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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
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
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
It is important to remember that when capitalism is expressed as “pure” it is to remind that its influence on the system which employs it is unencumbered and unrestricted; its effects (like wealth stratification and environmental degradation-for-profit) are actively realized by participating agents who engage in their own varying degrees of misbehavior. Oftentimes, the idea of capitalism that is used by economists and others is … Continue reading The “Purity” of Pure 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
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”
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
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