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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
Whether or not we are here to experience it, and whether or not you care, the future is inevitably going to happen, and every single moment of that unfolding future will be at least slightly unlike the moment before it, if even in the most minuscule of ways, as nothing in the universe is ever actually still. Thus, from our own vantage point, this inevitable … Continue reading The Future Smells of Inevitability and Question Marks
Feedback loops are systems where some or all of the system’s output is used again as input. Positive feedback loops are versions of such systems where the process increases, or amplifies, over time. Positive feedback loops are highly destabilizing and they can occur all over the universe at almost every scale of existence. They can be short-term or long-term, but none are ever permanent due … Continue reading Positive Feedback Loops
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
Patrimonial capitalism is an unfortunately common state of affairs throughout most of capitalism-as-usual’s history. Due to the laws and regulations in the United States, particularly those regarding inheritance, the amount of familial wealth that gets passed down from generation to generation contributes asymmetrically to those who already have it—the haves. In today’s global economy, the haves will always have more since their more will grow … Continue reading Patrimonial Capitalism
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
Since capital flow (as in: the ways in which money moves through the systems designed for money to move) is blind to ethics, morals, locality, race, attitude, desire, aesthetics, etc., it is our responsibility to instill and impart these ideas when designing systems within which capital flows. From a programming perspective, greed is a vicious malware that has been embedded into society since the dawn … Continue reading Mitigating Greed
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
Simpletism can be defined as the conversion of complexity into more-rudimentary components so that a “simpler” version of parts may be understood in order to find fractured, partial understanding as representative of the greater whole. Simpletism is a largely unconscious activity which also crucially enables the less-intelligent among us to continue to “participate” in the conversation, since, quite seriously, the simple matter of contemporary existence … Continue reading About “Simpletism”
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