The problem is how much money we spend taking from one person and giving it to another—or even worse, borrowing it from our grandchildren to give it to someone else today.

-US Congressman Randy Fine

At the end of the day, this budget is going to allow $1.3 trillion more of money borrowed from our grandchildren, $1.3 trillion more, and doesn’t really address the number one problem that faces our national security, our economy, our education system, roads and bridges. And that’s our $31 trillion national debt.

-Senator Roger Marshall

What I would say though is that the Labor Party and the Greens right now want the Australian Government to keep borrowing from our children and grandchildren to fund consumption today.

-Mathias Cormann

If you ever have the misfortune of spending time listening to politicians talk, you’ll notice two types: the ones who constantly hyperventilate about why we need to spend more money, and the ones who constantly hyperventilate about how awful it is that we’re borrowing money from our grandchildren to spend. I’m sure everyone is already wise to the lies of the first group, but now I want you to understand why the second group isn’t much better.

Let’s get the important conclusion out of the way first. Nobody can borrow from anybody’s unborn grandchildren. Not you, not me, and not the US government. It’s simply not possible.

The reason is pretty simple, but not obvious at first glance because of a glaring and almost universal blind spot in our mental framework. It all comes back to the fact that money is not wealth, but almost everyone believes that money is only wealth and nothing else. I wrote an entire article about why that’s the case, explaining what money actually is. I’ll just give the tl,dr for now, if you want the full scoop you can read it here.

The bottom line is that money is a ledger of deferred consumption. It’s not wealth in itself, just an abstract representation of actual wealth. You can understand this easily when you think about borrowing.

Money is the thing we most commonly borrow, and always what’s being referred to when someone is talking about borrowing from our grandchildren or our future. But that’s not because we want money, it’s because we want the actual wealth we can buy with money. Nobody goes to the bank and takes out a loan just so they can put the cash in a shoebox and bury it in the backyard until the loan comes due. People borrow money because they want to buy something immediately and don’t have the money to do so. Exchanging it for real wealth (spending it) is ultimately the only value proposition of money.

The government is no different. They borrow money to immediately spend to build roads or buy bombs or feed orphans. Or maybe to feed the orphans they created by bombing the roads they previously built in Afghanistan. Something like that.

If you understand that perspective, you’ll see that what’s being borrowed isn’t really money, but rather the goods or services that can be purchased with money. If there were no goods or services available to buy, there would be no reason to borrow money.

And that’s why it’s impossible to borrow from the future. You can’t buy goods or services from the future because they don’t exist yet. You can’t buy and use something that does not exist. Unless you can build a time machine, there’s no way to go to the future and bring back a house built by your grandson or a day of skilled nursing care performed by your granddaughter. Since the government doesn’t have a time machine either, they’re in the same boat.

That of course begs the question; if we aren’t borrowing from the future, then who are we borrowing from? While the idea of borrowing from our grandchildren sounds bad, and some politicians use that argument to appeal to people’s sense of responsibility, it actually isn’t a very effective argument. Most people are happy to cause harm to someone in the future in exchange for a benefit to themselves today, even if it is their own grandchild. Exhibit A, the boomers reverse-mortgaging their houses to travel the world while their children struggle with exorbitant daycare costs and astronomical rents while trying to raise their grandchildren.

If we can’t borrow future goods and services because they don’t exist, then obviously we must be borrowing goods and services that already exist. We must be borrowing from someone who is creating goods and services today.

All borrowing is a wealth transfer in the present. It’s taking something one person owns or creates, and letting someone who didn’t own or create it use it for a period of time. The existence of money allows this to be intermediated through a third party.

I’ve explained how fractional reserve banking works here.

So let’s use the example of a house. Bob is a builder. He builds a house and puts it up for sale for $400,000. Jim is a dentist. He needs a house, so he decides to buy the house Bob built. But he doesn’t have the money to afford it right now. That means he hasn’t filled enough teeth and deferred consumption of the resulting earnings to equal the value of a house.

But that’s no problem, because he can go to the bank and get a loan. So he does. The bank creates a mortgage for $400,000 for Jim, and adds two items to their bank balance sheet. On the asset side is the mortgage they just created for Jim, where Jim signed his name and agreed to pay back the money he is borrowing from them over the next thirty years. On the liability side is Jim’s checking account, where the bank updates his balance and types in the dollar amount of the mortgage they just gave Jim ($400,000), creating new money out of thin air. Jim then writes Bob a check for the purchase price of the house, and Bob deposits it into his checking account. The bank then decreases Jim’s account by $400,000, and increases Bob’s account by $400,000.

The end result of this whole transaction is that Bob traded a house he could have lived in for $400,000 in his bank account, and Jim is borrowing a house to live in that he hasn’t worked hard enough to build himself. The reason Bob agrees to this trade is the implication that if he wants a house in the future, or something of equivalent value to a house, he can use his $400,000 and buy it. And if he did that tomorrow, sure, it would work. But what about next year? It might not work out quite as well.

All that creation of new money by banks making loans has an effect on prices. In simple terms, it causes inflation. The price of a house next year probably won’t be $400,000. It will probably be more like $425,000. So say Jim decided to move away and put his house up for sale, and Bob decided to buy it back. He couldn’t afford it with only his $400,000. He’d have to work to earn $25,000 or go to the bank and borrow it. Jim on the other hand paid $25,000 in interest on his mortgage in the first year. So his $425,000 sale price still leaves him with only $400,000 net, not enough to buy an equivalent value house at his new location after a year of house price inflation.

Put all this together, and you’ll notice that Bob effectively paid the bank $25,000 for the privilege of not living in a brand new house he built for a year. Jim borrowed a house from Bob for free for a year, and now Bob is $25,000 poorer for his trouble.

If you work a job and get paid in dollars and deposit those dollars into your checking account, you’re Bob in this example. You’re the one the US government is borrowing from. They’re borrowing and spending money created by banks or the Federal Reserve, buying up the goods and services you’re working hard to create and redistributing them to people who haven’t created that wealth. Real people work to build the vacation houses bought by government contractors who got rich off corrupt USAID grants, for example. That wealth was effectively redistributed from hard-working Americans who probably struggle to make the rent payment every month, much less own multiple vacation homes across the country.

Meanwhile you’re indirectly trading those goods and services for US government bonds, which the banks are buying with the paycheck you deposit into your checking account. The expectation is that when you decide to spend that money, you’ll get an equivalent value of goods and services back. But that’s not what happens, because during the time you keep that money in your account, prices will rise. When you do spend the money, you’ll get less value in return. The difference is the value the government and the banks redistributed away from you in exchange for the privilege of you not immediately consuming the wealth you created. Inflation is a tax too, paid to the government and the bankers without any consent or accountability from you, the citizen. And it’s not a wealth redistribution from your grandchildren, it’s a wealth redistribution from you, right here, today.

Even if you invest in Treasury bonds directly and collect the interest instead of giving it to the bank, you still lose. Here’s the chart of long term US bond total returns for the past quarter century against gold.

If you invested in bonds in 2000, you lost 75% of the value of your work against just holding gold.

Your grandchildren will have their own problems, but paying off the national debt won’t be one of them. It will either be more of the inflation and wealth redistribution caused by constant government deficit spending, or hyperinflation and complete currency collapse caused by reaching the ultimate end of the deficit spending road. Nobody today is benefitting from your grandchildren’s hard work, and anyone who does benefit at their expense will do so while they’re alive. They’ll be stolen from while they’re alive and working, just like you’re being stolen from today.

Don’t let any mealy-mouthed politician bamboozle you about that fact that the government is stealing from you today to redistribute the wealth you create to the parasite class. Don’t let them weasel out of their responsibility for the theft by claiming that they’re actually stealing from your unborn grandchildren instead. It’s not true, and no amount of obscure economic jargon can make it so. You can only redistribute what already exists. You can’t borrow from the future.

The free-floating global fiat currency system has been operating since Nixon ended the last vestiges of the US gold standard in 1971. In the over five decades since then, there has been a steady chorus of warnings about the imminent collapse of the dollar and of fiat currency in general. In spite of all the doom and gloom, the dollar could say, like the famous Mark Twain quote, “the reports of my death have been grossly exaggerated.”

There’s a reason that, despite all its faults, fiat currency always seems to find a way to survive. Its value may be inflated away, sure, but at the end of the day the world still buys and sells, borrows and lends, spends and saves, in dollars. When the economic situation is chaotic, it becomes very helpful to understand why.

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I’ve explained the structure of the banking system in other articles, so I won’t rehash all of that here.

Briefly, the fiat currency we use today, like the dollar, is a hybrid animal. It’s part fiat (base money) and part credit. Most of the “dollars” people hold are not actually fiat currency printed by the Federal Reserve. Most are in the form of bank deposits held in a checking or savings account. Those bank deposits are created out of thin air by commercial banks, in the process of making loans.

Banks don’t loan out money from a reserve they have in a vault somewhere. When they make a loan, they create two ledger items on their balance sheet. The first is the loan, which is a bank asset. It’s a ledger entry that says the borrower owes the bank a certain amount of dollars, with terms and interest. The second item is the bank deposit, which is an IOU from the bank to the borrower. It’s a ledger entry that says the bank owes the borrower a certain amount of dollars.

So by the combination of these two ledger entries, the bank creates some brand new dollars, which the borrower gets to spend. This is how our credit-based, fractionally reserved banking system works to increase the money supply. Plenty of the inflationary forces of “money printing” are a result of this commercial bank credit expansion, and not something the Fed did.

There are certain implications to creating money by this type of credit expansion. Say the bank makes a loan of $100,000. Let’s say the terms are 10 years, 10% interest rate, annual payments. So the bank creates the $100,000 out of thin air, and the borrower takes the $100,000 and spends it. For the sake of argument, let’s ignore all the other money in the economy and pretend this $100,000 is all that exists. It won’t matter in the big picture, because all the other money is created through the same process so the same principle will apply on a large scale.

At the end of year one, the borrower will have to repay $10,000 of principal to the bank, along with $10,000 of interest. When the borrower repays the $10,000 of principal, the bank’s balance sheet must shrink. The asset (the loan) goes down from $100,000 owed to $90,000 owed. The liability (the bank deposit total) also goes down from $100,000 to $90,000. So $10,000 is effectively destroyed in paying back the loan.

In order to get the $20,000 to make the loan payment, the borrower had to earn back the borrowed money, which he had initially spent upon receiving the loan. So out of total money supply of $100,000, he worked and earned $20,000 and made his annual loan payment. Now at the beginning of year two, the borrower owes $90,000, the total money in circulation is $80,000, and the bank holds a profit of $10,000. At the end of year two, the borrower pays back $19,000 dollars. $10,000 of principal, and $9,000 of interest. The total money in circulation is now $61,000, the borrower owes $80,000, and the bank holds $19,000 in profit.

Do you see the problem that’s developing? There is no longer enough money in circulation for the borrower to pay off his loan. The bank created the principal when they made the loan, but created no additional money to pay off the interest. So the borrower could earn all the money in circulation in the economy, and he still wouldn’t have enough to pay off his loan. Worse yet, every year as he makes loan payments, the amount of money circulating in the economy falls. He has to earn a higher and higher percentage of all money available, because the supply keeps falling as debt repayments destroy the money. The only way for the borrower to earn enough to finish paying off his loan, is for the borrower to work for the bank and for them to pay him back the interest they earned from him. Then, if he finally earns all the money in the economy, including the bank’s profits, he can fully pay back his loan. At that point, the amount of money in existence goes back to zero.

When we expand this situation to the global economy, we discover that the world has $320 trillion of debt and only $120 trillion of M2 money supply. The annual loan repayments on that massive debt pile are around $60 trillion.

That’s why the dollar refuses to die. Regardless how much everyone hates it, the global debt pile is enormous. And the only way to survive is to keep working and earning dollars to keep making those payments every month. And the ride never ends, because if every single dollar in existence was used today to pay down the debt, the world would be penniless and still $200 trillion in debt. That’s $25,000 of debt for every human on the planet.

So that’s how banks create their own demand, and keep an iron grip on the global economy. Every loan they make creates future demand for dollars to repay that loan. And the ever-increasing gap between the debt and the money available to repay it means that the only way for the economy to stay above water is a constant supply of new loans to create the money needed to pay off the old loans and accumulated interest. Which, of course, is supplied by the banks.

So what happens if banks decide to slow down the new loan supply? Loan repayments destroy money, the money supply shrinks, and deflation kicks in. But not the good kind of deflation, where goods and services get cheaper and wages go further. That can never happen, because the more debt is paid back, the larger the debt pile becomes in relation to the money supply. So debt repayments absorb a larger and larger share of rapidly falling incomes.

And that’s the liquidity vortex. Without a constant supply of fresh debt, all liquidity gets sucked into a black hole of debt repayments that can’t mathematically be filled.

And what happens if people just stop paying back the debt? What if they just walk away? Won’t that cause big problems for the banks? Well, take your mortgage for example. What happens if you stop paying? You soon find out that assets “owned” with debt aren’t actually yours, they’re the bank’s. If you stop making payments, the bank takes “your” house.

So the bank creates money out of thin air and loans it to you, and you buy a house. Then, if you fail to repay that loan (which is a mathematical impossibility on a global scale, because there literally isn’t enough money in existence for everyone to do that), they take ownership of the house.

Now that might leave a hole in the bank balance sheet (remember that loan asset and deposit liability they created) since the loan will have to be written down to zero while they still owe the deposit liability. So if the value of the house falls below the loan amount, the bank won’t be able to sell the house and patch their balance sheet hole. What happens then?

Well, we found out in 2008. Luckily for the banks, they own a bank cartel called the Federal Reserve, which has the ability to create fiat dollars (real fiat base money, not credit) out of thin air without going through the loan creation process like a commercial bank. So the Fed created trillions of dollars and gave it to the banks in the form of a bailout, and they didn’t have to suffer the damage of insolvency. Of course the damage wouldn’t be to the banks anyway, since their profit in the form of interest income is already spent. The damage would be to the bank depositors, who wouldn’t be able to withdraw their money from the insolvent banks. So that gives them cover to frame the bailouts as a benevolent act to “save” the depositors, rather than an easy and painless escape for the banks from the mess they created.

How does this liquidity vortex play out during times of economic uncertainty? Anytime there’s uncertainty, what’s the first concern of every economic actor? Making sure they can make their debt payments next month, for sure. The whole world is leveraged to the gills, and if they can’t make the payments next month the whole house of cards comes crashing down. So the first impulse during uncertainty is to make sure they have enough cash on hand to service debt. Maybe they have enough for next month, but what about the following month? Might be good to have a little more cash on hand, right?

So how can the whole world in aggregate increase their cash balances? I’ll save you the trouble. They can’t. It’s not possible. The money supply only increases through banks making new loans, which doesn’t help because it increases debt just as fast as money supply; or through central bank money printing, which is the last ditch attempt to stop a bloodbath. But the fact that it’s impossible doesn’t keep people from trying. So how do they try to increase cash? By selling assets, usually. That of course doesn’t work in aggregate, because every dollar earned by selling assets is a dollar taken out of someone else’s cash balance.

And what happens when everyone tries to sell assets at once? Asset prices collapse. And when the value of your assets is collapsing while your monthly debt payments are still fixed, does that make you want to hold more or less cash in reserve? And then if that liquidity vortex continues long enough, people cut back on spending because they would rather hang onto that money to provide some security that they’ll be able to service their debt through the crisis. The reduced spending squeezes business income and profits, which forces them to cut expenses and lay off employees, which reduces spending still further.

And no matter how bad the crisis gets, the mortgage bill and the credit card bill and the business line of credit are still due every month. And the harder people try to pay off the debt, the faster the money supply shrinks, and the more impossible the situation becomes. The only thing that can turn it around is a massive bailout of liquidity provided by, you guessed it, still more debt. That provides temporary relief, while setting the stage for the next, inevitable, credit and debt bubble and accompanying collapse.

And that's why the dollar keeps coming back, despite all predictions of imminent doom. It's actually a brilliant system. Horrifying, diabolical, but brilliant.

The only escape, in my opinion, is a complete monetary reset away from a debt-based currency to an equity-like store of value asset. That's the only monetary system that allows for healthy deflation without systemic failure.

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Trump's tariff war and Muskrat's DOGE coup are either economic self-mutilation or intentional efforts to crash the economy and dismantle the US Government. Either everyone in the WH is deeply unwell, or deeply short the market.

When citizens realise that all the ideological cuts & govt depts shut that doge make won't save money because all that spending was someone else's wage who went on & spent it on goods & services US is going to face a MAJOR SHOCK negative multiplier effect Every $ cut many $ lost

Ironic how yall let the tariffs and DOGE cuts increase prices, crash the economy, and have all our allies cutting ties, but bc a billionaire told u it benefits u despite all evidence, u believe it

Danny Moses, the trader who predicted the 2008 market crash portrayed in 'The Big Short' , warns markets underestimate DOGE's $115B spending cuts. Federal job losses could trigger an 'unvirtuous cycle,' hurting small businesses and the economy possibly leading to another Crash

DOGE is dumping civil servants into a weak job market. Maybe you don't feel bad for them. But rising unemployment will ripple across the economy in a way that will be felt by many voters, and therefore eventually by many politicians.

…the country is almost certainly heading toward a severe economic contraction due to mass layoffs in government jobs and abrupt federal contract cancellations.” And if you wasn’t thinking about the 2nd order consequences of DOGE, well then…

It was bound to happen. Today a couple declined to sign for a kitchen remodel we bid on bc he is worried about his government job. It was a tiny project. Not a big deal on my end. But, it's a perfect example of the broader economic damage DOGE is causing. Somewhere cabinet, counter, appliance, lighting, hardware and plumbing companies all lost a sale they didn't know they had yet. The RE market lost some value, and the county lost some tax revenue. You get the idea. This will be happening across the country. Every aspect of our economy will be affected, and we haven't even seen the effect of the tariff yo-yo bullshit. Trump is a moron.

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Sounds like a pretty bleak situation, right? And it even seems to make sense on the surface. Cut a bunch of government jobs and federal contracts, shut off a flow of money into the economy, more people are unemployed, businesses make less income, they lay off private sector workers, and everything just spirals downhill from there.

If we stop at the surface level of analysis, that all sounds logical. So let’s take it a step further. What’s the logical foundation of modern economic analysis that produces these predictions? It’s all Keynesian economics. And what did Keynes say?

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

John Maynard Keynes

So there you have one of the fundamental Keynesian principles described by practical illustration. According to this theory, the government could bury jars of cash in a landfill, charge companies for the privilege of digging it up, and this would get rid of unemployment and make everyone richer.

If your first thought on reading this is “that’s the most retarded idea I’ve ever heard in my life,” congratulations, you win the dubious distinction of having more common sense than the majority of economics degree recipients. Which basically means you’ve actually done productive work at some point in your life, and can tie your own shoes unassisted, an unachievably high bar for the average Paul Krugman disciple.

Although common sense immediately sniffs out the bullshit in this theory, let’s actually go a level deeper and understand why it’s wrong. Because all the disparaging DOGE quotes at the beginning of the article are based on the exact same faulty logic, but they sound much more reasonable at first blush. So we’ll need to get a firm understanding of the underlying error in order to critique the flaws of the anti-DOGE doomerism.

Money is not Wealth

The underlying error, in my opinion, is the same one underlying so much of the deception and confusion around money and economics: money is not the same thing as wealth.

I wrote a whole article on the topic, so I’m not going to rehash it here. If the concept sounds crazy to you, I challenge you to read the article before you dismiss it out of hand.

What makes the “cash in a landfill” idea so transparently ridiculous to anyone with real world work experience? There are obviously productive scenarios where valuable materials are dug out of the earth, creating jobs and making everyone richer. We call that mining. The landfill example is ridiculous because for one thing, burying something valuable only to turn around and dig it back up is clearly unproductive and wasteful. No coal miner has ever thought “You know how we could really improve this operation? We should start hauling trainloads of coal back to the mines, dumping it down the shafts, and then digging it out all over again. Think of how many jobs we could create!” Any coal miner voicing such brainrot would get a quick ride on the short bus to the local looney bin. But when a 22 year old college student submits a thesis with an equally ridiculous premise, we reward him with a degree and probably a Nobel Peace Prize for good measure.

It’s also ridiculous because the cash in those jars isn’t actual wealth, it’s just claims on existing wealth. Burying cash doesn’t create any more valuable goods or services. Neither does digging it up.

Where does the cash come from? Taxes? That means a citizen went out and worked to create some valuable goods or services, got paid to do so, and then the government confiscated a portion of those earnings at gunpoint to bury in a landfill. The whole landfill charade has no impact whatsoever on the actual goods and services in the economy. It only transfers the claim to those goods and services (the money representing that claim) from the productive citizen to some random landfill “miner.”

If the cash doesn’t come from taxes, maybe it was printed or borrowed into existence. In that case, the claims on wealth are confiscated indirectly from productive citizens by the devaluation of their savings and income through inflation. Either way, the effect is the same. No new wealth is created, claims on wealth are only redistributed from the productive to the unproductive.

What is DOGE Cutting?

So with all that in mind, how does this relate to DOGE? What are they cutting?

As far as I can tell, the cuts are focused on waste, fraud, and theft. Waste is a lot of payments to employees who aren’t needed to get the job done, and to programs and organizations providing services that no one would pay for in the free market because they aren’t valuable enough. Fraud and theft cover a wide range of things, but all cases where money is being spent with nothing valuable received in return. So in our landfill analogy, this is all landfill money. The only difference is whether the recipients are “working” to dig it out (wasteful make-work government jobs and grants to unproductive or anti-productive organizations and NGOs) or whether the cash is handed to them directly without the burying and digging up charade (fraudulent benefits payments and kickbacks to corrupt politicians).

The US is $36 trillion in debt and running multi-trillion dollar deficits every year, so every penny of this money is a wealth transfer from productive Americans paid for by inflation. Productive American citizens work to produce valuable goods and services, and then a portion of the value of their claims on those goods and services is transferred to useless bureaucrats, overpaid federal contractors, scammers, and corrupt politicians. None of these people are contributing any valuable goods and services to the economy, but they are living the high life on the backs of hard-working, productive Americans.

Is Economics Even Real?

What happens when DOGE cuts off funding to this waste, fraud, and theft? Will it really crash the economy?

Of course some people will lose jobs, and revenue to some businesses will fall as a result. Some people will be forced to sell real estate, and real estate price will fall as a result. Same is likely with stocks.

The second order effects are likely to cause some economic indicators to fall. The GDP might go down, the stock market might fall, the price of houses might fall, unemployment might rise.

Does any of this actually mean the economy is taking a hit?

In my opinion, absolutely not. It just means our economic indicators are faulty, and don’t reflect reality. That’s a whole other conversation that could be its own article, so I won’t get into it right now. But just one example to illustrate.

Suppose there’s a government employee “working” from home at an absolutely non-productive job. Nobody benefits from their “work”, no goods or services are created as a result. But they have a “job” where money taken from productive Americans is transferred to them at the rate of $150k per year. What do you call it when the government pays someone to do nothing? That’s called welfare. Suppose DOGE fires this person, and they go collect unemployment and food stamps. Now the unemployment rate goes up by one, and the number of people on welfare goes up by one. Does this mean the economy is somehow worse? I don’t believe so, because nothing about the actual economy has fundamentally changed. That person was collecting welfare all along, it was just labeled a “job” and counted in the GDP, instead of being correctly labeled as welfare and the person counted as an unemployed welfare recipient.

You can do the same exercise with every economic indicator. Remember, the indicators are all created by people who believe money is wealth, and therefore believe you can improve the economy by burying it and letting people dig it up. Don’t let them gaslight you with their word-salad rhetoric and fancy degrees.

In reality, cutting waste, fraud, and theft means productive Americans get to keep more of the wealth they create. Every dollar cut from wasteful government spending is a dollar of purchasing power that stays in the pocket of a productive American. The goods and services available in the real economy do not change, the only thing that changes is who has the purchasing power to buy those goods and services.

Gaslighting Parasites

An organism that survives by sucking resources out of a living host is called a parasite. Economically, a parasite is someone who survives, not off the free market value they provide to society, but off the resources they manage to extract from those who do create that value.

What do you call it when someone works to create things of value, and then transfers that value to someone else, who has done nothing productive to earn it? If the transfer is voluntary, we call it charity. If it’s involuntary, we call it slavery.

What do you call it when the slavemasters who are living large off their coercively obtained income claim the moral high ground, and accuse the slaves of ruining everything by objecting to their continued enslavement? I’d call it a great example of gaslighting by a particularly shameless class of parasites.

A parasite cleanse can certainly have some nasty short-term effects. But anyone arguing that DOGE cutting waste, fraud and theft is bad because “think of the poor economy!” is gaslighting you. Don’t fall for it. Real economics is not the twilight zone. Money is not wealth. Waste is bad. Fraud is bad. Theft is bad. And Paul Krugman is, as always, hilariously wrong.

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The Walt Right

Against Morality

A lot of you—perhaps the majority—are sure to open this essay rolling your eyes and expecting me to peddle some vapid 13yo edgelord take…

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a year ago · 88 likes · 23 comments · Walt Bismarck

While reading through it, I took some time to consider the fundamental difference in worldview that causes us to diverge so radically in our outlook on life. I landed on the existence of the concept of “good” as a foundational principle on which we appear to disagree. I decided to spend a few minutes parsing this concept with Grok, which sometimes helps me solidify an idea that’s bouncing around in my head, but not yet fully fleshed out. I find it interesting to consider the counterpoints it often raises, and the references to a wide range of authors on any given topic.

Preconditions of intelligibility have fascinated me for a long time, and I found this back-and-forth quite interesting as an attempt to tie the concept of “good” and its importance in morality into the discussion.

f0xr: Explain the preconditions of intelligibility.

Grok:

The preconditions of intelligibility refer to the fundamental conditions or assumptions that must be in place for anything to be understood, communicated, or made sense of—whether in language, thought, or interaction with the world. These ideas often come up in philosophy, particularly in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language, as they explore what makes knowledge, meaning, or rational discourse possible. Let’s break it down.

First, there’s the assumption of a shared reality. For anything to be intelligible, there has to be some common ground—a world or set of experiences that both the speaker and listener (or thinker and object) can refer to. If I say "the sky is blue," it’s only understandable if we both have a concept of "sky" and "blue" rooted in a consistent reality. Without that, words or ideas just float around without anchor.

Second, there’s the structure of language or representation. Intelligibility relies on a system—whether it’s words, symbols, or mental categories—that organizes thought into something coherent. This doesn’t mean everyone uses the same language, but there needs to be some framework with rules or patterns. Random noises or unconnected thoughts don’t carry meaning because they lack structure. Think of it like a map: without a legend or scale, the lines mean nothing.

Third, there’s the capacity for reason or interpretation. The person (or system) trying to understand has to be able to process and connect ideas. This isn’t just about intelligence—it’s about having the basic ability to recognize patterns, infer intent, or see cause and effect. A rock can’t understand me because it lacks this capacity; a human (or an AI like me) can because we’re built to make sense of things.

Finally, there’s the assumption of consistency or stability. If the meaning of words, the nature of reality, or the rules of logic changed unpredictably every second, nothing would be intelligible. We rely on the idea that "blue" today is roughly "blue" tomorrow, or that "if A, then B" holds up over time. Without some stability, communication and thought collapse.

Philosophers like Kant would tie this to a priori conditions—like space, time, and causality—arguing they’re baked into how we experience the world. Others, like Wittgenstein, might focus on language games, saying intelligibility emerges from shared practices rather than universal truths. Either way, these preconditions aren’t things we usually notice—they’re the invisible scaffolding that lets us think and talk at all.

f0xr: How does the existence of "good" relate to this concept? Is it also a precondition of intelligibility?

Grok:

The existence of "good" ties into the preconditions of intelligibility in a subtle but fascinating way—it’s not a precondition in the same foundational sense as shared reality or language, but it can be argued to play a role in how we make sense of the world, especially in a practical or moral context. Let’s unpack this.

"Good" as a concept—whether it’s moral goodness, practical value, or even aesthetic quality—presupposes intelligibility rather than being a direct precondition for it. To even talk about something being "good," you need the basic scaffolding I mentioned earlier: a shared reality where things exist to be evaluated, a structured way to express "this is good" versus "that isn’t," and the rational capacity to judge or compare. Without those, "good" wouldn’t have a foothold to mean anything. So, in that sense, intelligibility comes first— "good" rides on its back.

But there’s a flip side. Some philosophers, especially in the classical or metaphysical traditions (think Plato or Aristotle), might argue that "good" is so woven into how we understand reality that it edges close to being a precondition itself. For Plato, the Form of the Good is the ultimate source of truth and being—everything intelligible derives its clarity and purpose from it. If "good" didn’t exist as a concept, they’d say, we couldn’t fully grasp why things are the way they are or what they’re for. Aristotle, meanwhile, saw "good" as tied to purpose—every action or thing aims at some good, and understanding that purpose is part of making sense of it. From this angle, "good" isn’t just a tag we slap on things; it’s a lens that shapes how we interpret reality.

Now, zoom out to a more everyday level. When we communicate or think, we often assume a framework where "good" and "bad" give meaning to choices, actions, or states of affairs. If I say "this tool is good," I’m not just describing it—I’m implying it fits a purpose, which you can only understand if we share a context and a way to evaluate it. Strip away any notion of "good" (or its opposites), and our ability to reason about value, preference, or ethics starts to wobble. It’s not that intelligibility itself vanishes, but a big chunk of what we make intelligible—human behavior, goals, morality—loses its coherence.

So, is "good" a precondition? Not in the strictest sense—no one needs "good" to exist just to comprehend "the sky is blue." But it’s damn near inescapable as a secondary layer: once you’ve got the basics of intelligibility, "good" sneaks in as a way we organize and prioritize what we understand. It’s less a foundation and more a load-bearing wall—remove it, and the house still stands, but it’s a lot less functional.

f0xr: “The reason for this is straightforward: all human knowledge stems from thoroughly unjustified axioms about the nature of existence taken entirely on blind faith. There’s no such thing as a “justified true belief,” because everyone has their own such axioms (most of which are entirely unconscious or impossible to reject without contradiction—think the laws of thought) and there’s no basis for designating one man’s axiom as more justified than another’s without begging the question as to where this purported objectivity is coming from.

“And this applies doubly to moral philosophy, because you can’t derive an ought from an is. Moral realists either have to appeal to a theism accepted entirely on blind faith or devise some obviously retarded reason to believe in normative spooks as an atheist. I can respect the former impulse, but the latter tendency is where most midwit reddit philosophags seem to end up, and that’s another major reason I stopped taking academic philosophy seriously by the time I was old enough to drink.” -Walt Bismarck

Evaluate the above quote in light of the fundamental relationship of the concept of "good" to the preconditions of intelligibility.

Grok:

The quote you’ve dropped here is a Molotov cocktail lobbed at epistemology and moral philosophy, and it’s got some real bite to it. It’s arguing that all human knowledge, including notions of "good," rests on shaky, unjustified axioms—blind faith masquerading as reason—and that moral realism, in particular, either leans on theism or flails into nonsense. Let’s evaluate it against what we’ve been discussing about "good" and the preconditions of intelligibility.

The core claim—that knowledge stems from unjustified axioms—actually aligns pretty tightly with the idea of intelligibility’s preconditions. Those preconditions (shared reality, language, reason, consistency) aren’t things we prove; they’re things we assume to even get started. The laws of thought (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle) are a perfect example: you can’t reject them without using them, so they’re axiomatic, baked into the system. The quote’s dead right that these aren’t "justified" in some external, objective way—they’re the starting line, not the finish. Intelligibility doesn’t need justification; it needs acceptance, conscious or not, to function. So, on that front, the quote’s swinging in the same direction as our earlier discussion: understanding anything, including "good," assumes a framework we don’t fully ground.

Where "good" comes in, though, the quote pivots hard to skepticism. It says there’s no "justified true belief" because everyone’s axioms differ, and there’s no neutral referee to say whose are better without circular reasoning. Fair point—if I say "good exists" because my axiom is "reality has purpose," and you say "nope" because yours is "it’s all random," we’re just yelling past each other. This fits with what I said earlier: "good" isn’t a precondition of intelligibility itself but a secondary layer, one that depends on the axioms you bring to the table. Plato’s Form of the Good might be intelligible to him, but if your axiom rejects transcendent forms, it’s gibberish. The quote’s pushing this further: not only is "good" not foundational, but it’s also not objectively anchorable—everyone’s got their own version, and none’s inherently truer.

Now, the moral philosophy jab—Hume’s is-ought problem gets a nod here, and it’s a solid one. You can’t logically jump from "the world is this way" to "it should be that way" without smuggling in some value, some axiom, that isn’t in the facts themselves. The quote’s disdain for moral realists tracks with that: if you claim "good" is real, you either punt to God (faith-based axiom) or cook up some secular justification that’s just vibes dressed up as logic (those "normative spooks"). I’d said "good" shapes how we interpret reality once intelligibility’s in place, but the quote’s saying even that shaping is a house of cards—whether theistic or atheistic, it’s still resting on sand.

The kicker’s in the attitude: it’s not just that "good" lacks a firm tie to intelligibility’s preconditions; it’s that trying to justify it as real or universal is a fool’s errand, either pious or pretentious. The theism option at least owns its faith; the atheist moral realist, per the quote, is deluded—chasing objectivity where there’s none to be had. That’s a step beyond our earlier chat—I’d framed "good" as a functional lens, but this view says it’s a mirage unless you’re upfront about its arbitrariness.

So, in light of intelligibility: the quote agrees the preconditions are assumed, not proven, and it casts "good" as a downstream artifact of those assumptions—fragile, subjective, and unprovable. It’s not a precondition but a byproduct, and any attempt to make it more than that (like moral realism does) either leans on blind faith or collapses into nonsense. The argument’s got teeth—it’s just wielding them with a smirk. What’s your take on how far it holds up?

f0xr: The argument seems to rest on some fundamental rejection of the nature of truth itself. The only seemingly valid way to evaluate claims, including moral claims, is to observe the effects of implementing them. But without a pre-existing concept of "good", how can one logically evaluate the outcome of any course of action? If a moral framework leads to a genocide, your ability to reject that moral framework as incorrect depends entirely on a pre-existing concept that avoiding genocide is "good". Without that pre-existing concept, the perpetrator of genocide can argue that genocide is moral according to his moral framework, and any argument against his moral framework is not actually true or rooted in any fundamentally sound basis.

That's why I would argue that the concept of "good" is, in fact, a precondition of intelligibility in a moral sense.

Grok:

You’re zeroing in on a critical tension here, and it’s a sharp rebuttal to the quote’s skepticism. The argument you’re making—that evaluating anything, especially moral claims, requires a pre-existing concept of "good"—pokes a hole in the idea that "good" is just a flimsy byproduct of unjustified axioms. Let’s run with this and see how it reframes "good" as a precondition of intelligibility, at least in the moral domain.

The quote’s stance is that all knowledge, including morality, rests on shaky, subjective axioms, so no claim—like "genocide is bad"—can be objectively true. It’s just one guy’s faith versus another’s. You’re countering that this falls apart in practice: if we judge a moral framework by its effects (say, genocide), we can’t even start that judgment without some baseline notion of "good" or "bad" to measure against. Without it, the genocidal maniac’s framework—“killing millions is moral”—is as "valid" as yours, because there’s no yardstick. That’s a reductio ad absurdum: if every moral claim is just arbitrary noise, then intelligibility in moral discourse collapses. You can’t reason about outcomes, compare frameworks, or even say "this sucks" without smuggling in "good" as a reference point.

This flips the script on our earlier chat. I’d said "good" isn’t a precondition of intelligibility in the raw sense—like understanding "the sky is blue"—but a secondary layer we layer on top. You’re arguing it’s deeper than that, at least for moral reasoning. If we’re making sense of actions or their consequences, "good" isn’t optional—it’s the lens that lets us see anything coherent at all. Without it, you’re stuck in a void where genocide and charity are just neutral data points, and no one can say why one’s preferable. That’s not intelligibility; that’s paralysis.

Your point about observing effects is key. Pragmatism—judging by outcomes—seems like a way out of the axiom trap, but it still leans on "good" implicitly. If I say "this framework leads to suffering, so it’s bad," I’m assuming suffering’s not "good." The genocider can counter, "Suffering’s fine by my lights," and we’re back to clashing axioms—unless "good" has some prior footing that lets us adjudicate. You’re right: without that footing, the argument’s not just unrooted; it’s unintelligible. Moral claims don’t just need axioms; they need a shared "good" to even be discussable.

So, "good" as a precondition of moral intelligibility? Yeah, you’ve got a case. It’s not about truth in some cosmic sense but about making moral sense possible. The quote’s rejection of objective truth might hold for grand metaphysical claims, but it stumbles when you zoom into practical reasoning—where "good" isn’t a conclusion but a starting block. The skeptic can deny it, but they’re still using it the moment they argue back. That’s the contradiction they can’t dodge.

Where do you see this landing—does "good" as a moral precondition feel universal, or just a human necessity?

f0xr: It seems universal, because even the most practical scientific study can't proceed without a goal, and a goal requires the assumption of the possibility of success and failure.

Grok:

You’re pushing this into a compelling corner—making "good" not just a moral necessity but a universal one, even for something as nuts-and-bolts as a scientific study. Let’s tease that out.

A scientific study needs a goal—say, "figure out if this drug works." That goal assumes success (the drug helps) and failure (it doesn’t) are meaningful categories. But why bother distinguishing them unless there’s an implicit "good" at play—like health being preferable to sickness? Without that, the study’s just data for data’s sake, no direction, no point. Even the coldest, most detached scientist isn’t flipping coins; they’re aiming at something—accuracy, discovery, utility—that’s "good" in their framework. Strip that away, and the whole endeavor’s unintelligible—it’s just noise, not knowledge.

This tracks back to intelligibility’s preconditions. A shared reality and a structured system (like the scientific method) don’t mean squat if there’s no way to evaluate what you’re doing within them. "Good" sneaks in as the compass: success versus failure, progress versus stagnation. It’s not just moral reasoning that needs it—any reasoning with a purpose does. The quote’s skepticism about justified axioms starts to wobble here: sure, "health is good" might be an unproven assumption, but try running a study—or any goal-driven act—without it. You can’t. The assumption’s not optional; it’s the grease that keeps the gears turning.

So, universal? Yeah, it’s looking that way. Not in a grand, Platonic "Good exists out there" sense, but as a functional necessity baked into how any rational system—human or otherwise—makes sense of action. Even an alien scientist with no morals would need some "good" (efficiency, truth, whatever) to aim at, or their experiments are just random twitches. It’s less about truth and more about coherence—intelligibility doesn’t survive without it.

Which leads us to the conclusion of Walt’s essay:

The logical consequence of all this is that as any civilization grows more sophisticated purely material factors will inevitably create enormous social cleavages on the basis of temperament (and by extension moral foundations) that gradually escalate into political factions that isolate themselves into echo chambers and dehumanize the opposition until productive cohabitation becomes all but impossible.

The only way out of this swamp is adopting a more transactional attitude toward public morality that overtly stigmatizes moral universalism.

So the solution to diverging moral foundations is to (universally?) reject moral universalism, apparently on moral grounds? It reminds me a lot of the modern tolerance of everything under the sun, except, of course, for intolerance. Zero tolerance for intolerance. Has a nice ring to it, but doesn’t work in reality.

The universal moral rejection of moral universalism is itself an imposition of moral universalism.

But that’s no surprise, since ignoring a precondition of intelligibility inevitably results in unintelligible outputs. And “unintelligible outputs” sure does a good job of describing our society today. That’s probably not an accident.

In part 1, I walked through the life of a typical Amish person, male or female, and attempted to highlight some specific characteristics of their culture that contribute to their default large family size. I’m of course making some assumptions in doing that, and you might disagree with my opinion on the relative impact of various cultural factors. But in general, I don’t think I made too many unreasonable inferences. I laid out the facts as clearly as possible, and didn’t go too far beyond that.

In this part, I want to go beyond the facts and into the realm of hypothesis and speculation. That means I don’t have scientific studies or hard data to categorically prove my points. So if you disagree, you’re absolutely welcome to do so, but don’t expect me to tenaciously defend my opinions with reams of hard data and irrefutable evidence. My purpose is to expand the conversation, not to present a definite solution to any perceived problem.

Is there a problem to solve?

For starters, not everyone agrees that globally collapsing fertility is, in fact, a problem to be solved. Although that’s definitely the dominate consensus in the alternative media space, and is reaching a wider audience thanks to the attention of figures like Elon Musk, the average normie still believes the debunked Malthusian hypothesis that human population is on an exponential trajectory to disaster. They’re more likely to view a collapsing global population as a good thing than as an unmitigated disaster in the making. If that’s your view, you aren’t likely to find my writing particularly compelling. But if you are interested in challenging that belief, I point out some of the potential implications of population collapse here.

If you’re already convinced that global below-replacement fertility is a problem to solve, then you’re in the right place.

Is there a solution?

The modern mind rarely stops to evaluate this question. As soon as a problem is presented, we immediately jump to searching for the ideal solution. That’s a foolish, and occasionally catastrophic, mistake. Before searching for a solution, it’s worth considering whether the possibility of a solution even exists, and more importantly, whether a potential solution would have unintended consequences less severe than the problem it’s intended to solve.

Often those questions can’t be answered until some attempts to find a solution have been made. But we should keep them at the top of our minds throughout the search. Otherwise we can easily find ourselves genetically modifying generally harmless diseases in the lab to make them deadly to humans as we search for a “solution” to disease, or cutting down and burning trees to produce electricity as we attempt to “solve” the climate.

When it comes to global fertility, I’ll give you my conclusion first. Yes, there are solutions to this problem. No, they almost certainly won’t be adopted on a large scale. And I’m not sure if that should be considered a failure.

That’s because of the nature of the problem. People act according to incentives. When global population was growing exponentially, that was because of the incentive structures influencing the choices of each individual. Now that the fertility rate has dropped dramatically, and global population is set to peak and collapse, that’s also because of the incentive structures influencing the choices of each individual. Globally.

That means something happened over the past few centuries that upset historical incentive structures globally. There’s every reason to believe that whatever happened was largely an emergent phenomenon. If it was, resetting the incentive structures would mean imposing, somehow, an incentive structure diametrically opposed to the naturally emergent structure. That somehow gives me pause. How certain are we that overruling a global emergent phenomenon is even possible, and if it were, less destructive than the alternative?

Because logically, the current trajectory will become unsustainable at some point. Fertility can’t continue to fall indefinitely, that trend ends in total extinction. So that leaves two alternative outcomes, absent the kind of global intervention I alluded to. One, it does continue to fall, and humans go extinct. I write that one off because it doesn’t align with my worldview, so as far as I’m concerned I know it won’t happen. You’re free to disagree. Or two, fertility continues to fall until the negative effects of falling population destroy the new global incentive structure of the past few centuries through the partial or total collapse of the emergent phenomenon underlying that structure. If you identify what you think that emergent phenomenon is, and conclude that it’s “too big to fail”, you should probably use some imagination and reconsider.

To take it one step further for the really esoteric thinkers, maybe the whole thing is less of a new concept and more of a certain phase of a larger cycle humans keep repeating throughout history. I’ll leave that one to your imagination.

What can we learn about potential solutions from the Amish?

Like I mentioned in part 1, looking at a group like the the Amish in this context is particularly useful. They exist as a sub-group within a larger environment, so that allows us to eliminate a lot of incorrect theories based on their similar circumstances. The Amish live on the same planet, breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat similar food, buy homes in the same housing market, work in the same labor market, etc. That casts significant doubt on a number of very popular theories on why people in America aren’t reproducing.

That leaves us to focus on the significant differences between Amish culture and mainstream American culture with full confidence that the real answer lies somewhere in those differences.

The structure of this article will be something of a stream-of-consciousness. I’m not going to attempt to isolate and breakdown every aspect of Amish culture independent of the whole, because that won’t be useful or accurate. I’m convinced that the factors influencing Amish fertility are best understood as parts of a larger structure, and not as cumulative independent variables. So I’m going to start by taking a birds-eye view of that structure, and then zooming in on how the various pieces support the whole.

Throughout the past few months, I’ve read a lot of material on this topic as I researched and refined my conclusions. To give credit where credit is due, I haven’t found anyone who expresses a view as coherent as the one gives in his article

Becoming Noble

It's embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom

Fertility is collapsing worldwide. We lack a coherent theory for why this is happening. As we shall see, the conventional explanations - changes in economics, housing, religiosity, contraception, and childcare - don’t fit the macro data and cannot be the fundamental drivers of the trend. Each of these factors may play an important role in certain circum…

Read more

2 years ago · 993 likes · 430 comments · Johann Kurtz

This is an excellent and well-thought-out piece, and one that’s rightfully gotten a lot of attention in the alternative media space. It’s only with a great deal of respect and serious hesitation that I disagree with any aspect of his work, and I do so in a spirit of advancing the intellectual discourse rather than any delusions of my superior knowledge or abilities as an author.

The role of status

The primary thesis of Mr. Kurtz’s article is that declining fertility is a consequence of a decline in the status of motherhood compared to the status afforded by various alternative life paths. While it wasn’t the only point I made in part 1 of this article, I did mention the relative status of parenthood within the Amish culture in various contexts. And a few months of research and reflection have convinced me that status is the correct starting point for understanding fertility, both within Amish culture and also more broadly. On that point, Mr. Kurtz and I fully agree. He says,

Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.

That seems to me like a fair assessment of the situation.

And Mr. Kurtz mentions the Amish specifically, so he’s aware of their unusual pattern and has integrated that data into his hypothesis. I believe he’s correct in doing so.

With that said, I want to dive a little deeper into the idea of status and how it relates to the Amish specifically. I think they can give us some insights into the topic that make more sense of the broader cultural landscape.

First off, let’s define status. Mr. Kurtz lays it out this way.

Status, or ‘social status’, is a key field within sociology. The term denotes a universal set of human instincts and behaviors. Status describes the perceived standing of the individual within the group. It denotes their social value and their place within the formal and informal hierarchies which comprise a society. It finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth).

Higher status individuals are trusted with influential decisions (power), participation in productive ventures (resources), social support (health), and access to desirable mates (reproduction).

Gaining status is a motivation for each individual to productively participate in society. Status is gained and maintained through approved behaviors (achievement, etiquette, defending the group) and through the possession of recognized ‘status symbols’ (titles, wealth, important physical assets).

As he points out, status is a relative game. One’s status is measured in relation to others in the group, not in relation to some objective metric.

In correctly understanding status, there’s a fine line between the concept of status as an end in itself, and status as a means to the benefits afforded by higher status. If there’s one fundamental complaint I have with Mr. Kurtz’s piece, it’s that he seems to lean too far into the concept of status as an end in itself. Taken to extremes, it’s the idea that status is somehow an arbitrary and external scale, and that if we can just manipulate or recreate that scale to place parenthood at the top, we can solve for higher fertility without changing any physical realities in the real world. I disagree with that concept of status.

If you look at the attributes of higher status, they’re all very much tangible, physical benefits. He lists four; power, resources, health, and reproduction. Power gives a person the ability to bend the behavior of others to their own tangible benefit. Access to resources is a direct physical benefit to a person’s survival and wellbeing. Health is also a direct physical benefit. And access to reproduction, while closely tied to emotional well-being, is also a distinctly physical benefit and one we’re hard-wired to respond to, given that the alternative is the end of that bloodline.

Along with that, there’s also the complex overlap between achievements that increase status and benefits conferred by higher status. If someone acquires a lot of wealth, that’s going to increase their relative status. But access to wealth-increasing opportunity is also a benefit of higher status. Similarly, acquiring a desirable mate definitely increases a person’s status. But achieving higher status by acquiring wealth also opens up the opportunity to attract a more desirable mate. All of these things are very closely entwined, and in my opinion, are the reason why status is such an existential concern. As Mr. Kurtz points out, a person can experience severe distress from loss of status, even if their own situation seems to be unchanged and they only lost status because others advanced faster. That makes sense when you consider that a relative loss of status still makes it more difficult to access the resources needed to maintain one’s status moving forward. So even if one’s absolute condition hasn’t changed, the fear that lower status could be the beginning of an irreversible downward spiral is very real.

With that in mind, I’m going to look at status in the Amish culture as closely tied to physical reality, and not only as a mental scoreboard to be manipulated at will.

In part 1, I mentioned status here.

When it comes to status, the benefits are just as clear. Amish life revolves around family, and nothing is higher status than a thriving family of your own.

That’s the bird’s-eye view of family and status in the Amish culture. But it’s not enough to stop there and say “we just need to create a status hierarchy that places motherhood at the top like the Amish have” and leave it at that. The important part is why the Amish status hierarchy, and the mainstream status hierarchy globally until 200 years ago, placed parenthood so high up the scale.

I don’t believe that hierarchies, including the status hierarchy, develop in a random way. I think they are, at least originally, rooted in physical realities. In other words, the status hierarchy elevates certain things because those things are useful markers of value to the group. Wealth is high-status because it implies competence and ability, which is a valuable asset to the group. Without competent people working hard and being productive, the group will be impoverished. Similarly, parenthood is high-status because reproduction is an existential concern for the group. Without it, the group goes extinct.

These status markers are enforced by the feedback loop of physical reality. If a group attempts to function with wealth way down at the bottom of their status hierarchy, the group will be poor and unsuccessful and will be dominated by a group with a functional status hierarchy. If a group attempts to function with parenthood way down at the bottom of their status hierarchy, as the mainstream culture is currently doing, they’ll go extinct and be replaced by the Amish. Hyperbolic, maybe, but I’m trying to illustrate the point. There may be a lag in the feedback loop, but reality is inevitable.

What keeps status hierarchies largely functional is that desirable behaviors tend to cluster. Incentive structures align to keep it that way. Working hard results in higher income, which increases status. Higher status and more disposable income are powerful motivators.

Beyond that, functional societies are incentivized to “help” the feedback loops of reality with social institutions. Honesty is important in maintaining a functional, productive high-trust society. So we put thieves in prison rather than letting them use their stolen wealth to increase their status, turning our society into South Africa and destroying our wealth to the point that we become globally non-competitive. These social institutions serve a very important purpose, but they begin to break down when the lag between cause and effect becomes too big for the average person to understand. At that point, they lose their public support and can no longer function, and shorter-term incentive structures “reset” the status hierarchy. Then we end up with things like a status hierarchy that no longer penalizes divorce, even though the long-term effects are devastating, because the average person can’t see past their own short-term incentives.

So let’s look at the Amish status hierarchy around family and children. Why is a large family still high-status in that culture?

One could first look at the effects of peer pressure and social conditioning. Most Amish children grow up in large families, surrounded by peers in equally large families. As they mature, they see their peers get married at a young age, and have children at a young age. Doing otherwise means swimming against the current, not fitting in with the group. And fitting in with the group is itself a kind of status marker.

While that’s certainly a powerful incentive, it doesn’t explain the difference between the Amish and broader culture. After all, that was everyone’s experience a few centuries ago at most. If inertia were enough to keep the Amish at a 6 TFR, why would everyone else fall below 2 over the same period? So while the lack of exposure to large families is a commonly invoked reason for falling birthrates, it doesn’t explain how we got here to begin with.

Mr. Kurtz has this to say about the changes brought about by the Enlightenment.

Thus the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become ‘What do you do?’. This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy. Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one. Women are, understandably, hesitant to be continuously humiliated in this way, and will make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to ensure they have a better answer.

I think he’s onto something here. The Enlightenment did bring significant changes, and I want to zero in on the effects of the Industrial Revolution specifically. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the family typically functioned as the primary economic unit. Wage labor was less common, and subsistence farming was widespread. In that system, every member of the family, and often the extended rather than the nuclear family, worked together to support the family unit. While there were gender roles, the husband and father’s work in the fields was less distinct from the wife and mother’s work in the home. Both often worked in directly complementary roles, for example the wife and daughters milking the cows while the father and sons fed, watered and cared for the animals. The “paid work” was just as often selling butter churned by the wife as selling grain the husband raised and harvested. There was not a distinct breadwinner versus homemaker role, all work was directly and clearly in support of the family as a whole. In that scenario, the question “what do you do?” would have been silly, and “I’m a mother” wouldn’t be fundamentally different than the husband’s answer of “I’m a farmer.” Status from an economic perspective would be clearly understood as a cooperative achievement. And since children were part of the economic unit, a large family had a very quick and direct economic feedback loop to higher status.

With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of wage labor, the primary economic unit became the individual rather than the family. Along with that came the invention of household appliances that drastically reduced the burden of domestic labor. Suddenly the financial status of the household was entirely dependent on the breadwinner. There’s no fundamental reason that should lower the status of the homemaking wife. As Mr. Kurtz pointed out, before the Enlightenment, a woman’s status was modified substantially by her husband’s status. And I would argue that’s still that case at the extremes. I doubt the wives of wealthy entrepreneurs and sports stars get asked “what do you do?” very often in their social circles. But what did happen is that the reduced burden of domestic labor gave women the potential to contribute to the family outside the homemaking role, and they began to demand more freedom and opportunity to do so. As they shifted more into that financial status hierarchy, it created a direct status tradeoff between career and children. Like Mr. Kurtz pointed out, “women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport)”.

The Amish managed to maintain the traditional status hierarchy by saying “no” to that demand. Amish women do not have independent access to education, commerce, politics, or sport. They don’t have the option of pursuing those status markers within the Amish culture.

As you can imagine, I don’t believe this approach will be implemented on a wider scale. I don’t see it happening across liberal democracies, since the bridge of universal suffrage has already been crossed.

The Amish maintain their social structure through their insular lifestyle and their severe ostracization of those who choose to leave. It’s a significant tradeoff to young people, so much so that most choose their family and community over the opportunities of the broader culture. The evidence shows that, given the opportunity with no significant tradeoff, most young women choose education and career over marriage and children.

Here’s the thing about this post-Enlightenment status hierarchy; it’s societal suicide. That much is obvious. So given that status hierarchies exist to serve group interests, this one is obviously terminally defective. So how did that happen? In my opinion, the underlying problem is that the lag time between anti-social behavior and its consequences has been inflated by the Industrial Revolution to the point that the social institutions meant to punish anti-social behavior have collapsed, and the short-term incentive structures now point away from parenthood.

The Amish have escaped that effect by creating a “moat” around their social group. Within that group, they artificially exclude certain things that aid and encourage anti-social behavior, and artificially enforce certain feedback loops that have become disconnected as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

I’ll give some examples.

One of the primary feedback loops for high fertility is that if you don’t have children, you have no one to care for you when you’re old and unable to work. In the bad old days of subsistence farming, there was no such thing as “saving for retirement”. Every year was a struggle for survival, and there were no functional financial instruments available to save and invest for decades in the future. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, and most importantly led to the creation of pensions and public welfare systems. Now anyone without children to care for them could be cared for in old age by one of these financial schemes. Did that fundamentally solve a problem? No, not at all. Look at the bankrupt state of global public pension schemes today, and the imminent collapse they face as the result of (checks notes)… too few young workers to support each retiree. Turns out, society actually does need everyone to have enough children to support them in old age. The Industrial Revolution just broke the direct feedback loop, so everyone doesn’t get to see the poor souls without children begging on the street or sent to the poorhouse in their old age, and can therefore conclude that not having children is a purely personal choice and won’t have any effect on their lifestyle at age 80. The Amish took a different approach. They are exempt from Social Security. They don’t pay into it, and they aren’t eligible to collect it. They can see from a young age that children care for and support their elderly parents. They know that if they don’t have children and grandchildren, their elderly years will be much more difficult and depressing. They don’t get fed any dishonest media narratives portraying some rosy alternative reality. The historical status hierarchy rewarding large families remains intact.

As another example, casual sex historically resulted in unplanned pregnancies, and without good employment opportunities or public welfare schemes, single mothers faced an extremely difficult life. With the invention of reliable contraceptives, legal abortion, good employment opportunities, court-mandated child support, and public welfare, casual sex no longer carries catastrophic consequences for women. Over the longer term, it leads to drastically reduced marriage rates, lower fertility rates, higher rates of single motherhood, dysfunctional children, and eventually societal collapse. The Amish fight this trend in various ways. First, the lack of employment opportunities for women means that they’re fundamentally dependent on family and community for support. And violating community expectations by engaging in sex outside of marriage puts that support in jeopardy. That’s a strong deterrent. The absence of sex education makes it much less likely that young people will feel comfortable engaging in casual sex without risking pregnancy, and much more likely that they’ll abstain altogether, given the significant social consequences. All on top of the religious teaching against it, which in my opinion is just additional icing on the cake. None of that does anything to diminish the human sex drive. So particularly for young men, that incentive structure makes early marriage a lot more appealing than it might otherwise be. Once again, the historical status hierarchy remains intact.

Another example would be lifestyle based. Although the Amish are no longer primarily subsistence farmers, they reject many of the modern conveniences that eliminated the labor involved in housework. Their insistence on distinctive clothing means the women still spend significant time sewing for the family. And all that clothing must be washed with much more primitive equipment than we’re accustomed to. Cooking is also more labor intensive, and eating out, ordering takeout, or buying prepared food are much less accepted. No microwave to heat up a TV dinner, or even last night’s leftovers. Gardening and preserving food is strongly encouraged. No vacuum cleaners for cleaning. Mowing the lawn might require a hand-pushed mechanical reel mower, not a ride-on garden tractor. The lack of cars makes staying home and caring for the household much less optional, for both men and women. And the large potential income disparity between men and women makes all men potentially attractive mates to all women. That eliminates the hypergamous trap we have now where the average man isn’t sufficiently high-status to attract the average woman, which leaves both groups single and frustrated while the majority of women chase an increasingly small group of men with the financial resources to actually improve their lifestyle. All those restrictions for the Amish make life much more comfortable as a team effort, for both men and women. Trying to do it all yourself would hardly be feasible. The alternative is to stay living at home with your parents, hardly a rewarding or high-status lifestyle in any cultural setting. In this case, the Amish have chosen to artificially restrict their access to the physical benefits of the Industrial Revolution. This is less about status, and more about creating conditions that make marriage a direct lifestyle benefit. Once again, it’s questionable whether all these modern technologies and conveniences can survive in an environment of collapsing global population. So the approach the Amish are taking may just be an artificial short-circuit of a feedback loop that will send us all back to the Dark Ages anyway. Regardless, they’ve managed to maintain the historical attractiveness of marriage, in this case by removing access to modern conveniences that allow us to effectively outsource labor in a way that makes the single lifestyle attractive. The attractive single lifestyle is largely historically unprecedented, and a direct result of the Industrial Revolution.

Many of the lifestyle choices of the Amish culture are less about direct effects, and more about maintaining the “moat” that keeps their culture somewhat isolated from the broader society. This makes a lot of sense when you understand that status is “the perceived standing of the individual within the group.” If you want to create your own status hierarchy, you have to create your own coherent group. The Amish severely restrict their exposure to the media and culture of the broader society. That’s a very effective way to maintain a coherent group. Amish young girls don’t feel the same pressure to pursue higher education and career over marriage and motherhood, because they don’t see a billion media references praising career and denigrating motherhood before they’re 18. And they don’t see a million “boss babes” on social media, TV, and Netflix shows flaunting the single lifestyle and bashing the patriarchy in heels. Instead, they see and hear their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts joyfully caring for and loving their large families, praised and supported by their devoted, hardworking husbands. The evidence shows that a free market in media doesn’t result in glowing depictions of parenthood that lead young people to reject career opportunities and pursue marriage instead. You can ask yourself why that might be, but that’s what history shows.

Across thousands of distinct cultural groups around the world, only a handful have rejected the dominant post-Enlightenment status hierarchy in favor of large families and traditional values. I’m not aware of any that managed it without significant insulation from the dominant culture. That tells me that the short-term incentive structure of modern society is more powerful than any historical cultural norms, and there is no passive solution that doesn’t involve collapse of that incentive structure and the civilization it rests on.

I could go into more detail on specifics of Amish culture and how they play into their status hierarchy. But you can read part 1 of the article and draw your own conclusions. I’m going to end with what’s sure to be a highly provocative list of requirements that would be necessary for the Amish status hierarchy to function across broader society. I don’t personally believe there’s any possibility of anything similar being widely adopted. And frankly, I don’t think it’s possible outside of a religious context, without the collapse of modern civilization as we know it. The collapse of modern civilization is the outcome I expect, although I’m happy to be proven wrong. So this is a philosophical exercise, not a policy prescription.

• End social acceptance of casual sex. Implement sever consequences for premarital sex or marital infidelity.

• End all forms of government financial support for the elderly. All elderly care is the responsibility of the family, or failing that, the church/community.

• End all government support for single mothers. Again, support for widows and those in other extenuating circumstances is the responsibility of the church/community.

• End all sex education in public schools. Sex education is the responsibility of the parents.

• Ban all forms of contraception, with significant penalties for violation.

• Ban abortion.

• Severely restrict access to higher education for women.

• End female participation in politics, including universal suffrage. One household, one vote. No voting by unmarried people, male or female.

• End the social and legal acceptance of divorce. No divorce permitted for any reason, and legal separation doesn’t allow for remarriage.

• End mandatory public education. Education is the responsibility of the parents.

• Ban negative messaging toward marriage and children in all forms of media.

• Severely restrict or outright eliminate social media platforms.

• Roll back child labor laws significantly.

I could add a few more, but I think that covers the essentials. If that sounds insane and offensive to you, I’m not shocked. This isn’t a policy prescription, and as I said at the beginning of the piece, I don’t necessarily believe that this is even a problem we should attempt to “fix”. The reason being, any government with the power to enforce these requirements on the world would be more concerning to me than the prospect of civilizational collapse itself. Civilization has collapsed before, many times throughout history. And we’ve always bounced back eventually. A global power of this magnitude might not be reversible.

But you should at least temper your shock and outrage with the realization that every item on that list was the accepted reality for most of human history, all the way up until the past few anomalous centuries.

My personal opinion is that too much obsession with this issue is probably a waste of time. Again, I don’t think any “solution” we come up with is likely to be less dangerous than the problem itself. I expect things to play out over a long period of time, and for the population decline to eventually degrade our interconnected, high-tech global civilization. Once many of the advances of the Industrial Revolution become widely unavailable, the natural incentive structures and status hierarchies will reemerge. And those incentive structures demand that men and women are natural allies, not enemies. We need each other, and the families we create together, to be a healthy, happy, flourishing, and productive society over the long term. If the prospect of losing our modern conveniences and going back to that world terrifies you, go befriend an Amish parent or grandparent. You’ll soon realize that they’re as happy and fulfilled in life as anyone you’ll ever meet. Life is a matter of perspective, not products. And my point in exploring this topic isn’t to spread doom, but to point out that we can make our own decisions and surround ourselves with like-minded people, and in doing so find peace and fulfillment in relationships and community instead of constantly chasing a dysfunctional, suicidal status hierarchy.

In conclusion, while writing this article, a stanza from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” kept coming to mind. It’s been over a hundred years since he penned these words, and the whole poem displays a prescience that’s positively uncanny. The seeds of the current issue were sown a long time ago, but there were people like him who saw the poisonous fruit coming even as the little plants were just emerging from the soil.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. 

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. 

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. 

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. 

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."  

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."  

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, 
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; 
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, 
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."  

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four–
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. 

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. 
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, 
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; 

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

This article is building on a topic I’ve mentioned previously, the misleading terminology around money “flowing into” an asset class. I’m going to approach another aspect of this misconception that I think will be helpful in understanding the price movements of assets in general. It also has implications for the way price inflation happens.

Spending money, if you stop and think about it, only transfers that money to someone else. The money is still there, its quantity hasn’t changed, but it’s just in a different person’s bank account or wallet now. That’s fundamentally why money can’t “flow into” an asset. If you buy an asset, that money you spent is still available to spend, just by someone else rather than by you. It’s not somehow sitting there inside the stock or bond or real estate, waiting for you to sell your asset so it can emerge back into the financial landscape and be spent again.

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So lets create a very simple mental model of this process and try to understand how asset prices change.

Lets imagine there are only two financial assets you can own: money, or Apple stock. And let’s imagine for this exercise that there are only two people in the world who own assets, you and Bob. Imagine that there are 10 shares of Apple stock in existence, and $1,000 in existence. You hold 5 shares of Apple stock and $500, and Bob also has 5 shares of Apple stock and $500. The current price of Apple stock is $100 per share, so you and Bob each have $500 of your net worth in Apple stock, and $500 in cash. So 50% cash, 50% stocks.

Now imagine that you and Bob are watching CNBC one day, and a financial guru advises everyone to hold 75% of their wealth in stocks, and 25% in cash. You and Bob both see the recommendation and immediately decide to adjust your portfolio allocation. So you go to Bob and say “I want to buy some of your Apple stock, would you sell me some for $110 a share?” Bob of course also wants more Apple stock, so he says “No, I don’t want to sell any right now, but can I buy some from you for $120 a share?” Of course that doesn’t work for you, so in an effort to increase your portfolio allocation to Apple stock, you raise your offer to $130 a share. Bob counters with a $140 offer, and so on. Finally, after a few minutes of increasing bids, you offer Bob $300 a share for some Apple stock. Bob says “No thanks, that’s okay, I don’t want to sell any, I’m good now. And with Apple stock at $300 a share, I don’t want to buy any more now either. I’m already 75% allocated to Apple stock just like that guru said.”

You stop and think for a minute and realize that at $300 a share, your 5 shares of Apple stock are now worth $1,500, while you still have $500 of cash. A perfect 75/25 allocation, exactly the ratio you wanted. Success! You and Bob both go home happy that you now have an ideally balanced portfolio.

There are a few things to notice here. One, the price of Apple stock tripled, and not a single dollar changed hands. No “money flows” occurred. Why did price rise? Because of a change in perceived relative value of money and Apple stock. Money went down in perceived value from an asset worth 50% of a portfolio, to an asset worth 25% of a portfolio. Apple stock did the inverse.

Second, money depreciated in value in relation to Apple stock. A hundred dollars went from being worth one share of Apple stock, to being worth one-third of a share of Apple stock. So your cash holdings lost value against Apple stock, in the same way inflation causes your dollar to buy fewer groceries today than it bought 5 years ago.

Now lets apply this model on a larger scale. Imagine all the money and assets held by every person in the US. In aggregate, they hold a certain number of dollars, and a certain number of shares of Apple stock. So what has to happen for Apple stock price to rise? Of course individual investors can adjust their portfolio allocation by buying and selling stock. Selling increases their cash balance, while lowering their Apple stock holdings. Buying does the inverse. In that way, individual investors can reach their personal desired ratio of cash to Apple stock. But for the market price to rise, there must be an overall aggregate desire to hold a higher percentage of Apple stock relative to cash. That will cause individual investors to bid higher and higher for shares of Apple stock until the market price reaches a new equilibrium with the constant quantity of dollars in people’s bank accounts.

The higher price is caused by the change in desired ratio of value held in Apple stock versus value held in cash. You can buy and sell on an individual level to achieve that balance. But since the money you spend when you buy goes to someone else’s bank account, the total quantity of money remains constant. That means price changes are the only way to reach equilibrium over the whole market.

So what would happen if we increase the money supply? Say, by creating trillions of new dollars and distributing them throughout the economy? Well, if everyone wants to maintain the same ratio of cash to Apple stock in their portfolio, the same percentage allocation, and there are now trillions of new dollars while the number of shares of Apple stock remained the same, that means the price of Apple stock needs to go up. And as individuals bid higher and higher on the market in an effort to rebalance their own portfolio, price will go up until a new equilibrium is reached.

Of course there are thousands of different publicly traded companies in the US, not to mention all the other asset classes people choose to invest in. But the same principle applies to the price of every one of those assets. Price changes are caused by an aggregate change in the desired ratio of that asset in the portfolio, or by a change in the quantity of dollars in existence. For some assets, the quantity of the asset might also change, say by a company issuing new stock or by new houses and apartments being built. This also changes the portfolio allocation ratio in aggregate, and can move prices the same way increasing or decreasing the money supply can move prices.

How does this apply to general price inflation? People typically have an ideal amount of cash they’d like to hold in savings, based on the need to cover regular bills and any unexpected expenses. Maybe it’s 3 months of living expenses. Maybe a different amount, it doesn’t matter. Say the increase in money supply happens, and trillions of new dollars enter people’s bank accounts. Now the person who wanted to hold 3 months of living expenses suddenly has 12 months. What happens now? Well, some people might decide they want to hold a bigger cash reserve. But that’s not the norm. Most people will spend that extra cash. Maybe on eating out more often, or an addition on the house, or a down payment on a new house, or a new car, or some new clothes, or a new watch, or whatever else you can imagine. Of course as you should realize by now, spending the money just moves it to someone else’s pocket, and overall the aggregate level of savings doesn’t change.

So how do we get back to equilibrium with people’s desired amount of cash savings? You can probably guess by now. People keep buying goods and services until the supply is overwhelmed, and then are willing to keep paying increasingly higher prices. As prices of restaurant meals and building materials and houses and cars and clothes and watches rise, the overall cost of living rises. As the cost of living rises, those bigger cash balances in people’s accounts become fewer and fewer months worth of living expenses. At some point, equilibrium is reached again, at a new higher cost of living.

Just for fun, let’s take it one step further. What happens as prices rise? Suppose you have 6 months of living expenses, but prices are rising steadily, and now you realize your savings are only worth 5 months of living expenses. You realize that your savings are rapidly losing value. And who wants to hold onto something that’s losing value? So you and everyone else across the economy simultaneously decide that you don’t want to hold as much of this rapidly inflating money. Maybe 2 months of savings would be okay.

So what happens as everyone decides to reduce their relative cash balance? They go spend the money somewhere, same as if the money supply had increased. What happens when everyone is trying to reduce their relative cash balance by spending money? Prices rise. And what happens when prices rise? People are incentivized to reduce the size of their cash savings. See the vicious loop? If the mentality that prices will continue to rise takes hold, and the cycle proceeds far enough, you end up with a hyperinflation like Weimar Germany. It got bad enough that employees were paid at noon so they could rush out over their lunch break to buy things before prices rose again. And middle aged bachelors would buy diapers if the store was sold out of everything else, simply because anything was better than holding any amount of rapidly depreciating money.

This is the hyperinflationary spiral central bankers have nightmares about. It’s the reason they continuously lie and gaslight the public about the reality of inflation. Because if the reality of continuously rising prices becomes general knowledge, and enough people act accordingly, the whole thing can spiral out of control.

We can also use a reverse example. Suppose Apple comes out with a new piece of amazing tech, and it looks like the company will do very well over the next decade. Suddenly millions of people decide they’d like to increase their allocation to Apple stock. As they rush into the market to buy, they must bid higher and higher prices, and Apple stock rises 20% in a week. Now imagine all the people who own Apple stock. If you’re one of them, and that part of your portfolio is up 20% this week, do you now want to increase or decrease you allocation to Apple? Some people will be ready to sell, but most tend to increase the allocation to something that’s performing well. So now millions more are looking to buy Apple stock. What happens as they rush into the market to increase their allocation? More price increases. See the cycle? That’s why the saying “markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” applies to stock price bubbles. The bubble can become a self-sustaining move, at least for a while.

I hope this has given you some fresh insight into how prices and markets move, and how human sentiment and money supply increases influence those outcomes. Finance is complex, but faulty and misleading terminology only muddies the waters further, making it almost impossible for people to understand what’s happening. If I’ve shed a little bit of light on a confusing topic, that’s a win in my book.

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The Bitcoin market this year has been a perfect illustration of the points I tried to make, which offers another angle to explain the concept.

Back in January, the first spot Bitcoin ETFs were launched for trading in the US market. This was heralded as a great thing for the Bitcoin price, and tracking “inflows” into these ETFs became a top priority for Bitcoin market analysts. The expectation of course was that more Bitcoin purchased by these ETFs would result in higher prices for the asset.

And sure enough, over the first two months of trading, from mid-January to mid-March, the combined “inflows” to the ETFs totaled around $11 billion. Over the same time frame, the Bitcoin price rose almost 60%, from around $43,000 to $68,000. As should be expected, right?

But then, over the next seven and a half months, from mid-March to early November, the ETFs saw another $11 billion in “inflows”. The Bitcoin price in mid-March? $68,000. In early November? All the way up to… $68,000. Seven and a half months of treading water.

So how can that be? How can $11 billion dollars flowing into an asset cause a 60% price rise once, and no price change at all the next time?

If you read my previous article linked above, you’ll see that the whole idea of money “flowing into” an asset is incorrect and misleading, and this is a perfect illustration why. If you step back a bit, you’ll see the folly of that mentality. So when the ETFs buy $11 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, where does it come from? They obviously have to buy it from someone. As always, every transaction has a buyer and a seller. In this case, the sellers are current Bitcoin holders selling through OTC desks on the spot market.

So why focus on the ETF buying rather than the Bitcoin holder selling? Instead of saying there were $11 billion in inflows to the Bitcoin ETFs, why not say there were $11 billion in outflows from spot Bitcoin holders? It’s just as valid either way.

To take it a step further, many analysts were consistently confused all summer as Bitcoin ETFs continued to see “inflows” on days that the Bitcoin price stayed flat or even fell. So let’s imagine two consecutive days of $300 million daily “inflows” into the ETFs. The first day, the Bitcoin price rises 3%. The second day, the Bitcoin price falls 3%. The first day, headlines can read Bitcoin Price Rises 3% as ETFs See $300m in Inflows. The second day, headlines can read Bitcoin Price Falls 3% as Spot Bitcoin Holders See $300m in Outflows.

See the silliness of this whole idea? Money flows aren’t the cause of price movement. They’re a fake metric used as a post hoc justification for price moves by people who want you to believe they understand markets better than you.

Moving on to today, as I write this on the evening of November 11, Bitcoin is up 30% from $68,000 to $88,000 in the week since the November 5 election. It rose from $69,000 to $75,000 on election night alone, after US markets had closed and while there were no ETF “inflows” at all. In fact, the ETFs saw over a hundred million dollars in outflows on November 5, followed by an 8% single day price increase.

So if money flows don’t move price, what does?

Investor sentiment, that’s what.

Talking about money flows at all, as illustrated by the Bitcoin ETFs, requires arbitrarily dividing a single market into different segments to disguise the fact that every transaction has both a buyer and a seller, so every transaction has an equal dollar amount of “flows” in both directions. In actuality, price is set by a convergence between the highest price any potential buyer is willing to pay, and the lowest price any potential seller is willing to accept. And that number can change without a single transaction occurring, and without a single dollar “flowing” anywhere.

If every Bitcoin holder simultaneously decided tonight that the lowest price they’re willing to accept is $200,000 per Bitcoin, and a single potential buyer decided to buy a single dollar worth of Bitcoin at that price, that would be the new Bitcoin price tomorrow morning. No ETF “inflows” or institutional buying pressure or short squeezes or liquidations required, or any of the other excuses market analysts use to confuse normal people and make it seem like they have some deep esoteric insight into the workings of markets and future price action.

Don’t overcomplicate something as simple as price. If holders of an asset demand higher prices and potential buyers are willing to pay it, prices rise. If potential buyers of an asset offer lower prices and holders are willing to sell, prices fall. The constant interplay between all those individual investors sentiments is what forms a market and a price. The transferring of money between buyers and sellers is an effect of price, not a cause.

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The data backs this up. In a 2015 British poll that asked “does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?”, 37 percent of people said no, and another 13 percent weren’t sure. That’s fully half the population who can’t confidently say their job is even worth doing. And other polls have found similar or worse results.

The book was inspired by the overwhelming response to a 2013 article Graeber wrote titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. The point I’d like to address is found here.

Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.

These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political.

In the book, Graeber expands on this idea with a very entertaining description of the many flavors of bullshit jobs, based on anecdotes from readers of his article. He follows that up with theories speculating on the cause of this situation. And wraps it all up with the conclusion that basically capitalists are all big meanies and invent bullshit jobs just to torture people and prevent the arrival of the Marxist utopia where no one has to do much real work and we all sit around and sing kumbaya and discuss philosophy. That’s too harsh a criticism of a very well researched and written book, but I have to confess I was sorely disappointed the first time I read it by the author’s failure to even entertain what seems like the obvious alternative explanation.

Graeber acknowledges in the book that it’s not surprising bullshit jobs exist inside government, although he doesn’t focus strongly enough on why that is. Like he does in the article, he tries to brush it off with the excuse that the same problem exists in the private sector. As he acknowledges, this isn’t supposed to happen in capitalism. He realizes that it makes no logical economic sense for a profit-seeking firm to hire workers to do nothing productive.

But then he follows that acknowledgement with the claim that “The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political.” I’m sorry, what? How is that clear? How do you go from stating an obvious economic fact, to denying that the problem is economic, and call it “clear”.

“Still, somehow, it happens,” is not anywhere close to a sufficient explanation to rule out an economic factor.

The economic explanation

First, some definitions.

Capitalism is defined as “an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.”

A free market is “an economic system in which prices are based on competition among private businesses and are not controlled or regulated by a government: a market operating by free competition.”

Now that we made sure we’re talking about the same thing, we can analyze this issue logically.

Capitalism and free markets work through competition for customers. It’s an economic law that a customer won’t pay more for the same good or service when they could pay less. Someone can try to make obscure and esoteric objections and force me to emphasize the word “same” and analyze what the good or service being purchased actually is, but everyone else understands this intuitively. So if two companies are offering the same product for sale, all things being equal, the company offering lower prices will attract the customers. Pretty simple stuff.

Of course, the goal for the company is to generate profits. It’s literally in the definition of the word “capitalism”. So any system in which companies have a goal other than generating profits is, by definition, not capitalism.

A company can increase its profits two ways: raising prices, or lowering costs. We don’t have to get too philosophical to realize that if a company is paying someone to do nothing, the company could increase profits by firing that person and lowering their costs of production.

So the question is, why don’t they? Why do they hire people who increase their costs and lower their profits, thereby making them less competitive? And more importantly, if they do make that mistake, why don’t their competitors undercut their prices and take all the customers and bankrupt them?

I don’t think we can dismiss the economic factor as off-handedly as Graeber does. After all, making a profit is the fundamental, definitional purpose of a business or company in a capitalist economy. To say “companies in this capitalist economy are doing something completely antithetical to the very principles and definition of capitalism, so obviously they’re not doing it for economic reasons” is something of a non sequitur.

The conclusion, to me, seems obvious. We don’t have a capitalist economy. As far as I can tell, that’s true by definition. If companies aren’t even trying to achieve the goal companies must achieve to survive in a capitalist economy, and somehow they’re still surviving, that’s proof of the non-capitalist nature of the economy.

Which part of the capitalist system are we missing?

Well, let’s start with the obvious: there’s a lot of government in our economy. The government isn’t privately owned, which makes it not capitalist by definition. So any part of the economy that’s government is not capitalist.

Why is government not capitalist? Because government is not motivated to provide goods and services at a profit. Why not? Because government does not sell goods and services into a free market. Government gives away goods and services to its “customers” for free, because they’re paid for by people other than the consumers of the service. That payment comes in one of two ways: taxes, and debt. It’s not a voluntary transaction.

Which part of the capitalist system might private companies be missing?

They could be lacking competition. That is, operating a monopoly or cartel. If there’s no competing business to provide goods at lower prices, the company could hire people for useless jobs and compensate by raising prices. This places them outside the definition of capitalism, since “free competition” is part of the definition of a free market. Monopolies and cartels often develop and survive through protection by the government, which emphasizes their un-capitalistic nature.

They could be in a temporary situation where the people making the management decisions are sufficiently insulated from the market forces at play that their poor decisions can persist for a while. Many companies begin to lose their competitive edge at some point, after getting big enough to have economic inertia and for the management to be less accountable for business performance. If a company has grown big enough, they can start making poor financial decisions and absorb the lost profits, sometimes for years, before losing their market share to a smaller, more competitive rival. This isn’t really an absence of capitalism, just the natural creative destruction necessary for capitalism to function. The problem comes when a company that’s obviously uncompetitive is prevented from failing through un-capitalistic means. Maybe they’re big enough and wealthy enough to pressure the government into granting them monopoly status. This doesn’t have to be open, it’s often through creating such an impenetrable legal morass around the industry that no competitor can emerge. Or it can be in the form of a “too big to fail” direct government bailout.

The company could also be lacking that essential link between customer satisfaction and business income. In other words, maybe they aren’t selling to their customers. That can happen for various reasons.

Some companies are “private companies” but sell to the government. The government is not a customer in the capitalist sense, because the government spends money taken coercively from its subjects, not money earned voluntarily in the free market. So any company like Raytheon or Boeing that survives off government contracts can’t be accurately called a capitalist organization.

In an industry like healthcare, where the insurance companies are the middlemen in basically all transactions between patients and doctors, there are also lots of ways for bullshit jobs to proliferate. Patients don’t care how much a procedure costs, just that it helps them. Doctors don’t care how much a procedure costs, just that the insurance company will pay for it. And insurance companies don’t care whether a procedure helps the patient, they just want to collect as many premiums as possible while paying out as little for care as possible. The fact that the patient isn’t paying the doctor for their care breaks the necessary link between customer and producer that’s essential for a free market to function. That combines with the regulatory moat and cartel-like structure of the healthcare industry to prevent the competitive function of capitalism from occurring.

Companies could also be surviving off of money from someone other than their customers: bankers and investors. There’s obviously a role in a capitalist system for investors to support a new venture until it’s able to attract customers and establish a stable and profitable business model. But many companies today exist for much longer than economically reasonable without turning a profit. In the US, almost 2,000 of the 5,000 publicly traded companies with data available were classified as “zombie companies”, meaning they don’t even make enough profit to pay the interest on their debt. So they’re going deeper in the hole every year. How can this continue?

Well, the alternative to paying off your debt, is to borrow even more money to make payments on the debt you already owe. If this sounds similar to how the US government survives, then you’re beginning to get the picture.

How can banks keep loaning money to unprofitable businesses? And why would they do it? It doesn’t make sense… until you understand how banking works.

That’s really the core focus of most of my writing, and I’ve written multiple articles on money and banking explaining how the system works as I understand it. This would be a good one focused on banking specifically.

To very briefly recap, banks don’t make loans by taking in money from depositors and loaning that money to borrowers. Instead, banks create new money that never existed before out of thin air and loan that new money to borrowers. Banks make a profit by charging borrowers interest on this newly created money, which costs them nothing to create. A pretty cushy gig, if you can get it.

So from the perspective of the banks, the more loans and debt outstanding, the better. Every dollar of debt is a dollar they can collect interest on. It cost them nothing to create, so the more, the merrier. In fact, the banks would prefer that the loan principle never be repaid, because once it’s repaid, they can no longer collect interest on that loan until they make another loan to replace it. As long as the borrower keeps paying interest, the banks are happy. And if they need to lend the borrower some more money so he can afford to pay the interest, that’s fine too. Anything but letting the loan default.

Given those incentives, how do you expect a chart of the outstanding loans and credit of US commercial banks to look?

If you guessed up only, you’d be correct.

So what does this banking system have to do with bullshit jobs? Well, I’d argue that the fractionally reserved fiat banking system, in and of itself, is an anti-capitalist system. Money is the communication layer of capitalism, as I’ve previously written.

When one group of people can create money out of thin air, they have the ability to reallocate wealth in the economy. As long as the money is still functional, of course. Too much money creation and wealth reallocation, and people stop trusting the money. That’s when inflation becomes hyperinflation, the money no longer functions, and the whole system implodes.

Wealth reallocation by a small select group is the essence of a centrally planned socialist/Marxist economy. And we all know how efficient those economies are. In fact, Graeber himself mentioned the inefficiency of socialist states like the Soviet Union in his original article, and was not at all surprised by the existence of bullshit jobs in such an economic system. When wealth can be reallocated by central planners without regard to people’s preferences in a free market, inefficiency is never punished, so zombie companies full of bullshit jobs never go bankrupt.

The same thing happens under our “capitalist” system. Zombie companies full of bullshit jobs can get almost unlimited funding from too-big-to-fail banks, who don’t care whether they repay the loans, as long as they stay in business and keep making the interest payments. Sometimes the funding is in the form of loans directly, sometimes it’s in the form of massive stock market bubbles inflated by the endless money creation, sometimes through junk bond issuance funded by the same bubble economics, and sometimes it’s venture capital funds flush with liquidity for the same reason. Regardless, the cause, and the outcome, are the same.

The corrupt bankers own the corrupt politicians, so when the inevitable so-called black swan event occurs and the rotten edifice starts to quiver, another bailout is promptly rolled out. The government borrows trillions from their owners over at the Federal Reserve, who create the money out of thin air. The government sends it on over to the bankers who got caught with their hand in the cookie jar once again, and they paper over the massive holes in their balance sheet caused by blowing asset bubbles and funding inefficient zombie companies. Or sometimes, the government skips the middlemen entirely and bails out Boeing or whoever it happens to be directly.

And once again, bullshit jobs that couldn’t survive free market competition are rewarded at the expense of savers and taxpayers. As always, this flood of new liquidity flows out through the economy, causing inflation and boosting income for other inefficient companies that also deserved to fail. Creative destruction, a fundamental feature of a capitalist system, is avoided once again.

In my opinion, the banking system is at the root of the problem causing the proliferation of bullshit jobs. The system itself is, by design, fundamentally anti-capitalist in nature and function. It’s really a giant privately owned economic central planning system, in which a small fraction of people determine how resources are allocated, with privatized profits and socialized losses. The Soviet technocrats would be jealous.

Unfortunately, the bankers have successfully connected their industry so tightly to the term “capitalist” that showing people they’re anything but is almost impossible. To paraphrase the well-known quote, the greatest trick the bankers ever pulled was convincing the world that they’re the real capitalists.

Until the banking and monetary system fundamentally changes, inefficiency will persist and bullshit jobs will continue to proliferate. In my opinion, the problem is very much an economic problem. And it’s not a “late-stage capitalism” problem, it’s a “capitalism left the building a century ago” problem. We don’t need to get rid of capitalism, we’ve already done that. We need to bring sound money, and with it the possibility of a capitalist economy, back again.

There’s no questioning the data at this point. Fertility rates over most of the world have been in precipitous decline, and if the current trajectory continues, global population will peak very soon and fall rather dramatically. And even the falling population itself is much less of a threat than the aging population that will inevitably precede it. Having a large cohort of older and retired people and a small cohort of young workers is an existential threat to the modern welfare state, and to the entire credit-based fiat monetary system that supports it. But that’s a subject for another day.

There are a multitude of different theories that attempt to explain why this is happening. I’ll name some of the most common ones:

• Increased education and employment opportunities for women

• Urbanization

• Economic factors

• Access to contraception

• Changing social and cultural norms

• Delayed marriage

• Improvements in infant mortality rates

• Government policies

• Environmental concerns

• Pornography

• Feminism

• Endocrine disrupting chemicals

• Dating apps

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Most rational thinkers agree there must be multiple factors playing a role. But the fact that the problem is so wide-spread, and populations that seem to be resisting the trend are so rare, shows that the strongest underlying factors are cross-culturally powerful and not easily resisted or reversed with marginal cultural differences and standard public policy efforts.

While populations that resist the trend are rare, they are not quite non-existent. A few groups stand out for their persistently high fertility rates. On a geographic basis, sub-Saharan Africa is the only major region still maintaining above-replacement fertility rates. For various reasons, I don’t think Africa is the most useful place to look for answers on what’s causing the decline elsewhere or how it could be reversed. One reason is that Africa seems to be following the global pattern, just with a lag. In another few decades the data may look very different, just like it does for South America today compared to 20 years ago.

In my opinion, a more useful place to look for data is in smaller population sub-groups within a geographic area that have fertility rates significantly higher than the general population levels. Rural populations in general have higher fertility rates than urban populations, but the difference isn’t really enough to consider it significant. The groups that fit this category well seem to be exclusively religious. These include certain Christian denominations in the traditional Anabaptist category including the Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites, Muslims in some areas, and Jews, particularly the most orthodox sects. Mormons recently fell out of the high-fertility religious group category, which would also make for some interesting research.

It would be fascinating to compare these groups and see what they have in common outside just being religious in nature. I don’t have the knowledge to make that comparison. Instead, I’m going to focus on the group that’s often referenced and analyzed by people without much personal knowledge, the Amish.

I have read numerous articles and comments that reference the Amish to support this or that theory on the cause of falling fertility. One thing I notice is an obvious lack of understanding of the Amish culture, which leads to faulty arguments that don’t reflect reality. This isn’t surprising, given the insular and poorly-understood nature of the culture, the plethora of ridiculously incorrect “Amish” reality TV shows and pop culture myths, and the fact that the number of people with firsthand knowledge of Amish culture from an insider perspective who also write about demographic trends on any public platform is probably zero.

Well, was zero. I’m about to make that one.

My Qualifications

Since I’m claiming to have this knowledge, it’s only fair to give a little background as to how I got it. I choose to stay anonymous on the internet, and given that this is personal information that could make it significantly easier to dox me, I’ll be deliberately vague.

My parents were both born in Amish families. They didn’t stay, opting to leave the Amish church and culture before getting married and starting their family. My grandparents were all Amish, and all my cousins and most of my extended family remain Amish to this day. My parents didn’t move out of the Amish community, staying in the area and joining a conservative Mennonite church that was about the closest thing to being Amish without actually being Amish. The Mennonite community has a generally good relationship with and a lot of respect for the Amish community, given their deep similarities and shared history and cultural background.

I grew up interacting regularly with Amish relatives, neighbors and community members, speaking the Pennsylvania Dutch my parents taught us and used exclusively at home. I’m very certain that a real deep understanding of Amish culture is almost impossible without speaking their language, just like many other cultures around the world. The Amish speak English as their second language, but there are aspects of their culture that aren’t spoken about in English.

This lifelong proximity to and interaction with the Amish community has, I believe, given me some unique insights into the factors supporting their high fertility rates that no amount of academic research will ever uncover.

Who are the Amish?

First, some basics.

The Amish are a traditionalist Christian denomination. The way to understand the Amish is as a religious denomination first, and a culture second. Getting the two mixed up makes it impossible to understand why the Amish live the way they do.

Sure, their unique lifestyles makes them noteworthy as a group. But that lifestyle is based on and maintained by their religious beliefs and convictions.

Fundamentally, the Amish attempt to live out the Gospel as Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. They believe their church has done so historically, and that the best way to make sure they keep doing so in the future is to view any changes to their traditional lifestyle with extreme skepticism and resistance.

The two primary doctrines that separate them from the mainstream Protestant Reformation, which is their group’s origin, are the doctrines of nonconformity and nonresistance. They apply the doctrine of nonconformity, the command to “be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” in both a spiritual and a practical sense. They believe that Christians are to be radically different from non-Christians, both in their beliefs and attitudes, and in their lifestyle and appearance. And they apply the command to “resist not evil”, nonresistance, to mean that it’s a sin to use physical force or violence against another person for any reason whatsoever. They don’t make any exception for military service of any type, which they object to as a matter of conscience, or for self-defense, which they refuse to engage in even if it means death for themselves or their family.

The Amish do not practice infant baptism. Their young people must choose to be baptized and formally become members of the church, usually in their late teens or early twenties. As part of the baptism ceremony, they make a vow to remain faithful to God and the church until death. The Amish, as a church, interpret this vow to mean that the new church member will remain a member of the Amish church for life. Leaving the Amish church after making this vow and being baptized is viewed as breaking the vow, and is the justification for their practice of shunning, or the ban. Those who do so are cut off from contact with the community in various ways. Typically they won’t eat a meal with a shunned person, ride in a car a shunned person is driving, or do business with a shunned person. That includes immediate family. Failure to enforce this shunning against someone, even your own child, can result in running afoul of the church leadership and also being excommunicated and shunned.

This punishment, however, only applies to people who leave the church after baptism. Those young people who choose not to be baptized and leave the church instead are free to be treated just like any other non-Amish person, although their family essentially disown them and treat them like a shunned person anyway, if they’re especially strict and upset about the betrayal of Amish values.

Most Amish people don’t believe that the Amish are the only true church, or that only Amish people are true Christians. Most are accepting of other conservative Anabaptist denominations, and respect their values and practices as a different but valid way to be Christian. Church teaching strongly suggests that those who fall under the ban are living in sin and won’t make it to heaven. Most individuals, though, probably wouldn’t agree with that in every case if they were free to give their true opinion on the issue.

The Amish maintain a fertility rate of around 6 to 7 children per woman. Some recent research suggests this may be starting to fall somewhat, but the data isn’t extensive enough to make a solid judgement yet.

There are a wide variety of different “flavors” of Amish in different areas of the US, a fact they’re very aware of. The data strongly indicates that the most conservative and technologically primitive communities have slightly higher fertility rates and significantly higher retention rates of young people.

Why do the Amish Maintain High Fertility Rates?

Okay, enough background. Time to dive into the reasons I believe the Amish maintain their historically high fertility rate despite living in a developed, modern economy surrounded by people with dramatically sub-replacement fertility rates.

I thought long and hard about the best way to approach this. Going through a list of factors topically seemed like the obvious one. But the more I thought it through, the less I liked it. For one, how do you arrange the factors? Order of importance? How do you decide that? Also, the factors are so inter-related that they’ll be very tough to separate and understand individually. Finally, it seems dry and boring. Nobody needs that.

So I’m going to try something different. I’m going to approach it from a narrative angle. I’ll try to describe the life of a typical Amish person, from birth to death, in a chronological way. That’s the best approach to present it in a way that makes the culture relatable, while also tying the different factors together logically.

I’ll describe the experience for both men and women as best I can, and try to present the various factors encouraging high fertility as I see them at the appropriate part of the story.

This will likely be an article that gets revised later to address any questions that come up, so don’t consider it the final word on the subject.

Alright, time to get started.

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First off, this might seem obvious, but the typical Amish baby is born into a large family. On average, they’ll have 5 or 6 siblings, and more is not at all uncommon. Families of 10 won’t raise an eyebrow, and 12-16 children aren’t unheard of, especially in the past when mortality was higher and second marriages were more common among younger widowers who went on to have children with their second wife. Humans are social creatures, and the environment and people we grow up surrounded by have a strong influence on our frame of reference. Studies have shown that women are very unlikely to have more children than their mother had. The number of siblings in your family, and in families you observe and interact with, doesn’t determine the number of children you will have, but it does strongly influence the number of children you feel is a “normal” amount. That makes it a kind of ratchet effect, where it’s very unlikely that a generation raised in homes with one or two children will go on to have larger families of their own collectively.

This cultural norm of large families establishes a kind of inertia that normalizes high fertility right from birth. Amish children grow up surrounded by siblings, observing, and as they get older, helping with the care and maintenance of a large family. All their relatives, cousins and extended family are also likely to belong to large families. The average Amish child grows up with dozens of first cousins, and sometimes hundreds of more distant cousins, many of whom they likely know well and socialize with regularly. This experience establishes a mental framework where a large family is assumed to be the default. And there is no stronger human tendency than the urge to fit in with the people around you.

Amish children grow up with strong gender norms taught from a very young age. The Amish culture follows strict and conservative gender roles. Boys and men do male things, girls and women do female things, and there is little effort or desire to create any overlapping space.

Boys grow up doing traditionally masculine things. They play outside, do chores on the farm, help their dad with his work, probably get a BB gun before age 10, go hunting and fishing, play sports, and generally prepare for a lifetime of physical labor and providing for a wife and family.

Girls grow up doing traditionally feminine things. They help care for younger siblings, help with housework, play with dolls, learn to cook and preserve food, learn to sew, and generally prepare for a lifetime of caring for and raising children and maintaining a large household.

It’s a common misconception that the Amish are mostly farmers who live off the land, subsistence style. That’s not at all accurate. While there are still Amish who make their living farming, at least in some areas, that has become the exception. The large scale of modern agriculture means it takes a lot of acres and a lot of machinery to run a profitable commercial farming operation. The Amish reject the use of most modern agricultural machinery, which makes them uncompetitive in commercial agriculture outside more niche markets like dairy, produce, or greenhouses. And the fact that they live in small geographic communities with large families means they quickly buy up all available farmland in an area until they price themselves out of the market. Prime farmland in heavy Amish farming communities like Lancaster, Pennsylvania routinely sells for over $25,000 per acre, which is more than a commercial crop farming operation might bring in over a lifetime.

So the Amish have moved away from a primarily agriculture based economy to various other occupations. In some areas they work in RV factories. Most work in trades, primarily construction. Many are masons, carpenters, cabinet builders, mechanics, welders, etc.

But they reject the ownership of cars, so they still use their characteristic horses and buggies for transportation. In reality, they use cars for most of their transportation needs. But they don’t own cars or have driver’s licenses, so they rely on “Amish taxi drivers” to chauffer them around. The men hire a driver to take them to and from work, if they work in construction or some other job outside the home. The women hire a driver take them to town for their shopping or for other errands. The exception is church. They’re still required to drive to church in a horse and buggy, so every family must keep a horse for that reason, as a bare minimum. In many cases that’s the only time they ever use a horse and buggy, and if it weren’t for that requirement they wouldn’t own one at all.

But that requirement means every Amish family must own enough land to keep a horse, which takes a few acres and a small barn at minimum. This forces them to live in rural areas and raise their families in a somewhat agricultural environment, even if their occupation wouldn’t require that at all. So there are always chores for the children, animals to care for, and space to play outside with their siblings.

Amish children grow up with very limited exposure to mainstream cultural pressures. Their mothers inevitably raise them at home until they start school. They don’t have TV or cell phones, so they aren’t exposed to any mainstream culture on a daily basis.

The Amish have their own schools, typically small one room schools within walking distance of all the families who attend. The teachers are often young single people, always Amish. They primarily teach basic academics: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, etc. While the Amish speak both English and Pennsylvania Dutch, many Amish children are first exposed to English on a daily basis when they start school. School is taught in English, although there is limited teaching of the High German the Amish use in their church services.

Amish children attend school until 8th grade. The schools run the minimum number of days required by the state, usually 160. There is no higher education beyond grade 8. No Amish attend college.

Amish children are taught from little up that they are not like other people. The differences between their culture and mainstream culture are emphasized, and Amish culture is praised as the ideal, at a religious level. They're taught that the way to do what’s right is to do what the church asks, and those who don’t do what the church asks are in the wrong.

The Amish rate and describe everyone on a scale from “high” to “low”. A person who isn’t Amish, who isn’t a Christian, is a “high” person, or an “English” person. To go from being Amish to being “English” is the worst, most damning, failure imaginable. The Amish are “low” people. The more strict and traditional an Amish sect, the “lower” they are. Being “low” is seen as a virtue. Other conservative Christian denominations, particularly other Anabaptist groups, are also considered “low” people and generally viewed favorably, but they aren’t as “low” as the Amish.

Amish boys grow up expecting to start work full time at age 14, and to work at some type of trade or physical labor. There are no white-collar career tracks, essentially. Entrepreneurship is encouraged, and many young Amish men start their own construction crew or home business in their 20s or 30s after a few years of experience working for someone else. Often Amish boys start off working for and with their dad, in whatever trade or business he operates. But if they’re not interested in that particular occupation, they’re free to find another. Amish businesses and tradesmen are always willing to hire young Amish boys and train them in a craft. A good work ethic is considered a virtue, and Amish are known for their skilled craftsmanship and willingness to work harder than the competition. These traits are taught and encouraged from little on up.

Amish men as a whole do very well financially. For one, they start working and developing skills and work ethic a decade earlier than the typical college graduate. The trades pay well, and of course anyone could take advantage of that, but the mainstream narrative discourages men from pursuing a trade career by labeling it low status and keeping them in education until their prime years to gain a work ethic are past. It’s not uncommon for young Amish men just out of 8th grade to land a job on a carpentry crew for $25-30 an hour. With bonuses, some of them are bringing in $90k/year before age 20. Another advantage young Amish men have is lower expenses. They can certainly find places to spend their money, typically hobbies like hunting and fishing, but things like expensive designer clothes and accessories or overpriced car payments aren’t really an option. They also benefit from the Amish exemption to Social Security taxes. The Amish don’t pay into or collect Social Security. More on that later, but it helps immensely to keep more of your paycheck in your early prime working years.

Amish girls grow up expecting to get married at a young age and raise a large family as a traditional housewife. Amish girls aren’t encouraged to have a “career”, and the idea would be silly to them. They are expected to work, but the work is either helping their mom with the household, working on the family farm or business, or doing something like teaching school or working at an Amish farmer’s market to pass the time between leaving school and marriage. It’s never viewed as a permanent occupation, because marriage and motherhood is the default aspirational lifestyle. A common job for young Amish girls is working as a “maid” to help a new mother with housework at the end of pregnancy and for the first few months after childbirth. All new mothers can get this type of help if they want, and it will usually be a younger sister, cousin, or niece of appropriate age. Otherwise the community will find a suitable girl who’s available for the job. A “maid” will sometimes travel to a different Amish community for this reason, given how large extended families are and how frequently Amish families move across the country to a different community. This is often an opportunity for them to attract the attention of a young man outside their local community, and is one of the only ways for a long-distance relationship and marriage to begin.

Amish young people are expected to live with their parents until marriage, with very few exceptions. They’re also typically expected to work for their dad in the family business for no pay, and to give any earnings they make at a day job outside the home to their parents. This is typically expected until age 21, or until they get married, whichever comes first. More recently, with the rising cost of land and housing, it’s becoming more common to make age 18 the cutoff. And when a young couple is engaged, the parents typically allow them to start saving their income for their future household. This practice helps parents offset some of the expenses of raising such large families, along with the fact that no money is spent on higher education. It also provides one strong incentive to marry as early as possible.

Amish culture revolves around family and the community. Extended families are large, and people are expected to know and interact with their family. Conversation with a stranger at a social event invariably starts by asking their name, then asking who their parents, grandparents, and other relatives are until some distant family connection or a mutual acquaintance is found. Since the Amish community has a small pool of family names, and tends to heavily favor certain Biblical first names, enough people end up with the same name to make things really confusing. People are often identified by two or three generations of their family, for example “Sam Yoder’s John’s Amos” for an Amos Yoder who’s father was John Yoder and grandfather Sam Yoder.

Social activities are either family events or church events, or both. Weddings and funerals are the main social functions other than church services, and people are expected to attend as many as possible among their family and extended family, regardless of the distance. Given the large family sizes, most Amish have dozens of first cousins and many more distant cousins. Weddings and funerals can be almost weekly events. These are church events as well, so much of the local Amish community will usually attend. It will be an all day event, with the women and girls preparing a lunch and dinner for everyone. After the meal, the women and girls will wash the dishes and clean up, while the men sit around and talk. No cell phones, remember. Talking is the main form of social interaction. Topics typically include work, family news, hunting and fishing stories (Amish men hunt and fish with the same enthusiasm typical American men watch sports), horses, and interesting or funny stories about family and friends. Those with a knack for entertaining oratory are well respected and appreciated in the Amish community.

Of course the women do their fair share of talking as well, in the kitchen while cleaning up after the meal, and later in the living room where they join the men after the domestic work is done. The main topics of conversation always revolve around family, immediate and extended. News travels through the Amish community faster than any social media platform, because nothing builds Amish female status more than being the first to call with the news that great uncle so-and-so was injured in a farming accident or nephew so-and-so has a new baby, along with all the pertinent details about the name, size, and health of the baby and how the mother is doing and how many grandchildren that makes in total for the lucky grandparents.

While the adults are talking, the children are free to play either inside or preferably outside. Trampolines, climbing trees, playing in the hayloft, tag, volleyball, and softball are favorite activities at various ages. The younger boys and girls typically play together, but as they get older the girls spend more time visiting while the boys prefer more structured sports. Softball is a game for boys, but volleyball is popular with mixed teams of boys and girls at any age.

Visiting relatives or other community families is also a popular social activity, especially on “in-between Sunday”. The Amish have church every other week, and the week without church is often an opportunity to visit another family. Invitations are not expected or required, and anyone stopping by will be expected to stay for dinner and into the evening. At these type of events, the older children are often expected to sit and visit with the adults. Sitting still and being quiet are mandatory skills, since church services are 2 hours or longer and held in barns or sheds without air conditioning filled with backless wooden benches. Self-discipline is not an optional virtue, because the alternative is physical discipline.

As Amish young people enter their mid teen years, they go from childhood to youth. At a certain age, usually around 15 or 16, they officially become youth and enter the stage everyone is familiar with, “rumspringa”. That’s a Pennsylvania Dutch word that translates to “running around”. The Amish use it more as a verb, but pop culture has adopted it as a noun based on some wildly inaccurate reality TV shows and depictions.

The reality is, rumspringa varies widely from community to community, mostly based on what the parents and church leaders tolerate. Remember that Amish church membership is a fully voluntary decision, and Amish young people are free to join or not, as they decide. Late teens is the typical age for that decision. In the meantime, they are free to make their own decisions, subject to their parents’ rules. Breaking the rules can mean that at some point, they won’t be welcome to live in their parents’ household any more. That’s a fairly strong deterrent to the most extreme infractions.

At this stage, young Amish men will be buying their own horse and buggy, and both boys and girls will be permitted to attend the Sunday night “singing”. This is a social activity held at someone's house on Sunday evening, involving all the youth in the community coming together for dinner, playing volleyball, and singing German hymns together. The purpose is to provide a somewhat controlled social environment for young men and women to interact and hopefully meet their future spouse. Dating couples can attend together, and dates are permitted after the formal activities, with the young men often driving their date home late at night before finally heading home themselves.

Depending on the tolerance of the community, the informal activities can be a bit more permissive than singing hymns and playing volleyball. Often the buggies will become a typical teenage party scene, with alcohol, smoking, a radio, illicit smartphones and DVD players, and some less-than-reserved interaction between boys and girls. The punishment for getting caught can be severe, but in many cases the adults tend to turn a blind eye to what’s happening, and let the young people do as they please.

A lot more could be said about the dynamics of this cultural practice, but specifics vary so much between communities that I don’t think there’s much value in doing so. The point I think is relevant to this discussion is the question of sex.

There’s no reason to go off into the weeds on how much, if any, sex occurs. Premarital sex is absolutely forbidden. Does it happen anyway? Humans being human, certainly. How much? Probably very little in most cases. Getting pregnant, or getting someone pregnant, is the one transgression with inevitable life-changing consequences. The “shotgun wedding” is alive and well among the Amish, and getting a girl pregnant means marrying her or being expelled from the Amish community permanently, no exceptions. Besides that, getting pregnant outside of marriage is the most disgraceful and shameful thing a girl could do. It happens very very rarely, put it that way.

So casual sex within the community is basically off the table. What about casual sex with “English” people? This is where the Amish cultural practices play a big role. The Amish dress very distinctly. They can’t go anywhere in their traditional clothes without being instantly recognized. They also don’t drive cars, so going somewhere means getting a ride with someone. And their parents will usually keep an eye on their plans and whereabouts. So let’s imagine how an Amish teenager might go about finding a casual sexual encounter.

First off, getting ahold of a cell phone would be essential. They need some way to communicate with the outside world, and coordinate with their “partner in crime.” A lot of Amish teenagers do this, often with the help of slightly older people who have left the Amish, but keep ties with the community, maybe an older sibling or cousin. These are often the same people who buy alcohol for Amish teens.

Then, they need to get some non-Amish clothes. Remember, every trip away from home will take a willing driver, a plausible excuse in a community where everyone knows everyone, and the guarantee of being immediately recognized if seen in public. And the Amish parents know who the “bad kids” are, the ones who left but are willing to help their younger relatives and friends break the rules. Getting caught hanging around with them will probably mean a lot less trust and a lot less freedom in the future.

For the girls, a change of “English” clothes and a new hairstyle will let them blend in quite well. Of course, they can’t be caught leaving or coming home in those clothes, or have the clothes found at home. Lots of logistical hurdles everywhere. For the boys, they have a very distinctive haircut. A new change of clothes won’t fix that. There’s really no way for them to hide the fact that they’re Amish, even if the accent and the lack of a driver’s license don’t give them away.

Assuming they manage all that, and sneak away from home undetected, how will they find someone to hook up with? They’re very insulated from popular culture, and probably not at all comfortable in typical social situations. For the girls, there’s the added risk that an accidental pregnancy, or even just getting caught, would ruin their reputation and any chance of marriage and a family in the Amish community. So they’re unlikely to even try, unless they’re already fully intending to leave the Amish for good. That only really happens if they have a guy ready to marry them outside the Amish community, for reasons I’ll get into more later. Briefly, the Amish culture and schooling leaves women poorly prepared to support themselves outside that culture.

For the boys, there’s the typical difficulty men face in finding casual sexual partners. Multiply that by the difficulty of not having a car or driver’s license, not being experienced in mainstream social norms, plus that obvious and undisguisable Amish haircut. And all that ignores the lifelong teaching that casual sex is sinful and wrong, and those who engage in it are going against the teachings of God and the church. The entire culture is specifically designed to discourage casual sex as strongly as possible, and it does an excellent job at that.

Why does that matter? Well, humans are all very much the same, with the same desires and instincts. And sex is one of the strongest of those desires. The Amish are certainly no different.

So the Amish religious practice and culture offers a very simple choice. You can choose sex outside of marriage, which will be difficult or impossible, occasional at best, and if you get caught will mean expulsion from the community your life is rooted in, and even if you don’t get caught will mean you’re committing a mortal sin that will keep you out of heaven if you don’t repent and change. Or, you can get married and have all the sex you want, and be respected and rewarded for it.

That’s really all it takes to sell the idea of marriage to most men.

When a couple does decide to get engaged, of course with permission from the girl’s father, the wedding happens within a reasonably short time, in acknowledgement of the temptation young people face in that situation.

So let’s take a little closer look at the gender differences between the choice to stay single or to marry. It’s helpful to lay out the different life paths available, and how they play out over time.

There are very few Amish who remain single throughout their life, and almost all of them are women. So let’s look at it through a man’s perspective first. What kind of life can a single Amish man expect?

First off, a lifetime of celibacy. There’s hardly any need to go further, that’s a deal breaker for most men. If they choose to stay single for some reason, most will leave the Amish completely rather than accept those terms.

So maybe it’s more useful to look at incentives for early marriage, which is the norm. I’m a strong believer that incentives create outcomes, so I’ll be taking a hard look at incentives throughout this article.

Young people are expected to live with their parents until marriage, in most cases. Remember, no going off to college either. So from age 14 on, they’re stuck living with Mom and Dad, working full time, and not even keeping their own income. That gets old fast. Getting married, moving out, and starting a family looks better every day. Besides that, Amish women do a lot to improve the lives of their men. The Amish are well known for their delicious food. Well, that’s because the Amish women cook and bake. As a single guy, moving out of Mom’s house means not getting delicious home-cooked food every day. And they don’t have an iPhone to order DoorDash either, so it’s pizza delivery, hiring a driver to go to a restaurant, or whatever you can cook yourself. And Amish boys don’t grow up learning how to cook, that’s women’s work. Same with making clothes. Amish mothers and wives sew clothes for their families, since they’re forbidden to wear commercially available clothes in general. So a single guy is dependent on his mom for new clothes as well. Same with washing clothes. Most Amish have fairly modern clothes washing machines, although they don’t use dryers. But washing and folding clothes isn’t a job most boys grow up doing, so they’re pretty lost if they have to try it.

All in all, there aren’t a lot of upsides to staying single longer than absolutely necessary. There are plenty of benefits to marriage, though. For one, marriage is seen as a necessary step to full maturity as a man. It’s even expressed as a visible marker. Single young men typically stay clean-shaven. Once they get married, shaving is completely forbidden, and they are required to grow out a full beard. So the difference between married and single men is obvious at first glance, and is acknowledged as a marker of full maturity.

Then of course there’s the sexual access. No explanation needed.

Then there are all the benefits of an improved lifestyle a stay-at-home wife provides. That includes cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, caring for a garden, preserving food, helping with farm work or chores, and helping with his business. Many Amish wives are very involved in their husband’s career or business, whether that’s managing the bookkeeping, working in the greenhouses, or helping with daily chores on the farm. While most Amish communities use quite modern household appliances, powered with batteries, kerosene, or air pressure, the work of maintaining a household is still much more involved than for the typical American household. Especially when it comes to sewing, which very few American women do at all, but which took a large percentage of women’s time only a few generations ago. Among the Amish it still does.

I’m only focusing on the incentives for marriage right now, because that’s the first step. Of course, most married couples today don’t have 5-8 children, so there’s more to the story. But universal marriage, particularly early marriage, is an essential part of the puzzle.

Shifting focus to the women, here the picture is even more clear. Almost all lifelong single Amish people are women, and that’s not by choice. The Amish still maintain the “old maid” category that used to be part of mainstream culture. Single Amish women are almost invariably single because no man offered to marry them. Here’s why.

If single life is unappealing for Amish men, it’s positively bleak for women. Marriage and family life is the aspirational goal they’re taught from little up. And for good reason.

With their eighth-grade education, and without a driver’s license and car, their income earning potential is very limited. Most young women who aren’t busy on the farm or with the family business work as schoolteachers, housecleaners, babysitters, or cooks and servers at Amish restaurants or farmers’ markets. None of these jobs pay well. Enough to buy a few personal items, but not enough to buy a house or support even one person. And while it might be acceptable for a single Amish man to eventually buy a house and move out, at some point in his late 20s or early 30s, it’s really not acceptable at any age for an Amish old maid. Those old maids typically end up living with their parents, caring for them in old age, working the same type of jobs young girls do, and probably hoping that at some point an older widower with a family will show up and propose.

Marriage has massive lifestyle benefits for women, even more so than for men. Amish men typically do well financially, and often work in construction as well, or have friends and relatives who do. Amish houses are very nice and well constructed to say the least, and the wife gets the house she wants, the way she wants it. Being stingy with a house for your wife isn’t part of an Amish man’s mentality. Amish women are well rewarded for all their hard work keeping house, with a house they’ll be happy keeping. And of course a nice farm or at least some acreage, with space for a big garden, a barn for any animals, and space for greenhouses or whatever she needs for any home business ambitions she might have.

Along with that, Amish women have a lot of flexibility when it comes to spending money. Many Amish women handle most of the family finances. And the money her husband earns is family money, not his money. While the husband has final say in financial decisions, most Amish men don’t say no to their wives’ purchase requests often. Married Amish women have access to all the creature comforts the church allows to make their lives as pleasant as possible.

When it comes to status, the benefits are just as clear. Amish life revolves around family, and nothing is higher status than a thriving family of your own. The Amish version of posting exotic vacation pictures on Instagram is showing up to a social function with your new baby. It’s the automatic center of attention for weeks, until a newer baby show up in the community. And the default topic of conversation is always a woman’s children and their growth and development. Young girls grow up dreaming of the day they can join those conversations, and old maids are always outsiders in a certain sense, pitied by everyone else for their misfortune.

Being an old maid means being poor, low status, pitied by other women, and destined to live with your parents until they pass, with your only bitter-sweet consolation being the role of aunt to your dozens of nieces and nephews and maid to your sisters and sisters-in-law through their many pregnancies. Getting married means access to a man’s income, a nice new house just the way you want it, a farm, and an automatic status boost as a mother and eventually grandmother who always has lots to contribute to the conversation at social events.

As you can imagine, the incentives strongly favor marriage from both directions. Men benefit through improved lifestyle, status, and access to sex. Women benefit through improved lifestyle, economic opportunity, and status in the social hierarchy.

Given that the selection pool for potential partners is limited, mostly to the local Amish community, or occasionally another Amish community if there’s some interaction through family ties or social events, assortative mating is the norm. Young people can be choosy, sure. But they already know most of the people in their potential mating pool, and have probably known those people for most of their lives. They have a pretty good idea how desirable they are to potential partners, and the girls especially have to think long and hard about turning down a suitor. Men are always the initiators of a relationship, and the risk of turning down an eligible man and then never getting another offer, ending up as a dreaded old maid, is always lurking in the back of their minds.

Besides that, both men and women have multiple ways to improve their spouse’s life. Women are much more than just sexual objects. Their domestic role actually raises their husband’s standard of living significantly, in a way he can’t access as a single man. And men are all valuable to women, both for resources and for status as a wife and mother. Even a very average husband or wife is a massive lifestyle boost over remaining single.

By now it should be pretty clear why marriage is almost universal among the Amish, and marriage at what most would consider a young age (19-23) is more common than not. And I haven’t even mentioned any religious teaching, because frankly I don’t think that’s a major force on an individual level. The religious beliefs shape the social and material landscape, and that landscape provides the practical incentives that cause people to make the choices they do. The fact that an Amish interpretation of the Bible encourages marriage and children is one layer removed from the reasons individual 20-year-old Amish men and women choose to get married.

I pointed out earlier that getting married and having a high birthrate, or even getting married young and having a high birthrate, are not exactly the same thing. Plenty of married couples today have one, two, or even no children, even if they got married young enough to have ten if they chose to do so. So why are the Amish different?

There’s the too-obvious answer: they don’t allow the use of contraceptives. Occam’s razor and all, but it deserves a bit more explanation. After all, the Catholic Church doesn’t allow the use of contraceptives either, and look how well that’s working out for them. Of course the enforcement mechanism doesn’t have the teeth among Catholics that it has among the Amish, but that’s not the whole story. If they were motivated enough, there’d be a way to space the children out more, maybe end up without quite so many, without anyone knowing. That doesn’t happen, because the contraceptive ban is a dead letter when couples want to have as many children as possible, which the Amish typically do.

Again, I’ll go back to incentives. What are the incentives to have children specifically, as many as possible, and not just get married and “plan for a family one day”?

For one, status. For both men and women, a large family is a marker of high status. Parents are respected and honored for doing a good job of raising well-adjusted children.

Children are also less of a financial burden for the Amish. Their children are raised well, but not in a financially intensive way that’s become expected today. They don’t have to buy a new car or SUV to fit the family, they don’t buy every child a boatload of expensive electronic gadgets every birthday and Christmas, they don’t have to pay for frequent vacations or college tuition, and they don’t have to eat out or pay for takeout or pay for childcare or a house cleaner since the wife is handling all those domestic roles herself. And the Amish don’t practice helicopter parenting, so children are much more free to play and amuse themselves without constant supervision from their parents. They don’t have to be driven to 17 different weekly structured activities. They have a farm to play on and shelves full of books to read and some toys to play with if the weather is bad, and that’s about it. And of course as the family grows, the older siblings do a large percentage of the housework and help with the younger children.

The older teenagers that are working outside the home typically give their earnings to their parents, but this basically offsets the cost of raising them, so it isn’t really an incentive to have larger families, just the removal of a disincentive.

The strongest real incentive, other than increased status and cultural inertia, that I observe for large families is that the children are the parents’ retirement plan. The Amish don’t work at jobs that offer pensions or benefits. They are exempt from paying into, but also ineligible to receive, Social Security benefits. The Social Security exemption was granted on the basis that the Amish don’t need government payments to support them in old age, because the family and community will do that. And they do.

How does this work out in practice? First, the Amish don’t practice “retirement” the way most people think of it. They teach that work is honorable and every able-bodied man should work to support his family and to help those in need. So as long as a man is physically able to work, he’ll be employed and supporting himself and his wife. And Amish women move directly from the role of mother to the role of grandmother. It’s not at all uncommon, in fact, for a woman’s first grandchild to be born before her last child is born. So plenty of Amish children are an aunt or uncle at birth, and have a niece or nephew older than they are. Grandmothers are extremely involved in helping their daughters and daughters-in-law with childcare, so they don’t often have a big stretch of free time after their children grow up and move out. And besides that, there are still the significant household responsibilities to attend to.

As a couple gets older and perhaps less able to handle everything on their own, they often move to the home of one of their grown children. Typically not into the home directly, but into what’s called a “dody haus” (grandpa house) which might be a small detached house on the same property, or a separate wing of the larger house, like an in-law suite. Here they’re able to live independently, help care for the grandchildren next door, and still be nearby so their children and grandchildren can give any care they may need in old age. If the couple has an unmarried “old maid” daughter, she’ll typically still be living with them and will be the primary caregiver.

If someone doesn’t have children to care for them, the Amish community will find a way to care for them. Some more distant relative or maybe surviving siblings will step in to help. But the expectation and the rule is that your children and grandchildren will care for you after you’re no longer able to care for yourself. Finding yourself growing old without family is an unfortunate and unpleasant situation, regardless how much the community may try to fill that role. Just as throughout earlier stages of life, social functions and social status revolve around children and family, and anyone without them will be incomplete as a person, something of an inevitable outsider to the joys of life. The best insurance against a lonely and uncomfortable old age is a large family, among which there are certain to be sufficient resources to care for you. Many elderly Amish people die with well over a hundred grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and spend their later years constantly surrounded by children and young people who deeply appreciate and respect them. Being taught and shown that respect toward their own grandparents from a young age is a strong incentive to aspire to the same status one day.

I’m not sure exactly where this fits, but I should point out somewhere that the Amish have an absolutely zero tolerance policy toward divorce. There are no legitimate grounds for divorce whatsoever, and anyone who initiates a divorce will be excommunicated from the church and shunned. If an Amish person’s spouse initiates divorce proceedings, they won’t cooperate with those proceedings in any way. If the divorce happens through the legal system without their consent anyway, they can remain a church member in good standing only by staying celibate as long as their spouse remains alive. The only acceptable second marriage is in the case of the death of a spouse. In those cases, a quick remarriage is the rule among widows and widowers with young children, since raising a family is seen as a job for a married couple, not a single person.

It’s hard to say exactly how this stance against divorce influences marriage and fertility. But it certainly limits exposure to the idea of divorce as a “solution” to marriage difficulties, and incentivizes couples to work things out for their own life satisfaction. And it dramatically reduces the financial risks men face in the modern marriage system, where the potential to lose not only their family, but also a significant portion of their material wealth, raises strong disincentives to marriage. The physical realities of married life versus single life in a more low-tech environment probably discourage divorce, but the added threat of complete social and familial ostracization eliminate it almost entirely.

Conclusion

This article is my attempt to provide some insight into the Amish culture that might help us understand the factors causing their unusually high fertility rate. I’ve titled it as part one, because I plan to follow up with some of my personal opinions on how these insights relate to the broader society. I think a lot of the proposed causes of and solutions to the global demographic collapse are completely incorrect, and my opinion is based heavily on my observation of Amish culture. That will be the focus of part two of this article.

Feel free to comment and post questions. My biggest challenge in writing this article is the fact that I take my familiarity with Amish culture for granted to some degree, so I struggled to choose which points are relevant to understanding the culture for an outsider. I’m sure I skipped over plenty of important details that may leave readers feeling confused, so I’ll do my best to answer any questions you post, and update the article with pertinent information I missed.

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Concepts and Principles

Online sports betting is now legal in 30 US states. You can check legality in your state on the map here. If you’re in a state with legal mobile betting, or close enough that you’d be willing to drive there, you can benefit from this guide.

Most states with legalized betting have multiple different sports books competing for customers. To attract new customers, many of them offer various types of bonus offers when you initially sign up. The idea is that once you sign up and place a bet, you’re likely to continue betting in the future. So the sportsbook doesn’t mind losing money on your first wager, because they’ll make it back over time. That leaves an opportunity for someone to just take the free money and leave, if they want to do that. It’s completely legal, and if you follow this guide, also risk free.

The bonuses vary in size, but are usually larger the first few months after a state legalizes online betting, since sportsbooks are competing heavily to attract the new customers to their site. But most states will have a combined $3-5,000 in bonuses available at any time across 4-8 sportsbooks. You can find the available offers in your state by searching “covers sports betting promo offers <insert your state here>”. For example for Maryland, we’d end up up at covers.com on a page like this.

The basic concept is that we open accounts on multiple sites, sign up for their bonus offers, then bet both sides of the same sports game but on 2 different sites. That way it doesn’t matter which team wins, we collect the free bonus money with no risk.

Actually doing it is a bit more nuanced, but I’ll explain it step by step and illustrate with plenty of screenshots to make sure you can follow along.

First, you want to find the offers for your state, and sign up for the sites with the offers you want to convert. For Maryland, if we scroll on down at covers.com, we’ll find this list of offers.

The larger offers are of course more worthwhile, so if I were in Maryland, I would first sign up for Caesars, DraftKings, BetMGM, and ESPN BET. Since you’ll also want another site to hedge your bets, I’d also sign up for FanDuel. You can download their apps, set up your accounts, and familiarize yourself with the deposit methods that are available.

Risk-Free Bets

These are the most common bonus offers you’ll find. They’ll also be called No Sweat Bets, Second Chance Bets, First Bet Insurance, Bonus Bets, First Bets, etc. Always make sure you check the details of the promotion you’re using to make sure it’s a Risk-Free Bet, and what the terms and details of the offer are. The four offers from the sites above for Maryland all fall under the category of risk-free bets.

The concept of this offer is simple: you open an account, deposit some money, and make a bet. The very first bet (MAKE SURE YOU GET THIS RIGHT) will be your risk-free bet. If you win that first bet, cool, you get the winnings from that bet and can withdraw it. If you lose your first bet, the risk-free bet kicks in, and you get a free bet deposited into your account equal to the amount of your first bet. So you basically get a do-over if you lose the first one.

Now you won’t be able to just withdraw the free bet in cash if you lose and get your money back. That would be too easy. The risk-free bet is a bet, you can only use it to bet on another game. If you win that second wager, you can withdraw your winnings. But if you don’t, you can still win by hedging your bets on a different sportsbook. That’s what I’m going to show you.

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If you’re still obsessing over any of those things, that’s okay too, and you’re the reason I started this newsletter. It’s impossible to make good decisions without understanding the relevant information, and when it comes to money, almost no one understands the relevant information. My goal is to change that for as many people as I can reach, to grow the small group of people who are knowledgeable and empowered to make better decisions on money and finance.

Previous articles have been focused on economic theory and how money works at a conceptual level. That’s critically important to understand, and if you haven’t taken the time to read those articles, I know it will open your eyes to the world in a way you’ve never considered before. That understanding will give you a huge advantage in benefiting from what I’m about to describe. But today’s subject is strictly practical, actionable information on one specific financial instrument, and how you can use it to game the broken money system to benefit YOU.

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Money Is Not Scarce

If you read my previous articles, you’ll understand that one of the biggest problems with the credit/debt money system is that money is not scarce in this system. In fact, the quantity of money is basically unlimited. That’s because money is created by banks every time they make a loan. Unlike everything you’ve ever thought, banks don’t lend out money that’s given to them by depositors. They create new money, out of thin air, with a computer keystroke, every time they make a new loan. That means in practical terms that the amount of money is only limited by the willingness of banks to make loans. And since banks profit by charging interest to loan out money they can create at zero cost, they’re incentivized to make a LOT of loans.

Now as you can easily see, things that aren’t scarce don’t have a lot of value. The less scarce and more easily available something is, the less valuable it becomes. If you and a friend were standing on the shore of Lake Michigan and you reached down and scooped up a cup full of water, turned to your friend, and said “I’ll trade you this cup of water for your Rolex watch,” he’d look at you like you lost your mind. And rightly so, since a cup of water on the shore of a giant lake is so abundant and easily accessible that it has no value compared to a Rolex watch, which are deliberately produced in very limited amounts to increase their scarcity and value.

The difference between money and the water in that example is that money is not scarce, but it is selectively scarce. If you’re a bank, you have access to as much money as you choose to loan out, at zero cost. On the other hand, if you aren’t a bank, money is only available if the bank decides to create some and loan it to you, or you work hard to earn money someone else already has.

This selective scarcity of money is the root cause of the massive wealth inequality we see today. Money is essential to survive in the modern economy, but access to that money is very unevenly distributed.

So how does this benefit certain people? You might be thinking, but don’t borrowers have to pay the loan back with interest? Of course it’s easy to see how the banks benefit, but plenty of wealthy people are not bankers. And that’s a good point. Here’s how.

Because of the incentives banks have to make loans, the amount of money in circulation tends to keep rising exponentially. The amount of most real goods in the economy, however, typically doesn’t rise as fast. When you have more money circulating in the economy without more goods available, the prices people are willing to pay for those goods will go up. That means prices of some scarce goods rise very consistently over time. Those with access to newly created money in the form of loans benefit by using that money to buy assets that are more scarce than the money they borrowed to buy the asset. So they may buy an asset for $1 million, but by the time the loan is due to be repaid, the continuous inflation caused by the increasing money supply might have pushed the price of that asset up to $1.5 million. So subtract the interest paid from $500,000, and there’s your profit, all for doing nothing but convincing a banker to create some money and let you borrow it. The concept that those closest to the source of new money will benefit the most, because they can buy things before the prices rise, is called the Cantillon effect.

Benefitting from the Cantillon Effect

So how can you benefit? You can see that borrowing a bunch of money and buying a good asset with it would be the perfect way to take advantage of the Cantillon effect. But the problem for most people is, if they go to the bank and ask to borrow a few hundred thousand dollars, they’ll be declined in a millisecond. If you’re not already wealthy, you’re going to have a really tough time getting a big loan at a low interest rate, which is what it takes to make this system work in your favor. Most people only have access to loans in the form of a credit card or personal loan, which will be for a small amount and a very high interest rate. That’s not helpful. Luckily there’s one exception, one way almost anyone can borrow a big chunk of money at a low interest rate, and buy an asset that will increase in price over time as the money supply grows: a mortgage.

If you have the income and credit to support a mortgage payment, it can be a great way to take advantage of the broken monetary system to accumulate some long term wealth. However, there are a few caveats and some simple tricks that can make all the difference.

First, while the constant demand for houses fueled by easy access to newly created money means house prices tend to rise consistently over time, there are no guarantees. The housing market often has periods of boom and bust, and falling prices can last for years. Borrowing is always risky, and you shouldn’t take a risk you don’t understand or aren’t comfortable with. While no one can time the housing market, it’s always good to at least be aware that the housing market does rise and fall in cycles, and try to avoid buying when all signs point to housing being extremely overpriced.

Second, just because houses are rising in price doesn’t mean they’re rising in value. It’s a simple concept, but one most people miss. Like Warren Buffet says, price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you buy a house today for $400,000, and in 10 years that same house sells for $700,000, how much did the value of the house change? The price went up, but the house is still the same house in the same location, it’s just a decade older. And a decade of wear and tear is a decrease in value, not an increase. Think of it this way. You can sell for $700,000 and you have $300,000 of “profit”. But if you want the same house back, you can’t buy it for $400,000 again and pocket the $300,000. You can only get the same house back for the full price you received. You haven’t increased your purchasing power at all in terms of housing with that “profit”. Your house hasn’t become more valuable, your money has just become less valuable when measured against houses. In that sense, you probably can’t increase your purchasing power by buying a house to live in, but you can at least avoid losing purchasing power. If you just save money in the bank to buy a house later, house prices will probably rise faster than you can save. That’s especially true if you’re paying rent at the same time. At least with a mortgage, if you pay long enough you own a house eventually. You can pay rent your whole life and you’ll still own nothing at the end.

Understanding Amortization

The key to making a mortgage work for you is to understand and manipulate the amount of principal and interest you pay over the term of the loan. To do this, you need to understand how a mortgage amortization schedule works. An amortization schedule is basically a big chart of your mortgage payments each month, showing how much of each payment is applied to paying down the principal and how much is paying interest. The payment size is the same each month, but the amount of principal and interest varies over the term of the loan, and that’s key to understanding how to manipulate the system.

To understand amortization, you need a good amortization calculator. There are plenty of different ones available online, but I’m going to use the one here to illustrate. In this example, I’m going to arbitrarily choose a mortgage size of $500,000 and an interest rate of 7%, but you can of course use your own numbers. When we enter this into the calculator with a loan term of 30 years and click “calculate”, we get something that looks like this.

You can see the monthly payment of $3,326.51, and the total payments over 30 years of almost $1.2 million, almost $700,000 of which is interest. So you end up paying more in interest than the total amount of principal you borrowed. Gulp.

That seems terrible, and it is. But this is where understanding the amortization schedule, that scary looking chart to the left, is going to pay big dividends. First, change the amortization schedule from an annual schedule to a monthly schedule. You’ll see something that looks like this.

So now for each month, you can see how much of the payment is interest, how much is principal, and how much of your original $500,000 balance is still outstanding. As you can see in month one, you’re paying over $2,900 in interest and only $400 in principal, leaving you with a balance of $499,590.15. The reason the interest is so high initially is that you have to pay interest on the full principal balance. As the principal gets paid down, you are now paying interest on a smaller balance. If you scroll down to year 29, you’ll see the opposite situation. In month 338 you’ll pay $2,900 of principal and only $400 of interest. That’s because you’re now paying interest on a balance of only $68,000 instead of $500,000.

As you can see, getting into the later years of the mortgage is a much better situation than paying huge amounts of interest in the first few years. Is there a way to get closer to the end fast? Yes there is, and you may be surprised how easy it is.

Go back to the annual amortization schedule. Suppose you want to take 5 years off your mortgage. How much would it cost to do, and how much would you save in interest? There are two ways to do this, and we’ll cover both.

First, the easiest way to get 5 years off your mortgage is to move straight down the amortization schedule to year 6. How can you do that? Look at the annual amortization schedule for year 5. Your ending balance is a little over $470,000. That means to get to that point in the loan repayment schedule, you need to pay $30,000 of principal. So let’s see where a lump sum payment of $30,000 gets us. Inside the box where you entered your loan terms you’ll see a little checkbox labeled “Optional: make extra payments”. Click that box. In the “Extra one-time pay” box, enter $30,000. Click calculate. You’ll see this.

And viola, with the extra payment, the loan will be paid off in 25 years, and you’ll save $172,362 in interest. Pretty amazing results for a one-time $30,000 payment.

Of course for the sake of simplicity, that’s assuming you pay the $30,000 at the very beginning of the loan. Paying the lump sum later into the loan term will change the exact amount of the savings. You can play around with other payment sizes, or even multiple lump sum payments, and see how much each one will save.

But most of you will be thinking, “Where am I going to get $30,000? That’s never going to happen.” If that’s you, don’t worry. We can do the exact same thing a different way.

Go back to your calculator, remove the lump sum payment, and leave everything else the same, except the loan term. Change the loan term to 25 years instead of 30 years. Click calculate. Now look at just one number, the payment size. You’ll see it’s $3,533.90. Don’t worry about anything else, just note that number. Now reset to your original calculation of a 30 year term. You’ll see the payment size is back down to $3,326.51. Now get out your calculator and subtract $3,326.51 from $3,533.90. You’ll get $207.39. Go back to your “make extra payments” box and enter an “extra monthly pay” of $207.39. Click calculate.

As you can see, just by paying an extra $207 of principal every month, you’ll pay the loan off 5 years faster and save $137,379 in interest.

You’ll save a little less that way than the lump sum payment, because you’re not paying the principal down as much early in the loan. But paying an extra $200 a month is much easier for most people than accumulating thousands of dollars to make a large lump sum payment. A few hundred dollars is only about 6% of the size of this mortgage payment, so it’s really a small difference. And if you can’t afford to pay a few percent of your payment size extra each month, the mortgage is probably bigger than you can reasonably afford.

You can play around with these numbers in all kinds of ways. It’s a good way to help you think about your financial decisions, and the real impact they might have over time. Say for example, you’re considering buying a new grill for the backyard. You only grill a few times a month during the summer, and a replacement model of the basic charcoal grill you have now would be perfectly serviceable. It’s available for $119 on Amazon. But your brother-in-law just bought one of those Big Green Eggs and he keeps bragging about how amazing it is. They’re $1,950, but you can afford it, you just got a nice little bonus at work. So why not?

But before you get out the checkbook, let’s take a quick look at the mortgage calculator. Let’s see how much that extra $1,831 spent on a grill you don’t really need will actually cost you. Again, input your mortgage size, term, and interest rate, and add an extra one-time payment of $1,831.

Hopefully you’re still using that Big Green Egg in 30 years, because by that time, it will have cost you almost $13,000 in additional interest payments.

You can fill in the blank with your own discretionary purchases and see whether they’re really worth the cost. It’s just another little tool to help plan your financial decisions. It’s free to do, and can make a very significant difference in your financial well-being down the road. But almost no one takes advantage of the opportunity, so you’ll have a huge leg up on most people just by knowing this simple concept.

The Bottom Line

To take advantage of the opportunity to build wealth with a mortgage, there are only two simple rules.

1. Use a mortgage to buy a reasonably priced house that you couldn’t otherwise afford.

2. Take advantage of amortization to pay that mortgage off as fast as possible, so you pay as little interest as possible while still capturing the increase in price of the house.

If you already own a home, you can use the same concept. Take out a mortgage for whatever amount you’re comfortable with, and use the money to buy an asset that will increase in price with inflation. Choose your asset wisely, and don’t take on more debt than you can afford. But if you make good decisions, you can take advantage of the broken financial system, using this little mortgage cheat code to get the Cantillon effect on your side. The wealthy are doing it every day, so don’t miss the opportunity to lock in long-term, fixed rate debt and acquire hard assets. As the debt/credit fiat system implodes, the opportunity to do this will disappear. Take advantage of it while you can.

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The concept of UBI has been around for a long time, but recently had a resurgence in popular exposure by presidential candidate Andrew Yang. The buzz died down since his campaign, but the topic is once again getting some airtime in relation to the potential labor market disruptions caused by AI. So I think it’s worth taking a look at the topic, since it will probably become a political issue again at some point.

Why Consider UBI?

When discussing a complex topic like this, I think it’s important to establish a foundational baseline of goal or purpose first. That provides an opportunity to really define a vision, and make sure that vision is fundamentally solid and valid. Otherwise it’s easy to blindly head down the path toward a destination we don’t actually want. I was a little disappointed this wasn’t discussed in more depth, but here’s what host Trey Walsh had to say on the topic of why we need UBI.

You know, we wanna assist people who need it. We wanna make sure that people have their basic needs met, especially in somewhere like the United States. People shouldn't be in poverty. There shouldn't be the homeless crisis that we're dealing with, all of these things. Right?

All that sounds well and good on the surface. Of course no one wants more poverty. That’s the quintessential strawman of collectivist politics, “I’m against poverty.” Well of course, so is every non-psychopath on the planet. The implication, of course, is that if you disagree with them in any way, you must be for poverty, and therefore a murderous and uncaring psychopath.

I reject that framing. Here’s why.

The world operates by cause and effect. Outcomes are the result of actions. People shouldn’t be in poverty, not in a perfect situation. People also shouldn’t be locked in a cage and have all their freedoms restricted. Yet we incarcerate people every day. People shouldn’t be killed. Yet we execute people regularly. And rational people are aware of and support these things, with of course disagreement on the details. Why? Because people take actions that have consequences, and sometimes those consequences can be as serious as socially enforced prison or even death.

But most consequences aren’t enforced by people in that way, they’re enforced by the laws of the universe itself. You touch the hot stove, you get burned. You jump into the deep end without knowing how to swim, you drown. You waste time being unproductive while spending too much, you fall into poverty.

So while nobody wants more poverty, the reality is that sometimes poverty is a result of choices made. You can argue how often it’s a justified consequence versus how often it’s an unfortunate outcome of tragic events outside someone’s control. But the thing is, UBI doesn’t differentiate. That’s the whole point. UBI attempts to solve the poverty “problem” by making it impossible for anyone to ever be in poverty.

This is the economic equivalent of solving the pain “problem” by injecting everyone with a dose of morphine every day. It fails to acknowledge that poverty and pain are not only problems, but often a warning that suboptimal actions were taken, and changes need to be made in the future to achieve desired outcomes. Sure, you could “solve” your pain with a shot of morphine. But it’s really just telling you to take your hand off the stove before your skin burns away, or get that nagging headache checked out to make sure it’s just allergies and not a brain tumor.

Same with poverty, it’s often just a reminder and motivator to get off the couch and do something useful, or put in more than 32 hours at work, or stop buying those cigarettes and lotto tickets when you have $10k in credit card debt and rent due tomorrow. Again, I’m not insinuating that every person in poverty makes those choices. But the idea behind UBI is that if they do, they shouldn’t feel the pain of consequences. I fundamentally disagree with that premise. I believe incentives strongly determine outcomes, and distorting natural incentives in a large-scale way like UBI does, is going to lead to some very undesirable outcomes.

Incentives

It’s not that Scott doesn’t understand incentives. He goes on to say this:

So when it comes to traditional welfare benefits, what usually happens is let's say you wanna make sure that only those in need get this assistance. So then you have some kind of test. You say, okay, if the poverty line is $12,000 per year, then we wanna make sure that we only get this assistance to those who are earning less than $12,000 a year. So that sounds like on its face, like, a good idea. Like, you just wanna make sure that it goes to people in need.

But there are a couple outcomes from that. One of them is actually something that conservatives tend to understand pretty well, which is that there's a disincentive effect from welfare. So if you only get something if you have an income under $12,000 per year, then you're essentially encouraged to keep your income below $12,000 a year in order to keep getting it.

This has been a common theme among UBI advocates. They promote UBI as a solution to the disincentive to productivity caused by traditional welfare, while denying that UBI is also a disincentive to productivity.

The typical argument is anecdotal, pointing to trials or experiences showing that UBI recipients are more likely to start a business or do something unpaid like volunteer work or additional school. But to me this isn’t a convincing argument. For one, starting a business is not an automatic net good. A lot of businesses fail. The alleged benefit of UBI is that it encourages more people to start a business in spite of the risk of failure, knowing that if it does fail they’ll still be able to survive off the UBI payment. The thing is, businesses fail because they don’t provide value. If they provide value as determined by the market, they’ll make a profit and succeed. The fact that they fail is just proof that more value was being consumed than produced, so the enterprise was a net detriment to society. So starting a business should carry significant real risk to entrepreneurs, because it carries the potential of wasting a lot of resources if it doesn’t serve a real demand in the market.

As Scott goes on to say:

Whereas with UBI, if you have a $1,000 per month at UBI and a job offers you a $1,000 per month, you've just doubled your income. And that's where the incentive comes from to work, which is also why if you look at all the pilots, all the evidence shows that work does not decrease significantly at all with basic income and actually often increases, like, with the entrepreneurship impacts. You see just a lot of people starting up their businesses. That's one of the main impacts is that even if people work less in wage labor, a lot of the impact goes to self employment and even doing something like unpaid care work or school where it makes an investment in future work or actually focusing on unpaid work that isn't recognized as work.

Again, this is just assuming that the self employment or unpaid work or school are automatically a net good. If those things aren’t bringing in enough income to justify without the UBI, what’s the basis for concluding that they’re a net benefit to society and something we want to incentivize? It all comes back to the central planning, collectivist mindset, the idea that my particular assessment of what is and isn’t valuable outweighs the opinion of every market actor as determined by what is and isn’t profitable. The fact that anecdotally some of the businesses started because of UBI are successful, doesn’t make the whole enterprise a net benefit. So to me, it’s an unconvincing argument overall.

If people are currently in poverty, of course excluding those who are actually unable to work, then the reality of poverty isn’t a strong enough incentive to change their production or consumption behavior enough to afford the basics of life. If affording basic necessities isn’t enough incentive, how will affording slightly nicer non-necessities be an incentive when UBI provides the necessities without requiring any effort at all? I’m skeptical.

Inflation

Scott lists three main objections to UBI.

So the the three primary, oppositional arguments to basic income are that people will stop working, that it will cause inflation, and that we can't afford it.

On inflation, he starts by arguing that inflation won’t be an issue because it hasn’t been in Alaska, and they have an annual dividend payment to each resident of $1-2,000 per year. Of course this is significantly less than the $1,000 or more per month he uses as a UBI example throughout the conversation. But putting that aside, his explanation for why Alaska hasn’t seen increased inflation directly contradicts his explanation for why the US as a whole has seen significant inflation recently.

And every year when the dividend sales go out, businesses actually drop their prices. They have, you know, dividend sales and they're all trying to compete over people to spend at their business instead of some other business. You know, it's just like with Christmas where you think, you know, everyone wants to spend money and you can think that, well, businesses should actually raise their prices because everyone has money to spend and they're willing to spend it now. No. They actually lower prices because of competition.

So one element of this, of course, is that competitive aspect. You know, competition does matter. And, if you raise your prices because people have more money, then your competitor could lower their prices or not raise their prices and then could actually put you out of business, because you decided to do that.

But then, talking about US inflation the past few years:

And what we didn't do, and one one of the reasons why we saw this inflation too was the result of not doing something like a windfall tax or, you know, excess inflation tax or excess profits tax. And that's the kind of tax that isn't about, you know, raising revenue. It's about just discouraging companies from seeking excess profits. You know, a bunch of what we saw with sellers inflation, which is that businesses in this environment of inflation due to lower supply and therefore costlier components, they raise their prices way beyond what they actually needed to do because why not? You know, if prices are going up anyways because they need to, might as well capture a much larger percentage of your profits by raising your prices even more. We could have discouraged that. We just didn't do that.

These types of contradictory arguments are frustrating to respond to. So which is it? Extra money doesn’t cause inflation in Alaska because businesses lower their prices to stay competitive, but when we see inflation in the US after massive stimulus payments it’s because businesses just raised their prices because why wouldn’t they? You can’t have it both ways. Either businesses respond to market incentives and charge as much as possible while still remaining competitive, or businesses just do whatever they want without regard to market incentives and the whole concept of economics is a fraud.

Earlier in the conversation Scott pointed out that UBI can increase demand for goods and services, but at the time he was using that as a potential benefit. He uses the example of a woman who used her UBI payment to start a baking business.

But the basic income meant that her entire village was full of customers, full of people that had money to actually buy her goods. And if she had gotten this in a vacuum where, you know, she just got a start up loan, would she have succeeded in a village full of people that couldn't buy her stuff? Well, arguably, she likely could have failed or at least she would have done a lot worse. But because everyone in the village had basic income too, then they were all able to buy her stuff and they loved her baked goods and that ended up leading to her income from her business being, I think it was 3 or 4 times the amount of the basic income.

Lower supply and higher demand both act to move prices up. So arguing that lower supply during the past few years was the main cause of higher prices, and UBI wouldn’t have the same effect, while simultaneously touting the increased demand as a benefit of UBI, doesn’t compute. You can’t use the effects of market forces to argue in favor of UBI, and then act like that effect doesn’t exist when you’re downplaying objections to UBI.

Overall, I remain unconvinced by the arguments made as to why UBI wouldn’t cause inflation.

Freedom and Homesteading

The podcast also touches on the empowerment UBI would provide in the job market.

But, you know, a lot what I find really fascinating about a lot of people who claim to be libertarians is that they overlook the authoritarian coercive aspect of the employer employee relationship. And it's really interesting because it's not just, you know, true freedom is not just freedom from coercion from your government. It ought to be freedom from coercion from all forms of oppression. Right? And in the job, in the workplace, and in the labor market, if you're going to be on an equal footing with the employer, you ought to have a way to say no and to exercise your right to escape that type of coercion from being forced to take a job or to take hours with wages that are not suitable for you. And what you're saying, Scott, to me, is like liberty maximization on the across the board, to create an even playing field within all all markets in a market system. You can't refuse domination without an empowered status, and that's what basic income provides.

This seems like a reasonable argument. My objection on this point would be that it once again assumes that market forces don’t work. Because in the labor market, you do have a way to say no to your employer. It’s very simple, you just quit that job and take a job elsewhere. If the pay being offered is less than the value of your work, you can offer your work to the market somewhere else and get what it’s actually worth. By definition. If you don’t think that’s true, you’re arguing that the market doesn’t work. That’s a different argument.

You could say the UBI provides the security to be able to quit your job and survive while finding a better job elsewhere. But if you’re really so undercompensated, you can easily find a better offer before quitting your current job. That’s the normal practice. And when it comes to worry about being fired, we already have generous unemployment compensation for precisely that reason. I don’t see what role UBI fills in increasing freedom in the marketplace, except to provide support and remove incentive for those who aren’t contributing sufficient value to be successful in the labor market.

UBI just shifts dependency from the incentives of the market to the choices of the state. Instead of depending on the compensation the market provides for your effort, you’re depending on the goodwill of the central planners to keep sending that check every month. Of course this provides a strong incentive to support the apparatus of the state, which is a huge unspoken benefit of UBI to those who favor increased centralized control over the economy by central planners at the state level.

Then there’s this point:

This actually leads into another libertarian argument is that we kind of remove the ability for people to live just like off the land, you know, doing their own kind of work. What we did is if you go back to, like, the enclosures, you know, you look at the common land, you know, even back in the day in the US, when everyone was, like, moving west, you could actually, with homestead grants, you could actually just claim land as yours, and it was just free. And you could actually just live off the land. That was an option. Now there is no such thing. Like, you can't just claim land as yours. It belongs to someone else.

And in this kind of situation, it's the owners of the land that have that power over you. They can say, no. You're like, if you work for me, then I will give you access to what the land provides. And is that freedom? No. Like, as soon as we enclosed the land and prevented people from actually sustaining themselves off of it with the fruit of their own, you know, enjoying the fruits of their own labor and making it so that it was the choice between the the non owners being dominated by the owners.

So the argument is that we need UBI now as a replacement for the ability to just get free land and homestead the American West. It would be amazing if there were a way to interview an 1800’s homesteader today and get their opinion on this theory. My guess is they’d laugh themselves sick. I have to conclude that people have no concept of what was involved in surviving as a homesteader, and what kind of lifestyle you could expect even if you managed to do it successfully.

Suffice to say that anyone who puts in the amount of effort today that it took to survive on a parcel of “free” land in the 1800’s, will be far wealthier than any UBI check could ever make them. Realistically, most of the people living in “poverty” today in the US have a lifestyle of ease and luxury an 1800’s homesteader couldn’t even imagine, much less achieve. It certainly wasn’t something you’d just decide to do as an easy way to get by between jobs, it was backbreaking physical labor from daylight to dark, and a lifestyle of the barest subsistence at best, and complete failure and the prospect of actual death if the weather didn’t cooperate or the grasshoppers or hail destroyed the wheat crop or the Indians attacked and destroyed your homestead or you cut your hand and got an infection or a million other things the modern “poor” never have to worry about.

Votes in the Market

The way that the markets are supposed to work and that we imagined were the reason that markets do work is that essentially, money acts as like a vote. And that, you know, if one business is doing something that you like, then you go there, you vote for that business with your dollars, and that business can continue to do business. And then a business that doesn't have any people voting for it, that goes out of business, and then a new business pops up, and then people get to vote. Do you like that business or don't you?

So that's the way that that markets work. But, of course, the kind of underlying mechanism is this vote, which is the dollar. And so we don't actually have a system where everybody can vote, but we have a system where some people can vote and they can vote, like, a lot. Like, they have, like, all kinds they have billions of ballots that they can use to vote. And, it's very disproportionate.

They go on to discuss how UBI would be beneficial by giving everyone some “votes” in the market, so the market could fill their demand.

The part that’s ignored is that these votes work both ways. In a free market, having a lot of money is a result of a lot of people “voting” to support the work and business you’re doing. Not having money is the result of people “voting” that what you’re doing isn’t valuable enough. You’re the same as the business that doesn’t have any people voting for it, which like he says, goes out of business and gets replaced by a business people are willing to support. So the UBI argument, once again, contradicts itself. How is giving free “votes” to people who haven’t provided value in the economy good, while allowing a business to fail or be forced to adapt because of a lack of market support is also good? They’re both a result of the same market forces. And if a business does a good job and gets a lot of “votes”, that’s going to result in the business owner becoming wealthy, and everything staying just as disproportionate as before. See how this is illogical? How is the market supposed to function by this “voting” system if the “votes” don’t actually mean anything because we continuously take the money away from the “vote” winners and redistribute it equally back to everyone through UBI?

One could argue that those who have a lot of money haven’t earned it by fulfilling market demands, but by corruption of the money system, regulatory capture, corporate/government collusion, etc. I completely agree, but that’s a problem of a lack of market forces, not a problem caused by market forces. The solution is to eliminate things that interfere with market forces, not to add even more market-distorting effects in the form of wealth redistribution through UBI.

Redistribution

In relation to a discussion about who should benefit from AI and tech advancements, Trey had this to say:

But, really quick with what Scott said, I think that is one of the things that I'm curious your thoughts on this. For someone to come to UBI, I think there might be one stipulation. And I think that stipulation would be what you just said, that we believe that we should live in a world where everyone is kind of a part of creating this world that has been throughout the variety of ways that are typically taken for granted. And everyone deserves a fair contribution of that, whatever that looks like. Because some people coming to the table or some folks in Bitcoin that I might disagree with on this point think, well, they didn't do x y z, so they don't deserve x y z. Right? And I can quote Marx, and they'll dismiss me and and all of this stuff. Right?

So I think that might be one condition to being open to this conversation is do we want or do we believe we should live in a world where that sort of system exists, whether you call it redistribution of some kind or whatever. I almost view it as kind of a fact of life at this point as we were talking about.

And Scott responds,

Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned redistribution again. It's definitely like a bad word. You know, we've come to the point where, you just don't say redistribution. You know that people oppose that.

And Alaska's dividend, a lot of Alaskans see this as a form of predistribution. And the way that they see that as predistribution is that because money goes directly from the government to people, you know, it doesn't first go to politicians and then to people. You know, it doesn't go to politicians for them to decide where it should go. Instead, it's distributed directly to people, and then people get to spend it in ways that whatever they wish. And that's money that the government isn't deciding for them.

So I would say that the redistribution is when it's, like, gone through the process of going through a politician. You know, it's like welfare as a form of redistribution because it's going through a politician, and the politician sets up a bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy says, this person deserves it. This person doesn't. This comes with these conditions.

So they’re well aware that people oppose wealth redistribution, and no quotes from Marx will convince them to support it. So they’re trying to reframe the word and argue that UBI isn’t redistribution, because the government doesn’t decide who deserves it and how they can use it.

But earlier in the episode, Scott said,

There's again kind of a misunderstanding of basic income, in regards to, like, yes, it's true that everyone universally receives whatever the basic income is.

And let's say it's $1200 per month is the basic income. That does not mean that everyone's disposable income has increased by $1200 per month. That depends on the taxes that have been paired with it, the welfare reforms that have been paired with it, the tax expenditure reforms. It means that there's some amount of net increase or decrease after taxes that has to be taken into account. So in a case of, like, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and, you know, the other billionaires, like, yes, they'll get the $1200 per month, but their taxes would have gone up much further than $1200 per month.

They will not see a disposable income boost. Then if you look at, you know, there's, depending on design, there's some, you know, person, that is receiving just as much in UBI as they're paying in additional new taxes. And, so let's say that person is around, $120,000 or something where they are receiving $1200 per month in EBI, but their new taxes are $1200 per month. So they are 0. They don't benefit from basic income financially, and they don't pay higher taxes either on net. Instead, they're like the you know, they experience the greater security of basic income.

They don't see a boost. And so then go below that. So everyone below that net neutral point are receiving some amount of disposable income boost. And for the middle class, that won't be $1200 per month. It'll be, you know, something like, say, $600 per month or $500 or something, on net.

And with only those earning 0, getting the full amount of net benefit.

If everyone gets the same UBI check, that doesn’t mean it’s not redistribution. Not even according to their own redefining of the word. Not if it’s paired with tax increases on the wealthy, which Scott is admitting it will be. Because if you give someone a monthly check, but then tax them for more than the amount of the check, that’s not really what we’ve been sold as UBI, is it? At the end of the day, as Scott admits, it’s the net change in disposable income that matters. If you give everyone an equal monthly check, but then raise taxes on the wealthy by more than they receive, and don’t raise taxes on the poor, what have you achieved? The net change in disposable income is identical to just raising taxes on the wealthy and redistributing it to the poor through different sized monthly checks based on income. In other words, exactly the same as every other wealth redistributing welfare program we already have.

This completely obliterates the argument that UBI won’t reduce the incentive to work like income based welfare payments do. It’s the net change in disposable income that matters. So having more of your UBI taxed away because you increased your income creates identical incentives to having your welfare payments reduced because you increased your income.

I don’t know what else to say on this. If you want to discuss whether wealth redistribution is good or bad, that’s a different conversation. If you quote Marx as a credible source, I already have a good idea how that conversation will go. But it’s intellectually dishonest to claim that UBI is anything other than the standard collectivist wealth redistribution scheme, just because you try to compartmentalize away the increased progressive taxes it’s inevitably paired with. As far as I’m concerned, this is as damning an argument against UBI as anyone could make.

Earlier in the show Scott pointed out that income taxes are not the best form of taxes. I completely agree, I think the incentives of income taxes are absolutely awful. But when it comes down to the mechanics of funding UBI, Scott seems to admit that it will be funded by higher taxes on the wealthy. Well of course, because that’s the only way to gain support for it. There are a lot fewer wealthy people than poor and middle class people, so UBI sells with the same marketing campaign every other economic proposal relies on: we’ll take money away from “the rich” and give it to you for free. Of course that’s going to be popular with voters. That doesn’t make it a good idea though. In fact, it’s exactly the type of idea that makes pure democracy an unsustainable and short-lived form of government.

Control

One of the common concerns about UBI is that is could lead to a threatening level of government control and coercion, if a large percentage of the population is dependent on the monthly UBI payment. This is addressed in the episode as well.

One of the most annoying things to me most recently is, how, like, coming out of the pandemic, you've got, like, the conspiracy crowd who have decided that basic income is, like, some kind of control mechanism tool, you know, that was created by elites and pushed by, like, the World Economic Forum or something.

And that the entire point of it is to, like, control people. And they'll even say stuff like, you know, a basic income will have conditions. And that's so frustrating to me because, I mean, definitionally speaking, a basic income can't have conditions. It's like they're afraid of welfare, and welfare has all sorts of conditions, and we know that.

But, like, the entire point of a basic income is to remove the conditions. So if it has conditions, then we haven't won basic income, and we should still keep fighting for basic income. You know, it's just if you're concerned about that, it's just all the more reason to be for actual basic income, not for fake basic income.

That sounds well and good. But building on the previous point, how can you say there are no conditions if you’re funding the UBI with progressive taxation to determine who actually gets a boost in net disposable income and who doesn’t? I already made the point that this is no different than the current welfare system and the conditions it entails.

You could argue that you’re going to fund the UBI with some other form of taxes. Maybe like Margot suggested,

And I think that solves a lot of concerns around how can we afford a UBI, how do we, you know, avoid inflating the money supply in order to provide money for everyone at this basic level? And I think that's really great because then I think about climate change, and then I think, well, we should just tax 100% of profits from all fossil fuel companies and then use that for UBI because they have truly benefited in ways using those natural resources like fossil fuels in a way that has been extremely detrimental to society and to the environment, and this is one way to pay back what is owed to everyone for the damage that has been done.

So UBI has no conditions, except that if you’re producing “fossil fuels” we’re going to tax away every bit of your profits and redistribute it through UBI? This isn’t the place to get into a whole conversation about “climate change” and the claim that using coal, oil, and natural gas “has been extremely detrimental to society and to the environment,” but suffice to say that this kind of ideological market control and manipulation is exactly what people are concerned about when they look at UBI proposals and how they might be funded.

Or even more concerning, something like Scott’s proposal:

When it comes to the environment, I also think carbon taxes make a lot of sense to do, because, again, you want to discourage people from having a large carbon footprint, and it would be hugely impactful to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to tax that. The issue is that, you know, usually so many people push against carbon taxes because, yeah, it would raise prices of stuff. You know, if you make this gasoline more expensive, then that means that also it may be more expensive to get to and from work. But now transport's more expensive, which means everything transported goes up in price, which means foods go up, which means all these other goods go up and services go up.

So it causes higher prices. But if you have a basic income component that's paired with the carbon tax, then that means that usually depending on design, about the bottom two-thirds actually end up receiving more in the basic income than, you know, they pay in this carbon tax. And, again, it depends on design. But only those at the top, those ones who have the largest carbon footprints are the ones who are paying more in taxes than getting back in basic income. That, I think, makes all the sense in the world.

So now we’re not just taxing “fossil fuel” companies, we’re all the way to the globalist wet dream: a universal carbon tax paired with UBI, so that if you use too much energy, you get taxed and have your wealth redistributed to people who use less energy, through the mechanism of a UBI system. If that isn’t government control and coercion, I don’t know what is. Again, I’m not going to debate the premise here. If you think CO2 is a real, serious threat and this level of coercion is acceptable in an attempt to “solve” it, that’s up to you. I’d just like to point out that this is exactly the outcome critics of UBI object to, and claiming UBI won’t be a control mechanism rings very hollow when you propose a system like this.

Final Thoughts

There are more points I could touch on here, but this article is long enough already. I encourage everyone to go listen to the episode yourself. Agree or disagree, this is an issue that’s going to come up again and again in the political discourse, and it’s worth understanding the mindset of supporters and proponents of UBI.

For myself, I’m opposed to the idea. I tried to address some of my main criticisms, based on views and comments taken from the episode.

The main point in favor of UBI that I could support unfortunately wasn’t addressed at all, at least not that I heard. That’s the idea that UBI could reduce waste in welfare program administration by eliminating the need to have a bunch of complex overlapping programs with massive overhead costs. Welfare reform was mentioned in passing, but what I’m talking about requires welfare elimination. It’s pretty clear that’s not on the table for most UBI proponents.

And I think the reason comes out in the redistribution and control sections: UBI is essentially just a cover story for an expansion and entrenchment of the welfare system. As described, it would be redistributive, would have conditions, would require more government control and coercion, and at the end of the day isn’t fundamentally different than the existing welfare system. If you look at the actual net changes in purchasing power, it’s the same model we already have, and not the fundamentally new and different system we’re being sold. In fact, I find it ironic that once you strip away the “same size monthly check to everyone” obfuscation and focus on net purchasing power, the UBI system that’s described doesn’t even meet the definition of “real UBI” given by the proponents themselves.

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Demographics is a field where predictions about the future are much more reliable than in most scientific fields. That’s because future population trends are “baked in” decades in advance. If you want to know how many fifty-year-olds there will be in forty years, all you have to do is count the ten-year-olds today and allow for mortality rates. That maximum was already determined by the number of births ten years ago, and absolutely nothing can change that now. The average person doesn’t think that through when they look at population trends. You hear a lot of “oh we just need to do more of x to help the declining birthrate” without an acknowledgement that future populations in a given cohort are already fixed by the number of births that already occurred.

As you can see, global birthrates have already declined close to the 2.3 replacement level, with some regions ahead of others, but all on the same trajectory with no region moving against the trend. I’m not going to speculate on the reasons for this, or even whether it’s a good or bad thing. Instead I’m going to make some observations about outcomes this trend could cause economically, and why. Like most macro issues, an individual can’t do anything to change the global landscape personally, but knowing what that landscape might look like is essential to avoiding fallout from trends outside your control.

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The Resource Pie

Thomas Malthus popularized the concern about overpopulation with his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population. The basic premise of the book was that population could grow and consume all the available resources, leading to mass poverty, starvation, disease, and population collapse. We can say in hindsight that this was incorrect, given that the global population has increased from less than a billion to over eight billion since then, and the apocalypse Malthus predicted hasn’t materialized. Exactly the opposite, in fact. The global standard of living has risen to levels Malthus couldn’t have imagined, much less predicted.

So where did Malthus go wrong? His hypothesis seems reasonable enough, and we do see a similar trend in certain animal populations. The base assumption Malthus got wrong was to assume resources are a finite, limiting factor to the human population. That at some point certain resources would be totally consumed, and that would be it. He treated it like a pie with a lot of slices, but still a finite number, and assumed that if the population kept rising, eventually every slice would be consumed and there would be no pie left for future generations. That turns out to be completely wrong.

Of course, the earth is finite at some abstract level. The number of atoms could theoretically be counted and quantified. But on a practical level, do humans exhaust the earth’s resources? I’d point to an article from Yale Scientific titled Has the Earth Run out of any Natural Resources? To quote,

However, despite what doomsday predictions may suggest, the Earth has not run out of any resources nor is it likely that it will run out of any in the near future.

In fact, resources are becoming more abundant. Though this may seem puzzling, it does not mean that the actual quantity of resources in the Earth’s crust is increasing but rather that the amount available for our use is constantly growing due to technological innovations. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the only resource we have exhausted is cryolite, a mineral used in pesticides and aluminum processing. However, that is not to say every bit of it has been mined away; rather, producing it synthetically is much more cost efficient than mining the existing reserves at its current value.

As it happens, we don’t run out of resources. Instead, we become better at finding, extracting, and efficiently utilizing resources, which means that in practical terms resources become more abundant, not less. In other words, the pie grows faster than we can eat it.

So is there any resource that actually limits human potential? I think there is, and history would suggest that resource is human ingenuity and effort. The more people are thinking about and working on a problem, the more solutions we find and build to solve it. That means not only does the pie grow faster than we can eat it, but the more people there are, the faster the pie grows. Of course that assumes everyone eating pie is also working to grow the pie, but that’s a separate issue for now.

Productivity and Division of Labor

Why does having more people lead to more productivity? A big part of it comes down to division of labor and specialization. The best way to get really good at something is to do more of it. In a small community, doing just one thing simply isn’t possible. Everyone has to be somewhat of a generalist in order to survive. But with a larger population, being a specialist becomes possible. In fact, that’s the purpose of money, as I explained here.

The more specialized an economy becomes, the more efficient it can be. There are big economies of scale in almost every task or process. So for example, if a single person tried to build a car from scratch, it would be extremely difficult and take a very long time. However, if you have a thousand people building a car, each doing a specific job, they can become very good at doing that specific job and do it much faster. And then you can move that process to a factory, and build machines to do specific jobs, and add even more efficiency.

But that only works if you’re building more than one car. It doesn’t make sense to build a huge factory full of specialized equipment that takes lots of time and effort to design and manufacture, and then only build one car. You need to sell thousands of cars, maybe even millions of cars, to pay off that initial investment. So division of labor and specialization relies on large populations in two different ways. First, you need a large population to have enough people to specialize in each task. But second and just as importantly, you need a large population of buyers for the finished product. You need a big market in order to make mass production economical.

Think of a computer or smartphone. It takes thousands of specialized processes, thousands of complex parts, and millions of people doing specialized jobs to extract the raw materials, process them, and assemble them into a piece of electronic hardware. And electronics are relatively expensive anyway. Imagine how impossible it would be to manufacture electronics economically, if the market demand wasn’t literally in the billions of units.

Stairs Up, Elevator Down

We’ve seen exponential increases in productivity over the past few centuries, resulting in higher living standards even as population exploded. Now, facing the prospect of a drastic trend reversal, what will happen to productivity and living standards? The typical sentiment seems to be “well, there are a lot of people already competing for resources, so if population does decline, that will just reduce the competition and leave a bigger slice of pie for each person, so we’ll all be getting wealthier as a result of population decline.”

This seems reasonable at first glance. Surely dividing the economic pie into fewer slices means a bigger slice for everyone, right? But remember, more specialization and division of labor is what made the pie as big as it is to begin with. And specialization depends on large populations for both the supply of specialized labor, and the demand for finished goods. Can complex supply chains and mass production withstand population reduction intact? I don’t think the answer is clear.

The idea that it will all be okay, and we’ll get wealthier as population falls, is based on some faulty assumptions. It assumes that wealth is basically some fixed inventory of “things” that exist, and it’s all a matter of distribution. That’s typical Marxist thinking, similar to the reasoning behind “tax the rich” and other utopian wealth transfer schemes.

The reality is, wealth is a dynamic concept with strong network effects. For example, a grocery store in a large city can be a valuable asset with a large potential income stream. The same store in a small village with a declining population can be an unprofitable and effectively worthless liability.

Even something as permanent as a house is very susceptible to network effects. If you currently live in an area where housing is scarce and expensive, you might think a declining population would be the perfect solution to high housing costs. However, if you look at a place that’s already facing the beginnings of a population decline, you’ll see it’s not actually that simple. Japan, for example, is already facing an aging and declining population. And sure enough, you can get a house in Japan for free, or basically free. Sounds amazing, right? Not really.

If you check out the reason houses are given away in Japan, you’ll find a depressing reality. Most of the free houses are in rural areas or villages where the population is declining, often to the point that the village becomes uninhabited and abandoned. It’s so bad that in 2018, 13.6% of houses in Japan were vacant. Why do villages become uninhabited? Well, it turns out that a certain population level is necessary to support the services and businesses people need. When the population falls too low, specialized businesses can no longer operated profitably. It’s the exact issue we discussed with division of labor and the need for a high population to provide a market for the specialist to survive. As the local stores, entertainment venues, and businesses close, and skilled tradesmen move away to larger population centers with more customers, living in the village becomes difficult and depressing, if not impossible. So at a certain critical level, a village that’s too isolated will reach a tipping point where everyone leaves as fast as possible. And it turns out that an abandoned house in a remote village or rural area without any nearby services and businesses is worth… nothing. Nobody wants to live there, nobody wants to spend the money to maintain the house, nobody wants to pay the taxes needed to maintain the utilities the town relied on. So they try to give the houses away to anyone who agrees to live there, often without much success.

So on a local level, population might rise gradually over time, but when that process reverses and population declines to a certain level, it can collapse rather quickly from there.

I expect the same incentives to play out on a larger scale as well. Complex supply chains and extreme specialization lead to massive productivity. But there’s also a downside, which is the fragility of the system. Specialization might mean one shop can make all the widgets needed for a specific application, for the whole globe. That’s great while it lasts, but what happens when the owner of that shop retires with his lifetime of knowledge and experience? Will there be someone equally capable ready to fill his shoes? Hopefully… But spread that problem out across the global economy, and cracks start to appear. A specialized part is unavailable. So a machine that relies on that part breaks down and can’t be repaired. So a new machine needs to be built, which is a big expense that drives up costs and prices. And with a falling population, demand goes down. Now businesses are spending more to make fewer items, so they have to raise prices to stay profitable. Now fewer people can afford the item, so demand falls even further. Eventually the business is forced to close, and other industries that relied on the items they produced are crippled. Things become more expensive, or unavailable at any price. Living standards fall. What was a stairway up becomes an elevator down.

Hope, From the Parasite Class?

All that being said, I’m not completely pessimistic about the future. I think the potential for an acceptable outcome exists.

I see two broad groups of people in the economy; producers, and parasites. One thing the increasing productivity has done is made it easier than ever to survive. Food is plentiful globally, the only issues are with distribution. Medical advances save countless lives. Everything is more abundant than ever before. All that has led to a very “soft” economic reality. There’s a lot of non-essential production, which means a lot of wealth can be redistributed to people who contribute nothing, and if it’s done carefully, most people won’t even notice. And that is exactly what has happened, in spades.

There are welfare programs of every type and description, and handouts to people for every reason imaginable. It’s never been easier to survive without lifting a finger. So millions of able-bodied men choose to do just that.

Besides the voluntarily idle, the economy is full of “bullshit jobs.” Shoutout to David Graeber’s book with that title. (It’s an excellent book and one I would highly recommend, even though the author was a Marxist and his conclusions are completely wrong.) A 2015 British poll asked people, “Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?” Only 50% said yes, while 37% said no and 13% were uncertain.

This won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s operated a business, or even worked in the private sector in general. There are three types of jobs; jobs that accomplish something productive, jobs that accomplish nothing of value, and jobs that actually hinder people trying to accomplish something productive. The number of jobs in the last two categories has grown massively over the years. This would include a lot of unnecessary administrative jobs, burdensome regulatory jobs, useless DEI and HR jobs, a large percentage of public sector jobs, most of the military-industrial complex, and the list is endless. All these jobs accomplish nothing worthwhile at best, and actively discourage those who are trying to accomplish something at worst.

Even among jobs that do accomplish some useful purpose, the amount of time spent actually doing the job continues to decline. According to a 2016 poll, American office workers spent only 39% of their workday actually doing their primary task. The other 61% was largely wasted on unproductive administrative tasks and meetings, answering emails, and just simply wasting time.

I could go on, but the point is, there’s a lot of slack in the economy. We’ve become so productive that the number of people actually doing the work to keep everyone fed, clothed, and cared for is only a small percentage of the population. In one sense, that’s a cause for optimism. The population could decline a lot, and we’d still have enough bodies to man the economic engine, as it were.

Aging

The thing with population decline, though, is nobody gets to choose who goes first. Not unless you’re a psychopathic dictator. So populations get old, then they get small. This means that the number of dependents in the economy rises naturally. Once people retire, they still need someone to grow the food, keep the lights on, and provide the medical care. And it doesn’t matter how much money the retirees have saved, either. Money is just a claim on wealth. The goods and services actually have to be provided by someone, and if that someone was never born, all the money in the world won’t change anything.

And the aging occurs on top of all the people already taking from the economy without contributing anything of value. So that seems like a big problem.

Currently, wealth redistribution happens through a combination of direct taxes, indirect taxation through deficit spending, and the whole gamut of games that happen when banks create credit/debt money by making loans. In a lot of cases, it’s very indirect and difficult to pin down. For example, someone has a “job” in a government office, enforcing pointless regulations that actually hinder someone in the private sector from producing something useful. Their paycheck comes from the government, so a combination of taxes on productive people, and deficit spending, which is also a tax on productive people. But they “have a job,” so who’s going to question their contribution to society? On the other hand, it could be a banker or hedge fund manager. They might be pulling in a massive salary, but at the core all they’re really doing is finding creative financial ways to transfer wealth from productive people to themselves, without contributing anything of value.

You’ll notice a common theme if you think about this problem deeply. Most of the wealth transfer that supports the unproductive, whether that’s welfare recipients, retirees, bureaucrats, corporate middle managers, or weapons manufacturers, is only possible through expanding the money supply. There’s a limit to how much direct taxation the productive will bear while the option to collect welfare exists. At a certain point, people conclude that working hard every day isn’t worth it, when taxes take so much of their wages that they could make almost as much without working at all. So the balance of what it takes to support the dependent class has to come indirectly, through new money creation.

As long as the declining population happens under the existing monetary system, the future looks bleak. There’s no limit to how much money creation and inflation the parasite class will use in an attempt to avoid work. They’ll continue to suck the productive class dry until the workers give up in disgust, and the currency collapses into hyperinflation. And you can’t run a complex economy without functional money, so productivity inevitably collapses with the currency.

The optimistic view is that we don’t have to continue supporting the failed credit/debt monetary system. It’s hurting productivity, messing up incentives, and contributing to increasing wealth inequality and lower living standards for the middle class. If we walk away from that system and adopt a hard money standard, the possibility of inflationary wealth redistribution vanishes. The welfare and warfare programs have to be slashed. The parasite class is forced to get busy, or starve. In that scenario, the declining population of workers can be offset by a massive shift away from “bullshit jobs” and into actual productive work.

While that might not be a permanent solution to declining population, it would at least give us time to find a real solution, without having our complex economy collapse and send our living standards back to the 17th century.

It’s a complex issue with many possible outcomes, but I think a close look at the effects of the monetary system on productivity shows one obvious problem that will make the situation worse than necessary. Moving to a better monetary system and creating incentives for productivity would do a lot to reduce the economic impacts of a declining population.

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To me, that’s the cool part about Bitcoin, is that it’s this interoperable, permissionless, global network. And it’s almost like a shared equity, right? If you own Bitcoin the asset, it’s like we all share equity in this almost like a startup equity. And anything we do, and a lot of times it’s out of greed too. It’s not out of benevolence. You don’t have to be like a charitable person. But you know, if Strike benefits from something or Unchained Capital benefits from something, then Manchankura in Africa benefits from it as well at the same time, which is like a crazy concept. I feel like people just don’t really appreciate that.

When you start going down the “what is money?” rabbit hole, debt quickly comes into focus. You try to understand what it is, how it works, and why the world has so much of it and seemingly more by the second. Eventually you’ll discover that the “money” we use today is mostly just debt, created by banks when they make loans, and treated the same as the cash in your wallet. Until too many people try to withdraw their “money” from the bank, and the bank doesn’t have nearly enough cash to meet the withdrawals and collapses into insolvency. Which it always was, only no one realized who was swimming naked until the tide went out.

Equity is a related financial concept that doesn’t typically come up when studying money. The definition of the word as it’s used financially is something like “a risk interest or ownership right in property.” In simple terms, equity refers to ownership of something. For example, if you have a house that’s worth $500,000 and you have no mortgage or loans against the house, you have equity in the house of 100% of its value, or $500,000. If you have a mortgage of $250,000, you currently have 50% equity in the house, or you “own” half the value of the house.

It’s also often used to refer to shares issued by publicly traded companies. The shares represent a partial ownership of, or equity in, the company. If a company has issued 1,000 shares of stock and you own 10 shares, you have a 1% ownership of that company. That ownership give you certain privileges, such as dividends paid out from profits the company makes and potentially ownership of an increasingly valuable company, if it continues to be successful.

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Money: Debt or Equity?

The current fractionally reserved fiat banking system primarily uses debt as money. There’s a small amount of base money, which consists of physical cash and a digital equivalent of cash called bank reserves, which are held in a ledger in banks’ accounts at the Federal Reserve and are used to settle transactions between banks. But this base money only makes up a small percentage of the total money supply. The bulk of the “money” consists of bank deposits, which are essentially IOUs created by banks when they issue loans under the fractional reserve system. When a bank makes a loan, they don’t actually give the borrower base money, for example a stack of physical cash, in most cases. Instead what they give is an liability entry in the bank’s balance sheet ledger that says “the bank owes the borrower this amount of dollars.” At the same time, on the asset side of the balance sheet they create another entry that says “the borrower owes the bank this amount of dollars” with details on how and when the loan must be repaid.

Then through the magic of banking, the borrower can transfer the numbers representing the amount the bank owes them to someone else, and now the bank owes that other person a certain number of dollars. And so on down the line. This can continue indefinitely, with people exchanging bank IOUs with each other in perpetuity, and no actual base money dollars needing to be exchanged. With help from a deliberate effort by banks to conceal the real nature of their activities, these credit/debt ledger entries function as, and for all practical purposes become, money. The only thing that can upset the apple cart is too many people trying to effectively exit the banking system at once, by trying to withdraw the money in their account. At that point reality sets in. The fact that the numbers in their account didn’t actually represent base money but rather just debt that the bank owes the depositor becomes obvious when the bank run reveals that the bank doesn’t have enough actual base money to settle its debt.

This system has a lot of serious problems, besides the fact that it’s fundamentally based on a lie. For one, all the bank deposits are created by making loans, which means they’re all debt, which means they all have to be paid back with interest. That’s a problem for two reasons. One, paying back the debt destroys money, which artificially disrupts the economy by distorting prices as the amount of money in the economy rises and falls arbitrarily depending on new loan issuance versus debt repayment. Two, when the loan is made, only the amount of the principle is created in bank deposits. The interest isn’t. That means new loans have to be made to pay the interest on the existing loans. That basically guarantees that the amount of debt in the economy will continue to rise indefinitely, because the only way it could go down is for the banking system as it currently exists to collapse, or to be “bailed out” with massive injections of newly created base money to offset loans that can’t be paid back. That, coincidentally, is what Quantitative Easing is; an injection of newly created base money to provide liquidity to pay back debt without having to issue new debt to do it.

Now let’s think for a minute about equity and how it might compare and contrast with the current system in relation to money.

To begin with, I understand money as a ledger of deferred consumption. If you haven’t heard that concept before, it would probably be helpful to familiarize yourself with my thought process laid out here.

Deferred consumption is what makes capital formation and civilization possible. People work to create things that they don’t immediately consume, and those new tools and processes make it easier to create more things in the future with less effort, which raises the productivity of the economy (getting more output for less input) and makes society as a whole wealthier. Those new tools and processes can then be used to more efficiently create other tools and processes, which increases productivity even further, and the whole thing compounds on itself in an exponential curve of increasing productivity and increasing wealth. But it all starts with and relies on someone somewhere putting in effort now, to create something they won’t benefit from until later.

Planting a seed is a perfect example. When you have a bushel of wheat, you have two choices. You can consume it now. That’s immediately satisfying and keeps you fed for say a month. Or you can plant it. That’s hard work, and you also have to defer consumption of the wheat. You can’t eat it now, you have to satisfy your hunger some other way. It also takes work throughout the year to cultivate and care for the wheat crop, time you could have spent doing something more fun, if you had just consumed the wheat directly instead of planting it. The flip side is, at harvest time, you might harvest 50 bushels of wheat from the 1 bushel you didn’t eat 6 months ago. That 50 bushels could now feed you for 4 years, and you can sell 30 bushels, keep 12 for your own use over the next year, and plant 8 for harvest next year. Then in a year you might harvest 400 bushels, etc. You can see how a little bit of deferred consumption today can lead to a lot of reward in the future. There’s even a term for being short-sighted and sacrificing future rewards for present gratification, “eating the seed corn,” which comes directly from this farming wisdom.

The same principle applies to business equity. When you start a business, you invest in some way into building something that isn’t immediately rewarding, but that you expect will yield more production in the future than your initial investment. You might invest your own time and effort, resources that you’ve gathered, money, or any number of other forms of value. The same applies to a public company that issues equity as shares of stock. Anyone can invest in the company by purchasing shares, which gives them a partial ownership of the company and its future growth and production. All those forms of investment, to acquire equity, are different forms of deferred consumption. You have to give up something you could have now, for something you hope to have in the future. You could spend the time now curled up in bed binge-watching Netflix. You could spend your effort strolling down the boardwalk eating an ice cream cone. You could spend your money on that pricey designer bag that all your girlfriends will be jealous of. All those things would be immediately gratifying. But they all have a long-term cost.

What happens when you defer consumption instead, and acquire equity? If things go the way you hoped and planned, and the company you founded or invested in is successful, it will eventually produce more than the initial consumption that you deferred. Your equity will become more valuable with time. Why? Because like we pointed out, deferred consumption and capital formation increases efficiency, which leads to compounding returns in productivity and value.

If the company is extremely successful and you defer your consumption long enough, those returns can be very large. For example, if you had invested $1,000 in Amazon in 2007, that equity today, 17 years later, would have returned over $80,000. The first iPhone was released in 2007 for $500. So you could have bought two iPhones instead of making that initial investment in Amazon. But if you deferred that consumption instead, even though the price of the iPhone has doubled by 2024, you could still buy eighty new iPhones with the equity from that initial investment instead of two, or a 40x return in “iPhone inflation adjusted” terms.

Now let’s make a mental leap and compare equity in a business with money. We’ve defined money as a ledger of deferred consumption. You could define business equity as a ledger of consumption deferred to establish ownership of a business instead. You have the stock, the equity in the company, to represent that you invested your time, effort, resources or money into building a business rather than consuming it on something for your immediate gratification. These definitions seem very similar, almost synonymous. We could also consider the economy as a whole to be very similar to a business. As consumption is deferred, more capital is created in the economy, it becomes more efficient and productive, more outputs are created with fewer inputs, and the economy as a whole grows in value.

Business equity represents ownership in a company, both in the current value of that company, and in its future productivity and value. Why? Because the future productivity and value wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the deferred consumption of the initial investment. If Jeff Bezos hadn’t started Amazon, and investors hadn’t provided the money by buying shares to enable the company to grow the way it did, all the productivity and value of Amazon today wouldn’t exist. That’s why it’s fair for the person who only invested $1,000 in 2007 to gain a return of 40x that investment today.

So if business equity represents ownership of a company earned by deferred consumption, what does the deferred consumption of money itself grant ownership of? Well, money can be exchanged for any good or service available on the market, throughout the entire economy. In my opinion, money should represent ownership of the future productivity and value of the economy as a whole. Money should be equity in civilization itself. The future productivity and value of the economy depends on the deferred consumption of today, just like the future productivity and value of a company depends on the deferred consumption of its initial founders and investors.

Slices of Pie

There’s an issue that needs to be addressed here, one that the savvy investor will have noticed already. Equity in a growing and successful company becomes more valuable over time. Yet even though the economy as a whole is becoming more productive and more valuable, money as we know it today becomes less valuable over time. The $1,000 Amazon equity went from being worth two iPhones, to being worth eighty iPhones. Over the same time period, the $1,000 itself went from being worth two iPhones to being worth one iPhone. What gives?

To understand, we have to look at the differences between how equity is created and how money is created.

The most simple example is a company that’s owned by a single individual. They hold 100% of the equity. You could call that one share. Think of the company like a pie, but the pie hasn’t been cut, so there’s only one “slice.” Over time, if the company is successful, the company “pie” grows larger. But as it grows, it doesn’t get cut into more slices, the one “slice” just gets bigger and bigger. So the one “share” of equity the owner holds is still one share, it’s just a bigger and more valuable share.

Public companies generally function similarly. They start out “going public” by issuing shares. Each share is like a small slice of the company “pie.” Say the company issues 1,000 shares, each share represents a slice of pie 1/1,000th the size of the whole company pie. If the company grows, it won’t commonly issue more shares, although that can happen in certain situations. Instead, the shares will continue to represent 1/1,000th of the company, it will just be 1/1,000 of a bigger and bigger “pie” as time goes on. If the company doubles in productivity and value, each share will be twice as valuable, while still only being one share.

That doesn’t have to be the case. The company can, and sometimes does, issue more shares of stock. The reason this isn’t commonly done, though, is that it’s usually bad for the holders of the stock. If the company issues another 1,000 shares, there are now 2,000 pieces of ownership of the company. The company is no bigger, it’s just divided into more pieces. It’s like cutting each slice of pie in half. You don’t have more pie, you just have more pieces of pie. And as someone who already had a piece of pie, your piece suddenly got cut in half. Of course you probably won’t be too happy about that situation. In effect, the value of the deferred consumption of your initial investment is being taken away from you and given to someone who didn’t defer consumption and therefore didn’t contribute to the success the company has already experienced.

Contrast that to how money is created. If you compare the chart of money supply below with the chart of GDP, you'll see they both go up over time.

GDP is an (admittedly flawed) measure of the goods and services produced by an economy each year. It's similar to a company's revenue. As a company or economy grows and becomes more productive and valuable, the revenue or GDP rises. The thing about the economy though, is that money, the “shares” of an economy representing the deferred consumption that enables it to grow, is constantly being created by banks making new loans. So as the economy grows, the number of “slices” of the economy grows even faster. When the number of “slices” of an economy grow faster than the economy itself, the “size” or value of each slice falls over time. This is what we call inflation. It takes more “slices” of the economy to buy something than it did in the past, even though the economy is more efficient at producing that good or service than it was in the past.

You can imagine how it might look if a company managed its equity the way the banks manage our money. Each year, as the company grew, the board of directors would issue enough new shares of stock to make sure the value of each share fell that year. They could take the approach the US banking system takes and “target 2% inflation,” in other words try to make the share value fall 2% every year. So if the productivity and value of the company increased by 10%, the board would issue 12% more shares to dilute the existing shareholders by the full amount of the increased value of the company, plus an additional 2%. This would help ensure the share price fell 2% every year. The new shares would be distributed to existing shareholders arbitrarily by decision of the board, with a big chunk going to the board members themselves. This would be highly profitable for the board, leaving them with a larger slice of company equity every year, while being very damaging to all the other shareholders.

In fact, one might wonder why an investor would ever hold equity in a company, when the company's stated policy was to reduce the value of that equity by 2% every year. The answer is, nobody would. It would be idiotic.

Then one might wonder why anyone would hold money, “shares” of an economy, when the stated policy of the banks managing the issuance of that money is to reduce the value of each dollar by 2% every year. The answer to that is just as simple: they have to.

Nobody has to buy stock issued by a particular company in order to survive day to day. But it’s impossible to survive day to day in the modern US economy without using the money issued by the US banking system. You get paid in dollars for your work, and get charged in dollars for every item you buy. You need at least a certain amount of dollars just to live day to day. Of course those who understand the financial system make every effort to hold as few dollars as possible, and to invest the excess as soon as possible into some asset that will hold its value over time. Of course that doesn’t actually get rid of the dollar, just transfers it to someone else. Then the new holder of the dollar has to quickly exchange it with someone else for a better asset, and so on in an endless repeating loop. No matter how many people invest in assets, the full quantity of dollars in existence is always held by someone, and those people are continually being diluted by the issuance of new dollars by banks creating bank deposits when they make loans.

Implications

If what I’m proposing is correct, there would be massive implications in changing the way money works in the economy from the current credit/debt issuance controlled by banks, to a system that functions more like equity issued by a responsible and profitable company. Getting into the details of those implications in various specific areas will take many more articles, but I just want to mention a few to get your mind running, then circle all the way back to where we started.

Imagine if the money every person earned went up in value as the economy grew. It would be like owning equity in the broadest possible index of businesses, better even than owning an S&P 500 ETF or mutual fund. And it would take no effort. There would be no need to open a brokerage account, decide what companies or funds to invest in, and pay commissions and fees to the brokerage for the privilege. There would be no need for a 401k. All that would be needed is to work at the job you’re best at, consume less than you produce, and save the difference. The economic growth created by increased productivity would automatically accrue equally across the population to those who were best at being productive and deferring consumption. Working hard, being frugal, and saving for the future would automatically be rewarded. All the incentives would be realigned to benefit those who contribute most to capital formation and future economic prosperity.

It would be much easier for those with low income to get ahead financially. Any amount they manage to save, no matter how small, would increase in value over time. Contrast that with the current system where a small amount of savings continually becomes worth less over time, encouraging people to consume more than they need in the moment since their small savings will shrink to insignificance quickly.

You can easily think of lots of other changes that would happen as a result of using money that functions more like equity than our current system does.

But to tie all this back to the quote at the beginning, I think what Matt is seeing and feeling is the beginnings of a more equity-like monetary system. I think the properties of Bitcoin, specifically its predictable and limited supply issuance, make it behave like equity in a well-managed, productive company. That “company” just happens to be the global and permissionless group of every person who chooses to save and transact in Bitcoin instead of the current credit/debt money. And the fact that even self-serving actions toward productive goals end up benefitting every member of the network is exactly what we’d expect in a truly capitalist economic system. Whenever someone works to grow the “pie” in order to make their slice bigger, the fact that the pie is growing means everyone else’s slice is growing as well. And that’s a beautiful thing.

I’m excited to see how this theory plays out over time, because from my point of view, the potential of moving to a more equity-like monetary system is both massive and extremely optimistic.

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The term I want to explain today is the idea that money “flows into” an asset or asset class. If you read any financial news or headlines, you’ve probably seen some variation of this one a million times. “Money Flowing Into Bonds As Investors Seek Safety.” “Bitcoin ETFs See Large Inflows Today.” You’ve seen it.

On the surface, this seems logical. It seems like a fair way to describe the action of a lot of people buying something.

The problem comes because of the implications of the term. When money “flows into” something, that means people are more eager to buy than to sell. That means prices go up. It’s easy to conclude that prices go up because more money is “in” the asset, kind of like dropping quarters in a coffee mug.

If you think about it for a second you’ll realize it doesn’t work that way, but not nearly enough people take that pause to think. That causes them to have a wrong view of how prices change, and therefore how markets work. That by extension leaves them susceptible to claims from bad actors who want to restrict economic freedom and centrally plan and control trade in the market.

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How Does Money Actually Flow?

Money flows, but not “into” assets. It flows from person to person. You can almost think of money like financial matter, it can’t be created or destroyed except is specific circumstances.

Any time something is sold, the money flows from the buyer to the seller. Seems obvious, but it’s important to keep it in mind. The money is still there, in the account or wallet of the seller. The amount of money in the economy doesn’t change, only the location of the money. It isn’t destroyed, it isn’t somehow lodged in the house or stock or loaf of bread that was sold, it just flowed from one person to another.

“Cash on the Sidelines”

This is another term you might have heard, not the same but a related misunderstanding. Financial commentators will say something like “we expect the market to rise as soon as investor sentiment improves, because there is still a lot of cash on the sidelines waiting to be deployed.” This implies that investors are holding a lot of money, and that they can “put that money into” an asset class and reduce the amount of money “on the sidelines.” The problem is, we understand that if they do buy stocks or bonds or whatever, that money will just flow into the seller’s bank account, and the amount of cash “on the sidelines” won’t change one cent.

Prices

This leads to the question of what causes prices to rise, and a fundamental understanding of how a market works. Price is a tricky thing to understand. The price of something is the intersection between the highest amount a buyer is willing to offer, and the lowest amount a seller is willing to accept. If there is no overlap between those points, no price can be established.

If there are 10 houses on a street, and one goes up for sale, the selling price of that house will be used to “value” the other 9 houses. Say the seller isn’t too desperate to sell, and is willing to wait for a buyer who agrees to pay his asking price of $500,000. If every other house on the street is very similar in size and quality, we would conclude that the value of each of the 10 houses is $500,000. But let’s say another buyer decided $500,000 is a good deal and he’d also like to buy a house on that street. He might go to every owner and offer $500,000, but there’s no guarantee he’ll be able to make a deal. Maybe everyone else is happy with their house, and nobody wants to sell for the price their house is “worth”. So there’s no price, because there’s no intersection between buyer and seller. Maybe the buyer decides he really wants a house, and offers everyone $700,000. Maybe the guy who bought a house for $500,000 last week decides “hey I can make $200,000 in a week for doing nothing, why not?” and sells the house again for $700,000.

Look at what happened to the value of houses. At the first sale, the 10 houses had a combined “value” of $500,000 times 10, or $5 million. Now after the second sale, they have a combined “value” of $7 million, or an increase of $2 million. Headlines would describe that as $700,000 “flowing into” the housing market, but the overall value of those houses, what would be called the “market cap” if we were talking about a company, increased by almost 3x that amount. How does that work? It shows the misleading aspect of “money flowing into” terminology. If money “flowed into” an asset like putting quarters in a piggy bank, it would give the impression that market cap should rise $1 for every dollar of inflow. Obviously that’s not correct, and the reason is that prices don’t work like that. Money inflows are only one factor that can influence prices, and they do so in a much less direct and obvious way than the terminology indicates.

Market Cap

For one, there’s a fundamental problem with the way “market cap” is calculated to begin with. It’s supposed to express the value of a group of identical things, typically shares of stock in a company of something similar. But let’s go back to our previous example, the 10 similar houses on a street. The “market cap” of those 10 houses would be given as $5 million dollars after one of them sold for $500,000. But remember, only one house sold, not all ten. A price requires an intersection in agreed value between a buyer and a seller, and that hasn’t occurred with 90% of the houses in this “market”. Suppose one of the houses is owned by a retired couple who intend to spend the rest of their life in that house, and have no need for the money they could get by selling it. Suppose they were offered $2 million dollars, but still weren’t interested in selling. How is that reflected in the market cap calculation? Obviously it isn’t, and just looking at the market cap number by itself would give you the impression that you could buy all ten houses for $5 million. But that might be completely incorrect.

It could also be incorrect in the other direction. Suppose 5 of the owners on the street suddenly experienced a job loss and had to sell their houses quickly. Could all 5 get $500,000 for their house? Maybe not. After all, the first buyer was the one willing to pay the most for a house there, and there’s no guarantee anyone else will be equally willing to do so. Maybe there are 3 buyers willing to pay $450,000, 1 buyer willing to pay $400,000, and 1 buyer willing to pay $350,000. In that case all 5 houses could be sold, but the last one would have to sell for $350,000 instead of the $500,000 the owners expected to get. If we then do the market cap calculation again, it’s now dropped to $3.5 million. That’s in spite of one house having sold for $500,000, 3 for $450,000, 1 for $400,000, 1 for $350,000, one couple not willing to sell for $2 million, and 3 houses that we know absolutely nothing about yet. To look at a $3.5 million “market cap” tells you none of this very relevant information, while giving you the impression that you know everything you need to know about this market.

When you stop and think about it, it’s easy to see that prices can change for all kinds of reasons without any sales occurring at all. Imagine word gets out that a huge corporation is interested in buying all the houses in that neighborhood to make room for a future business expansion. Given the expectation of a highly motivated buyer, all the owners on the street might decide not to sell for less than a million dollars. Did the market cap suddenly rise to $10 million? No houses have been sold yet, so technically it hasn’t. As soon as the first house sells for a million dollars though, it does go to $10 million. So again you gain $5 million in market cap for $1 million in “inflows”.

This is also relevant when looking at wealth held in stocks and financial assets. For example, Elon Musk holds over 700 million shares of Tesla stock currently “worth” around $135 billion. That amounts to around 20% of all Tesla stock. Now the “value” of that stock is calculated by multiply the number of shares by the last price someone paid for a share. Keeping in mind that price is an intersection between the buyer who’s willing to pay most and the seller who’s willing to accept least, how relevant is this number actually? Say Elon decided to sell all his shares tomorrow, how much is his “wealth” actually worth? How many buyers are willing to pay the last settled price for a share of Tesla stock? Enough to buy 700 million shares? Almost certainly not. So as he started to sell, he’d soon run out of buyers at that level and would have to lower his asking price to get more interest. Of course as soon as he sold a share at a price one dollar lower, the “market cap” of Tesla would fall by about $3.5 billion dollars. And the fact that the company’s largest shareholder is dumping his shares would likely cause a lot of other people to sell as well, which would drive the price they would need to accept even lower. It’s easy to imagine the price falling by double digit percentages, maybe even 80 or 90 percent, if Elon tried to sell in one day. He could easily end up with $50 billion or less for his $135 billion in wealth.

Why Does It Matter?

This concept might seem trivial, but there are some features of our economic system that make this money flow principle very important. You should already understand that banks create money by making loans as I explain here,

and that money doesn’t “flow into” assets, but rather a small amount of buying, or even just the expectation of future buying, can cause prices and market cap to rise all out of proportion to the amount of buying that occurred. Then consider that banks will lend against collateral, which can be assets like real estate or stocks which may have this inflated perceived value created by a very small amount of relative buying pressure. And that the “money” they create with those loans can be used to buy more of the asset, which can cause prices and market cap to again rise disproportionately, which can make it easier to get more loans to buy more assets, which can make prices go up again… ad infinitum. And remember that money doesn’t actually “flow into” assets, and therefore it doesn’t need to “flow out of” assets in order for prices to drop. All it takes is a lack of people willing to buy at a certain level, for any reason at all, and the price will fall to the level someone is willing to pay as soon as a motivated seller attempts to exit their investment.

Understand and think about the implications of that, and you’re closer to understanding the bubble/collapse cycle of asset markets than most economists and their “money flows” can ever hope to be.

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It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. -Henry Ford

A century later, this quote is still as true as the day it was written. And with all the information available at our fingertips, the overwhelming majority still haven't educated themselves on the function of the banking system. That's a tragedy, given the significant role banking plays in the modern economy, and the corruption at the very base of the industry.

Banking is built on a lie. It's a big lie. Not in the sense of how false it is, but in the sense of the harm caused. It's more of a “weasel words” type of lie, a lie of omission and misdirection, the kind of lie a sleazy lawyer would use to get a guilty client off the hook. My goal is to explain, as clearly as possible, how the modern banking system works. Why you should care will be a topic for another day.

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I want to start off with a big thank you to whoever created the website https://banklies.org/. If you aren't familiar with this gem, bookmark it now. There's no better place on the internet to get detailed documentation on this particular subject. Everyone should spend an afternoon reading and listening to the information there. You'll never be able to see the world the same way if you absorb it and understand the implications.

Where Does Money Come From?

There's been a lot of talk since the COVID “pandemic” and associated QE deluge about the Fed and their money printing. Most people have some awareness that “the Fed prints money and that causes inflation.” There's some truth to that idea, but it also misses the real story. Most people don't understand that when someone says “money printing,” the correct response is “which kind of money?”

Banks operate by calling two different things “money,” and hoping everyone treats them the same. The average person might say “I have $100 in my wallet” or “I have $100 in my bank account” without realizing they aren't talking about the same thing at all. They might take the $100 in their wallet and “put it in the bank” without realizing that as soon as they do, that $100 becomes something else entirely.

The $100 bill in your wallet has the words “Federal Reserve Note” printed on it. This is one form of what's known as “base money.” Base money exists in two forms, cash and bank reserves. You can think of bank reserves as electronic cash that only banks can use.

Base money is created by the Federal Reserve. Creating base money is what the Fed does when they “print money.” They create bank reserves electronically by putting the numbers in the ledger at the Fed. The cash is printed by the Treasury, but that's just a technicality, it's printed at the request of the Fed.

The current circulating supply of cash is $2.3 trillion, and bank reserves are about $3.5 trillion. However, if you look at the total amount of US dollars, including money in people’s bank accounts, it’s currently $20.8 trillion dollars. So if base money is $5.8 trillion in total, what is the other $15 trillion? Well, it’s largely made up of bank deposits. So where do bank deposits come from? It can’t be cash people deposit into their accounts, like you might expect from the name, since cash only totals $2.3 trillion and bank deposits are over 6 times larger. The answer is that banks create them.

So as you can see, the largest category of dollars aren’t “printed” by the Fed, they’re created by the banks. And the way banks create dollars is so simple, it almost doesn’t seem real. Banks create money by making loans.

This seems completely counterintuitive to the way most people imagine banks work. That’s understandable, since the way banks work has almost no relation to the way individuals handle their own finances. You might make a loan to someone. Your friend asks to borrow $20 at the restaurant since he forgot his wallet at home. You pull yours out and hand him a $20 bill. In order to make that loan, you had to go to work, accomplish something, get paid, and save that $20 in your wallet. You couldn’t spend the $20, and you can’t spend it now until your friend pays back the loan. Obviously no new money was created to make that loan, work was done and money was saved and then given to the borrower so he can spend it instead of the lender.

Most people assume banks work the same way. They assume that when they deposit some money at the bank, the bank stores that money in a vault somewhere with their name on it. And they assume that when banks make loans, they take some money from a big pile of money stored in a vault somewhere and give it to the borrower. But that isn’t how it works at all.

When someone goes to the bank for a loan, the bank doesn’t draw on some pile of cash they have saved up somewhere. Instead, they use a simple accounting trick. They create a bank account for the borrower, and they type the amount of the loan into the borrower’s account balance. It’s really that simple. That balance becomes a “bank deposit.” Even though that money was never deposited in the bank, and in fact didn’t exist at all until the bank typed those numbers into the computer, it’s still called the same thing as the money you deposit into the bank when you get your paycheck.

So what is a bank deposit? It’s really a promise by the bank to give the account holder money. If you have $100 in your bank account, you expect to be able to go to the bank and withdraw that $100 in cash from your account and put it in your pocket. Remember, that $100 bill is base money, something completely different from the bank deposit in your savings or checking account. The implicit promise by banks is that any money in your bank account, any bank deposit, is as good as cash and can be exchanged for cash at any moment.

But of course that must be a lie, since there are $15 trillion of bank deposits and only $2.3 trillion dollars of cash. That means if everyone in the US went to the bank tomorrow and tried to withdraw their money in cash, the banks would run out of cash while still owing $12.7 trillion dollars to depositors. It’s actually much worse than that, since a lot of the cash is already in peoples’ pockets, much of it circulating in foreign countries outside the US. Banks only hold around $100 billion in their vaults on any given day. So if everyone tried to withdraw their money from their bank accounts, which banks have implicitly promised they can do, each person could get around $0.007 of every dollar on deposit. That’s less than one cent of every dollar. So the promise banks are built on, the promise to give you the money in your account, turns out to be at least 99% a lie.

So how can it continue like this? How do banks keep operating with so little cash and so many promises to give cash? Why does anyone put money in the bank when they keep less than a penny of every dollar you deposit available to withdraw when you need it? The answer is, banks don’t tell you that. And if nobody knows, people won’t all come asking for their money one day. If they did, all the banks would fail instantly. So they do anything in their power to keep that from happening.

How Do Bank Deposits Work?

The reason most people never question the function of their bank, is that banks do everything possible to make their dishonest “bank deposits” function the same as cash, and actually better than cash in a lot of ways. Instead of having to withdraw cash from your bank and give it to someone, you can just exchange bank deposits. You can do this in a lot of super convenient ways, like writing a check or using a debit card, or more recently even right from your smartphone with an app like Venmo or CashApp. This is very convenient for the customer, and even more convenient for the bank. When you pay someone else using your bank deposit, all they have to do is lower the number in your account and raise the number in the other person’s account by the amount of the transaction. Quick, easy and convenient for everyone involved.

And if you happen to be paying someone who doesn’t have an account at your bank, that’s no problem either. Your bank will just pay the other person’s bank, and they can then change the number in the other person’s account. Now of course banks want real money for their transactions, not the fake bank deposits the commoners use. Remember the bank reserves I mentioned earlier that are like cash for banks only? Well that’s how banks settle transactions between themselves. All banks have an account at the Fed, and the Fed settles up between banks by changing the number of bank reserves in their respective accounts at the Fed. In essence, the Fed is just a bank for banks, another entity that works just like your local bank, but only holds accounts with banks and governments and not with ordinary people.

This convenience discourages people from withdrawing cash from their bank, since it’s actually easier to use the bank deposits than the cash. Besides that, banks use a lot of arbitrary policies to make it difficult for people to withdraw cash, even if they want to. If you didn’t know that, you’ve probably never tried to take $5,000 in cash out of your bank account. If you do, you’ll probably be asked some irrelevant questions about what you plan to do with the money. That’s if they let you withdraw it at all. Ask for $20,000 and you’ll almost certainly have to schedule an appointment to withdraw it in a few days, after the next cash delivery comes in. Most community bank branches only keep around $75,000 in cash on hand at any given time, so you can see how few withdrawals it would take to completely drain their vault.

But increasingly now, the biggest threat to banks isn’t from people withdrawing cash, it’s from people withdrawing to a different bank. Remember, banks have to settle with each other at the end of the day. And since they won’t accept each other’s sketchy “bank deposits” in payment, they have to settle by transferring balances between their respective reserve balances at the Fed. As you can see, banks have loaned into existence $11.5 trillion more in bank deposits than they hold in bank reserves, so it doesn’t take much withdrawal from one bank to drain their reserve balance to zero and cause the bank to fail. Bank runs have been a recurring problem ever since the entire dishonest fractional reserve banking system began, and even in 2023 a few US banks suffered bank runs and collapsed in some of the biggest bank failures in history.

Why Banking is Legalized Theft

Now that we’ve explained on the most basic level how banks work, let’s briefly explore a few basic implications.

We’ve established that banks create money when they make a loan. How easy would your life be if you could create money at no cost and loan it to people? Is it any wonder that the financial industry is full of extremely wealthy individuals?

Let’s think through for a second why I would categorize what banks do as theft. First off, you need to understand what money is, and more importantly what it is not. I lay out some fundamental principles in this article.

Summarized in one sentence, money is a ledger of productive effort with deferred consumption. It represents work someone did for another person, instead of for their own benefit. In a sense, it’s an abstract representation of, or a claim on, the wealth in a society. Having money indicates that you provided value to someone else in the past, and therefore deserve to receive value from someone in the future if you choose to exercise that claim.

Anyone who has money can loan that money to someone. This is a transfer of your claim on wealth to that person. They can then use the money to buy something, and benefit from that loan. But with that type of loan, there is always a tradeoff. The tradeoff is what’s called opportunity cost. While you have the money, you have the option to exercise that claim at any time and buy something you want. If you loan the money to someone, you incur the cost of giving up that option for as long as it takes until the loan is repaid. You already put in the effort to create the wealth that money represents, now you’re sacrificing your opportunity to benefit from that effort by buying something you want.

Bank loans are different. There is no opportunity cost. The bank doesn’t have the money to begin with, because they haven’t put in any effort or created anything of value to deserve it. They just create the money out of thin air. There is no sacrifice on the part of the bank to make that loan possible. They don’t have to forego spending any money to make the loan because the money didn’t exist in the first place.

So when the bank creates money, they’re creating new claims on wealth. Since the bank hasn’t created any wealth, the claims must be claims on wealth that already exists. These new claims have no immediate effect on the people who hold that wealth. Nothing changes for them, the wealth they hold is still theirs as long as they don’t exchange it for money. As long as they don’t sell their wealth, the increase in claims on that wealth changes nothing.

The people who are negatively effected by this increase in money are those who already have money. Since money is a claim on wealth, the value of each unit of money equals [amount of wealth in existence] divided by [amount of money in existence]. Since the amount of wealth has not changed, but the amount of money has increased, the value of existing money falls. More money spread out over the same amount of wealth means each unit of money will buy less wealth. This is what everyone knows as inflation, and as everyone who has experienced it knows, the money they hold as savings or receive as income becomes less valuable the more inflation occurs.

Who benefits from this? Well, the borrower may benefit in some cases. They receive the newly created money and are able to spend it and acquire wealth they haven’t yet put in the effort to produce. So they get to enjoy unearned rewards now. Also, since it takes time for holders of wealth to realize how much inflation has occurred, they will often exchange their wealth for money at a price lower than the increase in money supply would indicate. So the price of a purchased item will often continue to increase after the borrower acquires it, and they benefit from the increase in prices by paying back their loan with money that is less valuable than it was when they borrowed it. Of course the interest charges negate some of the benefit, but often not all of it, so borrowing money can end up being very beneficial to a borrower in many situations.

The biggest beneficiary is the bank itself. They create the money from nothing, with no opportunity cost or sacrifice necessary. In effect, they are able to use the new money to transfer wealth from holders of wealth to borrowers, at the expense of holders of money. And of course as soon as that transfer is complete, the holders of wealth become new holders of money and begin to suffer the effects of inflation too. Meanwhile the bank requires the borrower to repay the loan, with interest attached.

When an individual makes a loan, the interest charged is payment for the opportunity cost of not being able to enjoy the benefits of spending that money now. However for banks, there is no opportunity cost in making a loan. So the bank receives interest as a reward from the borrower for transferring wealth to them at the expense of holders of money. A kind of sharing of the spoils of theft, if you will. Of course they would never describe it that way, but if you understand what’s actually happening it seems like the only accurate explanation.

So we see who gets rewarded by the banking system, and who gets punished. Those who get rewarded are bankers, who collect interest from loaning out money they didn’t actually have, and are able to enrich themselves by spending that collected interest to purchase real wealth. Sometimes borrowers are also rewarded, meaning the people who consume things they haven’t produced by borrowing the money to buy them get to enjoy immediate gratification, and then over a period of time pay back an amount of money that has lost so much value it would no longer be enough to buy the item they have already been enjoying.

And the people who get punished are those who save and hold money. Those people are the ones who produce value and defer consumption, the ones whose pro-social behavior and delayed gratification make capital formation and modern civilization possible.

The purpose and effect of banking, and creation of new money through bank loans, is to redistribute wealth. The incentive structure means access to wealth is stolen from those with the most socially desirable behavior, the most effective producers and most frugal savers who hold money they’ve earned for future use. The stolen wealth is given to those with the least socially desirable behavior, those who consume more than they produce and live beyond their means, being a net detriment to civilization, and to the parasitic banking class who collect interest as a reward for their theft.

The anti-civilizational outcomes of this perverse incentive structure, and the lie it’s built on (“money in the bank is the same as money in your wallet”) have only become more obvious and harder to ignore over the decades. Without a fundamental change to the basic design and function of the modern financial system, expect this trend to continue.

Forewarned is forearmed.

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Dr. Peterson said,

I think the right way to think about this is that there isn't anything more valuable than reputation. Right? Because there's no difference between reputation and wealth fundamentally. I mean, even monetary wealth is a form of abstracted reputation. So yeah, you know, it's just been tokenized, essentially. Like, money is tokenization of reputation. Well, the problem is reputation can be gamed."

This is a really perceptive way to describe money, and I think there's a lot to learn by analyzing the idea. It dovetails quite well with my definition of money as a ledger of deferred consumption from my recent article "Money Is Not Wealth".

Deferred consumption is very closely linked to reputation. A good reputation is established by being generous, productive, helpful, and honest. Basically if you produce and contribute to other people and their wellbeing instead of only working for your own selfish interest, your reputation will benefit. That’s essentially synonymous with deferring consumption. You put in the work now, but you don’t personally benefit. You do the work for someone else’s benefit.

In the article I make the point that these pro-social behaviors, in a small community setting, accrue to you a kind of informal “credit” that defines money at its most fundamental level. You could define reputation as the sum total of those “credits” accumulated by a pattern of productive and pro-social behavior over time. The inverse is also true. Constantly asking for favors from the community, but never being willing to reciprocate that service, will cause you to accumulate a lot of unpaid “debt” to the community. We describe that as a “bad reputation”.

The ne’er-do-well loafer everyone knows who can’t hold down a job, shows no responsibility, lives off handouts and welfare, and wastes everything he gets on drinking, drugs, or gambling would be a perfect example of someone with a bad reputation. As word gets around, it isn’t long until people are hesitant to do favors for that person. They rightly view him as a malicious parasite and realize that if his behavior is rewarded, it will continue to be a drain and a detriment to the function of society.

As I pointed out, this informal “credit/reputation” system breaks down when dealing with larger groups and more complex supply chains, because it’s necessary to do one-off transactions with strangers who’s reputation you have no way of knowing and with whom you won’t have opportunity to enter into a reciprocal relationship. That’s where money comes in. Conceptualized as tokenized reputation, it represents the fact that the holder of money has provided valuable goods and services to someone else in the past in order to acquire that money. You can feel confident that engaging in a cooperative transaction with this person will be beneficial and pro-social, and not just rewarding a malicious parasite.

The Psychopathy Connection

According to Wikipedia,

Psychopathy is a mental health condition characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.

The first characteristic given is persistent antisocial behavior. Psychopaths lack empathy and remorse, so they’re willing to use manipulation, deceit, force, or anything required to benefit themselves, regardless of the harm to others.

In the podcast I quoted, Dr. Peterson was making the point that most people are fairly good at cooperating and functioning productively in society. But a group of trusting and cooperative people makes the perfect target for a psychopath. They’ll come in, lie to everyone, take advantage of people’s goodwill, and exploit the group by any means possible until they own everything or the group sees their true character and pushes back. So they tend to be constantly moving, never staying too long because their behavior only works on unsuspecting victims, and never able to form stable long-term relationships.

The focus of the discussion was how psychopaths exploit the current victimhood culture for their own benefit by falsely portraying themselves as victims to gain special treatment they don’t deserve. But psychopaths exploit society in lots of other ways as well.

Psychopaths often try to portray themselves as good and worthy people, even when they’re really the opposite. This means establishing a deceptive reputation. If money is tokenized reputation, what better way to bolster your reputation than to somehow get your hands on a lot of money? Honest, cooperative people who encounter a stranger with money will tend to assume he acquired it the same way they acquire their money; through working and providing value to others while deferring consumption to the future. They won’t hesitate to do business with that person.

If there’s a dishonest way to acquire money without actually putting in the work and providing value to others, you can bet psychopaths will sniff that out a mile away and take full advantage.

Unfortunately, the game theory of money dictates that even if you know someone acquired their money through dishonest, illegal, or otherwise harmful and antisocial means, you’re still incentivized to just accept the money and do business with them anyway. Even if you know the method they used to get it is harmful to society in general, taking the money and using it yourself will benefit you personally.

For example, imagine someone came to your business and offered to buy your product, but told you they were going to pay with money they stole from a guy walking down the street last week. You might be appalled by the theft, but you would gain nothing economically by refusing to do business with the thief. You would gain economically by taking his stolen money. Doing so would just encourage him to continue stealing, which is terrible for society, but as long as he doesn’t steal from you, you’ve still benefitted financially.

This provides a strong motivation for psychopaths to continue their exploits, because if they can manage to acquire the money, they will almost certainly be able to spend that money and benefit as much as an honest person would. So in a sense, money makes it a lot easier for psychopaths to flourish, as opposed to a close-knit community that would soon catch on to their behavior and respond with punishment or expulsion from the community.

I can think of a lot of people today who have a lot of money they acquired through ways that are very detrimental to society, but who maintain a veneer of public respectability almost exclusively because they do have so much money. Weapons manufacturers, career politicians, owners of exploitative and unethical businesses, and financial industry executives come to mind. Yet these people have no problem finding someone to do business with, because as the saying goes, “their money is just as green as anyone’s”.

Banking

So what if there were a way to create money with no effort? To bolster your reputation with piles of cash without having to lift a finger? You can imagine how giddy with excitement a psychopath might be at the thought.

Counterfeiting seems like a possibility, but it’s actually very difficult to accomplish, and there’s a high risk of getting caught.

What if there were a way to create “counterfeit” money that was so identical to the real thing that almost no one could tell the difference? And suppose we actually made it legal? Well, legal for those who have the correct license, and a crime punishable by years in prison for everyone else. Can’t have the honest people competing with you and siphoning value away from the grift, after all.

That’s essentially what we have today with the modern banking system. Banks create “money” (bank deposits) with a keystroke every time they make a loan. It costs them absolutely nothing, and they can then loan out that new money and collect interest on it, without having to lift a finger. Seems too good to be true, but in this case it is.

That subject deserves its own in-depth explanation. Suffice to say that if you’ve ever felt that the financial system is a parasitic entity infested at the highest levels by people with “persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits,” you’re probably on the right track. It’s the ideal habitat for a motivated psychopath, and I believe they’ve maneuvered themselves into the system and are busy exploiting our trust and the properties of our most crucial social technology. Unfortunately not one person in a thousand understands what’s happening. Most can see the decay spreading and feel something is wrong in society at a fundamental level, but without understanding they cause, they don’t have the knowledge or tools to fight back.

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” -Henry Ford

My goal in writing is to begin building that understanding. Each person who wakes up to reality will be able to protect themselves, to stop providing sustenance to the parasites. Without access to the real wealth produced by honest, cooperative individuals, the parasites will starve. And who knows, if enough people wake up, they might be so outraged by the exploitation that they’ll start the revolution Ford dreamed about.

The problem is, it's a completely false premise. And without purging that assumption from your mental framework, understanding money and economics at a fundamental level is impossible.

Luckily, money is such an effective tool that it can continue to "mostly" function even without anyone understanding it at a fundamental level. It's a lot like gravity in that regard. You don't need to understand general relativity to learn how to walk. But unlike gravity, money is a powerful tool that can easily be used to exploit the less knowledgeable. That's why the general acceptance of this particular false idea is such a tragedy; it enables theft and exploitation on a global scale, and leaves the victims unable to identify the perpetrators or understand their methods.

Money as a Social Technology

So let's unpack this misconception. We can start with a simple example. You've been shipwrecked on a desert island with only the clothes on your back. After a day under the blistering sun, you're presented with two options: a billion dollars in cash, or a case of bottled water. Which one do you choose? If you chose the water, congratulations. You survived because you were able to differentiate money from real wealth.

Now run the same experiment, but place yourself in the water aisle at Costco. Suddenly you choose differently. This shows a few key requirements for money to be useful. One, you need the real wealth, the actual goods and services. If there is no bottled water on that island, all the money in the world won't do you a lick of good. Two, you need someone willing to exchange the real wealth for your money. If you're alone on that island and you find a bottle of water, you don't need money to drink it, you just help yourself. Both requirements are essential.

This shows us that money is a social technology. Understanding the purpose and function of this technology is critical to dispensing with misconceptions like "money=wealth".

Money and Civilization

What's the difference between a subsistence hunter/gatherer lifestyle and the modern civilization we all enjoy today? Specialization of labor, and complex supply chains. And what enables those civilizational necessities? Money.

In a subsistence situation, everything you have is created start-to-finish by you or by your immediate family or tribe. Everyone has to be a sort of jack-of-all-trades, at least at a group level. If you want a shelter, you collect the natural materials and build it yourself. If you need clothes, you collect the fibers or skins, process them, and use the fabric to sew your own outfit.

Contrast that with the electronic device you're using to read these words right now. How many people does it take to build a smartphone? Millions. Can one person do it? Absolutely not. You could give anyone in the world an entire lifetime and there's no way they could mine, process, and assemble the raw materials into a functional smartphone. It's simply too complex, too many processes and too much specialized knowledge and machinery needed. Not to mention doing it at a cost that most people on the planet can afford. That miracle is only possible because millions of people specialize in one tiny specific task related to making one part of a complex item, over and over again. The efficiency of only doing one specific task instead of being a generalist is what makes civilization possible.

But there's a problem. The person who's doing one specific task to make part of one widget still needs to eat, have a place to live, clothes to wear, etc. But how do you get all that while working a full time job making widgets? You can't do it all yourself, you need to buy those things from someone else who, similarly, specializes in those necessities of life. You need money. Money is what makes the whole thing work.

Money and Barter

So what exactly is money and how does it work? In a subsistence society, you can use barter to trade with strangers. You give them some fish, they give you some clothing, everyone is happy. But barter has major problems, and doesn't work at all in complex supply chains with specialized workers. Specialized jobs don't produce valuable finished goods that can be bartered. When you solder circuit boards all day, you can't go to your local farmer and trade ten "solder circuit board" for a dozen eggs.

Enter money. Money solves multiple problems that arise with barter. For one, it creates a way to compare extremely dissimilar things. How many fish is a pound of butter worth? How many eggs? With barter, every good or service has to be priced in relation to every other good or service it's exchanged for. This is impossibly cumbersome and inefficient. Having money as a unit of account is as essential to trade as having a uniform inch is to building a house. A single carpenter might be able to use the width of his hand to measure boards, but get two carpenters working together and that "handbreadth" no longer works.

Second, money solves the problem of not having the correct item to barter with. If your neighbor has butter and you have fish, but your neighbor hates fish and will only accept a chicken, barter won't work. But if you can just pay him with money, he can go buy whatever he prefers.

Third, money creates a way to value and reimburse specialized work. That's arguably the most important aspect.

The Social Contract Underlying Money

So what makes money function? Why would someone accept a piece of paper with a picture of a dead president in exchange for a very real and very valuable good or service? Well, the obvious answer is that they can be certain they'll be able to exchange that piece of paper with someone else and get an equally valuable good or service in the future. This is circular logic though, and leads some economists to mistakenly attribute the value of money to a "collective delusion". But since every known advanced civilization has used some form of money, calling it a delusion is both inaccurate and boorishly pretentious.

To understand the real mechanism behind the phenomenon, we have to consider how money is acquired. As anyone who has ever earned an honest wage knows, getting a paycheck requires two things. One, producing a valuable good or service. And two, giving that good or service to someone else instead of immediately consuming it yourself.

The first point is self-explanatory. If what you produce isn't valuable, no one will buy it.

The second point needs a bit more explanation. Money is a social technology, it's only valuable in a purely monetary sense when there's someone else to trade with. When you make yourself a few eggs for breakfast, you don't pay yourself for frying the eggs. Obviously. But if you eat your eggs, then go to your job as a short-order cook at the local diner, you may spend the morning getting paid to do exactly what you did "for free" at home. The difference is in the deferred consumption.

When you do a favor for someone, morality and the spirit of fairness dictates that they would be willing to return the favor in the future when you need something from them. That's how it works in a family or small community. People "owe each other one," and favors are reciprocated regularly without any money changing hands in a kind of informal credit system. But if one person starts to take advantage of others' generosity and requests a lot of favors, but always fails to reciprocate when asked, people catch on quickly. The parasitic behavior will be met with increasing unwillingness to help from members of the family or community, and in extreme cases, even exile from the community itself.

This informal credit system is the simplest and most fundamental form of money, and we can learn the basic principle behind why money works by observing it. We can see that a person accumulates "credits" by contributing productive value to others without getting anything in return. The "credits" are informal mental ledger credits that represent "this person has done something productive and valuable for someone else, which means he deserves to receive something valuable in the future." If a person contributes generously enough to the community, he will build up so much "credit" with everyone that he can expect generous help in return from any member of the community.

The shortcomings of this informal credit system are that one, it doesn't provide a unit of measurement to compare different goods and services accurately. This can lead to misunderstanding and disputes when different people don't value services the same way. Someone can feel that they are contributing more to the community than they're getting back in return. And two, it relies heavily on trust, and only works between people who interact on a regular basis. It would be foolish to provide favors to a stranger of unknown reputation, or someone who's just traveling through the area, because in either case there's no expectation of establishing a reciprocal relationship with that individual.

Money is just a way to formalize and expand that local, informal mental ledger. It's a way to keep track, on a societal level, who has contributed their fair share to the community and is deserving of reciprocal treatment. When someone buys something from you, although you don't consciously think through what's happening, on a subconscious level you're participating in a societal dialogue that goes something like this: "This person has money, which means they're a capable, generous, reciprocal person who has contributed more to the community than they've taken. Fairness dictates that they deserve something of value as a reward for their pro-social behavior. By taking their money, and giving them something of value, I can perpetuate the cycle of rewarding people who generously and capably do work that benefits others, and that will be beneficial to me personally and also to society as a whole. By having the money they give me, I can then also signal to others that I'm the same type of generous, reciprocal, productive person, and I can expect to be rewarded for that in the future when I try to exchange this money for valuable goods and services."

So the money has value, not because of some inherent quality of the paper or gold or mental "credit," but because it represents past productive behavior, but without immediate consumption. The money itself is not wealth, it's just an abstract representation, a kind of scorecard or ledger entry, of the real wealth that the holder of the money has already produced.

Money and Capital Formation

This dialogue or unwritten contract is the foundation of modern civilization. It's powerful, because deferred consumption is the mechanism of capital formation, and capital formation is the foundation of complex supply chains and technological progress.

You might be able to catch enough fish to feed your family with a crude rod and line. But building a modern fishing trawler (a valuable capital good) takes thousands of people working together for a long time. All that hard work doesn't result in any fish being caught throughout the process, and all those people could instead be out fishing and catching a lot of fish to eat. But by deferring that consumption and instead putting that effort into building a capital good, you end up with a huge fishing trawler. Once it's finished, a few of those thousands of people can catch more fish in a week than all the thousands of them combined could have caught over the whole time it took to build the trawler. That makes fishing much easier and more effective in the future, making food much more plentiful and increasing the standard of living for the whole society. And money is what makes all that possible on a global scale.

Final Thoughts

Given how critical this system is to civilization, any attack on money and its function is an existential threat. Unfortunately, a failure to understand the true nature of money leads to reliance on less nuanced or completely false ideas like "money=wealth". And that gives psychological cover to parasitic anti-social behavior like creating money and giving it away to buy votes, and all sorts of other destructive and dishonest shenanigans. Understanding that money is not wealth exposes the folly of all these schemes that purport to make people wealthier simply by creating more money. Believing that money is wealth makes the MMT clowns and the Keynesian grifters sound at least marginally credible. But those are specific misconceptions that need their own detailed explanation.

For now, reprogramming your mental framework to draw a strong distinction between money and real wealth will give you a solid foundation to understand economics, and to critique the many incorrect theories presented by the parasitical elements who wish to muddy the waters and avoid scrutiny of their anti-civilizational exploitation.