Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Role: Economic historian.
Keith Rankin, 2 October 2026 – On 18 September I applied textbook ‘circular flow’ consideration to the New Zealand economy, in the context of plans by Labour and National to expand a savings mechanism at a time when a higher proportion than ever of New Zealanders’ savings are draining rather than feeding the economy. (Refer: Tone Deaf KiwiSaver and the Circular Flow of Income.)
This circular flow analysis is not a hypothesis. It’s a description made more vivid through the use of metaphor and analogy. Like all educational descriptions, it’s a simplification, a ‘model’. A model can never be the whole story. The circular flow model is an excellent way to understand ‘demand-shocks’, ie spending shocks; less useful, though far from useless, for modelling supply-shocks such as big increases in oil prices. Policy induced increases in interest rates are, simultaneously, demand shocks decreasing spending and supply shocks increasing costs.
Applying this mode of understanding to New Zealand at present, the drainage – or leakage – is to a large extent a result of funds managers using the savings of New Zealanders to buy foreign assets rather than to invest in the New Zealand economy. (Circular flow leakage is not only applicable to money going overseas. Hoarding “money in the tin” – as Cameron Bagrie [RNZ, 29 Sep 2026: Labour commits to securing first pay equity deal by next Budget would have the government do] advocates – is a form of drainage in the circular flow model. Money works by circulating, not stagnating.)
The present leakage – the large scale purchases of foreign financial assets by funds managers – is presently relatively benign, in the sense that it is helping to offset a huge inflow of export receipts resulting from high prices for meat and processed milk. (The other major offset to booming exports is of course import spending; there is also a rising interest bill payable ‘offshore’, as interest rates increase on present private and government debt.)
As a result of an export inflow of funds being more than matched by an outflow – especially into purchases of foreign assets, foreign goods, foreign services – the New Zealand dollar is falling in value on the world’s foreign exchange markets. (The NZD fell by 4.8% in a few recent weeks – from 24 August to 30 September – based on a trade-weighted average of 17 foreign currencies. The New Zealand dollar is now 19% lower than it was in 2015, again despite rapidly rising export revenues. Since 24 August, the NZD has fallen against all 17 of those currencies; the biggest fall has been against the South Korean won.)
Commodity export receipts (based on fortuitously high prices) and hot money (meaning money flowing into New Zealand to take advantage of higher interest rates) have been the two main taps – inflow valves – enabling the New Zealand economy to sustain a veneer of prosperity from 1985. The three open plugholes – three significant drains – have been imports, interest and dividends paid to foreign owners, and the purchases of foreign financial assets by funds managers.
New Zealand’s prosperity – inflows arising especially from the abovementioned export receipts – has increasingly taken the direct route rather than the scenic route from the taps to the drains, meaning that large swathes of New Zealand have missed out on that prosperity flow. When spending and income flow through the ‘scenic’ hinterland, as they should, government clips the ticket on each transaction, through especially income tax (including company tax) and GST. That’s good; it’s how governments gain their necessary revenue and thereby fund most of their spending. Circulation drives revenue.
We may think of economic prosperity as being like a spa pool full of circulating water; external (in and out) and internal circulation add to prosperity while keeping income distribution equitable. Taps and commensurate drainage holes – representing exports, imports, and other foreign transactions – keep the prosperity ‘fresh’. An emptying pool, or a stagnating pool, represents economic contraction; a filling pool represents economic expansion over and above natural growth; a spilling pool represents classical inflation.
The big question for New Zealand is: What happens when the stimulatory export tap turns off; or turns down, with inflows reducing to New Zealand’s historical average? The prosperity drains away, like a storage lake during a drought. As evidenced from the exchange rate numbers mentioned above, the external outflow of prosperity already exceeds the inflow. Fortuitously, the falling exchange rate – a market price – serves as a form of stabilising economic feedback.
If the drains remain wide open, the contraction becomes an economic crisis. If unremediated by offsetting policy or by constructive feedback (such as strong private sector responses to rising export and import prices), eventually the economy and the society collapses, dries up. (Will the last person to leave please turn off the lights? To use a phrase used by Rupert Murdoch among others. And used in New Zealand I recall, I believe in the early 1990s.)
We must we careful to understand the spa pool analogy correctly; the prosperity of an economy lies in the flow of spending and income, not the amount of ‘money in the tin’. And – for an economy, if not a jacuzzi – that ‘fluid’ prosperity maximises when there are significant flows through a variety of channels; the scenic route, rather than rapid flow through a single channel from tap to plughole. Spending by retired people represents one of these important prosperity channels.
We can usefully think of irrigated farmlands. The main flows of water through Canterbury are a small number of large rivers. The Canterbury economy is prosperous when that water is diverted through many slow channels, and with the amount of water coming into the system being matched over time by the amount of water going out. An important part of the slow-flow process is the filling of aquifers; nature’s reserve ponds. And the slow channels may provide good habitats for fish, a form of wealth. These channels are internal flows; the system is sustained by external circuits, equivalent to exports and imports. Rain flows into the system, and evaporation from the oceans – the source of rain – matches the flow of water into those seas.
Negative Feedback Processes
The circular flow process is a simple approach to understanding changes in the state of the economy; and conceptualising remedies for a failing or flailing economy.
All of the events noted in my earlier article – leakage and stimulus events – constitute primary change. Primary change induces feedback which is known as secondary change. Such events may start as disruptors within a stable or balanced economy; or such events – especially policy responses, which are themselves a form of feedback – may start within an already out-of-kilter economy. In the first situation, the event destabilises the economy, and the feedback – the secondary change – typically restabilises the economy though at a different point of balance. In the second situation, an appropriate policy intervention should facilitate a desirable correction.
This process of restabilisation is known as negative feedback, and is generally understood to be a good thing. Positive feedback, on the other hand, itself aggravates instability; and is generally understood as a bad thing. (This can be confusing for those of us who tend to associate the word ‘positive’ with ‘good’; and ‘negative’ with ‘bad’. In medicine, recovery from say influenza is a negative feedback process, whereas cancer is a positive feedback disease.)
The principal negative feedback mechanism recognised by orthodox (neoclassical) economists is called the price mechanism. Such economists may also call it the ‘market mechanism’; which can be misleading because markets correct resource misallocation through both price and quantity information. Key quantity words are ‘shortage’ and ‘excess’.
A ‘policy’ to rely solely on negative feedback is a conservative policy. It’s a solution to an economic problem which can be called ‘wait and self-heal’. However the wait may be too long and too uncertain; that’s why Keynes said: “in the long-run we are all dead“. Further, the resulting balance may not be the most desirable correction; for example, it may be unacceptably inequitable. John Maynard Keynes, in the 1930s, showed that something resembling balance could be achieved despite high levels of involuntary unemployment. (The present official definition of unemployment very much assumes the word ‘involuntary’; some economists today regard much joblessness as tantamount to a vacation, and the official definition reflects that view.) Such an undesirable form of balance may be called a rut, and activist fiscal policy is the surest way out of a rut.
Keynes’ solution for a depressed economy (with excess labour, with underemployed plant and equipment, and with unemployed self-regulating automata such as AI) – high ‘unemployment’ in every sense of that word – was for governments to ‘borrow and spend’. The New Zealand government did this in 1936 by borrowing at artificially low interest rates and spending on social housing. This was a major reason for New Zealand’s spectacularly rapid, though late, recovery from the Great Depression. The government intelligently deployed an available mechanism of artificially lowering interest rates.
The feedback mechanism which followed was that output and income increased, unemployed workers became employed, and income tax receipts grew even faster. Thus, by borrowing more and spending more, the fiscal deficit (the government’s budget deficit) decreased within a year or two; by 1938 the fiscal deficit was smaller because in 1936 it was made bigger. This process – by the government injecting new spending into the circular flow – led to a rapid corrective expansion, landing the economy in a good and popular place. (This included a couple of years of double-digit economic growth; 20% over two years instead of the paltry 0% over two years that we have in 2026!)
It was not for nothing that Michael Joseph Savage was widely regarded as New Zealand’s man-of-the-century. This was a negative (ie correcting) quantity (key information was shortages and excesses) feedback ‘loop’ that can be said to have saved New Zealand in the years just before World War Two. The new spending stimulated all corners of the New Zealand economy; it took the ‘scenic route’. Subsequent import controls in December 1938 meant that spending-output-income flows kept emphasising the scenic routes for longer. Other capitalist countries used comparable policies to create their post-war ‘economic miracles’; these policies actually saved capitalism from the fate widely predicted in the 1930s.
In my lifetime, economists have tended to emphasise corrective processes based on the price mechanism; on price rather than quantity information. Thus, when an imbalance occurs – too much leakage or too much stimulus – then the correction is that the prices of some things will go up (so we buy less of them) and the prices of other things will go down (so we buy more of them). (Note my use of the word ‘price’ rather than ‘cost’; today’s overuse of the word ‘cost’ relates to a narrative quite different from that of neoclassical economics.)
A recent example of this price mechanism in action is the substantial growth of foreign demand for dairy and red meat products, two classes of product with which New Zealand has comparative advantage. As a result, these products have become very expensive in New Zealand, so consumers here have switched to other cheaper sources of protein, including a variety of imported protein substitutes. Farmers’ higher incomes have filtered into the wider economy, though arguably not enough; otherwise prosperous New Zealanders have cut back on meat and cheese, on account of their high prices.
Automatic Stabilisation
One important form of stabilisation is known in the textbooks as ‘automatic stabilisation’. Under automatic stabilisation, when an economy contracts, there are forms of income available which automatically mitigate the loss of market income of those people adversely affected. And there is an automatic reduction in tax revenues, creating an automatic and stabilising government budget deficit.
A mix of a comprehensive social security and a suite of income-graduated taxes are the critical automatic stabilisers which have underpinned western post-war prosperity for decades. In New Zealand, a particularly potent automatic stabiliser is New Zealand Superannuation, which takes advantage of the ability of retired people to keep spending during an economic downturn, and to maintain spending from diverse and often scenic geographic locations.
Automatic stabilisers are the economy’s thermostats.
A basic universal income can be an efficient automatic stabiliser; as even former National and Act leader Don Brashrealises, as evidenced from his speaking in favour of a universal basic income at a TOP election meeting in Grey Lynn in 2020. (Does David Seymour know this, I wonder?) A universal income set into legislation – which of course is what New Zealand Superannuation is – serves this purpose well, because it immediately helps people to keep spending, and can be easily raised to create a fiscal injection.
(One easy win, in times like now, would be to create a 60-plus variant of the job-seeker benefit, which would have fewer conditions attached to it than regular job-seeker benefits; and which would have minimal abatement provisions for 60-to-64 year-olds taking on part-time or free-lance work. Additionally, 60-plus beneficiaries could be hired – perhaps on a semi-voluntary basis – to mentor young people starting on their life-journeys as productive workers.)
Fiscal Policy as Destabilising Feedback
My 1930s’ example above showed that, in particular at times of significant unemployment, borrow and spend policies were an important case of initiating a stabilising feedback process; creating eventual fiscal balance, full employment and normal growth. The ‘fiscal balance’ part is counterintuitive, given that the correction started by intentionally aggravating a fiscal imbalance. Yet improved fiscal balance was a result of that feedback process; prosperity was the more important result. The hinterland prospered, and the Treasury coffers filled; the First Labour Government ‘spent money to make money’, as an entrepreneur might say.
This suggests correctly that the opposite policy approach – cut-borrowing, cut-spending – constitutes destabilising positive feedback. Allowing a leaky draining economy to drain faster or to fester, waiting for a very slow price response (or worse, an aggravating private-debt-deflation response as we saw in the early 1930s), is at best government abuse through neglect.
A policy to cut spending in favour of public-debt repayment is a policy to accelerate the drainage of a draining economy. It creates positive feedback, making the existing problem worse. As such, it increases fiscal deficits by reducing government revenue, thereby raising public-debt; and, by decreasing or stalling GDP and possibly creating deflation, it further raises the government’s debt-GDP ratio. As the debt problem becomes bigger, further application of this false solution takes place; thereby escalating the problem, and escalating the policy that escalates the problem. And so on. At some point either the economy breaks (leading to a reset such as what may happen after a great war, perhaps a great levelling), the counter-productive policy is abandoned, or some (exogenous) lucky break from outside puts an end to the process.
Advocates of such downwardly destabilising policies tend also to advocate the removal (or lessening) of the very thermostatic stabilisers which help to maintain a semblance of order in a shock-prone world. The Act Party, for example, seeks a flatter (less graduated) tax scale, and without a negative income tax (as Milton Friedman advocated for in and around 1962) or refundable tax credit or basic universal income to compensate.
Economic Growth
A stabilised economy is not a static economy. It allows for natural growth processes; such as those attributable to improved production techniques, increased societal knowledge, and wider critical literacy. (Critical literacy is a feedback process – voice over exit – whereby participant suggestions are heard and acted upon.) It also allows for natural processes of substitution from income-preference to leisure-preference; productivity processes which were once argued to be the hallmark of fully-developed economic societies.
We note here that income acquisition means the subjugation of a person’s time to employers or clients. Leisure, on the other hand, represents activities or inactivities – the use of time – according to persons’ own preferences. Increased leisure relative to income is a central process of meaningful economic growth.
Some other important feedback processes
Economists these days do not emphasise either of the above-mentioned stabilising feedback processes as much as they used to. ‘Relative prices’ was once the ‘bread and butter’ of economics’ education. Now the big interests are inflation (and inflation psychology) – considered as a positive feedback process, ie a destabilising process – and the supposition that government spending suppresses business investment. (We note that, in late-1930s’ New Zealand, government spending was the critical facilitator which revived business investment.)
And there is the idea that economic success for a nation lies in the quantity of money that comes into a country – through sales to foreigners of goods, services or assets – facilitated by access to sufficient quantities of strategic resources such as fertiliser, diesel, high-tech-batteries, pharmaceuticals, or intelligence (human or artificial). Money that comes into the country through tourism or exports is deemed to be non-inflationary, whereas money created within the domestic banking system is deemed to be inflationary.
The idea of venerating money as wealth is the essence of mercantilism; mercantilism is to economics (a social science) as alchemy is to chemistry (a natural science). Both mercantilism and alchemy idolise gold. Money is not wealth; rather it’s the circulating lubricant which allows economies to function, and which allows economic quantities to be assigned a value.
The global economy is today facing a number of deeply problematic positive feedback processes. One is obviously the ‘arms race’ processes which lead to military escalation. As well as the destruction inherent in the consumption of military products, there are all the greenhouse-gas emissions arising from the production and operation of military goods, and lost opportunities arising from peaceful technology.
Another destructive form of positive feedback is the ‘race to the bottom’. These feedback processes can be well understood through a branch of economics known as ‘game theory’.
The feedback process I emphasise though is that of climate change – increased extremes in temperatures, compromised access to fresh water (drought and flood), and increased wildfires. Our response is to increase energy-hungry air conditioning, thereby exacerbating the problem which we are trying to escape from. This – along with the AI race, which includes unsustainable energy-hungry and water-hungry data centres – is a kind of slow race towards human end times; a race which is being reinforced by the present global arms race, so is very much a virulent form of a race to the bottom.
Further, artificial intelligence is a positive feedback process of ‘recursive self-improvement’ (RSI), a reinforcement learning race between AI agents; that’s what makes it so scary.
Inflation (and deflation)
Inflation is widely understood in economics today – as it was in ‘classical economics’ which had its heyday 200 years ago – as a form of positive feedback, of destabilising feedback; as a process which creates its own dynamic.
The belief today is that certain small policy mistakes (almost always, only evaluated in hindsight as mistakes) – such as allegations of overcooked or undercooked central banks’ monetary policies (eg in the Federal Reserve in 1929, and in the RBNZ in 2003/04 and 2021/22) – created inflationary or deflationary feedback spirals which thereby induced severe difficult-to-tame financial or fiscal crises. (In the early 1930s, the United States Fed committed much of its resources in a futile attempt to reverse deflation through monetary reflation.)
One of our alleged problems is called accelerating secondary or second-round inflation, and it’s presented as a pavlovian consequence – inflation expectations – arising from primary inflation. Primary inflation is anything, be it war or retirement spending, which may provide an impetus to push or pull prices upwards. Second-round inflation then – allegedly, and if untreated – causes the consumers price index to increase by ever-increasing annual percentages in excess of policy-target percentages. (We may note the notion of NAIRU which posits the idea that a certain amount of unemployment is required in normal times to suppress any outbreak of ‘accelerating inflation’.)
Normal neoclassical economics treats primary inflation as a shock or stress that leads to a stabilising price-feedback response. We spend less – not more – when general prices go up, and as a result prices go down again. And, when prices go up, we expect them to go down sooner or later; or to increase more slowly in the near future. New classical economics, on the other hand, claims that if the inflation rate is, say, four percent this year, we expect it to be more than four percent next year, and more again in the years after.
When a war causes the price of wheat to go up, and the price of diesel to go up, we actually expect two things. First, we expect the war to be short-lasting. Second, we expect supply-chains to adjust to the new circumstances; we expect supplies to be redirected or sourced from other places, with resulting decreases in prices, though maybe not all the way back to pre-war levels. (Take 2022 as a perfect example of this, re wheat.) At least, that’s what neoclassical economics – which sees price changes as stabilising rather than destabilising – supposes.
Another example is that, after Cyclone Gabrielle which wreaked havoc on apple orchards in New Zealand, we expected apple prices to go up – which they did; and then the prices came down with supply chain adjustments, and then they came down further as the destroyed crops came back into production. That’s normal market process – and normal market psychology – which is what happened, and the psychology was reinforced by what happened. The new classical monetary wizards, however, told us that, as a result of cost or spending shocks, we would expect all prices to accelerate upwards; unless, that is, they – the appointed wizards or wizardesses – intervened.
Another example was the global disruptions to supply chains caused in 2020 to 2022 by especially the Covid19 pandemic (sometimes called a ‘world global pandemic’, which is of course verbal inflation) and the whatever-scale Russian attacks on Ukraine in 2022. Global primary inflation soared in early 2022, and subsided in most countries by 2024. There is no evidence that there was ever a problem of secondary inflation; only stabilising ‘ripples’. And there is no evidence that policy responses, on the basis of ‘expected’ second-round inflation, made any beneficial difference to ‘cost-of-living’ outcomes.
The overblown concept of ‘problematic second-order inflation’ is important for our understanding of what has been framed across the western world as the ‘cost-of-living crisis’. Any non-wizard knows that there will always be some feedback effects arising from a supply-shock (a cost-shock) or a demand-shock; to expect otherwise would be equivalent to denying that there are ripples when a stone is thrown into a pond. The question is whether these ‘ripples’ of secondary inflation are destabilising or stabilising, are problem or solution. Do ordinary folk expect price ripples to turn into price tsunamis if the monetary wizards are not there to apply their magic? I don’t think so.
The economic orthodoxy for the last forty years says that secondary inflation constitutes destabilising positive feedback; driven by naïve expectations of business principals and wage-workers that ‘hyperinflation [100% or more] must be just around the corner’. Commonsense would suggest that price ripples decelerate – they don’t accelerate – and that when general prices go up we expect at most a slow decline in the inflation rate without having to have that expectation bludgeoned into us. The now-orthodox ‘accelerating-inflation’ hypothesis is completely wrong as a general hypothesis, and is only ever valid in a few highly specific historical cases; there has never been a global hyperinflation.
Inflation itself is an important debt-stabilisation feedback process
While inflation isn’t always a good thing, it can be. Indeed inflation is the solution to the world’s mounting problem of private and government debt; whereby a small investment class of already rich people extract interest from most of the rest of us.
Inflation and economic growth have been the principal mechanisms through which substantial post-WW2 government and private debts were resolved throughout the western world. And inflation – not compound interest – is the principal reason why so many people alive today born between 1925 and 1955 are asset wealthy. Inflation paid their mortgages and other debts. In the absence today of much economic growth, inflation – rising nominal GDP, the denominator used for all meaningful measures of national indebtedness – does the business of servicing debt and maintaining a stable income distribution between creditors and debtors.
In today’s capitalist global economy, interest rates in excess of inflation are unsustainable, inequitable, and systemically destabilising. (In medieval times, such interest rates represented the vice of usury.) Inflation itself is the stabilising price mechanism which makes real interest rates negative; which defuses to ‘usury problem’ for want of a better label. Inflation several percentage points above base interest rates achieves an outcome whereby ordinary people can “get ahead”, as Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon like to announce as their goal for “ordinary Kiwis”. That’s how the grandparents of millennials got ahead.
There is a comedic irony about all this. Two wrongs can make a right. If anti-inflation policy is counter-effective and inflation above policy targets is beneficial, then ‘anti-inflation policy’ makes us better off because it creates the inflation that it claims to cure.
While New Zealand’s relatively low government debt is the envy of most capitalist governments today, a healthy dose of inflation can make significant inroads into that debt. Inflation also increases government revenue even when the economy is struggling, through a process called ‘fiscal drag’ or ‘bracket creep’. (As such, this may be one reason why a democratic capitalist ‘universal income / flat tax’ policy is not favoured by our legacy political parties; a universal income would by its very nature be inflation-adjusted.) In the recent PREFU, the New Zealand government’s revenue was higher than widely predicted, not because of good economic management but instead because of the very inflation which the government says that it is determined to overcome.
Fiscal drag is not a benefit to working people. It is an ‘optical’ benefit to governments pushing the ‘into surplus’ rhetoric while being too afraid to introduce stabilising tax-benefit reforms. These are governments which acquiesce to prevailing class-based narratives, rather than seeking to bend or otherwise contest those narratives.
Interest rates
The mallet – bludgeon – of monetary authorities nowadays is ‘interest rates’. Interest rates are meant to be a critical market price which facilitates the balancing of saving and investment in the circular flow model. That is, if saving (a leakage) gets too high and investment (an injection) gets too low, the balancing price mechanism involves a market-led reduction in interest rates. Interest rates are critical to price-mechanism stabilisation, which is a negative feedback process. Interest rates are supposed to rebalance saving and investment. Neoclassical economics favours both stabilising feedback and minimum policy intervention.
Unfortunately, this particularly critical market price has been hijacked by macroeconomist policy interventionists. Interest is nowadays used as a policy lever to correct us of expectations which we – businesses and workers – never had in the first place. It’s a policy tool that ‘works’ by playing mind games on uncomprehending stakeholders.
The deeper and more tragic irony is that the raising of interest rates through monetary policy is itself a supply-shock – a cost shock, much like escalating diesel prices – which serves to create the problem that it is supposed to be fixing. Hence, the misuse of interest rates – as a blunt lever – reinforces the expectations which it is supposed to be dowsing. By becoming an instrument of positive feedback – rather than negative feedback, creating what it is supposed to be curing – we find the use of that lever escalates, making the cost problem worse, and therefore ‘requiring’ even more use of that lever. This is what is known in geopolitics as an escalation trap; a dangerous positive feedback process.
Escalating interest rates serve as a monetary drain serving the interests of the upper- and upper-middle classes at the expense of the remaining ninety-percenters. In New Zealand and elsewhere, large amounts of New Zealanders’ interest payments are flowing down that drain; increasingly as an external flow into the pockets of rich foreigners rather than to rich New Zealanders.
At some point, this feedback process of escalating interest rates breaks – as all destabilising processes do – and as did happen globally in 2008. The chatter out there in YouTube-land is that it will be significantly worse next time.
Benjamin Button economics: Forward to the Past
New Zealand and other contemporary capitalist economies are now being subject to a particularly virulent form of classical economics – classical economics being the dismal science – which preceded the neoclassical marginal revolution of the 1870s. New classical economics is particularly obsessed with government debt and inflation. Public economists – meaning economists who the public see and hear – have largely abandoned both Keynesian and neoclassical frames of reference.
And humans’ journey into the depths of their modern economic past may not end through re-engagement with the classical economics of David Ricardo and Reverend Malthus. Economic narrative is falling further back into the age of trade mercantilism, which is the pseudo-economics and public policy of Donald Trump and the people he prefers to talk to. (Some claim that capitalism is moving even further back, into a new age of feudalism. Refer Yanis Varoufakis: ‘Capitalism is dead. The new order is a techno-feudal economy’, El Pais, 11 October 2023.)
(While monetary and fiscal probity – small but powerful government – were important features of classical economics, its central thrust was a growth process which took advantage of a prior and fortuitous emergence of a substantial middle class, and proceeded through a growth process which would eventually eliminate that middle class. ‘Winners’ would be those who benefitted through social mobility and gained entry to the upper class; David Ricardo – a successful financial speculator – had already become a landed gentleman by the time he commenced his career as a political economist. Classical economics was a story of transition from one unequal stationary state into another. The offsprings of classical economics were Marxian economics – which would presage a benevolent end state following its harrowing birth – and neoclassical economics which preserved the middle class.)
I don’t think that the current set of opinion leaders and power brokers are deliberately stupid. Rather, their world view is based more around a linear narrative – as the Bible is – than a circuitous understanding of wealth moving within a biosphere which has self-correcting propensities. Economies start, things happen, eventually end times arrive. The winners (or winner) are revealed at the end. By definition, if you are not there at the end, you are not a winner.
Economic narrative is entering an era of financial mercantilism, an era of linear pseudo-social-science in which the goal of humanity is to extract – for no useful social purpose – as much ‘money’ from the Earth-system as humans and other ‘intelligences’ can before that system itself will no longer be sustained. Financial mercantilism describes a game, a race-to-the-end to see who can make the most money.
Musk-win Escalation Race
Races between and among superpower presidents, between super-entitled tech-lords, between Nietzschean Übermenschen; have become quite the topics of present-day chatter. While übermenschen dominate their worlds from within rather than above – including fictional examples such as Rakhmetov and John Galt – there is also today a messianic sense of the world concluding much as it began with a Singularity; ‘one God to rule them all’, to invoke the favourite book of one of the present world’s most notorious dark lords, a lord with a palantír and a New Zealand passport.
About the writer:
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.