I received many of these photos of daily life in Tehran in an email last fall.
Whatever our political-economic competition, I resist the path to war. Religious difference is an excuse, a justification, mere rationalization cloaked in moral self-righteousness. To alter the apparent inevitability of another war, we - as "a people" - must begin to create new bases for the global economy. It is up to us to shift the PPF from guns to butter.
The Production Possibility Frontier is a graph of the most efficient way an economy can produce goods and provide services. In a recent college classroom, the basic benchline diagram (at the macroecnomic level, such as global and national economies) is plotted between military expenditures ("guns") and domestic expenditures ("butter"). Interestingly, the links I'm finding with a general google search for "production possibility frontier" on the Internet give the example of two domestic products. What a subtle convenience! Let's just pretend that only the domestic matters! This is what drives consumerism - if we spend, the economy will grow. However, this is only half the equation, or - more realistically - less than half. "Wine" and "bread" is the (everyday living domestic) part that is currently dependent on the other, on the "guns" and bombs and armored uniforms and tanks and military expenditures generated ad nauseum when the US goes to war.
There are more roads to peace than there are to war. We must find the will to choose them.
