Competition

What are the root causes of the global economic crisis?

Authored by JP Orient

Abstract: This analysis argues that today's financial crisis is driven by computational heuristics, discoveries made by machines, to find logical rationales for maintaining moribund power structures. Rather than using computational heuristics to lead societies toward a world in which people desire to co-exist, the essay shows how vested interests have used machines to dictate and defend corroding centers of power. The result is an Imperium ex Nihilo, an "Empire Out of Nothing" but the assumptions of man inside the narrow focus of profit and greed.

Today's financial crisis can be analyzed through an array of lenses. In the narrowest, it is the capitulation of Keynesian economics to social conservatism emboldened by concentrated wealth. In the broadest, it represents lost trust in societies that delivered some of mankind's greatest social achievements: Enlightenment, Scientific Method, Democracy and Human Rights. Through an ecological lens we might see it as a resource-limitation shadow cast upon an ailing Earth. Militarily we may someday see the crisis as the product of imperial overreach. Commercially it could be scrutinized as a corporatist revolt, whereby organized interests overthrew the state in managing the world's tenuous plenty behind fortified castles of capital.

However history's kaleidoscope is used to see the crisis, it will be observed that the designers all used the same weapon in its proliferation: machines built to think for them.[1]