This week…
Old friends are the best friends. And smart, professorial friends lead to frequent deep conversations relevant to our future. I've known Professor Joshua Farley for almost 20 years now - he was the Chair of my PhD committee at the Gund Institute. What I really love about people like Josh is we can have an in-depth conversation about a single topic - out of the dozens central to the human predicament - for hours.
Previously on the The Great Simplification, Josh and I discussed the evolution of cooperation and how energy surplus accelerated coordination among humans at a cost of higher competition/less cooperation - and what this portends for the future. Today we are going to delve into a different - and equally relevant topic - Money! What is it? What does it accomplish? Where does it come from? How is it disconnected from our biophysical reality? What are some pathways towards monetary triage and ideas for a long term, more sustainable human monetary system?
To do this topic justice would require a 10 hour conversation - here we just provided a very good introduction. I expect in the coming decade a very large number of people are going to better understand what money is and what it isn't.
I hope you enjoy this conversation with my friend and colleague Josh Farley.
In case you missed it…
Last Saturday, I posted Episode #5 in the Frankly series. In this episode, I discuss some of the most frequently asked questions from Episodes 1-25 of The Great Simplification. The questions range from topics on: education, nuclear power, climate change and quite a bit more.
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I've just started listening to the episode, so maybe I'm ahead of myself but I have a Master in economics and taught at the college level in the 80s. I left the discipline and did other things in the 90s and throughout the rest of my career before retiring. However, having taught principles and intermediate economics as well as money and banking, I was startled to hear that it's news that banks create money. Of course that's how money creation works. That's what I taught throughout the 80s in conventional economics courses. How bizarre if everything has changed. Glad I'm just a retiree listening to podcasts while I work in my garden these days.