In a world that becomes more complicated for people, it is more difficult to judge whether things are going ‘well’ or not. Economists and politicians have traditionally used the term “Gross National Product” (GNP or GDP in English) for this: after all, if an economy grows, we will all benefit from it.

In recent decades it has become clear that this economic growth, certainly since the industrial revolution, also entails quite some consequential damage, especially in the social field (for example, growing inequality) and for our living environment (pollution, impoverishment of raw materials, decrease in biodiversity, etc).

We can certainly…

In nature, not a single organism keeps growing indefinitely. And not a single individual significantly outgrows its peers. There is a logic behind this.

However, in our financial and socio-economic domains we see multiple examples of excessive growth, sometimes in the order of magnitudes, relative to their peers. This is by many considered unsustainable, and unfair.

Currently there is a lot of talk about GDP being non-inclusive and the need for other metrics (circular, regenerative, etc), and breaking up big tech/big banks etc. This is part of fixing the current crisis in fundamentals in the economic discipline.

But before we…

Most people share an intuitive understanding of the concepts of order and disorder. The concept of ‘entropy’ is often simply explained as the systemic tendency from an orderly state to an unorderly state: a cup will only fall into pieces, but throw pieces are unlikely to fall into a cup. Even a rock (order) will, according to entropy, eventually turn into dust (disorder).

The direction from order to disorder is a one-way trip.

This ‘arrow of time’ of entropy is best known as the second law of thermodynamics, and it is undisputed.

However, scientists have long been struggling with a…

The revolutionary technology of the blockchain may have emerged at an inconvenient timing.

The technology itself is revolutionary beyond any doubt: it enables triple-entry bookkeeping, centuries after the revolution of double-entry bookkeeping that emerged in the Italian Renaissance. Crypto-currencies are currently the only viable application of this technology, but this application alone will surely penetrate lots of spaces in our socio-economic domains.

And the fact that it is a distributed form of money (without any central control) also promises that governments, (central) banks and other authoritarian powers are unable to devaluate this currency for geopolitical reasons or other manipulative measures…

This article is just an attempt to make sense of our current global crises by looking at them from very high abstraction levels, to explain how we got here.

Let me begin with a few lists concerning our global economy:

1. Unprecedented financial policies in place for almost a decade now:

• quantitative easing (Fed, ECB, Bank of Japan, Bank of England)
• zero/negative interest rates (ZNIRP)

2. Unprecedented trends and creativity because of the global yield crisis:

• passively managed assets overtake actively managed assets in value (US)
• high-frequency-trading is entering new markets, like commodities
• all kinds of new peripheral bubbles (local housing…

We have now witnessed the most staggering of ICO’s (Initial Coin Offering, IPO’s for cryptocurrencies), the Tezos one, valued at around USD 230 mln. Bloomberg reported that even some bankers are trading big bonuses for the crypto-market, because the potential revenues are currently so extreme.

Next to the huge amount of money pouring into the crypto-currency market, a lot of very bright minds are entering this niche as well.

But it seems everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room.

Jumping the IT-bandwagons

The IoT hype has shown massive deployment of all kinds of devices in several spaces, from the internet to intranets…

Het bijna mislukken van de 7 jaar lange onderhandelingen tussen Canada en de EU over het CETA-verdrag, doordat de kleine Asterix Wallonie afgelopen vrijdag een veto neerlegde (terwijl de rest van de lidstaten al akkoord is), heeft veel reacties ontlokt. De meeste reacties wijzen met de vinger naar een ‘opportunistische Walloonse premier’, of naar een ‘gemankeerde EU’, maar gaan daarmee voorbij aan de werkelijke oorzaak.

Over CETA is veel gedoe geweest, vooral omdat er over TTIP al zoveel gedoe was. TTIP is voorlopig van de baan, en de EU heeft, mede onder druk van de publieke weerstand en onder druk…

Alle huidige mainstream economische modellen zijn achterhaald. Puur vanwege de enorme schaalvergroting en toegenomen complexiteit van onze geglobaliseerde economie. Want door deze globalisering, eigenlijk een intense toename van de onderlinge vervlechting van economische participanten wereldwijd, is er geen sprake meer van min of meer autonome, enigszins stuurbare economische regio’s, maar van een (wereldwijd) complex super-systeem. En tijdens deze globalisering naar dit supersysteem is er een grens overschreden: de complexiteit van dit systeem is zo massaal geworden dat er een nieuwe laag van meta-processen is ontstaan. …