The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

I am not really sure if we really appreciate the true brilliance of the The Wachowsky brothers'  The Matrix . Its prescience was uncanny. In 1999, they dreamed up a world in which humans were harvested for their energy, for the benefit of machines. A sentient, all-encompassing machine--originally created by humans-- developed a sense of self-interest and built an illusory world available solely to the sensory perceptions of their captive slaves, who were entertained by such illusion and kept in apocalyptic-looking pods --hooked-up to devices that fed the machine with energy. "Reality" was simply too shiny. Too engaging. Too real to look away from. You needed to take the red pill to wake up . At the time --and up until very recently-- my idea of it all was that The Matrix was just a very sophisticated criticism of Capitalism. A " call to arms " of sorts to all nine-to-fivers who despised their monotonous jobs, felt utterly empty and purposeless, and desperate

You know there's a problem with Capitalism when Ray Dalio, a guy who has made billions in the financial markets is saying that capitalism will explode into an armed revolution if we don't reform it. You know there's a problem with Capitalism when the Business Roundtable announces that they've formally and officially renounced shareholder primacy . If the guys who stand to benefit the most from Capitalism are calling for reform, it is definitely indication that the fire has reached the backyard. Capitalism is akin to nature. Its natural selection process is the free market, in which competition selects winners over losers. Just like Evolution uses natural selection to arrive at fitter species, Capitalism uses the market to arrive at  "fitter citizens" ( wealthy citizens). But Evolution does not know about ethics (it is a mental construct devised by society, after all), nor does it carry a specific purpose (it isn't teleological). Here is where Capita

You and I are going to die. That much is certain. And --hopefully not much-- before that, we will burden our society and our family with the responsibility of taking care of us. Historically, the burden was carried by the children. That is why many societies have instilled in their members (I can't think of one that doesn't) the value of respect towards their elders --a societal self-preservation mechanism that allows the ageing to finally collect a loan they originally extended to society in the form of productivity when they were young. Be it directly (via familial care) or indirectly (via tax collection), that debt is paid for by the work and effort of those coming behind --kin or not. Younger generations are thus, by definition, cursed (or blessed) by the genealogical accident that assigned them cosmic responsibility of their older generation. Their collective agency with regards to their generational responsibility is stripped from them the same way it was also stripped

Societies are an agreed-upon set of collective norms. A bet on everyone else's behavior to cooperate for the benefit of all. Although that set is not really... set . Like any human construct, they evolve. Interact with their environment. They change course when faced with influencing factors. Also, not every member of society fulfills their agreement. Some people invariably defect (misbehave), and the collective agrees that some level of defection is just not worth getting that much worked-up about. Just ask San Franciscans  about car break ins. Or  John Oliver  about robocalls .  Behind all this lies an iterative process. After society determines it can't tolerate certain defection level, it pressures governmental institutions to tighten its grip via the codification of punishments directed at them damn defectors. New laws criminalizing the deleterious behavior arrive. Defection (hopefully) diminishes.  The iterative process is not only about fighting off pickpocketi

Trust is the lifeblood that keeps societies alive, and by extension, what keeps the lives of hundreds of millions of people from harm. Without trust, societies can't exist. You need to trust that your employer will honor your salary, your bank to keep your money safe, and your Angie's list-sourced plumber to not show up with an ax to chop your head off. At the beginning of human existence, morals and reputation within the tribe represented a kind of currency of value, which was used to interact cooperatively and constructively to further the shared goals of survival. Trust, it can be argued, is behind human's success on this planet. As hunter-gatherer groups grew in size, our brains' mental capacities to assimilate and process trust maxed out. After all, keeping a mental score of the number of people that have betrayed you in the tribe reaches a limit (called the  Dunbar number ) fairly quickly. Due to this mental ceiling, humankind demographic growth was constricted

The human brain is a marvelous adaptation. More than that. It's our super weapon. If we measured its capacity in bytes, it would be equivalent to 2.5 petabytes (or 2.5 million Gigabytes). For those who want to measure it in more palatable units, that's roughly 3 million hours of TV shows . No wonder why it's such an energy suck : with only 3% of our body mass, it uses 20% of the body's total blood supply and 25% of its oxygen. Our brain is what made us competitive in nature, what's allowed us to increase our standard of living, and what facilitated the domination of the elements for the exclusive and selfish benefit of our kin. And maybe, too, for the benefit of one or two super lucky chosen species that we like over the rest of the animal kingdom because we happened to breed them to our liking. But before we dominated the planet, natural selection was this randomized process of trial and error in which each species could get better generation after gener