FRIDAY SURPRISE: An important, and serious, topic

Friday, January 11, 2008 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Completely irrelevant
When I was in college, I had a keen interest in economics. This is a subject that most approach with trepidation; it is seen as a "difficult" subject to grasp, let alone master. Let me assure you: economics, in terms of understanding the mechanisms involved, is pretty simple. Then again, so is football. Predicting with any certainty the long range outcome of economic activity, though, is far from simple. Gee, again - a lot like football!

From my first freshman level course to my very last, the whole subject fascinated me. I had one prof who was an unrepentant Keynesian, while I - also unrepentantly - was a monetarist from the University of Chicago mold. ("Milton Friedman was right!") We had a mutual respect of each other's opinion, but our class time virtually always devolved to a debate between just the two of us, other students looking on with expressions of incomprehension.

(Most of the students in econ classes, at least at the lower levels, were business school students who were there because an MBA required a certain number of econ credits. I'll spare you the then-common jokes about how MBA students were people who couldn't hack the PhysEd curriculum, but they do tend to explain why B-school folks had no clue what we were talking about.)

For them, as well as a majority of Americans, economics has come to signify some sort of black art that few understand. Fortunately, today we have something other than dry textbooks to show you just how easy and approachable the subject really is.

One first needs a good understanding of what money is and how it is created - and believe me, it isn't done in the way you probably think it is! A few years ago, a Canadian graphic artist by the name of Paul Grignon made an absolutely masterful animated short that deftly explains money, both from a historical and a modern perspective, and will leave any viewer with a solid and comprehensive understanding of just what "money" is.

So important is this film that I recommend everyone see it, share it with friends and family, and talk about it at work. If you do nothing else in terms of economic education, watch this film!

The original is 47 minutes long, but to make it a little less daunting several people have posted it to YouYube in sections.

Money as Debt - Part One
Money as Debt - Part Two
Money as Debt - Part Three
Money as Debt - Part Four
Money as Debt - Part Five

(One caveat: Part Five contains Grignon's prescriptions for a solution to the problems inherent with our current monetary system. Being Canadian, he's obviously cut from a very socialist cloth and his solutions involve ever greater government intervention. I think he's completely mistaken in those conclusions, but they don't detract from what is otherwise a superb explanation of money for the average person.)

-=[ Grant ]=-
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