All the "shut up and calculate" in the world is just that much GIGO, if the underlaying premises are wrong.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its world functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is as the present going past to future, yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
Energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information. The circulation system is feedback in the middle.
As states function as social super organisms, government is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system. As cells in this entity, we don't like government directing our actions, but love the kick of ever more money, so government has been somewhat subdued, while banking has free rein. Consequently the only real job the flunkies allowed in office have, is running up the debt the banks need to grow metastatically. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. "The real money is in bonds."
Capitalism is not synonymous with free markets, as when the medium enabling markets is privately managed, we are all tenant farmers to the banks.
We are linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, so while people see money as signal to save and store, markets need it to circulate, so Econ 101 refers to it as both medium of exchange and store of value.
in the body, blood is medium, fat, as well as bone and muscle, are store.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can understand the difference.
While we are trained to money as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, it functions as a social contract. "Community tokens."
To store the asset side of the ledger, there has to be a debt to back it. Since the Federal debt goes back to the New Deal, not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well.
As a medium, we own money like we own the section of road we are on, or the air and water flowing through our bodies. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not responsible for its value, like a personal check.
If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over and we would be fighting over our plots of pavement.
The fact is that enormous numbers of people can't save individually, as it just turns the financial system into an enormous cancer and blows very large bubbles. There are lots of ways we can invest in a healthy society, but this isn't one of them.
I could go on, but hopefully this is some sense of just how screwed up our whole system is.
