It’s us against the Whirl

There is no “they” in charge.  That would be nice.  Then we could find “them” and do something to solve the “problem”.  But there is no “they” in charge.  There are people making decisions that have a greater impact than the decisions of other people, but they are not in charge, they are just doing what everyone else is doing but on a larger scale.

There is a process, properly described as a whirl: “To revolve rapidly around a center or axis.”  A tornado is a whirlwind.  The whirl that we are up against has a precise mathematical form, but before I tell you what it is, let me use an analogy. 

Suppose you start driving around in a circle increasing your speed ten percent with each circle.  You do the first circle at 10 miles an hour, the second circle at 11 miles an hour, the third circle at 12.1 miles an hour, etc.  How fast would you be going by the 100th circle? 

By the tenth circle you would be going 26 miles an hour, by the 20th circle you would be going 67 miles an hour, by the 30th, 174 miles an hour, by the 40th, 452 miles an hour… by the 100th circle, you would be going 138,000 miles an hour.  On the 105th circle you would be going 221,938 miles an hour, fast enough to reach the moon in one hour!  You would have created a whirl just by increasing your speed 10 percent per circle from 10 miles an hour.

Now apply the same math to money.  If a job paid $10 an hour to start and was increased 10 percent per year, in 10 years it would pay $26 an hour, in 20 years, $67 an hour, in 30 years, $174 an hour, … in 100 years, $138,000 an hour.  That’s the whirl we are up against.

Money numbers, what we call prices, income, wages, salaries, profits, and dividends, have risen by what seem like little, a few percentage points year after year after year to produce astronomical differences from person to person,   Not only does the top 1 percent have more money than the remaining 99 percent; there is enormous inequality among the 99 percent.

What can we do about it?

The first step is to convert all money numbers to Hours.  You can do it by dividing them by your wage per hour.  This will tell you how much things are costing you per hour of work.  We can do it together by dividing all money numbers by $20, which is about the median wage in the United States.  This step is like pilots being given altimeters for the first time so they can tell their altitude.  Before they could decide corrective action, they would need to know their correct altitude.  In the same way, we must first know how much money we are actually talking about before we can decide what policies to adopt.

The mathematical principle in the above description is: Any two numbers increased by the same percent become more unequal by the same percent.

Algebraically: AC – BC = C (A - B).

The whirl that we are up against is money numbers becoming increasingly unequal percent at a time.  That whirl has been growing for generations.  That’s why it is so visible today.  It’s a tornado tearing us up by more and more, faster and faster. 

I cannot overemphasize the critical importance of converting those numbers to hours, so we can begin to see what needs to be done.  We can stop the whirl right now by reducing interest rates to zero.  Lower interest rates are better; zero interest rates are best.