it. Or to put it differently, once one achieves a certain level of wealth, the concerns of money in terms of making more of it become a much lesser relative concern than they were when they had little and had to "put food on the table". This makes so much sense and yet it is widely accepted that the opposite is true - that a Billionaire will be focused on money more so than somebody who is short rent money this month. And where it gets really off the rails is in the implication that somehow, in terms of their behaviour, wealthy people will be willing to compromise morals, ethics and even the law in order to "get more money" and do so more readily than poor people. The unexamined and unsp...

Recent weeks and months have seen a remarkable escalation of emotions spread around the world. I won’t go into why, what it means and what may happen next, at least not here. What this recent period has made me realize is that the propensity of young men to “express” themselves through violence is a human universal, only this time around it has found a somewhat new, very thin, veneer under which to mask itself as being “different this time” than in other instances (such as French students protesting hikes in student fees). First of all, this is about violence, about physical confrontation including vandalism and damage of property. While women protest plenty, it took a man at women’s march in Edmonton to actually throw a punch (at a woman). For men, physical confrontation is not only a key part of their “expressing themselves”, it seems to be innate. Senseless violence of football hooligans in Europe has been around forever. Young men in Belgrade schedule to fight each oth...