When the news talks about “the economy” they always talk about percentages, especially growth or recession. Meanwhile, the U.S. GDP (a flawed but popular measure) is almost $20 trillion, almost one quarter of the $80 trillion world economy. The $80 Trillion World Economy in One Chart Put the pretty picture and the giant numbers aside for a moment and take a step back. The U.S. news is...
I’m in the middle of yet-another economics history book and came across the fact that investors in the first Bank of the United States purchased their shares for $25 in gold, then the remaining $375 in a mix of gold and other means. The book then continued on to talk about how the bank functioned. But not me. I was sitting there wondering what other currency those investors were using, as...
100 years ago, in 1919, the Michigan Supreme Court made a comment in their ruling of Dodge v. Ford saying (in its common paraphrased form), “The purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value.“ In 1970, Nobel Laureate in economics Milton Friedman repeated this in an essay in the New York Times entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits...
With capital “S” Socialism in the political news, when The Case for Socialism appeared in the new book shelf at my local library, I thought it a good time to see if Alan Maass and Howard Zinn could help me better understand Capitalism and its flaws. Unfortunately, instead this book had me asking my wife (a professor of philosophy and teacher of logic and critical thinking) for the...
Americans today think of “money” as paper that in minted by governments, but this was not always the case. A century ago money (“notes”) still retained their ancient connection to credit. Notes were promises to be redeemed for coin or reliable securities. — America’s Bank (page 200). Today we’ve not lost this underlying concept of credit, but we instead...
Back to uncovering the history of the modern economy and understanding of how money truly works (see Lords of Finance, War and Gold, Capital in the 21st Century, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and The Wealth of Nations to get up speed) my latest read is America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve. The title sounds a bit dry and the book delivers on that promise, but there...
The idea of anti-trust by government is not yet 130 years old, and it took a decade before President Teddy Roosevelt to put those ideas into action. The last time the U.S. government broke up a monopoly was AT&T in 1982. The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu gives a quick background on how anti-trust all began, then dives into the key questions: When is big too big?How do we measure big?Is Anti...
Fifty years ago, presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy shared these words: Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our...
Why do I spend my free time trying to understand wealth inequality? 0.7% of the global population (a.k.a. 52 million people) own 50% of everything there is to own. The other 7.5 BILLION people split the other half. 8.5% of the global population (a.k.a. 600 million) own 85% of everything there is to own. The other 7 BILLION people split the other 15%. 70% of the global population (a.k.a. 5.2...
These days it seems everyone knows China and India each have over 1 billion citizens, but ask an audience to name the third most populous country, and very few seem to know. Ask to list the top five, and its just the rare few who love the intersection of global geography, demographics, and statistics who can answer the question. I stumbled on the above chart, and its interactive website, and it...
