Economics

Economics is, to me, the biggest and most obvious gap in my knowledge. The fact of the matter is that I can keep a budget, participate as an economic entity in creation or dispersion of australian dollars, get hugely impacted by reserve bank decisions, by govt. budgets and also by world economies going this way or the other; and yet I am as baffled by economics as my dearest nephew* is by the number three. I am sure there is something going on there but I don't have the foggiest idea, what.

It was therefore, with quite the joy of relief, i read the following words in a pretty good interview on Seed:

One of my intellectual heroes, the Nobel Prize– winning chemist Frederick Soddy, put it another way. He said the problem in our economy is the one thing that economists have in their system which does not obey the laws of physics. And that is money. Money is the symbol of wealth, and yet it operates on laws which contradict the laws that wealth operates on. It’s very strange to have a symbol system that operates in ways that are fundamentally different from the thing being symbolized.

And another interview of Herman Daly here.

*my not-yet-two nephew on looking at the house lit up by the maximum number of fairy lights on a residential propery this christmas was properly awed and famously whispered, "two-two lights!"