II. Economic History: The Problem
The problem to be explained in the following has been captured by two charts depicting world population growth on the one hand and the development of per capita income (average living standards) on the other.
2. From The Malthusian Trap To the Industrial Revolution: Reflections on Social Evolution
I. Economic Theory
For economic theory the question of how to increase wealth and get rich has a straightforward answer.
Mises Daily Thursday by Frank Shostak:
True credit can only expand if the stock of real savings and real wealth expands. Unfortunately, fractional reserve banking and central banks facilitate the expansion of false credit which diverts resources from true wealth producing activities.
III. The Solution: Theory and History
The technological invention, then, that solved (at least temporarily33 ) the problem of a steadily emerging and re-emerging “excess” of population and the attendant fall of average living standards was a revolutionary change in the entire mode of production. It involved the change from a parasitic lifestyle to a genuinely productive life.
II. The Problem: Theory
About 35,000 years ago, i.e., 15,000 years after the initial exodus from Africa, practically all of Europe, Asia, Australia and, of course, Africa itself had been occupied by our ancestors, the modern humans, and archaic humans: homo neanderthalensis and homo erectus, were on the verge of extinction. About 12,000 years ago, humans had also spread all across the Americas.
The Solution: Theory and History
The technological invention, then, that solved (at least temporarily33 ) the problem of a steadily emerging and re-emerging “excess” of population and the attendant fall of average living standards was a revolutionary change in the entire mode of production. It involved the change from a parasitic lifestyle to a genuinely productive life.
II. The Problem: Theory
About 35,000 years ago, i.e., 15,000 years after the initial exodus from Africa, practically all of Europe, Asia, Australia and, of course, Africa itself had been occupied by our ancestors, the modern humans, and archaic humans: homo neanderthalensis and homo erectus, were on the verge of extinction. About 12,000 years ago, humans had also spread all across the Americas.
A Most Violent Year (2015, 125 minutes) is the third film from writer-director J.C. Chandor who wrote and directed 2011’s Margin Call about a Lehman Brothers-like firm in the early days of the 2008 financial crisis. Margin Call explored the complex relationships between white collar workers, corporate executives, and the firm’s customers in the face of economic ruin.
There are two kinds of credit: that which would be offered in a market economy with sound money and banking (true credit), and that which is made possible only through a system of central banking, artificially low interest rates, and fractional reserves (false credit).
Banks cannot expand true credit as such. All that they can do in reality is to facilitate the transfer of a given pool of savings from savers (i.e., those lending to the bank) to borrowers.
