Thinking in dimensions

I was reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thom Friedman, it's a pretty good book, but could be half the distance. Anyhoo, i was thinking that one of the things i really liked about the book is that he talked about 'thinking in dimensions'. What he meant by that was thinking along differen 'filters' for international events. Of course, especially before the end of the cold war, lots of people thought that the political dimension reigned supreme. Nowadays it's the economic and technological views that predominate analysis. With the war in Iraq the supreme dimension we think about is cultural (religious) with a heavy dose of economics (oil) and those countries lack of technological sophistication.

So i forget the other dimensions, i'll put them in later, but for now let me list them:
1. political (democracy/dictatorship)
2. cultural (religion/philosophy)
3. economic (capitalist/socialist)
4.
and a few others, he names six. Unfortunately i lent this book to a friend going to india so i won't be able to figure out the other dimensions.

In a related note, my dad is thinking about writing another book about my family's history. And since he's intelligent he first flushed out the main arguments he wanted to convey in this book. He said that he wanted to analyze economics, religion, family and sex (of course race), and he's also going to talk about these topics through the lenses of the 'moral elevation' happening after the Great Awakening (one of the feverish Christianization periods that the US went through) on the topics of race, class, gender and something else.

Don't you hate when you remember most of something? I did it twice in this one post. You can be mad at me, and blame me for your next four mistakes because i threw your 'energy' off. til nex time