[Music] is how do you pay for attacking covert because a large part you see some uh there are many movements in america the deficit hawks as they're called by by some people saying we've got to get the deficit back to zero etc etc because we're burdening future generations this again is one of the reason i designed minsky because are we burdening future generations it depends upon what are the monetary dynamics [Music] hi i'm jed mccosko at academicinfluence. com and wake forest university and today we have a returning guest professor steve keane coming to us this time from bangkok and we are so glad you're here today there's more things that i wanted to ask you about and let's just start in with the way that you see yourself as different from other quote heretics in economics for example we just interviewed herman daly tell us how you and he differ in the heresies that you talk about with regard to economics well firstly him and i are very compatible in fact henry herman is on somebody i read very very regularly in the 70s and 80s when i was working in overseas aid and and development issues in general and uh of course his work on ecology as well so uh we're very compatible on that front it's more where the emphases lie and what i've really been and my initial emphasis was on modeling financial instability so that gave me a role in complex systems analysis but applied mainly to the impact of bringing having a financial sector in capitalism where in mainstream economics the financial sector is hermetically sealed and pushed off to a totally independent subject called finance and finance itself meaning levels of debt equity and so on aren't seen as being important in economics i categorically rejected that so that's what i've been working on and that's a different field of emphasis to herman but otherwise very compatible the the real thing is i'd like to see is getting an overall if you like a general theory of of non-ma of of heterodox economics and that would have to incorporate both money and ecology and that's one thing i'm working on now and that would that would perfectly marry the the heresy you're proclaiming which is money and his heresy which is uh ecologies into one theory so that would be great um so speaking of your theories and models do you want to go ahead and share your screen and talk through some of more of the the things that you've got going on there yeah okay now what i'm going to show you is my minstrel pardon me this this is by the way and we're discussing earlier about whether we can um uh continue consuming a huge amount of energy on the planet uh then this is a a uh a paper that i or rather a blog post i highly recommend you read written by physicists as you can see and talking about can we actually use infinite amounts of energy on a finite planet that's uh that's more for the uh benefit of you jed than the audience necessarily what i meant to show what i meant to show is this is my minsky my software i call minsky named in honor of hyman minsky not um not uh whom i know of course but this is myself a package called minsky after hyman minsky and what it lets you do it's a system dynamics program so if you've ever used packages like stiller or that sort of thing it's uh it's a relative to those those programs and what it lets you do is generate systems of differential equations using a flowchart so i've zoomed in here and what i'm showing it you i'll just do a quick quick quiz can you recognize the model um no okay okay you know lorenzo's lorenzo's model of chaotic dynamics yes that's it okay so this is this is lorenzo's model of chaos in in in fluid dynamics and flows so you have just three variables x y and z three constants a b and c and this was uh in 1963 when um lorenz first built this model to explain why there was turbulence in weather and why we had to use nonlinear models rather than linear this is where we discovered what it was called the butterfly effect so you heard people talking about the butterfly effect when you plot one variable against another in this system you get what looks like the wings of a butterfly and that's what inspired durans to use that particular comment to uh to characterize how a tiny difference in initial conditions could lead to a completely different weather system where the flapping of the a butterfly wing flapping in in china can cause a hurricane rather than clear skies in in the usa so that's that's minsky as a way of modeling any dynamic system and it's actually quite good for mathematical modeling in general but what i've used it to do is to model the monetary system and as i mentioned in our talk a few a few days ago most people who don't study economics think economists must be experts on money because isn't the economics about money in fact mainstream economics has rationalized leaving money and banks and debt completely out of macroeconomics and what they've done is they they pretend that banks do not create debt they pretend that banks instead of what they call intermediaries who take in savings from one group of depositors and lend them out to another group of depositors and the model they used to do that is called the model of loanable funds so i know that that monster model was nonsense in terms of describing what the banks actually do so one event one ambition in building minsky was to make it easy to model monetary dynamics and analyze arguments like that so this is my part of myself effect is called minsky and what it uses a double entry bookkeeping if you have any accountants uh watching the show they'll regard this as fairly fairly familiar so what i've done and i'll just actually go to the other uh model over here brace yourself it's a bridge looks pretty messy um i think it's this one yeah this is the model of loanable funds done in minsky now okay it's it looks it looks deadly and all these things do but the fundamental dynamics are stored in this particular table which is the one i'm showing you which is showing the the economy from the point of view of bank where the banks do what neoclassical economists pretend they do which is a intermediate between their savers and and borrowers so what i have here is lending by a consumer sector to an investment sector so the consumer sector lends money to the investment sector then then repay the investment sector then repays some of the loans the investment pays interest to the consumer sector and the bank only gets money like an introduction fee um so that's the consumer sector paying a fee to the to the um to the banking sector and then i have the consumer sector hiring workers the investment sector hiring workers the investment sector buying into consumer goods to help make its output the consumer sector buying investment goods to make its output and workers consuming bankers consuming and bankers investing so that's just a simple um explaining the layout of the model that's i think that's fairly easy to follow rather than trying to work on what the hell's going on here yeah okay now nonetheless when you've got that i can vary the rates of lending and repayment this model by changing these two controls as i run the system so this is what's called the time constant for lending which is the number of views it takes to effectively to double the level of debt is currently seven years and i've got nine years to halve the level of debt and when i simulate the model what you get and you can see from this graph down here is a constant gdp i've got a rising level of debt which is the black line but no change in the money supply and if i make radical changes to how fast lending occurs and how fast repayment occurs i get not much effect on the gdp the the level of debt is risen the debt to gdp ratio has risen quite dramatically down here i'll just make it a bit smaller so you can see that while the while the simulation runs but a huge increase in the debt ratio not much happening in gdp then we have to go the opposite direction so lower lending much more slowly and repayment much more quickly you get a plunge in the debt ratio again not much change in gdp so that's that's the mental model neoclassical economists don't have anything as sophisticated but this is the mindset they have that says you don't need to worry about banks and debt and money you can have huge changes in debt and nothing much happens to gdp now with minsky i can dive in and say well it's actually a myth when you claim that the banks are intermediaries in fact they create loans they originate loans so it's more sensible to say that the debt which neoclassical say is an asset of the consumer sector is actually an asset of the banking sector so i'm going to just go inside and delete the debt being shown as an asset of the consumer sector and delete all those financial operations here come across to the banking sector's view and say well debt is actually an asset of the banking sector the interest payments are made to the bank and forget about the bank fee now i've made no other changes to the model i should make some changes to make it slightly more realistic but if i now start in the same situation that i showed beforehand with seven years to half the debt and nine years to repay it with only that change suddenly you've got a totally different model gdp is growing as debt is growing increasing level of debt causes an increasing level of the money supply if i then speed up lending so lending happens more quickly and repayments more slowly you get a boom and if you go in the opposite direction so repeat happens even more rapidly and lending more slowly you're going to slump i'll go back to the original situation again and last time you said that that slump is what we saw in 2008 yeah exactly kind of predicted it ahead of time and you went on the record saying that we're not really due for another slump even though covet has hit even though uh there are some similar lending practices now that that were in the private housing sector are now in the uh sort of business uh business um real estate sector but you said last time that because the business real estate sector is so small relative to the private housing sector we won't see the slump is are you still pretty confident of that well i think i think in terms of looking at the level of private debt in america right now you've the the household sector uh delivered about about 20 of gdp the business sector's actually got more debt now it's more leader than it was back in 2008 and there's been a dramatic increase in debt i think largely because firms are being forced by covert to basically access lines of credit and overdrafts um so that's that's boosted the economy when it's been happening because if they hadn't done that there'd be less money in the economy and less turnover and so on and more people have been laid off but if if we ever get to the point where you can say covet is over i can say that in thailand you can't say it in america but if you can say that then i expect those positions to be unwound this is not debt they took them because they were trying to invest or they saw some opportunity of boom so i don't expect a credit crunch in america but i do expect a serious economic crisis coming out of the fact that you have so much less money coming into the economy with the reduction in uh employment and the reduction in many businesses from the air you know airlines restaurants uh live entertainment and so on uh that we because the financial commitments people had made were pre-covered when they go back to a postcard situation having accumulated more debt during the crisis and having less income we're going to see financial failures coming out of that so covert will cause a downturn a financial crisis in america but not the actual dynamics of credit weren't going to cause another one okay so there will be a downturn and we'll start seeing it after covet somewhat resolves in the u. s and europe is that what you're saying yeah but also if you take away some of the supports that exist at the moment i mean i think i don't i don't know the details of the american supports as well as i do some other countries but like for a while you were giving an american household 600 per week per worker now that actually caused a boost in take-home incomes because so many americans are on insecure contracts you know the the zero-hour contracts and and the gig economy as they call it that was actually a boost and they weren't spending on transport to get to work so their expenses dropped the the cash coming in was similar if not greater than their wage so you got a boost to incomes at that point but if they get taken away you go in the opposite direction and fast and quite a large segment of the american population has less than not enough money in their bank accounts to cover a month's expenses so if you if you have a cut down on the government funding they will go under okay so so then you're seeing a big problem because once they go under then you do have this same 2008 problem where the private sector is under water is that what you're saying yeah and that then the banks the banks and the landlords banks the whole lot could be financially um in negative equity courtesy of this the aftermath of the covered shock okay and the lack of cash flows so last time you were on this show you said that there wasn't going to be a 2008 size depression or recession now it sounds like you're saying it could be just as large is that what you're with covert well covert itself is bigger is bigger the great depression and the the probably the most important point i want to make here which puts me outside the mainstream as well is how do you pay for attacking covert because a large part you see some uh there are many movements in america the deficit hawks as they're called by some people saying we've got to get the deficit back to zero et cetera et cetera because we're burdening future generations this again is one of the reason i designed minsky because are we burdening future generations it depends upon what are the monetary dynamics and the mainstream think there's a limited amount of money out there which if you use it for something like you know fighting covert then it's not available for investment and that's why they see a negative consequence from things like fighting covert but let's talk about the negative consequences of the world war two okay now what were they well not for america you lost less people than world war ii than you lost you've lost for covered so far as it happens but your economy burned absolutely boomed you came out of the second world war with the strongest economy on the planet and you went into a almost straight away into a boom the 50s and 60s and 70 early 70s are called the golden age of capitalism but if you look at the level of the deficit that was run out during the second world war the deficit in 1942 was 30 percent of gdp okay now how did we pay for the war okay this is not hypothetical how do we pay for the war the answer is government spending paid for it because when the government spends it ultimately puts money in people's bank accounts in the private sector when it taxes it takes money out of that voted bank accounts so if if it's spending 30 percent of gdp more than it's taking out it's boosted the amount of money in people's accounts by equivalent to 30 percent of gdp which is a huge boost now how do they finance that how do they pay for it well the way that the money is actually paid in is it it goes into your personal deposit accounts and it turns up on the reserves of the banking sector as well so if you have a thirty percent of gdp boost to money in people's deposit accounts at the banks you also have a thirty percent of gdp boost to the reserve accounts that those banks have at the central bank now reserves normally earn no interest or negative interest okay so suddenly the banks have got 30 percent of gdp in 1942 additional money sitting their bank accounts earning no return the government then issues war bonds okay the war bonds that might be valid at thirty percent of gdp and they have say a one or two percent rate of return so the government goes to the primary dealers as they know they're the part of the financial sector that actually buys the bonds and says would you like to buy these bonds and get a two percent rate of return let's say uh or would you like to stick with your 30 of money earning nothing what do you think they say we'll take the 30 thanks we'll buy them so the bonds are simply transferring money out of for the banking sector out of reserves into income earning bonds okay there is no not only is there no shortage of money the banks would need to be blithering idiots not to take on the offer of going from a zero return asset to a two or three or four percent rate of return asset so the bonds are purchased and the date doesn't take any money out of deposit accounts because deposit accounts are the liabilities of the banking sector this is all happening on the asset side so if i go back to searing my screen i'll just actually load the the right program before i before i do that i don't want to make the mistake of bringing up the wrong one well i i do want to talk about the one that you pulled up the last time so but yeah after you explain all this because this is fascinating okay so this is now using minsky again you can you model anything you like with minsky i've even modeled um epidemics using this logic by the way uh the sears series model but here what i've got is the the government um taxing and spending banks lending and getting repayments and then if the government spends more than it takes back in taxation i'll just actually uh make it possible to see that happening so here i've got taxes starting at 42 billion and spending at 45.
5 so there's 3. 5 billion additional money put into the firm sectors accounts in this simple model and therefore there's 3. 5 billion additional reserves uh then the uh government sells those bonds which means the 3.
5 billion gets converted to bonds which earn interest for the for the for the banking sector and that interest actually increases the amount of money in the economy as well the interest is paid for by the treasury borrowing from the central bank so there's absolutely no difficulty in paying for something like covert it simply means it's just like we pay for the second world war by creating money we'll pay for covert by creating money and at the same time um we actually have a a problem of deficient demand right now during the second world war you wanted to um to soak up some of the demand so more of the money actually went to armaments than to consumers and if i showed um bonds being sold to uh ordinary people i works where workers and bankers because i've got workers and capitalists here rather than bankers okay that would show money being taken out of circulation so you have to have a a model like this to be able to understand what monetary dynamics are and conventional economists don't have anything like this they they just work with a childish set of of notions about loanable funds and that like gregory mancu who's you would have never do you know the name mancu at all we actually spoke with him the other day yes right well gregory mancu's textbook has got a blatantly wrong model of of uh government funding using loanable funds now that would be okay if he'd written a 2014 15 at a pinch 2016. in 2014 the bank of england came out and said the textbooks are wrong and the heretics are right about money creation okay the 2014 paper by the bank even called money creation in the modern economy it said the textbooks are wrong now what mankip has done is to repeat that wrongness after he was told it was wrong by the bank of england the bundesbank and a range of other central banks so there's a very big gap between how non-orthodox thinkers like myself think about money and how the mainstream does and as it happens the mainstream is wrong and the unconventional bunch like myself like herman as well are right wow fascinating now all of this means to me listening that we could have a big economic boom after covid like we did after the second war world war if things were were done a certain way but but then earlier you said that we're going to have actually a downturn so explain the difference between the end of world war ii versus the end of coving okay the main difference was that first of all the great depression was was a cause by exactly the same victims that caused the 2008 crisis you had a boom in private borrowing in the 1920s uh which we call it the roaring twenties for good reason okay and the great gatsby and so on it was a period of huge speculative excess debt finance at the same time as the government was running a 1 of gdp surplus and congratulating itself on good economic management now while the government reduced its debt level by about 30 of gdp the private sector increased it's by about 60 percent and in particular uh this is the the most uh egregious thing about the great the brethren the great roy 20s in the great depression margin debt and back in those days you could you could put down a ten percent margin you put down a hundred thousand dollars for the swap broken by a million dollars worth of shares these days i think you've got to put down three hundred thousand to buy a million dollars worth margin debt went from one percent of gdp in 1920 to 12 and 1929 and then right back down to one percent again in 1930 okay that's why the crash wiped out so many people but in the process private debt hit about 150 of gdp in the middle of the 1930s and then from that point on it went down most of the time and during the second world war it halved again so it came out of the second world war uh with the private sector having a debt level of about 40 percent of gdp wow and we currently have 150 of gdp that's the difference if we we could use the reason people paid their debt off during the great depression and the second war is the huge scale of government spending particularly of course during the second world war now if you you couldn't go shopping you couldn't even buy coffee okay uh you had to buy i think almost almost had the dolly wood in my head though uh as a substitute for coffee you couldn't buy more than one cigarette a day or crazy stuff everything was rationed so with rationing you couldn't spend and therefore what would you do or you got extra money you pay your debt off right isn't that happening to some extent in the united states i've read reports that credit card debt is down and things like that so tell us more what's going on um household debts declined a substantial degree about 20 of gdp from about sort of about 80 percent to about uh 700 to about 80 percent of gdp roughly speaking i'm not looking at the figures myself right now i do have them but i haven't got them in front of me okay well as corporate that's gone corporate debt has gone up the other quantity the debt has gone up we now have the highest level of the corporate debt in american history of american capitalism okay so and that's bad right i mean we want both private debt and corporate debt to be low if we want a healthy economy and we want government spending to be high is that sort of the formula relatively speaking yeah because the government spends it creates money which is debt free for the recipient so the government gives you money it doesn't say you owe us here's a hundred dollars by the way you owe us a hundred dollars now if a bank gives you money here's a hundred dollars by the way you owe us a hundred dollars okay so government money comes without debt for the recipient and that means that it effectively if you have that sort of money coming in your equity rises your personal equity has gone up by a hundred yeah so you don't feel the pressure they all got to go borrow money to buy something i've got this money you know i'll use that so if the government is creating the money we actually have more personal equity and the less likely to go into debt and certainly less likely to speculate so it's actually more productive to have the government creating money than the private sector however i i am in favor of private banks a lot of people want to abolish private banks are on the heterodox side uh i would like to channel them so that they can only make money by lending for productive investment as opposed to as opposed to lending uh from banks for people who are speculating on the stock market or real estate and so on yeah real estate okay real estate you wouldn't let banks lend for real estate who i would limit how much they could lend a proposal i put forward about 10 years ago was what i call property income limited leverage which used to be if you're old enough to be in my age you know that that's that's the acronym is the pill which has a certain relevance for those who remember those days it doesn't do they talk about the pill anymore um but um that would limit the amount of money that anybody could borrow to buy a property to 10 times the annual rental income of the property known or imputed rental income in that case if you and i were learning at the moment if you and i on the same income we're fighting over the same property the one of us who'll win is the one who gets the high level of leverage from a bank right now if you make for the pill proposal you and i uh would the the place was say earning 300 000 330 000 uh dollars per year in rent okay you and i would both know we could the maximum we could buy was 300 000 if we borrow more than that we've committed a crime okay okay and so is the so is the lender so that would just rule out anything more than three hundred thousand so then in that case the one of us who would win would be the one who saved more money and they're out of their income so rather than getting a an amplifying feedback between house prices and leverage you'd get a dampening feedback and that's what we need okay so proposals like that but and i'd like to have for banks lending the ferns for working capital to consumers for actual consumer purchases houses to live in cars to drive and stuff like that and then funding entrepreneurs but of course that would involve another change in banks because at the moment banks can only issue debt i would like to have banks being able to issue uh money to a for corporation as a entrepreneurial corporation and take an equity position but it would be a non a non-voting not i've had plenty of people tell me what they think about banks being involved in day-to-day business decisions and i utterly agree um but you know make them an effectively a non-voting equity partner and in that case of like nine out of ten fail the one one that does succeed could make it a worthwhile venture for the banks so those sorts of changes to how banks operate because banks are critical to our economy and the mainstream leaving them out it's completely it mainstream economics has been a distraction from the important economic issues of our time rather than a way of understanding them oh interesting well this is just absolutely fascinating of course the average joe on the street wants to know well is it going to get really bad after covet it sounds like you're saying that because i mean our our private debt at 80 percent is not that much different in my mind than the 40 debt at the end of world war ii for private sector but the corporate debt is what's going to really sink us and the fact that the government although it's fighting covid and it's spending money to fight covet it didn't it's not spending as much as it did in world war ii are those the two main things that are driving uh the difference between the end of world war ii and the end of covet yeah i mean during nobody during world war ii uh complained about extra the deficit saying we can't afford that because if you if you um said we can't afford that extra you know a set of armaments then uh well we can't afford to have europe taken over by the nazis either which one do you want right so it's easy to suppress what you call the deficit hawks people who yeah that's right we're ruining our children's future by getting into debt which which by the way just as an aside it's not a stupid way of thinking because if i spent all of my inheritance for my children that would be ruining my children's future if i went out and bought luxury items and ran up credit card debt i would be burdening my children it's just that uh nations don't work the same way is that what you're saying exactly yeah because i mean and the stephanie colton puts it very well in her book the deficit myth which of course is much less technical than my mathematical modeling but exactly the same conclusions coming out of it and she said that where households and firms are current currency users okay they have they're going to spend they've got to get money in first of all banks and governments are currency creators their activities if banks lend more than they take back in repayments they create money if the government uh lends more over spends more than it taxes that also creates money so you don't have the the same dynamics or the same problems at the at the government level that you do at the individual level but because we are extrapolating from our own personal experience yeah we see the government as constrained as we are yeah so so you are in favor of sort of these ballooning uh national debts and you know just huge debts uh as long as maybe one with one caveat that the debt is to the uh the people in the country as opposed to like having a debt to a foreign country that's that's an important caveat yeah i mean it's only if it gets issued in your own currency that you're safe if you issue if america for example issuing uh currency uh issuing debt in terms of euros then it would need to earn euros to pay them and that that's not your situation but it is argentina's situation yes okay so so it is a case of domestic money creation is what matters and the learning debt is dollar for dollar equivalent to the government money creation so when you complain about ballooning government debt you're complaining about ballooning money creation now learning money creation is not causing inflation but stopping you falling into a a debt deflationary trap that's actually a good thing and the you can there's two ways you can get money in living out the export sector you can get it from banks or you can get it from the government you get it from a bank you owe the bank money they're going to be after you if you can't pay back you go bankrupt you get it from the government effectively it's the government's problem but if the government as long as the government is a you know a sovereign government like the american issuing its own currency and its economy is capable of doing that it doesn't have balance of trade payment problems you should have but you don't because you're the reserve currency of the planet um then it's safe right for that so you just said that trade deficit is bad so so deficit that we have in our own currency is good it means that you're creating money which means if you're doing it right you're creating money at the same pace that your economy is growing and in fact your creating of money is what's driving the economy to get bigger and bigger each year but trade deficit is bad is that is that true am i getting those two things right you're getting that right that that puts me outside modern monetary theory by the way um because the modern monetary theory group have a different argument which i think is completely fallacious but they're but they're um they they argue that exports are a cost and imports are a benefit and they wave their hands about the impact of the foreign trade sector i've i'm very critical of that i kept my mouth shut because uh initially because modern monetary theory has done something no other non-orthodox theory has done and let's get the public attention right at the stage at which there's a motion in congress to it to criticize modern monarchy theory from a from a from the republican side so it's it's yeah sorry sorry that i i i was i was going under the assumption that neither democrats nor republicans in the united states would ever give any credence to what you and your uh colleagues are saying no they're listening they're listening now interesting if you go just search for modern monetary theory on this new york times or any and you'll find lots and lots of references to it in the press these days which has not happened for any non-orthodox series ever since keynes uh ever since like john keynes or what were you yeah 80 80 years since any non-orthodox theory and mccains was non-orthodox when he started has got the public attention so that's a monumentally great achievement so are you personally hoping that the uh republicans will uh take back the house stay in the white house things like that or or what are you personally hoping no i look i want to say donald trump uh uh on on on 7th avenue um or maybe 42nd street um i i i i personally i think trump is the most disastrous human being to lead to lead a major economy since caligula um so you know sitting outside the whole thing i'm i'm but you're saying that the republicans are the ones that are listening to your theories that you're not trying to knock it down another republican there's a republican i think his name is heard h-e-r-d or h-e-r-n hearn i think and he's come up with a motion condemning modern monetary theory and i then went through it so he's actually angie the democrats are more more positive but to me it's simply saying if you're realistic about how money is created then there is no problem about selling government bonds and no problem about financing them and that's the opposite of what the so-called deficit hawks argue yeah but okay so i must have misunderstood you were saying earlier it sounded like that the republicans are the ones listening to your theories oh they're listening on the senses shut those people up uh okay okay but yet to me it seems like what you're you're talking about is almost like the reaganomics the the voodoo economics where if you pump more money into the economy it's going to you know stimulate the economy is isn't that what reagan said in the 80s reagan effectively was a modern monetary theorist without knowing it because he was he was fooled by by by laffer and i i can think of a few more aptly named people than than laffer uh you have about the laffer curve uh no i i'm not an economist so i've never lucky yeah lucky here believe me it's good for your mental health not to be an economist but laffer uh was a conservative economist who argued just he drew on a napkin like a a inverted parabola and he basically passed a certain point and he presumably already passed that point taxation reduces gdp uh it would be given so he if you reduce taxation you'll increase gdp so reagan came in and said are going to cut taxes and that'll actually increase government revenues okay so yeah cutting taxes would increase revenue because there'd be such a rise in the gdp that that would balance out the budget in fact the budget blew out but that's what then when reagan effectively was doing modern monetary theory and that's why the economy turned around under reagan okay so it was completely he was trying to do something that laffer was telling him to do which you say is wrong yeah you you don't you don't want to get rid of the deficit you want the government to be creating money and by accident that's what reagan did by cutting taxes not increasing spending all that much you had an increase in the deficit and that stimulated the economy interesting well this is all very fascinating now i just as we close out our interview this morning um would you be willing to talk a little bit about whether infinite energy could you know solve some of the uh the zero-sum game problems that uh that herman daley was talking about and you said it's actually not a zero-sum it's a negative sum so so what was the uh the article that you were pointing me to earlier okay i can actually bring it up on screen i really highly recommend reading i think it's a great piece of writing okay as well as everything else i'll just actually go back and share screen again okay by a physicist and it is called exponential economist meets finite physicist okay so and this this guy i've forgotten his name now but he was uh his first name's tom um and he started saying that economic growth can't go indefinitely and the economist came back and said oh no i believe it can go on indefinitely um so i recommend taking a look at that blog post the basic point that he's making is that even if we could stop generating carbon in our energy so it's zero carbon economy even if we did that um when you look at the rate of growth of gdp it's in terms of uh over the long term it runs about 2.
