Related papers: An Apology for Money
We present an elementary analysis of the dynamical aspects of the GDP / government surplus multiplier with relevance to the assessment of a country's debt repayment policy. We show the (at first) counter intuitive result that in order to…
This paper describes a basic model of a gift economy in the shape of a Giving Game and reveals the fundamental structure of such a game. Main result is that the game shows a community effect in that a small subgroup of players eventually…
The premises of an argument give evidence or other reasons to support a conclusion. However, the amount of support required depends on the generality of a conclusion, the nature of the individual premises, and similar. An argument whose…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…
This essay suggests that a proper assessment of the presently unfolding financial crisis, and its cure, requires going back at least to the late 1990s, accounting for the cumulative effect of the ITC, real-estate and financial derivative…
Money is more than just a numeric value. It embodies trust and moral gravity, and it offers flexible ways to transact. However, the emergence of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is set to bring about a drastic change in the future of…
Modern economies evolved from simpler human exchanges into very convoluted systems. Today, a multitude of aspects can be regulated, tampered with, or left to chance; these are economic {\em degrees of freedom} which together shape the flow…
Human error research on overconfidence supports the benefits of early visibility of defects and disciplined development. If risk to the enterprise is to be reduced, individuals need to become aware of the reality of the quality of their…
We analyze the main arguments that attempt to explain why there is no point in changing the envelope. Most people confuse estimation and calculation, conditional and unconditional probabilities, random and non-random variables, modelling…
This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community's capacity for…
Confusion and disagreement around the notion of time is due to the fact that we often fail to recognize that we call 'time' a variety of distinct notions, only partially related to one another. Many apparently obvious properties of time are…
The Turing Test is no longer adequate for distinguishing human and machine intelligence. With advanced artificial intelligence systems already passing the original Turing Test and contributing to serious ethical and environmental concerns,…
We use a controlled laboratory experiment to study the causal impact of income decreases within a time period on redistribution decisions at the end of that period, in an environment where we keep fixed the sum of incomes over the period.…
Financial instability has become a significant issue in today's society. While research typically focuses on financial aspects, there is a tendency to overlook time-related aspects of unstable work schedules. The inability to rely on…
Incongruity often makes people laugh. You have to be smart to say stupid things. It requires to be even smarter for understanding them. This paper is a shameless attempt to formalize this intelligent behavior in the case of an agent…
Affordances, a foundational concept in human-computer interaction and design, have traditionally been explained by direct-perception theories, which assume that individuals perceive action possibilities directly from the environment.…
In this paper, we provide a philosophical account of the value of creative systems for individuals and society. We characterize creativity in very broad philosophical terms, encompassing natural, existential, and social creative processes,…
As rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and the rise of some of history's most potent corporations meet the diminished neoliberal state, people are increasingly subject to power exercised by means of automated systems. Machine learning…
Infinity, in various guises, has been invoked recently in order to `explain' a number of important questions regarding observable phenomena in science, and in particular in cosmology. Such explanations are by their nature speculative. Here…
Creativity has always been synonymous with humans. No other living species could boast of creativity as humans could. Even the smartest computers thrived only on the ingenious imaginations of its coders. However, that is steadily changing…