of more drastic actions at a later date.

- You think that you've been taught things like confidence intervals

in an elementary statistical course that would let you do this;

but if you really studied carefully,

you'd know that they don't let you do this.

A really principled frequentist can't produce a probability distribution...

- The conclusion we want to point out when we think about valuation

is the fact that means are scarce. I alluded to this already that

as finite beings we can't will our ends to be attained.

- A statistical description of the government's net-of-interest surplus.

- ...deflation, I think that yields could drop to say, less than 1%

on the 10 years and less than 2% on the 30 years...

- ...that would effectively be a takeover of monetary policy by the Congress. - Oh, hello!

Daunting, right? Might even make you feel stupid.

Perhaps it's no wonder then,

while even with the ongoing economic failures across the world:

inequality, increasing poverty, debt collapse,

bank failures, unemployment rising,

very few today seem to be able to understand,

let alone discuss, modern economics,

outside, of course, the delegation game

where the only attempted solutions people know

is the mere shifting around of the deck chairs on the Titanic,

assuming some new politician, central bank policy, or corporate legislation

is going to save the day.

Some years back, after coming to the conclusion that our politicians,

legislators, and established authorities just might be provably incompetent

when it comes to the truly intelligent management of our society,

I started to look for questions and answers on my own,

asking those questions about things

that many today either seem to take for granted, ignore or even worse,

assume that they have no capacity or business investigating at all,

since our credentialed authorities in control

must be smarter, more informed.

It's a sad staple of modern culture, you know,

the old "Relax, turn on the TV, keep going into debt,

and pump out a bunch of kids while you're at it,"

but most importantly, keep showing up at those jobs

which you have likely already fooled yourself into believing

serve some legitimate social role.

Remember, the 1% of the world that owns 40% of the planet's wealth

did not get that way with you understanding how the world really works.

Nevertheless, and such cynicism aside (I'm sorry),

I decided that I needed to start again,

if you will, and ask some fundamental questions

about stuff most have simply written off and forgotten.

If you were to take a poll today of our species, asking what truly are

the most fundamental questions that pertain to human survival and prosperity,

such as, I don't know, what really supports human life, how food grows,

what energy is, what creates and reinforces good public health,

what defines a useful or detrimental belief system,

you can rest assured, that the vast majority would have more concrete answers

about baseball statistics, fashion trends, sitcom plots, and religious scriptures.

Not to demean the cultural pleasures and creativity of expression

that creates enjoyment in this life,

but we have a distortion of priority that has proven incredibly detrimental

to the future of our sustainability on this planet,

where the majority facing clear mounting problems

not only doesn't understand what the root of such problems really are,

they don't even know what questions to ask;

and today, there is no greater destructive ignorance at hand,

than the vastly delusional concept known as modern economics.

It is in this fundamental context that I found the most interest.

What is an economy?

Where does its foundational premise come from?

What are we relating to exactly?

How is societal organization finding a benchmark for itself?

Is there a benchmark? What are we doing?

Why does the discussion of this subject appear to be so elitist

in its vocabulary and orientation? Is it really that complicated?

I became so tired of being called ignorant of the subject

by self-proclaimed experts I've challenged,

I decided to take it upon myself to read the entire

macro-economics curriculum of Harvard University

from the undergraduate to the PhD level,

along with all the staples of influence: F.A. Hayek, John Maynard Keynes,

Ludwig von Mises; and I'll tell you what, I'm really glad I did

because I had some very poor judgments that needed correction,

not so much regarding my views about economics,

but that life is short, and I wasted an enormous,

unforgivable amount of time reading this outdated,

overly-intellectualized gibberish.

[Glass Breaking] Ah, shit!

Bob, would you take care of that please? The fuse panel.

Be careful man, it's not... [Explosion][Bob screaming]

As the following episode will detail,

modern economics is not true economics at all.

It's a mere ideological philosophy, built upon a series of presuppositions

that have been given the illusion of permanence.

There is absolutely no relationship to the scientific integrity

of our knowledge of the environment built into this model.

The monetary-market system of religious belief

is at the core of the vast majority of ecological and social imbalance

we see in the world today.

Sadly, it is in the face of normality, so many look past it.

We might begin to see that this principal notion and practice

is truly a problem in society, and to me,

it is at the heart of a culture in decline.

Earth: Curious little ball of rock, gas and water, isn't it?

Hard to believe this little bubble of chemical elements floating in space,

basically powered by the sun, could give rise to our colorful,

yet rather troubling super-monkey species,

a species often appearing pretty serious in its interest to destroy its habitat,

though I should say pretty serious in its interest to destroy itself.

- What is democracy?

- It's got something to do with young men killing each other, I believe.

- Excuse me a second. Bob, what the hell was that?

The cut away, it wasn't funny. It was just depressing.

Couldn't you find some guy shooting a bottle rocket out of his ass or something?

You know what our demographic is and the point of the show, right?

Okay, well please.

Anyway, perhaps our immaturity is just a phase,

a tragically comedic rite of passage,

no different than children that need to be burned

by a hot stove in order to realize they shouldn't touch it,

or what the physics behind it may be.

Nevertheless, the history and characteristics of this little orb

can be scientifically described with a good deal of accuracy:

A couple of billion years old now, a composite of gas and dust

that resulted mostly from a large chemical reaction long ago,

likely an exploding star or supernova;

and over millions of years this dust clustered into relatively big chunks of rock,

a pronounced gravitational field emerged,

our chemical elements were slowly reorganized,

and conditions emerged to enable water and an atmosphere,

which is what bred the first single-celled organisms;

and so went the slow process of mutation

into the very amusing circumstance we have today: us.

Of course, you are free to believe whatever creation story you like:

a rib from Adam, alien cross pollination, primordial ooze.

At the end of the day, the utility of such knowledge is quite small.

In fact, our little monkey brains

might never have a complete picture of something so complex.

Yet what we do know is that the universe is governed by laws,

not moral or religious laws, but laws that were around

long before we ever evolved a brain to understand them.

Laws that very clearly point out that we either adapt to them

and respect them, or we suffer the consequences.

Such is the true face of God: the Laws of Nature.

In many ways, the history of our universe

is the history of our understanding of it,

and we have come a long way as a species

with respect to how we organize our lives around these rules.

Likely the best example of this adaptation,

or in many ways lack thereof, is how we think about economy,

the foundation of our social survival.

Many thousands of years ago, our super-monkey brethren

began to discover how to engage nature.

We went from being completely at the mercy of the habitat,

gathering our food with some hunting,

living and migrating around the natural seasonal regeneration,

to an agricultural revolution, learning how to cultivate food,

create ever [more] sophisticated tools to ease labor

and in effect, learn how to mimic nature itself.

In fact, this new awareness and ever-increasing understanding

to harness the processes of nature to our advantage

is what has led to the vast technological innovation we see today.

If nature is doing something, odds are we can understand how

through these dynamic scientific principles, from artificial intelligence today

which works to emulate actual neurological processes,

to molecular engineering which uses the atomic logic

to manually recreate material objects.

And now, ever-important blood shifting erectile dysfunction drugs,

which if you have being watching TV recently,

must be the most epidemic health crisis in the Western world today.

Since this revolution, human society became less nomadic,

slowly merging into cities,

and systems of labor specialization began to rise

along with means for exchange. Barter is a common example.

You need some eggs? Maybe give some firewood you chopped up

in exchange for the dairy farmer's work.

Yet, such practices became cumbersome and impractical after a while;

so the idea of using some rare fancy rocks,

like gold and silver as a medium of exchange, eased these transactions

through a system of pricing goods in terms of their relative value.

This gave birth to what we know today as the adjustable price system

which, through the public's aggregate patterns of exchange and production,

creates a crude, yet semi-workable logic

where the prices of goods reflect the balance of supply and demand,

otherwise known as the market or market value. Let me explain.

When you stumble into the mall and buy the 85th generation

iPoop 4G mp3 colostomy-bag camera phone waffle maker,

you are creating economic signal information that is used to calculate demand,

local and regional preferences, and other resulting data

in concert with the millions of other impulsive consumers

who, having also likely bought the 84th generation

just two months prior for twice the price,

creates an aggregate flow of input data and feedback

that allows for an ostensibly rational regulation of resource allocation,

production, distribution, labor requirements, and of course

price consensus in the market based on perceived supply and demand,

not to mention the general data of how the marketing team

can screw you over even more later on.

This mechanism is partly what the ultimate high priest

of our current economic religion, Adam Smith, was alluding to

with his 'invisible hand' notion of causality in the free market.

And in many ways he was on to something.

It does work in a limited context and a crude way.

In fact, in the 1920's an economist named Ludwig von Mises put forward

the still high-standing claim that without the price mechanism

economic calculation and rational resource allocation

and general organization would be impossible.

He called it 'The Economic Calculation Problem'.

However things are much different today than they were 200 years ago

when Adam Smith published his 'Wealth of Nations'

or when Ludwig von Mises made his criticism of central planning.

The fact is the argument has changed. The economic debate now is

what is actually sustainable and progressive for the human species,

not to mere mechanics of the movement of the money.

While it is true the price system might allow

for the basic calculation of supply & demand data,

to help rationally allocate labor, preference, distribution and the like,

it ignores the real operational factors

that relate to true, efficient earthly management

hence the true definition of economy

which is: optimized efficiency on all levels.

For instance, there is no consideration for optimum resource allocation

based on the material's most efficient purpose.

Rational allocation of resources is not rational

if the most conducive use of those natural materials, scientifically,

is not directly considered and brought into comparison. [REJECTED]

There is no consideration for the organizational efficiency