Economics

Lakśmi—The Personification of Wealth

A few months ago, I was invited to participate in a live discussion. During the conversation, I could see a stream of user comments coming from viewers talking to each other about barely related matters. One such comment was that people in India lead miserable lives. It seemed to imply that listening to the conversation is pointless because it is not...

Moral Imperatives for Economists

Most people think that macroeconomics is a legitimate subject because its experts are employed by prestigious organizations like central banks, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, treasury departments, investment funds, and universities. They don’t know that macroeconomics is colonialism by another name. In this post, I will describe what macroeconomics is, and how it is used for exploiting weaker nations. Just as...

A Personalist Foundation for Social Sciences

I used the last post to weave many seemingly disjointed ideas—modalities, inseparability, qualities, how the illusion of motion is created without a motion by revelation and hiding of modes, how this leads to alternative ideas of space and time, an alternative conception of laws of motion, and why the idea of a separated reality modeled by mathematics is always false even...

Laws of Increasing and Decreasing Returns

Laws are supposed to predict and explain. Predict means to describe the future relative to the present. Explain means to justify that prediction based upon ideas about reality. The Law of Diminishing Returns is a law that predicts that returns on investment must diminish over time but does not explain it. Without the explanation, we don’t know when, where, to whom,...

What is Sustainable Economic Growth?

Economics has an unknown enemy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that entropy (disorder) cannot decrease in a physical process. If the net disorder is increasing, then how can there be net growth in wealth? Net growth in wealth is possible only with a net increase in order. Conversely, if net order in nature is not increasing, then net...

Artificial Intelligence and the Death of the Free Market

In classical economic theories, the “market” is an abstract entity, used by everyone, but owned by no one. It could be regulated by a government by enacting the rules and regulations of market transactions, but even the government did not own the market (unless it was the sole producer and consumer). In fact, nobody could say what the market really was,...

The Crisis of Capitalism and Its Remedies

Many people realize at present that there are problems with capitalism, but opinion is divided on what should be done about it. This post explores the alternatives to capitalism and their problems. The reality is that there are no provably stable economic models today. Centuries of economic studies have failed to provide a theory or model of how economic policies must...

How Shankaracharya’s Philosophy Made India Weak and Poor

There is a popular narrative in India at present that Islamic Invaders and British Colonialists destroyed India’s traditional culture and civilization. That is not entirely false. But any serious student of history is led to ask: Why did these invaders succeed in conquering India when numerous such invasions were repelled previously? The Mauryan Empire in India (beginning with around 200 BCE)...

Economics and Reductionism

Profits require that the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts. For example, half a chair is not half price of the full chair; most times you cannot sell two halves of a chair separately, or price them separately, even when you assemble the chair yourself from packaged parts. Similarly, the price a carpenter will charge for a...

Free Market Economics vs. Capitalism

Free market economics is about competition between businesses, and it operates under the assumptions of a closed system in which wealth can be redistributed, but the total wealth must remain constant. Capitalism is the contrary idea that the economy is an open system in which wealth can be infused, in order to create a net growth for the economy. The wealth...

The Balanced Organization

Vedic philosophy describes the body as a universe and the universe as a body. Since the world is intended for living beings, there is no fundamental divide between “physical sciences”, “life sciences”, and “social sciences”. Thus, the cosmic structure, the social structure, the biological structure, and the psychological structure are parts of a single continuum. Given this continuum, we can presume...

How Culture Influences Religion

We generally think of religion as something that pertains to transcendence beyond the current material existence. The reality, however, is that the day-to-day practice of religion involves societies whose cultural norms must be compatible with the tenets of the religion. If there is a misfit between culture and religion, then most likely the religion would be changed rather than the culture....