Sticky post
Capital flow, the moving and swelling and shifting of value, is an emergent property of the interaction between humans and money. Wherever we find money, we find dynamics and properties of capital flow, or rather, how money moves. Where the concept of money is absent (as in historical pure-trade economies) there is no fundamental object of money to move, measure or analyze. So, while capital … Continue reading An Introduction to Capital Flow
Capital, like our too-tricky-to-prove-but-too-critical-to-ignore-quantum-physics-friend the graviton, exhibits certain qualities that have gravitational effects on external parties. Specifically, the more capital that aggregates together, the greater the attractive gravity it has on other external capital (mediated through human decision making). Likewise, the faster capital moves through the channels of a business operation, the more gravity the operation exerts on other capital, so the velocity of capital … Continue reading Capital’s Gravity
In daily life, of course, there is no avoiding some version of the principal-agent problem: in every instance, who is really acting in whose best interest? Capitalism-as-usual has crafted a vast and complex network of competitive agents fighting for that almighty dollar. In such a system, participants are routinely faced with economic choices wherein it may not be clear whose best interest is being represented. … Continue reading Bad Faith
It’s not very contentious to say that the economy is populated largely with humans. If economics is the science and study of how people interact with value, and all people behave irrationally to some extent, or at least on some occasions, then the equations that actually express human behavior must be nonlinear; or, human behavior can only be modeled with equations that are unsolvable. If … Continue reading Ain’t Nobody Misbehaving
Phishing—as defined by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller in their book Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception —happens when one economic participant, Party A, knowingly takes economic advantage of another participant, Party B, in a voluntary free market transaction that is specifically harmful to Party B’s financial best interest. Example: Party A sells cheap knockoffs at inflated prices online. Who … Continue reading Phishing for Phools
Capitalism itself fundamentally emerges from the simple elements of individual agents participating in trade. As soon as intangible concepts like “money”, “interest” and “profit” are incorporated into the picture, economic growth for participating parties becomes decoupled from the real availability of resources, usually at an accelerated rate. With this basic history, many of us find ourselves in the present, profit-maximizing environment of capitalism-as-usual. For a … Continue reading Education & Emergence
Let’s cut right to the chase: the reality of being an employee is not actually what it’s made out to seem like. Even the inclusion of the idea itself into any business model is the application of shackles to the company’s accounting and financial reporting, their distribution of earnings, the labor contributions from and benefits given to the employee, and the flexibility of the company … Continue reading Exploit-ees
Let’s get right into it, shall we? Since each individual is the only such individual who has experienced the entirety of her own historical timeline from her own internal perspective, she is also, obviously but critically, the only person who has been shaped by her life history’s particular unfolding—her perpetually-evolving sensory environment. Our external-sensory and internal-subjective environments (both in their own right, and combined) are … Continue reading It’s the Environment, Stupid!
LOPSIII 