I’ve written about deflation twice before: Deflation and Deflation 2. Third time’s the charm?
The common wisdom is that deflation of the currency is bad. When money deflates, it becomes more valuable, even when you do nothing. So the theory is that people won’t spend their money, because it will become ever-more valuable.
That theory [...]

Dmitry Orlov recently posted an article titled Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation.
For those not familiar with Dmitry, he is the author of Reinventing Collapse, which is all about “prepar[ing] for life without much money, where imported goods are scarce, and where people have to provide for their own needs, and those of their immediate neighbours.”
In this article, [...]

The essential feature of a tit-for-tat strategy is reciprocity – rewarding cooperation and punishing defection. In his book, “Born to be Good”, Dacher Keltner claims that “tit-for-tat instantiates the principle of cost-benefit reversal”. He argues that a set of mechanisms that reverse the cost-benefit analysis of giving is built into the human organism. He suggests: [...]

I first became aware of Ha-joon Chang’s latest book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism in a critique written by Edward Glaeser , a prominent economist at Harvard University, and published in the daily paper, the New York Sun. I read this review with great interest. Professor Chang, [...]

How Small Is It?
New Zealand’s entire gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced within a year, was approximately $128.1 billion in 2007, around the same amount as the state of Iowa. The importation of one major piece of industrial machinery earlier this year required a comment in investment banks’ economic reports [...]