Interview, Ted Talk, Gold Bug Hope

Adam Caroll gave a Ted Talk about how people behave differently when money isn’t real. And gets into a discussion of how kids will click to spend on their parents’ phones without any real appreciation for what it costs. It’s called “When money isn’t real“. Real being the paper dollar, and unreal being a credit card, or worse yet, waving your phone over a payment sensor.

I just wanted him to see that his “real” money has, itself, been divorced from anything real. Similarly, economist Paul Romer, who just won the Nobel Prize, criticized economic models which are “pseudoscience”. He meant when central banks rely on flawed models, though he doesn’t see the applicability to the very idea of having a central bank in the first place! The premise is that free markets fail, and central planners can prevent or mitigation this failure. And he doesn’t like when central planners use models that are flawed. Oh, that’s just rich!