Economics is fraught with abstractions. A bewildering array of them. As I have posted here before it is almost as if economists are zen monks caught up in a koan question to ponder and answer, but the more they ponder the abstractions the further they get from solutions and from present time which is the only place they will be able to experience themselves and other physical universe realities with sufficient intensity and self actualization….to actually be conscious of and resolve the problems they’re looking inwardly at,….let alone the problems they increasingly aren’t even aware exist.

Balanced budgets, disequilibrium, equilibrium, GDP, stock-flow consistency, debits and credits….abstractions and almost utterly irrelevant data compared to the two sets of data which most significantly impact every human being and every economy, namely total individual incomes and total costs/prices simultaneously produced. There is the essential “on the ground reality” they need to address and craft policy regarding.  And how do you get there? You go to the cost accounting statistics of any ongoing business because that is where you get into the present time economy. Cost accounting is the 3 and 4 dimensional Space and Time, moment to moment discipline of commerce, and dynamic statistical flow of the economy. Measure those two data sets accurately and you know the deepest reality of the economy and the money system, and even more than that, what specifically to do about it.

As the economically paraphrased zen statement goes: Before the economist and reformer found enlightenment he saw that rivers were rivers and streams were streams, and when he became enlightened he still saw that rivers were rivers and streams were streams…he just saw them wisely.