QUESTION:
Dear Martin,
Although I am not that knowledgeable in Economics, I have been following your blog for some time now. I am intrigued by the patterns Socrates unearthed regarding human behavior. I can appreciate a good puzzle. We keep repeating everything we do, but it grows more devastating as our technical knowledge improves, or so it seems. Does Socrates think the human race is doomed to be a failed species in the end because of this? Or would he not even consider this? (I am thinking Darwin) It does not look too good.
Appreciative,
L.
ANSWER: I have been fortunate insofar as I did not inherit money, I inherited a talent for trading, logic, and reason intermixed with curiosity and imagination. The key to creating such a computer system was data. Literally, I put together perhaps the most comprehensive collection of monetary instruments from every society on a global scale to map out the trends. You will find much of the monetary history of the world on this site for reference. You will also find the history of interest rates, not to mention financial panics, alongside the history of economic theory. We have included nature, storms, earthquakes, climate changes (cyclical), and the rise and fall of populations, as well as war.
Bringing together so much data cost far more than most of the NY banks’ research budgets combined for decades, and this has enabled us to see that we do reach periods of tremendous concentration of trends — the rogue wave that appears out of nowhere in economics just as it does the oceans of the world. They are caused by the synchronization of many trends suddenly coming together to produce a giant wave that conforms to what people call Murphy’s Law, whereby whatever can go wrong, goes wrong all at once.
This is what we face about once every 300 years. Society can make it to the next step in our evolution if we at least understand what we are dealing with. Government is collapsing and it historically always becomes the worst evil for we are all economic slaves. We are property of the state: if you do not pay your taxes, they imprison you; if you have cash, they seize it. They will fight fiercely to retain that power. That is what they want: everything. They are paranoid, exactly as Stalin was, and live in fear of revolution, preparing for the worst. If we prevail, we can graduate to the next step in social evolution. Yet so many people keep trying to drag us down, condemning us to relive the past, and are unable to see the future.
By no means are we doomed. Yet, this is a real struggle.
