HeyJaredVīta Brevis, Wit Artefāctōrum Ætērna Podcast
Exploring innovation, progress and achievement: a first-principles approach to everything that matters; combining history, epistemology, economics, anthropology, geopolitics, finance, philology, etymology and more... for, life is short, knowledge forever. ashstuart.substack.com
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The Story of Money: The Great Crash of 1929 (opens the original)
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Last time we looked at the phenomenon of supposedly ‘rational’ behavior leading to wild aggregate market outcomes. Let’s now look at what’s arguably the most spectacular and devastating real-world example of this. For, even as the 20s in this article series come to an end at 029, we shall trace how the Roaring Twenties ended with this extraordinary crash in 1929! We won’t be featuring our fictional friends on this topic, the real-world characters involved here, as we shall meet in due course, th
The Story of Money: The Irrationality of Rational Action (opens the original)
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A key thread running through all my writing in this series is how each of these topics, and how economics as a whole, relate to each of us, here and now. So let’s today tackle the question of how human behavior impacts markets and how that impacts each of us back. The key tension here, as I’ve noted before, is that economics tries to be a precise science while seeking to describe messy human reality. In this spirit, economics, or at least some branches of it, have posited that humans are rationa
The Story of Money: The Rabbit Hole of Money Creation (opens the original)
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Back in the day when I worked in banking, in a workshop the presenter asked “What do banks do?”, and I said “they make money”, to which his reply was “of course every institution needs its earnings”. But that’s not what I meant. Let’s today discuss the concept of money creation. Let’s meet our fictional friends to start with. Steve and Bryan have been in the silversmith and pawn-brokerage business for some time now. In recent days however, having gained the reputation of the town, they have foun
The Story of Money: Meeting Malthus (opens the original)
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You might have heard of the Malthusian Trap in some TV programme, say as part of a solemn, strokey-beard pronouncement by an expert on a panel of very wise-looking, sagely-nodding, well, experts. Let’s unravel it today. We haven’t met our fictional friends lately. Brenda has news for Steve, Bryan, and Irene. The coming weekend is to be another one of those once-a-few-years lavish banquets thrown by the Lord Mayor to all the townsfolk. This is a tradition when there has been a bumper harvest that
The Story of Money: The Concept of Competition (opens the original)
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In the last episode we looked at monopoly , let’s now turn to its antidote, competition . To the extent that competition is at the opposite end of monopoly, and given monopoly literally refers to ‘one-seller’, the phenomenon we are talking about here should translate to ‘many-sellers’. (I wonder why, unlike for ‘monopoly’ and ‘oligopoly’ “few-sellers”, we don’t use a Greek-derived term for this related phenomenon - I guess ‘polypoly’ would sound like a parrot trying to do economics?) But yes, it
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