The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Knowledge accumulates throughout generations. It travels through time as long as there is always someone at the other end of the arrow of time to absorb it, assimilate it and apply it. Language helped it transcend --first in oral traditions , then in written form. Sure, there were some instances of miscommunication between some generations and knowledge stalled at times, but generally speaking, knowledge compounds itself. It exhibits the same exponential behavior as wealth. For early forager humans, the knowledge to conquer our environment (learning about medicine plants, edible roots, game migrating patters) was as valuable then as it is today to learn what's the next meme stock being hyped on reddit.  At the beginning the band forager culture fomented cooperation. To share what early foragers gathered/hunted was the rational thing to do. After all, the volatility of your returns (one day you'd have a good kill, but then days would go by without a catch) pushed you to share ...

Out of all the forms of societal organization (the tribe, bands, the  Kingdom, The City-State, The Empire, etc), the Nation-State seems to have been the most stable and successful way of human association. The competition was somewhat settled after WWI with the collapse of the last of the great empires, like the Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian one. But " most stable and successful " does not mean absolutely stable nor absolutely successful. Everything that's built by a human is bound to be flawed. From the concept of the family, to the effectiveness of vaccines, to the engineering of the Boeing 737 MAX . One of the most important functions of leadership in Nation-State is to keep stability. Without it, no society can sustain itself. Social stability depends on trust and legitimacy of its institutions. Economic activity rests on the bedrock of rule of law and contract enforcement. No one would venture to embark on a business if marauders will destroy your property on a whim...

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...