When macro-economists like Steve Keen and Michael Hudson explore the correct and most urgently needed area of change, that is money and finance, they can be quite insightful. However, even then they generally miss the true mark and come up with mostly palliative policy suggestions more often than not because the abstract maths and theortics of macro-economics have become so habituated in them that it actually prevents them from looking DIRECTLY at the economic/productive process itself and discerning the points/places in that process that policy can have its best and most paradigm changing effect, that is retail sale and at loan signing.

Presently the paradigm of monetary distribution is Debt Only. This enforced and restrictive monopolistic paradigm has hog tied economies for millenia and historically enabled a financial elite to dominate and manipulate every other business model and 95% of the general populace.

The solution to this civilizational problem is a policy regime that intelligently integrates the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting into the Debt Only system, and regulates, aligns and guides it by becoming conscious of the concept behind every historical paradigm change, namely the natural philosophical concept of grace. A Gift/Gifting after all is the reality of each new life, the fact and nature of the bounty of the cosmos and a basic aspect of grace. So also are directness and the starting, changing, stopping and restarting of reciprocality as a part of the inherent process of dynamic flow. This is why both a (direct) monthly universal monetary dividend and a 50% (reciprocal) Discount/Rebate at the points of retail sale and at the point of loan signing are the most basic and essential policies upon which to build and institutionalize the new paradigm.

You’re quite right K that mathematics (itself) IS like kata, a formality….unless of course it is a NEW and/or re-discovered mathematical insight like that money is most basically accounting and hence must abide by AND IS CONTROLLABLE BY the convention that equal debits and credits sum to zero. Then, if one realizes that the terminal ending and exiting point of the entire economic/productive process is retail sale, that retail sale is also the terminal summing point of all costs for any item or service as well as the terminal expression point for any and all elemental, basic and relevant economic factors like inflation etc. ….THEN, it’s the perfect place to utilize AND APPLY the above new/re-discovered mathematical AND ECONOMIC insight and accounting convention IN A TEMPORAL UNIVERSE PROBLEM RESOLVING, PATTERN/REALITY INVERTING AND HENCE PARADIGMATIC WAY like with a 50% discount/rebate (AND THUS INVERTING) price and monetary policy at that point.

Craig Copernicus signing off. 🙂

Complexity is analogous to a zen koan. Useful, not as a means of resolving its specific illogical question itself, but as a tool for the means of discovering the importance of utilizing integrative thought and experience that points to and better enables a new and deeper discovery.

How could wandering hunters and gatherers whose survival depended on chasing game and moving with the seasons to harvest fruits and grains conceive of the absurdity of staying in one place to better survive? Breed and corral stock and plant seeds. How could one believe that the earth revolves around the sun when the sun moves and the earth apparently doesn’t? Invent the telescope. How can austerity be resolved and inflation be prevented when the former seems to be the only way to curb/prevent the latter? Implement a 50% reduction in price and monetarily fulfill it with a reciprocally equating formula at the terminal ending and thus terminal factor expression point of the productive process at retail sale.

It’s quite simple. The purpose and the policy is to make the money system assist all economic agents, individual and commercial, not monopolistically dominate and thwart them.

Religion is the bane of human existence. However, it’s essential to recognize that duality is necessary if one is to decipher the unitary integrative thirdness greater oneness that is Wisdom. We ARE (potentially) homo sapiens, wise and discerning man. We just have to practice it is all.

Graciousness is the solution to life because it saves you from both yourself and from others. And if one is then logical and practical it follows that graciousness must be the solution to living, that is its application to human systems and institutions. Grace is love in action.Grace is the pinnacle concept of Wisdom, that is insight, rational and ethical judgement, and appropriate action/reaction. Grace is the ultimate pragmatism.Grace is the ultimate resolution of problems/conflict and is hence the ultimate unitary concept and force for The Good. Grace is the willingness and ability to integrate the particles of truth in seeming unresolvable opposites. Grace is the best and satisfying union.

Me: Jonathan,

Is not a monopoly the very dominating expression of economic power?

Thus is not the virtual monopoly monetary and financial paradigm of Debt Only as the sole form and vehicle for the creation and distribution of money/credit….not the issue we should focus on? The better to end such domination and hence bring greater individual economic freedom and security and systemic stability.

J: To Craig (January 21, 2021 at 6:43 pm)

The concept of ‘monopoly’ and the ideological dominance of the ‘financial paradigm’ are aspects of power. But in my view, focusing on these so-called ‘economic’ aspects power is far too narrow and deeply misleading.

The Capital as Power approach (CasP) rejects the very category of the ‘economy’, the discipline of ‘economics’, and by extension, the notion of ‘economic power’.

CasP argues that in capitalism, ALL forms of power that affect future profit, hype, risk and the normal rate of return end up being capitalized and in that sense become part and parcel of differential-capitalization-reads-power.

In conventional parlance, these forms of power are classified as ‘economic’, ‘financial’, ‘political’, ‘military’, ‘cultural’, ‘gender’, ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, etc. But this fracturing is part of the problem: it prevents us from seeing how capital shapes, encompasses and capitalizes them all.

Me: Would you not say that Finance and its monopolistic paradigm is the major part, the core of the problem of CasP, and is therefore the most strategic point of analysis and thrust for positive change? It IS Finance Capitalism we are grappling with after all.

My understanding from a study of the history of the fall of empires is that the major factor in their fall has always been their unawareness of or unwillingness to deal with the problems of ever increasing (mostly private) debt, and that in fact ever increasing debt was what kept many of the other factors that contributed to the downfall in (unnecessary) continuous suspension.

DT: Craig, I agree with what you are saying here, but I see Jonathan (January 21, 2021 at 8:00 pm) as rejecting what are now called “economics” and “the economy” when what he is actually rejecting is Capitalist monetary control of the economy and the condition Aristotle called Chrematism (money making). If I am right, I also agree with Jonathan that your practical focus on debt as the problem to be resolved “is far too narrow and deeply misleading”. Again, to make progress on this we need to reach agreement on our terminology.

Me: Dave, I would say that the sea = the current monetary and financial paradigm, which the navigator “knows” cannot be changed because it is full of serpents known and unknown and is chaotic and so unstable. Consequently the navigator gives no heed to it, even though like all current paradigms it is subject to change with a little imagination and actual analysis that might recognize the new tool and/or discovery that changes it from roiling-ly chaotic and unstable to always in watery process yet as graciously navigable as a lake on a sunny day.

deshoebox, That’s an excellent up to date purpose for modern economics, but it’s not a new paradigm. A paradigm is a pattern, a complexity, and a new paradigm is a new single concept that applied changes the character of the pattern it applies to. It is helio-centrism vs terra-centrism, its agriculture, homesteading and urbanization vs nomadic hunting & gathering, it’s competition and cooperation vs monopoly and domination, it’s wisdom/integrative intellectual inquiry vs reductive scientism only and it’s monetary gifting vs debt only.

You will notice that on the surface these old/new paradigmatic examples are also conceptually opposed dualisms, but in actual fact the new paradigm concept is an integrative thirdness greater oneness of the particles of truth in the apparent contentious dualism enabled by a new insight and/or tool. For helio-centrism it was the invention of the telescope and the discovery of the ellipse, for homesteading/urbanization it was agriculture, for The Reformation it was the recognition that individual self actualization was epistemologically higher than enforced religiosity, for wisdom/integrative intellectual inquiry it is the insight that indeed scientific thinking is a wholly included set within the larger mindset of wisdom thinking and for monetary gifting it is the insight of the pattern changing power of the ending, summing and terminal factor expression point at retail sale of a 50% discount/rebate price and monetary policy.

Dave, the study of complexities is interesting, informative and necessary, but the key to discovering and understanding paradigms and especially new paradigms is discerning deep simplicities, i.e. wisdom and the efficacy of wisdom’s pinnacle concept, i.e grace as in love in action/systemic policy.

“There seems no early prospect of any kind of “technology” evolving that can be employed to address concrete problems. If I am wrong I’d be pleased to hear about it.”

The technology is the hiding in plain sight 500 year old discipline of double entry bookkeeping and its convention that equal debits and credits sum to zero. Steve Keen whose brilliant de-bunking of DSGE has recently re-discovered the importance of that discipline in following money flows, it’s just that focusing primarily on theoretical and mathematical abstraction he hasn’t looked at the economic/productive process itself and hence hasn’t recognized the point in that process where the convention could be applied for Ptolemaic to Copernican complexity exploding effect.

Are you pleased….or still caught up in epicycles as explanations?