Wealth Beyond Nations (Abridged)

WEALTH BEYOND NATIONS
ECONOMIC & MORAL PRINCIPLES

of GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCE
Abridged Edition
Michael Byrnes & Tamara van Halm
Copyright 2004-2015 Michael Byrnes & Tamara van Halm
www.outoftheboxinsight.com
v4.0(p)13.3.2015
CONTENTS
ii
Notes on this Abridged Edition
A Debate Without Knowledge?
13
The Nature of Economic Activity
34
The Nature of Social Order
53
Principles of Interdependence
95
Pioneers to a New Frontier
108
History Repeating or New World?
112
About the Authors
PROLEGOMENA
UNDERSTANDING THE CAUSE OF CRISIS, PART ONE
UNDERSTANDING THE CAUSE OF CRISIS, PART TWO
THE FOUNDATIONS OF A NEW FOURTH ECONOMY
THE ENDEAVOR & CULTIVATION OF A NEW FOURTH ECONOMY
EPILOGUE
NOTES ON THIS ABRIDGED EDITION
This book is unorthodox in three specific ways. Firstly,

this thesis is constructed using inductive, rather than deductive
reasoning. Inductive reasoning deals with probability, and generally goes from the particular to a universal. Deductive reasoning
deals with certainty, and goes from the universal to a particular.
In discussing a specific subject, household equity as a function
of wealth distribution as an example, the orthodox methodology
would be to analyze as much data as possible including age,
gender, race, geographic location, and education level of homeowner, etc. From this specific data, then, it can be deduced that an
individual of a specific race, with a specific level of education, in
a specific geographic location, etc., will have a fairly certain likelihood in generating a household equity value of x.
Inductive reasoning, on the other hand, takes a wider birds
eye view of data in an attempt to discern some deeper pattern
such as a pattern to be discerned from comparing diverse streams
of data. Example: between 1947 2010, the rate of growth of
average hourly wages declined by 90%. But during that time, Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) experienced an overall 18% increase
in rates of growth. If wage growth rates were slowing, and GDP
growth rates were rising, something other than wages was fueling
the rate of growth of GDP. Certainly, the use of technology and
automation impacts both labor and output. But perhaps more tellingly, the rates of growth for household debt increased by 48%.
Inductive reasoning, then, would discern that GDP growth was
most probably fueled by increased usages of household debt.
This pattern within the data, then, translates into broad
economic as well as sociological questions to explore: is fueling
economic growth via household debt efficient or not, sustainable
or not, and even, is it moral or not? This last question of morality
is the second way in which this thesis is unorthodox. Conventional
writings of economics most often stay clear of broaching the vexed
subject of moral principles, of what ought or ought not to be. Clasii
Notes on this Abridged Edition
iii
sical and neoclassical economics primarily are focused on practical

solutions to resolve practical problems. This thesis, nonetheless,
will indeed venture into that uncomfortable territory of morality.
For it is there, in that terribly revealing mirror of what ought or
ought not to be, we are forced to face a mosaic of our collective
human natures as we participate in the marketplaces of life. We do
not mean morality as some specific judgment of a specific belief
or action (say, the personal morals involving religious doctrines
or racial discrimination, and the like), but rather, morality in its
universal and socio-economic sense such as, society taking direct
responsibility for its actions and non-actions. Seeking to better
understand the subtly interwoven relationship between our human
communities and the markets we have created for ourselves and
can create anew is the deeper quest of this book.
The third way in which this thesis is unorthodox is that we
utilize dialectic methods (we explain the spiral nature of dialectics later) in an attempt to discern some overarching pattern from
multiple individual patterns. Our objective in using a spiral, rather
than an orthodox circular method of observation and argument
is that we are not attempting to convince the reader of anything
in any authoritative sense; we merely are attempting to communicate that a series of patterns seem to be emerging that relate to
our human socio-economic state of evolution and that it is up to
humanity as a whole to determine the validity of and responses to
the following two observations that seem to be suggested within
the emerging patterns:
Thesis 1: A substantial amount of misinformation and outdated
knowledge is inappropriately guiding our collective understanding
of economics and more specifically and immediately, our
day-to-day management of the global economic crisis we presently
are facing.
Thesis 2: Human civilization has essentially experienced only
three broad paradigms, or fields of socio-economic activity (agriculture and mining, mass production, and services). Primarily due
to advancements in technology and automation, these three fields
no longer demand human labor resources sufficient to employ
the masses, and thus, can no longer sustain aggregate demand
throughout the masses. Aggregate demand is perhaps the most
iv
WEALTH BEYOND NATIONS Abridged Edition
vital ingredient necessary to sustain economic markets as well as

essential social order on a global scale. If aggregate demand cannot
be sustained, then the fabric of social order is jeopardized.
From these two observations, then, a self-evident solution to
the global economic and sociological crisis can be synthesized:
mass human labor now needs to evolve into a new fourth economy.
We shall endeavor to explain what this new fourth economy might
be, and how we can get there from here.
Having said that about the unorthodox construction of this
thesis, the functional intention of this abridged edition is to provide
readers with the essential principles put forward in the unabridged
edition omitting the more detailed exposition and data which
primarily serves to expand upon the nuances of the observations
and arguments that this thesis is making. The unabridged edition
will soon be available via iBooks Store. For further information,
please contact: oobi@outoftheboxinsight.com
It should be noted that Wealth Beyond Nations is, itself, only
the globally-relevant portion of a complex thesis regarding the
subject of developmental economics: Hands & Brains Unbound:
Revealing the Illusion of World Order & the Revolution Ascending
(287 pages), written in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2008.
This was a 9-year in-country project studying the socio-economic
effects of internationally-led nation building upon post-conflict
Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is in Hands & Brains Unbound where many
of the wider observations regarding the global economic crisis
and possible solutions to the crisis first began to take shape. If
the reader happens to be interested in the birth of ideas, or a critical assessment of nation-building, the complete Hands & Brains
Unbound can be downloaded from its permanent link at:
http://www.outoftheboxinsight.com/docs/Hands&BrainsUnbound.pdf
Finally, for communities large and small, we have developed
a dialogue and implementation planning document which facilitates the seeding of intangible assets-based wealth throughout the
masses of a community. The planning document is available upon
request from: oobi@outoftheboxinsight.com g
Prolegomena
A DEBATE WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE?
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy

of truth.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), physicist
Global economies still have not recovered from the

2008 Great Recession. Believing the crisis stems from a shortage
of capital liquidity, some governments national and local have
incurred unprecedented levels of public debt in an effort to stimulate economic activity via government spending programs. Other
governments claiming mass budgetary overreach and insolvency as the underlying causes of the recession have taken the
exact opposite approach and instituted often draconian austerity
measures in an effort to arrest hemorrhaging debt.
No matter the antithetical and extreme policies enacted,
however, economic growth is considered by most to be anemic
at best and in many communities to be sliding into total collapse.
Unemployment, underemployment, and the percentage of those
that dropout altogether from the job market remain acutely high
throughout most regions. Pension funds and other social security programs painstakingly constructed over several generations are in palpable jeopardy of insolvency and ruin. Real estate
markets, except in particular neighborhoods, remain depressed
and unstable. Corporate and personal bankruptcies/insolvencies,
throughout large swaths of the economy, continue to rise hazardously (which only exacerbates job losses). Public infrastructure is
severely aging and rapidly deteriorating with little or no funding
available for modernization.
All the while, income and wealth inequality between the
affluent class and the struggling masses is becoming more visible
1
and disruptive the disparities have grown so extreme that we

no longer speak of the 99% versus the 1%, but rather the 99.9%
versus the 0.1%. Long-festering tensions between citizens and
immigrants have on increasing frequency erupted into violence.
Extremist voices and organizations gain strength and resonance
within society as a whole. Fears of the financial consequences to
an already fragile economy have led to mass denialism regarding
the incalculable damage being inflicted upon global ecosystems by
human mass production and consumption. The citizens of once
proud and prosperous cities and even entire nations are forced to
experience the devastation of insolvency exposed and vulnerable to waiting predators as the rest of the world can do nothing
but watch the downward spiral. The jeopardy to global social wellbeing and order seems to grow more compound and intractable,
rather than be assuaged. The Great Recession, and its disruptive
human toll despite the vast and divergent efforts of national and
global institutions persists. In the face of this prolonged resistance to government and central banking interventions, the public
is growing increasingly pessimistic in its view of government and
its capacity to resolve these entwined adversities. Indeed, in the
eyes of many, whether the attention is centered on local economic
issues or foreign policy security concerns, institutions of government are becoming progressively ineffectual, even irrelevant.
To make matters even more confusing for society, there are
reasonable and rational voices suggesting that the crisis is being
over-dramatized the economic upheavals are merely normal
market corrections, merely blips on the markets long-range radar.
Once the adjustments can run their course, life will once again
return to normal. We are left, then, to try and hold on to whatever
hope we can as a cacophony of television pundits and talking
heads compete to extol the rightness or wrongness of government
spending programs, tax policies, benefits/risks of oil drilling and
pipelines, health care spending, the next election cycle, the next
candidate, market corrections, banking regulations et cetera
et cetera et cetera.
We shall endeavor in this thesis, Wealth Beyond Nations, to view
the lingering global economic crisis from a dramatically different
approach. We shall begin with this profoundly unorthodox view:
the problems relating to the crisis which a vast majority of the world
have been passionately discussing the liquidity problems, the job losses,
the government debts, the tax policies, banks being too big to fail, the
family and corporate bankruptcies, the wealth inequalities all these
problems are not actually problems. They are merely symptoms
of a much more profound and original cause.
This thesis shall endeavor to explain this original cause of the
crisis: societies throughout history have experienced only three
basic paradigms or fields of economic-labor relationships; agriculture and mining, mass production, and services1 (72 percent
of the global labor-force is now crowded into the services sector).
In the past, as technological advancements reduced the demand
for mass human labor in one field, that mass labor subsequently
moved onto the next field. The crisis we are now experiencing is
caused specifically and predominantly because mass human labor is no
longer needed in these three exhausted fields.
In short, we proffer herein that society is now at a crossroads
of how we even define the problem of the global economic crisis.
Either the crisis is caused by too high or too low taxes, too many
regulations, or not enough, too much or not enough government
intervention to create jobs, immigration policies being too lax or
too rigid or even that the crisis is not actually a crisis, but rather
only a market correction or, as this thesis contends, the crisis is
explicitly caused by nothing more than the ceaseless clock of evolution. The essential objective of this thesis is to stimulate a more
enlightened global dialogue to first accurately define the cause of
the crisis (if indeed it can be agreed there is a crisis), and from that
more accurate definition of the problem, some solution or set of
solutions can be more reasonably and rationally considered.
If society chooses to explore the definition of the crisis as we
herein posit it to be that our three accustomed fields of socio-economic activity no longer requires human labor the path this
unorthodox definition weaves shall lead to a series of disquieting
observations. What we mean by this is that if a society is accustomed to viewing the seemingly technocratic and practical func1 The services sector generally includes: government, telecommunication, information
technology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare/hospitals, education, banking/financial services,
insurance, legal services, consulting, news medias, casinos, tourism, and retail sales, etc.
tions of economics through a specific type of world-view lens, and

if that world-view lens were to somehow change, everything that
we thought we knew about economics, finance, corporate management, social policy, and political operations everything that we
think we know would have to be challenged. And this is precisely
what this thesis shall expose: if it is found to be true that the global
economic crisis is indeed a direct consequence to our three accustomed
fields of socio-economic activity (agriculture/mining, mass production,
and services) no longer requiring mass human labor, then it becomes an
inescapable observation that all the world governments, business leaders,
professional economists, and academicians all these elites, and by
extension the masses in general, have been and still are fundamentally
operating from profoundly outdated and misunderstood knowledge of
how and why economic markets function.
Whether relating to the technical process by which money is
created, or societys utopian belief in that economic actors are
somehow efficient as they operate in the marketplace we shall
demonstrate that the philosophies and mechanics of economics
which began to emerge in the 18th century have not been explicitly updated for a 21st century societal reality. As a consequence
of unquestioningly maintaining this outdated knowledge, not
only has modern society mis-diagnosed the crisis, the very solutions presently being employed to ostensibly combat the crisis are
actually exacerbating the damage to the socio-economic fabric
of society. Before we progress any further, a distinction must be
made between data and knowledge. Data (such as employment
rates and fluctuations in GDP, etc.) is merely a mathematical
signpost relating to a specific location on a map of the marketplace. But what if the very map we are using is flawed in some
crucial way? What actual relevance would the data possess if our
knowledge map is inherently inaccurate? In short, what if we are
not where we think we are? Accordingly, we submit that focusing
attention toward data no matter how well researched or presented
is intrinsically misleading society from its more central challenge
to reexamine the very map we adopted generations ago. True and
sustainable solutions cannot be rationally contemplated unless
and until a more accurate and robust comprehension of socio-economic philosophy and mechanics is explored and established.
Once the economic knowledge map (including all the data

derived from the map) upon which societies across the world are
presently constructed is finally recognized to be outdated and thus
nothing more than illusory, the resulting renovation of our shared
knowledge of economics both its philosophical underpinnings
as well as its practical mechanics shall finally expose the raw
and prodigious cognizance of the crisis as we herein posit it to be:
our accustomed three fields of socio-economic activity no longer
requires mass human labor. If the more accurate definition of the
crisis is indeed as this thesis argues, then how might we consider
any possible solution? First, we clearly state what seems to be a
self-evident solution to the observation that mass human labor is
no longer required in our three accustomed fields of socio-economic activity: mass human labor now needs to evolve into a new
fourth economy. If the crisis is indeed caused by nothing more than
the ceaseless clock of evolution, then certainly, it can only be evolution that provides us with the true solution to the crisis.
Secondly, since the explicit cause of the crisis is defined herein
in quite unorthodox methods, we are duty-bound to modify and
perhaps even discard particular orthodox solutions-related tools
and methods which we have so assiduously developed over the
generations. Whether we speak of orthodox micro- or macro-economic tools and methods, these very tools and methods may be
partially responsible for blinding us from seeing the potential
hidden in the unorthodox. Thus, we must exert caution in not
gravitating toward either extreme: defending the orthodox because
we fear the unknown; or throwing the baby out with the bathwater by absolutely discarding the totality of orthodoxy. As we
shall demonstrate, it is indeed possible to cherry pick specific
elements from multiple and diverse paradigms of thought, and
apply these specific elements to specific circumstances.
At a minimum, however, society shall begin to comprehend
that it matters not what orthodox legislative reforms are instituted
by either political or ideological persuasion raising or lowering
taxes, regulating or deregulating the banking industry, increasing
or lowering public spending and debt, and the like. There is absolutely nothing that governments can do that will ever alter the fact
that mass human labor is no longer needed in the three exhausted
economic fields of the past. Put simply, the Titanic has already hit
the iceberg, and no amount of patching the hull will prevent the
ship from sinking. The only rational course of action is to rapidly
and wisely construct a lifeboat a fourth economy.
Further, and keeping in mind that the three economic fields
humanity has been cultivating for generations are now exhausted
in terms of supporting the labor masses, we can also discern
that several of the newly emerging models of economics such
as sharing2, caring3, or gift4 economies, or corporate social
responsibility5 programs are equally incapable of preventing the
ship from sinking. Indeed, even though these types of emerging
economic models originate from genuine and humane intentions,
they may actually be masking our view of the actual problem facing
global societies and their markets. To explain this view: sharing
economy programs, such as Airbnb (accommodations sharing)
or Uber (transport sharing) are not actually sharing in some transcendental sense, but rather are nothing more than markets naturally seeking out more efficient flows of activity. In a conventional
corporation, the company is constantly searching to more effec2 Sharing economy (also referred to as peer-to-peer economy, mesh, collaborative
economy, collaborative consumption) is a socio-economic practice based on the sharing
of human and physical resources. The collaborative consumption model is used in
marketplaces such as eBay, Craigslist, Airbnb and Uber, emerging sectors such as social
lending, peer-to-peer accommodation, peer-to-peer travel experiences, peer-to-peer task
assignments or travel advising, car sharing or commute-bus sharing.
3 Caring economy is a socio-economic practice focused on raising awareness,
investment, and formal economic indicator status in the development of high quality
human capital (particularly for those that seek to assist society as a whole teachers,
doctors, nurses, women in general, and the like).
4 Gift economy (also referred to as gift culture or gift exchange) is a socio-economic
practice based on the notion that valuables are not sold, but rather given without an explicit
agreement for immediate or future rewards. This particular socio-economic practice, more
so than sharing or caring economies, has foundations that are more anthropological rather
than economic. Certain anthropologists have theorized that communities experience
internal conflicts when faced with economic exchanges that may not be mutually beneficial,
and thus seek to encourage members of a community to gift something of value to another
without an explicit expectation for some immediate or future reward thus diffusing any
internal conflict.
5 Corporate social responsibility (CSR, also corporate conscience, corporate citizenship
or sustainable responsible business) is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated
into a companys business model and ethos. CSR policies function as a self-regulatory
mechanism whereby a business monitors and directs its active compliance with legal and
ethical standards as opposed to acting within conventional competitive attitudes that are
more adversarial and/or purely self-interested.
tively utilize its assets, say under-utilized manufacturing capacity.

Thus, the company may choose to expand its product base or even
rent its excess capacity to others. In the same manner, an individual with under-utilized assets such as a spare bedroom or car
passenger capacity is simply and more efficiently utilizing their
assets by renting these assets to the marketplace. The room renter
or car passenger paying for these services are still making a simple
economic transaction but instead of paying a conventional incorporated or unionized taxi driver or hotelier, the payment is being
made to an un-incorporated individual. An obvious attraction of
the sharing economy model is that many of conventional costs of
doing business are minimized, even avoided (such as taxes, regulations, insurance, etc.). At its very essence, these types of sharing
economy programs are nothing more than the de-institutionalization of economic activity, and transferring this economic activity to
another format of an institution. Even this new format of institution
(peer-to-peer, web-based logistics) operates in much the same way
as a conventional institution the owners of the websites receive
a percentage of the profits, whereas the actual service providers
only receive revenues emanating from their specific asset. The
consumers of these sharing economy programs, exactly as they
would with conventional economic actors, simply pay a transaction
cost for the services.
Indeed, many of these sharing economy programs operate on
a firm foundation of capitalism and its strict adherence to profitability and protectionism. In December 2014, as an example, in
the midst of an armed hostage-taking circumstance in Sydney,
Australia, Uber rapidly exploited the situation in that city by aggressively raising its rates for individuals attempting to escape the area.
Indeed, Uber filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent Office
in September 2013, seeking patent protection for its surge pricing
software application. But more systemically, the vast majority of
sharing economy programs do not even share consumer or service
data between each other which would facilitate a much more
fluid and effective relationship between consumers and providers
across a wide network of activities. In short, nothing transcendent
has actually been altered in the transaction process of a sharing
economy activity. That is not to say, however, that substantial bene-
fits are not provided in utilizing some of these emerging models

such as the positive environmental impact that ride sharing
provides. But to classify or consider these emerging economic
models as transcendentally reforming economics and/or society is
simply misleading and disingenuous.
Relating to the orthodox macro-economic schools of thought
that have well-served human societies for generations from the
classical and neoclassical schools, Keynesian and Austrian schools,
capitalism, or any other ism this thesis shall not venture to
critique any of the specifics of these paradigms. Again, as we gain
confidence in exploring the unorthodox, we shall come to experience two fundamental insights. Firstly, we shall understand that
much of the foundations of knowledge and experience amassed
within these various schools over the generations, served a specific
set of circumstances mainly, circumstances that can be defined
as tangible. But as we shall soon discover, if indeed society is to
evolve into a fourth economy, the circumstances which society are
likely to experience in the fourth economy will largely be intangible.
Consequently, we shall most likely again cherry pick specific
elements from any orthodox paradigm, and adroitly infuse unorthodox tools and methods so as to wisely address specific circumstances as they emerge in a fourth economy.
Emerging models such as sharing, caring, or gift economies
even though they may be touted as game-changing alternatives
to capitalism are actually nothing more than genetic siblings of
capitalism, and thus, are treated herein as such. A minor exception
to this view relates to the so-called gift economy, and its anthropological foundation that imbalances in economic transactions
often causes societal friction. The conventional anthropological
view is that societal friction is something to avoid. Herein, we shall
make an opposing observation that societal friction is a natural
and healthy phenomenon friction is merely telling society that
something is amiss with the essential premise of what is being
exchanged, and why. John Kenneth Galbraith made this observation in 1958 in his seminal work, The Affluent Society. The more
definitive reason for excluding a specific critique of capitalism (or
any other ism) is perhaps best explained by means of an analogy.
Society, collectively, is laboring in a field to cultivate fruit. But over
the generations, the field has yielded declining volumes of fruit.

Society can either squander time debating the regulated sharpness
or length of its farming tools (analogous to the tool of capitalism, or
a sharing economy, corporate social responsibility, or regulatory/
monetary policies, etc.), or society can finally comprehend that the
soil itself has grown exhausted and simply can no longer support
the masses of society. The focus of this thesis is not on what tools
we currently use (whether wisely, or not), but rather on the fertility
of the soil and its intrinsic capacity to yield fruit which is of value
to society as a whole. Modern societies place such an exorbitant
amount of energy and resources into analyzing and refining how it
operates within the marketplace, that it never stops to question the
what of the marketplace.
Thus, to substantively question the what of the marketplace
what it is that we actually exchange within the marketplace
we are obliged to address the deeper philosophies underpinning
socio-economic behavior. Certainly, it is perhaps confronting and
thus uncomfortable to contemplate the more subtle and labyrinthine philosophies which serve as foundations to socio-economic
relationships. Thus, it has been easier for all parties to simply kick
the can down the road and focus societal attention onto mere
symptoms and abstract data (how the market operates). Consequently, society places itself in the counterfeit belief that, with
just the proper political leadership, a majority of its problems can
somehow be resolved over the course of time. But as we dissect
the foundational philosophies of economics as they were originally
instituted in the 18th century, and how they now misrepresent a
21st century civilization, we can better discern that what we do
our very occupations are no longer rational, or sustainable.
Adam Smiths commercial society touchstone was birthed in
1776 which established the foundations upon which society was
to be explicitly ordered by virtue of its mutually-beneficial participation in and production of economic activity. Modern societies,
however, have observably stagnated in both the purpose and execution of their common economic activity and consequently, societal order is weakening. As a consequence of a weakening societal
order, extremist voices and organizations spanning various ideologies attempt to fill the vacuum. Beyond societys day-to-day tribu-
10
lations with respect to healing from the persistent global economic

crisis, a much deeper and profound existential crisis is emerging:
the collapse of social order. Resolving the crisis and regenerating
mutually-beneficial socio-economic behavior on a global scale can
indeed be achieved. But not by squandering precious energy and
resources in refining how we operate within the marketplace. Only
by seeking a new rationale, and new glue, a new what, only then,
shall a renewed societal order reveal itself. Then, within this new
what this new fourth economy this new magnet will naturally
and organically influence how socio-economic actors operate.
Old economies have been largely based on the scarcity and
quantitative natures of tangible goods. As we shall demonstrate
and building upon the lessons learned from modern globally-networked applications such as technology transfer6, alternative currencies, and collaborative spaces a new fourth economy
can be based on the inexhaustible, interdependent, and qualitative natures of intangible value. Here in this prologue section, we
very briefly illustrate two examples of exploiting value that resides
intangibly throughout the entire global market one example
is simple, the other, more complex. Later, we shall delve into
greater detail of how a vast array of intangible value has yet to be
exploited. A simple example: the computer gaming industry has
been suffering for quite some time now from a persistent deprivation of cultural diversity in story lines as well as character development. Obviously, humanity, itself, is wildly diverse but simply
lacks a robust process within which humanitys natural diversity
can be effectively integrated into computer game story lines and
character development. Human social and cultural diversity our
6 Technology & knowledge transfer is the process of transferring skills, knowledge,
technologies, and methods of manufacturing among corporations, governments,
universities, and other institutions so that scientific and technological developments are
made accessible to a wider range of users who can then further develop and exploit the
technology into new products, processes, applications, materials or services. A technology
developed by a corporation on behalf of a specific client (say, a military application), could
have utility to a wider commercial market often in totally dissimilar sectors. In 1986, Thorn
EMI (now BEI Technologies, Inc.) revolutionized the design of gyroscope sensors used
specifically in military aircraft. The technology was additionally ported through a network of
technology transfer offices, and consequently exploited for automotive navigation, medical
devices, and even smartphone applications. The wealth generated by Thorn EMI (direct
and indirect) was exponential it impacted the revenues and employment benefits across
literally thousands of other companies throughout global markets.
11
human narratives have value but simply lack a process within

which this intangible value can be collected, assessed, distributed,
utilized, accredited, and remunerated. As technology transfer
systems facilitate knowledge and innovation throughout the corporate community, a similar human narrative transfer system for the
masses would generate new avenues of human engagement and
wealth from computer gaming applications to film and television
stories, and on a truly global scale.
A more complex example: an employee at a manufacturing
plant possesses both experience and know-how say, relating to
heat specifications appropriate for molding plastics. In our present
value system, the employee receives merely a standard salary based
on an hourly wage. Perhaps if the employee has been employed for
some extended time, that wage might increase on a year-to-year
basis. But the unique knowledge and experience of the employee
might be of value beyond the confines of the direct employer. If a
technical process was visibly available, that employees know-how
and experience could be cataloged and made available to a global
marketplace bringing revenues from global consumers of this
employees know-how back to both the employee as well as the
direct employer. Again, though, a tremendous volume of these
types of intangibles remain unexploited simply because the masses
are largely unaware that technologies necessary to facilitate these
types of global exchanges of intangibles already exist.
Cultivating this new fourth economy based on intangible
value is neither theory nor utopism. Various cultures and communities throughout the world have already given birth to pieces of
the whole. Herein, we strategically weave together several of these
embryonic pieces, along with a more accurate comprehension of
economic and moral philosophy, into actionable wisdom. We do
not have to wait until the present-day system utterly and inevitably fails. A new fourth economy can be opened up for business
today. We project that about 50 percent of the worlds labor-force
can evolve into this fourth economy by 2040 and generate new
global wealth value estimated at US$ 1,281 trillion, compared to
our present output of US$ 63.1 trillion.
By synthesizing these three objectives updating societys base
of knowledge about economics; exploring long-avoided philoso-
12
phies relating to what society values within a global marketplace;

and demonstrating that a new fourth economy is now essential
to maintain fundamental social well-being and order this thesis
tenders both a vision and an operating plan to evolve into an
economic paradigm more befitting the 21st century. We call this
new paradigm: principles of global interdependence. In addition to
compositing more informed knowledge of how economics operates
within the more modern opportunities of a new fourth economy,
it is also important to comprehend the mathematics undergirding
this fourth economy. In this abridged version, the mathematics will
remain tucked under the hood, and not be a burden to the reader.
In a groundbreaking tactic, this thesis utilizes the insights and
entanglement mechanics of quantum physics to construct more
humanistic non-linear and permutable econometric models. The
unorthodox strategy in using quantum physics-based economic
models is to finally address one of our most profound and longstanding misconceptions about economics. For generations, societies have been operating under the false principle that markets
(and people operating in these markets) are somehow efficient and
rational. Nothing could be further from the truth. Economics, in
its most base definition, is this: the physical and metaphysical manifestations of the human endeavor, and how these manifestations
are correspondingly valued by society as a whole.
The human endeavor is not inherently linear, efficient, or even
necessarily predictable. Consequently, and assuming the data
is not based on outdated knowledge, we can only truly employ
econometric models as nothing more than positional beacons to
identify where we are on the map of human evolution. Like the
fourth economy itself, our human journey is both tangible and
intangible. The primary task now facing society is to finally break
the cycle of being directed by the force of data or by the coercion
of a specific ideology, and for the human endeavor to purposefully
and wisely take responsibility and explore its awaiting destiny. The
fundamental questions for society, then, become: will the human
endeavor finally embrace its responsibility to evolve? And, as the
British essayist, James Burke, has communicated on numerous
occasions: what kind of future do we care to invent? g
Understanding the Cause of Crisis, Part One
THE NATURE OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY
The world we live in, our view of it and the values we attach
to it, is shaped by what we know. And when what we know
changes, the world changes and with it, everything.
James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed
In the decade of the 1940s, a series of compelling yet

confounding manuscripts were published that would illuminate the very foundations of our human endeavor. Perhaps as a
consequence of the terrible convulsion of the Second World War,
or that the manuscripts were written by mere economists rather
than philosophers or scholars, almost no one now remembers these
revelatory, even portentous texts. College professors have long
forgotten their expository significance and thus, no longer pass
their liberating insights to rising generations. Government and
business leaders, all these years later, have never been apprised of
the self-evident magnitude cloistered within their pages and in
particular, articulated within one specific chart based on socio-economic evolution. The general public is essentially oblivious to the
very existence of these manuscripts.
So, this is where we begin: a long-forgotten chart. A chart that
once unbound, might perhaps breathe new insights and opportunities into a human endeavor which is ceaseless in its evolution.
Colin Clark and Jean Fourasti, in separate manuscripts
published nine years apart7, revealed an elegant and seminal
observation of the human endeavor through three broad stages of
socio-economic evolution: extraction of raw materials, including
7 Colin Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress, London (1940); Jean Fourasti,
Le Grand Espoir du XXe sicle. Progrs technique, progrs conomique, progrs social, Paris
(1949).
13
14
agriculture (primary), manufacturing (secondary), and services

(tertiary) - see Figure 1. Clearly demonstrated in this model is the
integral and evolutionary natures of economies and their effects
upon societal order. As the demand for mass human labor is
decreased in one sector (due mainly to technological advancements), that mass labor consequently migrates to another sector.
Beginning in the late 1930s, technological advancements were
already beginning to impact mass labor demand in the manufacturing sector (at its apex in 1939), and thus, mass labor began to
shift into the services sector. 72 percent of the global labor-force is
now crowded into the services sector.
PERCENTAGE OF WORKFORCE
70%
APEX OF
MANUFACTURING LABOR ECONOMY, 1939
53%
35%
18%
0%
1850 60
70
80
90 1900 10
AGRICULTURE & MINING

[ primary ]
20
30
40 1950 60
MANUFACTURING
[ secondary ]
70
80
90 2000 10
SERVICES
[ tertiary ]
Fig 1Clark & Fourastis Sector Model (1950)
However, before we delve any deeper into Clark and Fourastis charting of these three economic sectors and their evolutionary consequences to the human endeavor, we need to briefly
travel back to the 18th century. There, we will observe the revolutionary birth of economies for the masses. This is important for
two specific reasons: the day-to-day practical nature of economic
activity; and the moral nature of social order. Prior to, and in the
early years of the Industrial Revolution, human labor was generally
coerced either via feudalism or outright slavery. But as a consequence of multiple events, including the reoccurring pandemics of
15
plague that devastated the populations of Europe and the Middle

East, human labor was in short supply and high demand, and thus,
coercion was less effective than fundamental economic incentives
in directing human labor to achieve specific tasks on behalf of a
local community, kingdom, or nation-state.
We often forget that it is the essence and function of community-supportive tasks that a society deems as valuable which provides
the foundations of economics. In the generations leading up to
Adam Smith, societal tasks were somewhat limited in their focus:
primarily the essentials of survival food, clothing, shelter, and
security from external forces of ideology or empiricism. In 1776,
as an example, someone marketing island vacation property
would be profoundly less valued by society than a simple side of
beef or a method of preserving food through the winter. In our
modern economy, on the other hand, an island vacation property
could very well be valued by a greater portion of society. Consequently, our individual and collective economic behavior should
be viewed in a wider perspective of the stage of development of
society as a whole. The concept of value itself evolves from one
generation to the next and from one distinct society to another.
In Adam Smiths time, value and the preponderance of individual
and collective economic activity was focused on establishing and
growing the assets of essential human survival. The flies in the
ointment, so to speak, to efficiently ordering that mutually-beneficial paradigm of economic activity throughout the masses of 1776
were the too-often competing forces of monarchism and religious
allegiance. It was difficult, to say the least, to establish some form
of socio-economic stability when some power-seeking empire or
religious institution swept throughout the countryside, burning
and/or stealing everything in sight, or cleansing non-conforming
citizens from a community.
Enter the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam
Smith and his magnum opus: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes
of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. In its day, Wealth of Nations singularly codified both the practical as well as moral principles for
how society could be largely self-ordered via a process of mutually-beneficial economic activity. Smith called this a commercial
society. This prudent yet revolutionary paradigm of a self-ordering
16
commercial society not only mitigated the persistent upheavals of

monarchism and religiosity that had afflicted much of the world, it
provided a stable environment for any and all citizens (the masses)
to participate in and benefit from the opportunities of personal
industry and prosperity within and between markets on a global
scale. Then, when mass production and its Industrial Revolution
was only in its infancy, a typical consumer who purchased, say, a
hammer from a local merchant, most likely would use the hammer
to produce some other marketable product (say, a table or cart)
which, in turn, could be sold to a new consumer (and this new
consumer would use the table or cart to generate some further
form of revenue). In these early days, almost every consumer
purchase was used to spin-off and create some subsidiary form
of revenue-generating value. Thus, the resulting labor-force was
simply another link in a seemingly endless chain of value and
revenue generation all working for both the collective well-being
of society as well as the individual. Markets for the newly enfranchised masses had nowhere to go, but up. Indeed, if a blacksmith
was operating in a specific community, and a second blacksmith
began a venture nearby, this was not generally considered competition as we now think of it. Perhaps there might have existed a
craft-centric competition between the two blacksmiths, but the
market was hungry for as many hammers and other tools that
could possibly be produced. Both blacksmiths were able to thrive.
Smiths new commercial society, for the first time in human
history, facilitated economic opportunities for the masses, where
previously, these opportunities were largely reserved for the aristocratic and privileged classes. In return, the masses were required
to conduct themselves in a moral and practical fashion that did not
endanger the fabric of the fledgling commercial society. Indeed,
Adam Smith was acutely aware that arbitrary government oversight of, say, apple production could lead to systemic market inefficiencies. A farmer was motivated to market good quality apples at
a fair price not merely out of the self-interest to maintain a consistent resource of profit, but also to simply be liked and respected by
others in their community. But what happens when that community becomes so large that the consumer resides on the other side
of the planet rather than in your direct neighborhood? In a global
17
marketplace, are the participants the producer, seller, buyer, or

even the public at large conjoined by any other bond other than
the self-interest of short-term profit? As the moral linkages between
market participants become more stretched and tenuous, governments must increasingly utilize the coercive nature of law and
regulation so as to stimulate right behavior and maintain social
order. Religious doctrine also becomes more aggressively communicated perhaps even imposed. But then, we must ask what is
right behavior? In Adam Smiths time, right behavior was somewhat limited in its definitions and jurisdiction. The questions of
the day, then, were centered on what days to work and rest, how
best to transport goods to a nearby commercial center (canal boat
or train), and the like.
But today, questions of right behavior have grown more
complex and formidable. Is it right behavior for a community
which is experiencing severe economic difficulties to invite and
facilitate a coal cleaning or chemical production facility to operate
within their community knowing full well that as a consequence
of creating much-needed job opportunities, these types of production facilities will assuredly pollute the soil, water, and air of the
community, and thus endanger the lives of citizens and their children for generations? Is it right behavior to purchase a product that
has been produced in a foreign country with slave or child labor?
Is it right behavior that hoards of human cattle amass on a day
they call Black Friday and compete for position (sometimes quite
violently) so as to merely purchase a television, computer game,
or brand of clothing? Modern civilizations are indeed cognizant
that their actions have long-term effects upon society, culture,
genetic health, local and global ecosystems, etc. Yet, we continue
to operate almost exclusively for short-term gains of profit and
self-gratification, while ignoring the long-term effects of our individual and collective actions. Adam Smiths commercial society
was resolutely under-pinned by foundations of moral choices and
consequences albeit somewhat simple choices and consequences
in comparison to modern circumstances. Moral foundations, in
modern economic markets, have severely eroded, weakening societys capacity to deal with day-to-day choices and their inevitable
consequences. In short, this disconnect between moral foundations
18
and economic activity jeopardizes both the efficacy and sustainability of a commercial society and thus, social order.
The evolutions and globalization of moral complexities are
only one facet of the existential threat being imposed on Adam
Smiths commercial society. Inevitably, technology and automation
replaces the need for mass human labor in increasingly broader
market segments and labor is thus forced to move on to some
newer field of revenue generation. As Figure 1 (page 14) shows,
Clark and Fourasti observed that as early as 1939, the U.S. laborforce had already begun to migrate out of the manufacturing sector
the epistle and empowering talisman of the masses and into
the uncharted territory of the services sector. In modern markets,
the services sector now makes up a considerable 72 percent of the
worlds output, and generally includes: government, telecommunication, information technology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare
and hospitals, education, banking and financial services, insurance, legal services, consulting, news medias, casinos, tourism,
and retail sales. Figure 2 illustrates the dramatic rate of growth of
the services sector in comparison to the agriculture/mining and
manufacturing sectors between the years 1962 and 2011.
Figure 3 illustrates how new jobs were distributed within the
U.S. labor market in 2014. Out of 3.3 million new jobs, the over-
Agriculture
& Mining
Manufacturing
Services
-7 %
11 %
211 %
Fig 2% Change in US Labor Force Par ticipation rates 1962 to 2011

Source: US BLS
19
Mining & Logging
22
355
Health care
450
Business services
660
Restaurants & bars
Fig 3Distribution of new jobs, U.S., 2014 (selected series) (in 000s)

Source: US BLS
Higher-wage industries
Mid-wage industries
Lower-wage industries
- 3,579
- 3,240
- 1,973
Jobs lost
Jan 2008 - Feb 2010
2,603
2,282
3,824
Jobs gained
Feb 2010 - Feb 2014
Fig 4Net change in private sector employment (in 000s)

Source: National Employment Law Project & US BLS
whelming majority were in services-related sectors that earn low

to modest wages (food, health, and business services, and the like).
In comparison, the depressed job creation in mining and logging
20
demonstrate that growth in traditional sectors such as manufacturing and housing construction have all but dissipated. From a
wider birds eye view, Figure 4 illustrates how various sectors of the
U.S. labor market were initially impacted by the 2008 Great Recession, and how the recovery within these sectors has been uneven
and over-balanced to lower-wage industries. Between 2008 and
2014, lower-wage industries accounted for only 22% of job losses,
but 44% of jobs gained (the majority of overall employment gains).
Mid-wage industries accounted for 37 percent of job losses, but
only 26 percent of job gains. Higher-wage industries accounted for
41 percent of job losses, but only 30 percent of job gains.
Hidden within the data, however, we must recognize that
in the limited ways and sectors it can, the hand of government
intervention in stimulating job creation, has consequences. The
Barack Obama Administration, as an example, in facilitating a
somewhat aggressive expansion in health care services (and the
1.2 million new jobs necessary to facilitate this care), as a consequence of mandating that employers contribute to subsidizing
their employees insurance premiums, some employers have retaliated to this mandate to contribute by cutting labor and investing in
technology that replaces the need for labor. This gravitation toward
technology replacing labor, as Clark and Fourasti demonstrated
in the 1940s, has always been present. But as can be observed with
various government intervention projects, the short-term economic
(and political) gains derived from these interventions have often
unanticipated long-term consequences that effect the very fabric
of human socio-economic activity. Also hidden within the data
are the fundamental shifts occurring within traditional bastions of
wealth, power, and influence. U.S. law schools, as an example, are
experiencing the lowest number of applicants in 40 years, fewer
legal jobs for graduates, and wildly rising tuition costs. At the same
time, the legal services profession has experienced a fundamental
shift in the way it functions. Law firms which once depended
upon young graduates to do laborious tasks such as search through
volumes of documents, now use computer programs.
Overall, Figures 2, 3, & 4 should provide an initial pattern, an
initial insight that something fundamental has shifted in the essential nature and function of economic markets. The pattern that
21
seems to emerge from the above (and similar) data which interprets
only the symptoms of the persistent global economic crisis, is that
market economies which already were overly populated into the
services sector, a small and confined market of low-wage services
has now become the last refuge of the masses. And we know as a
human species what inevitably happens in confined markets where
scarcity and competition for survival come face to face.
From this initial pattern revealed in the above symptoms, we
can begin to discern a series of deeper observations that begin to
illuminate the true cause of the economic crisis. Three primary
risks exist in such a large percentage of the human labor-force
being focused toward the cultivation of any single market field
(in this case, services). The first risk is that a tragedy of the commons
is created where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each ones self-interest, behave contrary to the
larger groups long-term best interests by depleting some common
resource. The second risk is more specific to the services sector
in that services should operate from a valuation of quality (rather
than quantity). In agriculture and manufacturing, quantity is the
primary objective we want, as a society, to purchase a quantity
of something, say, automobiles. Yes, quality is important, but it
is quantity which provides a market-wide demand for not simply
automobiles, but fuel stations, roads, and replacement parts. In the
services sector, however, a corporation does not have as its priority
to solicit a quantity of consulting services documents, but rather to
acquire the most quality from any specific consulting document.
But global economic markets are almost universally constructed
to facilitate quantity. The key economic indicator of a national
market is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) a function of quantity,
not quality. Modern markets simply do not yet know how to facilitate quality as a fundamental benchmark.
The third risk relates to securing and maintaining aggregate
demand. A critical necessity to sustain a commercial society is that
the masses generate enough demand (meaning, possessing disposable capital) circulating throughout the marketplace to keep the
masses employed producing for and consuming from each other.
Obviously, then, without aggregate demand being maintained, not
enough fuel is able to circulate throughout the engine of economics
22
and the engine essentially stalls. A little later, we shall explore the
often severely negative impact of the services sector has on maintaining aggregate demand but first, we need to put the notion of
aggregate demand into a wider historical perspective.
The challenge of maintaining aggregate demand is certainly not
new. Before, during, and after the Great Depression of the 1930s
to 1940s, two great schools of thought fiercely debated how best
to regain aggregate demand throughout the marketplace (remembering that aggregate demand is simply enough capital money
flowing through the market in sufficient quantity to facilitate the
masses to consume). One school, represented by John Maynard
Keynes, argued that it was vital for governments to aggressively
increase the supply of money flowing into the marketplace. This
was done by way of two primary methods: central banks lending
money at more favorable rates to commercial banks so as to
encourage increased investment, and thus, employing new labor to
operate and manage this new investment; and governments instituting public-oriented spending, such as infrastructure expansion,
so as to directly increase labor demand.
This first school of thought is generally referred to as Keynesian
economics. In the main, liberal and social political institutions tend
to adopt Keynesian tools so as to manage aggregate demand in
part, because these types of political institutions inherently tend to
hold the view that government programs are materially best suited
to serve society as a whole. Thus, Keynesian tools conveniently fit,
a priori, into these paradigms of social purpose, organization and
management.
The contrasting school of thought attempting to best manage
aggregate demand is demonstrated by Friedrich Hayek and his
view that the business cycle of ebbs and flows to market demand
was only natural, and that markets should essentially be left alone
to sort itself out naturally. Hayek argued government intervention
into the marketplace either via increasing the supply of money
or via government jobs programs was artificial, and thus, would
produce only artificial results. Understandably, this Hayekian
school is easily adopted, a priori, by libertarian and conservative
political institutions due to their belief that government should
persistently get out of the way of the private sector.
23
The terrible irony, however, of our present-day debating

between these Keynesian and Hayekian schools of thought in
relation to managing the supply of money is that since the 1970s,
neither governments, central banks, nor even the corporate sector
at large, any longer have direct influence on the supply of money.
If Keynes and Hayek were alive today, they simply could not even
debate the role of governments, central banks, or the corporate
sector at large with respect to managing the supply of money. How
the supply of money functions has evolved dramatically over the
past three-quarters of a century. In the time of Keynes and Hayek,
the supply of money was centered on the gold reserves and tax
revenues aggregated by a government, and then borrowing from a
central bank (using its assets of gold and tax revenues as collateral),
and directing the central bank to provide this borrowed capital to
the commercial banking system at rates favorable for producers to
expand production, and hence, consumption. Additional capital
was obtained for the purpose of debt lending via aggregating a
prudent percentage from individual savings accounts. Now,
however, the supply of money is entirely a function of real estate
lending between a borrower and local commercial banks almost
completely bypassing any direct or substantive influences from
governments and central banks. To attempt to apply Keynesian
or Hayekian tools to the 21st century management of the supply
of money is akin to applying a slide-rule to the management of
complex theories of quantum physics or Internet search algorithms;
old tools can no longer manage the extraordinary decentralization
that has evolved throughout economic markets since the 1970s.
Keynes and Hayek, in broad terms, represent the neoclassical
school of economics where the notion of value extends beyond
simple utility value to include perceived value, particularly relating
to luxury and non-essential goods and services. And if we travel
back to the birth of the classical school the 18th and 19th centuries we begin to see and comprehend the fundamental roots of
both of these schools: how to balance the store of a nations gold
with the value of production and consumption. The philosophies of
classical and neoclassical schools of thought are almost exclusively
rooted in the following: from civilizations beginnings, monarchs,
empires, and finally nations have been obsessed with accumulating
24
gold as the preeminent definition of wealth. These distinct states,

naturally, produce items which are valued by society as a whole
(whether these items are raw materials or produced goods and
services). Since physical currencies most often were the exchange
mechanism between buyer and seller, and since currencies were
issued based on the fluctuating values of the reserves of gold a state
maintained, these physical currencies were constantly needing to
be balanced to assure the value and stability of the states treasure of gold in relation to what the states people produced and
consumed. This balancing act is made more complex when foreign
trade (imports and exports) are taken into consideration.
Thus, within this fundamental balancing act between the
states valuation of gold, versus what the states people produced,
consumed, imported, and exported, the principle debates which
occurred between individuals residing in these classical and
neoclassical economic schools were merely debating the tools or
methods they believed would best attain this balance. The central
premise of balancing a states gold value with production/consumption value was never in question; only the tools or methods to
attain this balance were of debate. As we will soon explain, this
entire premise of balancing a states gold value with production/
consumption value no longer exists; states no longer maintain
national valuations of gold reserves, central banks no longer issue
loans to governments based on using gold as collateral; the gold
standard no longer exists. Yet, the entire world still continues to
operate within the orthodoxy (and all its affiliated institutions) of
classical and neoclassical schools of economics.
The common thread that binds all nations together is the illusion that governments must somehow balance their budgets while
at the same time attempt to maintain an equilibrium in market
prices (price equilibrium takes into consideration production price,
consumption price, the volume of production and consumption,
and the velocity of production and consumption). These political
and technocratic machinations made visible to the public relating
to the near-mystical management of the supply of money are, in
actuality, no longer tangibly controlling, stimulating, or influencing the general marketplace in any kind of appreciable manner.
The balancing act between value and price whether successfully
25
balanced or not is now being directly implemented between

two (and only two) parties: the local borrower and the local bank.
Above central banks dictating industry-wide interest-rates (which
any computer algorithm could now do), governments and their
central banks no longer possess the capacity to directly control
the supply of money circulating throughout the general markets.
Indeed, the touchstone of how governments and central banks
have attempted to stimulate markets post-2008, has been what is
referred to as quantitative easing (QE) an unconventional (some
might say desperate) form of monetary policy where a central bank
creates new money electronically to buy financial assets, such as
government bonds. The intention of QE is to distribute a substantial volume of new money supply directly to commercial banks,
and thus, to hopefully stimulate private sector spending. But as
the data and our experience has demonstrated, this new money
supply has not resulted in flowing into the general markets. In
short, banks now have tremendous volumes of money supply to
lend, but the economic markets do not actually need the money.
The market, to put it simply, needs demand. We shall discuss this
type of government-facilitated liquidity trap later in the thesis.
To ease our way into understanding why neither classical nor
neoclassical economics (and their distinct monetary and fiscal
policy tools) any longer can be considered rational methods to
manage the modern supply of money, we first need to understand
the role of institutionalized debt for the masses. Since the end
of World War II, as mass labor began its mass migration into the
services economy, new avenues of wealth appeared to be created to
fuel aggregate demand throughout the masses. But this appearance
was deceptive, and indeed, by the 21st century had evolved into a
hazardous delusion. Figure 5 (next page) illustrates that it was not
exclusively labor-income which fueled the economic engine, but
that it was household debt which played the essential and ever-increasing role in maintaining the appearance of growth.
Figure 5 compares three distinct rates of growth of the U.S.
economy: average hourly wages; household debt; and gross
domestic product (GDP). Between 1947 1970, average hourly
wages grew by 39%; but between 1970 2010, wages grew by only
4%. This represents a 90% loss in the rate of growth for wages for
26
RATE OF GROWTH
100%
75%
50%
25%
0%
Period 1: 1947-1970
AVG HOURLY WAGES (ROG)
Period 2: 1970-2010
GDP (ROG)
HOUSEHOLD DEBT (ROG)
Fig 5Rates of grow th comparison of US household debt, avg. hourly wages, & GDP

Source: BLS and US Federal Reser ve
these two periods. But during the same two periods, GDP experienced an overall 18% increase in its rate of growth. Obviously, if
wage growth was slowing, and GDP growth was rising, something
other than wages was fueling the growth of GDP. Certainly, the
use of technology and automation impacts both labor and output.
But more tellingly, the rate of growth for household debt during
these two periods rose by 48%.
If effectively used to provisionally stimulate a particular
segment of the market in times where certain inefficiencies have
inadvertently entered, debt might then be considered beneficial.
But as Figure 5 suggests, the masses became addicted to exponentially increasing doses of the debt drug. Since the Middle Ages,
world markets have employed a monetary system of currency based
on reserves of gold and sometimes silver. But beginning in the
1970s, the U.S. led the way to replace the gold standard with what
is called fiat money currency which originally derived its value
from government regulation or law. As of 2013, no nation-state
uses a gold standard as the basis of its monetary system. And this
is where a substantial amount of misinformation and confusion
begins to distort our fundamental understanding of economics
and in turn, the crisis of the Great Recession.
Almost exclusively, government and business leaders, well-respected economists, and academicians from around the world
27
have mistakenly accepted as gospel that fiat money is created by

central banks on behalf of governments. Closely related to this
mistaken belief, is the presumption that this central bank-created
fiat money is then supplied to commercial banks which then use
this fiat currency, along with other depositors savings, to act as an
intermediary and provide consumer loans to average consumers.
This long-obsolete system of central bank money being aggregated
with consumer deposits by commercial banks acting as intermediaries, was referred to as fractional reserve banking. The problem is
that this fractional reserve system the system which many if not
most of our leaders and institutions have blindly accepted as fact,
and which Keynes, Hayek, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Hume, Locke,
Smith, Marx, and a host of others, debated all those years ago
is unquestionably not the reality of how money has been created
since the 1970s. In actuality, roughly 97 percent of all money in
use throughout the world is created electronically by conventional
commercial banks during the process of creating a real estate loan.8
Fiat money no longer originates from central banks operating on
behalf of governments (exogenously created money), but rather, fiat
money now originates from the creation of a real estate loan made
directly by conventional commercial banks (endogenously created
money). In short, modern money is created on a computer screen
by your local banker when a new loan is made. Conversely, money
is destroyed when a loan is repaid in full. Although we explain this
in much more detail in the unabridged version of Wealth Beyond
Nations, the following six observations regarding real estate-based
fiat money are important to make:
a] Since the dissolution of the gold standard, the only remaining
tangible asset that can be globally used and accepted as security for
the issuance of a loan is real estate.
b] The Great Recession of 2008 erupted as a direct consequence of the global banking system having lost confidence in
the capacity of real estate lending to continue to increase in value
which then transferred real estate debt instruments into the derivatives markets, where they believed new money could continue to
8 Dyson, 2012. For more information about how money is actually created, begin here:
http://www.positivemoney.org/how-money-works/how-banks-create-money/
28
be created at increasing value. Consequently, since the real estate

markets throughout most of the world economies have not regained
their capacity to generate reliably increasing rates of return, the
banking system has no method of securitization, and thus can
no longer maintain providing the level of daily consumer credit
to which consumers have grown accustomed. Thus, aggregate
demand can no longer be stimulated and maintained via household debt. Thus, the house of cards can no longer be sustained.
c] This presentation of the disconnect between accepted
(albeit illusory) orthodoxy of how money is created exogenously,
versus the reality that money is created endogenously, is not new
or unique. As early as 1988, Charles Goodhart, then a member
of the Bank of Englands Monetary Policy Committee, and now
Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, characterized the exogenously created base money multiplier model as
such an incomplete way of describing the process of the determination of
the stock of money that it amounts to mis-instruction (Howels, Mariscal, 2005). Since then, the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal
Reserve have publicly published several papers and briefing documents for government and business leaders specifically and categorically stating that the system of a base money multiplier is implausible (Carpenter, Demiralp, 2010). And finally, as Sir Mervyn
King, then-governor of the Bank of England, stated in a speech on
23 October 2012: When banks extend loans to their customers, they
create money by crediting their customers accounts.
d] In spite of U.S. and European central banks attempting to
communicate to government and business leaders that they have
long been leading and governing from a profoundly outdated and
erroneous comprehension of how the global economic system operates, our government and business leaders inexplicably continue
to this day to operate from this illusory knowledge-base of how
money is created and circulated throughout the marketplace.
e] If government, business, and academic leaders the world
over are unquestioningly operating from severely outdated knowledge regarding specifically the money supply, from what other illusory knowledge are they and all of us operating?
f] If gold is no longer the foundational treasure of a state, then
what is?
29
So, with this brief examination of the subject of debt, we

return back to the subject of aggregate demand. We have already
highlighted that labor-income has not been sufficient in creating
aggregate demand throughout the masses and that household
debt before the Great Recession had become a dominant mechanism to augment labor-income with the necessary capital so as to
create the appearance of aggregate demand.
Here, we explore a seminal observation made by the Harvard
economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, in his 1958 book, The Affluent
Society. Galbraith observed modern consumer demand for goods
and services is not organic. That is, the demands are not intrinsically created by a consumer such as demands relating to food,
clothing, and shelter these utility-driven objective demands have
been substantially met for the vast majority of western economies.
Demands beyond those for the essentials (generally, luxury goods
and services subjective, extrinsically-induced demands) are created
by advertisers and the machinery for consumer-demand creation
that benefit from increased consumer spending. Galbraiths initial
concern was that this exuberance in self-centered private production and consumption supplants public spending and investment
relative to society as a whole (education, transportation, health,
environmental protection, etc.). Galbraith called this the dependence effect, a process by which wants are increasingly created by the
process by which they are satisfied. In addition to Galbraiths moral
concern that the pendulum was overbearingly swinging from societal-centric to individual-centric production and consumption,
there is a more practical flaw which is exposed by a dominant
portion of the economic activity being directed toward luxury.
As was highlighted earlier, in the time of Adam Smith, a
consumer would purchase a hammer which was then used to
produce a subsequent product (a table) which then would be
sold for profit accruing back to the initial consumer. The result of
this consumption-for-production activity is what is referred to as a
type of multiplier effect. But in todays luxury-centric market, when
a consumer purchases that same hammer, or a restaurant meal, a
movie ticket, a medical procedure, a car mechanics services, or
even a smartphone, these products and services are more than
likely to be utilized for personal, subjective, and non-profit making
30
purposes. Instead of creating a multiplier effect, a dominant focus

on luxury-centric production and consumption creates diminishing returns. The result of this absence of subsidiary profit
potentiality is that the consumer must make future purchases either
from capital gains earned via labor wages, equity holdings (such as
real estate, stocks, etc.), or by incurring debt. Since increasing use
of automation throughout nearly all economic sectors is decreasing
the demand for human labor, and as we have highlighted earlier,
the growth of wages in general is not effectively increasing labor
wages cannot be seen as a dependable source to sustain aggregate
demand.
Additionally, a dependence upon capital gains from real estate
is also not a realistic source for the masses to sustain aggregate
demand. And obviously, a persistent dependence upon household
debt to sustain aggregate demand is both monetarily and practically irresponsible. Hence, considering specifically the mechanics
of utility-centric (past) and luxury-centric (present) demand, mass
production and consumption carried out in a 21st century affluent
society simply cannot generate and sustain the crucially important
objective of aggregate demand. Maintaining a dominant focus on
luxury-centric production and consumption can only result in an
inevitable collapse of the market.
Further, and perhaps the most fateful of all for the sustainability
of the services sector of the economy, the services sector possesses
inherent flaws in its capacity to generate and sustain aggregate
demand throughout the masses. Consider consulting services as
an example. Harvard Business Review estimates that U.S. corporations spend an average of US$ 50 billion annually on change
management consulting services but that a full 70 percent (US$
35 billion) of these change management projects fail. To equate
this to Adam Smiths 18th century marketplace: if 70 percent of all
hammers sold were defective, then not only would the monies paid
for the hammers be wasted, substantially less revenue-generating
tables and carts would subsequently be produced and obviously,
this would have a compound effect upon all areas of job creation
and the sustainability of aggregate demand. At present, our
economic, government, and academic institutions do not formally
account for these massive losses institutions have for centuries
31
only measured the quantitative aspect of productivity (GDP being

the singular goal, no matter if the production has positive or negative consequences), not the qualitative aspect (which considers the
resulting financial, operational, social, or environmental consequences of production).
Even our most venerated services such as health care
services, as an example are also subject to exhibiting severe as
well as ever-mutating flaws relating to a quantitative versus qualitative concentration. Recent studies from multiple institutions
and academic centers reveal that consumers are often needlessly
spending billions of dollars for medical procedures and dietary
supplements that once were touted as being essential, but are
now shown to be largely ineffective and sometimes even injurious. Thus, as we attempt to come to terms with the qualitative
measurements of health care, we encounter the obvious paradox:
if we consume more wisely with an eye toward quality rather than
quantity (essentially, spending less on quantity, and perhaps more
on quality), this will negatively impact profits and employment
security throughout the health care services sector and beyond
which then only exacerbates economic deficiencies associated with
unemployment, underemployment, government-funded benefits,
etc. Rooted in this same manifestation of a moral-versus-economic
paradox is the cause of society descending into mass denialism
regarding the environmental consequences to mass production
and consumption because to act morally would intrinsically
decrease demands for mass production and consumption.
Mass industrialization, and the early manifestations of services,
were indeed well suited during a time of widespread poverty or
absence of basic essentials where rapid production and distribution of these basic goods was necessary for the fundamental security
of a society, and where consumption by its very nature generated a
myriad of multiplier effects. Figure 6 (next page) illustrates both the
societal desire and self-ordering mechanism of post World War II
western economies where the house and home become the center
of peaceful living a secure environment for total living. Finally, it
seemed to most, the American Dream was not simply possible, but
indeed inevitable. However, once a society evolves to a stage where
the masses are able to achieve widespread affluence and where
32
Fig 6A propaganda poster, c. 1950s
multiplier effects become difficult, even unfeasible to distinguish

the fundamental economic principles and mechanics which guide
socio-economic behavior also necessitates evolution. As the 2008
Great Recession has turbulently revealed, mass consumption does
not necessarily or infinitely lead to mass prosperity.
It should now be obvious that propagandizing so-called
sharing, caring, or gift economy programs as somehow being
game changers only serve to mask or cover-up the foundational weaknesses of society in much the same way that raising or
lowering bank lending interest rates or tax rates treat the symptoms rather than the cause of economic imbalances. Imbalances
and frictions serve an essential purpose: to warn us that we are
drifting off-course.
The unabridged version of this thesis explores in more specific
detail these and several additional components to the evolutionary
nature of economic activity ranging from issues such as our
33
long outdated management of taxation and the conflicting definitions and consequences of market efficiency, to the deficiencies
inherent within advertising-dependent business models as well as
the paradox of financialization9 and. But what has been presented
thus far in this abridged version should be sufficient in allowing
the reader to discern an emerging pattern:
Thesis 1: A substantial amount of misinformation and outdated
knowledge is inappropriately guiding our collective understanding
of economics and more specifically and immediately, our
day-to-day management of the global economic crisis itself.
Thesis 2: Once we update our knowledge-base of economics, we
finally will realize the inescapable truth that our three accustomed
fields of agriculture and mining, mass production, and services
no longer demand human labor resources sufficient to employ
the masses, and thus, can no longer sustain aggregate demand
throughout the masses. Without aggregate demand, Adam Smiths
economies for the masses can no longer be maintained. Without the
glue of a commercial society (or some alternative), social order by
and amongst the masses can no longer be maintained.
In short, the socio-economic compass we have been assiduously following for generations, upon enlightened inspection, we
discover has been rusted and broken for quite some time. By excavating the long-forgotten charts of Clark and Fourastis, we now
find ourselves in the uncharted and unstable territory of reality. The
collapsing nature of our individual and collective socio-economic
actions, no matter how illusory it has been for nearly three-quarters of a century, has a devastating and corrosive impact upon the
moral nature of social order. The next chapter shall explore the
strange paradox of how a global civilization can perceive that its
social order is derived from considered and accurate knowledge
but, in actuality, social order has been artificially constructed
upon the two incongruous pillars of illusion and fear. g
9 Financialization is a pattern of accumulation in which profit-making occurs

increasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production
(Krippner, 2005)
Understanding the Cause of Crisis, Part Two
THE NATURE OF SOCIAL ORDER
Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes, in some

measure, a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what
is properly a commercial society.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Monum ental contests for pow er. King against brother.

Leviathan or Kallipolis. A protestant versus catholic God. Legions
of generations lost to malice. Rivers and fields red with blood. All
seemed forsaken.
Modern civilization has lost its fellowship with just how much
conflict and disorder existed prior to Adam Smiths 18th century
contribution to the human endeavor of reason and order. Even
after 16 European states, 140 Imperial States, and 38 interest
groups forged a peace agreement known as the Westphalia Treaties
in 1648 which finally ended the Thirty Years War and Eighty
Years War Pope Innocent X in Zelo Domus Dei called the treaties null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane,
empty of meaning and effect for all time. In spite of the Popes futile
condemnation, the Westphalia Treaties to this day stand the foundations of international relations due, in large measure, to the
extraordinary insights revealed to humanity by the political economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith.
The previous chapter focused attention to various misunderstood and evolutionary mechanics of economic activity essentially, how economic markets function. This section will focus
more on the human relationships forged (and sometimes disaffected) by socio-economic behavior essentially, why economic
markets function. We shall examine Smiths insights into how and
why society is bound together by mutually-beneficial economic
34
35
behavior and his prophecy that if mutuality somehow were to

become imbalanced, social order could be placed in mortal jeopardy once again made vulnerable to monumental contests for
power. The consequence of this examination shall reveal that,
since the time of Adam Smith, participating in economic activity
has been in the main a unifying force throughout society a form
of social order which has been referred to as the invisible hand of
the free market but in modern economic markets, that unifying
force has now been incapacitated. Adam Smiths foreboding
prophecy is being fulfilled. But to better understand the upheavals
of the present, we must venture back to the past.
The 18th century, from where the bulk of modern socio-economic knowledge originates was itself a time of great social, political, and economic upheaval. The absolute authority of the Roman
Catholic Church, the Pope, and various monarchs was being challenged by each other as well as by the general public and no one
was on strong political footing for very long. Even the institutions
of nation-states (born from the 1648 Westphalia Treaty) were still
in their infancy. Further, with the rise of the Enlightenment movement, the masses throughout Europe and the New World insistently and increasingly sought their natural rights of individual
sovereignty which even further diminished the once unquestionable powers of the church and monarchy. In this very fluid time,
Smith devised a unique and elegant middle way for all parties to
peaceably cooperate in the otherwise hazardous world: a commercial society. A society that, in its most base disposition according to
Smith, desired the approval of others, and thus, the invisible hand
of self-interested behavior would guide society (and the markets)
to peaceable cooperation.
If we attempt to imagine our present-day selves standing in the
midst of an 18th or 19th century marketplace, we would be witness to
a soup of commercial activity. Merchant houses (primarily, traders
with foreign markets), outdoor carts and tables topped with fruits,
meats, farming tools, and tobaccos, etc., and then a thick broth of
horses, chickens, men, woman, children, and even the occasional
snake oil salesman all stewing together in a market guided by a
fairly simple objective: survival. A small farmers surplus chickens
would help the local tavern feed hungry travelers. A hammer made
36
by a local blacksmith would be used by a local craftsman to build a

table or cart to trade for much needed shirts and dresses. The table
or cart would help a local merchant to display and transport goods
for sale to customers. The more blacksmiths, the more hammers.
The more hammers, the more tables, carts, and ships, etc. Inevitably, the snake oil salesman would be run out of town (or worse).
In short, we would be witness to an entire community of people
who benefited from and provided benefit to each other. Those
that did not provide benefit found it much harder to reap benefit.
Indeed, there were a few luxuries tobacco, chocolate, or a Sunday
dress but in the main, the market was for the exchange of the
essentials for survival or tools which facilitated the production of
new wealth (like the hammer). In short, market actors cooperated
together so as to better survive.
But as mass production and industrialization matured, this
middle way of a commercial society began to erode. Smith had
already begun to comprehend that his primary contribution to
economics his principle of the division of labor possessed a
profound weakness. He saw that the very act of the division of
labor would ultimately lead the laboring masses to grow stupid
and ignorant. Smith explains in Wealth of Nations:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few
simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always
the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert
his understanding or to exercise his invention
Because society has remained steadfast to the mantra of Smiths
then-advantageous reductionism, society over the generations has
broken up into ever-reducing and ever-isolating specializations
individuals no longer possess an understanding of the big picture
as it relates to society in general. Doctors speak a language that
mechanics find difficult to decipher. Bureaucrats mysteriously
manage societys affairs of transport, education, prisons, hospitals,
and taxes while the masses remain oblivious to the details behind
the mystery. Even modern-day economists have little or no experience or even curiosity for the nuances of philosophy. Todays economists tend to focus almost exclusively upon the mathematical
mechanics of economics. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas
37
Robert Malthus, and Ibn Khaldun, as examples, were multi-disciplinary obtaining their wisdom from philosophy, theology, and
study of society as a whole, and then applying that wisdom into the
practice of economics.
Know, then that the difference between people arises
principally from the difference in their occupations; for their
very union springs out of the need for co-operation in the
securing of a livelihood.10
The human wisdom displayed by the above observation of Ibn
Khaldun in 1377 is contrasted by contemporary institutions which
more narrowly focus their observations on the technical mechanics
of economics. As the following text proclaimed by the Swiss-based
Center for Banking Studies demonstrates, the focus becomes so
profoundly narrowed toward mechanics, our human behavior is
essentially excluded from any consideration. Problems and their
solutions thus become subjects of technocratic, rather than
human intervention and consequence. Our capacity for wisdom
begins to atrophy.
Unemployment. What are the causes of involuntary
unemployment? Contrary to what is often believed, it can
be shown that pathological unemployment is due not to the
behaviour of economic agents, but to a monetary anomaly
affecting the process of capital accumulation. At the core of
the anomaly is the fact that profits give rise to a bank deposit
that never dries up, thus generating repeated financial
lendings of the same sum. Once the process of capital
accumulation has reached a level that no longer allows for
a positive difference between natural and monetary rates
of interest, new investments are necessarily reduced and
employment shrinks. [This] analysis [] leads to a proposal
for a monetary reform allowing capital to accumulate
consistently with the very nature of bank money and with
the logical and factual distinction between money, income
and capital.11
10 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 1377
11 Centro di Studi Bancari (Center for Banking Studies) - http://www.csbancari.ch/
pubblicazioni/RMElab/concerns.htm (as of December 2014)
38
In their very essence, societies have grown to almost reflexively operate in a hierarchical and competitive manner focusing
their existence around the perpetual task of acquiring increasing
amounts of material wealth (which exists only in limited supply) so
as to maintain or acquire additional security and/or power (which
tends to grow narrower as one climbs the pyramid). Consequently,
individuals fall into the timeless and dishonorable trap of competing
with each other for this limited supply of wealth, security, and
power thus self-perpetuating the dysfunctional pyramid structures and dogmas for the generations that follow. Exacerbating this
zero-sum competition for wealth and power, society as a whole
is compelled to sustain the entire global economic and political
system via the act of persistent and increasing material consumption even though the natural resources required to produce this
endless material consumption are limited. Thus, we have self-created a paradox for ourselves: an economic and political system
based on scarcity, but fueled by endless material consumption.
The modern societal fabric has been progressively torn apart
into competitive rather than cooperative relationships. This ever-increasing division of society, then, has caused society to disregard
their desire to seek approval from others and instead, to seek
nothing but self-gratification and self-aggrandizement. Society
and by extension, its marketplace has lost its cooperative nature
which is essential to maintain value generation, and hence, order.
Thus, differences begin to fester and erode the commercial society
which has served civilizational order for over 200 years. And as a
consequence of a weakened social order, society is neither confident nor cooperative in questioning or self-regulating its overall
behavior and thus, cannot clearly see the terrible paradox of scarcity-versus-consumption it has self-created. Somehow, modern
society has come to accept as some divine inevitability that the
primary objective of a prudent and realistic person is to strengthen
those qualities we have come to define as ambition and success to
persistently strive to get ahead. Our moment-to-moment task is to
escalate up the pyramid of wealth, station, class, and ultimately for
the select few, power. Everyone else, then, is to be considered an
adversary that we must surpass and even defeat at all costs. The
rule of survival of the fittest, of social Darwinism, is the game.
39
But, as we have seen, the game now seems to have finally run
its course, to have finally exhausted not only the resources of this
Earth, but also the moral fortitude of the human endeavor itself.
Governments can no longer afford to fund a plethora of social
entitlement programs, yet both the aged and the young maintain
that their group is indeed entitled to certain social and employment benefits, no matter the cost to the other group. Indeed,
between 2007 and 2011, the younger generations, as a percentage
of the U.S. labor-force, declined, whilst those aged 55 and older
increased (BLS, 2011). Businesses aggressively seek their version
of entitlements as well, from tax breaks to the relaxing of various
regulatory oversights from how they treat the environment and
even their own employees. Industries with the best and most wellfunded government lobbyists win the best concessions, whilst
industries that cannot afford such representation, bear the full
burden of maintaining the social systems, thus essentially subsidizing the wealthier industries. Instead of Adam Smiths market
where multiple blacksmiths are able to jointly feed and collaborate
with a growing market demand, our modern Darwinist market
is turning on itself and like the ouroboros, is eating its own
tail. Until now, no matter how unforgiving or even immoral our
Darwinist markets had become, there seemed to be no other game
in town; no game-changer or no messiah leader seemed to come
to societys rescue. When some new technology or project or leader
professes to have the sacred game-changer, society pauses for a
moment, breathless, hoping against hope that indeed the game
can be changed. Inevitably, though, the game continues on, and all
society can do is make the best it can as it is forced to muster any
ambition and drive for success which might still somehow remain.
The moral foundations of this thesis shall attempt to communicate that, despite the game being perhaps mortally wounded by
the 2008 Great Recession, the only true game to change is our very
selves. The practical foundations of this thesis, then, shall attempt
to demonstrate that the very act of seeking out a new fourth
economy will inherently and intuitively begin to inspire society to
shed its Darwinist tendencies, and in turn, rebirth their collaborative and empathic tendencies. In order for us to explore such a
process via which we can somehow regain our societal cooperative
40
natures and thus, soci0-economic interdependence (as well as

reason and moral courage), we need to dig just a bit deeper into the
darkness of how and why we have come to be separated from one
another and society. By better understanding our darker influences,
we begin to discover something quite unexpected: we are only a
breath away from gaining access to virtually untapped and limitless resources of wealth. To better understand this waiting potentiality, we shall explore (albeit much too briefly) seven disparate
threads of social-economic influence as represented by Edmund
Burke, Michel Foucault, John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Sandel,
Dan Pink, Ibn Khaldun, and Dave Meslin.
We begin with this simple question: are the masses apathetic
or deliberately precluded from social governance? In 2010, a Canadian community organizer, Dave Meslin, presented a TED Talk
(www.ted.com) titled The Antidote to Apathy. His presentation questioned the validity of the common wisdom that true substantial
change is not possible because the public masses are too selfish,
too stupid, and too lazy; that they simply do not care. Meslins
observation is that government officials actively discourage
engagement of the masses by intentionally designing and placing
obstacles and barriers throughout the system. Meslin provides
Fig 7Meslin example 1 - a typical city administration public notice.
41
three pictorial examples of his thesis - Figures 7, 8, & 9 [ figures are

Meslins, from his presentation].
Figure 7 shows a typical city administration public notice
newspaper advertisement seemingly purposefully constructed
to be complex and discouraging. Figure 8 shows if corporations
published ads in the same manner, consumers would have a difficult time discerning exactly what was being marketed. Finally,
Figure 9 shows what an ad would look like if a government administration would truly desire active public participation. In this
manner, Dave Meslin attempts to address what is the reality being
expressed in seeming public apathy whether in relation to contrib-
Fig 8Meslin
example 2 - if
consumer
corporations
published ads in
the same manner
as Fig 7, they
might look like
this.
Fig 9Meslin
example
3 - if a city
administration
truly wanted to
encourage public
engagement,
their ad might
look like this.
42
uting their voices to day-to-day social-political-economic agenda,

or extremely low voter turn-outs in modern-era political elections.
Certainly, Meslin well illustrates that individuals and institutions
presently in power often use their power to either discourage or
initiate certain agenda. But something even deeper is running
through the blood of modern society.
Whether the example is of the above disenfranchising manner
in which city public notices are advertised, or of the paternalistic
and indiscernible manner in which laws and regulations are generally written within any government, or of the Kafkaesque machinations that often exemplify our justice systems our institutions
of government are both distant from the masses, and precisely like
the global banking system of today: too big to fail, and too big to
save. But we must also consider this uncomfortable observation
of the masses: we are just the same. As we have been divided by
the system, we thus divide ourselves. We, too, intentionally place
obstacles and barriers between ourselves and those elements in life
which we desire to eschew.
Modern-day French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926
1984) dedicated much of his life to the examination of the dividing
practices that society embodies within itself. His most famous
examples are the isolation of lepers, the confinement of the poor
and insane, the segregation of the infirm into hospitals and the
unlawful into prisons, and the stigmatization of sexual or cultural
deviance. In short, Foucault argues that dividing practices serve
not only to banish from our sight these uncomfortable aspects of a
society, but also defines our personal and social identities (healthy
vs. unhealthy; conforming vs. non-conforming; them vs. us; rich
vs. middle-class and poor; professional vs. domestic servant, etc.).
Foucault observes, as an example, as we segregate the infirm
into hospitals, we intentionally deny ourselves the responsibility
(some might even say the sacred opportunity) to more directly
care for the infirm and elderly. Emerging data suggests that the
number of people needing care have already exceeded the number
of trained care givers. So, why is it not the social norm, as an
example, for someone who is recovering from, say, a medical
operation, to recover in the warmth and energy of a volunteers
personal home? Why has society confined this fairly elementary
43
service to the cold and sterile environs of a hospital room? Why

is it not the social norm for someone who has lost their source of
employment to share a meal or other necessities with a neighbor?
Why has society relegated this modest service to some state institution or charity organization? Why has society essentially substituted its day-to-day natural responsibilities with monetary donations made to some specialized institution that performs these
responsibilities on its behalf? Why do large corporations establish
independent organizations to conduct their charitable activities,
rather than these activities exist as a core and daily service of the
corporate owners and employees? These very same dividing practices existing within our individual selves and how we feel discomforted by various experiences of society, then, plays out in the more
complex manifestations of political and economic affairs and the
divisions between, say, social minorities vs. majorities, American
markets vs. European markets, Judeo-Christians vs. Muslims,
even Northern vs. Southern states.
As was mentioned earlier, John Kenneth Galbraith, in The
Affluent Society (1958), voiced a moral concern that the pendulum
was overbearingly swinging from societal-centric to individual-centric production and consumption that society was simply
gorging itself on luxury. Individualism was, then, already beginning to overshadow the collective society. Galbraith was attempting
to warn us of the inevitability of our self-centered actions: at some
point, the ordering glue of society would weaken. We would no
longer find value in maintaining a collective society. Perhaps
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher best captured the
zeitgeist of our modern affluent society in her infamous quote in
Womens Own magazine, October 31 1987:
And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There
are individual men and women, and there are families.
Another voice makes a similar set of observations but from an
opposing world-view lens. In What Money Cant Buy: The Moral
Limits of Markets (2012), Harvard University professor Michael
Sandel recounts the story of a day-care center, which responded
to a problem of parents arriving late to collect their children by
44
introducing punitive fines. But the result of the fines was that
late pick-ups actually increased. Parents still arrived late, paid the
fine, and just went on with life. Sandel, in the same the masses
are victims vein as Noam Chomsky before him, argues that the
markets are somehow separate from the masses, and that some
external life-force somehow possesses the soul and institutions
of the markets to imprison the weak and powerless masses. The
masses are merely victims of the market. Sandel argues that it is the
market which is responsible for corrupting the natural and moral
idea of collective responsibility. Once the old norm of arriving
on time at the day-care center had been monetized, according to
Sandel, it was impossible to change back.
But Foucault argued (famously with Noam Chomsky in a 1971
television debate) that this the market is responsible attitude only
enables and fortifies our individual and societal sense of victimhood. Foucault argued against the institutions influence us
approach because almost every institution that exists throughout
all aspects of human civilization does so for the inherent purpose
to perpetuate some articulated or unarticulated (conscious or
subconscious) will of society. Thus, Foucaults observations ultimately lead us to this destination: society either directly or indirectly creates any and all institutions and their resulting policies as
a direct consequence of societys need to have institutions control
society rather than society, on an individual and collective level,
control itself. Throughout history, society has tended to appoint
institutions to enact the general will of the people.
Two consequences, however, arise from our choice to institutionalize our natural responsibilities: firstly, we abdicate our
natural responsibilities to someone else. This Adam Smith division of labor approach may, at first glance, seem an efficient way
of managing the affairs of society. But, as we have seen throughout
the experiences of our lives, our separatist world-view can also
do us harm. And secondly, over the centuries, we have simply
lost consciousness of the underlying philosophies, intentions, and
cultural norms that are embedded into our institutions, our market
economies, and our entire way of life. We have inherited, but we
have not comprehended what we have inherited. We are in the
system and the system is in us. We have been divided into indi-
45
vidual productive units for the sake of profit only because we have
chosen not to join together in collaborative and interdependent
endeavors for the sake of pure experience. Wall Street bankers and
inept government officials have not led us to the cliff of economic
ruin. We have all led ourselves into crisis.
Is it possible the owners of the day-care center story Sandel
recounts in a misguided effort to resolve what they saw to be
a collective responsibility failure by their clients are the ones
actually responsible for projecting a monetizing solution into
the problem? What if the owners had simply sat down with their
clients to discuss the human elements of what was happening and
as a result of this more human dynamic, the community discovered some collaborative approach which addressed not merely the
symptom of the problem (parental lateness), but the problem itself
(the day-to-day dynamics of child care)? Perhaps someone in the
community might have been inspired to start an in-house arts and
crafts project for children, or established a relationship with active
elderly volunteers (helping both young and old). The lesson here:
the knee-jerk reaction to consistently blame markets rather than
ourselves, often blinds us in our ability to see unexplored possibilities just waiting for us in our own consciousness.
A mere 13 years after the revolutionary births of American
republicanism and Adam Smiths mass liberation of the laboring
class, the very sovereignty of the British monarchy and governance itself throughout the territories of Europe were now in
mortal peril. The common man had been liberated from poverty
and slavery but now wanted more. The common man was now
emboldened to want natural rights rights that originate from
life itself, rather than from some self-appointed governor or law, no
matter how benevolent. To the elites minds, the genie had to be
put back in the bottle, and quickly. In the year 1790, the political
theorist and philosopher Edmund Burke published Reflections on
the Revolution in France and perhaps no other document or philosophy has had such an enduring and crippling impact upon how
ruling elites view the masses within a modern-era government
and how the masses, still today, have continued to cower from
their own natural responsibilities. Edmund Burke, in arguing
why a French Revolution should not be supported, parroted much
46
of Platos ancient philosophies of how individuals, societies, and

governments should operate. Namely, that the most preferred form
of governance was an aristocracy led by a philosopher-king and
the least preferred was actually a democracy because this would
inevitably lead to tyranny.
In Platos and Burkes view, the masses were generally poor,
uneducated, and prone to drunken populist emotions. Thus, if
these drunken masses would attempt to participate in a democracy, the system would eventually break down into nothing short of
tyranny. Burke, on numerous occasions, painted a picture so dire
for England if she, too, were to succumb, and allow the drunken
devil of democracy to enter the sacred folds of her skirts. Burke
unreservedly praised the divine sanctity of King George III and
the sober practicality of royalism.
The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment
is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species
is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always
acts right. 12
Burkes coup de grce which still haunts us today:
Government should be a matter of prudential
management and practical statesmanship practiced by the
aristocratic class rather than rule by abstract principle.
Because the masses were deemed incapable of exercising
natural responsibilities, they were not to be granted natural
rights. The belief that the masses are intellectually incapable to
undertake self-control and that they needed to be led by some
form of elitist control still permeates our societies today. Even on
a more organic level, a second major theme of Plato which Burke
also venerated was that society was naturally divided into three
distinct castes, or classes. Rulers or Philosopher Kings: those who
are intelligent, rational, self-controlled, in love with wisdom, well
suited to make decisions for the community. These correspond to
the reason part of the soul and are very few. Warriors or Guard12 Burkes Speech on Reform of Representation in the House of Commons
(7 May 1782)
47
ians: those who are strong, adventurous, and brave; in the armed
forces. These correspond to the spirit part of the soul. Workers:
laborers, carpenters, plumbers, masons, merchants, farmers, etc.
These correspond to the appetite part of the soul. Certainly, we
can see that this reductionist view of the human species is effectively predeterminative, even dehumanizing for each of us can
possess a mixture of all three of these aspects of psychology
and behavior at any given time. We are much more subtle and
composite than Plato or Burke believe us to be. We do not have
to be compartmentalized into behavioral and social boxes. We do
not have to be governed by some external force of power. We can
govern ourselves.
Finally, this leads us to the concept of self-governance versus
our conventional perception that we require some form of extrinsic
incentive (an incentive that is external or separate from the primary
activity being performed) in order to govern our actions and our
socio-economic behavior. Management advisor, Daniel Pink, is a
forceful voice for helping us to observe that a profound mismatch
exists between what science knows and what business does.
Modern economic and business models continue to be based on the
notion that some monetary award should be given so as to motivate
a person to complete a task in the shortest time possible. A simple
example: a person is offered some monetary award if they successfully stack a certain number of boxes or saw a certain volume of
wooden planks in a specific alloted time. But what happens when
the task is not merely mechanical when the task requires some
element of creativity or ingenuity?
As early as the 1940s, science was already demonstrating
that people often had difficulties in visual perception and problem-solving tasks. The Gestalt psychologist, Karl Duncker,
devised the now-famous experiment called the candle problem to
test what he termed functional fixedness (where one element of
a whole situation already has a [fixed] function which has to be
changed for making the correct perception or for finding the solution to the problem).13 The result of Dunkers experiment and
13 For a more detailed description of the candle problem, see http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Candle_problem
48
generations of scientific experiments the followed all observed

that people can overcome their deficiencies of functional fixedness
when some intrinsic motivation exists say, a doctor attempting
to revive an unconscious patient is primarily motivated to revive
the patient as an instinctual and intrinsic motivation of life itself,
and any financial rewards are secondary to the doctors motivation. As a consequence, a bicycle tire pump laying in the vicinity
of the unconscious patient, no longer is constrained by functional
fixedness, and perhaps becomes a life-saving instrument. Indeed,
Dunker and many others have observed when these intrinsic
motivators are replaced with extrinsic motivators (again, something external to or separate from the challenge at hand, such as
financial reward), then people actually took longer at successfully
completing the given task or even simply failed at conceptualizing
a solution to a given problem. And yet, modern institutions of
business almost exclusively utilize extrinsic motivators of financial
reward to incentivize employees.
Certainly, when the task at hand is narrowly defined, mechanical in nature, and requiring no true sense of creativity, financial (extrinsic) rewards may indeed work well. This pretty much
defines the bulk of the labor requirements of the 19th and 20th
centuries. But, the 21st century requirements of the services
sector (as symbolized by the candle problem) are based more on
cognitive and creative skills as well as moral/ethical judgment. In
these cognitive-centric areas, as Dunker, Daniel Pink, and others
remind us, extrinsic rewards are not only ineffective, they often
do harm. These types of candle problem experiments have been
repeated over, and over, for the past 70 years all with the same
results. In 2005, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, after completing
a joint study in the U.S. and India, published the following (Boston
Working Paper No. 05-11): [O]nce the task calls for even a rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.
Yet, as Pink warns:
The vast majority of businesses around the world are
still operating, are still making their decisions based on
assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted
more in folklore than in science.
49
The underlying and unspoken objective that seems to be motivating the business sector to not accept what observable science is
recommending, is that business owners are singularly focused on
forcing compliance upon the labor-force (meaning, this is what
you must do to get paid), rather than to allow the labor-force to be
intrinsically engaged into the deeper affairs and inner workings of
the business. The three clear observations to be made in understanding the consequences of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators: a] Pink observes what stimulates a persons internal sense of
consciousness (and thus, performance motivator) is the yearning
to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
b] Thus, rather than compliance coerced with carrots and sticks,
what should motivate modern-era labor resources is the more
naturally and intrinsically felt need to make a valued contribution
or service (internal to a persons sense of consciousness, utility, or
societal/personal consequence). c] On simply a functional level,
the challenges and tasks inherent to the 21st century services-centric economy inherently require all economic actors to be engaged
in some type of collaborative partnership, rather than bound by
conventional owner and labor-rent relationships.
Yet, we illogically disregard what science and naturalness
are attempting to communicate, and we stubbornly adhere to an
outdated paradigm based on compliance and coercion, rather than
an evolved paradigm of collaboration and service. If we attempt
to imagine a scene from some primitive society, or perhaps from
Adam Smiths generation, we can easily conceptualize that each
member of the community was tangibly experienced and valued
by the community as a whole. The hunter-gatherer who brought
back a deer carcass was made to feel the gratitude of the entire
community, perhaps with offerings of fruit or drink. A craftsman
who wielded a blacksmiths hammer to construct a simple table or
a complex building structure left a tangible mark upon society and
its capacity to survive, progress, and evolve.
But in todays self-centered marketplace, when we pass by a
bank building or stand in front of a government service bureaucrat,
we quite often do not exude this type of positive feeling that individuals laboring within these institutions are actually attempting
to assist society as a whole. Indeed, we often feel that an increasing
50
percentage of the labor-force are attempting to either protect

their particular market share (and hence, see and experience
other people as adversaries), or worse, to extract as much profit as
possible in any transaction (and hence, see and experience other
people with apathy or even antipathy). As recent tensions between
American communities and their police departments seem to
suggest, certain sectors of society (particularly minorities) have
come to feel that police departments no longer serve and protect
the community as a whole, but rather the police view particular
segments of society (meaning minorities) are an existential threat
to society as a whole. Thus, police departments have become so
militarized that it has grown difficult to discern the distinction
between civil police departments and military units. As this tension
within a society is allowed to expand, society clumsily attempts
to classify the tension as being racial-, class-, or religious-centric.
But these classification attempts are both grossly simplistic as well
as fraudulent. To repeat the wise observation made in 1377 by
the Tunisian economist and philosopher Ibn Khaldun as to why
society either experiences order or disorder:
Know, then that the difference between people arises
principally from the difference in their occupations; for their
very union springs out of the need for co-operation in the
securing of a livelihood.
And Ibn Khaldun digs even deeper to shed light on the much
wider perspective of societal evolution:
Civilizations must go through four stages: the first
stage is the emergence of a new civilization and society.
The second stage covers a period of growth and prosperity.
Stagnation and decadence characterize the third stage where
wealth can no longer increase. This brings us to a fourth
stage of decline leading to the ultimate collapse. Finally, a
new civilization emerges from the ashes of the previous one
and another cycle is born. The conditions of the world and
of the nations do not persist in one unchanging state, but
are transformed with the passage of time and move from one
condition to another.
51
John Kenneth Galbraith was attempting to warn us in 1958

that western civilization was entering a third stage of evolution
where wealth can no longer increase for the masses. Herein, this
thesis is attempting to warn that western civilization is now rapidly
evolving into Ibn Khaduns fourth stage a decline leading to ultimate collapse. The masses simply cannot hope to maintain the
most vital of all economic imperatives of civilizational existence
and social order: aggregate demand.
This chapter has attempted to synthesize: a] Adam Smiths
18th century division of labor principles; b] the elitist-separatist
philosophies of Burke; and c] our own socially detached and isolationist practices examined by Foucault and how these seemingly
esoteric abstractions tangibly impact the economic crises and the
essence of social order. The synthesis seems to lead us to an essential realization: substantial healing of our socio-economic existence
can never be achieved simply by conventional institutional reforms
by electing new politicians, or writing more laws and regulations,
or government stimulus of new jobs, or raising or lowering taxes,
or bailing out more banks or even entire industries, or printing
more trillions in money to distribute to either local commercial
banks or even directly to individuals or corporations, or even eliminating money altogether, or drilling for more oil, or instituting
only clean energy use, or building hundreds of eco-friendly cities,
or converting the world to a single religion, or implementing any
other tangible so-called real world reform.
Conversely, we are not sad victims of some corporate or government conspiracy. Central banks are not the bad guys and populist liberal politicians are not the messiahs. New Age rhetoric that
humanity needs to dramatically reduce its environmental footprint
(and thus save the world) is not only nave, but also destructive in
the long-term. Humanity must evolve, not devolve.
As we have endeavored to weave together the seven disparate threads of social-economic influence represented by Burke,
Foucault, Galbraith, Sandel, Pink, Ibn Khaldun, and Meslin, we
hope that it has been made unavoidably clear that the reality of
economics, in its most base definition, is the physical as well as
metaphysical manifestations of the human endeavor, and how these
manifestations are correspondingly valued by society as a whole.
52
Since 1776, Adam Smiths economics for the masses has been at
the center of social order. By allowing the commercial society to
weaken, social order is now in palpable jeopardy. As a consequence,
we have a collective duty to finally come to terms with this inescapable fact: the crisis we are now experiencing (economic, social, and
environmental) is caused specifically because mass human labor is no
longer needed in the three exhausted fields of agriculture/mining, mass
production, and services.
In the end, as Foucault observes, we truly have no one other
than ourselves to blame for the increasing fracturing of our
socio-economic order. Our own gluttony, our own hubris, our own
antipathy to evolve these are the unhealthy seeds to our present
socio-eco0nomic crisis. Society has allowed itself and its integral
responsibilities to atrophy, and no longer comprehends how to
balance between individual well-being and enlightenment, societal well-being and order, and responsibility to care for and sustain
Earths resources and environment.
Only we the entirety of the masses can make the decisive move to finally change the game and stem this decline we
are presently experiencing, and thus, re-knit the societal fabric
of the human endeavor. As Ibn Khaldun intimated so long ago,
we need to rediscover some form of mutually-supportive occupational paradigm as we explore some new socio-economic endeavor
beyond that of mere luxury consumption (and technically, making
sure that this cooperation results in aggregate demand on both a
local and global scale). As Daniel Pink observes (and as countless
others throughout history have observed) that the yearning to do
what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves is what
most effectively (and honorably) motivates a labor-force. The next
chapter shall attempt to discern what might be the larger than
ourselves foundations which animate this new paradigm beyond
luxury consumption. We shall explore what we call principles of
global interdependence. g
The Foundations of a New Fourth Economy
PRINCIPLES OF INTERDEPENDENCE
We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe

each other a terrible loyalty.
G.K. Chesterton
When any attempt is being made to either discuss particular principles of any existent or conceptual world-view, we are
duty-bound to venture down a rabbit-hole of sorts to earnestly
peer into the uncertain fog of humanitys collective philosophical
precepts. This abridged edition of this thesis in its undertaking
to visualize the principles of some new socio-economic paradigm
of global interdependence cannot even begin to examine comprehensively or even fairly into the myriad of intricate concepts that
comprise the philosophical underpinnings of our human endeavor
seeking its next evolutionary milestone. This text can merely touch
the surface of only a minor selection of these concepts. Some form
of beginning, however, must be ventured so that societies can be
stimulated to initiate a wider and more thorough discernment
process.
Thus, what follows in this chapter shall briefly highlight four
selected concepts: a] certainty versus curiosity; b] rhetoric versus
parrhesia; c] individualism versus collective society; and d] exclusiveness versus entanglement (specific to socio-economics, this
could also be called zero-sum versus trans-market applications of
profit-seeking). As a result, we shall attempt to synthesize each
of these four threads into a coherent tapestry of what a fourth
economy set of principles based on the valuations of intangible
assets might be, and indeed, how society as a whole is to weave such
an evolutionary tapestry if it so chooses. This thesis is also dutybound to declare what it discerns to be none of its business: namely,
53
54
to suggest that any specific foundation of a new fourth economy

(intangible assets-based or any other foundation) should be seen
as some sort of exclusive imperative. Once society as a whole collectively understands and agrees with the prognosis that the crisis
we are now experiencing (economic, social, and environmental) is
caused specifically because mass human labor is no longer needed
in the three exhausted fields of agriculture/mining, mass production, and services diverse communities from around the world
will inevitably need to come together and discern a course of action
these communities deem as appropriate and wise. This thesis is
only attempting to demonstrate one possible (perhaps even probable) option. We are certain, however, designing and cultivating
any new fourth economy no matter its foundation is not going
to be as a result of some messianic figure leading society like sheep
to this new frontier. The fourth economy will, itself, naturally
demand that society consciously co-creates, and equally, takes a
shared responsibility in its wise cultivation of any new frontier.
No matter how unrealistic or Utopian as the notion may be of the
masses finally and collectively undertaking direct responsibility for
their actions, the human endeavor may soon not have any other
choice. The purpose of this thesis is merely to provide a seed of
knowledge so that global civilizations are afforded an opportunity
to peer over the cliff of socio-economic destruction and coherently
choose a new evolutionary path.
Hence, with these mortal challenges in mind, we begin with
certainty versus curiosity. If we humans are to be honest with each
other, we have to be able to admit that we are, as a species, a bit
schizophrenic. On one hand, we seem to need certainty in our lives
absolute answers, whether relating to the existence of a supreme
being, an afterlife, or even the principles of social order. Thats
what order is, certainty. On the other hand, we simply cannot stop
our sense of curiosity from asking questions peering into the
unknown of space and wondering what is out there? On one hand,
certainty (whether based on fact or fabrication, or even outdated
fact) facilitates uniformity, and thus, conformity. On the other
hand, curiosity facilitates innovation, change, and thus, evolution.
Certainty versus curiosity. Conformity and stability versus changeability and evolution. A balancing act that we often mishandle.
55
Perhaps the rational or socio-economic thread that binds

together and makes sense of our persistent bouts with mass-schizophrenia is the realization that those elements in our existence that
can be defined as certain facilitates our capacity to secure (and/or
control) some predetermined standard of living (or station of class
or power over others). Whilst our curiosity, however, is merely a
luxury that can be enjoyed only after some predetermined standard of living or power of control is secured. We can readily hear
the social voices of certainty: we should budget a space exploration
or international aid program only after we have resolved socio-economic issues at home or: we should not be providing free handouts to a particular group of persons that we are not absolutely sure as
to what end they will use these hand-outs. To combat these voices
of certainty, other voices of curiosity attempt to wield the power of
rhetoric to tout those aspects of scientific or social programs that
might make social order more certain: by engaging in science or
providing these social hand-outs, we are actually facilitating private
sector consumption, and thus, profits. Rhetoric is societys prevailing
choice of tools as to how and why it communicates.
Using non-rhetorical, or Parrhesiazomai (an ancient Greek
word which Michel Foucault shall explain for us just a bit later)
tools, would be judged as being nave, or too direct: space exploration (or undersea exploration, and the like) are natural instincts of
a curious species; or, providing care for others is simply the right and
loving thing to do. Over countless generations, we have learned
to hide behind rhetoric because Parrhesia reveals our nakedness.
Societal norms tell us that rhetoric is for adults, and parrhesia is
for children.
Ricardo Semler, a Brazilian business owner and advocate for
industrial democracy (where employees more directly make strategic business decisions, and thus, share in the responsibility and
authority in the workplace) relates an observation made by his wife
regarding workers sharing in the responsibility of decision-making:
In many ways, it is more difficult to work in a situation
like that instead of someone saying I want you here at
one [oclock], and work at something until four, or six
and then you are free people are saying solve this
56
[problem] for me somehow and then you end up taking

the problem home you wake up at two in the morning
trying to solve the problem. You dont wake up at two in
the morning when someone says just do this [activity for a
certain amount of time] and then you go home. 14
This commentary mirrors Daniel Pinks observation that the
bulk of the labor requirements of the 19th and 20th centuries were
essentially mechanical in nature, and requiring no true sense of
creativity, but that the 21st century requirements of the services
sector (as symbolized by the candle problem) are based more on
cognitive and creative skills as well as moral/ethical judgment.
Again, though, a sense of certainty exists in the old model (work
x number of hours for x amount of income) whereas in a model
where employees share in the responsibility of problem-solving,
the outcome (and perhaps income) is much less certain. In the
old model, the employer-employee contract is codifying a sense
of certainty between both parties. But the model required by the
21st century utilized by only a small handful of companies
should instill a sense of responsibility as well as risk between both
parties. It is therefore not difficult to comprehend that the masses
would need to diminish their generations-long dependence upon
the certainty of contractual labor-wages, and increase their confidence in operating in an environment where income and wealth
were more directly tied to responsibility and risk.
If we view this from an even wider angle, we can more effectively comprehend that when the scientific community, en masse,
warns the human species that global warming is now profoundly
jeopardizing ecosystem sustainability, we simply have difficulty
accepting this type of warning from science because of our dependence upon certainty. The threat of global warming, on socio-economic and socio-political levels, jeopardizes our sense of certainty.
To reduce our environmental footprint would most assuredly
reduce economic production, and thus, jobs
. Consequently,
accepting the responsibility to reduce global warming would make
the human species vulnerable to the unknown.
14 Interview, VPRO Tegenlicht 4 February 2013
57
We have grown to fear the unknown. Our fear of the unknown

is so great that as a consequence of theological influences in the
late 16th century, the very etymological meaning of the Greek
word khaos (abyss, that which gapes wide open, is vast and empty)
was abruptly transmuted to chaos (disorder, utter confusion). This
type of fear-induced severance of language from its origins, then,
seeps into the blood and DNA of all successive generations until,
finally, we loose sight of all nuance and prudence.
In an attempt to pacify the moral antagonisms between the
opposing world-views of certainty versus curiosity and risk, we
have come to defensively segregate individuals (and their beliefs/
perspectives) into self-reinforcing camps or parties or factions
of society. And yet, as much of this thesis has attempted to illustrate, these echo chambers of identity are founded not on fact or
reality, but rather on illusion, subjectivity, and outdated knowledge.
In short, we quite often attempt to create order out of nothing
more than illusion. Not surprisingly, we have created for ourselves
complex labyrinths of institutions, bureaucracies, and myths
which provide us merely a false sense of order. As a result of our
mass-misunderstandings of fact (how socio-economics functions,
as an example) and our almost singular use of rhetorical tools to
make the (often fabricated) facts fit the policy, we have virtually
no rational or realistic chance to formulate enlightened policy to
fit the facts. Our capacity to see beyond rhetoric is limited, and as
a consequence, our view and experience of the world is likewise
limited distorted and illusory.
We have fallen asleep and deceived ourselves with rhetoric to
defend or coerce others to conform to our beliefs/perspectives, and
thus, have forgotten the discernment and wisdom to be found in
the practices of parrhesia and synthesis. As we attempt to rediscover
truth with respect to how socio-economics actually operates, we
must also re-examine the human voices which profess a particular
concept of truth. There is a distinction to be made between truth
and truth tellers. Again, Michel Foucault:
Etymologically, parrhesiazesthai means to say
everything from pan (everything) and rhema (that
which is said). The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes,
58
is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not

hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to
other people through his discourse. In parrhesia, the speaker
is supposed to give a complete and exact account of what
he has in mind so that the audience is able to comprehend
exactly what the speaker thinks. The word parrhesia then,
refers to a type of relationship between the speaker and what
he says. For in parrhesia, the speaker makes it manifestly
clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion.
And he does this by avoiding any kind of rhetorical form
which would veil what he thinks. Instead, the parrhesiastes
uses the most direct words and forms of expression he can
find. Whereas rhetoric provides the speaker with technical
devices to help him prevail upon the minds of his audience
(regardless of the rhetoricians own opinion concerning
what he says), in parrhesia, the parrhesiastes acts on other
peoples mind by showing them as directly as possible what
he actually believes. 15
Foucault is again challenging our notions of policy-making
on a social scale and the institutionalization of these policies. Are
we conscious, as a society, that much of our policy debates are
communicated behind the often misleading veil of rhetoric? Are
we conscious of the bewildering labyrinth of human psyche that
resides deep within those messengers of rhetoric? Are we conscious
of the distinctions between truth and truth tellers?
Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely (5 April 1588) when
his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada;
Hobbes later reported that my mother gave birth to twins: myself
and fear.16 After being involved in a fight with another clergyman
outside his own church, Hobbes father (also named Thomas, a
clergyman) was forced to flee to London, England, leaving his wife,
two sons and a daughter behind. If society would be conscious
of the fear and feelings of abandonment that crippled Hobbes
throughout his life, would society be better prepared to discern the
wisdom and value of Hobbes writings and counsel? In Hobbes
masterpiece, Leviathan, he wrote: civil war and the brute situ15 Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia, 1983
16 Biography, www.notablebiographies.com/He-Ho/Hobbes-Thomas.html
59
ation of a state of nature (the war of all against all) could only be
avoided by strong undivided government. Hobbes argument was
that it mattered less the specific design of governance, as long as
the nations security was maintained. Security was paramount to
any other concern. Can we not hear the echoes of this fear-based
ideology when leaders of the U.S. government and military attempt
to use rhetoric to convince the public that torture or the civil rights
limiting Patriot Act are valid and necessary tools to protect the
nation from acts of terror? Are we conscious of their childhoods
and deeper psychologies? Have we grown afraid to peer behind
the veil of rhetoric and those that speak rhetoric? Upon these vague
unstable foundations of myths and prejudices, we have come to
build great monuments of economic institutions and policies. Our
ritualistic commitment to these monuments have provided a justification for us to deceive ourselves with subjective-based preordinations such as that each of us, as individuals, are to arrive at
some specific destination (standard of living, class/power position,
or even stage of retirement). As a consequence of our holding on
to ritual, we have forgotten to give credence to the journey itself.
We dont even question any other alternative to concepts such as
retirement, or specialized occupation, or our nations persistent
focus on the quantitative nature of GDP figures. We have deceived
ourselves with superficial distinctions of identity by attempting to
contort our occupations into the essential definition of our identity.
We proffer that our superficial definitions of identity and our
unquestioning commitment to socio-economic ritual when
discerned more by curiosity than certainty can provide us with
new vistas of thought and opportunity. As we expand and make
more authentic our definitions of identity, and as we let go of myth
and ritual, we will finally discover that our identities are multi-layered, and that our value to society can never truly experience retirement, or even death. In short, the unknown void of khaos (in this
case, the fourth economy and beyond) actually provides a natural
order based not on certainty, but rather, on curiosity. But first, we
still need to untangle the knots of individualism versus collective
society, and exclusiveness versus entanglement. We begin: the
individual ought to be valued by a collective society, and society
ought to be, in return, valued by the individual.
60
Let us consider the following situation: one day, in a corporate

cafeteria, a young female computer programmer carries her food
tray to a table and sits nearby to a small group of the companys
executives. After several minutes, she overhears a portion of the
conversation between the executives; the essence of the conversation being that the company is suffering from a particular problem
which could severely jeopardize the survival of the company.
Inspired by some memory from her past, the young computer
programmer interrupts the executives conversation and shares her
thoughts. And indeed, her input spurs a renewed dialogue between
the executives, and as a consequence, the company makes strategic
changes in its market focus and operations. The company, as a
direct result of a computer engineers intangible input, evolves.
A central question which arises from the above example: what
value, in technical economic terms, did the young computer engineer contribute to the company in her telling of a personal observation? Previous to the encounter in the company cafeteria, did
the corporation ever look upon this young computer programmer
as anything other than a computer programmer a compartmentalized tool in some pigeon-hole? Was she seen, as an example, as
someone whose very life experiences were of value to the company
as a whole, or even any of its employees? Or perhaps, was she
seen as someone with a personal network which could be beneficial to the company, or its vendors? The most likely answer: even
if a corporations owners might have a genuine empathy for its
employees, corporations simply do not possess the infrastructure capable of systematically seeking out (let alone quantifying)
the greater potentiality of its workforce, or conversely, capable of
providing its workforce with access to the corporations direct or
indirect assets for the individual benefit of the employee.
In part because of Adam Smith and his division of labor principles, and in part because of our unquestioning commitment to
ritual (and often, even myth), societies have persistently adopted
the reductionist law of life, and seem to only seek the shortest and
most immediate route to profits possible. But this single example of
a computer engineer providing to her employer an intangible asset
beyond that of her computer expertise, exposes the following two
questions: what other assets of value remain untapped throughout
61
our economy untapped simply because we remain transfixed by

the rituals of identity and specialization? And, who are we, if we
are not simply our occupation?
If the very definition of individual identity is evolving (even
though we may not intellectually accept that evolution), what impact
does this evolved version of individual identity have on the collective society? Here, we need to make a subtle distinction between the
concept of individual or popular sovereignty (the concept that not
merely a privileged few, but all persons are naturally imbued with
natural rights) versus the concept of an individuals socio-economic
and moral contribution and responsibility to the collective society. As
discussed earlier, critics of individual or popular sovereignty (such
as Edmund Burke) believed that the masses had little to no skin
in the game (risk) with respect to the moment-to-moment design
and mechanics of the marketplace and thus, the masses could not
even begin to take responsibility for something that it had virtually
no input, save that of simple labor and consumption. As a consequence, our limited laborer-consumer-based individual identities
are inherited from this notion that the masses have accepted little
to no risk in the design and mechanics of the marketplace. Thus,
a collective society becomes merely the aggregate of low risktaking individuals the individuals identity is limited, and thus,
the collective societys identity is limited. But what if the equation
were to change? What if the masses actually participated in the
moment-to-moment design and mechanics of the marketplace?
What if (reasonable) risk was the new social norm?
As the next chapter will assert, any new fourth economy
particularly an economy focused on intangible assets would
spontaneously reveal an environment within which all individuals
would intuitively aspire to co-create and take a shared responsibility/
risk in the design and sustainability of the marketplace. Instead of
feeling forced or coerced to take moral responsibility to perpetuate
the general will of society, a new fourth economy would present
an environment where the uniqueness of the individual actually
becomes animated as a consequence of their mutually-supportive
exploration and contribution of their personal and authentic identity. Perpetuating the general will by enlightened choice and
yearning, rather than by force is the essence of natural law.
62
To better understand authentic identity, we need to explore

(again, all too briefly) the following concepts of natural law. In
the past, identity has essentially been a function of a persons
utility within a specific definition of time (essentially, the present
moment of need) meaning, a doctor without a patient has little
utility. The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889 1976)
provided this fundamental insight: the presence of things for us
is not their being, but merely their being interpreted as equipment
according to a particular system of meaning and purpose. A doctor
being ready at hand (Heideggers term) to assist a patient has been
the conventional definition of identity. We have blindly adopted
the following identity equation: identity = utility. Authentic identity, however, means to facilitate the free-flowing expressions of a
persons being. But we need to be a bit careful here. Charles Taylor
defines personal identity perhaps too narrowly:
There is a certain way of being human that is my
way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in
imitation of anyone elses. But this gives a new importance
to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life,
I miss what being human is for me.
[] Being true to myself means being true to my own
originality, and that is something only I can articulate and
discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am
realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. 17
In 1905, the German sociologist, philosopher, and political
economist, Karl Emil Maximilian Max Weber, published The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he proposed
that ascetic Protestantism (as opposed to Marxs conjecture of
historical materialism) was the primary force associated with the
rise in the Western world of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state. Weber endeavored to shed light on the view
that is was the cultural influences embedded in the experience of
religion that would allow us to better understand the genesis and
evolutions of capitalism. Like Ibn Khaldun before him, Weber
observed that certain cultural and religious influences directly
17 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 1991
63
shaped both the choice of occupation as well as the ensuing work

ethic of that cultural citizen or religious adherent. As an example,
Weber found that adherents to the Roman and Orthodox Catholic faiths, tended to view their stations in life as being fixed, and
thus, focused on advancing their craft within their fixed station.
Protestants, however, as a consequence of reforms instituted by
Martin Luther and John Calvin, viewed their stations in life as
being fluid, and thus, possessed the capacity to transcend their
birth-station and seek out their deeper calling. Weber observed,
as a consequence, that Protestants tended to gravitate toward positions of management and ownership, whereas Catholics tended to
remain focused on advancing a specific craft, and thus, remain in
positions of labor rather than management or ownership.
This thesis, then, cognizant of the diverse and subtle ways in
which humanity defines identity and utility (whether wisely, or
not), proffers a subtle synthesis of three principles in an effort
to prepare societys contemplation of evolving into a new fourth
economy: a] An individual is not isolated from the world or a
community and thus cannot be true to his/her own originality
in some arbitrarily-designed environment of isolation. Our originality is animated sparked alive as we authentically interact with
others. b] As we begin to diminish our use of rhetoric, and increase
our use of parrhesia, we will begin to challenge our personal wellsprings of courage and prudence to shed the absolutism of adopted
beliefs and thoughts. We will increasingly gain confidence in practicing Immanuel Kants timeless maxim: Sapere Aude dare to
be wise; dare to know. c] The fourth economy is one which facilitates value exchanges throughout the masses that emanate from
the exploration and expression of a persons being (both tangible
as well as intangible states of being), in addition to their specific
ready at hand utility exploitable within a specific moment. As
a consequence, the individual is no longer limited by its identity
tethered exclusively to utility, but rather, is liberated by the khaos
(the unknown) of exploration and human interaction. Utility and
value would be defined not merely in the specific moment of need,
but also in the boundless void of potentiality. In short, both the
individual and collective society would be liberated to focus on
the journey itself, rather than exclusively on arriving at a specific
64
destination in a specific time-frame. Graphically speaking, our

conventional view of identity and utility might be similar to how
we see and experience the proverbial iceberg; the tip of the iceberg
is deceiving, for what resides hidden from view is both larger and
more complex than we have experienced or even imagined. The
hurdle which prevents many to easily contemplate this re-framing
of identity and utility to include potentiality is that we have for
generations unquestioningly accepted the notion that supply-anddemand economic markets are founded and valued on the specific
ingredient of scarcity. Any supply/potential-and-demand/potential
economic market which values limitlessness seems at first glance
quite impossible and/or unrealistic to contemplate. This just isnt
how the game is played.
Nonetheless, herein, we highlight emerging examples of
limitlessness-based value which demonstrate that potentiality is
indeed a commodity that has already entered the global marketplace and is producing advancements to social well-being as well
as financial profits. Further, the examples to follow also appear
to be naturally negating societys long-held dependence upon a
scarcity-based socio-economic experience. Whether consciously
or subconsciously, humanity may be already beginning to seek
out a socio-economic experience founded on the limitlessness
of authentic potentiality. Various communities may have already
begun to take the first tenuous steps to changing the game. As we
shall come to understand, the specific ingredients missing which
would finally facilitate a mass migration from the past three economies of agriculture/mining, mass production, and services toward
a fourth economy based on intangible assets seems to be knowledge
and action. The next chapter will address these two missing ingredients of knowledge and action. But first, we need to expand upon
a series of concepts we introduced back in the prologue section
and also make a distinction between control and khaos.
Beginning in 1996, the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells
published what would soon be revered as The Information Age
trilogy comprised of three interrelated works: The Rise of the
Network Society, The Power of Identity, and End of Millennium.
The essential premise of the trilogy: beginning about the 1970s,
our industrial society is shifting to an informational society, and
65
is increasingly structured around networks rather than individual

actors. Castells observes the evolution toward an interrelationship
of social, economic and political features of society, and argues that
the network is the defining feature that marks our current epoch.
And yet, as Dan Pink has observed, businesses on the whole have
not actually embraced this evolution toward an economy animated
by information and knowledge where information and knowledge are the economy, rather than merely some tool a company
employs in an effort to manage its production more effectively.
Indeed, a vast majority of the worlds businesses seem fixated on
maintaining the old order of mechanics, control, and individual
competition. The venerated Eastman Kodak Company is an effective example of such a business that persistently failed to even
attempt to exploit its knowledge assets (such as its vast history of
chemistry-related knowledge which would have been of significant
value to a multitude of corporations and universities around the
world). Instead, Kodak spent its resources struggling to compete
in the declining photographic film sector. As a consequence of its
inability to evolve into exploiting its intangible assets, Kodak was
forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2012.
But there have been a number of corporations that have evolved
to actually comprehend their institutional knowledge is, itself, a
commodity. In the prologue section, we defined technology and
knowledge transfer in this way: the process of transferring skills,
knowledge, technologies, and methods of manufacturing among
corporations, governments, universities, and other institutions
so that scientific and technological developments are made accessible to a wider range of users who can then further develop and
exploit the technology into new products, processes, applications,
materials or services. Staying with Kodak as an example: in 1976,
Kodak enjoyed a 90% market share of photographic film sales in
the United States. But the company also possessed generations
of knowledge of how film and other aspects of chemistry operated and could be more effectively managed. If Kodak had been
more forward-thinking, the company could have sold or licensed
this knowledge to other companies in exchange for a percentage
of profits emanating from this exchange of knowledge. According
to the research report, More Than Money: The Exponential Impact
66
of Academic Technology Transfer18, from 1997 to 2007, technology

transfer licensing originating from merely the university sector
(not licensing originating exclusively by and between private sector
actors) had a US$ 187 billion impact on U.S. gross domestic
product, a US$ 457 billion impact on U.S. gross industrial output,
and created 279,000 jobs. Technology transfer efforts also provide
economic benefits from increased and expanded funding sources
bringing in new federal, private, or international dollars to the
region and local community. Thus, we can see that even though
technology and knowledge transfer can be a potent market opportunity, many corporations (as well as governments) continue to
operate from an opposing perspective of old school control and
battlefield-style competition.
And this is precisely where this thesis begins to venture into
hitherto under-explored territory. For even the corporations that
presently engage in exploiting their assets of knowledge and technology, this exploitation is almost exclusively controlled by the
institution of the corporation; exchanges are conducted by and
between the institutional entities of the corporation. Individual
employees, themselves, possess no legal or practical authority to
assess or exploit their individualized knowledge or experience. We
argue that vast untapped resources reside on this individual-to-individual level; this uncharted reservoir is, indeed, one of many
possible examples of what we refer to as a fourth economy.
As we earlier introduced in the prologue section: an individual
employee at a manufacturing plant possesses both experience
and know-how say, relating to heat specifications appropriate
for molding plastics. In our present value system, the employee
receives merely a standard salary based on an hourly wage; the
knowledge and experience of the employee is exploited essentially
exclusively for the direct benefit of the employer. Here, we need
to make three specific distinctions with respect to employer-employee relationships.
Value distribution. The most elementary and widely made observation is that there is a severe imbalance between the employee
18 Valerie Landrio McDevitt, Joelle Mendez-Hinds, David Winwood, Vinit Nijhawan,
Todd Sherer, John F. Ritter, and Paul R. Sanberg, 2014
67
and employer with respect to value and income generation. An

example of this imbalance: various media outlets, both print and
web-based, rely on the journalistic inputs (the research and stories
developed by the journalists) for the content which is read or viewed
by consumers. Yet, the vast percentage of the media outlets profits
are distributed to the owners/shareholders of the corporation,
rather than more equitably being distributed to the body of journalists which actually created the value in the first place. Particularly for entities which derive value generation from the creativity
and knowledge of the human experience, the old model of profit
distribution primarily to the corporate owners/shareholders will
eventually be replaced by a recognition, even open expression of
gratitude made to any and all contributions to the entitys value
generation and thus, profits (as well as losses) will eventually be
more equitably distributed throughout the value-chain. We reiterate, though, for this type of moral as well economic evolution to
occur, the masses will have to accept the risk of losses, if they are
to seek greater benefits and rewards.
Value resources. A very limited number of corporations have
taken small but important steps in this direction, but even then,
tend to restrict the inputs and responsibilities of the employee-base
to that of collaborating in the making of essential management
decisions (but not in the sharing of profits or losses of the entity).
The inclusion of the employee-base in the overall management of
the business is generally referred to as co-determination. Herein,
we do not want to minimize the importance of co-determination
programs, but we also recognize that co-determination is merely a
modest step in the direction of a more profound recognition of the
multi-faceted avenues of value generation emanating from individual employees, and thus, a more equitable distribution of value/
wealth/risk. As the next example demonstrates, there exists much
more wealth creation potential when we view the puzzle from a
profoundly different angle.
Value cultivation. In an effort to demonstrate just how multi-faceted any single employees value might be to not only a direct
employer, but also to a much wider marketplace, we will expand
upon the example which we introduced earlier in the prologue
section, regarding the employee at a manufacturing plant who
68
possesses both experience and know-how say, relating to heat

specifications appropriate for molding plastics. Let us assume this
employee happens to meet another employee from some other
corporate entity, who expresses that this second entity has certain
inefficiencies in how it manipulates plastics. Right then and there,
in a naturally-occurring entangled socio-economic experience, it
would be beneficial to all parties (the two corporate entities as well
as the two employees) that the know-how possessed by the first
employee is officially transferred to the second employee. With
the recent maturing of expert systems19, the intellectual property
(IP) transaction could easily be uploaded to a global network of
expert systems via both employees smartphone devices, and any
future improvements to the second entitys revenue generation as
a consequence of this new IP would result in a percentage of that
new revenue generation to be remunerated to the first corporation
as well as to the two employees who initiated the transaction. In
turn, the employee from the second entity might transfer this same
IP to still another employee in a third entity (which, by the way,
might have nothing at all to do with plastics, but something never
before recognized about the IP might somehow relate to the needs
of this third entity), and any resulting revenue generation would be
remunerated back down the entire chain of participants.
As a synchronistic consequence of spontaneous human relationships, not only can know-how be more widely dispersed
throughout the marketplace, IP can still be protected (perhaps
even more so than via conventional regulatory or legal means),
and now can be personally and exponentially valued by anyone,
anywhere. By valuing not the sovereignty of a corporation, or even
its intellectual property but rather, by valuing our own human
relationships and how IP can become an entangling agent we can
liberate from ancient chains the very definition of value itself.
19 An expert system is a computer application which makes decisions or solves

problems in a particular field, by using knowledge and analytical rules defined by known
human knowledge. People solve problems by using a combination of factual knowledge
and reasoning. In an expert system, these two essentials are mimicked by two software
components, a knowledge-base and an inference engine. The knowledge-base provides
specific facts and rules about the subject, and the inference engine provides the reasoning
ability that enables the expert system to form conclusions.
69
CENTRALIZED
DE-CENTRALIZED
DISTRIBUTED
Fig 10How knowledge is distributed throughout society
As Figure 10 illustrates (and which mirrors Manuel Castells

observation about society evolving from an individual world-view
into one which is network oriented), multiple paradigms establish
and control how information is disseminated. Unfortunately, even
though the Internet has provided the world with a wildly effective process to disseminate information in a distributed fashion,
most economic actors still disseminate information in the archaic
and hierarchical centralized fashion. We still continue to be
shackled by our egos telling us that we need to control our assets,
rather than allowing natures magnet of potentiality to take us to
places we cannot yet imagine. Instead of corporations attempting
to covet and protect their investments via outdated mechanisms,
they could in a naturally-occurring entangled socio-economic
paradigm invest the vast treasure chests of know-how they (and
their employees) possess throughout the world, and reap an almost
limitless value from the direct and indirect fruits that would be
borne by such investments. If a technical process was visibly available, any employees know-how and experience could be cataloged
and made available to a global marketplace bringing revenues
from global consumers of an employees know-how back to both
the employee as well as the direct employer. Again, though, a
tremendous volume of these types of intangibles remain unexploited simply because the masses are largely unaware that the
70
technologies necessary to facilitate these types of global exchanges

of intangibles already exist. To witness tangible day-to-day usage
of technologies more than capable to facilitate global exchanges of
intangible value, we merely need to look at the banking sector.
Banking sector: innovators of distributed networks. The global
infrastructure that has already been in place since the 1950s which
facilitates financial transactions made with credit/debit cards is
known as Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) networks. An extremely
simplified description of a typical EFT transaction: a European
tourist is making a purchase in a U.S. clothing store with his/her
credit or debit card. The tourist (in this case, the EFT industry
calls the cardholder) swipes the credit/debit card through a
point-of-sale terminal, and the EFT software then proceeds to
facilitate a myriad of actions. Let us assume the purchase was
for an item of clothing costing US$ 100.00. The EFT software
first contacts the cardholders bank to make sure the cardholders
credit/debit card is both valid and possesses the appropriate level of
funds to cover the cost of the purchase. A small fee (a percentage of
the transaction amount) is automatically transmitted directly into
the account of the European bank which first issued the credit/
debit card to the cardholder. Another small fee is automatically
transmitted directly into the account of the U.S. bank which is
acting as the merchants bank. Another signal is simultaneously
transmitted to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel,
Switzerland to record the split second timing of the transaction
and currency conversion rates at that split second (to convert the
tourists Euros into U.S. dollars). The BIS also receives a small fee
for this service (again, a percentage of the transaction amount). Up
to a dozen separate parties may automatically receive a small fee at
the moment the transaction is occurring. These fees (technically
called the merchant discount) are instantaneously deducted from
the US$ 100.00 purchase price of the clothing item; say, roughly
US$ 5.00 of fees are split amongst the various parties; and the
merchant is left with US$ 95.00 in net revenue. The banking sector
receives a relatively minute fee for facilitating these transactions,
but that the extraordinary volume of transactions made each and
every day, help to provide substantial revenues throughout the
global banking sector. It is estimated that over US$ 36 trillion per
71
day is transferred via a global meta-network of various types and

specializations of EFT networks (the Visa Money Transfer network,
as an example, boasts that their network connects over 1.7 billion
accounts, world-wide20).
But the not-so-obvious concept that emerges from better
understanding how the global EFT networks operate is this: if a
system exists that, within seconds, segregates a myriad of small
fees from specific consumer purchases, and automatically transmits those fees into the bank accounts of various parties, then, why
do we still continue to send a single lump-sum payment on an
annual basis to a centralized tax agency? Indeed, the technology
already exists for each and every citizen on the planet to have
access to minute-to-minute budget assessments relating to any
and all public service institutions (schools, hospitals, roads, police
and fire departments, etc.), and to automatically transmit funds
made via purchases or voluntary payments directly to the institutions designated by the citizens at any given moment. Technically,
it is (and has been for the past 20 years or so) absolutely unnecessary to send tax payments to a centralized tax collection authority;
these payments can more effectively be made via a distributed
network infrastructure as Figure 10 (page 69) illustrates. Since the
technology already exists to more effectively manage the aggregation and distribution of funds via a distributed network, why
does the human species continue to practice the outdated ritual
of appointing specialized human bureaucrats to centralize and
debate how to aggregate and distribute funds? The answer that
Michel Foucault would undoubtedly provide is that human society
essentially abdicates its individual and group responsibilities to
others, and by so doing, individuals become increasingly isolated
from society. Just a bit later in this section, we shall expand upon
this thought.
Banking sector: innovators of intangible products. Beginning in
the 1970s, with the development of money market funds21, the
shadow banking system was born and has grown to represent an
20 Source: http://investor.visa.com/
21 A money market fund pools money from many investors to specifically purchase
securities. Securities, broadly, are: debt (banknotes, bonds and debentures); equity
(common stocks); derivative (forwards, futures, options and swaps).
72
estimated 30 percent of the total financial system. The shadow

banking system (SBS) is loosely defined as financial transactions
that are for the most part disconnected from interactions between
financial institutions and the general marketplace essentially,
off-balance sheet transactions that occur solely between the financial institutions themselves. The nature of these off the books
(and often non-regulated) transactions are varied, but generally
are nothing more than exotic mathematical algorithms that are
packaged and sold amongst the financial institutions; these packaged instruments have no material value, only perceived value.
Indeed, by various reports22, these perceived values are not even
intellectually or practically understood by those that trade these
types of instruments. A substantial percentage of these algorithmic-products are developed by mathematical savants who are
often diagnosed as being affected by mental health issues such as
Aspergers syndrome.23 The Financial Stability Board estimates
that the SBS now accounts for an estimated US$ 75 trillion in this
perceived value, annually; this represents about 120 percent of the
global gross domestic product. These SBS transactions, as highlighted above, do not normally interrelate with the general marketplace except when large holders of these packaged instruments
miscalculate, and cannot settle their accounts with other institutions. Indeed, this is what is thought to have happened in 2008,
when specific large financial institutions were unable to settle their
off-balance sheet accounts, and were forced to tap into (and drain)
their normal balance sheet assets which then catastrophically
incapacitated these institutions to provide capital to the general
market.
It would be too convenient to simply label these SBS transactions as a by-product of greed or regulatory negligence. The
deeper observations are these, and which parallel the essential
thesis of Wealth Beyond Nations: firstly, the vast sums of wealth
now being created throughout the SBS (perceived, or otherwise)
are largely intangible; nothing of material substance is actually
being exchanged. Secondly, the wildly substantial and growing
22 Financial Stability Board, VPRO Tegenlicht, et al.
23 VPRO Tegenlicht, 2013
73
SBS phenomenon is a direct result of the general marketplace

having failed to provide growth opportunities in the normal course
of day-to-day socio-economic activity thus, the banks naturally
evolved into a new marketplace. The fundamental questions that
these observations force us to consider are: what is it that exists at
the core of the failings of the general marketplace, and what can
these failings tell us about ourselves as socio-economic actors?
The answer to these fundamental questions appears to be
that our three accustomed socio-economic fields of agriculture/
mining, mass production, and services no longer require mass
human labor, and thus, can no longer sustain aggregate demand
throughout the global markets. Our human rituals and myths seem
to compel individuals to react to this lack of aggregate demand
in a social Darwinist survival of the fittest mentality and methodology. Individuals increasingly view the larger fabric of society
with distrust and even malevolence; isolation and fear is allowed
to calcify. But if humanity were to pause for a moment, and more
wisely view the challenges it now faces, new vistas of opportunities would begin to enter our imaginations and actions. Indeed,
we would reach out to one another, and honorably, perhaps even
joyfully, serve one another in a new fourth economy.
And this leads us, finally, to the issue of exclusiveness versus
entanglement. As people such as Manuel Castells and many others
have observed, and as Figure 10 (page 69) illustrates, a natural
evolution is occurring which is altering both the mechanics and
essential purposes of human organization away from an individual-centric and toward a network-centric experience of the
world. A naturally-occurring consequence of evolving toward a
network-centric society is that our previous judgments of what is
to be valued will also evolve away from value judgments based on
scarcity (which propagates exclusiveness) and toward value judgments based on human relationships (which propagate entanglement). It is important to make a distinction between exclusiveness
and uniqueness. In its most base elements, an item, or a person, or an
ideology that is exclusive merely becomes something or someone
to covet or safeguard. An item, or a person, or a world-view that is
unique becomes something to experience and share. Exclusiveness
demands compliance to the game, while uniqueness liberates all
74
to explore and develop the strengths and weaknesses of the individual as it naturally desires to serve the whole of society.
As society naturally evolves, each individuals uniqueness will
also evolve. In short, exclusiveness attempts to dissuade or protect
us from natural evolution, where uniqueness naturally adapts to
and adds color and depth to the ever-changing circumstances and
priorities of evolution. Thus, if humanity is to somehow make a
concerted effort toward embracing the notions of network-centric
entanglement as the essential foundation of a new fourth economy,
we shall require some form of dialogue and process which sparks
both our imagination as well as our action. The following (and
final) chapter will outline such a dialogue and process intended to
spark a concerted action toward a new fourth economy. But first,
we briefly outline the quantitative as well as qualitative principles
of global interdependence which could perhaps serve as a fountainhead of a new fourth economy.
Envisioning a new fourth economy, we interweave two particular aspects of a radical transformation of the concept of value:
shareholder value, and product/service value. In present-day
capital markets, a publicly-traded corporations stock value cannot
truly be considered a rational quantification of the companys
tangible value; the purchasing and selling of a companys stock
has degenerated into nothing more than mere casino speculation. Purchasers and sellers of stocks no longer are interested in
the actual (intrinsic) value of an enterprise, but rather, they seek
profits by betting on or against any company or even industry (and
large purchasers/sellers often do both at the same time). In a paradigm of socio-economic interdependence, however, all economic
actors formal corporations, ad hoc collaborative networks, one-off
ventures, etc. operate so as to more fully enfranchise and diversify the issuance of shareholdings. Building on the principles of
uniqueness rather than exclusivity, and similar to the liberation of
intellectual property models, as discussed earlier, enfranchisement
is meant in this way: economic actors which, say, provide services
to a company (whether as employees, or vendors, or even on an ad
hoc basis), can choose to be remunerated in company shares, rather
than cash and these shares can be freely exchanged at any time
for anything else of value, without the need to submit the transac-
75
tions through an unnecessarily extraneous brokerage system. The

exchange is consummated via online expert systems which, in
turn, dynamically and in real-time, value the shares considering
multiple intrinsic and extrinsic inputs (outlined just below).
Classical and neoclassical economics have persistently
suggested the more a product is consumed, production economies
of scale allow the product to be produced in a manner that consistently lowers the cost of production. At the same time, consumers
apply pressure to consistently lower the end-user purchase price
which stimulates even greater consumption. The long-term
impact of this classical valuation process, however, is that no one
along the innovation-to-consumption chain directly shoulders
the responsibilities of society (societal well-being, protection of
the environment, etc.). Any thought or action of self-restraint
has been relegated almost exclusively to the legal and regulatory
systems. Accordingly, so as to provide a facility for all economic
actors to directly balance self-initiative with self-restraint, the
valuation process of goods and services is expanded in a socio-economic interdependent model. As Figure 11 (next page) illustrates,
any single purchase of a good or service is no longer an isolated or
unrestrained exchange of the product/service for a price specified
between only two parties (the buyer and seller). In an interdependent market, value and price are also determined directly, and in
real-time in concert with inputs from society at large. We illustrate three flows of activity.
Flow 1: The consumer is not merely a consumer of a product; the
entanglement process recognizes that any person, in any moment,
might have contributed intellectual property to any venture, or
in another moment, might have consumed a substantial quantity
of some other product or service. Depending on how entangled
a person might be, this becomes part of the final price-to-value
determination. A bit later, we shall provide an econometric model
to quantify this entanglement potential on a global scale.
Flow 2: Relating to the product/service itself, the entanglement process considers: (a) total level of global consumption; (b)
intrinsic value of global usefulness; and (c) balance of market and
social responsibility. These inputs are harmonized with conventional cost and profit inputs originating from the producing entity.
76
CITIZEN operating as
(a) innovator - laborer - consumer - investor/shareholder
(b) innovator - consumer - investor/shareholder
(c) consumer - investor/shareholder
CITIZENS CONTRIBUTION a combination of
(a) intellectual property
(b) capital investment
(c) labor
CORPORATE PRODUCTION
Product & service value
weighted by:
(a) global market consumption
(b) global market usefulness
(c) global market accountability
CITIZENS RETURN via

Shareholding entity
3
As a consequence of a consumer purchase of
weighted good / service / idea / intellectual property
(benefit vs. responsibility)
Earned revenue (balanced by market) flows to citizen

FUTURES
MARKET
SOCIETAL
WELL-BEING
CAPITAL
institutional
& ad hoc
Fig 11An interdependent process of determining product/service value
By interweaving these two flows, a more responsible econometric model to determine price-to-value can be established. In
an entanglement process, the more a product is consumed on
a global scale, the greater its value to and burden upon society.
In other words, if product x was consumed by 25 percent of the
global population, its value (consumer purchase price) might be
US$ 1.00. However, if product x was consumed by 75 percent of
the global population, then its value (consumer purchase price)
might be US$ 1.25. Thus, value is determined not by labor-value,
but instead, by a visible (and persistently fluctuating) socio-economic weighting process. Capital and futures markets become
more responsive to the moment-to-moment requirements of the
market. This removes the incentive to divert capital away from the
general marketplace and toward an isolated market where off-balance sheet financial speculations occur. Thus, the very definition
of price is expanded beyond merely the conventionally directly
77
visible costs (as an example, the direct cost to purchase raw materials), to include the more indirect and long-term costs to the environment and society at large in extracting, using, and discarding
raw materials.
Flow 3: All global citizens are shareholders in corporations
of their choosing. These consumer-shareholders, then, receive
moment-to-moment dividend payments from each good, service,
and intellectual property consumed.
This radical transformation of value quantification from laborvalue to interdependent-value occurs as a consequence of humanity
altering what specifically it consumes in the new fourth economy.
If, as an example, humanity chooses to embrace the vision of wise
exploration of space, oceans, land, and even the human self as its
fourth horizon then this new socio-economic activity will, itself,
possess an intrinsic element of moral value which re-knits the
fabric of social order in a manner that inspires the best and most
honorable part of ourselves. It is quite easy to discard a used fastfood package onto the street when its short-term utility is expended.
But it is vastly more difficult to discard a human being which is
teaching you how to breathe several hundred meters under the
ocean (if, for no other reason, you may have a reciprocal opportunity to exchange with the other person some intangible asset which
you possess). Since we, ourselves, essentially become the economy,
we materially transform what we value and how we quantify and
exchange this value.
Inevitably, humanity must make a choice. Is our present luxury-centric mass consumption economy sustainable? Is it truly
rational to continue to squander precious time and resources in
refining how we operate within a decaying marketplace? Is it truly
feasible to expect that if we simply persevere in efforts to clean up
how businesses and governments operate, that somehow we can
restore aggregate demand throughout the markets? And even if
it was indeed somehow feasible to maintain aggregate demand in
a luxury-centric mass consumption economy, would this be the
enlightened or even moral thing to do? In making a choice, this
thesis does not mean to imply that luxury-centric consumption
should no longer occur, only that luxury-centric consumption no
longer becomes the centerpiece of our socio-economic activity.
78
Fig 12The four th economy: evolving away from accumulating material wealth (top photo),
toward growing the well-being of all people, including children (bottom photo).
Bottom photograph is a still photo capture from video of a young girl, in awe, par ticipating in an
undersea discover y on the team of Rober t Ballard, 2008. See the video at www.ted.com
The choice becomes, as Figure 12 illustrates, whether humanity

continues to construct industries and corporations and brands
and commercials and societal pressure so as to acquire increasing
amounts of material possessions for the sole purpose of self-gratification. Or whether humanity chooses a future which seeks the
priceless wealth of wonderment and discovery.
If humanity chooses to venture into a new frontier, the technical econometric challenge, then, becomes how to measure this
intangible potential. In 1995, Jeremy Rifkin published The End of
Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the
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Post-Market Era. Rifkins central thesis was that advancements in

information technology would cause increasing worldwide unemployment and underemployment, and that a labor-less economy
would be its inevitable consequence. Beginning in the year 2000,
when the precursors to this thesis were being researched and
written (Image Civilization and Hands and Brains Unbound), an
attempt was made to view this effect of a labor-less economy
as being a natural and healthy evolution of the human endeavor,
rather than being fearful or resistant to this evolution. Also about
this time, quantum mechanics24 was experiencing a substantial
amount of public attention, and as a consequence, we undertook
an unorthodox exercise to apply both the entanglement principles
as well as the mathematical models of quantum mechanics directly
to the field of socio-economics essentially, leaping into the largely
unexplored territory of quantum economics.
Much of the philosophical concepts of socio-economic entanglement that have been discussed throughout this thesis have
been animated by the observations of entanglement in the field of
quantum mechanics. In the unabridged edition of Wealth Beyond
Nations, as well as in the precursor books of Image Civilization and
Hands and Brains Unbound, the mathematical models derived from
quantum mechanics, and applied to socio-economics, have been
drawn out in more detail; in this abridged version, we shall only
provide a very brief overview of the modeling concept. A subset of
quantum mechanics is knot theory, which is the study of mathematical knots. A central test in knot theory is to comprehend how each
24 Quantum mechanics (also, quantum physics, quantum theory) is a branch of
physics which deals with physical phenomena at nanoscopic scales, the level of individual
particles of an atom (subatomic). Before quantum mechanics, the scientific community
believed that atoms of energy and matter behaved either as discreet particles or as waves
of particles, and that there existed a strict distinction between energy and matter. Modern
studies of quantum mechanics, however, are beginning to challenge that belief, and that
sometimes atoms can operate simultaneously as particles and as waves and that there
appears to be deliberate interactions between particles and energy and matter (this is often
referred to as entanglement, and essentially implies that sub-atomic particles and energy
inherently possess a sense of consciousness). Over the past decade, quantum mechanics
has given rise to an emerging field of physics and engineering called quantum technology,
which evolves some of the stranger features of quantum mechanics, especially quantum
entanglement and most recently quantum tunneling, into practical applications such as
quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum simulation, quantum metrology,
quantum sensing, and quantum imaging.
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component of something which is knotted physically relates to all

other components throughout the knot. In a beginning attempt to
apply the lessons of quantum mechanics to the field of socio-economics, we utilized knot theory to visualize an initial model of
quantum economics as it applies to the potential radically freeflowing exchanges of intellectual property as we have discussed
earlier. One such visualization of knot theory is called the Brunnian link model. It is this Brunnian link model which serves as the
basis of our econometric model of visualizing the consequences
of entanglement upon socio-economic activity. As Figure 13 illustrates, a Brunnian link serves as a visualization of individual and
group economic actors exchanging intellectual property (or really,
anything of value). Each segment of the diagram represents an
econometric input.
Universe of infinite
socio-economic potentiality
Brunnian
entanglement links
Individuals &
Groups
Intellectual
Property
Transactions of
Intellectual
Property
Exponential utilization of
new socio-economic activity
Fig 13A Brunnian link model visualizing the potential of socio-economic activity
What follows is meant to be only a crude initial attempt to

view the potentiality of socio-economic entanglement through the
revolutionary lens of quantum mechanics; the following observations and statements should not be considered authoritative by
81
any stretch of the imagination. The following calculations are a

result of a single person attempting to build a multiverse model
out of hundreds of spreadsheet files integrating data from wildly
diverse sources as fundamental global macro-economic data,
individual corporate reports, personal interviews, and even more
exotic data reflecting the effects of Bilateral Investment Treaties
(BITs). It is our sincere hope that as a consequence of this thesis,
more mainstream institutions as well as ad hoc interest groups will
pick up where we have left off, and begin to construct much more
sophisticated models, and rigorously test these models in the real
world. Our intention in presenting the following calculations is
merely to illustrate the vast untapped potentiality that exists in the
free-flowing exchange of intangible assets.
Having said this, our initial step in utilizing a Brunnian link
model (Figure 13) to visualize the consequences of socio-economic
entanglement is to calculate the volume and value of economic
transactions any employee, employer, vendor, or even customer
might initiate volume, meaning the number of transactions, and
value, meaning each transaction will be unique some transactions might be somewhat limited in value, while others might
possess more significant value.
The following are simplified annotations to the Brunnian link
model: each Brunnian link represents only a single snapshot of a
single moment in a single human interaction; each person has a
wide variety of interactions with others throughout the course of
any day; each of these interactions possess their own unique flavor
and substance; and depending on the size of the corporation or
social community, it should be easy to comprehend that these
diverse human interactions result in an almost infinite number
of possibilities to create socio-economic value. Then, within each
Brunnian link, somewhat like looking at the components of an
atom as Figure 13 suggests, there exists various particles which
constantly interact with each other some particles are individuals,
some particles groups, and other particles are intellectual property. Like oxygen or blood flowing through a living body, intellectual property (or anything of value) also flows throughout the
living body of society. Each of these particles are given a set of
econometric variables; and each variable is weighted against a set
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of larger socio-economic principles such as total level of global

consumption; intrinsic value of global usefulness; and balance of
market and social responsibility, etc. In the original models, the
method of assigning some numerical value to such an esoteric
concept as global usefulness was derived from energy expenditure and genetic replication models found in nature essentially
using biomimicry25 as the method to visualize a numerical value to
human behavior.
The following represents a brief summary of the end results
of the econometric calculations (all calculations are based over a
10-year implementation cycle). But we reiterate, these calculations
should only be considered demonstrative, not authoritative.
Corporate sales and profits. By taking a selection of existing
corporate revenue statements, spanning small and medium sized
enterprises (SMEs), ad hoc consortia, and large corporations,
totaling annual profits of US$ 357 million the Brunnian link effect
would increase total profits to US$ 2,405 million. This represents
a 70 - 659% growth in profits, depending on the size and scope of
the corporation.
Corporate share value. Again, using existing data of corporate
share values and trading volumes (taking into account total share
value, shares issued, and price per share, etc.), the Brunnian link
model would increase total share value within the test group from
US$ 1,275 million to US$ 2,006 million, a 57% rate of growth.
Employee wealth value. Using a starting average annual
employee salary of US$ 30,000, the Brunnian link model demonstrates that via a concerted use of free-flowing trading of corporate shares, new share value of US$ 740 million would be created,
which would have a net effect of increasing the average annual
employee salary within the test group to US$ 424,000 - 978,000,
depending on the size and scope of the corporation.
Impact upon creation of new global wealth. We project that about
50 percent of the worlds labor-force can evolve into this fourth
25 Biomimicry is an approach to product innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to
human challenges by emulating patterns and strategies found in nature. Janine Benyus is a
science writer, innovation consultant, and conservationist who has pioneered the concept
of biomimicry not only as a method of innovation, but also as an opportunity for industry
to generate revolutionary economic opportunities. See: http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_
benyus_biomimicry_in_action?language=en
83
economy by 2040 and thus generate new global wealth value

estimated at US$ 1,281 trillion, compared to our present output
of US$ 63.1 trillion. Figure 14 is a modern expansion of Clark and
Fourastis 1950 economic sector model (outlining our past three
economies, as shown back in Figure 1 (page 14), and then adding a
global evolution into a new fourth economy).
% LABOR FORCE PER SECTOR
70%
53%
35%
18%
0%
2010
2015
PRIMARY
2020
2025
SECONDARY
2030
TERTIARY
2035
2040
[NEW] QUATERNARY
Fig 14A global migration into a new four th economy
Throughout early human development, individuals were born

into specific social and economic circumstances (from royalty
to slavery; from farmers to merchants; from white to black;
from one religious sect to another; even from one sports team
to another). Multiple studies by researchers such as Desmond
Morris, Jean-Michel Faure, and many others, have made a series
of complex observations regarding societys relationship to sport.
In simple terms, once the nation-state became the legal owner of
the conduct of legitimate violence via the institution we refer to
as militaries, sub-groups within a nation-state transposed much
of the sub-groups tribal identity into the rituals and mythos of
sports teams. This not only has an effect on how these sub-groups
impose the objective of winning the contest over the objective of
how the game is played, it also establishes the underlying foundation to why these sub-groups are hesitant to question various
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issues of ethics that often arise. An example of this can be found

in the evidence that modern technology has demonstrated that
American football players experience an unusually high health
risk from the effects of concussions; the likelihood of severe and
lasting brain damage is significant. Within a discreet circle of the
health and legal communities as well as a few athletes themselves,
there is a growing awareness that something fundamental has to
change in how the game is played. Not surprisingly, broadcasters
and advertisers are loathe to consider the financial consequences
of this; greed is the fuel of this form of moral challenge. But interestingly, sports fans themselves are loathe to substantively consider
fundamental changes the reason for this, in no small measure,
is because to challenge the status quo of the game, would mean to
challenge the status quo of the tribal identity. Our need to protect
our tribal identities, consequently, overrides our moral obligations.
Thus, it is not greed, but societys displaced experience of identity
which is the fuel of this form of moral challenge. Athletes, consequently, like much of our consumer products, become disposable.
Thus, we persistently self-reinforce the need to segregate and define
our personal identities within limiting and adversarial views. If our
social psychology and moral foundations relating to something as
simple as sports is this perplexing and dysfunctional, how can we
truly expect to wisely manage even more complex relationships
such as racial and religious diversity?
A pattern which should be discernible from the above scrutiny
of tribal identity: individuals have yet to see and experience themselves as a whole of humanity where each individual is an interdependent part of the whole. We are so much greater than mere
identities of labor specializations or of individual tribal cultures.
In short, we are one organic body of humanity. Thus, instead
of emulating Adam Smiths paradigm of individuals seeking
approval from others, we should first simply be who we innately
are, and then mature who we innately are. Inevitably, whether in
the near or distant future, we will finally realize that as we mature
in our personal journeys, we apply our experiences to either give
or receive more experiences and maturity to and from others we
serve others by entering into an authentic relationship with others.
And in so doing, social and economic order is achieved not by
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coercive cooperation for external purposes, but rather by natural

interdependence of human relationships. Once humanity comes
to terms with the concepts and ethics of authentic human identity
(and finally exploring and applying the natural talents that reside
within this authentic identity) as well as our natural responsibility toward human interdependence, then we can more clearly
see how, technically, economic interdependence might operate.
The economic opportunities available to the masses during
the time of Adam Smith were essentially rooted in the land and
its natural resources. But if the land and its natural resources are
either monopolized by the few, or even are too contaminated or
overused to effectively exploit for economic gain, what opportunities now exist for the masses? We proffer the unexplored and
limitless territories available to humanity are our experiences, our
knowledge, our know-how, our memories in short, our very
selves. The fundamental challenge for society, then, is to become
cognizant of the distinctions between knowledge and identity that
is authentic (obtained via discerned experience) versus nominal (in
name only) knowledge and identity. When these distinctions are
made, a plethora of much more subtle and sublime relationships
between individuals and markets can be established. To exemplify: in our present construct of markets, we tend to recognize the
cultural ingredient as something to compete against (an American
automobile versus a French or German or Japanese automobile, as
an example). We do not easily recognize that certain components
of the automobile might have been designed or evolved through
history within a diverse selection of cultures. But in more subtle
expressions of the human endeavor from culinary and painted
arts, to storytelling and even typography the cultural ingredient
is not something to compete against, but is something to celebrate
and marvel. The typeface you are now seeing as you read this book,
as an example, originates from drawings made in the 16th century
and archived at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium.
This Plantin typeface possesses a mixture of French and Dutch
cultural history. Over the past few decades, as a consequence of
publicly-affordable software, typeface designers from every corner
of the world, every single day, contribute subtle and profound
additions to the palette of type and graphic design. Russian,
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Croatian, Iranian, and Czech designers have joined the honored

pages of history along with their brethren of French, German,
and English designers. Newspapers, magazines, books, corporate
signage, and websites the world over are graced with diversity and
technique of typography that all too often goes unnoticed (and
thus, unvalued) by the masses. As the fictional character Sherlock
Holmes lamented: you see, but you do not observe. When we
initially think of the power and influence that a nation such as
Russia is attempting to thrust upon the world, the game stipulates
that this is done via military might and the political machinations
of leaders these are the serious ways by which culture and
ideology are to be respected. But what would world relations be like
if society was more aware of the subtle and significant influences
made by Russian filmmakers, animators, software programmers,
fashion design, poetry, scientific discovery, medicine, and even
typography? The essential reasons that the names of Oleg Macujev,
Frantiek torm, or Nikola Djurek are not nearly as recognizable as Tom Brady, Cristiano Ronaldo, Vladimir Vladimirovich
Putin, or Angela Dorothea Merkel are two-fold: first, politics and
sports reinforces societys tribal and adversarial identities, and
second, individuals within a society have not yet understood how
to become engaged in any kind of significant and collaborative
socio-economic relationship with the more subtle ingredients of
culture. Society has not yet understood how to achieve and facilitate human relationships transfer as we have with commercial
technology transfer. Certainly, the diverse ingredients of human
relationships exist in plain sight. The technologies to facilitate
these subtle exchanges of human relationships also exist in plain
sight. Why havent we put these two ingredient together so as to
create mutually-beneficial socio-economic activity?
In an attempt to jump start new markets of human relationships (the foundation of a new fourth economy), this thesis proffers a radical shift in how we manage intellectual property: that IP
should be made free moving (not constrained by outdated dogmas
of ownership). In the fourth marketplace, IP is exchanged by
anyone to anyone at any time. As this IP is transferred from one
specific circumstance to another (often in completely varied environments), everyone along the previous chain of IP exchange
87
transactions receives economic value from all other uses of the

IP. By unleashing IP from the dogma of ownership, IP becomes
the energy exchanged by the entirety of the human species and
this more free flowing source of energy can create a new limitless
resource of wealth generation for all people.
As we liberate IP, we also liberate the concept and functionality of money itself. Most people, including almost every single
political and business leader of today even Nobel prize-winning
economists erroneously believe that banks of today issue loans to
borrowers based on the deposits that are held by the bank (these
deposits supposedly originating from either the general public or
a nations central bank). As we have demonstrated, this is false
and has been false for about 20 years now. The reality of the
debt-based banking system is that banks electronically create new
money for the loans it issues. Individual banks create what is called
fiat currency without necessarily requiring any supervision or
approvals from any government.
So, the final question we raise in this chapter: if debt-based
currency can be created by fiat, then why cant equity-based
currency? Over the past several years, a diverse selection of alternative currencies as well as crowd funding platforms have emerged,
and some have undergone rigorous challenges (such as computer
system security issues, counterfeit and hoarding issues, and crossborder acceptance issues, etc.). Evolution is not always easy or
pretty. Alternative currencies and crowd funding platforms will
undoubtedly continue to mature and grow increasingly reliable;
they may never fully replace established national currencies or
debt-based banking systems, but they certainly can well function in conjunction with national currencies and banks. As this
maturation of alternative currencies and crowd funding platforms
continues, it is indeed feasible that fiat currencies can be created
based not on a basis of debt, but rather on a basis of equity of
mass co-ownership.
It is important to clarify what we mean and do not mean
by co-ownership. We are not attempting to insinuate a blanket
critique of the concept of debt financing as an institution or even
necessarily as an economic tool, or even the notion of by whom
or how monies are controlled or spent. Our deeper observations
88
relating to debt-based versus equity-based financing relates to

three essential elements of how economic markets function. The
first element is that society often erroneously perceives that the
institutions of banking are an objective arbiter of good business
practices; that banks are somehow sheltered from human passions
and that they provide financing only to the deserving. The reality is,
however, that banking institutions themselves are often not effectively managed, that they are vulnerable to getting into the trap
of providing loans to enterprises that are not deserving. Indeed,
as any business consultant can attest, the marketplace is littered
with enterprises that receive multiple and overlapping loans for the
simple reason that the business could not survive any other way.
In those situations, banks are often loathe to simply pull the plug
on an enterprise for if they did, this would reveal their history
of mistakes to the banks shareholders. In short, the hidden hand
of the free market does not necessarily weed out the unfit; the
co-participants of enterprise and bank are often not authentically
driven by the principles of markets, but rather are often driven
by personal considerations of reputation, greed or even ego and
both parties use the structures of an enterprise and debt merely as
a refuge to protect these personal considerations.
Secondly, since the ending of the gold standard in the 1970s,
the banking sector has been left with only a single source of collateral to its debt instruments: real estate. It is never advantageous
for an economic system to be dependent upon a sole resource or
asset. Providing more widely distributed access to equity-based
financing would serve the marketplace of the masses with diverse
forms of liquidity, and thus, more effectively facilitate diverse
socio-economic activity. Thirdly, instead of subjecting business
ventures to the archaic and constraining paradigm of debt-based
financing, and thus possibly risk unnecessary failure or existing
in some zombie state as many now do capital acquired through
an equity transaction would provide a more dynamic process for a
deeper and more profound interaction with the market as a whole.
Consequently, the wisdom of the crowds has a more direct opportunity (as well as co-ownership incentive) to interact with any and
all participants in the market in real-time. In short, with equity-based financing, all participants have skin in the game.
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It can be argued that governments, since the end of the gold

standard, have essentially de facto vacated their monopoly hold
over the creation of money. Most governments of today have
amassed so much debt liability, that exercising their (perhaps illusory) monopoly hold over money creation and supply management
may be essentially untenable over the long term. Thus, it is at least
feasible that a globalized equity-centric fiat money system could
be legally constructed. In fact, today, there are over 4,000 privately
issued currencies in more than 35 countries. These include commercial trade exchanges that use barter credits as units of exchange,
private gold and silver exchanges, local paper money, computerized systems of credits and debits, and electronic currencies, such
as Bitcoin and others. Again, as a consequence of Internet-based
expert systems, it is entirely possible for these types of privately
issued currencies to be exchanged across the global markets, no
matter where the currencies originated. By intentionally liberating
money creation and supply, one very powerful consequence would
result. Economic activity would no longer be arbitrarily or artificially confined to or controlled by select institutions (banks and
governments). Thus, neither would economic activity be confined
to or controlled by individual nations. Global markets would finally
become exactly that: global. Humanity, seeking to join together in
a new fourth economy, and utilizing such tools as an equity-centric fiat money supply, would finally establish for itself a stateless
economy bound not by arbitrary border, but rather by the limitless opportunities of human relationships. We shall expand on this
concept of statelessness just a bit later.
As we have already noted, a central task of the state has been
to balance the supply of money throughout the marketplace in a
manner that does not diminish the value of the states primary
source of treasure of gold. Another vital reason to effectively
balance the money supply circulating throughout the markets has
been to control bank interest rates upon lending. During the time of
the gold standard, when central banks more directly controlled the
flow of money distributed to individual banks, it was recognized
that having too much money flowing through the system would
cause interest rates to collapse to the point that banks would essentially be giving away money without the ability to generate some
90
form of appreciable profit. Conversely, not enough money circulating through the system would escalate interest rates to a point
where few borrowers could effectively use the borrowed capital
to generate profits. History demonstrates that a states monetary
policy tends to be shaped by having to cope with three specific
situations which adversely cause disequilibrium in the supply of
money.
Liquidity trap. Initially described in Keynesian theory, a
liquidity trap is a situation in which injections of cash into the
private banking system by a central bank fail to lower interest
rates and hence fail to stimulate economic growth. According to
Keynes, it was the supply of money which caused fluctuations in
interest rates provided by the private banking system to the market
and that interest rates provided the true stimulus for borrowing,
consumption and investment. Critics of this theory suggest that
money supply and corresponding interest rate fluctuations might
play a stimulating role in cases where the markets required only a
bit of tweaking. But pronounced liquidity traps occur primarily
as a consequence of a failure in aggregate demand being generated;
money supply is of negligible consequence. Indeed, since Keynes,
historical events seem to contradict Keynes argument as to the
true cause of a liquidity trap. In Japan, throughout the 1990s, and
in the U.S., since 2008, central banks have attempted to stimulate
the markets by both injecting new money into the system as well as
lowering interest rates to or close to zero. But these big gun monetary policies have had a negligible impact to stimulate the market
back to expansion. Indeed, there has been a tripling of the U.S.
monetary base between 2008 and 2011 and yet, this has failed
to produce any significant effect on U.S. domestic price indices
or dollar-denominated commodity prices. Consequently, it could
be argued that whether fiat money supply is created by governments and their central banks (past), private banks via the creation
of loans (present), or even an equity-centric process (future), the
money supply, itself, is not a cause of liquidity traps, and thus,
arguing that any future equity-centric process of money creation
would create liquidity traps is simply not supported by the facts.
Interest rates and rates of inflation-deflation. In a debt-centric
money supply system, over- and under-supply would certainly
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have an impact upon interest rates. But, if a socio-economic interdependent paradigm would eventually augment (if not replace) a
debt-centric money supply with an equity-centric money supply,
interest rates would no longer be of significance. Relating to inflation and deflation situations, economists have conventionally
agreed that these situations are caused by an excessive fluctuation of the money supply. But again, modern market activity seems
to confuse this issue. Conventional wisdom supports the notion
that money, itself, has been a commodity which is valued as to its
surplus or scarcity. This certainly was of import under a system
of representative currency, but under a system of fiat currency,
money, itself, is no longer a store of value. What this means is, in
the past, anyone could essentially walk into a bank with currency,
and demand that currency be exchanged for gold or silver. Indeed,
until just a few years ago, many local banks in the U.S. still held
small reserves of gold in their local bank vaults for this very reason.
But today, if someone were to walk into a bank with currency, the
bank would have nothing to exchange. In short, money no longer
represents something; it merely is a unit of exchange. As we have
seen, the private banking system has created fiat money when
the demand for loans required such money creation. In western
markets, the vast over-supply of money that presently exists does
not seem to impact, positively or negatively, rates of inflation. So
again, by introducing equity-based money creation, these past
challenges of managing interest rates and rates of inflation/deflation would no longer be a central focus of concern. In short, it is
our thesis that by introducing a free-flowing equity-based supply
of money, many (but certainly not all) of the historical upheavals
caused by a debt-based money supply would be mitigated.
Equilibrium & game theories. One of humanitys long-standing
cornerstones relating to economics is the management of market
equilibrium. Economic equilibrium is a state where economic
forces such as supply and demand are balanced; meaning, equilibrium occurs at the point at which quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal. Game theory is a process where mathematical models are used to predict how actors plan for or react to
various events or situations that occur within the marketplace. If,
as an example, crude oil prices begin to fall, mathematical models
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gained via game theory explorations will help manufacturers and

financial institutions to be prepared to prompt various types of
consumer behavior throughout the market. It is understandable,
then, that a significant amount of societys economic and political
resources are institutionalized around the attempt to manage the
myriad of inputs and potential outcomes of supply and demand with
consumer behavior, ranging from natural resource management
and inventory management to social trends and financial management. Perhaps an orthodox way to visualize this, is to conceptualize a circle (a uniform, and thus, stable environment), and all the
components within the circle agree to abide by a fundamental and
cohesive objective: remain secure within this circle do not act in
a way that jeopardizes the integrity of the circle. The rules of equilibrium, then, provide the marketplace with the tools that facilitate socio-economic behavior to express some element of free will,
while at the same time, providing some element of certainty. These
tools of equilibrium-seeking have served humanity relatively well
as long as humanity operates with the world-view that the human
endeavor evolves within the confines of a circle.
History has proven, however, the human endeavor evolves
in a spiral process like our very children, our human experience births a new manifestation of itself, and that manifestation
matures and creates its own offspring. Thus, this thesis proffers
that it would be more accurate to visualize equilibrium in this way:
a state of micro-equilibrium operates with the precognition that
human evolution will ceaselessly gravitate in a spiral movement,
and thus, becomes interdependent with a state of macro-equilibrium which facilitates our transition from one paradigm to another.
In short, orthodoxy only considers the status quo. But the natural
law of the human condition is that life persistently evolves; nature
is not circular, containable, or certain. Indeed, it is in the khaos of
existence that we discover who we truly are our authentic identities of what metal we are truly made. The status quo has not
only diminished our experience of ourselves, it has diminished our
capacity to generate socio-economic relationships. These more
vibrant and subtle socio-economic relationships translate not only
into economic wealth that is astoundingly vast, but also human
well-being that is secure in the movements of change and evolution.
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This chapter has endeavored to proffer, as a first step to finally

discern that natural law and the human condition is indeed spiral
in nature, that if we were to liberate assets of intellectual property, corporate share trading, and even the creation of money itself,
from its present-day bondage of control, and instead, allow these
instruments to be free-flowing, that vast untapped opportunities
of wealth and well-being creation on a global scale might perhaps
be facilitated. By totally liberating the creation of money into the
responsibilities of the masses would unquestionably be dangerous
but it could also be nothing less than our own salvation. To finally
evolve to the stage that money is not something to covet, but rather
is only a tool which facilitates the day-to-day endeavors of the
human experience, would alter the human species in its deepest
nature.
We have endeavored to interweave various principles of moral
philosophy with those of macro- and micro-economics. The
purpose in making such an attempt, as Adam Smith did in 1776, is
to rehabilitate an oft-forgotten definition of economics. Economics
cannot rationally or honorably be reduced to mere numbers and
yet, this is how modern civilization has come to define economics.
In its most base and more accurate definition, economics is the
physical and metaphysical manifestations of the human endeavor,
and how these manifestations are correspondingly valued by
society as a whole. To discuss any aspect of economics without
equally addressing the diverse inputs of morality and ethics would
only serve to hinder our human evolution.
If the observation is indeed sound that our accustomed three
fields of socio-economic activity (agriculture/mining, mass production, and services) no longer require mass human labor, then it
seems truly irrational to expect that by somehow tinkering with tax
regulations or government spending programs, any of these three
fields can somehow be rehabilitated. We must have the courage to
simply let go and seek out a new fourth economy. It should also
now be self-evident that government and business leaders as well
as the global masses have been operating from vastly outdated
and illusory knowledge of how economics actually functions. The
classical schools of economics naturally evolved into neoclassical
schools of thought as a consequence of facing up to the notion that
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value could no longer be quantified simply on the basis of utility

value; perceived value also had to be taken into account. We have
proffered herein that another evolution is occurring this time,
that intangible assets have value. We can either face up to this new
evolution, or not. The aim of exploring the concepts of socio-economic interdependence, as we have throughout the preceding
chapters, is to demonstrate that the principles of global interdependence achieves what classical and neoclassical economics thus
far have not: the intrinsic values of all individuals who contribute
value to the innovation process throughout the entire production-consumption chain, finally, are quantified and secured on
a truly global scale. The valuation of social responsibility in the
production and consumption of goods/services are balanced into
the valuation of wealth generation. Aggregate demand is attained
and maintained as a direct consequence of society making an a
priori and real-time determination as to the direction and force of
its economic activity and consequences. The people, themselves,
consciously evolve from being merely (disposable) cogs in the
wheel of economics, to becoming economics.
If the observations and resulting discernments of various
socio-economic patterns explored thus far in this thesis are judged
to be both rational and constructive, and as a consequence, global
societies endeavor to consciously evolve into some new fourth
economy, then the obvious question becomes: how do we get to
this new frontier from here? g
The Endeavor & Cultivation of a New Fourth Economy
PIONEERS TO A NEW FRONTIER
A persons authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated

planes that establish themselves as he relates to different
people; it is created by and appears within the framework of
his interpersonal relationships.
Philip K. Dick, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1972-1973
Throughout our human history, when some new social or

political agenda is being evangelized by a political candidate, a
thought leader, or even a celebrity, the candidate/leader/celebrity
earnestly proclaims to a rapt public the timeless entreaty: follow
me follow my plan I will lead you to a better life. This messianic type of language and world-view still continues to resonate
throughout human societies because both the candidate/leader/
celebrity as well as society itself has come to adopt the orthodox
realist world-view which stipulates that technical problems simply
require technical solutions. The trick is to find just the right technical solution.
Endeavoring to evolve into a new fourth economy and interdependence agenda as this thesis proposes, however, cannot be implemented in these orthodox and messianic terms. The challenges we
now face are not merely technical; they are systemic and deeply
embedded into our erroneous understanding of how economics
functions. Indeed, what our thesis is essentially proclaiming:
follow yourselves design your own plan you will lead yourselves
and each other to a better life. We have a great deal to learn (and
unlearn) together. We cannot be led by any single messiah, or
even any single ideology. As unorthodox or disconcerting as it may
be, this thesis is not going to provide some form of blueprint that
can be followed so as to reach some pot of gold at the end of a
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rainbow. All of us will need to get our hands dirty; everyone will
need to have skin in the game. Individuals and societies will need
to come together and discern for themselves whether global economies can continue to operate within the three fields of agriculture/mining, mass production, and services or not. Humanity
will need to come together and discern for themselves whether
seeking a new fourth economy based on the exchange of intangible
value is feasible or not. The fundamental purpose of this thesis
is simply to provide an insight that humanity has been operating
from outdated knowledge, and that once our knowledge-based
has been rehabilitated, a rational and reasoned discernment of our
new knowledge would almost certainly lead humanity to realize
that some new fourth economy is not only warranted, but perhaps
even desired. This thesis cannot attempt to convince anyone of
anything. As Immanuel Kant, long ago, challenged us: we must
have the courage to think for ourselves.
What this thesis can provide, however, are broad descriptions of two distinct spheres of action which would most likely
emerge during the process of global evolution toward a new fourth
economy if indeed, humanity was to discern for itself that a new
fourth economy is to be its endeavor. These two spheres of action:
a revolutionary format of dialogue (in part, to re-educate ourselves,
and in part, to initiate a new experience of human relationships);
and infrastructure and process (deciding what present-day institutions should be maintained, reformed, completely dismantled, or
created anew so as to best facilitate the free-flowing exchange of
intangible value).
Revolutionary format of dialogue
The format of dialogue conventionally experienced throughout
many societies goes something like this: a panel of experts
assemble on a stage and debate their points of view; perhaps at
the end of the experts debate, the public audience is invited to
ask a couple of questions. Several flaws exist, however, in this
expert-panel format. Firstly, as we have demonstrated throughout
this thesis, the vast majority of these so-called experts have been
operating from outdated and illusory knowledge. We do not imply
that these people are not intelligent or worthy of participating in a
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dialogue; we do explicitly state, however, that true experts in any

field rarely exist, if at all. As Richard Feynman, the physicist wisely
remarked If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you
dont understand quantum mechanics. Another flaw in the expertpanel format is that experts tend to discuss a specific subject
via their specialized lenses of knowledge and experience. But the
modern world is complex and requires from us a dialogue which is
trans-disciplinary. The harsh reality is that it is exceptionally rare to
find a so-called expert which is indeed trans-disciplinary. Again,
Richard Feynman in 1956:
In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know
one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great
problems of the relations between one and another aspect
of human activity have for this reason been discussed less
and less in public. When we look at the past great debates
on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we
should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old
problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are
still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as
ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the
limitations of specialization.
A somewhat more modernized variation of the expert-panel
format is to interweave snippets of input originating from the
public at large via social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, and the like. But again, the essential flaw in this expert-panel/
social media format is that the masses are not required to struggle
with the issues at hand and attempt to discern some intrinsic
element of wisdom; the masses merely voice their prefabricated
opinions, not their discernment. Furthermore, an expert-panel/
social media format persistently aggregates the risks and responsibilities of discernment and action to a select few; the masses
continue to abdicate their responsibilities of research, analysis, as
well as action to others.
As a consequence of recognizing the essential flaws inherent
within our conventional formats of dialogue, we must inquire
whether some other format of dialogue would provide humanity
a better opportunity to discern its way to any future. Just a bit
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later, we shall highlight one such alternative format of dialogue

which has emerged fairly recently, but first, we need to address
two opposing issues of mass collaboration (positive) and groupthink
(negative).
Mass collaboration. Throughout much of human history, when
some form of socio-economic activity was contemplated, this
activity has been generally organized via some format of an institution. A private sector activity (say, the production of automobiles, as an example) is generally organized via the institution of a
corporation. A public sector activity (say, the delivery of primary
and secondary education, as an example) is generally organized
via the institution of specialized and government-mandated
departments or agencies. Two fundamental objectives of both
private and public sector institutions are control of the ideological
framework and operational process necessary to obtain a specific
preconceived output. The socioeconomic-driven keystone of any
(and most) institutions is standardization. Whether the output is
automobiles or students, institutions focus much of their energy
in either subscribing to or circumventing such elements as safety
standards or testing standards, and the like. The prevailing logic
has been by standardizing the inputs of production, the outputs
will thus be standardized.
As the Internet has matured, however, an alternative to institutions as being the primary method of facilitating group output can
be found in what is referred to as mass collaboration. Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers
of people work independently on a specialized project. Such projects are typically facilitated via the Internet, using social software
and computer-supported collaboration tools. Mass collaboration
projects have continued to mature and expand into multiple frontiers of technology, society, and economics. Over the past decade,
numerous mass collaborative projects have emerged, including
Wikipedia, Linux, Yahoo! Answers, and Amazons Mechanical Turk
and a growing effort is being directed at developing more diverse
and complex platforms. In 2011, as an example, a small group of
computer gamers facilitated by a site called Foldit (http://fold.it/
portal/) solved the structure of a protein found in an AIDS-like
monkey virus. The structure had confounded scientists for over a
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decade; the gamers, incredibly, cracked it in less than three weeks.

Similarly, crowdsourcing platforms are increasingly being used for
commercial purposes, such as: crowdfunding, microwork, creative
crowdsourcing (graphic design, architectural design and problem
solving, apparel design, writing, illustration, etc.), crowdvoting,
language-related data collection, and even policy crowdsourcing
(web-based mediated crowds for policy purposes including the
use of virtual labor markets for policy assessment purposes and
experimental investigations). Selected crowdsourcing sites include:
Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Crowdrise.
Although mass collaboration continues to mature, there exists
two essential weaknesses in the day-to-day operations of mass
collaborative networks. The first weakness relates to the observation that the majority of the platforms and uses of mass collaboration are narrowly focused to solve specific and compartmentalized problems, such as protein structures or software coding.
The various separate collaborative networks have yet to integrate
themselves into meta-collaborative networks where knowledge
gained in one particular field can be applied in another perhaps
unrelated field. The second weakness relates to the observation that
mass collaborative networks do not generally address prevailing
or emerging social, moral, or operational inputs of production or
problem solving. Meaning, mass collaborative networks are generally established to facilitate an already predefined operation or
problem; mass collaborative networks, in the main, do not spontaneously assemble and then seek out an operational opportunity or
problem. Further, collaborative networks do not generally build-in
the capacity to ask transcendental questions such as: is solving a
specific problem perhaps creating other unforeseen problems, or is
solving a specific problem benefiting society as a whole, or merely
a limited selection of people, and the like. In short, mass collaborative networks are demonstrating that group output can be effectively facilitated, but that group input has yet to be addressed in
a sophisticated and coherent manner. This leads to the issue of
groupthink.
Groupthink. Various studies and books can be found which
caution that mass collaboration is nothing more than utopianism
and breathless hype precisely because the masses are capable
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only of mass mediocrity (Harvard Business Review and Choice,

2007). One of the reasons cited by critics of mass collaboration is
the collaborative networks dependence upon what they refer to
as groupthink, where the mode of thinking that happens when the
desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides some
other realistic appraisal of alternatives. Group members try to
minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical
evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. The negative impact
of groupthink is the loss of individual creativity, uniqueness, and
independent thinking. Irving Janis (1972) defined groupthink as
a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply
involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members strivings for
unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. Paul Hart (1998) defined groupthink as
collective optimism and collective avoidance. An earlier example
of groupthink can be found in what is referred to as the Asch
conformity experiments or the Asch Paradigm a series of laboratory
experiments directed by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The experiments demonstrated the degree to which an individuals own
visual observations as well as opinions are influenced by those of a
majority group.
We argue, however, that this dilemma of groupthink is not
exclusive to mass collaborative networks, but is universally found
in many and perhaps all institutions, private and public. Whether
considering the symptoms and effects of groupthink in a typical
corporation, a local police department, a news organization, a
government administration, the global relationships and/or divisions between diverse religious principles, or even a collaborative
network, we can only state the obvious: the world is awash in the
haze of groupthink. Participate in almost any meeting or conference that can be imagined, and groupthink is most likely to be the
norm. This is a fundamental reason why societies have become
dependent upon the leader, some specific person who can either
convince, coerce, or force a group to consider or avoid alternative
viewpoints; someone to guide the group, either benevolently, or
malevolently. This is why societies are organized in the manner
they are and why social ordering principles as proffered by such
philosophers as Edmund Burke have taken such strong root in the
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collective consciousness of humanity. The masses do not have a

strong foundation of wise discernment experience, for they have
persistently abdicated the responsibilities of wise discernment to
some elite class of leaders and governors. The question this thesis
raises: is there any process of dialogue and subsequent action that
can feasibly be contemplated which would facilitate the exercise
of wise discernment throughout the masses, beyond mere groupthink? Furthermore, is there a process of dialogue and subsequent
action that can feasibly be contemplated which would naturally
stimulate and naturally inspire the masses to increasingly undertake direct responsibility for their actions and their consequences?
Since 1999, the Berlin, Germany based project, Mobile Academy
(http://www.mobileacademy-berlin.com/) has been organizing and
facilitating a group dialogue process that is unique in both its
methodology as well as its design. Its essential design is rooted in
the principles of dialectics. Dialectics, or the dialectical method, is
both a method of thinking as well as argument. Most people, especially in western societies, have been taught to receive some form of
cognitive input and spontaneously categorize that input into some
preconceived structure of belief or experience. An example: a
person hears someone say, certain minorities are prone to violent
behavior, and that cognitive input enters the listeners consciousness and, spontaneously, is filed in the listeners preconceived
library of thoughts and beliefs. The consequence of this circular
method of thinking is that new inputs tend to either reinforce or
refute the listeners preestablished beliefs and world-views. The
dialectical method, on the other hand, is spiral in nature a cognitive input enters the listeners consciousness, and is purposefully
tested in multiple and diverse rooms in the minds library, and
importantly, the mind is conscious that some rooms of the mind
may not possess equal levels of knowledge or experience as others.
Thus, a little room is always reserved for doubt. The dialectical
testing process allows a thought (thesis) to freely interact with
multiple and sometimes contradictory thoughts (antithesis), and as
a consequence, a synthesis of all these thoughts are facilitated. The
synthesis, itself, spawns an entirely new set of theses and antitheses, which result in a new act of synthesis, ad infinitum. This is
the spiral nature of dialectics. The dialectical method, applied to
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argument, is the same: a thesis interacts with an antithesis to result

in a synthesis, which spawns a new set of arguments.
The Mobile Academy project operates from this essential dialectical method a dialogue might be organized around an overarching theme (say, cultural aspects of job creation), but discussion inputs might be as diverse as folklore, photography, migration,
ethics, gangsterism, food, as well as the conventional inputs of
government and business policies, market demand, and the like.
The methodology of the Mobile Academy dialogue is somewhat
analogous to a speed-dating conference two people, face-to-face,
discuss a subject for several minutes, then rotate and discuss with
someone else a subject for several minutes, then rotate again. This
rotating process continues for several hours, until each member of
the group has had an opportunity to discuss their subject with each
Fig 15The Mobile Academy process
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of the other members of the group. While these micro-discussions

are taking place, another group is tasked to simply observe the
totality of the diverse conversations taking place. The observers
can focus in and observe a specific conversation, as well as observe
multiple conversations at the same time all the while, taking note
of common and differing themes, viewpoints, and data. The final
sequence of the Mobile Academy process is for the entire group to
collectively gather, and attempt to synthesize common threads of
thought and possible avenues of action. Figure 15 illustrates the
essence of the Mobile Academy process, and a short video (01:52
min.) perhaps better captures process, viewable here: http://www.
outoftheboxinsight.com/videos/MobileAcademy.mp4.
Projects such as the Mobile Academy provide a revolutionary
method for public discourse a method that seeks to venture
beyond mere groupthink or expert lecturing and into a more
holistic and dialectic experience that interweaves the authentic
consciousness of the individual with the authentic consciousness of
the group. The essential objective of a more holistic and dialectic
experience of dialogue is to more effectively facilitate natural states
of entanglement, simultaneously, between both the individual as
well as the group as a whole. As a consequence of this simultaneous entanglement exercise, societies will increasingly rehabilitate their atrophied muscles of responsibility and discernment, and
thus, will decreasingly be dependent upon elites and experts to
guide and resolve the challenges of social order.
As this thesis has argued, many of our government, business,
and academic leaders who we regard as experts, are more likely
than not to be operating from outdated doctrines of economics.
That signifies that the masses, too, are likely to be operating from
outdated knowledge. Consequently, it becomes imperative that
some form of a revolutionary process of dialogue be implemented so
as to radically update the publics knowledge-base and discourse.
This rehabilitated knowledge-base and process of discourse, then,
would intuitively pull into existence a global movement to view
rational and discerned alternatives to our three outmoded fields
of socio-economic activity (agriculture/mining, mass production,
and services). Being better informed as to the flaws of our present
economy, and being inspired to establish some new fourth economy
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for all of humanity communities all around the world would come
together to explore their human (tangible and intangible) opportunities and priorities particular to their specific community, and
with the assistance of expert systems, each community would be
fundamentally conscious of the opportunities and priorities being
discussed throughout all other communities on a global scale. Via
this global discernment process, once each community has identified its general path forward into the quaternary economy, each
community will undoubtedly require some aspect of collaboration
with various other communities and resources. Consequently, and
to use the quantum mechanics imagery, each community and each
individual within a community will simultaneously desire to act as
both a particle and wave of particles. This collaborative dialogue
exercise, then, will intuitively pull into existence a need for some
new format of infrastructure and process so as to most effectively
facilitate the implementation of a new socio-economic paradigm of
global interdependence.
Infrastructure and process
A key aspect of envisioning an evolutionary infrastructure which
can facilitate and sustain the dynamics and fluidity of socio-economic interdependence is process, not institution. An institution is
constructed so as to protect some substance (say, central banks
controlling the amount of currency circulating throughout the
system, or a corporation controlling its assets and profits). Process,
on the other hand, is not inherently focused on controlling but
rather in facilitating. What presently circulates through a conventional bank is limited to currency and debt instruments, and
through a typical corporation is limited to production resources
(including labor) and profits. But throughout a socio-economic
interdependent value exchange, what could circulate would have
few, if any limitations. A transaction facilitated via an interdependent value exchange might include: an idea, book, music portfolio,
span of highway, unused capacity of a manufacturing facility, an
employees social and professional contacts, fiat equity money, or
simply the essential culture of a community of people.
Thus, the technical process of how socio-economic interdependent dynamics might be facilitated requires some out of
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the box designing. Part Internet skeleton, part software neural

network, part human heart, and part unseen potentiality an
interdependent process infrastructure would be tantamount to a
living multi-dimensional organism. Figure 16 illustrates the overall
concept of a process infrastructure which could facilitate global
entanglement and interdependence.
Orthodox institutions are often both slow to respond and
hesitant to anticipate. In response to these weaknesses inherent
to orthodoxy, Figure 16 illustrates a dialectics-based process and
RESOURCE CONDUITS
Technology Transfer
Know-how & Education
Logistics & Communications
Human Resources
Capital Resources
Real-time synthesis
between
Conduits &
Networks
PROCESS NETWORK
GLOBAL COLLABORATIVE EXPERIENCE
ECONOMIC (AGGREGATE DEMAND FUNCTION)
ECONOMIC (FACILITATION TOOLS)
SOCIAL WELL-BEING
ECOSYSTEMS
GOVERNANCE
Fig 16A dialectics-based organic process to facilitate global interdependence
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conduit architecture which is, essentially, an expansion of already

existing technology transfer networks, and is designed to anticipate
and rapidly facilitate the global spread of knowledge and best practices in real-time. The globalized process network is the macro side
of the network, which includes components ranging from collaboration and aggregate demand facilitation, to social well-being
and governance facilitation. Interconnecting each of the macro
processes, are the resource conduits. This is the micro side of the
network bringing together and distributing any and all resources
required to achieve socio-economic interdependence (ranging
from technology and knowledge transfer to capital resources). The
conduits are the connecting points by which local communities
directly interface with any other community so as to collaborate
on any given project. By constructing this conduits process for
each communitys diverse and unique assets to be globalized, the
uniqueness of individual skills and social cultures can be liberated
from old market dependencies and geopolitical constraints, as well
as past experiences of isolation and disenfranchisement.
Generally, each conduit is comprised of private individuals,
small and large corporations, universities, government agencies,
interest groups, capital and natural resources, etc which all feed
knowledge, information, technology, know-how, market necessities, etc. throughout the network of conduits. A substantial amount
of critical experience and discernment has been gained from the
Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti international development
failures, as well as from studies of the post-World War II successful
implementation of the Marshall Plan. By synthesizing the discernments gained from both the failures and successes, then, new
dialectic-centric project management strategies can now be envisioned and developed so as to more effectively and wisely rollout
a process and conduit network on a dynamic local-to global scale.
For information regarding these evolutionary project management
strategies, please contact www.outoftheboxinsight.com.
The intention of this thesis is not to hold in contempt the
institutions of government or industry but rather, to objectively
observe that the economic crisis humanity is now experiencing can
no longer be resolved by conventional institutions. The knowledge
and objectives from which our traditional leaders operate is simply
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outdated and can no longer substantiate their futile efforts to lead

us out of any crisis. The global crisis is so immense and interwoven,
that no single government or coalition of governments can hope to
resolve the labyrinthine problems that now challenge us. It is now up
to the masses themselves to join together and seek a fourth horizon
a new economy, a new world. And perhaps, this is as it should be.
Societies have for too long abdicated their natural responsibilities
to elites which, in turn, have exploited the opportunity so freely
provided to them. As the system increasingly unravels, this may
be the very time for the masses to finally awaken to their greater
potentiality and duty. A technical process and conduit network,
as outlined above, provides the essential infrastructure to effectively and rapidly facilitate such an awakening.
Having said this, however, some institutions may indeed be
likely to remain, whilst others may be recognized as being no
longer supportive of societys free-flowing socio-economic activities. If individuals no longer seek to be isolated from social responsibilities, but rather seek to be naturally entangled with others,
such institutions as, say, health care, education, or taxation might
perhaps be reformed. Instead of relatively elementary out-patient
care being institutionalized, perhaps community members might
provide this out-patient care in the comfort and humanity of their
homes. Instead of children sitting in standardized classrooms and
studying standardized texts, our children might join an undersea
exploration team. Or perhaps our children might engage in a
dialogue around a kitchen table with someone who has experienced some personal discovery or historical milestone or might
wish to have these deeper experience of life and seeks the optimism and courage inherent with a child so as to take that first
step toward discovery. Instead of sending a single annual payment
to a central tax authority, individuals might on a daily basis
contribute labor, capital, or even know-how to various social projects and infrastructures.
By liberating ourselves from the rituals inherent in maintaining
institutions, new ventures can be born. New ways of thinking and
new types of resources are brought together. New experiences and
relationships are brought to life. New wealth is created. It is here,
humanity steps into a new world of its own true making. g
Epilogue
HISTORY REPEATING OR NEW WORLD?
Magnus ab integro sclorum nascitur ordo

iam redit et Virgo
The great order of the ages is born afresh

and now the Virgin [justice] returns
Virgil, Eclogue 4, c.3938 BC
We have been here before this very moment where humanity

finds itself at a precipice. Historys pages are soaked in the trials
and tribulations of socio-economic upheaval upheavals caused
by plagues, state and religious conflicts, technological revolutions,
and even as a consequence of extreme disparities of income and
wealth distribution. History shows us, too, that these upheavals,
somehow, find an end. Someone or something always seems to
come to the rescue sometimes calmly, sometimes violently, a
solution is found. Humanity, once again, is brought back from the
brink. Life goes on.
In our present world, global markets still have not recovered
from the Great Recession of 2008. To some, the recession is a mere
inconvenience. To others, however, the effects of the recession
have led to large swaths of homelessness, hunger, disenfranchisement, even death. Many throughout society maintain that if only
the correct political party could take leadership and control over
the levers of power, long-waiting solutions would finally restore
order to the world. Others, however, have lost all hope that any
political party or institution can find a way out of the crisis.
This thesis has endeavored to observe and synthesize that a
truly viable and sustainable solution to the present global economic
crisis cannot be reasonably or rationally implemented by any
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government or other orthodox institution. This time, humanity

cannot be brought back from the brink by someone or something
else. No back-room negotiation, no conservative or liberal agenda,
no amount of overhauling the tax laws, no new-age sharing
economy project, no form of wealth redistribution, even giving
money away to the masses none of these options can possibly
result in resolving the actual root causes of the crisis. The three
primary reasons for this extreme assessment are:
Thesis 1: A substantial majority of government, business, and
academic leaders, as well as the masses, have all been operating
from long outdated knowledge of how and why economics actually
functions. We are not where we think we are. And if we do not
know where actually we are, then how can we rationally conclude
that some political leader or institution can successfully lead us out
of the wilderness? How would we rationally recognize salvation?
Thesis 2: Once our knowledge-base is finally updated, we will
all discover a terrible, yet liberating truth: that our past three fields
of socio-economic activity (agriculture/mining, mass production,
and services) no longer require mass human labor and thus,
these three fields can never hope to be revived to a point where
aggregate demand can be attained and maintained. Certainly, we
must always be mindful of and celebrate our past, but it is now
time to move on. A new fourth economy is the only reasonable and
rational alternative to finally resolve the fundamental challenge of
aggregate demand. Attempting to rabidly protect the rituals of our
past can only serve a continued destruction of both the economy
as well as what remaining social bonds that, thus far, seem to have
held on in spite of the failings of the system.
3 - Synthesis: Once humanity begins to contemplate any new
fourth economy, it is vastly unlikely that some government or even
group of governments will be at the center of debating or implementing such a fourth economy. No matter how unorthodox or
irrational as it may sound, the only truly viable and sustainable
solution to the persistent Global Recession is for the masses to
finally come together and begin to take both individual and group
responsibility for their socio-economic relationships.
And perhaps, this is precisely as it should be. Humanitys
muscles of discernment have long ago atrophied. A substantial
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body of humanity has actually forgotten how to think and speak

beyond mere rhetoric, coercion, and zero-sum competitiveness
humanity has forgotten how to access its capacity for parrhesia,
dialectics, and mutual collaboration. But that capacity never truly
leaves us; it still exists in our DNA. Is is possible for some spark
to reawaken this capacity? Is it possible for mediocrity and self-absorption within the masses to somehow be replaced by pioneer-ism
and service? Undoubtedly, as humanity attempts to authentically
unveil and undertake direct moral responsibility for its actions
(and thoughts), certain individuals and groups will make horrible
mistakes of judgment, and the consequences of these mistakes
might very well be severe. Horrible, or not, evolution cannot be
avoided simply because we fear mistakes. Whether we understand
it, or not, the laws of nature feel no malice or remorse everything,
all successes, all failures, exist so that we may learn and evolve.
No matter how horrible the mistakes may be, from a fundamental
moral perspective, we must allow the masses to stand on their own
feet, rather than be persistently protected from themselves. As
we begin to move from one gravitational field of socio-economic
behavior to another, certainly we will initially feel out of balance,
unsure of ourselves, insecure. But if we join together in this new
venture, we shall assuredly discover and experience what Abraham
Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.
But beyond the notion that it is simply the right thing to do in
facilitating the masses to undertake increasing amounts of responsibility, there is something else to consider. The single vital ingredient that has never been present throughout all previous human
upheavals, and thus facilitated someone or something else to come
to the rescue of humanity the single vital ingredient that now
actually does exist, and which possesses a natural capacity to
empower communications and action between every single human
being on this planet that single vital ingredient is the Internet.
With the existence of the Internet, a treasure-trove of new tools
and processes can be brought to bear so as to cultivate vast reserves
of intangible value. From quantum computing and expert systems,
to web-based payment systems and 3D printing technologies the
interdependent relationships between the tangible and intangible
worlds finally become visible to us all.
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As the wise who walked this earth before us have observed, it is

our very occupations that can either divide us or unite us. If indeed
the true definition of economics is the physical and metaphysical
manifestations of the human endeavor, and how these manifestations are correspondingly valued by society as a whole how can
we, then, begin to truly value each other?
Admittedly, this thesis is unorthodox in both its methodology of argument and its fundamental intentions. Classical and
neoclassical foundations primarily are focused on the technocratic
and mechanical relying on the powers of deduction and rhetoric to arrive at reason. The once vibrant and significant, but now
neglected German schools of dialectics and economics, however,
celebrate in getting our hands in the soil of the earth, and of life
in struggling with complex and spiral issues that demand inductive reasoning as well as parrhesia in our search for those momentary glimpses of wisdom. The mode and purpose of a conventional
thesis is to elicit support from the public for a specific agenda being
espoused by an individual leader, or political interest group. Here,
though, in this thesis, the mode and purpose is only to stimulate
the consciousness of the masses so that they might come together
to determine their own agenda to choose a metamorphosis of the
human potential. Certainly, if we desire to authentically delineate
our cultural identities via the constructs of nation-states, that is
for humanity to discern. But when we attempt to create arbitrary
borders in an economic sense, we only destroy the natural and
stateless laws of our socio-economic existence.
The objective of this thesis is to endeavor to discern pattern
pattern of economic activity and pattern of human behavior. To
bear witness to these patterns may certainly not be easy. But if
the human endeavor is to continue its ceaseless evolution, bear
witness we must. This thesis ends with an inescapable question:
will history merely continue repeating itself, or has the time finally
come when we realize that everlasting wealth resides within us all,
beyond the reach of any nation, beyond all nations? Will we have
the courage to join together as a species, and seek our way out of
the rituals and myths of fear, and into the noble light of duty? Will
we finally create an everlasting new world order out of khaos? g
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael Byrnes has served

three U.S. Administrations in an
advisory capacity in designing
and implementing post-Cold War
economic conversion strategies, as
well as technology transfer systems
implementation. He has counseled
Fortune 100 companies as well
as small businesses in matters of
mergers and acquisitions strategy,
crisis management, and ethics.
For decades, Michael has traveled the world to observe and learn
from the diverse challenges facing humanity and its economic
endeavors. Wealth Beyonds Nations is the culmination of that focus.
Tamara van Halm served as a

political affairs analyst with the
Defense Ministry, Netherlands,
operating in the conflict-zone of
Bosnia-Herzegovina (where she
and Michael met).
For the past few years, Tamara
has been focused on educating and
awakening humanity to the challenges and limitless opportunities
we now collectively face.
112
http://www.wealthbeyondnations.com

Wealth Beyond Nations (Abridged)

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WEALTH BEYOND NATIONS

ECONOMIC & MORAL PRINCIPLES

Michael Byrnes & Tamara van Halm

Copyright 2004-2015 Michael Byrnes & Tamara van Halm

Notes on this Abridged Edition

A Debate Without Knowledge?

The Nature of Economic Activity

The Nature of Social Order

Pioneers to a New Frontier

History Repeating or New World?

About the Authors

UNDERSTANDING THE CAUSE OF CRISIS, PART ONE

UNDERSTANDING THE CAUSE OF CRISIS, PART TWO

THE FOUNDATIONS OF A NEW FOURTH ECONOMY

THE ENDEAVOR & CULTIVATION OF A NEW FOURTH ECONOMY

NOTES ON THIS ABRIDGED EDITION

This book is unorthodox in three specific ways. Firstly,

Notes on this Abridged Edition

sical and neoclassical economics primarily are focused on practical