http://www.money-sustainability.net/category/appendices/
Articles in Appendices
Appendix A: A Primer on How Money Works: ‘Your’ Money in Its World
“The only people who claim that money is not an issue are those who have sufficient money that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.” So thought the American writer Joyce Carol Oates.
This Primer (Appendix A from Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link) explains why now even those fortunate few should think about it.
It also answers the following questions:
- Where does your money comes from?
- How is the value of money determined?
- Who is really in charge of your savings?
Appendix C: Mapping Paradigms – Christian Arnsperger
Contents:
C.1. Three examples
C.2. The mirage of neutrality
C.3. The inevitability of paradigms
C.4. Paradigms and their basic dynamics
C.5. The workings of Traditional Economics
C.6. The twofold reductionism of Traditional Economics
C.6.1. The economy as an interactive system
C.6.2. Traditional Economics and the loss of process
C.6.3. Two versions of equilibrium
C.7. Beyond Traditional Economics: The post-neoclassical paradigm
C.7.1. Instrumental rationality: From parametric to strategic
C.7.2. Non-cooperative games and the dynamics of interaction
C.7.3. The Nash solution and the return of the independent-agent approximation
C.7.4. The flaws of game theory and the advent of bounded rationality
C.7.5. Elements of complexity economics
C.7.6. Elements of behavioral and neuroeconomics
C.8. Beyond the post-neoclassical paradigm: Integrating ecological economics, monetary behaviorism, and critical political economy
C.8.1. Making the post-neoclassical paradigm ecologically rational
C.8.2. Making the post-neoclassical paradigm sensitive to the behavioral efficaciousness of money
C.8.3. Opening the post-neoclassical paradigm to critical and existential rationality
C.9. Toward a new economic paradigm?
This Primer (Appendix C from Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link) gives and extended and detailed introduction to paradigms in economics.
Appendix D: Complex Flow Networks
This paper (Appendix D from Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link) presents more of the theoretical framework on which the proposed scientific approach towards sustainability used in the Report is based.
The approach used here is mathematical. It is completely based on conventional Western science, integrating thermodynamics, network theory and information theory.
This appendix uses philosophical language to shows that, for the first time, Western science is demonstrating the validity of the insights of ancient Chinese philosophy. Specifically, it shows that Taoism provides a better insight into the behaviour of living systems than the Aristotelian linear cause and effect model.
Appendix F: Concentration of Wealth
In 2006, the top 0.01% averaged 976 times more income than America’s bottom 90%. At the same time, people earning more than a million dollars paid just 23% of their income in federal tax. 1% of the world population own 40% of the global assets. The richest 2% of the world population own more than 51% of the world’s assets, while the richest 10% own 85%.
At the same time, 50% of the world population own less than 1% of the world’s assets. On a global scale, the so-called established wealthy (people who own over $5 million in net assets), representing 0.1% of global households, have increased their ownership of all private wealth from 19% in 2008 to 21% in 2010. The highest wealth concentrations are found in the Middle East, Africa and North America. Similarly, the top 1% of households in these countries accounts for 70 to 90% of all their respective countries’ private financial and real-estate ownership.
This appendix looks in detail at the related issues of poverty and the concentration of wealth, worldwide.
Appendix G: Kondratieff and the Long Wave
In 1926, Nicolai Kondratieff (1892-1938), at that time the head of Russia’s Economic Research Institute in Moscow, published a technical paper in a German statistical journal documenting the discovery of a 60-year ‘long wave’ in modern economies, starting in the eighteenth century. On this basis, he forecast a depression period for the 1930s, at the completion of the third Kondratieff wave.
Although a communist himself, he opposed the Stalinist elimination of the market mechanism, resulting in him being sent to Siberia and executed for ‘anticommunist agitation’. Joseph Schumpeter, and Nobel laureates Simon Kuznets and Jan Tinbergen have substantiated the validity of Kondratieff’s findings. It has also become clear that the Kondratieff cycle is not just an economic phenomenon, but is driven by technological and societal shifts.
This appendix describes the five waves already experienced so far, as well as the sixth, expected to play out over the next decades. Each long wave relates to a technological breakthrough called a ‘core innovation’ initially working itself through the economy as a powerful growth carrier. As its effect on the economy wears out, an economic downturn occurs and the impact of the next core innovation begins to manifest.
