Keynes thought around, and in some instances plagiarized Douglas, his contemporary, and neither one wrote 10 words when they could less decipher-ably write 50. Douglas however, was definitely the more insightful and more in touch with present time and economic reality. Macro-economics is really more a body of knowledge to avoid significant economic and monetary insight than to garner it, although Steve Keen’s herculean task of de-bunking DSGE is admirable as is Michael Hudson’s focus on the tyrannous key business model of finance. Now if they’d just practice paradigm perception instead of macro-economics…they’d see how Wisdomics-Giftonomics unites their thinking and creates policies and regulations that would resolve the major intractable problems of modern economies.

ML:  Yes, yes, on having our binding referendums. I have to admit I was originally in favor of UBI back in the days of the Clinton presidency, but given the behavior of the TBTF banks and Funds, it looks more like  a bandage to cover a rotten system.  There’s usually a reason for “First things first” at this stage.

Me:  The Swiss referendum process is a great democratic one that America should absolutely adopt.

The UBI/Universal Dividend policy is a good one and when paired with the retail discount/rebate would literally be the expression of the new monetary and economic paradigm. Social Crediters have valiantly held forth for them for almost 100 years now. Their only problem was they mistakenly thought the two policies should merely fill the gap to the point of economic equilibrium…which is temporally impossible and would still enable financial and commercial agents to game them (the two policies). What is necessary is to create what I refer to as “the higher disequilibrium” by inverting the social credit insight on the scarcity ratio of the rate of flow of total costs and so prices always tending to exceed the rate of flow of total individual incomes, thus making it an abundance rate of flow of individual incomes in ratio to costs/prices that effects not momentary equilibrium, but continual free flowingness.

….no matter whether one chooses to believe it is supernatural or utterly integratively natural and ontological.

Me:  Science is wonderful, progressive and necessary for understanding temporal apparencies. Wisdom is inclusive of science. (the sages of yore, particularly of the Hindu and buddhist traditions were the scientists and most objective observers of consciousness of their or of our age) Integrating Science and Wisdom can enable a higher state of epistemological insight, and in fact the signature of scientific breakthrough is the integration of the scientific method and an aspect of consciousness like looking-visualization, curiosity, intuition, imagination etc. etc. This is why we require a Wisdomics.

If I may suggest a couple of koans and a straight forward question for economists and scientists:

What exists wherever you go?

How can you experience the three dimensionality of space while blindfolded?

What is the single integrative and aggregative point between the micro and macro economy, and as both the pricing system and the money system are digital what might that mean so far as beneficial monetary policy?

Me:  Wisdom is the discerning process of integrating the truths, workabilities, applicabilities and highest ethical considerations in apparently opposing perspectives. And that is precisely what economics needs to truly progress, and science needs to move beyond its 400 year old process of becoming an orthodoxy rather than a legitimate paradigm for inquiry.

KZ:  Observing the world requires always an observer. The observer chooses what to examine and how to examine it. The observer in the end is the source of all human knowledge. There is no “already there.

Me: That begins as an apt observation, but then contradicts itself.

As Jon Kabot-Zinn’s book states Wherever You Go There YOU ARE. So the “thing” that is always there is consciousness and excluding or suppressing that fact is very unscientific…if one believes in good non-orthodox science that is. Wisdom, which is the de-dogmatized science inclusive mental discipline of inquiry, is what is needed for the complete (though momentary) understanding known as scientific breakthrough. And grace-graciousness as in love in action/process is the pinnacle concept, experience and goal of both science and wisdom.

Investigate the concept of grace vis a vis economics and you’ll find its aspects of individual freedom, systemic free flowingness, gifting, abundance as opposed to austerity, non-dominating, non-orthodox benevolent power and control and dynamically flowing, simultaneous integration of opposing factors….to be precisely what all of the present cutting edge reformers are saying….yet not fully cogniting on or unifying under because they’re only thinking with science and mathematics instead of Wisdom which includes consciousness itself and which is a component part of a new paradigm.

PP:  Articles on this blog (RWER) repeatedly go on about how modelling macro phenomena by simulating micro representative actors doesn’t work. Hold on! It doesn’t work because the way economists go about this (as far as I know) is rubbish: The actors are too simple and too uniform, the simulations are too small, and there’s no attempt to fit models to reality.

Try applying this technique in earnest. Make large-sale simulations of randomly varied actors, and give each of them a package of complex motives. Model 2nd and 3rd level phenomena like marketing and imitation. Start with modelling a specific population and time period that transpired in the recent past past, initially informed by statistical data and common sense, and then tweak the actors until the macro simulation matches historical reality. Run many variants of the assumptions using generic algorithms to be sure that you have convergence and didn’t just luck out. Then you may have a model with some predictive power applicable to some real-world domain.

And then it may still not work. Economic behavior may be just too emergent to model this way. But we don’t know that. We’ve not heard why micro modelling cannot possibly work, only that it doesn’t work when done in an obviously ineffective way.

Me:  That’s a very good scientific suggestion. Another way to approach the problem is to find a stable and relevant micro foundational datum and point in time where all agents are terminatedly and willingly participating and are also in agreement about an economic decision….like at the point of retail sale…and then craft monetary policy there that recognizes that both the pricing and the money systems are digital and so are able to resolve the major chronic problems that modern economies are afflicted by.

KZ:  Pavlos, what you describe is referred to as backcasting by modeling professionals. Modelers don’t use the terms micro and macro. They don’t accept this distinction. Actions are modeled in relation to one another over time. Most modelers also don’t deal with the notion of causation. The objective is to create models that depict actions following on one another over time. For example, what happens to different sorts of communities that have poverty, pollution, etc. over time. Using computer models the actors and actions can be constructed in whatever fashion the modeler fancies. A common route to assess whether what we put into the model provides results useful in things like testimony, policy development, writing legislation, etc. is backcasting. Here the model is applied to an historical period for which complete (or near complete) data for the areas that concern the modeler and/or policy makers appears to be accessible. The results of the model are compared with historical data. The model is modified through insights and skills that come only with study and experience until the results are “close enough” (again only with study and experience) to historical data. There are two main challenges with backcasting (aside from gaining the needed experience and insights). First, is the historical data acceptable? Often there are numerous versions of historical data from which to choose. Second, which of the various versions of “close enough” agreement between model and historical results do we select? There’s no right answer. It’s a pragmatic choice based on what seems to work best in different situations.

Me:  Models and theories are the chaff of science and research, paradigm perception is the 24 carat gold of same. Why? Because theories come and go, or in the case of neo-liberalism stay way beyond their efficacy. On the other hand even though it’s an affront to the merely scientific mind (and historically verifiable)….everything adapts to a new paradigm….not the other way around.

Me:  If you don’t perceive at the level of paradigm you can theorize for ever and not see either the singular concept to base and align all policy and regulation on, or the new pattern that they all fit into. There’s nothing wrong with theorizing of course, but it’s such a much more simple rational process….after you perceive the paradigm.

Paradigm perception is the systemic equivalent of awareness….of awareness, i.e. consciousness itself. This is not new age BS it’s simply thorough going integrative thinking. Again, once you know the new paradigm you see its aligned policies, regulations and structural necessities so much more clearly and definitively, and then all you need to do is gen up the mass movement necessary to herd the entire political apparatus toward its sanity and beneficial effects.

I agree with theorists and reformers like Michael Hudson, Steve Keen and MMT. Now let’s recognize the paradigm that unifies their thinking and get it implemented….with post haste.

DT:  Well yes, Craig; so what do you make of what I keep trying to say? What I see deficient in your arguments is any mention of the form of payback for the giving. It certainly shouldn’t be tit for tat, as the monetarists now demand.

Me:  The pay back is the rebating of every cent of the retail merchant’s discount/gift to the consumer by a monetary authority specifically mandated to do so, and so that they are made whole on their overheads and margins of profit. The new paradigm is Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting. This is not the indirect, abstract, flawed and elitist financial nonsense of monetarism. It is the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting. Any other questions? I’ll be happy to address them.

Steve Keen correctly identifies the fact that modern economies are demand constrained and in disequilibrium. But he didn’t see that we can create what I refer to as “the higher disequilibrium” by cogniting on the fact that retail sale is the terminal expression point for inflation and utilize the digital nature of the pricing and money systems and implement a discount/rebate policy that breaks up Finance’s virtual monopoly on credit creation and is of a high enough percentage that no enterprise can game it or resist opting into it.

Michael Hudson correctly rails against Finance as parasitical. The fact that one agrees to buy a home from a home building corporation for $200k…and then POST that retail sale you have to go to a bank and add on a note that increases your costs by a factor of 3 or 4….exposes finance as an exterior parasite that has been problematic for at least the last 5000 years as David Graeber has written about. It is the sheerest of folly that private finance with its monopoly paradigm of Debt ONLY can be stabilized. Public control of Finance of course has its own problems….unless its policies are directly and reciprocally beneficial to both the individual and enterprise….like the 50% retail discount/rebate which is the virtual expression of the new paradigm and a public monetary authority which does not allow libertine financialized speculation.

MMT has the system mechanics of money creation correctly defined. What they don’t see is the above discovery of the power of monetary policy linked directly to retail sale so that price deflation is painlessly and beneficially integrated into profit making systems. They also do not see the actual greatest insight of MMT which is that with the primacy of the new paradigm, i.e. DIRECT CREATION and distribution of credit/money….the government can fund itself without the need for income taxes. Instead they punt on politics and mistakenly advocate for a job guarantee only as the way to increase demand which is completely old paradigm while dismissing the aligned policy of a directly distributed universal dividend which paired with the discount/rebate policy immediately ends poverty. (Of course as an adjunct and aligned policy a job guarantee could be a part of new paradigm thinking for anyone who is having problems with finding purpose in addition to or without employment.)

The paradigm level of thinking. It clarifies, focuses and unites the best reforms.

DT:  So, Craig, you’ve not answered my question (“what do you make of what I keep trying to say?

Me:  “So, Craig, you’ve not answered my question (“what do you make of what I keep trying to say?”

With all due respect, and I DO respect your prodigious intellect, I think much of what you say is erudite irrelevance by comparison to the clarity and focus that is and that results from genuine paradigm CHANGE perception. I can identify with the problem. Trying to integrate thinking on temporal matters while carrying the burden of simultaneously needing to communicate the necessity of a new paradigm whose nomenclature is identical with traditionally religious thinking is very difficult and problematic especially when science ONLY is the current paradigm for intellectual inquiry.

Money, debt and banks are the essential economic factors that neo-classical economics confuses/ignores. The paradigm of monetary Gifting breaks up the monopolistically contradictory and dominating paradigm of Debt ONLY that private banking/finance currently and problematically enjoys, and if finance/banking as a public utility was thoroughly based upon and focusedly aligned with policy and regulations reflecting Gifting and the natural philosophical concept and ethic-zeitgeist of grace from which the concept of Gifting is derived….then the trinity of factors at the beginning of this paragraph could become part of a thirdness greater oneness that is the signature of Wisdom, grace and paradigm change.

The Cosmic Code  [ (A  x  B)  <–>  G/C ]

is not only the formula of Wisdom and the experience of Grace. It is also the definition and formulation of logic, of process, of growth, of the natural/temporal universe and of consciousness itself. It is also the formula of human therapy as the duality is the definition of a conflict/personal problem (emotion x counter emotion) (thought x counter thought) (intention x  counter intention) and the thirdness greater flowing and integrated oneness is the result of consciousness resolving the conflict.

The Cosmic Code is reflected throughout nature, human logic and thought, the mental disciplines of both Science and Wisdom and again, of consciousness itself. It is a TOE, a theory of everything. It is the formula for conflict resolution…..whatever the conflict may be. It is the path toward rationality, fully ethical thinking. It is the formula for deciphering and integrating the entire existential truth of any matter.

Because Grace is the greater consciousness, the greater more inclusive, more integrated, more integrative, non-obsessive, more loving, more active, more experiential, more complete consciousness.

The key to ecological sanity is establishing  money creation as a non-profit public utility based on the new monetary paradigm of grace as in Gifting not just state public banks which still only create money as debt. Making finance an economically efficient and stable business model and costless and paradigmatic-ally  freeing public service will enable us to finance all of the best ecological innovations and retro-fitting of current infrastructure that will lead us to sustainability.

This does not mean there will no longer be loans/debt/borrowing, just that monetary Gifting will become the new primary financial and economic paradigm and that borrowing will not exact additional costs.

Let us end the hypnotism of private profit making finance.

Almost everyone is well intentioned. Almost no one sees the third integrative alternative and so the paradigm change. Liberal reformers and conservative authoritarians are alike small minded and driven more by the psychology of domination and control associated with old/current paradigms than the self actualized emotions and freeing insights of new ones. This is not necessarily a put down, but it is an historically confirm-able fact.

Failure/refusal to actually look is the end of science and wisdom and the beginning of orthodoxy and all of the mental and emotional vices associated with it that humans are prone to. On a scale of epistemological understanding looking is right below knowing and knowing/knowingness is synonymous with self actualization/self knowledge.

Neither liberals nor conservatives have any substantial faith as in confidence, hope as in vision of the future, love as in passion for the Good and especially not grace as in love in action, for these most intimate reasons.

Paradigm perceivers are the loneliest people on the planet because they think and see in two directions at once, that is scientifically/reductionistic-ally and wisely/holistically/pattern-paradigmatic-ally and hence integratively  which mirrors and is the signature of  awareness of awareness i.e. self awareness. Being a perceiver of self awareness likewise mirrors the nature of the paradigm which is a single concept like Agriculture or Helio-centrism that simultaneously fits within, establishes and/or creates an entirely new pattern.

Let us look, let us see, let us know, let us love and then be gracious both individually and systemically which is love in action.