Me:  Dave,

Varoufakis is just like virtually every other economist, extremely erudite on his subject matter and the process of REFORM….and a paradigm perception dunce.

Of course there is a process AFTER a new paradigm is recognized, but it’s really only with those who haven’t cognited on it yet and once it becomes a reality someplace its recognized by the human population there and elsewhere that its such a phenomenally progressive step that everyone copies it. That’s historically verifiable. When a single hunter-gatherer stopped being nomadic, settled in one place and created enough food to feed three tribes, well, that was the end of hunting and gathering as a lifestyle.

Learn the signatures of historical paradigm changes…and you’ll have paradigm perception/wisdom:

1) Discovery or re-discovery of a new insight/new innovation that resolves long term current paradigm problems (the 50% discount rebate policy at the point of retail sale/the missed “hiding in plain sight” recognition that retail sale is the terminal ending, cost and price summing and final problem expression point of the entire economic, actually productive process and hence a simple mathematical operation can reverse systemic realities)

2) Conceptual Opposition (Debt/burden/obligation to re-pay vs Monetary Gifting)

3) Inversion/Transformation (Individual income scarcity and systemic monetary austerity to abundance of same)

4) Resolution of long standing current paradigm problems. (Individual income scarcity and chronic inflation)

5) Permanent change/progression in the area of human endeavor that the paradigm change takes place in. (pick your own paradigm example)

6) End of the primacy/monopoly of the major structural entity of the old/current paradigm and replacement of it by a new primary structure conceptually aligned with the new paradigm. (private finance to finance as public utility)

7) Paradox (Increased freedom and ability to consume [if intelligently and wisely regulated and incentivized] rather than becoming profligate ecocidal idiocy, instead enables forthright and immediate movement toward ecologically sane consumption and ability to finance whatever projects are needed to reduce CO2 etc.)

KZ:  Craig, just one question for you. Why would any modern financial millionaire or billionaire accept, let alone champion your proposal over the current economic arrangements that have and will continue to make them rich?

Me:  They wouldn’t of course. But they are few, we are many and when the constituency of we awakens to the fact that the policies, regulations and structural changes of Wisdomics-Gracenomics immediately more than doubles their purchasing power, doubles the actually available money for their goods and services, doubles the doubled purchasing power for new homes, electric vehicles and any product that reduces our carbon footprint, doubles the doubled purchasing power of savings, lowers every individual’s and commercial agent’s taxes and amongst loads of other “spill over” benefits in other areas of life that finance has wheedled its way into also enables us to escape oppressive homo economicus’s subset of purposes labeled Employment Only and choose from the set of All Positive and Constructive Purposes…..the alleged power of finance will fold like a rag doll. And if they don’t, then “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

KZ:  Craig, I don’t give a damn for economics or economists. But in the “real world” when challenging an existing way of life, such as neoliberal economies, winners and losers in keeping vs. abandoning that way of life must be considered. Those who benefit from neoliberal economies will oppose your “new” paradigm if the change hurts them or their friends. No matter how much the change might help those hurt by neoliberalism. It’s better to figure out how you propose to handle this fight before launching the “new” way of life. I speak from many years of experience. By the way, in my experience most of the proposed changes lose this fight.

Me: Who loses with the policies of Wisdomics-Gracenomics? Virtually no one, that’s who. Even the vast majority of the managerial class in private finance will be able to find a job in the new publicly administered non-profit national banking system and with the dividend and 50% discount/rebate policies they probably won’t lose much or any purchasing power to boot. The benefits of the policies in my book are “all good”, “way good” and a huge increase in the 99%’s purchasing power, lifestyle, chronic mental state and also builds an institutional infrastructure that will enable them to choose to work on their personal problems and self actualize the higher thoughts, emotions and attitudes of wisdom.

If the entirety of that can’t be “sold” and or acculturated then maybe we shouldn’t be called homo sapiens i.e. “wise and discerning man”.

KZ:  Craig, perhaps you are correct. But I suggest you brief some folks likely to question your plan and get their input on objections it might raise. Forewarned is forearmed. Just a suggestion. I always take this precaution myself.

Me:  Well, I thought that was what I was doing in posting here. Unfortunately there has been almost zilch actual questioning about/analysis of the policies, philosophy and paradigmatic studies I’ve enumerated here hundreds of times. All I get is cynicism, doubt, probable non-comprehension, occasional attempts at invalidation or no response at all (all of which are typical responses to new paradigms considering that new paradigms are always in conceptual opposition to orthodoxies surrounding and the precise concept of the current/old paradigm).

I’m ready to take specific questions regarding the actual policies, regulations and philosophy of Wisdomics-Gracenomics and about assertions regarding them. Let’s have an actual discussion. It might be an opportunity for me to learn.

KZ:   Craig, you’re confused a bit. Money is not basically, or any other way, accounting. It’s the reverse. Accounting is constructed to serve the needs of money. Including uncovering when money is not money and when money is used for purposes other than those of money. In institutions organized around money, money input can be more, less, or the same as money output, depending on the purposes of the institution. Humans really don’t lack self-awareness. The “self” is, like society and culture socially constructed, and much of that work is held tacitly by humans, after the work is done. This could make it seem humans lack self-awareness. The problem is twofold. First, human imagination never ceases, so humans are always “making-up” other societies, other cultures, and other selves. Just too much happening for any of us to be aware of it all. Second, the notion of self-awareness and conscious/unconscious is also “made-up” by humans, so their forms are variable, both over time and over geographical location.

Craig, you use terms such as “bean counting,” “retail sale,” “accounting” as if their connotation and use is fixed, unchanging. But each has a history. That history is the source of connotation and uses. And that history embodies one or more cultures. This relationship is joint. Humans make cultures and history, and cultures and history make humans.

Me:  Ken,

I’m not confused about money, accounting, retail sale or consciousness.

Steve Keen only recently discovered how important accounting is to the economy and the money system when he bemoaned the fact that economists could get their PhD in economics without so much as taking an elementary course in it. He then went about proving that the monetary/financial system de-stabilizes the economy via differential equations in order to re-discover what C. H. Douglas originally discovered via doing the calculus on the datums of cost accounting.

I said “money is BASICALLY accounting”….and that is both correct, significant and potentially extremely insightful. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other purposes of course as you point out. However, basics are extremely important as I’m sure you would agree.

The same is true for the basic temporal universe economic fact and point of retail sale as I have elaborated here many times.

Personality is essentially delusion. Consciousness itself is not….no matter to whomever or whatever one attributes it. And there are definitely levels and modes of consciousness and ways of experiencing it. At the top of the scale of ways to experience it are knowingness with lookingness right below that. Science i.e. abstractingness is a few levels below these two.

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KZ:  I have difficulty taking seriously this reliance on “general equilibrium” of any form. No other science, physical or social moves in such a tangent to what actual data shows. The focus now in all the sciences is moving equilibrium. What’s called recurrence in chaos thinking. Our chaos concept requires the system (network) to come back to the neighborhood of its current state at some point in the future, and to do so again and again. This is the way everyday systems come into balance. Between the periods of recurrence, the system can and does swing a lot or little in multiple or a single direction. Anthropologists and historians encounter networks. It’s their work. Everything they conclude and write is based on these encounters. So, they know from experience that the “normal” for most systems is not equilibrium, except in the recurrence sense of that term. Enough predictability and durability to make society and culture possible, but never enough to make them steady or stable perpetually. They also know that the divisions between things like politics, economics, religion, government, etc. are made-up, cultural fictions that will change with time and circumstances. Economists need more course work in history and anthropology.

Me:  Completely agree on the orthodoxy regarding equilibrium and the need for economists to utilize history and anthropology. Integrative studies aid in cultivating wisdom which is the ultimate integrative study.

Equilibrium theory in economics is an unfortunate hold over from classical economics. The economy and all systems are actually in a continual state of dynamic, interactive, integrative disequilibrium. We should be pursuing “the higher monetary, ethical and sane disequilibrium” not the delusion of equilibrium.