(This is in response to Jeff Bezos’ call for feedback/ideas on his philanthropy) Jeff, If you want to immediately help a few homeless in Seattle, do that. But what about the other 10,000 homeless in Seattle and the other tens of thousands of homeless in other American cities? And what about the billion others who live a life with even less food, less shelter, and less chance of a...
It’s good to be out of debt… even when that means finishing David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I had started on this book before diving into the rabbit hole of The Wealth of Nations, Communist Manifesto, Capitalist Manifesto, Divine Right of Capital, Et al, revisiting Debt’s 400 pages on occasion to clean my mental palate between other books. Debt is another...
After finishing The Divine Right of Capital, I searched my house high and low for my copy of Owning our Future, Marjorie Kelly’s other book on Capitalism, which I remembered was good enough to merit ordering a second copy after the search came up empty. Whereas The Divine Right of Capital is 95% problem, Owning our Future is a travelogue of solutions. Kelly takes us with her traveling to...
A much better manifesto of Capitalism is Marjorie Kelly’s The Divine Right of Capital (amazon.com). In it, Kelly explains in greater detail the divide between capital and labor, some of its origins, and dives deep into the assumptions latent within the current system which she hopes to see uncovered and overturned. Kelly repeatedly returns to the metaphor of feudalism, with the noble Board...
Jumping forward to 1848, 72 years from The Wealth of Nations, Great Britain, Western Europe, and the United States experienced an economic revolution in the Industrial Revolution. Steam power, coal, gaslight, railroads, etc. With that change came the industrialization of work, with far more powerful capitalists and unpowerful laborers. From that change came Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the...
Continuing my dive into Capitalism, I headed to the beginning, to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, better known simply as Adam Smith’s masterpiece The Wealth of Nations. This is one of those books you hear about so often you think already know, but which you really only know of until you crack it open and dig into the details. And wow, are there ever details...
Income inequality is in the news, along with the populist Brexit, Trump, and La Pen movements that have sprung from the consequences of that issue. Before those votes, I wondered if there were any real-world consequences from income inequality, or whether it just made good sky-is-falling news stories. One book that greatly helped me understand what is truly going on is Thomas Piketty’s...
I often blame my training as an undergraduate mathematician for seeing the world differently than most others. Case in point, the inefficiencies of the everyday stop sign, and the lesson that fails to teach us about other areas of society. Specifically, picture a busy intersection with a 4-way stop sign. Or better yet, picture a traffic light on a busy street on a day when the power has gone...
Remember when YouTube was a site to post snippets of videos of your baby, puppy, or kitten? Perhaps its still used for that… but for me, it is a near-daily source of snippets of lifelong learning. I subscribe to well over 100 different channels, spanning a dozen different topic areas. A few of these are spectacularly good at telling an compelling story which conveys an interesting...
Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny looks than nods. At an event today, people seriously talked about potentially moving to New Zealand and to finally doing the leg work to get EU citizenship through an ancestral immigrant. Despite the mid 2010’s...
