The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Reality is what you perceive it to be. That much is obvious. We were bred this way by nature, and it is thanks to this ability to react to our individually perceived reality  that we are where we are as a species, for better or worse. That we are social animals is no surprise, either. We pick teams , pledge allegiances to like-minded groups, mimic the behavior of other people, and fall for mental shortcuts  that inform our decisions ( many times to our own detriment ). That social networks exploit these bad habits of ours is also exceedingly clear by now. But what about Governments? They don't necessarily need armies of patriotic trolls hawking dissident Facebook users to shape the collective discourse. Forget for now about the fact that Facebook is literally teaching the authoritarian governments of institutionally weak countries how to harness the evil powers of the network to sharpen their manipulation skills and their grip on society.    All Governments ne...

Wars are no longer waged on the ground. Or at least not just there. Conquering Invasions are not necessary when what you need to  conquer is the mind . Inflicting human losses via bullets is so counterproductive. Dead people can't contribute to the monetization of online content, after all. Corpses can't be  groomed online nor harvested for profit , you see. Now, battles are waged in the ethereal realm of the internet. It is there where ideas spawn, linger, are nurtured,  get amplified , and most importantly, morph into radicalization. The decadence of traditional media (with the  disintegration of its grip  on the collective conscience), has given way to this new (and dynamically fluent) status quo: people get their daily dose of information from the internet. They interact with each other, and experience an increasingly broader share of their daily lives there. Physical interaction no longer exists. The public square is now dead. And so is the mall ....

As inhabitants of this universe, we have always evolved within a time continuum. Entropy is inexorable . Time inevitably advances in a single direction. As a consequence, our development as living beings in this planet has always been ruled by the perception of causality. One event happens, and it influences a subsequent event. A linkage between past and present can be drawn. And it can be drawn because this trial-and-error mechanism called evolution settled in our brains after thousands of iterations --in a masterfully choreographed case of survivorship bias -- this form of knowledge acquisition. The linkages have a mundane name: rules. Or what evolutionary psychologists like to fancily call  heuristics . And they have a simple reason to exist: so the brain processes information in the most energy-efficient manner . These have always been the rules of engagement --and we can't consciously process reality any other way. They shaped --nay,  created--  us E...

There used to be a time when the internet was not a winner-take-all mad dash for world dominance. Steven Johnson taught me that.   In the beginning, developers of the foundations of the interwebs created open protocols for the benefit of all, free of charge. Many times under the auspices of the government. That internet still lives on in the guts of what we all experience online nowadays. You just don't realize it, because you pay no licensing fee for the use of the HTTP protocol. No company profits from your use of email protocols POP, SMTP or IMAP, either. They're just there. Built for your benefit by someone who was not tying to hit the next unicorn and become a billionaire (or trillionaire ?). Johnson calls it "InternetOne": the layer of the internet created by distributing its benefits to everyone who cares to join. Cryptocurrencies are an example of it. They distribute the benefits among those participate (through mining) so the network grows. Capitalis...

Economics has always assumed that Capital (K) and Labor (L) are complementary factors of production (Y). Look how pretty and sophisticated this economic abstraction looks Meaning, roughly, that you can't produce something with K if you don't have a bunch of people (L) pulling K's levers and buttons. Alas. As is the case with many things economists have cooked up in their simplistic, impossibly abstract assumptions, this is not even close to reality. K and L are fundamentally different. L is human; K isn't. K might be owned by a human (the Capitalist), but K does not function the same way as L does. K doesn't go to restaurants. K doesn't buy gifts for its family on Christmas. Any income K receives, it recycles it back into itself, compounding its power; into reinvestment, and away from restaurant dinners and Christmas shopping for the family because, well, K doesn't have a family. There used to be a time in the past when K and L formed a succe...

You and I, inhabitants of the Americas, should all speak Chinese (or a derivative of it) instead of a European language. We don't, of course, because it was the Europeans who "discovered" ( for the second time ) this continent in 1492 and sparked a rat race among European States to stake a territory in the "virgin" lands of the "New World". China had all in its favor to beat the Europeans in the early 15th century. They led the world then in technological innovation: cast iron was  first invented  in China; the compass  was invented there ; gun powder was  first concocted there . Not to mention printing; the umbrella, porcelain, the wheelbarrow, hot air balloons, and even seismographs to measure earthquakes. How can you be that advanced and not attempt to conquer other lands to extract their resources? Well, they did. And succeeded.  Decades before  Columbus "discovered" La Hispaniola, the Chinese had reached as far as East Africa. Befo...

The search for a new social and economic world order continues in the middle of all this madness. At least in my head. Growth and its power-law dynamics brought us to a place where the losers can't hold it together any longer. Rage engulfs  the developed world. Irrationality  reigns supreme . Capitalism (coupled with rule of law and property rights ) had provided the avenue to exercise our self-determination. The principle that material success is entirely (or at least mostly) dependent on our effort had proven a quasi-religious mantra for many. And it was alluring. More than that: self-vindicating . The idea that I'm the architect of my destiny and that nothing can hold me back can be an inebriating, hypnotizing force that arms us with untold amounts of discipline and resolve to over-perform. Forget for now about the fact that that over-performance can be easier to achieve in the fast lane   of that avenue. Or that a government has to build the actual ave...