tijaco

an enquiry into the mind

This is a theory I came up with while I was in a bit of a manic writing state listening to ‘The 1975’’s new album and feeling sorry for myself for being unproductive. I hate feeling sorry for myself. It often leads to this negative spiral which is really difficult to get out of. But there was something that came from it because of my weird obsession with writing down my thoughts – I came up with this theory that we all have multiple personalities. I might have also come up with this theory because in this shitty spiral I was playing a lot of Fortnite and I guess because there are different characters in the game it got somewhere in my subconscious and let me to whatever this weird conception of reality is.

The theory is that we all have multiple personalities and that all we do in our lives is choose which character we play with. It follows that there is some external (or internal?) consciousness that allows us to choose which character embodies us. It’s like this consciousness is the knowledge of the video game controller, or the controller itself, and all we do is choose which character, consciously or unconsciously. My argument is that we should aim to do it more consciously and that this basically equates to free will, or consciousness, or at least whatever it is that separates us from animals.

We don’t act the same around our grandmother as we do our friends. We don’t act the same around little children than we do adults. We don’t even act the same around some friends as we do other friends. We are always adjusting our own personalities and presenting different sides of ourselves. This doesn’t mean that we are lying or that we are being deceitful or that we aren’t being ourselves. It is simply a part of life. If we were the same person across all situations all the time we would be incredibly boring and unhelpful. We need to be dynamic, and so we are.

The way I conceptualise this is that life is a video game and we are the only playable character. We cannot control anyone else or anything else other than through our own actions. But we do have a choice of which character within our own mind we can play. In certain situations in our lives, we will choose certain characters. We might, at the controller level, wish to play a certain character, but in the game fail to do so because we fall into old habits and because we lacked the discipline. The way I see it, the goal should be to somehow take control of the controller if we want to be in more control in our lives.

If we have control over the controller, then we have more control over our actions. We can more easily take the emotion out of the situation and choose which parts of our character we should be using in that specific instance. This way of conceptualising your mind is useful because it is simply an extension of seeing the world as a simulation.

Seeing the world as a simulation and understanding that you cannot control anything other than with your own actions is powerful because it stresses the importance on your own actions and your ability to take responsibility. This is that same thing but zooming in on the individual and on how your mind operates. You are able to control the controller by virtue of the fact that you can make decisions. If you improve on your control of your own actions, you are, in this analogy, controlling the controller.

I think what I am coming to is that our focus can be in different parts of this analogy. Our focus can be in the sprite of the game and we can allow all of the preconditions of our life to control the controller. In this instance, we are letting go control and whatever path we are on is the path that we will follow. Instead, I aim for my focus to be on the controller itself. In this instance, I can see all the preconditions and I can see where I am going if I continue down this path. But I do have focus on the controller, so I can change my path.

I am not saying that we should always aim to have our focus on the controller, because that would mean always constantly analysing things and never living in the moment and seeing where life takes you. It seems that there is a balance to be struck here. I do believe that we need to at least have some regular control over our controller.

This comes to a micro and a macro level, too. On a micro level, situation by situation, we can check in with our controller, see if we are playing the character that will provide us with the best outcome and act accordingly. On a macro level, we can see what kind of character switching and patters are going on over the course of time whether it be across a day or across years. If we can check in with the controller and see where we are heading on this macro level, we can better manage our lives and execute our plans.

To wrap up this rant, we live in a simulation in which we are the only playable character. We cannot control other people directly, but we can influence them through our own actions. Our character is whatever we choose it to be, consciously or unconsciously. We have the choice for our character to be the one which is polite to our grandmother, the one which is an engaging communicator at work, the one which has heaps of fun with our friends, whatever we want.

We want to be able to take ourselves out of the situation and analyse which character is best for that micro situation. We want also to be able to see how the patterns of how our characters work in different situations and how that might play out in terms of achieving our goals in future. We also want to be able to get out of the controller box and live in the moment sometimes. It’s all a balancing act.

a rant on a necessary activity

I read about 30 books last year and yet I don’t like reading. I like having read those 30 books, but I don’t enjoy the process of reading. If there were a pill or a potion that I could take that would provide me with the same effects without having to go through reading for those hours on end, I would gladly take it. I would say that that is probably the case for most readers. I think that is the case for most people doing most activities that are worthwhile.

Many people who work out do not particularly enjoy working out, but they enjoy the way it makes them feel for the rest of the time, so to them it is a small sacrifice to pay. This is much the same with me and my reading. I don’t enjoy sitting down and reading most of the time. There are probably around five books of the thirty I read last year that I enjoyed reading. But that doesn’t mean that I regret reading any of them. In fact, there are no books that I regret reading. I am happy that I put myself through the pain of reading some of them, just so that I can take the benefits of having read them.

So many people I come across say that they aren’t good at reading and that they don’t like reading. I hear many excuses; “I don’t have time”, “I am just not good at it”. If we cease lying to ourselves, we see that this is simply bullshit. You only have time for what you make time for, and you are only good at what you make enough time to get good at. We all know that people who sacrifice their time and energy to read difficult books to challenge their views benefit from it in the long term, but what makes it hard for us to make the sacrifices in the short term?

Reading is hard. As is working out. If it was easy, there would be no point. If we want ourselves to benefit, we will will ourselves to read more. If instead we would prefer to stay comfortable in our little bubbles, we will not read. And when we do read, we will make sure that it is nothing that will properly question our view of the world. Fiction usually serves this purpose pretty well. As does non-fiction whose scope is prohibitively narrow.

But whoever is watching this video or reading this piece is probably set in their own ways. Nothing I say here will make you start a journey of challenging reading as soon as you click off this. You will probably go back to what you were doing before, because we are all mostly dictated by our own habits. If you read a lot of fiction, you will continue to read a lot of fiction. If you don’t read much at all, you will most likely continue to not read much at all.

Something I have come to learn is that people very rarely take action outside a very narrow scope – their own perceived self-interest. A key word here is ‘perceived’, and a lot of your perception has to do with your identity. You can identify strongly with being a female, with being intelligent, with being kind to people, with your profession. Whatever you identify strongly with will affect your perceptions of your self-interest.

This is why marketing works so well. Advertisers attach their products to some aspect of your identity and once that connection is made, it is very easy for the advertiser to make you think that buying their shitty product is in your self interest. Let’s take big four-wheel drive cars. For most people in Australia, a 4WD is utterly unnecessary. But the advertisements that they produce make people think that in order to be respected as a man in Australia, you need a big car. A lot of the people reading this who already wanted a 4WD will make their own justifications and reasons, but the reality is that this is a big part of it. You most likely have no need for a 4WD when you think about it. If 4WDs and SUVs didn’t exist in Australia, or only really existed in the niche markets of skiers and hardcore campers, no one would know the difference. That is, except for those who run the car companies because they wouldn’t be making so much money.

My point here is that we only act in our own self interest, that that self interest is dictated by our identity, and therefore if I want to get you to read, my best bet is to attach it to some meaningless part of my audience’s identity and manipulate you into thinking that you need to read. But I have a feeling that that won’t work – unlike buying a car, reading is a difficult activity. It’s harder to market. I could sit here and explain the benefits to you all day but again, unlike the car, the benefits won’t be realised until you have expended a lot of time and effort.

A car is something you can just drive away from the dealership. You can play with the fancy buttons, connect your car up to the updated software and feel the novelty of the car for a few weeks until it becomes normal. The benefits are upfront and then they fade away as they become normal. Reading is inversed.

There are no benefits after you read for an hour. You might get a few endorphins, but you’ll more likely just a bit frustrated because you spent half the time getting distracted in thought and having to go over the page for the fifth time. After a week of reading for an hour every day, you still won’t feel the benefits. And most don’t even get to a week. You might not even feel the benefits after a month.

After a few months or even a year, you might start noticing that you can put your sentences together a bit better. You might start noticing that your thought patterns are a bit clearer, that you start connecting different ideas from different fields of the books you were reading. You might start actually getting passionate about one area or another and want to explore more. After many years of pursuing these rabbit holes and exploring different fields, you will probably rise to the top of your field in whatever job you are doing. But trust me, that won’t come quickly.

The point of this piece isn’t to convince you to start reading. I don’t have a good track record for that. It’s simply to state that reading isn’t fun. There are benefits, but they come late. Very late. No one is good at reading, just like no one is good at doing a Rubik’s cube. Some people might have slight genetic advantages, but a lot of the skill comes from some having done it a bit more than others. It’s the same with everything – the longer you do it, the better you will get at it and the more benefits that you will see.

But if you don’t want to put the work in, you don’t have to. We live in a world now where you will be fine if you don’t read. There are plenty of jobs that don’t require you to want to better yourself, that don’t require you to be constantly improving, that don’t require you to put in very much effort at all. It’s just whether that’s the kind of job you are willing to take, because that’s the kind of job you will end up with.

This isn’t to say that if you don’t read, you cannot succeed. But the mindset that a lot of people take to reading easily spreads – no time, no ability. No time to build your ability. I think it’s pretty clear where that mindset leads you.

democracy dictated pt1

Words on a page are simply labels for concepts in real life. Whether it be a noun, a verb, an adjective, all that these words do is represent some concept in the real world. The word “blue” represents the colour that we understand to be blue. There is nothing blue-like about the word blue. When we write down blue, we don’t have to make sure it is written in blue ink, nor do we have to point to something blue in order to specify. We all understand, through shared meaning, that blue means blue. This is the same with any word in any language. The words we use are arbitrary in most cases, with the exception of onomatopoeia. Our words are arbitrary, but they have a shared meaning amongst groups of people who speak the same language, which is what gives meaning to them.

Words are abstractions of concepts in the real world. It is necessary to define abstraction here. By abstraction, I mean the grouping of different concepts. Words are labels for a group of concepts. So, the word “blue” as mentioned above, is an abstraction of each and every colour which the speaker defines as “blue”. If the sender and receiver have different concepts of what “blue” is, the message can become distorted and there can be misunderstandings. In order to communicate effectively, we need to make sure that the messages we are sending are clear. Otherwise, there is almost no point (sorry post-modern artists).

Images can serve as a bridging between words and reality. Without going into semiology and the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, it appears that we are able to interact more easily with images that words. Using images of the world around us, whether it is a realistic photo or a crude drawing, we can usually better communicate what is in our own mind’s eye. This is one reason why I like to use models in my work. When reading a book or listening to a lecture, language often appears as a long string of words which are difficult to visualise as connected ideas and concepts. There are often some great communicators who use imagery to describe a scene, but it is rare to find an academic communicator who employs such tactics.

My aim is to place myself in that void of academic communicators who use imagery, not only in language but by drawing out the models themselves. There is great value in models, even if they are abstracted from the reality of situations, because they tend to directly communicate more information than even the most image-provoking words. Imagery in language often leaves much up to the interpretation of the reader and for works of aesthetic fiction this is highly valued, but communicating defined academic concepts requires a different tact. Instead, it is more valuable to be communicating as accurately as possible. This means assuring, to the best of your ability, that the message being sent is precisely the one being received. To this aim, drawing out the diagrams is a better method than simply using image-provoking language.

One example of a diagram which many use liberally is the political spectrum. We see this in our mind’s eye as being a line from left to right and, while we might rarely draw it out or even picture it vividly in our mind, we still interact with it in our speech as if it is a physical thing. Having attempted to draw out the political spectrum as we believe it to exist, I usually find a curious thing. On one side of the spectrum, we see absolute state power – what most of us term as Communism. On the other side of the spectrum, we see absolute corporate power – what most term as libertarian free market capitalism. This spectrum between two concentrations of power implies that we should have some balance of the two. It implies that we should find some middle ground between a corporate sector which is sufficiently regulated and a government which is sufficiently relaxed.

This model, for all its flaws, has stuck with us for a long time. I don’t believe this to be because it is an accurate depiction of society or the decisions that we have to make – in fact, it is completely inaccurate. Instead, it is because it provides a visual representation for interpreting politics. Since these visual representations are easier to grapple with, along with other factors to do with maintaining the status quo, they are taken as gospel and their status within our discourse is solidified.

In this series of pieces and videos, I will explore some of the models that I have created to interact with the world as I see it. This means discarding some of the older models and replacing them with new ones, but also creating models for things that I haven’t seen modelled before. Human belief and is something in which I have always had an interest but I have never been provided the tools for understanding it in a visual sense. This is one example of concepts that I have attempted to model, and you will see this in pieces to come.

Through the telling of stories and the visualisation of these concepts, we can better understand the world and our place within it. With these stories and these visualisations, we can better picture a world in which we want to live and see how it is different to the world in which we live today. It is very easy to be idealistic and create a utopian world in our minds and fret that this existence will never come about. It’s much harder, but far more constructive, to deal with the world in which we live and then find practical ways to make it better.

The path to making a better world begins with understanding the world in which we live and how we can manipulate it. We also need to have a foundation upon which our “better” world is built. Even dealing with the word “better” is no simple feat. We first need to define the word “good”. For that, we need to address our core values and what we believe is something worth our effort in aiming towards. That is what I will address in the next piece.

We were becoming isolated long before the pandemic. The constant scrolling on our screens and the constant tailoring of our newsfeeds have created a world in which we never have to reach out of our bubble. We become bumbling idiots, in the old Greek sense of the word: isolated, apathetic and ignorant. Unable to interact culturally or politically because we are confined to our own small areas of the internet maintained by unfounded absolutes. How did we get to this place and why would anyone want to create a society in which this occurs? These are the questions I seek to answer in this piece.

Our social media feeds are made up of certain material. This material is tailored to the individual. If it were not, there would be far less value in it for the social media company. The incentive for the company is to show you what you want to watch and to keep your eyes on their website for as long as possible. This seems like a win-win because you would probably enjoy the social media feed far less if it were not personalised, right? But there is a part of most of us that wants to cut down on social media consumption. The reality of human beings is that we’re complex creatures – parts of us wants the pizza and chocolate right now, and parts of us want to eat healthy and workout more. So, which part of us does our social media represent? For the vast majority, it is focused on the short-term dopamine-fuelled part which addicts you to your screen.

This short-term part of us is the part which provides these companies with their profits through the selling of advertising, but the long-term effects of this sustained short-term mindset is the killer. Having isolated and separated us into tiny groups, we become isolated from our peers and this breeds cultural and political apathy. In order to maintain the world as it exists today, it is crucial to isolate the population into individuals. We know that all resistance movements require a mass coordination to rise up against some concentration of power, with examples of revolutions taking the same template throughout history. If the population is atomised and isolated from one another, not to mention distracted by advertising and the constant scrolling, it is very hard to organise and coordinate.

We can see examples of both the advertising motive and the apathy motive throughout history. The “divide and conquer” strategy has been used in advertising ever since Edward Bernays’ Lucky Strikes campaign back in the 1930s to sell cigarettes to the feminist movement. Dividing people into their genders and taking advantage of how people attach their identities to otherwise meaningless aspects of themselves is a fantastic strategy. This is how Bernays rose to fame and became arguably more influential than his uncle Sigmund Freud. The movement of postmodernism and its perspective on history is a great example of the use of apathy to subdue a population. The postmodern view of many events throughout history is that there are many ways to look at an event, none more valuable than the other. Looking at the Israel-Palestine conflict through this lens depicts a situation in which there are two valid sides, rather than the reality of a coloniser and colonised with comparisons to a modern version of apartheid South Africa.

In Ancient Greece, the word “idiot” had a very specific meaning. If you were an idiot, you were a private person. You were someone who was not engaged culturally or politically. I happen to believe that this is a very apt definition, and one which precisely describes the kinds of people that the largest corporations on Earth seek to create. If they are to create a population of idiots, of isolated and unengaged individuals, of private people, they can maintain the status quo. They can continue to put the human race at risk by destroying the Earth and increasing human suffering by creating increasing inequality across the world.

I want this book to be a documentation of all the models that I form in my own head. I am a big fan of a man named Ludwig Wittgenstein, and outlining his philosophy is a good place to start in terms of describing why I am writing this book. His first big idea as written in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was that we use language to trigger images in the minds of others. This idea hit me hard, and my rationalisation of it went to evolutionary biology. Images allow for far more information than do words. There’s a reason we use the saying “a picture paints a thousand words” or whatever it is. Images are more primal, deeper within our brains. Images are things that we learned to process far earlier in our evolutionary cycle than words. Words themselves are more like abstractions or representations of the images that we see around us. We saw and sensed the world around us far earlier than we abstracted it with arbitrary audible utterances and lines upon a page. This is the reason why Wittgenstein was right, in a far deeper sense than he perhaps ever knew. Language does trigger images in the mind because that’s language’s only real purpose. What other function, at its core, was language ever supposed to serve? In the early days of language, it was utterances to one another and stone carvings on a wall. They served to describe something about the world, to represent some real concept, to trigger than concept (or image) in the mind of another.

I feel as though I should define the word “image” – I don’t mean a 2D image. Instead, I mean the concepts that our eyes can see. Perhaps “reality” is a better word here. This kind of self-commentary is something you will get used to – it’s a distinct part of my writing style. In order to be critical of the world, we must first be critical of ourselves. I seem to have the ability to do this in real time with more ease than most others, and I build it into my writing.

A good example of this image-triggering language is evident in fiction novels. I expect that you have read a few fiction novels, even as a child. I expect that you developed a scene within your own mind. An idea of what the setting looked like, what it felt like. It was likely based on some version of an existing reality, but it could have been some more imaginative scene. The best novels on Earth are those with the best imagery – perhaps that’s why they get turned into movies – or maybe it’s just for the money.

We don’t even need to go to novels in order to find this imagery. I would bet that you have encountered the following scenario once before. Your friend is telling some story or recounting some event and you are picturing it within your mind’s eye. You have made some assumption about the story or event that they are talking about. They say something inconsistent with those assumptions – that the thing happened in a different place, at a different time etc. Your response is something along the lines of “ohhh, I was picturing it like ”. That’s precisely the imagery to which Wittgenstein refers.

So, Ludwig Wittgenstein said that language triggers images in the mind. How does that relate to this book? The models that I explore in this book aim to trigger images in the minds of the reader. By creating these models, I am attempting to not only trigger the images, but provide the images as they exist in my mind. If they fulfil their function, they will allow people to understand concepts about the world that would otherwise be inaccessible. Our world is complex, and those who apparently understand it best seem to use complex language that prohibits the casual reader from properly understanding themselves. My aim in this book is to use a combination of simple language and imagery to explain complex topics. This seems to be some strange mix between the aforementioned Wittgenstein and George Orwell.

Orwell was uninterested in the academic class. He preferred to spend his time in pubs in the North of England. He preferred to talk to real people. In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ he explored how much of what writers write is complete bullshit. The labels they use, the unnecessary complex language and the inaccessibility of their writing makes them essentially useless to society. I will explore this concept more in the chapter about ideologies, but it’s an important aspect of my writing so I will explore it here, too.

This relates to Wittgenstein’s idea of language triggering images in the mind. It speaks to the arbitrary nature of language. I like cats, so they will be my example here. The word ‘cat’ is not in any way related to the concept of a cat. It’s arbitrary. It could be replaced with the letters ‘fuck’ and be pronounced ‘shit’. If we all agree on the fact that when we write ‘fuck’ or say ‘shit’ we mean the domesticated animal with whiskers and pointy ears, that wouldn’t strike us as weird or bizarre. What relation really is there between the noises you make with your mouth and the shape of the ink on the page? None. There’s no relationship between the noises, the ink shapes and the real world concept – it’s all based on some agreed-upon meaning. If we agree that the word ‘cat’ (as written and spoken) represents the real world concept of cat, then it will trigger that image in our mind and we can use it to communicate. The purpose of this paragraph is to nail the point that the concept of language is based on agreed meaning – remember that, it’s important.

Orwell’s idea was very similar. If you are using words which do not have an agreed upon meaning, you are not communicating. You might be speaking or writing, but you aren’t communicating. This is why academics frustrated Orwell so much – they would speak to each other in these academic terms that a working man would never understand. They were in a bubble, and Orwell saw through it. These academic terms had no agreed upon meaning in society, so Orwell saw them as useless. I agree with him completely, which is why I am trying to write this book in the most accessible way possible.

There are modern writers who do an outstanding job of writing in a way which is accessible and easily understood. Noam Chomsky is a name that springs to mind. His works compiled from his countless speeches and interviews, are extremely accessible. His academic writing is less accessible, but it served its own purpose in proving his theories. In terms of economics, Yanis Varoufakis is the first communicator that comes to mind. His book ‘Talking to My Daughter’ should be required reading for any high school student, and yet the concepts are ones which seem to escape many college graduates. In the area of self-help, the best communicator I’ve encountered is Tony Robbins – his writing style is more accessible than any other. These strong communicators are rare. Too often the best minds in the most important topics on Earth are stuck in the academic bubble. There are exceptions, and they are precious.

The combination of Wittgenstein and Orwell is the basis for my communication style. Triggering images in the minds of the reader using accessible language. I think this is the best way for me to access the greatest number of people with the most important subjects. I think that’s enough preamble, so let’s get into the concepts themselves.

First, I will go through each one quickly to give you a rough picture of the kinds of things we are covering in this book. Then, we can get into the chapters and explain each topic in depth. Here we go.

Before we do that, I want to note how this book is structured on a macro level. The two big ideas on which I base much of my life are as follows: prolonging the existence of society and reducing the suffering of the individual. That is precisely how this book is structured. The first half is focused on modelling society and building a better one. We then have an important transition chapter which focuses on the individual’s role in society. The second half is focused on the individual, their beliefs and their relationships. Let’s get into a short summary of the chapters.

The first model that I want to discuss is a power model. This plots out the different power bases, or characters, that are at play in the world as it exists today. The four characters are the media, the corporations, the government and the people. I have made links going between each of these four characters and attempted to describe the power relationship that flows between them. This is represented in this diagram.

Here, we can see the different relations between the characters. In the chapter about this power model, I will go through each of these relationships. I will also explore how they might best be manipulated to create the ideal society for the majority of people – a democratic society.

Much of the first half of this book will be focused on this power model, its different variations across the world and better versions of this power model that could exist in an ideal society. First, I will explore it in general to give you a good idea of how it works. Next, we will travel to the United States to explore how the power model exists in the “home of freedom”. We will then look at how China can be modelled, and the different advantages and disadvantages of these two methods of governing. I will finish with an ideal power model and what that might look like – that’s the fun part.

Within this power model is another model which is not my own – and this is the next model which I’ll address in this book – the propaganda model. This is a mechanism by which to understand the machine that is the media. This is the only model that I’ll explore in this book that I have not created myself so, from the outset, I encourage you to read the book Manufacturing Consent. Written by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, it explores the propaganda model and proceeds to use evidence to prove that it is accurate. In this book, I will explore the propaganda model in my own way, using modern Australian examples. I will also address the closing window of technology companies and the opportunity that our society has to address this media problem at this moment in time.

After exploring the propaganda model, we get stuck into economics. I’ll spend one chapter exploring the models of free market economics and Keynesian economics. I will be using the power model to describe the implications of these systems on the structure of society and how it affects individuals themselves. I will then move on to Marxian economics and explain how that might work if we were to adopt the policies that Marxian economists propose. “Marxian” is a term that I use very reluctantly and only because that is how they refer to themselves, but I will provide a rugged definition of that word at the beginning of that chapter. My reluctance to use the term “Marxian” brings us to the next model that I will introduce.

This is one which describes personal opinions. It is a spherical model, which has this general outline:

This model describes how personal opinions are made and explores the dangers of ideological thinking. It seems that we all have very similar core values. Those core values inform our policy opinions, but those policy opinions can be taken in infinitely many directions, hence the circular nature. Ideology seems to be an abstraction of those policy opinions which reflect some absolute that a person is unable to abandon. These ideologies tend to create bubbles of thinking and, once established, it seems very difficult to get back down into the policies. While explaining this structure, I will explore where we should aim to base our discussion and where breakdowns in communication seem to occur.

To segue from this personal opinion and ideology model, we explore a religious belief model. This is one type of ideological belief and with this model, I describe it in some visual sense. There seems to be three main absolutes within religious thought. First, that God exists. Second, that some text is the word of said God. Third, that the individual’s interpretation is correct. I use the concept of a platform, with different buckets and windows from those buckets looking out into the world to describe these different absolutes. In this chapter, I will also define science as opposed to religion and explain why I think science is better. There is plenty of nuance to this argument with advantages and disadvantages on both sides, and I hope to reflect that in my writing.

For the final two chapters, I will be exploring relationships. At the end of a relationship, it’s a hard time. After the end of my last relationship, being me, I tried to model the emotions I was going through. This is my way of figuring out the world and understand what is going on inside my head. I came up with two main models (and a graph) that described how it felt. Those models are what I will discuss in the final two chapters. The first is based on two plants growing next to each other, and what happens as they grow together and when they are torn apart. The second is based on a person standing on one leg and leaning on the other. The two models are very much related to each other, but the pairing helped me to describe what I was going through. Hopefully it will help you if you ever need that visualisation, or even to help others going through something that you might find difficult to understand.

A final note on this introduction: there seems to be a general feeling amongst a majority of the population that the world cannot be changed. I have always disagreed with that premise. The John Mayer song “Waiting on the World to Change” always annoyed me. Come on, John. You’re going to be waiting a long time if you don’t wake up, get up, and at least try to change it yourself. That’s what I aim to do with this book: present ideas that will change the world, even in some small way.

A friend asked me recently for some recommendations of books for understanding economics on a deeper level. I began to compile a list and ended up with around ten different economics communicators that have really helped me to understand the world of economics on a level that I never thought possible without formal, traditional economics training. I thought I would relate this list in this piece and describe how each of these economics communicators has helped me in my understanding. Of course, I am no economic expert, but I would say that I have a far stronger understanding of the economic system than most, and these are the people whose work has helped me.

I will begin with Australian economists.

Going through modern Australian history, you cannot go past former Prime Minister Paul Keating as an economic manager. His body of work is something I want to research more, but his analysis of politics when he does make a rare public appearance these days is always sharp. Keating’s work in the 1980s and 90s set up the Australian economy for the 30 years of uninterrupted growth that we are now seeing come to an abrupt end.

Wayne Swan is a man who, together with Kevin Rudd, made Australia’s economic growth streak last an extra ten years by expertly navigating the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008/09, leaving Australia as one of the only developed nations on Earth to avoid a recession through that period. Wayne Swan was recognised as the best treasurer in the world by Euromoney for his efforts through the GFC and, fittingly, was the first Australian to win it since Keating in the 1990s.

Moving away from politicians and into modern economics communicators, Richard Denniss and Alan Austin are the two Australians who immediately come to mind.

Richard Denniss is the head economist at The Australia Institute, the leading progressive thinktank in the country. They are hosting weekly webinars on the economic impacts of coronavirus at the moment and they are all wonderfully informative. Richard’s articles published in various independent (and the occasional establishment) publications are always good reads, and I have found that to be the case even before I started really understanding economics at the level that I do now. His books Econobabble, Dead Right and Curing Affluenza have been recommended to me multiple times and given his great communicative skills in his articles, those books are high on my to-read list.

Alan Austin is another great economics thinker who is very much data-driven. His articles appearing regularly in both Independent Australia and Michael West Media (both great sources of independent news, by the way) are always very informative and clear in their messaging. This is something that is shared amongst all of the economists here but is very rare amongst the field in general. Alan uses a lot of graphs and visual representations along with very succinct analysis that makes sense of otherwise complicated economic policies.

Another economics communicator that I have come across recently is Steven Hail. I first came across his work through his articles on Independent Australia and have since watched a few of his lectures available on his YouTube channel. He is one of the best communicators of modern monetary theory (MMT) that I have come across, especially in its relevance to Australian politics. His presentation on the need for a paradigm shift in economic thinking towards MMT especially through the COVID-19 pandemic is one which has massively clarified my thinking on economics.

Moving now to more international economists, I have a long list of particularly American economists but also one very clever Greek man.

We will start with that Greek man, whose name is Yanis Varoufakis. He is an economist who found himself in the position of Greece’s Finance Minister in 2015 in which he had to negotiate their debts and horrible austerity program as dictated by the European Central Bank. This is recounted in detail in his book Adults in the Room which I have just finished reading, and it is fascinating. The first book of Yanis’ books that I read was Talking to My Daughter, which took him 11 days to write and is the single book to which I give credit for the majority of my understanding of economics. It is so well-written in basic language and describes the economic system through stories across history in a way that is unparalleled. Yanis also founded a group called Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25 which, especially through this crisis, have produced some of the most informative videos discussing not only economics but the entire politics of the crisis and especially how it affects Europe.

Moving now to the United States, we find Richard D. Wolff, Stephanie Kelton, Warren Mosler and Joseph Stiglitz.

Richard D. Wolff is a self-described Marxian economist. His lectures on worker-owned cooperatives and the fundamental flaws of capitalism were big eye-openers for me, and his ability to simply explain complex concepts is really something special. There was one lecture in particular in which he describes capitalism’s flaws with diagrams and offers the very simple solution which was a game-changer. His YouTube channel Democracy at Work is great and he also hosts a weekly podcast called Economic Update which is great for worldwide economics news. Recently, the podcast has been focused on the mental health impacts of COVID-19 and capitalism’s incapability to prepare for the crisis. I have read one of Wolff’s books, Democracy at Work, which offered much of the same arguments presented in his YouTube lectures, and his textbook Contending Economic Theories is one that is on my to-read list.

Stephanie Kelton is an economist who has served on Bernie Sanders’ campaign as an economics adviser and is, along with Warren Mosler, one of the biggest contributors to modern monetary theory (MMT). Kelton’s lecture on MMT in which she uses very physical and visual demonstrations of how the banking and monetary system works is one of the best I’ve seen. Her interview with comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore is a must-watch, not least because she is explaining it to someone who doesn’t quite (or at least acts as if he doesn’t) understand which is always incredibly valuable. Kelton also has a book coming out in June (could be delayed now, not sure) called The Deficit Myth which is much anticipated. Warren Mosler is another great communicator on this and, especially once you have sufficiently wrapped your head around MMT, his conversation/debate with an Austrian libertarian economist is pretty entertaining (for an economics nerd, at least).

I finish this list of international economic communicators with Joseph Stiglitz, who is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of a book I couldn’t recommend more highly called The Price of Inequality. It’s a great insight into why inequality isn’t just bad for the people at the bottom but is also for those at the top, especially in the long-term. His address to the National Press Club was the first economics lecture that I ever watched and, evidently, it struck a chord.

Finally, I wanted to talk about a few institutions that are great for communicating not just economics but politics in general. I have usually found the lectures and interviews from these institutions quite accessible, even for those, like me, who not completely versed in the field.

First, a group that hasn’t been mentioned here yet is the Asia Society Policy Institute. Kevin Rudd is their inaugural president and, especially recently, they have been producing many interviews discussing the economics and politics of coronavirus and its effects on the Asia Pacific region. This is especially important for Australia as the world’s power shifts across the pacific from the United States to Asia in the next decade or so.

Next is The Australia Institute, which is the leading progressive thinktank in Australia. I mentioned them above as Richard Denniss is their head economist, and again I would recommend you check out their weekly webinars and follow their social media to be informed of those and other events and reports that they produce. Other aligned and more specific groups include the Centre for Future Work, Centre for Responsible Technology and the Nordic Policy Centre who all produce valuable reports.

Finally, we have DiEM25. This is the group founded by Yanis Varoufakis as mentioned above. Again, I highly recommend their YouTube channel and their countless videos addressing many different topics from economics and politics to art and mental health.

At the end here, I just wanted to leave you with some tips. Economics is hard work and it’s pretty difficult to understand. In saying that, a lot of economists are very shit at explaining how economics works. If they are bad communicators, it’s not your fault. In that case, they probably don’t understand it well enough themselves and they are quite possibly stuck in a bubble of people pretending they understand so they keep getting their big pay packets. That’s bankers in a nutshell.

In saying that however, a lot of these concepts take a lot of grunt time to understand. It’s the same with everything – if you want to properly understand it properly, you have to spend ungodly amounts of time frustrated and not understanding before it finally goes click and you start getting it.

Alright, that’s enough from me, go check all of those people out and stay tuned here for my own explanations of how the economy works because I have some of my own models that, hopefully one day, can approach these greats of economics communication.

P.S. If you have any other economics communicators whose work you have found valuable, please let me know.

List

• Politicians
  • Paul Keating
  • Wayne Swan
  • Kevin Rudd
• Communicators
  • Richard Denniss (Recommended books: Econobabble, Dead Right, Curing Affluenza)
  • Alan Austin
  • Steven Hail
  • Yanis Varoufakis (Recommended books: Talking to my Daughter, Adults in the Room)
  • Richard D. Wolff (Recommended books: Democracy at Work, Contending Economic Theories)
  • Stephanie Kelton (Recommended books: The Deficit Myth (upcoming))
  • Warren Mosler
  • Joseph Stiglitz (Recommended books: Price of Inequality)
• Institutions
  • Asia Society Policy Institute
  • The Australia Institute
  • DiEM25