Expecting deglobalization to happen is like expecting politicians to balance the budget; misaligned incentives prevent both from occurring. I don’t need to see misleading data that shows an uptick in US manufacturing driven by subsidies to know the incentive structure of CEOs makes deglobalization impossible. What is organically happening is a revolution in energy to power data centers, but that’s not restoring middle class jobs or reversing the trade deficit. The fact is globalization is irreversible and will deepen over the coming decades as technology organizes the resources of domestic economies into an integrated, computerized global system orchestrated by artificial intelligence to provide humanity with all of its needs as the First Turning is born within the Fourth and Capitalism comes to an end. I will also point out where I think the counter arguments have valid points, particularly about unfolding future events that could certainly occur since the future is not written in stone so our choices make a difference. Two of the more subtle temptations to avoid in an endeavor like this is curve-fitting a narrative to a personal bias, or operating from the ideological level of concepts. My natural way of thinking tends to be grounded in the pragmatic physical world and the motivations and incentives of the people who occupy it, which pervades the level of concepts that seduces so many people into theoretical perspectives that fit neatly in your head but don’t hold up in practice when humans get involved, but you always have to be on alert for unseen biases because all it takes is one false assumption in your mental model to cause all kinds of false conclusions that appear to you to be true. I’m presenting this series of articles as The Illumination of Truth, which is an audacious title meant to capture the spirit of the endeavor and my conclusions, not an unbending absolutism, so if someone can make a better argument, or new information comes to light, I will gladly change my mind, but I’ve heard most of those arguments, and I find them unconvincing, and typically tainted by bias and conflicts of interest. I highly encourage you to not read these articles through the lens of your existing worldview but instead cultivate beginner’s mind to absorb what is being expressed with an openness first, then hold it up against your worldview and analyze the cruz of our differences to determine if you have a false assumption that’s unknowingly influencing your conclusion, or you stand convicted in your beliefs and think it is mine. The goal is to identify the inputs that create your outputs to illuminate the key variables that lead to divergent views. Sometimes they can be reconciled; other times they cannot, but it’s critical to know what they are. One of life’s great ironies happens when someone is presented with the truth but they view it through the lens of their existing false assumptions and perceive it as wrong. The uniqueness of our era lies in how much opportunity there is to proactively design the future of the system, rather than cobbling the pieces together from remnants of the past in the depths of a crisis. These articles attempt to describe where we are, and where I believe we are going. In that light, I hope even when you disagree that you find them illuminating in strengthening, or softening, your convictions, and remember the spirit behind them is one of seeking the Truth. I will post a new article every weekend for seven weeks. Here are the titles and teasers: 1. The Governing Dynamics - Economic building blocks, globalization, and the Fed. 2. The Nominal Game We Play - Magic wage/price spiral says…numbers go up. The Fallacy of Real Yields & Universal Inflation - Misleading measures mislead. 3. The Surprising Superiority of MMT - Did a sound money advocate change his mind? The Subsidized Deglobalization Illusion - If a little works, why not MORE? 4. The Unit of Account Problem - Why Bitcoin will never be money. 5. The Flaw of Humans - Are humans the real reason every system collapses? 6. The Spirituality of Technology - Starring...the Earth as The Matrix for souls. The Uneven Distribution of Talent and Luck - Unequal inputs equal unequal outputs. The Reincarnator - Eternity is a long time to learn the golden rule. 7. The Proposal - The birth of the First Turning in the ashes of the Fourth.
