Latest Blogs

Democracy, Democracy 2.0, Politics

Politics for a civilised world – Part 0

Steve Kelsey 3 mins read

There can be little doubt that we are seeing a deliberate and very stealthy restructuring of our society. This has been underway from before the Thatcher and Reagan years that saw the first surfacing of the hard-right agenda. This move was accelerated profoundly by the 2016 elections in the USA and the UK. The election of Tump in the USA and Brexit in the UK are just another step on the path that was largely unplanned but, having happened, was seized as an opportunity to accelerate this restructuring.

Their objective it to move society away from democratic norms towards a new hyper-capitalism. This is a very peculiar form of capitalism that promotes monopolies in industry and the concentration of power and money in the hands of a few. This is not at all what you would expect from the dynamics of a free market model. As evidence you only have to look at the US healthcare system where efficiency, choice and cost effectiveness are far from evident. read more

Civilisational Wealth, Economics, Economy 2.0, Thinking Money

Economics for a civilised world – Part 4

Steve Kelsey 2 mins read

The Price Transformer

The price transformer determines how much of the imaginary wealth equates to the concrete value of real wealth. Price is established during a complex process which involves the following elements

  • The real wealth element, intelligence applied to base matter- conventionally defined as the manufacturing cost.
  • Plus the ‘market’ elements
  • The size of the market-  how many people need the product?
  • The perceived need- is the product an essential medicine or a toy?
  • The Supplier premium- is the supply rationed?
  • The Marketing premium- the price premium delivered by various psychological manipulations?
  • The Competitive premium, how dominant is the company manufacturing the real wealth element?
  • The state of the economy.
  • All of the market factors play a dominant part in setting the price to be paid for the wealth ‘on sale’.  They have no direct connection with the real wealth element of the price and some, e.g. the Marketing premium, are purely psychological. 

Today Brand and Marketing often play a controlling role in setting the price to be paid and can be responsible for the significant premiums that can be charged over the real wealth element.

In conventional economics, price is given great significance, defining the value of a product to the consumer. However, price is entirely subjective and breaks any objective link between real wealth and the market. We have seen this systematic mutation of reality before. read more

Civilisational Wealth, Economics, Economy 2.0, Money, Thinking Money

Economics for a civilised world – Part 3

Steve Kelsey 2 mins read

Money = Imaginary Wealth

Money is potential or imaginary wealth (iW). Money is variously described as a credit or an IOU for resources or the labour that converts resources into wealth. Note that the terms ‘resources’ and ‘labour’ are a convention and are colloquial synonyms for matter and energy intelligently directed by the labourer.  

Money is an invention and has no objective reality. it cannot be assigned a value until until it is converted to real wealth. This is counter to the convention where money is believed to denote value, but money has value only in relationship to real wealth. Money was reinvented many times all over the world. Money is a form of virtual wealth that can be traded for the real thing  at a future date. In this sense money is future wealth, but to be realised the virtual wealth has to be accepted by any provider of real wealth. The acceptability is governed by the wealth provider being able to repeat this process with a third party. Elaborate systems have evolved to ensure that virtual wealth maintains its value over time relative to real wealth.  read more

Civilisational Wealth, Economy 2.0, Money

Economics for a civilised world – Part 2

Steve Kelsey 2 mins read

Wealth and Work

Energy over time is work. 

E x t = Wk

The amount of wealth created in an hour depends upon the context the work is done. 

As we have seen, the wealth created by hour of work by a brick plant is less than that of an ICU fabricator because the amount of Applied Energy, our analogy for intelligence, involved in the fabrication of a brick is much lower than the energy required to produce an ICU. 

Productivity

Before industrialisation the amount of intelligence that could be applied to base matter in an hour was limited to the activity of one person. Industrialisation has increased the amount of intelligence that can be applied to base matter many times over. We call this measure productivity. A highly optimised system would seek to maximise the productivity per person to increase the wealth that one person could create. Assuming equitable distribution of wealth, if everyone had a productivity ten times greater than a single person is capable of we would all be ten times wealthier. It is this increase in productivity that has allowed us to enjoy far greater wealth than our ancestors. read more

Civilisational Wealth, Economics, Economy 2.0, Thinking Money

Economics for a civilised world -Part 1

Steve Kelsey 2 mins read

A physics based economic model starts with a physical definition of wealth.

Wealth is the product of applying intelligence to base matter. This process raises base matter to a level of functionality that satisfies a need. Clay becomes brick, bricks build cities. Iron oxide becomes steel, the steel becomes machines. Our civilisation is based on trillions of transformations of this type. 

We cannot measure intelligence as a physical effect, but we can measure the amount of intelligently directed energy employed to embed intelligence in base matter.

We can therefore define wealth in physical terms using read more

Civilisational Wealth, Economics, Economy 2.0, Thinking Money

Economics for a civilised world – Part 0

Steve Kelsey 3 mins read

Economics is an evolving discipline. During my lifetime economics has transitioned from post-war Keynesianism, through the emergence of Neoliberalism in the 80’s  and now stands at a new evolutionary juncture with competing theories and and beliefs. But there is one common thread that links these theories together and that is their focus on money rather than wealth.

Irrespective of theoretical foundations, all economic models concern themselves with fiscal and monetary policy. Fiscal policy focuses on the governments ability to create and distribute money, Monetarist policy focuses on the private creation and distribution of money. But money is a concept with no physical reality. Wealth, by contrast, is entirely about physical reality. Wealth surrounds us in the cities we live in, the products we use, the services we enjoy. But modern economics has little to say about the creation and distribution of wealth. Modern economics makes assumptions that wealth is an end goal, a product of the economic system, but views wealth through the abstract medium of money. read more

Currency, Economy 2.0, Money

Community Money

Steve Kelsey 10 mins read

We are used to conventional money being issued and backed by authorities, banks and governments. However, banks are relatively new institutions historically, evolving from earlier methods of money creation. Banks as we understand them today are evolved from Lombards. Invented in Florence in the 13th Century, Lombards were a form of pawn brokerage where assets were deposited as collateral for loans (and where the assets were too large or immovable, e.g. property or land, promissory notes were lodged with the Lombard allowing the Lombard to take ownership in the event of failure to repay the loan). Private banks were prone to failure until the invention of the Central Bank in 1694 as lender of last resort.  But until very recently banks only existed for the wealthy. The common community had many alternative forms of debt and credit, many different forms of money based on community trust which operated successfully well before the invention of modern banking. read more

Civilisational Wealth, Money, Thinking Money

A Physics based Economics

Steve Kelsey 11 mins read

The search for a physics based economic model, a thought experiment.

We start by defining wealth as intelligence applied to base matter. There is no physics-based way of measuring intelligence, so we use an analogue, the amount of intelligently directed energy applied to base matter.

W = M+E

We can therefore define a unit of wealth with a fixed physical definition. e.g. I Joule/kg is one kilogram of matter embedded with one joule of intelligently directed energy. 1000 Joule/kg is one kilogram of matter embedded with 1000 Joules of intelligently directed energy.

The energy intelligently applied to base matter ranges from the hand manufacture of a single item to the intelligently directed energy used in mass manufacture. read more

Democracy, Democracy 2.0, Ideology

Liberty Libre

Steve Kelsey 17 mins read

“ Every epoch therefore develops a range of contradictory discourses and ideologies for the purpose of legitimising the inequality that already exists or that people believe should exist”

Thomas Piketty – Capital and Ideology

The Role of Ideology

Thomas Piketty, in his seminal work ‘Capital and Ideology’, presents evidence for the role of ideology as the means of maintaining inequality through history, from feudal societies, through the proprietary societies of the 19th century, to the hypercapitalist societies of today. Although the identities of the perpetrators, the techniques used, and their professed politics may differ, they can all be reduced to a simple formula. A small self appointed group seek to capture as much wealth for themselves as possible by overt or proxy violence. This simple formula has written all of human history to date.   read more

Democracy, Democracy 2.0, Politics, Resistance

This is not England

Steve Kelsey 5 mins read

My family is as English as they come. My family name of Kelsey is derived from two villages in Lincolnshire North Kelsey and South Kelsey. They have been there for  a long time. A Kelsey is noted as a member of the Rump Parliament of the 1600’s, his profession a button maker. My mother’s maiden name is Cornwell and has an equally long history, deriving from a hamlet it Oxfordshire. For generations both sides of the family worked as farmhands. I am as English as they come.

In the 1930’s my maternal Grandfather Charlie Cornwell and his sons took part in the Battle of Cable Street. The East End rose up against Mosley’s Fascist Blackshirts attempt to march on the Jewish Communities of the East End. 10, 000 police had been drafted in to make a path for the fascist march but they were defeated and the march was abandoned. read more