Money and other Crises

C h a l l e n g e s O f O u r T i m e
Problems and Priorities

Currently the world, as I observe it in my day to day life, seems to be quiet, predictable and stable. In my whole life time there exists no memory of any bigger crisis and I tend to take it for granted that the world will continue to work the same way into the far future. All of my friends and in general all of the people I know seem to live in the same belief.

Nevertheless if I start to think and when I start to set known facts into relation with eachother I come to the conclusion that it is quite possible that we will soon have to face severe crises that have the potential to change the life as we know it.

This web-site should serve as a single big question: How do you judge these matters? I would like to hear your opinion. I would like to know if my reasoning has any big holes that I did not consider. I would be grateful if you would contact me to shed some light on these matters from your point of view.
Email: Christian dot Schuhegger at gmx dot de

Currently I see the following big challenges that our generation will have to face (in no specific order):

Overpopulation of our planet.
Unemployment of masses of people.
Limits in the supply of fossile fules (peak oil) and other sources of energie (e.g. Uranium).
Related to that are:

Problems in the supply with food and the basic needs of the world population (nearly nobody knows how energy intensive our current style of agriculture really is).
Problem of global warming and its consequences.

Over-indebtedness of basically all governments of the western world.
Related to that are:

Possible breakdowns of several currencies of western nations.

The limits in the supply with fossile fules and the over-indebtedness of basically all industrialized countries have both alone the potential to cause deep global economic and political crisis. Chances are good that we will see both causes to take effect nearly at the same time.

I never experienced any bank breakdowns in my whole lifetime and I assume my money and my security papers to be safe in the banks. In addition several of the security papers I hold are from a legal point of view a "debenture bond" of the issuing bank house. I believe that nearly nobody includes in his calculations the risk of losing either his savings or his money that he invested in the stock market, because of a bank going bankrupt. The lessons of the big depresson of 1929 are too far away to still play a role in the memory of the current generation.

I do not know how much time we still have until we will experience the first effects of the upcoming crisis, but I advocate to act quickly and to take action to prepare our societies for the upcoming problems. I see this case similar to somebody investing in an insurance. It costs some extra money to pay the monthly installments, but in the case that you really need the insurance it is worth every penny. In the case that you do not need the insurance: even better!

In my opinion the highest priority should be to enable people to solve their problems decentralized and on a local scale. We should train people in their capacity to act independently from a global central government and we should train them to use their brains themselves. I believe that a nation of active, capable and critically thinking people will go through a possible crisis much easier than a horde of lemmings. Independent of which political group you belong to our common goal should be to invest in human capacities of low tech problem solving. Facing the severity of the upcoming problems we cannot afford to end up in a situation where we as a civilization lose the capacity to act coordinated, ordered and peacefully.

Another issue that we should attack quickly is to reform the "science" of national economy. Recently I've started to read several books in that direction and I am shocked by the style of hand waving qualitative arguments that economists use to "prove" their point. I believe economics on the scale of nations is a very complex system with a lot of cross depencencies, feed-back loops and other complicating matters. In my opinion the only way to make a sound and solid science out of this discipline is to introduce the experiment as the only mechanism to discover "truth". This will be expensive, but though are physics experiments, too! As long as national economy is a club of debating philosophers the quote of John Kenneth Galbraith that "In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone." will hold true and the masses who are wrong will be rewarded and the one who is right will be punished. As soon as the experiment is the decisive measure of "truth" courage will be rewarded and active thinking will start from scratch.

M o n e y
What is Money and how does it work?

This document is a single big question: is my understanding of the core nature of the subject money correct or did I miss some important aspects? If you disagree with my interpretations then I would be very happy to hear your arguments. This document should serve as a working basis for people who are interested in this subject and who would like to participate in creating a sound and understandable explanation of basic questions.
I am certain that the ideas brought forward in this document are not new and a lot of ideas I took from books that I've read. But because I did not find a single concise source of information that would describe all those topics described here and which would in addition set those topics in relation to eachother I decided to write this document. Besides that I dislike the pure qualitative conversational style of most economics literature that I've read and therefore this document tries to explain the ideas in terms of simple mathematical models which are rich enough to give some insight into the questions that arise.
>>Always the latest version

S c a r c i t y O f F o s s i l e F u l e s
Insanity of modern production practices

U n e m p l o y m e n t
Reasons and Consequences

D e m o c r a c y
Our political system

P r o j e c t B l u e P r i n t
A proposal for an experiment (Ebbutz)

Last modified: Wed Aug 29 13:39:19 CEST 2007