This is a fantastic book. Highly recommended. What follows is just a home for my notes on the book. Also, see Christine Desan , a commentator on money and the institutional structures that support it. There is a connection with my AI deliberations. "Money" is in the eye of the beholder. Piketty points out that the social structures behind it are also in the eye of the beholder, such as class, property, and borders. This leads to the observation that many see elements of capitalism, such as inequality, are real and not "subjective." Economic inequality tangibles to actual results. The human "economy" is built on top of a real environment. Money is imaginary until you have none. Wealth is in the eye of the beholder until you look at the physical destruction involved in our economic history (war, depression, climate change). Since all aspects of the "economy" and the structures of society are subjective, it is not surprising to see wildly differen...

An excellent CBC Ideas episode is a nuanced treatment of how we tend to become more "conservative" as we grow older. I felt that the entire discussion was missing the point, or at least the "lefties" and "conservatives" were talking past each other. We have lost sight of the real world around us and have grown to depend on utterly unreliable ways of thinking about it. There is a lot to unpack here. For one thing, words such as "liberal" and "conservative" suffer from " reification " - slipping into thinking that something is a "thing" just because we use a name. "Socialists" have famously never agreed on what "real" socialism is - they are always accusing each other of not being "real" socialists" The idea of "conservatism" is just as amorphous, as illustrated by its defenders in the CBC episode. Why, for example, is Trump "conservative". Of course, conserv...

In a previous post , I wondered about how debt becomes the "civilized" mechanism to form the skeleton of a structure that recognizably similar to the kleptocracies documented in "Thieves of State". The theory is that over time (and a few political revolutions), "Western" societies settle into a way to suck the blood out of the poor "legally", eliminating the need for overt corruption such as bribes and kickbacks. In many of these "democracies", bribery continues to be important in the form of "dark" political contributions that constantly outweigh the desires of the general public. Money itself becomes a corrupting influence. But let's take a look at debt first - especially its connection to "capital" or "wealth" - the material goods of a society. Especially with the appearance of cryptocurrency, we find people believing the myth of "fiat currency" - the idea that the government can print piec...