Introducing: Real Economics

Will human civilization survive beyond 2100? 

The conclusion of the Real Economic Society is that the human population will be significantly diminished by 2100, and the quality of life for most botanical and zoological species will be severely degraded.

This conclusion is based on general observation of certain data from a broad range of inputs such as atmospheric and pelagic chemistry and physical characteristics, biological population dynamics, and mass ecologically ablative processes  conducted by the growing human population.

Economics – the language and discipline we have evolved to describe and quantify the activities, consumption and production of valuable products and the policies governing their control – is a deficient and poorly evolved social science. 

Its outputs form the language of justification in government policies that protect elite private financial interests to the direct detriment of the broader public interest, and fail to account sufficiently for the cost of ecological degradation resulting from such malformed policy.

Furthermore, its continued practice is a direct contributor to the ecological deterioration now accelerating across ocean, forest and sky. It enforces the self-destructive direction of mankind’s evolution.

We need to change the language, and the structures we have allowed to evolve that output such defective policy into something that will serve humanity’s interest in the longest possible term.

Real Economics is a proposed revision to the science that seeks to reorient economics, its practice, instruction and implementation and all of humanity toward a rehabilitative mode of symbiotic existence on the celestial organism called Earth.

A Real Economist is any individual human being who elects to conduct their lives according to the rehabilitation of the global ecology through tempered ambition, voluntary limited reproduction, and a willingness to render one’s impact on the planet net additive to the ecology that is the economy by reducing consumption, optimizing waste, and escalating the value of natural systems.

The Real Economic Model proposes to quantify and categorize the entire biome of Earth to generate optimum population targets for each species and provide the data to decision makers to achieve real sustainable behaviours and impacts by individuals, governments, corporations and institutions to facilitate the achievement of these targets.

The overarching objective of Real Economics is to balance the global biome to achieve the maximum possible lifespan of all species as a group on the living organism called Planet Earth that is the biological ship upon which we all travel through time and space.

All are welcome and respected here. None are excluded. We are all Real Economists. 

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We humans are engaged in an existential crisis for our species that has already  resulted in a decline in the average life expectancy of men and women, regardless of their place of birth.

This is not a hysterical overstatement, or theory. It is demonstrably true in the most cursory analysis of the available data.

Homo Erectus, as the planetary apex predator, has been so successful in overcoming the natural limitations of the ecology through the application of technology that we have saturated our planet disproportionately.

The COVID pandemic – regardless of where you stand on its origin – has precipitated the first sustained reversal in life expectancies across the board in recorded human history.

This pandemic and the increasing frequency with which infectious diseases are migrating from nature into human pathogenic threats can be considered a manifestation of the immune system of the organism we are members of called Earth in response to what amounts to an infestation.

The modern discourse in economics serves to distract the average human being from the Real Economic state of the global ecology, which is deteriorating rapidly. The rate of deterioration is itself accelerating, though recognition and remedial action are woefully sporadic within the population.

The corporations that have achieved “personhood” in the legal sense, but without the liability of consequences for individual negligence or malicious exploitation, use the ecological crisis as a selling feature to (in most cases) fraudulently represent a non-existent ecological benefit to their products.

Exacerbated by an elite oligarchically orchestrated press, people are subliminally encouraged to immerse themselves in identity politics to assign blame for financial limitations in their lives, rather than seek out the underlying causes of it, which is wealth concentration in the hands of the relatively few.

The problem is further aggravated by the fact that reasonably capable and talented individuals seek a level of financial independence that acts as a fence against adversity. Once achieved, these high performing upper middle class professionals tend to withdraw from participation in the political process (unless that is their ambition) to enjoy life through the expenditure of their capital pools.

The racial barricades established by European white settlers throughout the last thousand years ensure high barriers of entry that are nonetheless denied by the controlled press. Meanwhile, the profusion of guns in American society has caused a routine indifference to gun violence unless one is directly affected by it.

My intention for this book is to demonstrate that Economists and Economics today are defective to the point of being a cause of the ecological collapse underway, and not of any imaginable benefit to the long term interests of humanity as a species.

I wish to kindle the recognition among human beings of modest ambition that any hope of a future for subsequent generations relies on a global collective revolution by people of this societal plane, who demonstrate every day via a careful moderation of consumption that great wealth is not required to live comfortably in any corner of the world.

It is incumbent upon this segment of the global population to come together to drive a change in global governance and its subordination to the interests of billionaire oligarchs, and reorient it to the service of long term human interest.

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We fall into one of two categories of human beings: either we are cognizant that this crisis is upon us and we are accelerating into our own premature extinction and seek to redirect your energy into changing the course, or you are in denial of the urgency or even maybe the existence of such a crisis, or perhaps paralyzed by the futility of contributing to change, and continue to pursue whatever ambition/distraction is driven by your psychological mindset.

This text is for the former.

With that in mind, we must recognize that neither democracy, nor socialism, nor any other political system, has provided the ability for humanity to collectively act in its best interest.

We must acknowledge that we, of the first group above mentioned, must attempt to collectively induce the second group into behavioural alignment with the objective of reorienting humanity toward ecological rehabilitation despite their worldview that there is no crisis.

Its like being trapped belowdecks in third class on the titanic while all the officers and crew of the ship, and the elite passengers, blissfully dance and drink the night away as we careen toward mutual destruction in a sea of icebergs.

Realizing this, I began to formulate the concept for Real Economics as I waded through the texts of recognized “economists: from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman over the last three decades.

So while I am not an accredited economist in the professional sense, I have been reading economics since I was a teenager, and have been trying to reconcile the optimistic certainty with which these theorists describe economic processes with the utter shambles that economics has created in the global ecology.

Having arrived at the table of the Ecological Economists through (first) Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his utterly brilliant The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, the fundamental relationship between humans and the physical world as described in the context of thermodynamics and energy is perfectly revealed, but again, the emotional energy plane of humans is not considered as an economic input.

And so we need something else. We literally have to dupe the rest of our species into such a behavioural realignment by incentivizing the change with the same dopamine and serotonin-releasing rewards that currently drive their wealth accumulation imperative. 

For this, we must appreciate that the democratic process cannot succeed. Because, as we are currently witnessing, the vast majority of human beings are incapable of acting in their own special long term interest.

About my intended meaning of the word “special”: This word used in this text will signify “of the species” as opposed to the current dictionary definition as “being distinct or endowed with irregular features”.

The futility implied in Winston Churchill’s famous pronunciation that “democracy is the least worst system” is all the evidence we need that the tendency of human beings to seek the solutions that are the most expedient with the least amount of effort is our achilles heal.

We don’t have pure democracy at any scale in any government.

What we have is a controlled process carefully shaped and decorated with all the trappings of democracy, but where only an exclusive subset of privileged elite narrow the range of choice into only one or two possible candidates representing left and right. This is moreso the case in Canada, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Europe has greater variety within national boundaries, but the financial marketing firepower of candidates is still a significant determining factor on who governs.

Across the G7 and more broadly, the G20, the policies of government are informed by economists, justified in the language of economics, and measured using arcane and ultimately misleading economic formulas and text.

The effect is that most people consider themselves unqualified to discuss economics, or opine on economic conditions and phenomena beyond their own personal economies – a reality that passes unnoticed by individuals too busy pursuing wealth accumulation strategies or just trying to provide for their families through the practice of a trade or profession.

The point being here is that, under the banner of “democracy”, we have, in almost all cases, a thinly disguised oligarchy, where a small minority of the global financial elite control the political process from beginning to end, including its rules, candidates, and victors.

The result is that there is little to no representation of the interests of most of us. The governments divvy up the natural resources of their geographic domains, and allocate their extraction to the highest bidder. 

Ecological concerns are always secondary, and the long term eonic implications are not even discussed  in economic, ecologic, geologic, or evolutionary terms and implications.

With the convergence in the timeline of global supply versus global demand now passed, there only remains the intensification and proliferation of violence as the natural agent of change on a civil, social, national and special level.

Rather than pretend or expect a solution to arrive from the corporate or governing class (whch includes the subset of ludicrously wealthy human beings who inherited their wealth), it is going to be up to us to defend against the vast resources of this financial minority as they increase the pressure on lifespan to reduce human population.

This process is well underway. The construction of the social media systems such that they are designed to facilitate an “us versus them” mindset in daily life is evidence that a conspiracy among the global elite is underway, with population reduction through civil and racial warfare as the objective.

Think about it. Arm the masses with a plethora of weapons (that will be useless against the expensive technical defenses and weapons systems in use by the elite), then incrementally erode their standard of living, social institutions, and political representation, until they feel justified in resorting to lethal force against the perceived “them” as the architects of their misfortune.

The hard irrefutable evidence that such a conspiracy is being conducted by the global elite is carefully concealed by this cartel, for they control the algorithms that deliver an audience to any content publisher.

So literary speculation pieces such as this can be easily adorned with the mantle of “uncredible source”, simply because we have been conditioned to believe that a) anyone without a degree is not credible, and b) any content with a limited number of views is not relevant.

This is by design, and the purpose is to prevent advocates for human liberty from aggregating a mass following.

This perception by the general public is further fortified by permitting the assembly of large audiences behind controversial content creators who are advocating for either a) radically violent overthrow of government, or b) Christian right wing extremists.

If you are of a calm, analytical temperament, you will notice a distinct absence of calm and measured discussion anywhere online, since this is the most dangerous content because it uses the power of logic to persuade individuals who are motivated by a rational mindset in pursuit of a truthful worldview.

What if everything we’re taught about economics at the university level is wrong? Not in the context of “incorrect”, but meaning we are focusing our thought and energy on the wrong set of data.

By focusing economics on the study of resource management and consumption exclusively from the human perspective, we operate on the assumptions that 

Continuous economic growth is desirable and possible and is in our collective best interest;
The ecology is a source of inputs and nothing more;
Humanity is sustainable in its current configuration.

See what I mean? Knowing what we know now, these three assumptions are disastrously faulty.

Humanity has demonstrated that it is incapable of acting in its own best interest. That is because the vast majority of humans have their values ordered according to that which contributes most substantially to sense of self, or the comfort and ease thereof.

There is no leadership on Earth who could be said to have the best interests of humanity at the root of their ambition to lead, and there are no heroes to save the human race from its own stupidity.

So this book is intended for those who survive the sixth mass extinction event, upon which we are now decisively, yet unconsciously embarked.

As this process unfolds, the current economic framework of the world will collapse, because it is rigidly dependent on and driven by Continuous Economic Growth (CEG). Again, this is because humanity values most highly the superficial trappings of luxury and the perceived freedom that wealth imbues us with.

CEG is physically impossible on a finite planet such as Earth, interplanetary ambitions notwithstanding.

The pursuit of CEG drives overpopulation, and has caused the excess population to expend the available global inventory of natural resources faster than they can be replenished. Also, the pressure on the global ecology inflicted by such concentrated resource consumption renders it unable to process the waste and effluent from such output.

Once the process of this sixth mass extinction has run its course, the question will be what should the shape of economics that drives human resource governance look like?

This book provided a framework for the next generation of economics, largely based on ecological economics, but with the objective being the maximization of the duration of humanity at the apex of the global food chain.

The world’s ecology is rapidly deteriorating toward a convergence of systemic breakdowns that are starting to reduce the longevity of humans and increase the rate of mortality via climate events. While some call it the 6th extinction event, it certainly appears humanity is on the cusp of a reversal in population growth.

The branch of human professionals called scientists have been growing more strident in their climate warnings, and have now started to participate in acts of civil disobedience designed to draw attention to their message. The consensus among that ilk is that we have passed the point of no return, and now must act to diminish the intensity of the effects of climate change.

Yet there is no response from government or industry, beyond superficial measures designed to qualify their corporations as “ESG” compliant.

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Wikipedia describes it as “an approach to evaluating the extent to which a corporation works on behalf of social goals that go beyond the role of a corporation to maximize profits on behalf of the corporation’s shareholders.”

The European Union decided in 2021 to include nuclear power companies and natural gas industries in its ESG “taxonomy” which is its official outline of what qualifies as ESG.

The whole intent of the ESG designation is to outline “the steps portfolio managers need to take to reach the goal of net-zero carbon dioxide emissions in their investment strategies by 2050.” 

ESG, much like the climate accords such as the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Agreement before that, have been more symbolic than concrete attempts to reign in emissions from human economic activity.

COP26, held in Glasgow in 2021, was characterized by a usual selection of government and financial elite flying in on private jets to collaborate on yet another insufficient statement of intention to reduce global warming.

The annual World Economic Forum event – nothing more than another exclusive conference of elite billionaires and their government enablers strutting importantly amid canapés and pontificating on equality, infectious diseases, and of course, climate change.

Yet nothing concrete ever materializes, and they all soar off in Gulfstreams and Boeings to the next extravagant event to see and be seen, adding to the problem while pretending to solve it.

And herein lies the stark reality; our global governance and leadership, guided by the mantra of perpetual and maximum economic growth, has become so transfixed on the appearance of action while collectively acting to preserve their wealth and elite lifestyles that any meaningful change is impossible.

If you scratch beneath the surface of all the great “philanthropists” of our time, we see a legion of billionaires trying to offset their perceived greed with acts of charity. True charity is conducted anonymously. 

We live in a toxic feedback loop where our values are, by default, defined by the most ignorant and rapacious manifestations of humanity whose addiction of opulence is only exceeded by their indifference to the fate of humanity. 

I use the term “ignorant” deliberately, for in one context of the word, implying an absence of comprehension, we might be able to assign the phenomenon to a lack of ecological education. But the other sense, where one is aware of but chooses to ignore information, a more sinister responsibility is implied.

Either way, the billionaire elite class has no excuse to be travelling in the most greenhouse gas-emitting form of transportation (private jets) while cloaked in the mantle of concern for humanity.

At a time when greenhouse gas emissions from excessive petroleum product consumption is exerting the effect of intensified rainfall, drought and wildfires, how is that travel by private jet is still allowed? And to add insult to injury, is reserved only for the class of people who consume the most of everything per capita?

This community of elite serves no other function than to preserve and protect their status and wealth from being undermined by the popular outrage.

The argument that these are the world’s employers is patently false. Through the globalization and centralization of industry, they squash diversity in competition, and thereby squeeze wages lower while their profits skyrocket.

We must confront this gross overriding hypocrisy head on. Media is part of the billionaire-controlled globalized discourse, focused on instilling an “us versus them” mentality on the population to divert attention from the daily gross transgression of the billionaire class.

From Google’s meticulously (and algorithmically) curated search, we are confronted with world where there are only two choices: red versus blue; socialism versus capitalism; black versus white. This is the product of the billionaire class’s war against We The People.

Without a fundamental shift in values, humanity is doomed to repeat the ecologically destructive behaviours from which it derives its livelihood every day.

The era of acceptance of the global eco-political power structure is now over, because they have squandered their opportunity to lead and instead indulge, while thumbing their noses at the public and the rules they create to keep the rest of us in line.

Despite the recognition of the planet’s growing ecological frailty, scientists are travelling to Antarctica and every corner of the world’s last remaining wildernesses on fossil-fuel powered vessels, thus compounding glacial ice melt in pursuit of evidence that the climate is changing.

The inherent contradiction of such research appears lost on the scientific community, rendering it at least in part complicit in the human ablation of planetary ecological integrity.

As a species, we practice a willful ignorance of this reality, each of us intriguing and scheming to advance our personal ambition according to values we hold as individuals. 

In that pursuit, we have caused the rate at which subsurface natural resources are converted into engineered exosomatic composite products to increase dramatically over the last hundred years. And alongside that, the rate of ecological contamination that is a byproduct of manufacturing technologies and systems has grown exponentially.

Economics – the system by which we account for, measure and forecast the consumption and distribution of natural resources and the products they comprise, has failed to adequately inform the governing powers of humanity of the status of the ecology. 

In fact, economics has promoted the pursuit of perpetual economic growth, and contemplates no alternative scenario.

 Thus, the ecology has evolved to be categorized as a natural environment that the economy happens inside of.

This is one of the fundamental perceptive flaws in the conception and execution of the economic model. 

What we are discovering as a result of our misconception of what an economy is is that the ecology is, in fact, the entire global economy. We have made the ecology into an economic input without properly – holistically – accounting for its ablation.

This book is designed to identify the values we hold as individuals, families, communities and institutions that are destructive to the global ecology, and offer substitutes and methodologies for achieving them.

The goal is to attain values that result in behaviours and choices that are ‘net rehabilitative’ to the global ecology, and thereby reorient human action toward ecological integrity as the leading human value – not money.

When we consider the ecology in the context of economics in this way, it becomes inherently obvious that we are in a crisis of ecology, due to the economic behaviours our misconception has induced humanity to conduct across personal, familial, civic, national and international social strata.

What needs to happen is that we must collectively, voluntarily reorient our values such that our economic behaviours become ecologically positive, instead of negative. We must pursue the reorientation of collective human behaviour to a first “rehabilitative” mode, and thence to a sustaining preservation mode.

Which requires the participation of global leadership on a cooperative basis. The only way to do this is to formally recognize these definitions, and move to suppress the competitive approach to sustenance and render it overtly cooperative.

But here we have a problem.

Our system of global governance is neither truly democratic nor socialist. Each of the most developed nations have achieved their relative wealth through the exploitation of their and subsequently other countries’ resources, and now hold their governments and citizens in indentured servitude through the mechanism of debt.

The billionaire class in developed countries influence media and educational curriculum to inculcate the value system that drives the pursuit of wealth as the overarching daily activity; everyone wants to be a billionaire.

Billionaires have an exorbitant amount of access to and influence over politicians who make laws and policies, and their classification as “oligarchs” is appropriate.

Governments are thereby naturally prone to corruption that sees billionaires’ interests placed ahead of the public interest.

There are over 700 billionaires in the United States of the roughly 2500 listed by Forbes magazine. Yet there is clearly a segment of billionaires who are not listed by Forbes and who keep the magnitude of their wealth private. One might surmise that the undisclosed billionaire list is actually several times larger than the list maintained by Forbes, though that would be next to impossible to prove.

Suffice to say that the ratio of billionaire’s influence on any and all political processes is far greater than any modest citizen’s.

Never mind the corporate billionaires, 

That more than anything is the fundamental flaw of democracy as it exists today.

However, if one were to include the “corporate” billionaires, then the numbers swell to tens of thousands.

Even the term “billionaire” is starting to lose the significance it once had in the face of corporate billionaires now becoming “trillionaires”. Trillions is the new bar for corporate billionaire aspirants.

One dismal reality has become clear; neither billionaires, nor their captive political class, are going to lead humanity out of these circumstances.

All they can do is react by pledging money to the problem, but it is money that has caused the problem, in part, and so can do little to impact the main causes of ecological degradation.

The time has arrived for those of modest ambition and genuine concern for humanity, the planet, and its ecology to abandon their quiet lifestyles and join together to catalyze a worldwide revision in leadership and values.

If we recognize that the economsits, billionaires, and elected officials are only capable of perpetuating the status quo due to the corrupt influence of billionaire, then we can start to act independently of that system.

With the social media interconnectivity at the level we it is, coordinating global collective action has never been more possible.

We are the Real Economists. Those of us who practice, through tempered ambition, a rehabilitative mode of living through agriculture, or other ecologically remedial or preservationist professions.

This book is a recruitment document to demonstrate how economics can be enlisted by such citizens willing to devote significant time and effort to effecting this change.

Protests and civil disobedience are great for getting media attention, but ultimately this has not resulted in any meaningful persistent improvement in governance nor ecological protection. 

Media, the Adversary

Outside of the applied sciences, everything we’ve been taught in school is wrong.

Or rather, deficient. 

Particularly as it pertains to the science of economics, which has evolved from an invisible system of biological and psychological urges driving consumption of the natural environment, to today’s complex and largely artificially stimulated mass extraction and transformation of the Earth’s crust into an infinite range of products exclusively for human convenience.

That has arguably been the key defect in our evolution of economic thought; it has always proceeded from the perspective of human need and action.

The natural world shows us that there are many processes that could be described as economic that are independent of human participation or involvement. (Though not interest, considering the ubiquitous saturation of humans presently).

Economics should be redefined to describe the input necessities for survival juxtaposed against the actions available to the system in question.

So a rock lodged on a hillside subject to annual rains can be regarded as being subject to the economic processes that will see it eventually break loose, tumble down the mountainside, shatter into a multitude of smaller rocks, all while making micro and macro transformations to the insect, plant, geological, bacterial, and a range of other systems during its voyage.

None of this is considered as the product of economic activity, yet if this scenario plays out in an area that was historically desert, but has now become subject to monsoon-like activity thanks to anthropogenic climate change, then the transformation of these systems are as a result of human economic activity.

But we currently only consider these other processes in the context of slope mechanics, physics, thermodynamics, atmospheric etc, without tying the cause or the resulting effect back into the economic discourse as it today exists. 

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Economics as a social science has failed humanity and the Earth, and needs to change. Or rather, be changed.

We can change it. You and I. The “people”. We shall, in this book from this point forward define the “us” and the “them”.

They are the industrialists, politicians and billionaires who believe they are entitled to extract more than their fair share of Earth’s production by exploiting the labour of the masses.

At this point you are likely trying to categorize this as either “socialist” or “communist” or “anti-capitalist”. None of these are accurate. 

This is ecological capitalism. This is social capitalism. This is capitalist socialism.

For at the core, capitalism is the right and ability of the individual to exploit opportunity for personal reward. And there is no greater opportunity – nor reward – available to the next generation than the rehabilitation of the Earth’s ecology.

The change required is so drastic that it is almost impossible to imagine it occurring from within the  profession, because the profession is in its current state a derivative of the flawed scope of thought that Real Economics must incorporate in order to be successful.

This book is intended to convey to you the reader that economics is a simple proposition, by which we are all governed, and are therefore under personal obligation to understand and practice in our lives.

If we collectively act to take charge of our own economic destiny, we can disintermediate governments and businesses that parasitize society for the sole purpose of personal wealth generation and accumulation.

Think about it.

If only 3 -5 percent of human beings adopt the intentional procreative restraints suggested in this book, we would in a single generation reverse the growth of human population. All of the problems associated with excessive human population would then naturally begin to diminish. But we dive deeper into the population question in Chapter 3.

But reaching the point of economic self-sufficiency is the first step in catalyzing a global response that can effectively achieve Real Economic equity. Racism, industrial resource exploitation, and mass production of goods must all be subordinated to this new economic way of being.

And together, voluntarily, without the participation or even the awareness of government, we can begin the next phase of human evolution without shedding a single drop of blood.

I have incrementally abandoned my profitable existence as an investment content producer to become a farmer in Ontario, Canada, because this is the best way to demonstrate my commitment to and the viability of the concepts I am about to lay out for you.

My intent is to demonstrate through real world application the concepts herein explained, and show that regenerative, organic farming is the only agricultural economic system that can increase land productivity without a commensurate burden of chemical effluent that causes ecological diversity reduction.

The land upon which this project is undertaken was a derelict greenhouse operation growing potted plants for roadside sale. The previous owners would bury the surplus plastic pots, trays, greenhouse plastic sheets and chemical additives in their containers at various places across the property.

We have been sifting the soil (literally) for two years now in an ongoing and seemingly futile effort to remove the plastics from the soil. I can’t imagine what the microplastic load is going to be on a ppm basis once this herculean task is complete.

But we are also building soil by layering shredded trees that are available cheaply from the local county waste management authority nearby.

With global governance firmly entrenched in the economics as taught in universities today, there is zero chance of the dramatic shift required.

So it is up to non-economists to demonstrate that Real Economics is not only a superior approach to the management of humankind’s resources; it is the only approach that can result in the reversal of our accelerating progress into an extinction event.

This book proposes a new model of economic resource management, a guide to behavioural adaption of the principles of this Real Economic Model across individual, institutional and corporate entities, and a global marketing campaign to capture the participation of the segment of population who are capable of understanding the need to change and the ability to do it.

Entrenched attitudes and thinking toward economics at the level of global governance is derived from the academic tradition as it has evolved through history. Its practitioners have contemplated the management of resources from only the perspective of human utility and consumption, and attempted to explain cause and effect by interpreting data associated with consumption, supply and demand.

It has failed to incorporate the interests of the billions of other components of the Earth from which all economic commodity and utility is derived. Therefore, the ecology – in this book, the entirety of all other constituents of the biological and non-biological elements of Earth – has been deprecated to the bottom consideration for the conduct of economy.

This is not merely unsustainable – it is accelerating the collapse of ecological systems such that portions of the Earth’s surface are unable to support human – or any – life. The amount of uninhabitable area is only going to grow as desertification increases, while the amount of habitable area is being eroded by rising sea levels, melting permafrost, and receding ice sheets.

So the conduct of economics to date is not only self-defeating; it is self-destructive. As I discuss in Chapter 3, the unbridled explosion of population is the purest evidence of humanity’s inability to apply economic restraint to their own reproductive output. As a result, the excess population is the fundamental underlying cause of all climate change, resource depletion and pollution.

Whereas the presumed function of economics is to intelligently manage resources to the benefit of humanity, it has instead become the mechanism by which financial oppression is deployed as a tool by the wealthy to maintain the subjugation of the proportion of humanity who do not qualify as such.

Thanks to the proliferation of information technology, the awareness of this fundamental power and wealth imbalance has become increasingly widespread. So much so, that a survey of social media platforms and sentiment clearly indicates a rising tide of resistance to the status quo.

This book is presented as a system of thought and action that can begin to address these defects in the human character, and provide alternative modes of valuation and occupation in such a way that they are a realistic and tangible alternative to all readers.

The reality of the two-party system that is dominant in many developed economies projects the appearance of choice, and is maintained by financial rules that ensure it is extremely unviable to create new parties with any penetration. This is conducted under the illusion of democracy.

The illusion of democracy is projected because there is the institution of free and unfettered journalism. But this is not entirely accurate, because the vast majority of western media outlets are under the concentrated ownership of a small group of billionaires, who determine the editorial range and content agendas of each media source. We discuss the function of media and journalism in Chapter 5.

In the authoritarian oligopolies such as Russia, Turkey, China, etc, personal freedoms are restricted, and no pretense of freedom of the press even exists. There is no choice of government by the people, and the government system is conducted under the illusion of communism.

But the communist system is so far removed from what really exists in these countries, which is ostensibly based on an egalitarian interest driven by socialism, that it is laughable.

And so we find the world and its resource wealth controlled and distributed by similar elite private interests under false political and social pretences.

As a result, the global ecology is decaying rapidly, social support structures are collapsing, and infrastructure is crumbling.

Humanity has arguably entered an acceleration toward its own extinction driven by its inability to realize the full potential of sentient species characterized by intelligence.

And we are incapable of escaping this trajectory given the captive nature of our global governance by extreme self-interest by the controlling minority.

So we have to find a way to dismantle and disempower the legacy systems of government and resource management. And we need to do so through collective action that is fundamentally cooperative instead of competitive.

The Real Economist presents a system of acting collectively that will disempower the status quo over time, and replace it with a system of autonomous self-determination where the information delivered through media, education and public discourse, is anchored in science, and not populism, or some billionaire’s financial interest.

The extent to which the chosen behaviours of individuals are shaped and driven by media influence captive by billionaires may surprise you. But the incorporation of desire as inspired by media as a driver of human behaviour is pernicious. We find ourselves making choices and buying things on impulse as the result of our susceptibility to suggestive social media influencers whose power is derived by the number of followers they have, which is determined by the owners of the platforms upon which their influence exists.

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An academically trained economist would not likely find themselves in agreement with the principles set out in this work. And so it is with some degree of irony that I settled on the name for this book.

A PhD economist will likely conclude that this is not a work of economics at all, but rather a political philosophical ramble by an un-academically trained individual.

But I arrive at this endeavour honestly.

My father told me when I was 14 years old that gay people were sick and needed to be sent to a psychiatric hospital. He didn’t know it then, but I am gay. From that point forward, I went to war against the world. I hit the road on my motorcycle on a journey of exploration and contemplation. I sought to exact revenge on society by (in my thinking) punishing it for being as it was.

I started reading when I was young thanks to my parents’ prescient purchase of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World, a set of 54 volumes including everyone from Aristotle and Plato to William James, Adam Smith, Charles Dariwn and Leo Tolstoy. Thus I had become predisposed at a young age to questioning authority and acting in a non-conforming manner with society.

I don’t mention this to impress but to explain that I come to economics not through academia but through a lifelong interest bordering on obsession in literature. For in reading the Great Books, which indeed form an excellent representation of the evolution of western thought, it becomes evident that the principal motivation of mankind through the ages is the pursuit of power through wealth.

I should say that I haven’t read this entire series cover to cover, and in fact haven’t even gone past the first few pages in many, but exposure to this set throughout my childhood is the metaphysical foundation that shaped my intellectual pursuit in life.

So in the absence of academic credentials in the field of economics, you might disqualify me from eligibility to opine on the subject. However, I counter with the idea that I had no time to study economics at school because I was too busy living it by the skin of my teeth.

In fact, by the time of my conscious teenage war declaration, I had already concluded that the ruling class of the world was corrupt and that the geo-political order of the world was largely illusory. Furthermore, it seemed to me that school was nothing more than a forum for indoctrination of the conformist response to the hypocritical values that were/are projected to anchor global society’s supposed and often contradicted moral code.

Also, I wish to disclose at the outset no valid claim to moral high ground in this pursuit, as my many sordid tales of life on the road through the underbelly of North America will demonstrate. 

So I was born an economist, and so were you, as I shall prove herein.

•••••••••••••••••••

If I told you that the duration of human life on the planet Earth was only .004% of the time that Earth has existed, you might not be surprised.

Earth should be viewed as a living organism which we depend on for continued survival.

In fact, the priority should be the health and vitality of Earth. In the Real Economic Model, the overarching priority is precisely that. First, we must rehabilitate the ecology by implementing the measures of self-restraint discussed in population, then we need to adopt the rehabilitative modes of existence that render the entire species a net positive ecological presence, then we have to preserve what would then be a sustainable natural equilibrium that would offer its members lush and fulfilling lives full of natural beauty and wonder.

I come from the universe and this is the wisdom of the universe as whispered to me in my incessant roaming through the forests of the west coast of Canada. I did that for about 10 years in my 30’s and 40’s, and I now seek to invest that knowledge in this project called The Real Economist. 

An Economist, by the earliest definition, is one who acts economically. 

That is, they live within their means by ensuring a balance, to the best of their ability, of inputs versus output.

This applies to health, personal finance, relationships, families, and mental state. 

In this book, I shall continuously distinguish Real Economics from academic economics, which is derived from the traditional and classical schools of economic thought to today’s structure of interpreting economic phenomena from the basis of a small rigid set of principles.

I quit school and began a youthful journey of self-discovery supported by menial labour jobs and itinerant entrepreneurialism. I wandered North America in various configurations working construction in Arkansas, logging in the Queen Charlotte Islands, cooking at the Hotel Plaza II in Toronto, working a flea market in Alabama, refinishing furniture in Jordan, Ontario, selling magic mushroom chocolates at the Tragically Hip’s Roadside Attractions across Canada, growing weed in Vancouver, bartending in Banff, farming in Manitoba…you name it.

The Who’s lyric “hope I die before I get old” was my anthem and I was recklessly intent on ensuring that sentiment’s fulfillment. I had no intention of becoming a part of the society that would categorize me as ill while deeming its own destructive behaviours socially acceptable..

My reading list evolved toward Carlos Castenada, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs during this period of wandering, and became an avid consumer of marijuana and psychedelics. I became immersed in mysticism ranging from the Baghdad Gita to Alistair Crowley and pursued a hedonistic withdrawal from normal society, seeking to follow the inclinations born in psychedelic bliss and follow a path of self-enlightenment.

By the time I was in my early thirties, it dawned on me that I was wasting my life in a prolonged teenage rebellion, and I decided that the only really good use of my time on earth was to attempt to influence the direction of humanity by changing it from within.

Recognizing that my ability to influence the geopolitical establishment was laughable given my history of abstention from education, politics, industry and society, I decided it was time to create the perception of a businessman who was on Team Capitalism in the most profound and meaningful way.

I started reading economics post Adam Smith, and realized there was a particularly libertairian segment of successful business people who were oriented toward what is known as the Mises school of economic thought, after Ludwig von Mises, an economist who defined the field via “praxeology” or the study of human action.

Von Mises is most appreciated today for his business cycle theorem and monetary theory, and is notable in the history of economic thought in that he was the iconic father figure of the branch of economic thinking foundational to today’s Libertarians, that eschews any government interference in commerce or the right to self-determination.

I address the individual influences of the most recognized historical economists in Chapter 3, and use their foci to support the relevance of Real Economics.

In all pursuits, there are economic considerations. No more so than in the execution of war, as Napoleon and Hitler can well attest. Economic miscalculations were at the heart of the dismal ends both despots ultimately realized.

In my personal war, I felt, as any warrior does, justified in my conduct because at least, I thought then, gay people at least weren’t breeding uncontrollably like lemmings and suffocating our shared habitat.

Never one for violence, my warfare took the form of petty transgressions against society at large, a period from which I emerged remarkably unscathed.

I learned more reading outside of school than I ever did in school. I made more money operating my businesses according to my own rules and experiences, and don’t share the conventional lust for typical social experiences that are pursued by most people.

So in studying economics, and more importantly, the effects of modern economic policies on society and the world, I quickly came to realize that the function of economics in society was to serve as a reference justification for the policies enacted to serve private financial interests over the public interest.

As an avatar of the anti-establishment, I am determined to promote the dismantling of the power structures of economics and politics, and harness the individual collective action to drive an egalitarian distribution of resources while eroding the legality and morality of extreme individual wealth.

To classify this as socialist is to miss the point entirely.

On a planet where overpopulation of the most destructive species will shorten the lifespan of all humans independent of political, spiritual, sexual or gender affiliation, such identity politics have no place.

Neither capitalism nor communism, socialism or democracy, can occur on a barren planet with no atmosphere, ocean or forest.

The program herein proposed is to reverse the ablative destruction of the Earth’s ecology by humans adhering to the status quo by empowering the intelligent choices of truly sentient individuals who understand that the health of the whole is dependent and correlated to the health of each individual species.

I hope you are sufficiently intrigued – and human – to continue.