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  • - Modest preemptive actions can obviate the need

  • of more drastic actions at a later date.

  • - You think that you've been taught things like confidence intervals

  • in an elementary statistical course that would let you do this;

  • but if you really studied carefully,

  • you'd know that they don't let you do this.

  • A really principled frequentist can't produce a probability distribution...

  • - The conclusion we want to point out when we think about valuation

  • is the fact that means are scarce. I alluded to this already that

  • as finite beings we can't will our ends to be attained.

  • - A statistical description of the government's net-of-interest surplus.

  • - ...deflation, I think that yields could drop to say, less than 1%

  • on the 10 years and less than 2% on the 30 years...

  • - ...that would effectively be a takeover of monetary policy by the Congress. - Oh, hello!

  • Daunting, right? Might even make you feel stupid.

  • Perhaps it's no wonder then,

  • while even with the ongoing economic failures across the world:

  • inequality, increasing poverty, debt collapse,

  • bank failures, unemployment rising,

  • very few today seem to be able to understand,

  • let alone discuss, modern economics,

  • outside, of course, the delegation game

  • where the only attempted solutions people know

  • is the mere shifting around of the deck chairs on the Titanic,

  • assuming some new politician, central bank policy, or corporate legislation

  • is going to save the day.

  • Some years back, after coming to the conclusion that our politicians,

  • legislators, and established authorities just might be provably incompetent

  • when it comes to the truly intelligent management of our society,

  • I started to look for questions and answers on my own,

  • asking those questions about things

  • that many today either seem to take for granted, ignore or even worse,

  • assume that they have no capacity or business investigating at all,

  • since our credentialed authorities in control

  • must be smarter, more informed.

  • It's a sad staple of modern culture, you know,

  • the old "Relax, turn on the TV, keep going into debt,

  • and pump out a bunch of kids while you're at it,"

  • but most importantly, keep showing up at those jobs

  • which you have likely already fooled yourself into believing

  • serve some legitimate social role.

  • Remember, the 1% of the world that owns 40% of the planet's wealth

  • did not get that way with you understanding how the world really works.

  • Nevertheless, and such cynicism aside (I'm sorry),

  • I decided that I needed to start again,

  • if you will, and ask some fundamental questions

  • about stuff most have simply written off and forgotten.

  • If you were to take a poll today of our species, asking what truly are

  • the most fundamental questions that pertain to human survival and prosperity,

  • such as, I don't know, what really supports human life, how food grows,

  • what energy is, what creates and reinforces good public health,

  • what defines a useful or detrimental belief system,

  • you can rest assured, that the vast majority would have more concrete answers

  • about baseball statistics, fashion trends, sitcom plots, and religious scriptures.

  • Not to demean the cultural pleasures and creativity of expression

  • that creates enjoyment in this life,

  • but we have a distortion of priority that has proven incredibly detrimental

  • to the future of our sustainability on this planet,

  • where the majority facing clear mounting problems

  • not only doesn't understand what the root of such problems really are,

  • they don't even know what questions to ask;

  • and today, there is no greater destructive ignorance at hand,

  • than the vastly delusional concept known as modern economics.

  • It is in this fundamental context that I found the most interest.

  • What is an economy?

  • Where does its foundational premise come from?

  • What are we relating to exactly?

  • How is societal organization finding a benchmark for itself?

  • Is there a benchmark? What are we doing?

  • Why does the discussion of this subject appear to be so elitist

  • in its vocabulary and orientation? Is it really that complicated?

  • I became so tired of being called ignorant of the subject

  • by self-proclaimed experts I've challenged,

  • I decided to take it upon myself to read the entire

  • macro-economics curriculum of Harvard University

  • from the undergraduate to the PhD level,

  • along with all the staples of influence: F.A. Hayek, John Maynard Keynes,

  • Ludwig von Mises; and I'll tell you what, I'm really glad I did

  • because I had some very poor judgments that needed correction,

  • not so much regarding my views about economics,

  • but that life is short, and I wasted an enormous,

  • unforgivable amount of time reading this outdated,

  • overly-intellectualized gibberish.

  • [Glass Breaking] Ah, shit!

  • Bob, would you take care of that please? The fuse panel.

  • Be careful man, it's not... [Explosion][Bob screaming]

  • As the following episode will detail,

  • modern economics is not true economics at all.

  • It's a mere ideological philosophy, built upon a series of presuppositions

  • that have been given the illusion of permanence.

  • There is absolutely no relationship to the scientific integrity

  • of our knowledge of the environment built into this model.

  • The monetary-market system of religious belief

  • is at the core of the vast majority of ecological and social imbalance

  • we see in the world today.

  • Sadly, it is in the face of normality, so many look past it.

  • We might begin to see that this principal notion and practice

  • is truly a problem in society, and to me,

  • it is at the heart of a culture in decline.

  • Earth: Curious little ball of rock, gas and water, isn't it?

  • Hard to believe this little bubble of chemical elements floating in space,

  • basically powered by the sun, could give rise to our colorful,

  • yet rather troubling super-monkey species,

  • a species often appearing pretty serious in its interest to destroy its habitat,

  • though I should say pretty serious in its interest to destroy itself.

  • - What is democracy?

  • - It's got something to do with young men killing each other, I believe.

  • - Excuse me a second. Bob, what the hell was that?

  • The cut away, it wasn't funny. It was just depressing.

  • Couldn't you find some guy shooting a bottle rocket out of his ass or something?

  • You know what our demographic is and the point of the show, right?

  • Okay, well please.

  • Anyway, perhaps our immaturity is just a phase,

  • a tragically comedic rite of passage,

  • no different than children that need to be burned

  • by a hot stove in order to realize they shouldn't touch it,

  • or what the physics behind it may be.

  • Nevertheless, the history and characteristics of this little orb

  • can be scientifically described with a good deal of accuracy:

  • A couple of billion years old now, a composite of gas and dust

  • that resulted mostly from a large chemical reaction long ago,

  • likely an exploding star or supernova;

  • and over millions of years this dust clustered into relatively big chunks of rock,

  • a pronounced gravitational field emerged,

  • our chemical elements were slowly reorganized,

  • and conditions emerged to enable water and an atmosphere,

  • which is what bred the first single-celled organisms;

  • and so went the slow process of mutation

  • into the very amusing circumstance we have today: us.

  • Of course, you are free to believe whatever creation story you like:

  • a rib from Adam, alien cross pollination, primordial ooze.

  • At the end of the day, the utility of such knowledge is quite small.

  • In fact, our little monkey brains

  • might never have a complete picture of something so complex.

  • Yet what we do know is that the universe is governed by laws,

  • not moral or religious laws, but laws that were around

  • long before we ever evolved a brain to understand them.

  • Laws that very clearly point out that we either adapt to them

  • and respect them, or we suffer the consequences.

  • Such is the true face of God: the Laws of Nature.

  • In many ways, the history of our universe

  • is the history of our understanding of it,

  • and we have come a long way as a species

  • with respect to how we organize our lives around these rules.

  • Likely the best example of this adaptation,

  • or in many ways lack thereof, is how we think about economy,

  • the foundation of our social survival.

  • Many thousands of years ago, our super-monkey brethren

  • began to discover how to engage nature.

  • We went from being completely at the mercy of the habitat,

  • gathering our food with some hunting,

  • living and migrating around the natural seasonal regeneration,

  • to an agricultural revolution, learning how to cultivate food,

  • create ever [more] sophisticated tools to ease labor

  • and in effect, learn how to mimic nature itself.

  • In fact, this new awareness and ever-increasing understanding

  • to harness the processes of nature to our advantage

  • is what has led to the vast technological innovation we see today.

  • If nature is doing something, odds are we can understand how

  • through these dynamic scientific principles, from artificial intelligence today

  • which works to emulate actual neurological processes,

  • to molecular engineering which uses the atomic logic

  • to manually recreate material objects.

  • And now, ever-important blood shifting erectile dysfunction drugs,

  • which if you have being watching TV recently,

  • must be the most epidemic health crisis in the Western world today.

  • Since this revolution, human society became less nomadic,

  • slowly merging into cities,

  • and systems of labor specialization began to rise