Ah, I've been thinking a lot about the late David Graeber lately. He was right about diagnosing so many problems (and quite wrong about many of his proposed solutions). Debt, The First 500 Years, has become one of my favourite economics books. I keep coming back to it and how it makes explicit the dirty … Continue reading Debt and Taxes
Sometimes a picture gets the point across quicker. Money is a necessary evil for allocating real scarcity - therefore it needs to be definitively scarce itself. Markets make more (good for maximising and allocating goods, bad). Monopolies make less (good for limiting bads; evil for limiting goods). Artificial abundance has unintended consequences (artificial goods can … Continue reading Of Markets, Money and Monopolies
"Everyone except an economist knows what 'money' means, and even an economist can describe it in at the course of a chapter or so..." ~ A.H. Quiggin Best chased (in my opinion) with a little eurodollar crash course (like this) Money, The Unauthorised Biography is one of the better efforts in the genre of "attempting … Continue reading Money (the unauthorised biography)
If you work for a salary or even own a business that requires you to work a defined number of hours in a defined place every week, you are a slave. A slave is a dependant on a master. A slave is tied to a physical location - a time and place, not of his … Continue reading Who is your master?
I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of books. In this fictional universe the gods get their power and divinity through the belief of their believers. The more believers the god has, the more powerful the god. But when their believers stop believing in them entirely, the gods disappear. This belief/power dynamic is … Continue reading The power of belief
