Idiotnomics and the Age of Extinction

The Last Few Years Have Been a Lesson: Our Economy Isn’t Ready for This Century

Image Credit: IMF

Cue Jaws music. It’s….real! See that chart? That’s the IMF confirming that greedflation, something I wrote about a year ago, is very, very real. And that’s…a Very Big Deal. Because what’s rising in the world today is what I’ve come to call Idiotnomics.

Idiotnomics. It comes in many flavors. There’s the popular version — people read, listen to, crackpots. They come to believe in what said crackpots have to say. The blind lead the blind, and a chain reaction of ignorance ignites. This form of Idiotnomics is your everyday tech-bro libertarian, who really believes that, LOL, AI is going to fix all our problems, or we’re going to upload ourselves into the cloud, and, on a more mundane level, that public goods shouldn’t exist, life should be a Darwinian battle for existence, and therefore, investment in one another is just a “waste of money,” because people are just “liabilities.” This form of Idiotnomics idolizes billionaires as better than everyone else, just because they got lucky, learned how to game the system, and so forth. It’s about getting rich — individualistically, materialistically — not prosperity.

Now, this form of Idiotnomics has spread steadily since…well…the internet came to be. But another form of Idiotnomics that’s grown in more recent times. And it’s much more dangerous, because it’s at the very top of our institutions and systems. From people who should know better. Finance Ministers, Central Bank Governors, heads of state, and so forth.

This form of Idiotnomics looks at the world today, and sees everything through a warped lens. It thinks this is still the 1980s, or maybe 1990s. It doesn’t understand that we’re living in the 21st century, and everything’s different now. Economics, too, must evolve and keep pace — or else. Or else what? The wreckage you see rising across our societies — stagnation, a feeling of pessimism, despair, even, all of which destabilizes democracy, and is putting lunatics in power across the globe. Idiotnomics is the handmaiden of a growing tidal wave of social upheaval, conflict, rage, and self-destruction.