Mind's Eye turning the world Greek

A common phrase in my childhood when we couldn't understand something
was 'it's all Greek to me'. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are all
Euro periphery nations now on the brink of collapse. I've been trying
to explain what's going on in a series of lectures recently. I start
from the premise that economics is all Greek to me. This is some
combination of me not understanding the muck and my belief that what
it's all about is a politburo imposing the Greek fate on us all.
Michael Hudson has written extensively on this.

Most of us can't debate economics because we can't get our attitudes
out of the Idols that generate our 'understanding'. I usually start
with a few questions about debt and what money is. It's rare anyone
has much sensible to say on either, let alone knowledge of the history
on might find in, say, David Graeber's 'Debt: the first 5000 years' or
Paul Ormerod's 'Dr Strangelove's Game'. I veer off a little and
explain that when I started university teaching, you could base a
course on text like this aiming at truth than than quantitative
manipulation. These days, education has shifted towards producing
technocrats with instantly transferable job skills. Teaching doesn't
get much further than compiling and manipulating spreadsheets.

Ask yourself who owns the debt, what is its size in comparison with
the productive economy. The answers are startling, but less so than
the general ignorance in which we have been educated not to know. I
test the latter with a bit of computerised button-pushing before I
start.

The debt is several times the productive economy - or rather the
consuming economy. It's owned, in the main, by a small number of
people through stock markets and bonds (bonds are much bigger than
shares these days). As few as 92,000 people own most of it around the
world. These are the politburo or alien lizards who run the show.

I venture off into some Thorstein Veblen and a book on Germany and the
world wars by an Italian - 'Conjuring Hitler'. This is really to show
that current economics isn't new at all. I run through some economic
modelling and then ask what results we'd get if we designed our
spreadsheets from history rather than theory, including a turn on
delta, gamma and Poisson leap hedging.

My last question is 'where did the money go'? You see, all the
spreadsheets work, but they don't show what money is or where it ends
up. Something called the Cantillon effect helps here. Money is
effectively 'radioactive' and the plan worldwide Greek. We cut
schools, police and welfare services and the money goes to a rich
oligarchy who fund our politics, destroying the hope of democracy.
Viewed as a physical system, economics is a control system that uses
more resources in control than in production. We don't go for this in
science, except in highly complex experiments as at CERN and
Fermilab. The essence of economics is a plot by a government of he
rich to own everything and rent it back to us. This is the essential
Greek model.

It's easy enough to get to this stage. The arguments can be made very
accurately. This is only stage one. Underlying the argument are the
Idols - complex soaked-up collective ignorance that actually prevent
economics as a science and our recognition that finance is a
complicated, religious control fraud (Veblen comes free on the Net).

Lecture two starts with the question 'what is our evidence that
private sector disciplines work better than the public sector and if
so, why is the private sector so interested in running the public
sector rather than producing radical, innovative, better
alternatives'? This is something of a Wittgensteinian turn as I think
organisation itself is misunderstood in private versus public sector
debate. Underlying this is the ideology of meritocracy and its
contradictions that money buys unfair advantage and wealth results in
rents the rest of us pay.

Is your country turning Greek?

--