The Courses

Economics Debunked

About twenty years ago, for various reasons, I became aware that much of what passed for economic truth and action was largely arbitrary, often self-contradictory, and logically inconsistent. And I began to seriously question the validity of the economic information I was being asked to believe by government and business. If the study of economics was supposed to make life better, then it was clearly failing because poverty seemed to be increasing in the wealthy countries, and extreme destitution in the poor ones. And I wondered why it was failing given that the formal study of Economics was supposed to mirror the study of Physics or Chemistry in that such study would lead to improvements in the quality of life?

By happenstance, I began to examine this at about the same time I began my formal study of Economics at Simon Fraser University. My experience with getting an extended minor in Economics taught me, amongst other things, that ...

1. In its efforts to be a hard 'physical' science, Economics is failing its natural function as a Social Science;

2. Economics is basically simple, but its presentation is deliberately confusing so as to manipulate economic choices individuals and societies make;

3. The practice of enacting economic policies are often the ideological expressions of economic graduates who have become economic idealists.

After I completed my economic schooling, and as a consequence of what I learned, I expanded my research, honed my observations and critical examinations of economic thought and practice. I began writing small critiques of our economic and social structures, often via letters to journalists and news room editors, and in the occasional essay.

Out of that evolved my writing, intermittently but consistently over ten years, a university style economics course that I called 'The Hand Inside the Invisible Glove: Economics for the Perceptive'. To date I have not rolled out this course as I'd originally envisioned myself doing. As an excuse for that failure, I weakly proffer my being a full time labourer in an understaffed department, along with the usual busy life reasons.

Recently I've participated in intense social and economic discussions on the 'state of the American economy' that have brought about a new understanding of economics: its fundamental structure is incorrect. And that that structure, as it is proscriptively implemented, must by necessity create poverty and, ultimately, destitution.

Fortunately my clever wife suggested that I approach Adult Continuing Education with my ideas and, to my surprise they liked it. But only if I could be shortened into three days.

And thus it is that Economics Demystified / Debunked evolved.

Banks Skanks

One of the students from Debunked asked me about banks a few times. In my original long course I devoted one full chapter to how the Federal government manages/manipulates money supply. Now that I have written Banks Skanks, I realize that I had been awfully naïve in my criticism, and that I needed to examine the history of money and the development of currency and money supply through debt. During the writing of this course I discovered that what we commonly think of as money may have begun as the exchange of slaves. I also discovered that currency is the most unnatural means of exchange, only existing under the "threat of the spear," as anthropologist David Graeber writes, first coming into existing during the Axial age. I also learned that the rationale for currency as the means to replace barter is a lie, because in the anthropological record barter has never existed as anything but a rare ad-hoc event between strangers.

General Remarks