The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

If you ask me to name the one thing that makes the United States the most powerful and influential country in human history...  I don't answer its military. Even though the U.S. defense budget is staggering. I don't answer its rule of law. Even though the U.S. ranks very high in the world .  I don't answer its living standards. Even though the U.S. ranks in the top 5  in economic freedom. I don't answer its cultural inclination to dominate and conquer faraway lands , nor the facility (and most importantly, the willingness ) of its citizens to move within its borders in search for a better future. Laudable as that may be.   Even if the % of movers has decreased since the 90's, close to 17MM people moved within the US in 2017 alone.  That's almost  the equivalent of the Netherlands, or Ecuador, or Senegal moving houses in 12 months  🤯 .  I would not even answer its marvelous capacity  to take in immigrants from all other the world for mor...

Paradigms are a funny thing. They are collective conventions people believe in --even rely upon for functioning. They're ideas everyone has agreed as truth, which few (or not a substantial number of people) question, until a revolutionary thinker, or a massively influential event (or a combination of both) occurs, and they are busted. The earth was flat and no one questioned it until a "brave revolutionary" called Copernicus dared to think outside convention and declared earth revolved around the sun. And boom: Ptolemaic cosmology was gone. Money and government, both social constructions that rely on people according them legitimacy , also rely on paradigms to function. A major one is that money is finite -- we  can  run out of it . Another one is that we can get it only if we do (work on) something of value for somebody else . Also, that we can't make our own money --unless we want to land in jail. Or be tragically killed . Therefore, the reputation of a currency, at...