Of Two Minds

How much gold will you trade for a few eggs? It depends on how hungry you are. Two ideas will help us understand the rest of this tumultuous decade: core-periphery and the revaluation of what’s truly important: systemic adaptability, transparency, accountability, risk, capital and resources.

Greed is good until all the vulnerabilities and fragilities of systemic risk asymmetries manifest. When you put too many eggs in one basket, you create systemic fragility: if anything knocks that basket over, the loss is so overweighted that the entire system unravels. Why do we put too many eggs in one basket?

It’s getting hard to fill toxic low-pay jobs, and that’s not going to change. The nature of work and the labor market are changing in ways few discern or perhaps are willing to discern because these changes are disrupting the exploitive system they want to remain unchanged.

Waste is not growth, and neither are the unlimited expansion of debt and speculative bubbles. The financial punditry is whipping itself into a frenzy about a Federal Reserve “policy error,” which is code for “if the music finally stops, we’re doomed!”