The document discusses several topics related to economics, history, and human behavior. It summarizes how past economic ideas have led to both progress and disasters. It also examines human psychological tendencies that have driven economic booms and busts. Finally, it questions whether current economic and social patterns can continue indefinitely and calls for developing wiser approaches to capitalism to avoid future crises.
3. Are we epistemologically reliable?
What do we know? What can we know? How do we
know?
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4. Historicism
The “Best” ideas flourish & spread
“Best” is always being redefined according to
O the geopolitical as well as socio economic
r landscape of the time.
g
a
n
i
s
Can these “best” ideas
e
d
sometimes lead us to
disaster?
KNOWN
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5. Case of Easter Island
200 BC Polynesian‟s begin to
settle
300 AD Island completely settled
600 AD Ahus constructed
1000 AD Massive deforestation occurs
1500 AD Resources become scarce
Intense warfare begins
1600 AD Resources depleted
Cannibalism begins
1722 AD Spanish arrive
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6. Psychological viewpoint
“Modern skulls house stone age minds.”
Are we hard wired to be capitalists
1. We are conditional – we are trained by hunter gatherer minds to be
competitive, group orientated and power driven.
2. We are hierarchical – which allows us to divide labour and distribute
resources “reverse dominance
hierarchies”
Productive hierarchies (businesses) vs. Allocative hierarchies (dictatorships or
aristocracies)
State should be productive but can be hijacked easily by Allocative types
3. Envious zero-sum thinkers www.cato.org
4. We are traders by nature Sponsored by JP Morgan
7. Limitations of the economy
Money is property. Property is a bundle of
rights to exclude others from what I have
What is Money? through the use of government force.
Concentration of wealth
Interest perpetuates wealth disparity
“Consumption beyond one‟s means
is good for the growth of the
economy, but bad for the individual
who is pilling up debt” Milton
Friedman
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9. A Look at the
Paradoxes of
Our Recent
Past and
Patterns
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10. Look out for…
• Emerging Best Ideas
• Herd Mentality
• „Bullish Behaviour
• “Bubbles” Forming
• Shorter Cycles– decades and years,
not centuries?
• Short Memories
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13. OPEC
Crisis
Winter of Sell of public
discontent assets
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14. I990‟s Coming of the
Information Age
• CNN News 24
• Sky News 24
• Growth of the Internet mid 1990‟s
• Growth in optimism – “Things Can Only
Get Better”
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15. Technology Boom –
Experts View
„We have one general response to the word “valuation” these days:
“Bull market”. The internet has introduced a brave new world for
valuation methodologies and it is a time of especially high risk/reward,
in our view. When you overlay the high valuation of many start-ups
with the relatively high valuation of the general market, well, we are
where we are just trying to do our jobs and find some early stage
great companies. If they execute, the valuations will take care of
themselves. Again it‟s about monster markets, great management
teams and good products.‟
Mary Meeker, stock analyst, Morgan Stanley.
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17. New Millennium – Safe as
Houses
• Different this time
• Aversion to Stocks
• Relaxed Lending
• Buy to Let Relaxed
• Media Bandwagon
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23. Challenges facing us
Rising unemployment Rising inflation
Decline in
manufacturing
Rising sovereign debt
Rising household
Rising oil prices debt
Historical low interest rates
Rise of India and
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24. What does it all mean?
Human Social character
condition
Herd mentality Consumer
Envious zero-sum thinkers Competitive
Traders Materialism (our relationship to
nature)
Driven by greed and fear “Greed is good”
Short sighted Individualism
Can we keep going like this?
If not, where do we go?
What attributes do you need to succeed?
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25. Where now?
To avert the next great calamity, what we
need is not better hindsight, but wisdom to
better navigate through a deeply troubling
future. We need "good" capitalists.
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Notes de l'éditeur
The list of new technology companies once valued at hundreds of million pounds and that eventually folded is lengthy and includes online dog food retailers, and the much hyped Boo.com an online designer clothes retailer, with the fundamental problem that people would not part with designer size money over the internet for clothes that they could not touch and feel or try on. Nevertheless J.P.Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Benetton financed the venture to the sum of $185 million dollars, which was lavishly squandered by the businesses founders Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten, photogenic Swedes in their twenties who managed to generate only $1 million worth of sales and whose website took over a year to launch and even then was flawed and difficult to use. Lastminute.com, essentially just a travel agent soared in value on its floatation day to £733 million on a turnover of just £490,000; yet within three days the share price had halved.