Thinking ahead leads to good things?
A referral to a referral to a referral to an article. It's how ideas get passed along.Jim Lerch pointed me toward the blog, Marginal Revolution written by Tyler Cowen, an economist who teaches at George Mason University. His blog reminds me the Freakonomics blog, because he also applies economic analysis to a wide variety of situations.
The entry to which Jim directly referred me was, "Which countries have an eye on the future?"
In that entry, Cowen is referring to another blog, the Private Sector Development Blog at the World Bank.
Cowen's comment on the topic might help us understand the dissatisfaction and hope revealed in the public opinion poll in Nigeria that I cited here. Cowen wrote, "Having an orientation toward the future is also strongly correlated with both happiness and confidence."
A cautionary comment on that blog noted psychologist "Daniel Gilbert's findings that people with limited (or no) choices are comparatively happier," so maybe the correlation with an "orientation toward the future," is suspect.
Could your political science students find correlations between "an orientation to the future" with political characteristics? See the chart that accompanies the article below to see the rankings. Then set students the task of finding other factors (consecutive number of contested elections, protection of civil liberties, transparency of government) that produce similar rankings.
The primary article is in the Harvard Business Review and is titled, "Forward-Thinking Cultures" by Mansour Javidan.
"My colleagues and I discovered [that cultural orientation toward the future varies widely the world over]... By surveying over 17,000 middle managers in 61 societies, we have been able to discern clear differences in nine key areas. One of these is what we call “future orientation"...
"In our study, Singapore emerged as the most future oriented of cultures, followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. The least future oriented were Russia, Argentina, Poland, and Hungary. Squarely in the middle were Germany, Taiwan, Korea, and Ireland. Even more important, however, is our further finding that the greater a society’s future orientation, the higher its average GDP per capita and its levels of innovativeness, happiness, confidence, and (as the chart shows) competitiveness..."
[There's a nifty chart in the online article displaying these results.]
Labels: concepts, pedagogy, political culture
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:34 AM
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