Hacking the economy

[Hey Bubu]

Hacking the economy is easier than it looks.

The first step, of course, is to remember that the economy itself is just a model. It's a way of understanding the world as a series of transactions made by rational, self-interested beings working to maximize value for themselves. That's supposedly the given.

Of course, it isn't even true. We don't live in an economy. Never did. If we were really all playing some sort of poker game for chips — and making all the right decisions —— then our world might behave like an economy. But seeing as how we're really more concerned with our moment-to-moment experience, getting laid, or finding a private place to poop, the last thing on our minds is retention of value over time.

We do live amongst some really big economic actors though. And the more we mistake the stage on which they act for the world in which we live, the less access we have to script. We end up in the audience, watching the financial spectacle and — worst of all — mistaking it for real life.

The economy we live in is a rigged game, established around the time of the Renaissance in order to promote the welfare of early-chartered corporations and the monarchs who gave them license to monopolize world business. Until that time, there were many kinds of money in use simultaneously. People used centralized currency to conduct long-distance transactions, and local currency to transact on a more day-to-day basis.

Most people, in fact, never used centralized currency at all. They simply brought their season's harvest to a grain store, then got a receipt for the amount of grain they had deposited. This receipt was currency, redeemable at the grain store for something everyone knew had real value.

But since a certain amount of grain went bad or was lost to rats, and since the grain store had some expenses, this money lost value over time. Since the money would be worth less the following year than it is worth that day, the bias of the money was towards spending and reinvestment. That's why medieval towns built cathedrals: as a way of investing in the future with excess money from the present. They were that wealthy. Women were taller in Medieval England —— a sign of their good health and diet —— than at any time until the last two decades.

more at:http://www.hplusmagazine.com/article...acking-economy

[johnny861]

bitches be eatin'!