| Unlocking Pandora's Box Dear Daily Prophecy Reader, To follow up on yesterday's Daily Prophecy regarding time-prices, I thought I'd share this previous piece about Pooley and Tupy's Time-Price Theory. More specifically, how this way of thinking can lead to a wealth of questions and problems due to misunderstanding. Keep reading... I hope my readers have patience with my preoccupation with the time-price revolution. Time-price theory is the view that the real value of anything is measured by the time it takes for a worker to earn the money to buy it. It sounds simple and even obvious. In my theory, it stems from the information theory of money as time. Money must be scarce to mediate tradeoffs and priorities in economics. Time is the economic resource that remains scarce when all else becomes abundant. Money is the device that enables the scarcity of time to be fungibly translated into transactions and valuations. Everything in economics — indeed nearly all metrics in science — must finally be defined in terms of hours, minutes, and seconds. When governments manipulate money, they are really rebelling against time. In my view, crucially refined and documented under the tutelage of Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy, the time-price method of gauging value and economic progress is a huge breakthrough. It can transform nearly all economic calculations and assumptions — from the rate of economic growth, to the weight of debt, to the degree of inequality, to the impact of atmospheric CO2, to the level of true interest rates. But like any new way of viewing reality, time-prices open a Pandora's box of wealth of questions and problems. A Lesson to Be Learned: The Key to True Understanding In science, what is first encountered as an interesting curiosity becomes the key to broad understanding. Signs of magnetism and electricity in amber (electra) come to be recognized as the pervasive condition of all matter and energy. Initial anomalies of shocks and attractions ultimately led James Clerk Maxwell in 1865 to discover and calculate the velocity of light in any medium without conducting experiments. My daughter, Louisa, wrote a major book on quantum "entanglement," The Age of Entanglement (Knopf, 2008). The uncanny linkages between photons at huge distances began as an elusive and enigmatic effect. For a long time, it was dismissed as a possibly deceptive figment of the statistics or influence of the measuring gear. Now, physicists recognize quantum entanglement as a property of all light everywhere. The enabler of quantum computing, it is being tested in China by Pan Jianwei as a method of protecting the integrity of communications. With his teacher, Anton Zeilinger of Austria, Pan in 2017 entangled and disentangled photonic messages over 1200 kilometers between satellites. For a possible new book, Louisa has been studying the history of superconductivity. Still not understood by physicists any more than entanglement, they discovered this collapse of resistance in certain materials as an exotic feature of matter at extreme temperatures near zero Kelvin. Currently, superconductivity is being discovered in materials near room temperature. Carver Mead and Tahir-Kheli at Caltech believe it is a possible property of all electrons in atoms, explaining why these negative particles do not plunge into the positively charged nucleus. When I wrote Knowledge and Power (2013), I stumbled on time-prices in writing a chapter entitled "The Light Dawns." It told the story of William Nordhaus, a Yale professor who demonstrated that prevailing accounts of economic history underestimate real economic growth by a factor of nearly 100,000. This is an exponential "oops!" moment, where an existing paradigm resoundingly gives way. As I wrote, economists erred because "they concentrated on money prices rather than real labor costs — how many hours these workers had to labor to buy light." Nordhaus ended up calculating the number of hours a worker had to toil to buy lighting. Last year, Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in economics! |
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