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How Do We Change Our Lives in a System That’s Broken?

September 30, 2018

How Do We Change Our Lives in a System That’s Broken?

Rather than fight a system designed to thwart us, we need a model for our own lives that bypasses the perverse tides and obsoletes the impediments in our path.

Everyone wants to change their lives for the better (or preserve what’s positive), and this is relatively straightforward in a healthy system with positive incentives and a transparent, productive set of rules and feedbacks.

But what if the system is broken? How do we change our lives for the better in a dysfunctional system of unearned privilege and perverse incentives? Needless to say, it’s difficult, and this is why we see a rise in inward-directed solutions.

If we can’t change the external world we inhabit, then the “solution” is to nurture an inner tranquility. It’s no wonder that Taoism–perhaps the ultimate inner-directed philosophy–arose during the Warring States era in China, when social unrest and conflict were endemic.

But what about real-world changes such as improving our health, fitness, resilience, work/career satisfaction, income security and psychological well-being? When it comes to affecting real-world changes in a broken system, it often feels like we’re swimming against the tide: the system doesn’t make positive improvements easy, despite an abundance of lip service to individual goals such as losing weight, improving our career options, etc.

There are number of reasons for this; here are a few:

1. The economy, society and systems of governance are all changing in fundamental ways. I’ve written a lot about these forces– AI, robotics, globalization, financialization, the concentration of wealth and power at the top, etc. –and how we can respond positively, particularly in my books A Radically Beneficial World and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

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Can’t Anyone Fix This?

October 20, 2015

Can’t Anyone Fix This?

The legacy mainstream media has a collective brain like dog’s — it exists in an eternal present, so that whatever’s happening right now is all there is. Thus, Hillary’s performance in the first Democratic debate, being as bad but not worse than her competitors’, means she has a lock on the nomination for president. The better part of a year lies between now and the convention, and time would be on the side of whatever force or figure rises to oppose the woman whose “turn” in power rides a myth of inevitability.

What perhaps ought to be more alarming is the way that the two major parties are lining up to be a men’s party and a woman’s party, a perfect acting-out of psychological archetypes in a society churning out millions of lost souls year-by-year. The American people apparently want a Daddy to fix all the broken systems and they want a Mommy to reassure them that everything will be all right. Hillary, of course, wants to be both, but her problem is that a lot of voters won’t accept her as either.

Her record doesn’t suggest she’s much good at fixing anything. That’s why the Benghazi affair is such a good stick to beat on her with. That was a moment when America needed a Daddy with a toilet plunger or a screw gun and all they got were cables from the home office saying everything was going to be all right. Mommy couldn’t save the Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans slaughtered there. The big pretense, of course, is the idea that congress holds hearings “so something like this will never happen again.”

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The Endgame Takes Shape: “Banning Capitalism And Bypassing Capital Markets”

October 11, 2015

The Endgame Takes Shape: “Banning Capitalism And Bypassing Capital Markets”

One month ago we presented to readers that in the first official “serious” mention of “Helicopter Money” as the next (and final) form of monetary stimulus, Australia’s Macquarie Bank said that there is now about 12-18 months before this “unorthodox” policy is implemented. We also predicted that now that the seal has been broken, other banks would quickly jump on board with an idea that is the only possible endgame to 8 years of monetary lunacy, and sure enough, both Citigroup and Deutsche Bank within days brought up the Fed’s monetary paradrop as the up and coming form of monetary policy.

So while the rest of the street is undergoing revulsion therapy, as it cracks its “the Fed will hike rates any minute” cognitive dissonance and is finally asking, as Morgan Stanley did last week, whether the Fed will first do QE4 or NIRP (something we have said since January), here is what is really coming down the line, with the heretic thought experiment of the endgame once again coming from an unexpected, if increasingly credibly source, Australia’s Macquarie bank.

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Would more QE make a difference? Have to move to different types of QE or allow nature to take its course

It seems that over the last week investor consensus swung from expecting Fed tightening and some form of normalization of monetary policy to delaying expectation of any tightening until 2016 and possibly beyond whilst discussion of a possibility of QE4 has gone mainstream.

Although “QE forever” and no tightening has been our base case for at least the last 12-18 months, we also tend to emphasize the diminishing impact of conventional QE policies. As the latest Fed paper (San Francisco) highlighted, “There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed-inflation and real economic activity. Indeed, casual evidence suggests that QE has been ineffective in increasing inflation”.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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