Or: when abundance becomes the curse and the beggar does not know when he can eat salmon
You can prohibit water, not thirst.
– Eduardo Galeano
If I don’t have money, I can’t eat salmon with mayonnaise. If I have money I must not. But then when will I be able to eat salmon with mayonnaise?
– A beggar who understood everything
Dedicated to all those who think efficiency solves everything, including those who have discovered that yes, efficiency solves everything: it confines us outside the system.
THE MYTH THAT EXPLAINS OUR PRESENT (and that nobody wants to hear)
Once upon a time there was a king named Midas. The gods granted him a wish and he, as a good economist ante litteram obsessed with growth, asked that everything he touched turn to gold.
Great, isn’t it?
Touch a stone: gold. Touch a tree: gold. You touch a chair: gold. GDP skyrockets. Productive efficiency is maximum. Everything has value. Literally: EVERYTHING has value. There is just one tiny problem. Midas tries to eat. Bread turns to gold. He touches water. Gold. He touches his daughter to embrace her. Golden statue.
King Midas dies of hunger and thirst, surrounded by the greatest abundance ever seen in human history.
And as he dies, probably some advisor of the gods is explaining to him that the problem is only one of ‘redistribution’ and that a ‘participatory platform’ is needed to better manage the allocation of gold. Midas dies anyway. Surrounded by gold. And by PowerPoint.
BECAUSE MIDA IS US (and AI is our cursed touch)
In my previous article, I told you about Isis Ambidextrous: the one that was supposed to put the pieces of Osiris back together but ended up creating 140 more. The government that wants to be efficient AND innovative but ends up being paralysed AND bureaucratic. Today I tell you about the sequel: King Midas of Efficiency.
Why? Because we have spent 200 years optimising everything. Making everything more efficient. Producing more with less. Artificial intelligence is just the last touch – the final touch – that turns everything into gold.
More productivity: gold.
Less costs: gold.
Price deflation: gold.
Total automation: gold.
Mass unemployment: gold… wait, what?
Yes. Because like Midas, we discovered too late that gold cannot be eaten.
THE BOAT AND THE WITCHES (aka: we’re all in the same boat, idiots)
Before I go on, I will tell you a story that I like very much (otherwise I would not tell it to you).
A group of people are crossing a river without bridges on board a ferry. At one point a young man pulls out a drill from his backpack and starts drilling holes in the hull beneath his seat. Horrified, the other passengers beg him to stop. “We will all drown!” they shouted at him. Without even raising his head, the young man replies : “Shut up, don’t get involved. I paid for my ticket and it’s under my seat that I’m drowning, so it’s all about me!”
The river is the world. The ferry is society. The crossing is life. The hole is the efficiency that optimises its position not caring about the rest. And the young man with the drill? That was all of us for 200 years. “More competitiveness! Less costs! More efficiency! Outsourcing! Automation! Disruption!”
And now that the water is coming in, we look around in astonishment: But how come we are sinking? We have optimised everything!
Yes. Optimised. Like Midas.
THE PERPETUOUS STIMULATION (or: when getting into debt means buying less and less)
Now we get into the material that nobody wants to read but which explains everything, almost everything. For generations, when private demand faltered, governments relied on fiscal stimulus as an instrument of last resort. From Roosevelt’s New Deal to the CARES Act of the pandemic era: direct spending, subsidies, monetary support. Restoring confidence. Avoiding collapse. As the era of sovereign artificial intelligence advances, however, growing questions arise about the effectiveness and sustainability of this scheme.
Translation: Stimuli no longer work the same as before.
Translation: You’ve punctured the boat too much, genius. Now scooping up water with buckets is useless.
The US added almost five trillion dollars to the national budget from 2020 to 2021. Stimulus cheques, increased unemployment, corporate bailouts, health care. Did it work? It did. For a while. But by 2023, the federal debt had exceeded 120% of GDP. Interest payments were beginning to rival spending on major government programmes. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office:
You cannot get out of structural decline with stimulus. There comes a point where new spending produces less and less, and the debt burden itself becomes a brake on growth.
In other words: Midas can buy all the gold in the world, but he still cannot eat.
Carmen Reinhart, Harvard economist: Confidence in the government’s ability to pay is the ultimate solution. Once questioned, stimulus becomes counterproductive.
Translation: When people realise that the king is naked AND hungry, the magic ends.
DIMINISHING RETURNS, GROWING SCEPTICISM
The International Monetary Fund estimates that the fiscal multiplier from new deficit spending has halved since 2010. What does this mean? That if in 2010 spending 100 generated 150 of economic activity, today it generates 75. It is like pumping water into an increasingly holey boat. Sooner or later you are no longer draining: you are just pumping.
And the hole? The hole is the value compression I mentioned in the Isis Ambidextrous article. AI produces abundance → prices fall → wages fall → demand compresses → stimulus is needed → producing less and less → and meanwhile AI produces even more.
It is the Midas touch applied to economics.
Everything becomes efficient (gold), but efficiency itself kills us (we don’t eat).
THE MENDICANT AND THE SALMON (i.e.: when can you eat?)
Second story. A decadent man convinces a wealthy acquaintance to give him a loan, describing his destitute condition. Shortly afterwards, however, the benefactor is stunned as he observes the beggar sitting comfortably in a fancy restaurant in front of a generous plate of salmon with mayonnaise. Puzzled and indignant, he enters the restaurant: “But how, you ask me to borrow money and then order salmon with mayonnaise?” Calmly, the beggar replies: “I just don’t understand you. If I have no money, I cannot eat salmon with mayonnaise. If I have money I must not. But then when will I be able to eat salmon with mayonnaise?”
Stop for a moment. Reread. Because this story IS citizenship income. It is the economics of abundance. It is all our madness.
The beggar is right. The prevailing logic tells him:
– If you are poor, you cannot afford the luxury
– If you have money, you don’t need loans
– So you can never eat salmon
It is the same logic he says:
– If you don’t work, you don’t deserve income
– If you have (citizenship) income, you have to prove that you ‘deserve’ it
– But the work is not there
– So…?
Desire is never just a desire for bread. The great and immense Eduardo Galeano: “You can prohibit water, not thirst.”
Desire does not have the same nature as basic needs. Desire is more than the satisfaction of basic needs. The beggar does not just want NOT to starve. He wants to live. He wants salmon with mayonnaise. Not because it is necessary. Because he wants it. But society – the society that has the Midas touch – has also turned desire into gold. And gold is not desired. It is hoarded.
THE ‘CREATING WORK’ DILEMMA (aka: the bar for tired robots)
Olivier Blanchard, former IMF chief economist:
Stimuli buy time, not solutions. The longer a structural reform is delayed, the greater the final economic, political and social cost.
Exactly. Stimulus is the scotch on the punctured boat. In a compressed economy, where AI reduces the need for human labour, traditional job creation tools lose their effectiveness. Policy makers may feel pressured to subsidise jobs directly – to create ‘job-creating’ positions simply to keep people formally employed, even when their workforce becomes technologically redundant.
Translation: We pay people to do useless things so we can say they work.
Japan’s experience is a cautionary example: decades of low growth have resulted in a proliferation of state-supported public works projects and employment programmes that buy time but yield only modest social benefits.
Idea: Let’s open a bar for tired robots. A sort of after-work club for robots.
Of course, it remains to be defined what it means to be tired for a robot. But whatever, that’s a detail. Let’s create employment! The bartenders serve the automatons. The automatons pretend to drink. Bartenders pretend to work. The government pretends everything is normal.
Welcome to the Midas economy: everything is gold, nothing is true.
STOP SAYING WE DON’T KNOW (what we know very well)
We don’t know what jobs will be there in ten years.
ENOUGH.
Stop this lie. We know it very well. The data tells us so. AI tells us so. Common sense tells us so. The jobs that will be there in ten years are the jobs that are there today, but done by machines. We can’t wait ten years to find out. What do we tell young people? (and it’s now seven years since I first read it and we’re still here saying it, so it’s 17?)
Don’t worry, you will see that new jobs will be invented, as they always have been
Then go with the stupid comparison (it’s not even a metaphor) with the industrial revolution . In fact, there is always someone who brings up this argument: Even during the industrial revolution they said that mechanical looms would destroy work, and instead…
NO. WRONG. DIFFERENT.
At the time, the jobs were there and they were well defined. People had to be brought from the countryside into the factories. The factories were there and there was a lack of workers. Today there is no equivalent of factories to move workers to. We are not moving people from one industry to another. We are replacing people. It is as if before the cars came we had already installed the petrol stations and done the electricians’ courses. While the horses are still there wondering what the fuck is going on.
DEQUALIFICATION, DIGNITY AND THE FUTURE OF WHAT? (work in progress towards nowhere)
Daron Acemoglu of MIT warns that a guaranteed income, while necessary for economic security, could diminish motivation and weaken the social fabric. Indeed. Because the ‘social fabric’ stands on the fact that everyone must suffer equally. If someone suffers less, the fabric tears. Supporters argue that new forms of civic, creative and caring work will become more important than ever. Such as?
– Creative and cultural work: Will we all become artists? Perfect. Who pays? Ah yes, the citizenship income. Which some politicians only want to give if the pledges. To do what? Art? But if art by definition is free….
– Care work: elderly care, child care, mental health. Beautiful. Too bad kids would rather talk to an AI system than a psychologist. And the elderly? Robots will look after them. More patient. More efficient. More… gold.
– Civic engagement: Volunteering, environmental protection, local governance. Perfect. But local governance is already full of committees that do nothing (see previous article on Isis Ambidestra).
The truth? Nobody has a clue. And what about this beautiful statement: You take a citizenship income and continue your studies.
Yes, but what studies? To do what? For ten years (or maybe three)? And then what? Another ten years of studies? It’s all questions to the end.
Like the little story of regressio ad infinitum that my philosophy teacher used to tell over and over again to train our minds to stop:
If Atlas holds the world on his shoulders, who holds Atlas?
A tortoise.
And who holds the tortoise?
Another tortoise.
And who holds this other tortoise?
“Guaglio’, it’s all turtles all the way.”
For philosophers: it is all questions to the end.
For governments: it’s all commission all the way.
For us: it is all salmon that we cannot eat all the way.
WHEN FISCAL CAPACITY EXPIRES (i.e.: game over)
The final and most worrying risk is that governments will eventually reach the limit of their borrowing and spending power. The US has already suffered credit downgrades. The largest holders of US debt – China and Japan – are gradually reducing their exposure.
What happens when Midas can no longer turn things into gold?
What happens is that he discovers that he has always been poor. That gold was an illusion. That true wealth was in the things he could touch without destroying them.
– But it is now too late.
– He touched everything.
– He made everything efficient.
– He optimised everything.
And now he is starving surrounded by the abundance he himself created.
ABUNDANCE OF WHAT? (the question no one asks)
We talk a lot about ‘abundance’. AI produces abundance. Prices going down. Products everywhere.
But plenty of what?
– Of products? Yes.
– Of services? Maybe.
– What to do with life? No.
– Of significance? No.
– Work that makes sense? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Isn’t it that there is an abundance of workers who don’t know what to do with them? For a lifetime we have taught in economics the PAM principle : More with Less. Produce more with less energy, less materials, less time. Too bad we forgot to put the variable ‘human resource’ into the equation. And now? Now we have discovered that that too has been optimised. Made efficient. Turned into gold.
And gold does not work. Gold is hoarded. (Scrooge McDuck docet)
GOLD DOESN’T HAPPEN (the human cost of efficiency)
But there is another abundance that nobody talks about. The abundance of things we lost while we optimised everything else. Midas didn’t just turn food into gold. He turned his daughter. He wanted to embrace her. He touched her. And killed her. Turned her into a golden statue. Beautiful. Precious. Perfect. Dead. That’s what we did. Not just to the economy. Not just to work. But to everything that makes life human.
MIDA TOUCHES RELATIONSHIPS (and everything becomes a transaction)
We optimised relations:
– LinkedIn: not friends, connections. Measurable. Quantifiable. “I have 500+ connections.” Beautiful. But how many do you really know? How many would you call at 3am?
– Tinder: relationships optimised by algorithm. Swipe left, swipe right. Pure efficiency. Desire turned into data. Love reduced to match. And if you don’t match? You are inefficient. You got the wrong picture. You have the wrong bio. Optimise yourself.
– Facebook: friends you haven’t seen in 15 years but whose breakfast you know. Simulated intimacy. Connection without relationship.
Everything became networking.
How much are you worth? (what can you be useful to me) instead of Who are you? (what are your values). Relationships turned to gold. Sparkling. Numerous. Cold. And we wonder why we are lonely. Midas embracing his daughter. Gold does not embrace. The gold is there. Precious. Worthless.
MIDA TOUCHES IDENTITY (and everything becomes performance)
Who are you if you are not what you do? For generations, the answer was simple: you are what you do. The carpenter. The doctor. The farmer. The musician. Identity = Work. It worked. As long as the work was there. Now? Now Jack can do everything but is useless. And who is Jack if he can’t do?
Efficiency has turned identity into CV. Measurable. Quantifiable. Optimisable.
– Key competences
– Years of experience
– KPIs achieved
– Measurable results
Your value is a number. Your identity is a list. Your being is a performance. What if the performance is no longer needed? What if the robot does better? Who are you? Gold. Efficient. Useless. Identity turned metric. And metrics, like gold, do not embrace.
MIDA TOUCHES TIME (and everything becomes productivity)
There is no more wasted time. Every moment must be optimised.
– Mindfulness to be more productive
– Meditation for better performance
– Exercise tracked
– Monitored sleep (sleep score: 87/100, you can do better!)
– Reading for personal growth
– Hobbies that develop transversal skills
Rest is also optimised.
Idleness? Dead. Turned to gold. You’re doing nothing. It’s become an accusation. What did you do today? If you answer Nothing, you have failed. Free time is no longer free. It is time to be filled. To be invested. Not to be wasted. As if time were a scarce resource to be maximised. We started by doing this with the children. We became their managers: an hour of English, an hour of sport, ecological walks, music, we filled their days with things to do; they had to learn not to waste time.
But time is not scarce. What is scarce is the permission to waste time. The Sufis knew: Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are sleepy. It sounds trivial. But try it. Try eating ONLY while eating. Without a phone. Without TV. Without thinking about anything else. Try doing nothing for an hour. Really nothing. Without guilt. You can’t do it. Because time has become gold. And gold is not wasted. So we spend our days doing ‘useful’ things (to whom?) that do not make us happy, optimising a time we no longer enjoy, to achieve an efficiency that kills us. (And my philosophy teacher used to tell us: You have already read more books than Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, Calvin put together, but you are not like them and never will be: Why?
Midas touching time. Every second turned into gold. Precious. Heavy. Dead.
MIDA TOUCHES DESIRE (and everything becomes a wishlist)
The beggar with the salmon was right. Desire is not need. Desire is something else. But we have turned even that into gold. Amazon knows what you want before you do. The algorithm tells you what to desire.
– Recommended for you
– People who bought this also bought…
– You may be interested in…
Desire turned into data. Anticipated. Optimised. Satisfied within 24 hours. And here the big lie: data is the new oil. Enough, the new oil is desires and algorithms are designed to intercept your desires and do so with just a few clicks. (see previous episode) “the wish train in my thoughts backwards goes” sang Celentano
But is it still desire?
Or is it just consumption driven by an algorithm that knows that if it shows you that thing at that moment you have a 73% chance of clicking? Galeano: “You can ban water, not thirst.” But what happens when thirst itself is created by the algorithm? When you no longer know whether you want something or whether the algorithm has made you believe you want it?
When can you crave salmon?
Not when you are hungry. That is need. Not when you have money. That is spending power. But when you desire just for the sake of desiring. Without justification. Without optimisation. Without algorithms telling you that desire ‘makes sense’ for your profile. Free desire is dead. Turned into gold. Into wishlist. Into “add to cart”. And we wonder why nothing really satisfies us. Because gold is not desired. Gold is hoarded.
MIDA TOUCHES THE COMMUNITY (and everything becomes smart but only)
Remember the boat with the holes? That was the problem: one punctures underneath his seat thinking that it is his business. But there is an even bigger problem. We are not even in the same boat anymore. We’re each in our own. Optimised. Efficient. Alone. The neighbourhood’s gone. When was the last time you asked the neighbour for sugar? Or even said ‘Good morning’ to him? The squares are empty. Or rather, they are full of lonely people. Everyone with their smartphones. Connected to the world. Disconnected from those around them. When was the last time you made a phone call to someone you know just for the pleasure of saying hello?
Smart cities where no one speaks.
Everything optimised. All efficient. Everything smart. Smart traffic lights. Smart parking. Smart lighting. Too bad people are getting dumber. Not in the sense of IQ. In the sense of isolation. Connected everywhere. Alone all the time. Community turned into network. The network into platform. The platform into algorithm. And the algorithm does not know what a community is. It knows what a cluster is. A target. A demographic segment. But community? That thing where you meet by chance, talk about nothing, share time with no purpose? Dead.
Turned into gold. Into ‘interest groups’. Into ‘online communities’. Which are not communities. They are aggregates of connected solitudes. René Girard was right: society stands on its enemies.
But what happens when the enemy is invisible? When is it the system? When is it algorithm? When it is efficiency? You cannot fight gold. You can’t hate Midas. He’s just a king who wanted abundance. Like us. And like him, we discovered too late that the abundance we wanted made us poor in everything that matters.
THE REAL COST OF EFFICIENCY (the one that does not appear in the GDP)
We look at the numbers. Always the numbers.
– GDP growth? OK. Done.
– Increasing productivity? OK. Fact
– Maximised efficiency? OK. Done
And meanwhile he goes down by knockout:
– Depression rates: on the rise
– Loneliness: global epidemic (WHO)
– Burnout: normalised
– Anxiety: the new baseline
– Relationships: shorter, more fragile, emptier
– Community: death
– Identity: fragmented
– Time: never enough
– Desire: algorithmised (I don’t think you can say it, but it gives the idea)
But GDP grows.
And the gold piles up. Midas starves, but his storehouses are full. Midas dies of thirst, but his fountains are gold. Midas dies of loneliness, but his daughter is there. Beautiful golden statue. Who will never embrace him again.
This is the true cost of efficiency. Not economic. Human.
And no commission is measuring it. No platform is optimising it. No algorithm is solving it. Because gold does not embrace. And we have turned everything into gold. Including ourselves.
HOW DO WE ANSWER BRUCE? (the question that matters)
Now we come to the point. How do we respond to Bruce Springsteen when he sings ‘Jack of All Trades’?
I’ll hammer the nails, I’ll set the stone
I’ll harvest your crops when they’re ripe and grown
I’ll pull that engine apart and patch her up ’til she’s running right
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be alright
How do you respond to a person who has always done his duty and then gets thrown out of the system? Certainly not by him. But by those who had to decide and did so only for their own interest and not for the community.
Who answers him?
“Sorry Jack, you’ve been made obsolete. But don’t worry, here’s the citizenship income. You can’t eat salmon, though. You have to prove you deserve it. How? Take a class. Get creative. Volunteer. Care for the elderly. Ah no, that’s what robots do. Well, then… study. What? I don’t know, something. For ten years. Then we’ll talk.”
Is this the answer?
The Boss sings about a man who can do it all. Drive nails. Set stones. Picking up. Repair engines. And we say to him: ‘Well done Jack, too bad that now everything you can do is done by a robot. And it does it better. And it costs less. And it doesn’t complain. And it doesn’t need salmon with mayonnaise.”
Jack turned gold.
Efficient. Optimised. Pointless. Like Midas touching his daughter to embrace her and turning her into a statue.
THE PLEASURE WE ARE MAKING (i.e.: missing the target)
‘Sin’ originally meant missing the mark. Not a moral fault. Not an offence against God. Simply: you shot and you missed. What is the target we are missing? The target was abundance. We wanted to produce abundance for all. We produced abundance.
But we have missed it. Because the abundance we have created is like Midas’s gold: it cannot be eaten. IT IS AN ABUNDANCE OF:
– things you don’t need if you don’t have the money to buy them.
– free time that you don’t know how to fill.
– efficiency that makes you superfluous.
Do you want to see that we hit the wrong target? And now, instead of admitting the mistake and changing aim, we keep shooting at the same target, only with more accuracy. “More AI! More automation! More efficiency!” We are trivialising the target.
And trivialising the target is the real sin.
SOCIETY STANDS ON ITS ENEMIES (thank you René)
René Girard was right: human society normally stands on its enemies. Who is the enemy now?
– AI? No, AI is the solution (they say).
– Work? No, work is what we have to ‘create’ (they say).
– The young? The old? The robots? Capitalism? Citizenship income?
– No one. Or rather: everyone.
Because when there is no clear enemy, the human mind invents one. And the most effective lies are a kind of self-absolution. It is not our fault. It is the fault (in order)
– of the IA
– of young people who do not want to work
– of the system
Meanwhile, heretics are also becoming normalised. They are part of the picturesque landscape. They are absorbed into the narrative to prove that everything is difficult, complex, and that there is nothing you can do about it. Heretic means separate. A kind of truth separated from context. But if heretics become part of the context, they are no longer heretics. They have become gold. Like everything else.
THE NEED FOR ORDER (which becomes dictatorship)
The need for order is a normal thing. But taken to excess it leads to dictatorship. Fear of disease can become obsession. The desire for efficiency can become the Midas touch. And where are we? We are exactly there. At the crossing point. Where
– order is becoming rigidity
– efficiency is becoming self-destruction
– abundance is becoming hunger
The distinction is no longer between good and evil. It is between what is vital and what is mortal. And gold – however precious – is mortal. Because you don’t eat it. It is not drunk. It is not embraced.
HOW DO WE GET OUT OF THIS ENGOING? (spoiler: we don’t get out)
Our bicameral consciousness is atrophying us. For those unfamiliar with the theory: according to Julian Jaynes, humans once did not have a unified consciousness like ours. They had two ‘chambers’: one part that spoke (like a voice of the gods) and one part that listened and obeyed. We are back there:
– One part of us knows that the system does not work. The other part continues to obey.
– One side knows that the citizenship income is necessary. The other side says it is against the dignity of labour
– One side knows that AI will produce abundance. The other side is afraid of that abundance.
We are Midas who knows that touch is a curse but keeps on touching. Because it is the only thing we know how to do. How do we get out of it? Maybe we don’t get out. Maybe the question is wrong. Maybe we should ask ourselves: does it still make sense:
– Does it still make sense to speak of a ‘republic founded on labour’?
– Does it still make sense to remunerate people only if they work?
– Does it still make sense to measure success by GDP?
– Does it still make sense to keep touching everything by turning it into gold?
CODA: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MIDA AND ISIDE (i.e.: recompose vs. destroy)
In the previous article I told you about Isis who had to recompose the 14 pieces of Osiris. Today I told you about Midas turning everything into gold. What is the difference?
Isis recomposes. Midas transforms. Isis takes separate pieces and reunites them into a body. Midas takes living things and transforms them into dead (but valuable) objects.
The modern government is Midas disguised as Isis. He says he wants to recompose. That he wants to create unity. Cohesion. Participatory platforms. But in reality he touches everything. And everything he touches turns to gold. Bureaucratic gold. Inefficient gold. Gold that serves no purpose.
Isis at least had a purpose: to revive Osiris. Midas had no purpose. He only wanted to accumulate. And us?
We just want to optimise. Make everything efficient. All gold. Until we realise that gold cannot be eaten. And that we have also turned ourselves into gold. Efficient.
Optimised. Dead.
P.S. – SOMETHING THE SUFIS ALREADY KNEW
The Sufis tell of a master who was asked, “What is the secret of life?” He replied: “Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are sleepy.” The pupil retorted: “But everyone does that!”
And the teacher: ‘No. When they eat they think of a thousand things. When they sleep they dream of a thousand other things. Eating when you are hungry means ONLY eating. Sleeping when you are sleepy means ONLY sleeping.”
Midas did not know how to eat. We do not know how to live in abundance. We have spent 200 years creating abundance. And now that we have it, we don’t know what to do with it. Because the abundance we have created is gold. And gold cannot be eaten.
P.P.S. – ANSWER TO BRUCE (the one we don’t have)
Bruce, sorry. We don’t have an answer. You did everything right. You learned all the trades. You’re the perfect Jack of All Trades. And we turned you into gold. Efficient. Optimised. Useless. It’s not your fault. It’s the Midas touch we called progress. The only thing we can tell you is this:
When the eyes of the sleepers open, they see that everything is made of gold.
Too bad gold can’t be eaten. And we, Jack, are hungry. All of us. Surrounded by abundance. Like Midas. Like the beggar who doesn’t know when he can eat salmon. Like you.
As I write this, somewhere an algorithm is calculating how long it took you to read each paragraph. But unlike AI, we humans don’t learn from data. We repeat the same mistakes, only with more gold around. The real phantom traffic jam is not in the traffic. It is in the institutions that turn everything into gold and then wonder why people are hungry.
Midas is still there, hungry. The beggar is still there, waiting to know when he can eat. And Jack is still there, who knows how to do everything but is no longer of any use.
Welcome to the economy of the gold that cannot be eaten.
The Midas King of Efficiency welcomes you. Surrounded by abundance. But Starving.
END (but not for the public debt, that continues and knocks us out with a perfect knock-out). One more moment Thomas Stearns Eliot writes: ‘What we say beginning is often the end, and ending is beginning. The end is where we start’. So if it is not an end, it is a beginning, but how? Stay tuned One more moment: what if we started to think like the alchemists, but on the contrary, not starting from lead to turn it into gold, but starting from gold and turning it into humanity?