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<p>…</p>
<p>Do you even see the arguments you’re making?</p>
<p>Hey, HisGraceFillsMe;</p>
<p>You, me, and a few others will band together, creating an unstopable force of job creationism! Who cares what the economic enviornment is like, the strength is in our numbers :). Sound like a good idea?</p>
<p>It follows from #39. You will always be useful, somewhere. Because you doing something > more productive than you doing nothing. If other people (you come across) don’t find you useful, make your self useful, and sell your own services, some way, some how. There will always be a way in which you are useful, because again, human want is infinite. </p>
<p>When people talk of “recession” or “not enough loans”, it’s usually a matter of organisation: supply isn’t meeting demand – i.e. the right people are not meeting with each other to make the right transactions. Hence, it is a matter of the marketing and the search.</p>
<p>Also, society always has the means in which to provide loans. If money did not exist, society would still have the means to finance new investments, new businesses (by agreeing to provide a service that will construct the investment and to take part of the benefits only later). So it makes sense that in a society with money, this capability suddenly does not simply disappear. What’s the issue?</p>
<p>Again, organisation and networking.</p>
<p>Galoisien, In you words, what are the basic problems within the american economy?</p>
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<p>Absolutely! Let’s go 
Maybe if we get enough of us together they’ll suddenly have openings!</p>
<p>“human want is infinite”</p>
<p>But the money supply is not. I think you seem to be forgetting that…</p>
<p>Money supply is a human construct that aids in organisation. Money in itself is worthless: it’s the goods, the capital and the productivity that it represents matters. 1 million dollars is worthless on Mars, but six people are <em>very</em> useful. </p>
<p>In fact, there is no money supply on Mars. Does this mean that six people on Mars (give them some terraforming infrastructure, and a year’s worth of food and water) would be six people too many? </p>
<p>Of course not.</p>
<p>So again, the problem of money supply simply represents a more fundamental problem: that of organisation.</p>
<p>The former problem can be circumvented by organising economic activity (temporarily or otherwise) through other means. Money is just legal tender for which people agree to provide goods and services as part of a social contract; an allocative tool. It’s not useful in and of itself. If society did not have money, the capability to make investments would not suddenly disappear. It would be a lot more difficult, but you’d simply have other organisatory mechanisms.</p>
<p>What you’re saying is like the idea of communism. It looks great on paper (or in your case, online), but it just doesn’t work out there in the real world. You’re incredibly naive. </p>
<p>Money, yes, is a societal construct. But it’s one that has been around for hundreds of years and we have become obsessed with it. You can’t just throw it out and declare it meaningless. Our whole culture would collapse.</p>
<p>You should read your post again. And then mine.</p>
<p>I am not at all suggesting we get rid of money. WTH. I’m saying that “there is no money supply” ==> there is no means of making investments.</p>
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<p>Umm, I’m anarcho-capitalist.</p>
<p>No, it’s not like communism. You would still work under a social contract. You’d just need to trade or organise or agree on economic transactions by other means. Of course, verbal agreements, decision trees and the like don’t work on an economy involving 6 billion people. But luckily, we have the internet.</p>
<p>Your solutions would work well if we weren’t in a recession… and if we actually had a free market system.</p>
<p>When I referenced money supply, I was trying to say that no matter what you produce at this point, no one is going to consume it (because they don’t have the money). When a recession occurs, the economy contracts; you obviously know this. When debt is paid off and the savings rate goes up, citizens can consume once again. That is when there is opportunity in the job market, once again.</p>
<p>I fear that the more we talk about this stuff, the more we find we are going to agree. This saddens me :(.</p>
<p>You have a builder and a farmer. Neither of them have money. The farmer needs to expand but has food; the builder needs food but can build infrastructural expansions.</p>
<p>Ooops, none of them have a money supply. Thus, neither can “pay” each other to do anything. THUS, THEY ARE HELPLESS! THEY CANNOT DO ANYTHING! Or can they?</p>
<p>What I am saying is not at all proposing that we get rid of money. Rather, having a money supply (that happens to be rather tight) is better than not having a money supply. So surely, we are better off than the farmer and the builder. But the farmer and the builder are not helpless. Thus, by logical extension (and the application of the property of transitivity), we are not helpless.</p>
<p>^I didn’t mean it in that sense.</p>
<p>I mean it in the sense that neither of them would actually work in the real world.</p>
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<p>Which involves more people every day. Just one more flawed statement.</p>
<p>Guys, galoisien’s clearly taking a microeconomics course. Don’t you realize this makes him an expert on the economy and the real world?</p>
<p>The internet is self-organising.</p>
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<p>Do you know what “simple analogy for the purpose of rhetoric” means?
Of course, a system that works for six people will not necessarily work for six billion.</p>
<p>Yet, observe this: there is never such a thing as too many workers. I am simply saying your assertion is patently false. There is always a worker shortage, and there is always a job oversupply. It’s a case of allocation.</p>
<p>Thus, there must <em>exist</em> a means in which to make this allocation. It could be long and tedious, or short or automatic (involving the self-organising property of the internet), but it must exist.</p>
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I’m not taking a microeconomics course. I am not majoring in economics. I finished that stuff in high school. 5 on the AP exam baby.</p>
<p>My current 22-credit courseload is entirely all natural science and math based.</p>
<p>I am however, probably going en route to some biological discipline, which will include the use of ecology. Ecology uses many non-monetary economic principles (game theory, Nash equilibria, evolutionary stable strategies, etc.), mapping out how dynamic, self-organising systems allocate resources in the absence of money. </p>
<p>There is no money supply in the biosphere. Yet, ecological systems are efficiently organised. How do you think this occurs? I mean, without money, how does a biological system pass on dynamic information?!!!</p>
<p>I found your problem.
You’ve spent too much time in academia. Step into the real world for a bit and see if spouting off all of that stuff makes any difference or sense.</p>
<p>“Yet, observe this: there is never such a thing as too many workers. I am simply saying your assertion is patently false. There is always a worker shortage, and there is always a job oversupply. It’s a case of allocation.”</p>
<p>Again, this would be true if we were not in a recession. You are completely right with your statements about how growth comes about in a free market, but we do not have a free market. We haven’t for a while. One of the main problems with current economic policy is that the allocation of recources is a responsibility that the government has taken from the market. Obviously, beaurocrats in Washington have no idea what the market wants, so, naturally, growth becomes stagnant.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Ben Bernanke handles monetary policy like that of a four year old. Pump some money into this bank, keep this insolvent bank propped up, combat natural price deflation with an increase in the money supply and, before you know it, BAM!, inflationary depression.</p>
<p>It does make sense. There are efficient, dynamic, self-adapting ways in which to pass on information. Information like resource cost and prices, which in turn, sets up its own system for allocation.</p>
<p>Of course, all you finance majors are too myopic in your little PricewaterhouseCoopers cubicles to see creative, out-of-the-box possibilities, or to condescend to study things like evolutionary biology, natural dynamic, self-modifying evolving information systems** or Richard Dawkin’s concept of memes.</p>
<p>** (example 1: linguistic systems and the evolutionary means of spontaneous, self-organising linguistic change; example 2: Neurobiological systems and the finding of the most efficient circuitry paths in the brain, spontaneously creating organised, integrative output, yet is dynamic enough to be wondrously varied from person to person; example 3: take a leaf from neurobiology, linguistics and the internet, and see if similar principles can be used in social, political and economic organisation).</p>
<p>Note that the magic of all these systems relies on that fact of selfish self-interest. Genes “want” to selfishly spread the most copies of themselves, memes want to selfishly spread the most copies of themselves, and economic individuals (homo economicus), too are selfish…</p>
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<p>Not really. There is always a worker shortage, and always a job oversupply. <em>Always</em>.</p>
<p>However, there is less spending in a recession because fear and uncertainty make people withhold their decisions too long when making allocations (==> no economic progress). So suddenly, everyone is withholding their allocations (or is withholding more of their allocations). So information flow is restricted, economic organisation decreases, the information entropy of the economy increases, and as you can imagine, economic activity slows down. </p>
<p>Solution: culturally resolve the fear and uncertainty, and get people allocating again. You don’t need to be paid something (right there and then) to commit to labour. In fact, when you agree to build the new greenhouse or irrigation system for the farmer with an agreement to be paid back with the harvests later, you are in fact, giving out a form of a loan. But rather than an external bank loaning a farmer who pays the builder, the builder loans the farmer his labour. Thus, economic progress is not hindered. </p>
<p>Advantage of our situation: we have a money supply. (It’s always more useful to have an external bank.)</p>
<p>You can start to see how cultural motivation, getting people to stop despairing, and energising people economically are effective solutions, if partial ones. “Just do it” can be an effective philosophy. You know, the nature of my original post.</p>
<p>“pull yourself up by the bootstraps” is probably one of the most ridiculous american myths</p>