Over the course of the past year, I’ve written over three dozen essays that all focus on a single, fundamental question: if we’re so rich, why aren’t we happy?
Capitalism has, as you say, an almost infinite capacity for material improvement. But human happiness and contentment is a scarce resource. The limiting factor ultimately is human nature. Neither capitalism nor an other 'system' can do much about it.
Having said that, I too am sympathetic to the "broad-based DIY/hacker “counterculture” that celebrates the virtues of productive self-sufficiency" that you hope for. But I am not holding my breath. I am not one for predicting the future but my instinct is that, before any positive counter culture emerges an ugly transition would inevitably precede it. Where we are at present in the West, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Maybe we can leave some useful footprints for those who come after: we can put the Permanent Problem into a time capsule to help them understand the last few centuries. (But would they get the references? Maybe we should be creating a cautionary mythology as well: in a way the myths are already there in video games and other popular culture; we'd just need to print it up onto some kind of indestructible paper.)
"Maybe they’re right, maybe another singularity is coming, but what’s clear enough — take a look at the chart below — is that we’re already on the other side of one."
This is a great point, one that I have not yet seen made. I begin my book with the same chart, showing the incredible explosion of what we call "progress" in the a brief period of time. I suppose the question is, when we are talking about "arcs," is progress just a brief effloresce? Perhaps humanity will, some day, create more problems than its ingenuity can resolve. Perhaps the 'mass' of those problems will overcome the forces of ingenuity, collapsing in on itself like a dying star. Is this end inevitable?
It's certainly not the future I want, but it's something I contemplate and write about quite often.
I figure that we've already overrun our own ingenuity, but tend to use biological metaphors - "species dieback" rather than collapse. Maybe a bit less apocalyptic, and takes the perspective that we aren't the only amazing creatures on the planet.
Government control of K12 is the single biggest problem. Had we had a market in education, had it been voluntary, the focus of education would have more consistently been lifelong happiness and well-being rather than consumerism and egotism. Happiness and well-being are built on healthy habits and attitudes. For many Americans, that includes religious education. For secular Americans, it includes more agency-based schools such as Montessori, Waldorf, Acton, and more recent models such as Prenda, Sora, Prisma, and the thousands of microschools popping up.
My program, The Socratic Experience, is explicitly focused on lifelong happiness and wellbeing. I teach a "Purpose" course every day based on the famous "Ikigai" diagram, the intersection of "What do you love?," "What are you good at?," "What will the world need?," and "What will the world pay for?" We also have courses on relationships and how to be an adult. We also provide a range of cool digital skills, audio engineering, video engineering, software development, animation, etc. that they love because they want to be part of the digital world.
This isn't a solution for all students, but it also isn't limited to high IQ students. We attract many creatives who do not do well in conventional school. They are happy and flourishing.
I've spent most of my life in counterculture hubs such as Santa Fe, Austin, and San Francisco, where despite the recent influxes of money, it has long been normal to do what they love. Esalen has been a shrine as long as I can remember. Lifestyle innovations such as meditation, tai chi, adventure sports, massage therapy, etc. have long been normal in these places. Not coincidentally, the latter two have been hotbeds of innovation.
I see the East coast as a late adopter to all of these trends. I'm not claiming any particular virtues for any particular path - I'm very much an advocate of a market in lifestyles. For some people a return to traditional Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim virtue traditions may be most valuable. For others it may be some mix of more contemporary lifestyle traditions - digital media gurus such as Tucker Max (now into Waldorf education) and Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic) have gone beyond making money as a way of life and into new lifestyle trends. Tech entrepreneurs have founded many of the new models of education, including Acton, Alpha, Prenda, Prisma, and Sora. They see how obsolete the old models are.
Traditional K12 is mostly a waste of time that trains children in passivity, meaninglessness, and therefore we graduate the spiritless humans we graduate. In a fully developed education market no one would pick this garbage for their children. The Permanent Problem is an artifact of government control of the most crucial period of human development.
A recent substack on this building on my decades of writing on this topic:
Thanks for the meaty, thought-provoking comment, Michael. I'm sympathetic to the idea that mass institutional schooling for large groups of same-age cohorts is a weird artifact of the industrial era, and I've long hoped that someday we will find much better ways to raise and train our young. But if K-12 schooling is really the fundamental problem, why don't we see a South Korea/North Korea distinction between the 90% of kids who go to public schools and those who try something else? Is contemporary private schooling an insufficiently radical alternative, or are there other confounding factors that make it difficult to see the differential effects of different models of schooling?
Again, a cogent and excellent analysis. I'll continue to beat the drum of being skeptical that the sort of local, self sustaining communities you envision will happen short of a spiritual or religious revolution.
Throughout history the coordination problem has always been extremely difficult to overcome, typically only being defeated by religion. In the modern age where we dramatically reward defecting in prisoners dilemmas and generally selfish action, that problem becomes far harder to bypass. Personally I doubt we will see any real change until institutions break down far further, or we get some sort of messiah who will pour us new wine, as Jesus would've said.
It's very difficult for me to see an economic independence movement getting off the ground without either the forcing agent of some cataclysm or the rise of some powerful new (possibly religiously inspired) social movement. But it's always easier to picture how things can fall apart than to imagine how they might be revitalized, so I'll keep scribbling and hope for the best.
Brink, The ideas here are equally useful for addressing global climate change from a societal viewpoint, as is the direction suggested towards more local "living" on all fronts.
I like the mention of "superhuman," which for me is another way to say "uncontrollable complexity". Pairing the idea with "orientation towards market profit" sums it up. The reminder that "industrialization was a massive exercise in planning, organization, and calculation with an intensity and rigor never before seen" is fodder for my own thinking.
It seems like the basic biological impulses that led to our thriving as a species, "Food!" "Shelter!" too easily translate into "Money". All the time we've been overlaying the qualitative values that come from being a creative and intelligent species: ethics, justice, fairness, love of learning, art, etc. But how to overcome that essential (?) connection between inbred urges towards survival and oh-so-quantifiable money is the puzzle I can't get past (nevertheless, I sense that you're on the right track.)
Major shifts in value systems have occurred with the rise of religions, ideologies like communism, the widespread academies when everyone spoke Latin and there was just less to read, and of course the enlightenment and the rise of science and hyper-rationalism. I see the main problem with culture today as fragmentation. We've naturally grown out of the old value systems, but there are just too many possibilities for replacing them. This is why my own essay on the "permanent problem" would be even less judgmental. The loss of traditional institutions was bound to happen with globalization and the world wide web (symbolized for me by the explosion of channels beyond the reliable three in the U.S., along with the decline of journalism from apex during the 20th century.)
I don't see social media so much as an opiate but as an irresistible obstacle that thwarts the mental development of young brains in terms of attention and curiosity. No one is forced to be bored any more.
In the meantime I have reservations about science and technology, which are also ultimately driven by money rather than by our higher social values. A recent New Yorker article about CRISPR gene editing (9/11/2023) had me realizing that in the best of worlds, all scientific education and every scientific research project would be driven by ethics, to the point that you couldn't be a scientist unless you were ordained and active in a rigorous, multi-disciplinary ethical community.
Thanks for the stimulating work. The language and analysis are spot-on and extremely well expressed. These issues are growing more and more important, as we're seeing some very sinister "permanent solutions" being explicitly analyzed and discussed in the media.
I share a lot of these concerns, but not the one about declining fertility. The world population in 1900 was 1.6 billion, and that was enough to fill the planet. At a net reproduction rate of 0.5, it would take us three generations (more than a century) to get back there, even without considering the impact of longer life spans. Small families are part of the solution, not part of the problem
Here we disagree deeply. We can't go back to the population of 1900 -- it was much younger than we are today, dramatically younger than what we'll be when we've shrunk so much, and it was growing. Even declining population growth with aging is bad for productivity growth; outright depopulation with old populations will lead to shrinking GDP and it's going to be ugly. And once it starts, it will be very difficult to stop: even if young people start breeding like rabbits, there will be so few of them that they will have to keep it up for decades before things turn around. A few big cities will suck in population as everywhere else goes into a doom loop: loss of tax base means loss of services or higher taxes, which leads to more population loss and so on. Vast stretches of the country will all but abandoned, cities left to ruin. Do you really imagine any progressive values can flourish in that kind of environment? What kind of future-orientation is possible when children are a rarity and the cultural tone is dictated by old people living in the past? Rural population decline is already strongly associated with support for authoritarian populism -- just wait till what's been happening in eastern Europe the past 20 years (mostly due to emigration) is happening pretty much everywhere.
I'm planning a much more extensive analysis of this, but you are confusing the effects of population mobility with those of lower birth rates. The two are quite different.
I don't see how, unless AI would take the lead in invention and innovation. A shrinking population places incredible strain on government finances, depresses economic growth, curtails innovation, and threatens our ability and will to solve the problems of the future: https://www.lianeon.org/p/we-dont-have-enough-people
An emptying planet would have hallowed out cities, decaying apartment complexes, and roads, fewer airline routes, and less vitality overall.
All of these claims are made repeatedly, and all are wrong. A shrinking population means less need to invest in roads, buildings, airports etc, as you implicitly admit in your final sentence
How do you maintain existing roads, buildings, airports when the local population is shrinking? Nearly half of U.S. counties are now losing population and I've read many reports of the fiscal burdens this causes -- any stories of population loss actually improving local goverment finances?
All news stories about local government finances are bad news stories.
This is a fact about news stories, not about local government. Where population is growing, roads and other infrastructure are congested and inadequate.
I'm planning a long study on this, but I'll start with a simple point in response. Population decline is problematic for government finances if working-age adults are leaving, not so much if fewer children are being born.
You write "the capitalist system has developed in ways that leaves us well short of mass flourishing"
The way this is expressed implies that the absence of mass flourishing is something that was imposed by some sort of outside force. It was not. I is a political choice that was made more than half a century ago.
It's my judgment that the New Deal order had basically been abandoned by the left before right-of-center neoliberalism filled the vacuum. Check out my essay on Brad DeLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia."
Also did you check out the link I provided? I made a specific case for policy choices made no later than 1964 as responsible for the end of the New Deal order. This was before the New Left.
Thanks, I also read the piece on the Capitalist Crisis. I also have a capitalist crisis, but it is a very specific thing that can be identified empirically. I first noted the capitalist crisis in 2010. Here's my piece on this.
An issue I have with explanations like the New Left or the Neoliberal turn, is they do not explain mechanistically how they *caused* the economic events they are trying to account for.
My account directly associates fiscal imbalance with declining gold reserves, causing the end of the gold standard in 1971. Nixon implemented price controls to prevent the inflation this would cause until he was safely re-elected. Price inflation soared after they were released, and OPEC took advantage of trend to quadruple oil prices. I note that oil prices after the hike were no higher than they had been in 1970 when expressed in terms of gold. Had the gold reserve not been allowed to fall, the 1973 embargo would still have happened, and there would be a spike in inflation, but would be short-lived like the one we just went through. We wouldn't have had a decade of inflation.
Real wage growth stopped in 1973 for the same reason it stopped rising after 2020, inflation. This time, the inflation lasted two years, last time it was 24 years before the inflationary forces had disappeared and low unemployment rates could again be achieved without inflation.
Lack of real wage growth for decades means no labor power. Unions cannot function in such an environment (unions magnify labor power and are powerless when there is no power to magnify).
So, there's your neoliberal turn, it's just mechanical. but the environment this creates affects politics. For example, inflation was stopped using high unemployment as I explain in the post I previously cited. With inflation controlled (at workers expense) Republicans could cut taxes for the rich without the inflation that would be worse that the benefits of the tax cuts. In the past Republicans had supported tax *increases* in order to forestall inflation. Fiscal responsibility was no longer necessary, as Dick Cheney pointed out in 2002, Reagan proved deficits don't matter.
Bush was right, Reaganomics was voodoo economics, but the voodoo works if the Fed is suppressing the inflation your fiscal irresponsibility would otherwise generate. Then as I explain in my inflation model, today inflation is prevented by the SAME financial flows that cause the capitalist crisis.
This is how systems work, one thing affects something else, which affects a third thing that feeds back on the first, and, well its complicated. That's why I have to reference so many posts that explain how the components work.
When large organisations compete for the top spot, be it on the battlefield or at the mall, the resulting costs are huge, and mostly borne by those whom they enlist/employ. I know competition is valuable, but can we find ways to make do with less of it?
Capitalism has, as you say, an almost infinite capacity for material improvement. But human happiness and contentment is a scarce resource. The limiting factor ultimately is human nature. Neither capitalism nor an other 'system' can do much about it.
Having said that, I too am sympathetic to the "broad-based DIY/hacker “counterculture” that celebrates the virtues of productive self-sufficiency" that you hope for. But I am not holding my breath. I am not one for predicting the future but my instinct is that, before any positive counter culture emerges an ugly transition would inevitably precede it. Where we are at present in the West, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Maybe we can leave some useful footprints for those who come after: we can put the Permanent Problem into a time capsule to help them understand the last few centuries. (But would they get the references? Maybe we should be creating a cautionary mythology as well: in a way the myths are already there in video games and other popular culture; we'd just need to print it up onto some kind of indestructible paper.)
"Maybe they’re right, maybe another singularity is coming, but what’s clear enough — take a look at the chart below — is that we’re already on the other side of one."
This is a great point, one that I have not yet seen made. I begin my book with the same chart, showing the incredible explosion of what we call "progress" in the a brief period of time. I suppose the question is, when we are talking about "arcs," is progress just a brief effloresce? Perhaps humanity will, some day, create more problems than its ingenuity can resolve. Perhaps the 'mass' of those problems will overcome the forces of ingenuity, collapsing in on itself like a dying star. Is this end inevitable?
It's certainly not the future I want, but it's something I contemplate and write about quite often.
I figure that we've already overrun our own ingenuity, but tend to use biological metaphors - "species dieback" rather than collapse. Maybe a bit less apocalyptic, and takes the perspective that we aren't the only amazing creatures on the planet.
Government control of K12 is the single biggest problem. Had we had a market in education, had it been voluntary, the focus of education would have more consistently been lifelong happiness and well-being rather than consumerism and egotism. Happiness and well-being are built on healthy habits and attitudes. For many Americans, that includes religious education. For secular Americans, it includes more agency-based schools such as Montessori, Waldorf, Acton, and more recent models such as Prenda, Sora, Prisma, and the thousands of microschools popping up.
My program, The Socratic Experience, is explicitly focused on lifelong happiness and wellbeing. I teach a "Purpose" course every day based on the famous "Ikigai" diagram, the intersection of "What do you love?," "What are you good at?," "What will the world need?," and "What will the world pay for?" We also have courses on relationships and how to be an adult. We also provide a range of cool digital skills, audio engineering, video engineering, software development, animation, etc. that they love because they want to be part of the digital world.
This isn't a solution for all students, but it also isn't limited to high IQ students. We attract many creatives who do not do well in conventional school. They are happy and flourishing.
I've spent most of my life in counterculture hubs such as Santa Fe, Austin, and San Francisco, where despite the recent influxes of money, it has long been normal to do what they love. Esalen has been a shrine as long as I can remember. Lifestyle innovations such as meditation, tai chi, adventure sports, massage therapy, etc. have long been normal in these places. Not coincidentally, the latter two have been hotbeds of innovation.
I see the East coast as a late adopter to all of these trends. I'm not claiming any particular virtues for any particular path - I'm very much an advocate of a market in lifestyles. For some people a return to traditional Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim virtue traditions may be most valuable. For others it may be some mix of more contemporary lifestyle traditions - digital media gurus such as Tucker Max (now into Waldorf education) and Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic) have gone beyond making money as a way of life and into new lifestyle trends. Tech entrepreneurs have founded many of the new models of education, including Acton, Alpha, Prenda, Prisma, and Sora. They see how obsolete the old models are.
Traditional K12 is mostly a waste of time that trains children in passivity, meaninglessness, and therefore we graduate the spiritless humans we graduate. In a fully developed education market no one would pick this garbage for their children. The Permanent Problem is an artifact of government control of the most crucial period of human development.
A recent substack on this building on my decades of writing on this topic:
https://michaelstrong.substack.com/p/what-are-we-building
Thanks for the meaty, thought-provoking comment, Michael. I'm sympathetic to the idea that mass institutional schooling for large groups of same-age cohorts is a weird artifact of the industrial era, and I've long hoped that someday we will find much better ways to raise and train our young. But if K-12 schooling is really the fundamental problem, why don't we see a South Korea/North Korea distinction between the 90% of kids who go to public schools and those who try something else? Is contemporary private schooling an insufficiently radical alternative, or are there other confounding factors that make it difficult to see the differential effects of different models of schooling?
Again, a cogent and excellent analysis. I'll continue to beat the drum of being skeptical that the sort of local, self sustaining communities you envision will happen short of a spiritual or religious revolution.
Throughout history the coordination problem has always been extremely difficult to overcome, typically only being defeated by religion. In the modern age where we dramatically reward defecting in prisoners dilemmas and generally selfish action, that problem becomes far harder to bypass. Personally I doubt we will see any real change until institutions break down far further, or we get some sort of messiah who will pour us new wine, as Jesus would've said.
It's very difficult for me to see an economic independence movement getting off the ground without either the forcing agent of some cataclysm or the rise of some powerful new (possibly religiously inspired) social movement. But it's always easier to picture how things can fall apart than to imagine how they might be revitalized, so I'll keep scribbling and hope for the best.
Brink, The ideas here are equally useful for addressing global climate change from a societal viewpoint, as is the direction suggested towards more local "living" on all fronts.
I like the mention of "superhuman," which for me is another way to say "uncontrollable complexity". Pairing the idea with "orientation towards market profit" sums it up. The reminder that "industrialization was a massive exercise in planning, organization, and calculation with an intensity and rigor never before seen" is fodder for my own thinking.
It seems like the basic biological impulses that led to our thriving as a species, "Food!" "Shelter!" too easily translate into "Money". All the time we've been overlaying the qualitative values that come from being a creative and intelligent species: ethics, justice, fairness, love of learning, art, etc. But how to overcome that essential (?) connection between inbred urges towards survival and oh-so-quantifiable money is the puzzle I can't get past (nevertheless, I sense that you're on the right track.)
Major shifts in value systems have occurred with the rise of religions, ideologies like communism, the widespread academies when everyone spoke Latin and there was just less to read, and of course the enlightenment and the rise of science and hyper-rationalism. I see the main problem with culture today as fragmentation. We've naturally grown out of the old value systems, but there are just too many possibilities for replacing them. This is why my own essay on the "permanent problem" would be even less judgmental. The loss of traditional institutions was bound to happen with globalization and the world wide web (symbolized for me by the explosion of channels beyond the reliable three in the U.S., along with the decline of journalism from apex during the 20th century.)
I don't see social media so much as an opiate but as an irresistible obstacle that thwarts the mental development of young brains in terms of attention and curiosity. No one is forced to be bored any more.
In the meantime I have reservations about science and technology, which are also ultimately driven by money rather than by our higher social values. A recent New Yorker article about CRISPR gene editing (9/11/2023) had me realizing that in the best of worlds, all scientific education and every scientific research project would be driven by ethics, to the point that you couldn't be a scientist unless you were ordained and active in a rigorous, multi-disciplinary ethical community.
Thanks for the stimulating work. The language and analysis are spot-on and extremely well expressed. These issues are growing more and more important, as we're seeing some very sinister "permanent solutions" being explicitly analyzed and discussed in the media.
I always look forward to your comments -- thanks for sharing.
I share a lot of these concerns, but not the one about declining fertility. The world population in 1900 was 1.6 billion, and that was enough to fill the planet. At a net reproduction rate of 0.5, it would take us three generations (more than a century) to get back there, even without considering the impact of longer life spans. Small families are part of the solution, not part of the problem
Here we disagree deeply. We can't go back to the population of 1900 -- it was much younger than we are today, dramatically younger than what we'll be when we've shrunk so much, and it was growing. Even declining population growth with aging is bad for productivity growth; outright depopulation with old populations will lead to shrinking GDP and it's going to be ugly. And once it starts, it will be very difficult to stop: even if young people start breeding like rabbits, there will be so few of them that they will have to keep it up for decades before things turn around. A few big cities will suck in population as everywhere else goes into a doom loop: loss of tax base means loss of services or higher taxes, which leads to more population loss and so on. Vast stretches of the country will all but abandoned, cities left to ruin. Do you really imagine any progressive values can flourish in that kind of environment? What kind of future-orientation is possible when children are a rarity and the cultural tone is dictated by old people living in the past? Rural population decline is already strongly associated with support for authoritarian populism -- just wait till what's been happening in eastern Europe the past 20 years (mostly due to emigration) is happening pretty much everywhere.
I'm planning a much more extensive analysis of this, but you are confusing the effects of population mobility with those of lower birth rates. The two are quite different.
I don't see how, unless AI would take the lead in invention and innovation. A shrinking population places incredible strain on government finances, depresses economic growth, curtails innovation, and threatens our ability and will to solve the problems of the future: https://www.lianeon.org/p/we-dont-have-enough-people
An emptying planet would have hallowed out cities, decaying apartment complexes, and roads, fewer airline routes, and less vitality overall.
All of these claims are made repeatedly, and all are wrong. A shrinking population means less need to invest in roads, buildings, airports etc, as you implicitly admit in your final sentence
See also, panic about "population aging"
https://insidestory.org.au/the-ageing-alarmists-wont-let-go/
How do you maintain existing roads, buildings, airports when the local population is shrinking? Nearly half of U.S. counties are now losing population and I've read many reports of the fiscal burdens this causes -- any stories of population loss actually improving local goverment finances?
All news stories about local government finances are bad news stories.
This is a fact about news stories, not about local government. Where population is growing, roads and other infrastructure are congested and inadequate.
https://www.governing.com/finance/pandemic-population-boom-strains-everything-from-schools-to-rent
I'm planning a long study on this, but I'll start with a simple point in response. Population decline is problematic for government finances if working-age adults are leaving, not so much if fewer children are being born.
Population growth must stop at some time.
https://pastebin.com/gU615Hgb
You write "the capitalist system has developed in ways that leaves us well short of mass flourishing"
The way this is expressed implies that the absence of mass flourishing is something that was imposed by some sort of outside force. It was not. I is a political choice that was made more than half a century ago.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
Another choice could have been made. Another choice could still be made today, but our rulers have no incentive to pursue this.
It's my judgment that the New Deal order had basically been abandoned by the left before right-of-center neoliberalism filled the vacuum. Check out my essay on Brad DeLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia."
I didn't see it. Can you provide a link?
Also did you check out the link I provided? I made a specific case for policy choices made no later than 1964 as responsible for the end of the New Deal order. This was before the New Left.
Here you go. https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-slouching-towards-utopia
Thanks, I also read the piece on the Capitalist Crisis. I also have a capitalist crisis, but it is a very specific thing that can be identified empirically. I first noted the capitalist crisis in 2010. Here's my piece on this.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-capitalist-crisis
An issue I have with explanations like the New Left or the Neoliberal turn, is they do not explain mechanistically how they *caused* the economic events they are trying to account for.
My account directly associates fiscal imbalance with declining gold reserves, causing the end of the gold standard in 1971. Nixon implemented price controls to prevent the inflation this would cause until he was safely re-elected. Price inflation soared after they were released, and OPEC took advantage of trend to quadruple oil prices. I note that oil prices after the hike were no higher than they had been in 1970 when expressed in terms of gold. Had the gold reserve not been allowed to fall, the 1973 embargo would still have happened, and there would be a spike in inflation, but would be short-lived like the one we just went through. We wouldn't have had a decade of inflation.
Real wage growth stopped in 1973 for the same reason it stopped rising after 2020, inflation. This time, the inflation lasted two years, last time it was 24 years before the inflationary forces had disappeared and low unemployment rates could again be achieved without inflation.
Lack of real wage growth for decades means no labor power. Unions cannot function in such an environment (unions magnify labor power and are powerless when there is no power to magnify).
So, there's your neoliberal turn, it's just mechanical. but the environment this creates affects politics. For example, inflation was stopped using high unemployment as I explain in the post I previously cited. With inflation controlled (at workers expense) Republicans could cut taxes for the rich without the inflation that would be worse that the benefits of the tax cuts. In the past Republicans had supported tax *increases* in order to forestall inflation. Fiscal responsibility was no longer necessary, as Dick Cheney pointed out in 2002, Reagan proved deficits don't matter.
Bush was right, Reaganomics was voodoo economics, but the voodoo works if the Fed is suppressing the inflation your fiscal irresponsibility would otherwise generate. Then as I explain in my inflation model, today inflation is prevented by the SAME financial flows that cause the capitalist crisis.
This is how systems work, one thing affects something else, which affects a third thing that feeds back on the first, and, well its complicated. That's why I have to reference so many posts that explain how the components work.
When large organisations compete for the top spot, be it on the battlefield or at the mall, the resulting costs are huge, and mostly borne by those whom they enlist/employ. I know competition is valuable, but can we find ways to make do with less of it?