In the video below Stefan shows all the money that was wasted in the recent US Middle Eastern wars and what Americans could have had instead. Although he doesn't mention this, the trillions wasted really went straight back into the hands of One Percent, who own the armament industries. And the government borrowed the money from the private banks which are also owned by the One Percent. A double whammy for the mega rich, while the tax payer pays for it all.
I have just watched this again and it is superb and beautiful shot.
Paradise Stolen - DON'T SHOW YOUR CHILDREN
In this video below Stefan shows how China had many great civilizations but they all crumbled exactly the same way. First of all primitive people would form simple societies and then towns and villages start to develop and so does trade. This is the start of civilization and then an Emperor takes control after winning over other warlords. At this point society lives in relative peace and the emperor is benign and rules fairly and wisely, keeping law and order and providing public services, national defence, and security. Society then advances and a merchant class starts to develop and at this point a great civilization begins to come into existence. And that's okay for a while but the merchants start to get extremely rich and so can corrupt the government and the emperor. The new merchant class also squeeze more and more profits out of society and get the Emperor to shift all of the tax burden onto ordinary people. In the last stage of civilisation it starts to crumble because ordinary have no money left to spend anymore. Eventually the whole things falls in and every rich person of the merchant class gets hunted down and killed. No one ever escapes, except for one emperor who hid in a monetary and became a monk for the rest of his life.
Despite all the Chinese scholars and academics who knew exactly what caused the breakdown of all the great empires the Chinese could never stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Stefan believes the US is going the same way.
Historical Cycles: Are we doomed to repeat the past?
10 comments:
nivekvb-
"And the government borrowed the money from the private banks which are also owned by the One Percent."
Issuing TSY CDs is not a borrowing operation of Fed checking depsoits anymore than Chase issuing a Chase CD in exchange for some Chase checking deposits is Chase borrowing its own IOUs.
And while I agree that paying interest to TSY CD holders is a far less productive use of a dollar than just about any other spending, but with that said, lets be honest and accurate here:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/10/230944425/everyone-the-u-s-government-owes-money-to-in-one-graph
$6 trillion is owned by foreigners
$6 trillion is owned by the Federal Govt
and most of the remaining $5 trillion is held domestically by pension funds both private and state\local Govt pensions, mutual funds and insurance entities. So its not the case that all this interest spending is just going to banks or the 1%. A broad cross section of the USA receives interest income from TSY CDs.
And Auburn as they continue to raise rates the state/local govts are going to get well as much current revenues are going to pick up the slack in the pension funds... those balances are going to become available for more state/local public works as the rates continue to go up... its going to help..
Please use proper link tags. In html is:
< a href="http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/" >MNE< /a >
w/o the whitespaces. For usability and aesthetics.
Yes Ignacio, I will look into how I can make the links active.
Hi auburn, thanks for correcting me.
Historical cycles? Of course. This is no mystery to anyone who's been exposed to or studied evolving, recombinant systems.
It's a problem of both pace AND scale.
Simple analogy. Every adolescent, upon going through a grow spurt, HAS TO (by definition) get temporarily clumsier before they can regain agility, or attain more.
Again, that's a simple function of both pace AND scale. To accommodate either rapid or novel growth, the internal system instrumentation has to reorganize, AFTER THE FACT.
In a human physiology, the system instrumentation = your sensory & nervous systems, both peripheral and central.
In a human culture, the system instrumentation which has to be reconfigured and reorganized are the components of our social system, from data broadcasting, sampling, sharing and analyzing to social response generation (Public Initiative), from governance to taxes to regulation to distributed implementation methods such as Automatic Stabilizers.
The $100 question is how graceful a growing, recombinant system can be when making adjustments to unpredictable needs of pace or scale alone. Biology & ecology as we know it includes deeply engineered methods for continuous recombination, which we describe through topics such as genetics and embryology and programmed lifespans. Those are all methods for spawning recombinant forms, fostering them to final form, and then gracefully getting out of their way.
In addition to all the details, what's novel for human culture is the sheer scale and unprecedented pace or tempo of demands for cultural recombination.
Instead of paying attention to too many outmoded taboos randomly foisted by people living 200 or more generations ago, we may well need to be artful about the different tempos needed for social recombination (heck, maybe we'd be better off with 10x MORE homosexuals), social embryology (send your brightest kids to marry bright kids anywhere on the globe?) and more attention to programmed institutional lifespans (you know, so our outmoded policies and institutions can get out of the way of those trying to construct new methods to meet new challenges).
I've written about this multiple times at MNE. Hopefully there will gradually be less complaints that people don't understand.
Now, about the task of achieving GRACEFUL rather than painful social adjustments. Is that so wildly different from an adolescent adjusting to changes in their own body ... through PRACTICE? No and yes. Remember that current, national and global social-embryology is continuous, distributed and interleaved, through staggered generations, not as punctate as sperm&egg combining and then growing for 9 months.
In that regard, a growing human culture is more like a tumor growing uncontrollably. Is it any wonder that, like cell tumors, we human cultural-tumors initially try the tact of simply killing off large numbers that we lack the wit to quickly cooperate and coordinate with?
Despite being the most cooperative species known on planet earth, it sure seems like human progress is gonna require orders of magnitude MORE cooperation. How? Or by what other methods? Either way, what options do we start exploring? Schools? Lifelong training? Social challenges, instead of social wars?
As various wags say, methods drive results.
Yet Desired Aggregate Outcomes and milestone-goals drive appearance of new methods.
So we seem to have a never ending chicken & egg problem. What comes first for a species or culture, the growth or the recombinant reorganization?
And can we ever escape from the cycle of expedient vs graceful adaptations?
Mathematically, it seems doubtful that either method will ever drop to zero in our cultural toolkit. That's as unlikely as assuming we'll ever stop removing some tumors from growing adolescents. The goal in each case, however, is clearly to pursue cheap prevention rather than expensive repair ... at least if we want our descendants to be all that they can be (OUTSIDE of just the Army :) ).
@ nivekvb
Use "Link" in the center of formatting bar at the top of the page when creating a new post in Blogger to insert a clickable link in a post.
HTML will only work if you switch from Compose to HTML in the top left of the formatting bar. If you do this for YouTube, then the YouTube content will appear in the Blogger page when you switch back to Compose.
You can also insert a graphic or video by clicking on the graphic and video insert buttons that are to the right of Link in the formatting bar.
Good points, Roger.
Seems to me that there are three major areas of challenge.
1. educating new generations, keeping pace with knowledge growth.
2. responding to opportunities and challenges resulting from emergence.
3. dealing with ignorance and misinformation.
# 3 can be compared to restoring sight to a person born blind. Although they can now see, they have to learn how to see in the sense of making connections between the language they have learned while blind and the use of language coupled with sight. There's a coordination issue and it takes time to acquire the needed coordination.
I don't share Stefan's pessimism. Our technology is far more modern than anything before and we have the Internet. I think we will get out of this.
I'm going to write an article about Peter Joseph and the Zeitgeist movement at some stage. And I also have an article to finished off about epigenetics and nueroplasticity.
I looked on the net and I have discovered that HTML is computer language. I'm looking into it. Thanks, Tom.
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