Thursday, January 29, 2009

is Globalization a giant ponzi pyramid scheme

was Globalization sustained by a giant ponzi pyramid scheme supported from schemes such as privatization of public resources, economic colonization etc.?

Automatic Earth provides a stark vision of globalization

1. Ponzi Schemes

"Everyone has heard of pyramid, or Ponzi, schemes. In their simplest form they are short-lived deliberate frauds where a small number of existing members are paid from the buy-in of a larger number of newer members until the supply of newer members is exhausted, whereupon they collapse. Typically, the founders, and perhaps a few others who got in early and out before it was too late, end up making a lot of money at the expense of later entrants, who end up holding the empty bag. There are always many more losers than winners. What most do not realize, however, is that Ponzi dynamics are far more pervasive than people think. There are many human systems that ultimately rest on the buy-in of new entrants, and every one of them will ultimately meet the same fate, although it can take far longer for complex constructions than for simple pyramid frauds.

What allows a more complex pyramid to last for longer than a simple one is a supplementary source of funds to pay members, besides merely the buy-in of newer members. The more such sources there are, legitimate and otherwise, the more complex the pyramid can become and the longer it will last, as the apparent on-going success of early entrants will attract many more new ones. There's nothing like seeing one's friends and neighbours seemingly making a lot of easy money for a long time to eventually overcome the mental defenses of even the most skeptical."

2. Ponzi Scheme applied to Globalization

At the largest scale, empires are also grounded in pyramid dynamics, which is why they too have a limited lifespan. They grow by assuming control, either politically or economically, of new territories, positioning themselves to cream off surpluses from an ever-expanding geographical area in a form of involuntary buy-in. In the past political control through invasion or physical colonization was more common, but latterly globalization has enabled the development of a sophisticated system of economic control based on international debt slavery, supplemented with economic colonization for the purpose of resource extraction. Both resources and financial surpluses, in the form of perpetual interest payments, could be efficiently extracted from the periphery and accumulated at the centre, where they led to the development of an unprecedented level of socioeconomic complexity.

Such wealth conveyors in favour of the economic centre, at the expense of the hinterland, are the very heart of empire, but without continual expansion to feed rapidly developing central complexity, they eventually fail, leaving the centre unable to sustain its existing complexity level. As with economic bubbles, empires hollow out in the latter stages, consuming their own substance in a catabolic manner in order to compensate for the inability to strengthen wealth conveyors sufficiently quickly to keep pace with the expanding requirements of the centre.

Soros also been saying the same about the Super Bubble based on US Dollar as Reserve Currency of the World. Ponzi Scheme metaphor definitely suits Globalization well.

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