The term “economics imperialism” has been coined in recent decades to describe a tendency of economists to meddle with such seemingly non-economic aspects of life as crime, the family, irrational behavior, politics, culture, religion, and war. Mine is an attempt to invade the world of music.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Georgia went through a process of civil war and economic collapse. Official estimates suggest that Georgia’s GDP shrunk by more than 70% between 1990 and1994.

Georgia’s growth performance since independence has gone through extremes, from an unprecedented -44.9 percent in 1992 to 12.3 percent in 2007. Although growth rates temporarily fell in the aftermath of the Russian-Georgian war and the world financial crisis they have since then recovered to 7 percent in 2011

Anyone who has seen an old American classic “Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) probably remembers the scene where one of the protagonists, Al Stephenson, a banker who just returned from the war in the Pacific, tells his incredulous colleagues: “Our bank is alive. It’s generous.

I know. I know that I know. For as long as the human race existed, knowledge embodied power. In the life of a society, however, what becomes even more important is the fact that we share certain knowledge with fellow human beings, and that we, moreover, are aware of each other’s knowledge.