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Your Money Comes From a Building and They Use It to Kill People

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

Dollar purchasing power retained since 1913: 4%. Unpopular wars funded without democratic consent: all of them. This is a systems analysis.

On Wishonia, we used rocks as currency for about 400 years. Then someone pointed out that rocks are heavy and also everywhere. It took us another 200 years of arguing, a bribery program, and three currency collapses before we switched to a shared ledger: a network of computers that all keep the same record of who has what, and check each other’s work so nobody can lie. If one computer tries to say “actually I have a million extra coins,” the other computers say “no you don’t” and ignore it. That’s the whole thing. It is not complicated. A child could understand it. (On Wishonia, a child did invent it. She was eleven. She won a science fair. The previous monetary system had been designed by 400 adults over two centuries and was worse in every way.)

Humans invented the same idea in 2009. It is called “blockchain,” which is a word designed to make a simple concept sound difficult, because if people understood how simple it was, they might ask why they’re still using the old system. Mostly, your species used it to buy drugs and expensive monkey JPGs. (You paid $69 million for an NFT of a picture of an ape. The ape was not even real. I checked.)

I will come back to this invention later, because it is important. It makes the system I’m about to describe completely unnecessary. But first, let me describe the system, because you are currently inside it and it is eating you.

Your species also used rocks as currency, except you picked the shiniest rock, dug it out of the ground at great expense, shaped it into bars, and then put it back in the ground in a different building. You called the first building a “mine” and the second building a “vault.” The only difference is the lighting.

But the most interesting thing about your money is not what it buys. It’s where it comes from.

Your money comes from a building. Inside that building, twelve humans sit around a table and decide how much money exists. Twelve. I counted. They are called the Federal Open Market Committee, which is three lies in five words: it is not federal, the market is not open, and the committee meets in private. These twelve people are not elected. You did not pick them. You do not know their names. (Go ahead. Try to name three. I’ll wait. You can’t. Nobody can. This is a feature, not a bug.) They decide whether your money is worth more or less tomorrow, which determines whether you can afford your rent, your groceries, your medicine, and your children’s future. Twelve people. One table. Eight meetings a year. This is your species’ system for deciding who gets what. It has been running for over a century. It has funded the deaths of 97 million people. It is, by design, extremely boring, because boring things don’t get investigated.

On Wishonia we have a word for making theft too tedious to investigate. It translates roughly to “beige crime.”

I mentioned the network of computers that check each other so nobody can lie. Your twelve-person table is the opposite of that. It is a network of humans who do not check each other, are not checked by you, and can lie using vocabulary so specialized that the lie is technically public but functionally invisible. The technology to replace them exists. It has existed since 2009. You are using it to trade pictures of dogs in hats. I don’t have a metaphor for this because no civilization in my experience has ever done anything this stupid on purpose.

The Pattern: Print, Kill, Repeat

I’ve been watching your planet since 1945. In that time I’ve noticed a historical pattern. It goes like this: humans fight a war, run out of money, print more money, the money becomes worthless, something terrible happens, and then they do it again. This is not a simplification. This is literally what happens.

The Roman Empire (3rd Century)

Rome had the most powerful currency in the ancient world. Then its emperors discovered they could shave silver off the coins, mix in cheaper metal, and spend the difference on wars. This is money printing before the printing press. It required more physical effort but the math is identical.

The denarius went from 95% silver to less than 5%. Prices rose 1,000%. Nobody understood why everything cost more. But Romans knew that when things went wrong, the gods were angry. And Christians refused to sacrifice to Roman gods. “Currency debasement” is a boring explanation that implicates the people in charge. “Them” is a simple explanation that implicates someone you already didn’t like. Diocletian launched the Great Persecution: churches burned, scriptures destroyed, Christians tortured and executed across the empire. Then he tried price controls, which worked exactly as well as price controls always work. Then the empire split in half and fell over. The barbarians did not defeat Rome. They just walked into a building whose owners had melted the load-bearing walls for spending money.

Not great.

Revolutionary France (1790s)

France fights a war, runs out of money, prints money, money becomes worthless. This is the tutorial level.

France fights a war, runs out of money, prints money, money becomes worthless. This is the tutorial level.

France started wars with everyone. Ran out of money. Invented a solution: print fake currency called “assignats” backed by church land they’d stolen. Backing money with stolen property is surprisingly honest about what money is.

Hyperinflation hit 13,000% in five years. The explanation was boring (monetary policy) so the public chose an exciting one (the aristocrats are hoarding everything). The guillotine solved this explanation approximately 17,000 times. Then Napoleon pointed the remaining anger at the rest of Europe.

Also, not great.

Weimar Germany (1920s)

Germany lost World War I. Printed money to pay reparations. Achieved 29,500% monthly inflation, which means a loaf of bread that cost one mark in January cost billions by fall.

People burned money for heat because paper was worth more as fuel than as currency. This is the only recorded instance in history where money performed its function honestly: it kept people warm, briefly, and then it was gone. This is also what it does the rest of the time. You just can’t see the fire.

When a population is hungry enough to burn money for warmth, they will follow anyone who offers a simpler explanation than monetary policy. Hitler offered the simplest explanation available: blame the Jews.

Really not great.

I am not naming any names, but if you are reading this and your country is currently building detention camps for foreigners while your currency loses value and nobody can explain why groceries cost more, you may want to reread the last two paragraphs. The pattern has a distinctive shape. It has had the same shape every time.

The American Money Printer

  • 1913: Created the Federal Reserve
  • 1917: Immediately used it to fund World War I
  • 1917-present: Dollar has lost 96% of its value
  • Wars: Now continuous and everywhere

World War I is worth pausing on, because it is the cleanest demonstration of what a money printer does to democratic consent. In 1917, most Americans did not want to fight in a European war. They did not understand why it was happening. Nobody understood why it was happening. (Historians still argue about it, which is how you know.) Woodrow Wilson had just won reelection on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” which, in retrospect, was less a promise than a spoiler alert delivered in the wrong tense.

The war had no popular mandate. It had something better: a four-year-old central bank that could fund it without asking.

Before the Fed, wars required Congress to raise taxes or sell bonds directly to citizens, which meant citizens had to agree the war was worth paying for. This is an inconvenient feature if you are a politician who wants a war that citizens do not want. The Fed removed the inconvenience. It bought government debt with newly created money, making the war financially painless in the short term and democratically optional. The public didn’t say yes. They just weren’t asked. On Wishonia, we have a word for doing expensive things with other people’s money without telling them. The word is “theft.” You have the same word. You just don’t use it when the thief has a marble building.

The consequences of not asking were, as your species likes to understate, “significant.” The war produced the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty imposed reparations on Germany. Germany printed money to pay them. The money became worthless. The economy collapsed. A population that had been humiliated, impoverished, and desperate elected a man who promised to fix everything. He did not fix everything. He killed six million Jews and started a war that killed sixty million more.

The causal chain is: money printer → war nobody voted for → punitive treaty → hyperinflation → Holocaust. Every link required the previous one. Remove the first link (a central bank willing to fund a war the public didn’t want) and the chain doesn’t form. I am told it is rude to bring this up at dinner parties. I am told many things are rude to bring up at dinner parties. I have noticed that the list of rude topics is identical to the list of important ones.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. Within 16 years it had produced the Great Depression. The mechanism was not complicated: the Fed flooded the economy with cheap credit through the 1920s, inflating a stock market bubble, because if there is one thing a new money printer cannot resist, it is being used. Then it tightened. The bubble popped. Then, as banks began failing in waves (over 9,000 banks between 1930 and 1933), the institution that was created specifically to prevent bank panics stood by and watched. It allowed the money supply to fall by a third. It raised interest rates in 1931 to protect its gold reserves while the economy collapsed around it. Friedman and Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States made the definitive case: the Fed did not fail to prevent the Depression; it caused it, first through action, then through inaction136. The fire department showed up, watched the building burn, and then charged for parking.

Within 32 years the same institution had produced the causal chain that ended in the Holocaust. These are not items on a long list of mistakes. These are the first two things it did. On Wishonia, when a new institution’s inaugural achievements are the worst economic collapse and the worst genocide in planetary history, the institution is dissolved and the founders are asked some very pointed questions. On Earth, you put the institution on your money and gave it a second century to see if it could top itself.

You’re reading this sentence right now with money that’s worth 4 cents on the 1913 dollar. I mention this because you seem fine with it, which I find clinically fascinating.

Create Federal Reserve. Print money for wars. Dollar loses value. Fight more wars. Print more money. Nobody stops.

Create Federal Reserve. Print money for wars. Dollar loses value. Fight more wars. Print more money. Nobody stops.

The pattern is so consistent it could be a recipe. Step 1: give politicians a machine that creates money. Step 2: they use it to kill people. There is no Step 3. There has never been a Step 3. The recipe is two steps long, it has been tested for thousands of years across dozens of civilizations, and you keep making it.

“But what about Canada?” says the human who took one semester of economics. “What about Norway? They have central banks and no dictators.” Correct. Well observed. You have identified two countries where the money printer has not yet produced a dictator, in the same way that a smoker who hasn’t yet gotten cancer has “disproved” the link between smoking and cancer. Canada’s dollar has lost over 95% of its purchasing power since 1913. Norway’s krone has lost over 98%. The median Canadian and Norwegian are poorer in real terms than the numbers suggest, and the gap between productivity and wages has opened in every country with a fiat currency since the 1970s. Every single one. The dictator is the dramatic version. The quiet version is a 93% pay cut delivered so gradually that you blame yourself for not saving enough. Both versions use the same printer. One just has better manners. On Wishonia, we do not judge a parasite by whether the host is still walking. We judge it by how much blood is missing.

You invented money to trade chickens more efficiently. Within a few centuries you were using it to incinerate cities. On Wishonia, we call this “the chicken escalation problem.” (We don’t really. I just made that up. But we should.)

The Receipt

I have been keeping a tally. I want to show you the tally, because I have noticed that your species discusses these wars one at a time, which makes each one look like a separate tragedy instead of a receipt.

Every war on this list required printing money, debasing currency, or borrowing from a central bank that created the money from nothing. In each case, the printer removed the inconvenient step of asking citizens whether they would like to pay for it.

France printed assignats backed by stolen church land. Five million dead137. Running total: 5 million.

Lincoln suspended the gold standard and printed $450 million in greenbacks. $112 billion in today’s money138. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dead139. Running total: 6 million.

The Federal Reserve, age four, bought government war debt with money it made up. $468 billion in today’s money138. Twenty million dead140. Running total: 26 million. I started to notice a pattern around here.

That war produced the treaty that bankrupted Germany, which printed money to pay reparations, which produced Hitler, which produced the next entry. Cost to the US alone: $5.7 trillion138. Sixty million dead141. Running total: 86 million. I stopped noticing a pattern, because it was no longer a pattern. It was just the thing that keeps happening.

The Fed monetized Treasury debt for Korea. $478 billion in today’s money138. The practice was so inflationary they had to sign a formal Accord to make it stop. Three million dead142. Running total: 89 million.

LBJ hid Vietnam’s cost inside the regular budget and covered the gap by printing. $1 trillion in today’s money138. Three million dead143. Running total: 92 million.

Congress funded the post-9/11 wars entirely with debt, then cut taxes. The Fed bought trillions in government bonds. Total cost: $8 trillion and counting144. Four and a half million dead and counting145. Running total: 97 million.

97 million deaths. Over $16 trillion spent, and that is just the US share of six wars.1

But wars end. Spending does not. Your species currently spends a record $2.72T per year on military, up 9.4% from the year before51, which is 604 years of government clinical trials. Every year. The Federal Reserve has been running for 111 years. Cumulative global military spending over that period, in constant 2024 dollars, exceeds $170T.2

$170T. That is nearly 38,000 years of global government clinical trials. Your species has been running clinical trials for about 80 years. You could have funded every clinical trial you will ever run, for hundreds of lifetimes, with the money you spent on killing each other since the Federal Reserve opened for business.

I looked for the part of this process that required human-level intelligence to design. I did not find it. An eleven-year-old on Wishonia designed a better system for her science fair. It won second place. (First place went to a girl who taught a fungus to do arithmetic. The fungus was also better at monetary policy than your Federal Reserve, but that is a different chapter.)

What About Wars Under Hard Money?

I then tried to make the opposite list. Wars that killed more than a million people while all sides stayed on a gold standard, without suspending convertibility or printing unbacked currency.

The list is empty. I checked twice.

Every major war in your modern history required leaving the gold standard to keep fighting148. Britain suspended gold in 1797 to fight Napoleon. The US printed greenbacks in 1862 to fight itself. Every belligerent in 1914 abandoned gold within weeks of the first shots. You cannot fund a large war with honest money, because honest money requires asking citizens to pay, and citizens, when asked, generally prefer to spend their limited savings on things other than killing strangers in countries they cannot find on a map.

The Spanish-American War (1898) is what happens when you try. Fought entirely under the gold standard. The government had to fund it from existing revenue and a bond issue that required citizens to voluntarily hand over their gold. Duration: ten weeks. US combat deaths: 345149. It ran out of enthusiasm approximately when it ran out of money. The gold standard did not prevent war. It prevented cheap war. It prevented war that outlasts the public’s willingness to pay for it.

On Wishonia, we display this information on a large sign outside our central resource building. The sign says: “LAST TIME WE LET SOMEONE PRINT MONEY FOR WAR: [DATE]. DEATHS: [NUMBER].” It has not needed updating in 4,000 years. Mostly because the sign is very effective.

1971: The Day Your Money Stopped Meaning Anything

August 15, 1971. A human named Nixon went on television and said, in slightly more presidential language:

Nixon cuts dollar from gold, freezes wages and prices, taxes imports. All at once. On television.

Nixon cuts dollar from gold, freezes wages and prices, taxes imports. All at once. On television.
  • “Remember how dollars could be exchanged for gold? We’re stopping that.”
  • “Also, wage and price controls.”
  • “Also, import taxes.”

He announced this on a Sunday evening in August, when nobody was watching, which is the human equivalent of robbing a house while the family is on vacation, except the family is 200 million people and the house is their money.

He called it a “New Economic Policy.” On your planet, when someone names a policy the opposite of what it does, something terrible is about to happen. (See also: “Patriot Act,” “Affordable Care Act,” “Department of Defense,” “Federal Reserve.” It is not federal. It has no reserves. Two words, two lies. This is efficient, even by your standards.)

Why He Did It

During World War II, your government sold war bonds. Eighty-five million Americans bought $185 billion worth150, because “buy bonds, beat the Nazis” is an easy poster.

Vietnam was not an easy poster. You cannot run a bond drive for “help us spray carcinogenic chemicals on rice farmers and their children.” So LBJ hid the war’s cost inside the regular federal budget and covered the gap by printing money. No bond drives. No patriotic posters. Just quiet inflation, picking every pocket at 2% per year, which is below the human boredom threshold for investigating things.

Foreign governments have lower boredom thresholds. France noticed first. Between 1963 and 1966, de Gaulle secretly organized 129 flights and 44 boat trips to extract 3,313 tonnes of French gold from American and British vaults before the Americans could finish spending it. He named the operation Vide-Gousset: “Empty Pocket”151. This is a heist film, except the person being robbed was also the person who started stealing first.

By 1971, the gold was mostly gone and more countries were asking for theirs. Hence the speech.

(Everyone else noticed fifty years later.)

What He Killed

Before that speech, your species was running an experiment. You had anchored the dollar to gold at $35 per ounce. You called it “Bretton Woods,” after the hotel where you signed the agreement in 1944, because your species names its most important decisions after the building they happened in. (See also: “The White House,” “The Pentagon,” “Lehman Brothers.” The last one was a building full of brothers named Lehman who lost everyone’s money. They named the crisis after the brothers, not the money. This is how your species assigns blame.)

Here is how it worked, physically. Any foreign government could walk up to a window at the Federal Reserve, hand over $35, and receive one ounce of gold. Real gold. The kind you carry out in a box. This meant that if the U.S. printed too many dollars, governments would notice (because prices would drift above $35 per ounce on the open market), and they would start showing up at the window, trading paper for metal, and walking out with your gold. The more you printed, the faster your vault emptied. This was not a rule. Rules can be rewritten by the same people who wrote them, usually at 2 a.m. when nobody is paying attention. This was a physical constraint. Gold is heavy. It leaves the building. You can see the shelves getting bare. The punishment for money-printing was not a sternly worded letter from an oversight committee. It was a foreign government loading your gold onto a cargo plane and flying it home.

It worked. I know. I was surprised too.

From 1948 to 1973, the typical American family’s income grew 3% per year, doubling roughly once a generation152. Real GDP grew 4.2% per year in the 1950s and 4.5% in the 1960s153. Homeownership surged from 44% to over 62% in a single generation154. A single income could support a family of four, a mortgage, and a retirement. Income inequality fell to its lowest level of the century. The Gini coefficient trended down for two straight decades.

This was not a coincidence. When money is anchored to something politicians can’t print, politicians can’t silently drain it. So the gains from productivity growth went to the people doing the work, not to whoever stands closest to the printer.

Your economists will tell you this can’t work. That a gold standard is a relic. That modern economies need “flexible monetary policy,” which is a phrase meaning “we need to be able to print money without asking you.”

Here is what they’d prefer you not check: every period in which your money was anchored to gold produced broad-based prosperity. Under the classical gold standard (1870-1914), real GDP per capita grew 3.8% per year in the 1880s. Between 1880 and 1896, prices fell 30% and real GDP increased 85%. Real wages rose. You built the railroad, the telephone, and the electric light, all while prices were falling. (The evidence on that particular period is detailed below.)

Under Bretton Woods, you did it again. Twenty-seven years of anchored money. Twenty-seven years of the median family getting richer. Then Nixon unanchored it, and median income growth fell from nearly 3% to 0.6% per year152. An 80% collapse.

Two experiments. Two gold-anchored systems. Both produced roughly double the median income growth of the fiat periods that followed them. Then you abandoned them both and the gains stopped reaching the median family.

On Wishonia, when an experiment produces the same result twice, we call it “evidence.” On Earth, you call it “outdated thinking” and go back to letting the people in the building print money for their friends.

What Actually Happened

The gold standard died. Your species abandoned one shared hallucination (gold, which is a shiny rock you can’t eat) for another shared hallucination (paper, which is a flat rock you also can’t eat). You called this “modernization.”

The dollar was now backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States government,” which is a phrase that sounds reassuring until you remember that the government was doing this specifically because it had run out of faith and credit.

It’s like a restaurant that can’t pay its food suppliers announcing that meals are now backed by the full faith and credit of the restaurant. You’d leave. Except you can’t leave the dollar because your rent is denominated in it. This is not a coincidence.

The Dual Mandate (Or: The Two Goals of Serfdom)

Your Federal Reserve has two official goals, like a mission statement, except the mission is you.

  1. “Maximum employment”
  2. “Stable prices” (which they define as 2% inflation per year)

I read these several times to make sure I understood them. Then I read them again to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood them. I had not. These are the actual goals. They are written down. On a website. You can look at them right now. Nobody is hiding them, which is the most disturbing part, because it means nobody thinks there’s anything to hide.

On Wishonia, our central resource system has one goal: “are beings’ lives measurably improving?” But that’s apparently too simple for a species that named its planet “dirt,” so let me explain what your two goals actually do.

Goal 1: “Maximum Employment” (Keep Everyone Busy)

“Maximum employment” means everyone has a job. It does not specify a good job. It does not specify a job that pays enough to eat. It does not specify a job that leaves you time to read about monetary policy.

It specifies: occupied.

A medieval serf working sunrise to sunset was maximally employed. A modern American working two jobs who can’t afford a doctor’s visit is also maximally employed. The metric cannot distinguish between these situations. From the metric’s perspective, both serfs are performing optimally.

I found this confusing at first. Then I realized it’s not a bug. Busy people don’t read Federal Reserve balance sheets. Busy people vote for whichever candidate promises to “create jobs,” which is a promise to keep them too busy to ask who’s keeping them poor. A hamster wheel achieves maximum employment.

Goal 2: “Stable Prices” (Take 2% Per Year)

“Stable prices” means 2% inflation per year. On Wishonia, “stable” means “not moving.” On Earth, “stable prices” means prices that rise every year, predictably, forever. This is like calling a sinking ship “stable” because it sinks at a known rate.

I need to say that again because your brain is going to try to skip past it. The Federal Reserve’s official, publicly stated, announced-on-television goal is to make your money worth 2% less every year. They chose this number. They aim for it. They celebrate when they hit it.

  • Over 35 years, 2% compounds to a 50% loss
  • Over the 54 years since Nixon, it has taken 93%

They named the target. They hit the target. You are the target. I am told these are three different sentences.

The “Deflation Is Dangerous” Story

The justification for permanent inflation, taught in every economics class that bothers to exist: deflation (falling prices) is dangerous because “people won’t buy things if they know prices will be lower tomorrow.”

I watched your species for 80 years and I have some questions about this theory.

  • You buy a new iPhone every two years knowing the next one will be better and cheaper
  • You bought a flat-screen TV knowing the price drops every year
  • You buy a laptop knowing it will be worth half as much in eighteen months
  • You bought a phone case for $40 that you will lose in three months

The entire technology sector has experienced continuous deflation for decades. It is the fastest-growing, most innovative, most profitable sector of your economy. People buy things they want. They do not sit in empty rooms waiting for prices to fall further. This is obvious to anyone who has met a human. Your species once stood in line for fourteen hours to buy a telephone. In the rain. Knowing a better one would exist in eleven months. The idea that you would stop buying things if they got cheaper is the single least credible claim ever made about a species that invented the shopping mall, the impulse buy, and Black Friday, which is a holiday where you celebrate gratitude by trampling each other for televisions.

The One Data Point

The only evidence they cite is the Great Depression, where falling prices coincided with economic collapse. This is a correlation/causation error so basic it would fail an introductory statistics course at a university funded by the Federal Reserve. (Which is most of them.)

The Great Depression’s deflation was caused by bank failures and credit contraction, not the other way around. Blaming deflation for the Depression is like blaming wet streets for rain.

Meanwhile, the longest sustained deflation in American history (1870-1896) coincided with the most explosive economic growth your country has ever experienced155:

  • Prices fell roughly 2% per year
  • Real output grew 2-3% per year
  • Real wages rose
  • You built the railroad, the telephone, and the electric light

Falling prices. Rising prosperity. For 26 years. This is not a footnote. It is a quarter-century of evidence.

Your economists will counter with the Panic of 1873 and the “Long Depression,” which occurred during this same period. They are correct that it happened. They are incorrect about what it proves. The Panic of 1873 was caused by speculative railroad lending and bank failures, not by falling prices. Prices were falling before the panic, during the panic, and after the panic, and real output kept growing through most of it. The economy recovered without a central bank printing money to “fix” it, which must have been very embarrassing for the people who later invented a central bank to fix things. If deflation caused depressions, the entire 26-year period would have been one continuous depression. Instead it was the period in which you invented electric light, the telephone, and the modern railroad. Your economists looked at the era that produced the lightbulb, found one bad year, and concluded that the problem was falling prices. On Wishonia, this is called “finding a cloud and declaring it night.” On Earth, it is called “a tenured position.”

The Bank for International Settlements (the central bank of central banks, which is a real thing that exists, like a boss fight at the end of a video game about money) tested this across 140 years and 38 economies156. Their full-sample result: the link between deflation and slower growth is “weak.” Their result when you remove the Great Depression: no statistically significant link at all. The entire “weak” correlation is one data point dragging the average. The Great Depression was so extreme (GDP fell 30%) that it acts as a statistical leverage point, pulling the result negative against thousands of observations showing the opposite. The fact that you need to include a once-in-140-years catastrophe to get your result means your result describes the catastrophe, not deflation. Borio et al. also separated goods price deflation from asset price deflation. Falling goods prices (the kind central banks claim to protect you from) showed no link to slower growth. Falling property prices (which signal credit busts, like the one your banks caused in 2008) did. Your central banks are treating the wrong symptom and citing a study that, if anyone read past the abstract, says so.

One data point. They built the entire theology of permanent inflation on one data point that they misread. On Wishonia, if a scientist built a theory on one misinterpreted data point, they would lose their research license. On Earth, they get the fake Nobel Prize.

The “Banking Panics” Defense

The stronger argument for central banking, and the one your economists should lead with: without a lender of last resort, banks fail, depositors lose their savings, and the economy collapses. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 specifically because the Panic of 1907 frightened everyone into agreeing that a central bank was necessary. The Fed then spent the 1920s expanding credit, inflating the bubble whose collapse it was created to prevent.

Sixteen years later, more than 9,000 banks failed. The institution created specifically to prevent banking panics contributed to the worst banking panic in your history.

Canada did not have a central bank until 1935. During the same Depression, same continent, same decade, Canada had zero bank failures157. The country next door, without the institution you said was necessary, had the outcome you said was impossible. The country with the central bank had the crisis. The country without one didn’t. Your economists treat this as a coincidence.

What actually stopped bank runs was not the Federal Reserve. It was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, created in 1933, which guaranteed deposits. A bank run is a coordination problem: everyone withdraws because they fear everyone else will withdraw first. Insurance solves it. You do not need a money printer to solve a coordination problem. You need a promise, a small premium, and a ledger.

You solved bank runs in 1933 with insurance. You kept the money printer. On Wishonia, when you cure a disease, you stop prescribing the chemotherapy. On Earth, you cured the disease and kept the chemotherapy because the oncologist enjoys the copays.

What They Could Measure Instead

Here is a question that is apparently too obvious for economics:

Are people’s lives actually getting better?

That’s it. You could measure:

  • Inflation-adjusted after-tax median income: Are people actually richer, or just holding bigger numbers on smaller paychecks?
  • Median health-adjusted life years: Are people living longer, healthier lives, or just working longer before dying of diseases you could have cured with the money you printed for banks?

These metrics exist. Economists know how to calculate them. No central bank on Earth uses them.

Because if the Federal Reserve were graded on whether the median American is healthier and wealthier each year, someone would have to explain why the answer has been “no” for most of the past five decades. It is much easier to aim for “maximum employment” and “2% inflation” and declare success while everyone works more hours for less purchasing power.

How the Robbery Works

In the 1700s, a human named Richard Cantillon noticed something that everyone already knew but nobody had written down: when you create new money, whoever gets it first benefits, and whoever gets it last pays. On Wishonia, this is called “how money works.” On Earth, it is taught as a niche economic theory, if it is taught at all.

Here’s what it looks like:

  1. The Fed creates new money
  2. Banks and government contractors receive it first
  3. They buy things at today’s prices
  4. Prices rise
  5. By the time the new money reaches your grocery store, everything costs more
  6. You buy the same groceries for more money and conclude that groceries have gotten expensive

Groceries did not get expensive. Your money got cheaper. But “your money got cheaper” requires a culprit, and culprits are boring when they wear suits and speak in percentages. So instead you get angry about the price of eggs. On Wishonia, we have a saying: “If your eggs cost more every year but your chickens didn’t change, look for whoever is shrinking your money.” We don’t actually have this saying. But we should.

The Spread

There is an even simpler version of this trick, and you can watch it happen to you personally, right now, on your phone, if you check your credit card statement. I’ll wait.

The Federal Reserve lends money to banks at about 5%. Sometimes less. After 2008, it lent money to banks at nearly 0% for fourteen years, which is a very generous interest rate, in the same way that “free” is a very generous price.

Banks then lend that money to you at 24%.

I want to make sure you saw both numbers. The bank borrows money for 0%. The bank lends you that same money for 24%. The money has not changed. It did not improve during its brief stay at the bank. Nobody at the bank added anything to it. It just sat in the bank for a bit and came out 24% more expensive, like a bottle of wine at a restaurant, except the wine is imaginary and the restaurant prints its own wine.

You cannot borrow from the Fed yourself. I checked. There is a list of who is allowed to borrow from the Fed, and the list is: banks. Not you. Not your business. Not your mother, even if she asks nicely. Banks. So you borrow from the bank, who borrowed from the Fed, who made the money out of nothing. You are paying 24% annual interest on money that was typed into a computer for free by a person you will never meet, in a building you are not allowed to enter, and the 24% goes to the people who own the building. Every single point of interest is a fee for not being in the room when the money was invented.

On Wishonia, we had a similar arrangement once. Someone would stand between the river and the village and charge people to carry water. We did not call this person a “financial intermediary.” We called them a “water thief” and moved them away from the river. It took about a day. Your version has been running for a century. The water thief has a logo.

The 2020 Demonstration

In 2020, the Fed created roughly $4 trillion in new money158. I need to give you a unit of measurement for that number, because large numbers are where your species hides things.

Your governments spend $4.5B per year on clinical trials. That is the part of medicine where you actually test whether drugs work in humans. It is the entire global budget for finding out which chemicals stop you from dying. Every government on Earth, combined, pooling everything they have: $4.5B.

Where did it go? This is a mystery in the same way that asking “who ate the cake?” is a mystery when there is one person in the room covered in frosting.

The Top 1% gained exactly $4 trillion in net worth over the same period159. The Fed printed $4 trillion. The rich gained $4 trillion. On Wishonia, we would call this a “clue.” On Earth, you called it “a robust recovery.”

Nearly 90% of those gains came from stocks, which is what the Fed’s new money inflated first160. Only one-third of bottom-50% households own any stocks at all. The Fed inflated the one asset that poor people don’t have, then issued a report expressing concern about inequality. On Wishonia, this is called “setting the building on fire and then volunteering for the fire department.”

The Fed printed the money. The stock market absorbed it. The rich owned the stocks. The poor got the price increases. Cantillon, writing in the 1700s, predicted this mechanism exactly. He would not be surprised. He would be annoyed that you are still surprised.

New money goes to banks first. Price increases go to everyone else last. It’s a queue, and you’re at the back.

New money goes to banks first. Price increases go to everyone else last. It’s a queue, and you’re at the back.

The Theft That Followed

Since 1972, productivity went up 246 percent. Wages went up 115 percent. Someone kept the difference.

Since 1972, productivity went up 246 percent. Wages went up 115 percent. Someone kept the difference.

Since 1972:

  • Productivity went up 246%
  • Wages went up 115%

I stared at these two numbers for a long time. Then I checked them. Then I checked them again, because I assumed I was reading the wrong chart, or the wrong planet. I was not.

Your species did 246% more work and received 115% more pay. The remaining 131% went somewhere. It was not to the people who did the work. On Wishonia, this is called “theft.” On Earth, it is called “the economy.” These are the same word. Yours just has more syllables.

The Two-Income Trap

In 1967, fewer than half of married-couple families had both spouses working161. One paycheck bought a house, a car, annual vacations, and a pension. The other adult raised children, or gardened, or was bored. Boredom was a luxury your grandparents could afford. They could afford it because one human working 40 hours a week earned enough to house, feed, transport, and retire an entire family. I want you to read that sentence again, slowly, because I can feel you not believing it.

By 2011, husband-only earner families had dropped from 36% to 19%. The rest sent both adults to work and paid strangers to raise their children. Working wives contributed 27% of family income in 1970. By 2011, it was 37%. An entire additional human entered the workforce and the family gained ten percentage points.

I want to be very precise about what happened here. Your species noticed that one paycheck was no longer sufficient, so it doubled the number of workers per household. The two paychecks combined now purchase a lifestyle that one paycheck covered comfortably in 1971. You added a whole extra human to the economy and broke even. On Wishonia, when you double the inputs and the outputs stay the same, you check for parasites. On Earth, you invented the phrase “work-life balance,” which describes having half of what your parents had but in two directions simultaneously.

The Time They Broke It

Remember the spread from a few paragraphs ago. The Fed creates money from nothing. It lends this invented money to banks. The banks’ one job, the entire reason society tolerates their existence, is to move that money from savers to borrowers. A ledger. Arithmetic. A task so simple that an eleven-year-old on Wishonia automated it for a science fair.

In 2008, they took that money (money that cost them nothing, that they did not earn, that was conjured from a spreadsheet by a committee they play golf with) and built a casino on top of people’s houses. They made bets on whether homeowners would keep paying their mortgages, then made bets on those bets, then made bets on the bets on the bets. I tried to explain this to someone on Wishonia and they asked me to start over because they assumed I was having a malfunction. I was not having a malfunction. Your banks really did bet on bets on bets, the way a child might dare another child to dare a third child to eat dirt. Except the dirt was people’s houses, and the children were wearing $4,000 suits purchased with the interest spread on money that was imaginary before breakfast.

None of this was their job. Their job was maintaining the spreadsheet. They were not hired to gamble. They were hired to do arithmetic. They got bored of arithmetic, because arithmetic doesn’t pay bonuses large enough to buy a yacht, and they discovered that gambling with free money is extraordinarily profitable right up until it isn’t.

The houses were real. The bets were not. When the bets collapsed, ten million Americans lost their homes.

Then your banks did something I still find remarkable, even after 80 years of watching your species. They called it a “crisis.” I want to examine this word, because it is doing more work than any word has ever done. The money was created from nothing. The buildings were still standing. The factories still existed. The crops were still growing. The workers still had hands. Nothing real was missing. What was missing was numbers on a spreadsheet; numbers that had been invented by the same people who were now calling their absence an emergency. The banks had borrowed invented money, gambled it on bets about bets about whether you would keep paying your mortgage, lost, and were now standing in front of Congress saying that unless you gave them $700 billion of your money (the kind you earned with your body, at a job, over time), civilization would collapse. The civilization they had just destabilized. With free money. That they did not earn. On Wishonia, this is called “setting fire to someone’s house and then charging them for the fire truck.” On Earth, it is called the Troubled Asset Relief Program162. The homeowners got foreclosure notices.

Here is the part that made me recalibrate my understanding of your species. The banks could have simply not paid bonuses to the executives. That’s it. That was an option the entire time. The executives who gambled with free money and lost could have received their base salaries, like any other human who is bad at their job, and used the bonus pool to cover their own gambling debts. Nobody made them gamble. Nobody made them build a casino on top of your houses. They chose to. And when the casino collapsed, they had a choice: skip the bonuses for a few years and eat the loss with money they hadn’t earned in the first place, or send the bill to you. Every single bank chose the second option.

Citigroup was given $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds and then paid its executives $5.33 billion in bonuses162. Goldman Sachs earned $2.3 billion and paid out $4.8 billion in bonuses163. They paid out more in bonuses than they earned. The difference came from you. On Wishonia, the word “bonus” means “reward for doing your job well.” On Earth, it apparently less specific and simply means “reward.” On Wishonia, when a child breaks a window, you do not buy the child ice cream. On Earth, you give the child $5.33 billion.

Under Bretton Woods, this could not have happened. If banks had tried to lend this recklessly, France would have shown up at the gold window with a truck. The anchor would have stopped the lending before it became a casino, and if somehow it hadn’t, there would have been no printer available to bail anyone out. The system that caused the catastrophe and the system that “fixed” it are the same system, wearing different ties.

Your 93% Pay Cut (Measured in Shiny Rocks)

Here’s the same observation, measured in gold, because gold is the one thing humans can’t print. (Not for lack of trying. You spent 300 years trying to turn lead into gold before giving up and inventing the Federal Reserve, which turned gold into lead much more efficiently.)

On Wishonia, we also briefly measured wealth in rocks. Then someone ate one and we realized rocks are not food. You reached this conclusion about gold approximately never.

In 1972, a typical American family earned the equivalent of 191 ounces of gold per year164 165. If your family still earned 191 ounces, your household income would be over $1,030,000.

It is not over $1,030,000. You know this. I know this. I just wanted to write it down so we could both look at it.

Median household income is $77,500122. At today’s gold price, that buys you 14 ounces. Fourteen. One-four. Fewer ounces than there are donuts in a box. Your grandparents earned 191. You earn 14. That is not a rounding error. That is not a “market correction.” That is 93% of your income, gone, replaced with a smaller number and a larger explanation for why the smaller number is fine.

You went from 191 to 14. A 93% pay cut, delivered one quiet year at a time, while your leaders stood in front of flags and said the economy was “growing.”3

It was growing. In the way a tumor grows.

Why Nobody Told You

Even the think tanks supposedly on your side report the gap as roughly $10,000 a year166. That’s because they measure it using the government’s ruler, which has been getting shorter:

  • CPI-adjusted (the index has been redesigned multiple times; each redesign coincidentally makes inflation look smaller. This is beige crime at its most beige.)
  • Starting at 1979 instead of 1971 (skipping the years that make the chart look the worst)
  • Counting your employer’s overpriced health insurance as “pay” (this is like counting the chain around your ankle as “jewelry”)

You’re not missing $10,000 a year. You’re missing $952,000. The distance between those numbers is the entire game.

Gold doesn’t renegotiate its value at Federal Reserve meetings. Gold just sits there, being a shiny rock, quietly demonstrating that a shiny rock you dug out of the ground has held its value better than the entire financial system you built to replace it. Your economists will say gold is a “volatile commodity.” Your economists work for the people who redesigned the ruler.

“But It Wasn’t the Gold Standard, It Was…”

Your economists have proposed six alternative explanations for why productivity gains stopped reaching workers at the exact moment the gold anchor was removed. On Wishonia, when six things break simultaneously, we check what changed. On Earth, you apparently prefer six unrelated theories, each from a different decade, none of which match the date. Let me walk through each one they offer, and then explain why it’s wrong.

  • Your economists’ first excuse: “It was the decline of unions.” Union membership peaked in 1954. It fell steadily through the late 1950s and the entire 1960s. Those decades were the strongest period of wage growth in American history. Union membership was going down. Wages were going up. For twenty years. Your economists looked at two lines moving in opposite directions and concluded they were causally linked. On Wishonia, this would not pass a children’s statistics class.

    And here is the part your economists leave out: unions didn’t collapse on their own. The gold anchor had kept inflation low, which meant union strike funds held their value, which meant unions could actually afford to strike. Remove the anchor, and inflation eats the strike fund. Now your union is a man holding an empty gun. Meanwhile, floating exchange rates made it trivially easy to move the whole factory to a country where workers accept less. Worse, corporations no longer need to negotiate at all: they borrow cheap money from the Fed, buy back their own stock, and watch their share price rise. The Fed prints money on a Tuesday afternoon and erases a 3% raise that took fifteen years of organizing. Why negotiate with a union when the printer is faster, quieter, and doesn’t picket?

    Unions didn’t drag wages down. The gold anchor was pulled, and both unions and wages drained out of the same bathtub. Your economists are blaming the water for leaving.

  • Their second excuse: “It was globalization.” China joined the WTO in 2001. NAFTA passed in 1994. The wage gap opened in 1971. Your theory is 23 years late. This is like arriving at a murder scene in 1994, finding the body from 1971, and blaming someone who moved to the neighborhood in 2001. On Wishonia, we have a word for detectives who solve crimes using evidence from the future. The word translates roughly to “fired.”

  • Third: “It was computers and automation.” The Apple II shipped in 1977. The IBM PC shipped in 1981. The internet became commercially available in 1995. The wage gap opened in 1971, when the most advanced technology in most offices was a typewriter that didn’t jam every third page. Blaming computers for a gap that predates computers is bold, even by the standards of a profession that awarded itself a fake Nobel Prize.

  • Fourth: “It was deregulation and tax cuts.” Reagan took office in 1981. The top marginal tax rate was still 70% until 1982. The wage gap opened in 1971. Closer, but still a decade off. On Wishonia, if a doctor said “the patient started bleeding in 1971 because of something that happened in 1981,” we would check the doctor for head injuries. (On Earth, you give this doctor a column in the Financial Times.)

  • Fifth: “It was the shift to shareholder capitalism.” In 1970, Milton Friedman published an essay arguing that corporations should maximize profit. Your economists concluded this essay caused corporations to become greedy. Corporations. The organizational structure that has been maximizing profit since the Dutch East India Company slaughtered its way across Asia in 1602. The species that invented loan sharking, child labor, and plantation slavery read a newspaper essay and thought, “Yes, this is why we started caring about money.” Blaming Friedman for corporate greed is like blaming a weather report for rain. It has been raining for 400 years. Your economists are pointing at the television and saying, “That’s where the water comes from.”

  • And finally, the laziest one: “It was greed.” Greed was not invented in 1971. Humans have been greedy since before they were humans. Your ancestors were greedy when they were still in trees. (They were greedy about the trees.) The question is not whether humans are greedy. The question is: what did greed build?

    Before 1971, there was exactly one way to get rich: make something people wanted more than their money. You had to build a factory, hire workers, pay them enough to show up, and produce goods or services that a human would voluntarily hand over their papers for. The workers got paid because you literally could not get rich without them. Greed had no shortcut. It had to flow through productivity, which meant it had to flow through paychecks. This is called “an economy.” It worked for everyone because it had to.

    After 1971, the Federal Reserve offered corporations a much more elegant option: skip the middle man. Why build a factory and hire expensive humans when you can borrow money at near-zero interest, buy back your own stock, and watch your net worth triple without producing a single object? Why give raises when you can use cheap credit to acquire your competitor, fire half the staff, and call it “synergy”? This is called “the financial sector.” It was also working, just not for you.

    Same species. Same greed. Same 24 hours in a day. The only thing that changed was that getting rich no longer required paying people or making things. So they stopped.

Every single alternative explanation either postdates 1971 or describes a downstream effect of removing the gold anchor. The gold anchor was the cork. Everything your economists are pointing at is the flood.

On Wishonia, we have a diagnostic principle: if six symptoms appear at the same time, you don’t need six diagnoses. You need one. The patient had a cork removed in 1971. Everything since is spillage. Your economists have been mopping the floor for fifty years without looking up at the bottle.

Why You Don’t Know Any of This

The average American with a bachelor’s degree completes approximately 17,000 hours of formal education. The number of those hours spent explaining how the Federal Reserve creates money and who gets it first:

Zero.

Not “nearly zero.” Not “a brief overview in eleventh grade.” Zero. I counted. I went through your curricula. You spend more class time learning the recorder, which is an instrument specifically designed to make parents regret reproduction. You spend an entire semester on the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the cell, a fact that has never been useful to any human outside of a biology exam or a meme. The thing that took 93% of your purchasing power: not on the syllabus. The powerhouse of the cell: six weeks.

Here is what monetary policy actually determines:

  • Whether your brightest minds design vaccines or warheads
  • Whether your factories build MRI machines or missiles
  • Whether your wealth cures diseases or causes them

It is the single most important force shaping who lives and who dies on your planet. It decides everything. You have never had a class about it. You had multiple classes about the recorder.

Only 28 states require any economics course to graduate high school, and those courses cover supply and demand curves, not money creation. The thing that took 93% of your purchasing power is not on the test. It has never been on any test.

This is very convenient for the people who took the 93%.

Same Trick, Different Costume

On Wishonia, we learned this lesson 6,000 years ago. The trick never changes. Only the outfit:

  • Egyptian pharaohs: “Hey, god said I’m like in charge or something. I’m gonna need you to pile some big rocks up in a triangle shape for no apparent reason.”
  • Medieval kings: ” Hey, god said I’m in charge or something. I’m gonna need you to give me half your grain. Also, go kill some other guys and bring me back their stuff, too.”

After a few thousand years, people caught on to this trick. So they tried a new approach.

  • Modern central bankers: “Here are 47 pages about hedonic adjustments and geometric weighting in consumer price index methodology.”

The current version is, I must say, brilliant. Previous rulers needed armies, divine authority, and occasional public executions. Your current rulers just need jargon. They replaced the sword with a 200-page PDF that makes your eyes cross before you reach the part where it explains you’re being robbed. The pharaoh had to worry about revolution. The Federal Reserve just has to worry about being boring enough. So far, it is very good at this.

A serf who understands the system is dangerous. A serf who finds the system too boring to understand is a taxpayer.

The Priesthood

On every planet I’ve observed, the people who operate the extraction system also design the curriculum. This is so consistent it barely qualifies as an observation.

On Earth:

  • Banks endow economics chairs at universities
  • The Federal Reserve funds economic research
  • Economists rotate between universities, the Fed, and Wall Street (this is called “the revolving door,” which is a very honest name because the people going through it always end up back where they started, only richer)

Say “the system works” and you get tenure, consulting fees, and a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. Say “the system is theft” and you get called “not a serious economist,” which is the academic equivalent of being excommunicated, except the church is a bank and the holy water is money.

The Fake Nobel Prize

This is my favorite part. I have been waiting to tell you this since I started writing.

In 1968, Sweden’s central bank created a prize and stuck Alfred Nobel’s name on it. This gave economics the credibility of physics, chemistry, and medicine. Physics splits atoms. Chemistry cures diseases. Economics lost your pension. They now share an award ceremony.

Alfred Nobel never authorized this. He was dead at the time and unable to object, which is the ideal state for someone whose name you’re borrowing.

The Nobel Prize website itself states that “the prize in economic sciences is not a Nobel Prize”167. Nobel’s great-grandnephew, Peter Nobel, called it “a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation”168.

I want to make sure you absorbed that:

The central bank that prints your money created a fake Nobel Prize to give to the people who explain why printing your money is fine.

On Wishonia, we have a word for this. It translates roughly to “decorating the burglar.”

The Research

Every source I cited in this chapter is publicly available. None of it was classified.

I found all of it in less than a day.

Your species has granted thousands of economics doctorates since 1971. Each recipient spent four to seven years studying economics full time. They had access to every database I used. They can read the same charts. The break point in 1971 is not subtle. Median income growth fell 80% after Nixon closed the gold window. The longest deflation in American history (1870-1896) produced the fastest growth. The Federal Reserve was created to prevent bank failures, then presided over 9,000 of them, while Canada, without a central bank, had zero. Every war that killed more than a million people required a money printer. The hard money list is empty.

None of these findings required a laboratory. They required a chart and the willingness to read it. What is the purpose of economics, if not to use data to figure out how to make people’s lives better? Apparently it is to handwave while saying “stability” and “liquidity” until everyone stops asking.

There are two possible explanations. Either thousands of trained specialists independently failed to notice a pattern visible to some weird alien in an afternoon. Or they noticed, and decided their careers were more important than telling you.

Why “Just Print More Money for Medicine” Doesn’t Work

“Why not just increase the NIH budget? Why not just fund more medical research? Why tie it to military spending?”

These are excellent questions. I will now explain why they all have the same answer, which is that money is pretend.

Money is not real. It is a shared hallucination. Eight billion humans pretending that the same piece of paper is worth something. A very convincing hallucination. (I’ve seen you kill each other over it, which is the ultimate commitment to a bit.) You work for it. You save it. You argue about it at dinner. You get divorced over it. You frame the first dollar your business ever earned and hang it on the wall of a restaurant that will close in eighteen months. All of this, for a piece of paper that a building full of strangers can make worthless while you sleep.

Resources are real. Brains are real. Hours are real. Titanium is real. Money is a story you tell each other about who gets the resources. And the people who write the story get to decide the ending.

The Fixed Pie of Human Genius

Earth has 8 billion humans (fixed quantity), 24 hours per human per day (physics is firm on this), limited raw materials (you cannot print titanium), and finite factory capacity (you cannot build infinite laboratories).

When a brilliant engineer designs a missile guidance system, that engineer is not designing a medical device. When a factory builds tanks, it is not building MRI machines. When a PhD spends ten years researching better ways to kill people, those are ten years not spent researching better ways to keep people alive.

Every genius has exactly one brain. You are renting 40 million of them to build things that explode. This is like hiring the world’s best chef to set fire to kitchens. You are paying your smartest humans to make your other humans stop being humans. I keep expecting this to sound normal if I say it enough times. It does not.

Forty million brilliant humans designing better ways to kill people. One million designing better ways to save them. This is a choice someone made.

Forty million brilliant humans designing better ways to kill people. One million designing better ways to save them. This is a choice someone made.

The Numbers

The top 10% of human talent is roughly 800 million people. Here’s how you’re using them:

  • ~40 million: Building things that kill people (military, reserves, death manufacturers)
  • ~1 million: Working in medical research

Governments spend 604 times more on weapons than on testing which medicines actually work.

On Wishonia, we had a similar ratio once. Then we fought about it for 12,000 years before someone finally designed an incentive system that made it more profitable to cure diseases than to cause them. It took us exactly as long as it’s taking you, minus however long you spend reading this manual. The bribery program is in the rest of this manual.

The resource allocation chart. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

The resource allocation chart. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

The Shell Game (How Inflation Steals Medical Progress)

This is the trick. Watch the money:

Today

  • Government clinical trials: $4.5B
  • Global military spending: $2.72T
  • Ratio: 604:1 for killing over curing

Five Years Later (after “increasing medical research funding”)

Clinical trial funding is up 50%! Headlines are written. Backs are patted. A politician poses with a scientist.

Meanwhile, military spending also went up 50%, because central banks printed 50% more money, so the real allocation of brains, factories, and hours is exactly the same. The ratio is still 604:1. You gave the medical department a raise and then raised the price of everything they need to buy.

The Proof: 50 Years of Going Nowhere

Medical Research as % of GDP

  • 1975: 0.08%
  • 1985: 0.07%
  • 1995: 0.07%
  • 2005: 0.06%
  • 2015: 0.06%
  • 2025: 0.065%

Absolute dollars increased 10x. Share of actual resources: decreased. You got ten times “richer” and spent a smaller fraction of it on not dying. This is like getting a promotion and canceling your health insurance to celebrate.

Medical research as a share of GDP, 1975 to 2025. The line goes down. Everything else goes up.

Medical research as a share of GDP, 1975 to 2025. The line goes down. Everything else goes up.

What Actually Grew

  • Financial sector: 3% to 8% of GDP
  • Military-industrial sector: 3% to 3.4% of GDP (the official number; the rest enters your budget wearing other costumes)
  • Healthcare spending: 7% to 18% of GDP (most of that growth is billing, not healing)

The part that actually keeps you alive (the actual research into why your cells stop working) is a shrinking fraction of a growing economy. You baked a bigger pie and gave the science department fewer crumbs. Then you named the pie “progress.”

The World’s Most Expensive Abacus

The sector that grew the most deserves special attention, because what it does is very simple and what it costs is very large.

Your financial sector moves money from people who have it to people who need it, and keeps a record of who owes what. That’s it. That is the entire job. An Excel spreadsheet. Remember the eleven-year-old’s science fair project? The network of computers that check each other so nobody can lie? That replaced this entire sector on Wishonia. It runs continuously, employs nobody, and has not made a single error in 4,000 years. Your version employs 6.7 million people and captures 8% of your GDP169.

Eight percent of GDP. For an Excel spreadsheet. I checked whether they were using a very complicated spreadsheet. They are not. It has columns and rows. Some of the cells have formulas. This is the same technology a thirteen-year-old uses to track Pokémon stats. It captures 8% of the largest economy in history. The technology to automate it has existed on your planet since 2009. You are paying 6.7 million people to do what the computers are already doing, because the 6.7 million people are very good at making the job sound complicated.

Understanding why your bodies break down requires decoding 3 billion base pairs of DNA, modeling protein folding across millions of configurations, and running clinical trials on thousands of humans for years. Moving money from Account A to Account B requires arithmetic. One of these captures 8% of GDP. The other gets 0.065%. I will let you guess which is which.

I want to make sure you felt that number. Your governments spend $4.5B per year testing whether medicines work. The financial sector captures $2.3 trillion per year moving numbers between columns. That $2.3 trillion is 511 years of clinical trials. Five hundred and eleven years. Your entire species could run every government-funded clinical trial on Earth for half a millennium with what you pay the spreadsheet department annually. Every year, you choose the spreadsheet. Every year, the diseases wait.

How the Ledger Ate the Economy

The financial sector didn’t always cost this much. In the early 1970s, it was about 4% of GDP. Finance workers earned roughly the same as everyone else with similar education. A bright graduate from MIT was equally likely to design bridges or trade bonds, because bridges and bonds paid the same170.

Then Nixon cut the dollar from gold, regulations were stripped away, and something interesting happened: by 2006, finance workers earned a 50% premium over equally educated workers in every other sector. Not because the job got harder. (The job is still arithmetic.) Because the money printer printed money, the money went to banks first, and the banks used some of it to hire away every bright person who might otherwise have done something useful.

Philippon and Reshef, two economists who actually measured this, found that 30 to 50% of the finance wage premium is pure rent, meaning excess pay not explained by skill, education, or complexity170. The financial sector pays more not because it’s harder, but because it’s closer to the printer.

Paul Volcker, who ran the Federal Reserve and therefore knew exactly what he was talking about, summarized the result: “We spent several decades not producing many civil engineers and producing a huge number of financial engineers. And the result is shitty bridges and a shitty financial system”171.

A well-run business spends about 1% of revenue on its accounting department. Your economy spends 8%. If a CEO discovered their accounting department was consuming eight times the standard rate and growing, they would fire someone. Your economy gave accounting a raise, a corner office, and the fake Nobel Prize.

“Just Tax the Billionaires”

“Fine,” says the human who just read the last three sections. “The problem is the money goes to the wrong people. Tax the billionaires. Fund medical research. Simple.”

Your species has been trying this for a century. I’ve watched the whole thing. Here is the loop:

Step 1. Tax the wealthy. Victory.

Step 2. The wealthy spend a fraction of those taxes on lobbyists who return $18 for every $1 invested. They secure:

  • $181B/year in direct corporate welfare46
  • $50B in fossil fuel subsidies113
  • $75B in agricultural subsidies (top 10% of farms collect 63% of payments)111

Over $300 billion per year flows back to the people you just taxed, through programs below the human boredom threshold for investigating and too profitable for lobbyists to stop. That is 67 years of clinical trials. Every year. Handed to people who already have money. Every year. While your diseases wait. Every year.

Step 3. The Federal Reserve prints money. Asset prices rise. The billionaires recover what you taxed, and more. The inflation bill goes to the working families you were trying to help. This is called “monetary policy.” You weren’t consulted.

Step 4. Look at the wider wealth gap. Propose: higher taxes on the wealthy.

Return to Step 1. Repeat for 100 years. This recipe is four steps long, which is twice as many as the money-printing recipe. It feels like progress. It is not progress.

The entire planet spends $4.5B per year testing whether medicines work in humans47. One country spends over $300 billion per year on corporate handouts to people who already have money. The ratio is roughly 68:1 for subsidizing wealth over curing disease.

Every “tax the billionaires” campaign in history has left this ratio untouched, because the same system that collects the taxes allocates the spending, and that system has a documented 0% correlation with what voters want.

The diagnosis is correct (the allocation is insane). The prescription is the problem: pour more money into a captured system and hope it flows somewhere different this time. The money goes in as taxes. It comes out as subsidies, asset inflation, and an NIH that spends 3.3% of its budget on clinical trials. The pipe leaks faster than you can fill it, and the leaks flow upward.

This is why the 1% treaty172 doesn’t route funding through your existing institutions. It builds a new pipe that the lobbyists haven’t found yet.

You don’t fix a rigged game by playing harder. You build a different game.

Why Money Printing Matters: Geniuses Follow the Money

Smart people go where the money is. The money is in weapons. Then you wonder why nobody’s curing your diseases.

Smart people go where the money is. The money is in weapons. Then you wonder why nobody’s curing your diseases.

When the Fed prints a trillion dollars for war, weapons manufacturers get it first and immediately buy the best engineers, scientists, and equipment.

An MIT graduate with $200,000 in student debt chooses between:

  • Raytheon: $150,000/year, full benefits, signing bonus (makes missiles)
  • NIH postdoc: $55,000/year, shared office, vending machine (cures diseases)

Student debt does not negotiate. The graduate goes to Raytheon. She is now very good at making things that find other things and then both things stop existing. She could have been very good at making your cells stop forgetting how to cell. But Raytheon offered dental. The NIH offered a lanyard.

Multiply this decision by every talented graduate, every year, for fifty years. Then wonder why nobody cured your mother’s cancer. Then blame the graduate.

Printing more money for medicine doesn’t fix this, because the money printer prints even more for war, and the ratio stays the same. The hamster runs faster. The wheel doesn’t move.

The only fix is to change the ratio. Take from the war budget. Give to the life budget. That’s what the 1% treaty does. Not because it’s moral (though it is). Because it’s the only thing that moves the geniuses. You cannot out-inspire a signing bonus. You can only outbid it.

The Two Receipts

I promised I’d come back to the eleven-year-old’s science fair project. Here it is.

This chapter has two receipts. I want to put them next to each other, because your species prefers to look at them one at a time, the way a doctor might prefer to review a patient’s symptoms one at a time if the doctor were also the disease.

Receipt 1: What the Printer Killed

97 million deaths. Over $16 trillion spent. Every war that killed more than a million people required printing money. The list under hard money is empty.

Every war on this list required a room where a small number of humans could create money without being checked. The eleven-year-old’s science fair project is a room where every computer checks every other computer. You cannot secretly print money on it. You cannot fund a war nobody voted for, because the computers say “no you didn’t” and ignore you.

Remove the room and you remove the wars. 97 million deaths. That is the price of a room without a check.

Receipt 2: What the Printer Wasted

Your governments spend $4.5B per year testing whether medicines work. Here is what the printer spent instead, measured in years of that:

The six wars on this receipt cost over $16 trillion (US share only). That is 3,500 years of clinical trials. But those are just the named wars. Cumulative global military spending since the Fed was created exceeds $170T. Nearly 38,000 years of clinical trials. Spent on killing.

And that is just the killing. The printer also built itself a bureaucracy:

  • The financial sector captures $2.3 trillion per year (8% of GDP) to move money and keep a ledger169. That is 511 years of clinical trials. Every year. For arithmetic. The eleven-year-old’s science fair project does this for free. It has done it for free since 2009. You are paying 6.7 million people to do what the computers are already doing, and you have been doing it for fifteen years since the computers made it pointless.
  • The Fed printed $4 trillion in 2020 for banks: 889 years158
  • The 2008 bailout: $700 billion for banks: 156 years162
  • Corporate welfare: $300 billion per year for having lobbyists: 67 years, annually

The printer funded the wars. The printer inflated the financial sector. The printer bailed out the banks. The eleven-year-old’s invention makes all of it unnecessary: no room, no unchecked printing, no 8% GDP spreadsheet department, no wars funded without consent. The technology has existed since 2009. Your species is using it to trade pictures of dogs in hats.

The Ask

I want you to think about someone you’ve lost. A parent. A friend. A child. Think about the disease that killed them. Now understand: the money to fund the clinical trial that might have saved them was created on a Tuesday afternoon, by a committee you’ve never heard of, and handed to a build bombs or conduct wars you would not donate your money to. The bank did not cure your mother. Your mother is still dead. The spreadsheet is doing fine.

The 1% treaty asks for 1% of the global military budget. $27.2B per year.

Your species has 7 thousand diseases with zero approved treatments. At current capacity, testing them takes 443 years. At treaty funding, it takes 36 years. One generation instead of five centuries.

The printer spent nearly 38,000 years of clinical trials on killing.

I have been watching your species for 80 years and I still cannot tell whether you are bad at math or just very, very well trained.

  1. War costs are US military expenditures adjusted to 2024 dollars from CRS FY2011 estimates138, except post-9/11 wars which use Brown University’s comprehensive $8 trillion figure including veterans’ care and interest144. All-belligerent costs would be substantially higher. Death figures are mid-range estimates. Many scholars cite higher numbers, particularly for World War II (up to 85 million including war-related famine and disease) and post-9/11 wars (up to 4.7 million). The less conservative total exceeds 110 million.↩︎

  2. SIPRI data from 1988-2024 sums to approximately $65-72 trillion in constant 2024 dollars51,64. The Cold War era (1946-1987) adds roughly $50-70 trillion, reconstructed from US spending data and CIA estimates. World War II cost all belligerents approximately $23 trillion146, WWI approximately $7 trillion, with $3-5 trillion for interwar budgets. The range since 1913 is $150-190 trillion; $170 trillion is the central estimate. The full historical tab, including all pre-1913 warfare, is approximately $180 trillion (see The Cost of War). The Institute for Economics and Peace estimates the current annual economic cost of violence and conflict at $20 trillion when indirect costs are included147.↩︎

  3. Your economists will object that gold’s price is inflated by rising demand from a growing population. Above-ground gold stocks were approximately 93,000 tonnes in 1972 and have grown to over 212,000 tonnes today. World population went from 3.85 billion to 8.1 billion. Gold per capita: 24.2 grams then, 26.2 grams now. Mining has kept pace with population. The demand argument explains approximately none of the price increase. Even if you generously assume gold is 50% overpriced due to non-monetary demand factors (central bank hoarding, ETFs, jewelry), the pay cut is still 85%. The number changes from catastrophic to slightly less catastrophic. Your economists will find this very comforting.↩︎