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Sangath, www.sangath.com, is looking to build a centre for services, training and research and seeks to buy approx 1500 to 2000 sq mtrs land betweeen Mapusa and Bambolim and surrounding rural areas. Please contact: [email protected] or [email protected] or ph+91-9881499458 http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2009-July/180028.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hello All, Are there any individuals who have worked or are currently working at/with the World Bank. or anyone who knows someone who would be willing to talk/dialogue/engage with a friend of mine on Social Capital. If yes, then do please email me. On another note this may be a topic of interest Goanetters who could use it as a topic worth discussing. venantius j pinto ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Hi Venantius, How have you been, I've been meaning to catch up with you. There's been a lot of new changes on my side. Obviously the baby is going to be a big change.. but apart from that, I have started reading into the theory of Social Capital and Game Theory. Both still very young disciplines, merely a few decades old.. I went back to Tokyo for my friend's wedding and in the process, decided that I had to do something about the way extreme individualism (false democracy and freedom) was causing a gradual degradation of societal cohesion. This can be seen by the change in the types of crimes committed. Crime with hatred and jealousy, or even revenge are rare and far in between. We see more crime caused by mental disorders and people who simply slip out of society, feeling like they just had to kill someone just because they could. The quality of these new types of crime, and traditional crime of stealing, revenge, etc, are quite different. Crime is merely a visual indicator. As societal norms degrade from generation to generation, the rippling effect digs deeper into the future, meaning, the effect becomes more and more chronic the longer we let is sink into the younger generations. Because societal ties and cohesion is becoming weak, lower generations learn to cope with less ties and "togetherness", causing the cohesion level to drop further, from generation to generation. Schools cannot deal with this, simply because it is not only their job to do so. Parents do not do anything because they are mostly illusion ed by the sense of independence and freedom that comes from irresponsibility,solitude, and self inflicted segregation. The bottom line is that even from an informal analysis of 1 generation (parent and child), it is apparent that there is a sort of unidirectional change (degradation) happening, that will not fix itself for the foreseeable future. So a couple of my friends and I decided that we'll spend the next couple of years learning about this problem and prepare to create an organization whose mission is to fix this situation. Perhaps it will be an npo, hopefully a private consultancy for the government.. the format doesn't really matter, but it is apparent that the problem needs to addressed. I started researching into "declining societal cohesion", and the study of social capital popped up. I was actually quite surprised because I did not know that most societies had this problem. US especially, since at least the white folks stick together in their comical homogeneity. But still, social capital has been declining since the 60's, and has won the attention of many researchers. Reading further into Social Capital, there seems to be several aspects that keep researchers interested. (and getting grants) One is economics. Social capital, and generalized trust go hand and hand, and they also happen to go hand in hand with a healthy economy. So there is monetary reason for the government / state to be interested in social capital. Next is civil activity. When there is a decline in social capital, there is a decline in civil activity, and vice versa. And lastly, social capital has great implications on the well being of people, and is an interest to people from health care. (people survive better with a strong net of trusted friends, etc) What I thought was some tiny problem I was glad to have found early on in Japan, is quite widespread and is being actively researched in the US, UK, Italy, and Scandinavia. So I'm quite glad I wasn't the only one who decided to act on the issue. Now the problem is where to go from here. My current goal is to get to know the practical implementations of social capital better. See it in action, see how it can be used. (especially at the government level) There are several groups that use social capital. First is Australia. Australia's Institution of Family Research has a group studying social capital and its effect on family function. They also have a group in the Census Bureau that is researching how to measure social capital. The biggest of them all is the World Bank. They have been researching social capital for close to 20 years now, and have a special Societal Capital Team. I was wondering if you knew anyone who is involved with the world bank. The world bank's initiative to abolish poverty is very nice, but I am also concerned with the terrifying amount of criticism on world bank's choice of policies. (because they are dicta ed by G8 to merit G8) Anyway, I wanted to hear your opinions about them, if you even care about them. But anyway, this is all very interesting stuff. I think you would like the conceptualization surrounding this discipline. This is a brief article presented to International Monetary Fund by Francis Fukuyama: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/seminar/1999/reforms/fukuyama.htm Fukuyama has written some key documents in the field, and is also a very influential thinker in the US. Anyway, let me know how you process all this information. Very curious to exchange views with you on this matter. How is your schedule for the next few weekends? -Ken
