Pim Fortuyn on 4 May 2002, two days before his assassination

Troubles in the Multicultural Society

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Crossroads of civilisation

In several ways, the Netherlands has been ahead of the rest of the world, such as in liberal reforms like gay marriage and the right to decide about ending one’s own life. It was the result of the political manoeuvring of the left-wing liberal party D66 and, most notably, its leader, Hans van Mierlo, who had schemed to make it happen. The Christian Democrats, who had always been in the government, had long blocked progressive reforms. In 1994, after the Christian Democrats had lost the election, D66 forged the purple coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA and the right-wing liberals of the VVD. These parties set aside their differences and focused on their shared progressive values to implement amendments. A large section of the Christian Democrat electorate supported these changes, including most Roman Catholics, so they remained uncontested afterwards.

The Netherlands is one of the least nationalist countries. In their preparedness to die for their country, the Dutch score particularly low, according to a Reddit survey. It is the most closely tied to both the continental European and the Anglo-Saxon world. Together with Great Britain, the Netherlands is oriented toward the United States. It may explain why the Dutch provided more NATO heads than any other country. If geographical distance indicates cultural distance, it is worth noting that the Netherlands lies between Great Britain, Germany, and France. Being close to Scandinavia, it was also one of the least corrupt countries, with a fiscally prudent government.

The Netherlands long ranked highly in sexual liberty. Prostitution is legal and performed openly in red light districts. It was not all good. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, paedophiles could operate in the open until the focus returned to the damage they do to children. On the work floor, equality is the norm, as the Dutch balance work and private life, which is uncommon in most countries. In many ways, the Netherlands has progressed the furthest. The Netherlands doesn’t lead on all fronts. For example, the country lags in the number of women on boards and in parliament.

On top of that, the border between the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds runs through the Netherlands. And so, it became the crossroads of Western civilisation, and with more minorities coming in, the crossroads of world civilisation. That wasn’t on my mind at the time, but in hindsight, there is more to it. The Netherlands means ‘the Low Countries’ because half of it lies below sea level. The word ‘Nederland’ almost translates to ‘humble country’. The most unpretentious part of it might be Twente, the region I came from.

The Dutch are known for their tolerance, which is close to indifference. There had long been parallel societies with Protestants, Catholics and socialists living separate lives, so it was mind your own business. For long, Protestantism had been the official religion and Catholicism was illegal, but Catholics could hold masses in secret. That was tolerance. Today, smoking weed is not a problem. The Netherlands was also a haven for Jews until the German occupation during World War II. That same tolerance was the stance towards immigrants for a long time. In that sense, the Netherlands didn’t differ from several other Western European countries.

It was a fairy-tale society, with Van Kooten and De Bie seeking the nuance. Their characters represented the so-called conservative, ignorant and xenophobic undercurrent in the Dutch culture, and of course, hustlers, such as Jacobse and Van Es, infiltrating politics with their corrupt schemes and dubious deals. The undercurrent didn’t go away. Instead, it grew stronger. Immigrants continued to arrive, causing a growing unease. The progressive values many Dutch cherished didn’t agree with the conservative worldview of many immigrants, most notably Muslims. These feelings only needed a catalyst, like the Germans needed Hitler, to give the anger and discontent a voice.

The existing political parties had become complacent and didn’t see what was coming. Nor had I. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a maverick politician, Pim Fortuyn, rose to prominence with his strong views on immigration and Islam. Fortuyn claimed that leftists were to blame for immigration. He called them the Leftist Church for their moral superiority claims. They would call you a racist if you opposed immigration. Many wanted to contain immigration, most notably of groups that had trouble adapting. Only, no politician said it that plainly as Fortuyn did. The others were more careful not to promote division in society. Most immigrants did okay, and inciting hatred wouldn’t improve things. Keeping a good society is not a simple affair. It is like a juggling act of keeping many balls in the air. Fortuyn didn’t seem to understand or care and sought personal fame.

Balls on the ground

Fortuyn had terminated the fairy tale of the multicultural society. I had believed in it or wanted to believe in it, for if there will ever be world peace, the world must unite and become one multicultural society. Living with people from different cultures isn’t easy. I should have known that, given what happened to me as a student. Culture can be an unbridgeable gap. Some Fortuyn supporters seemed to anticipate civil war and hoped that it would start sooner rather than later, when the authentic white Dutch were still a majority. The atmosphere quickly turned grim. Under the guise of free speech, the sewers opened, and the rivers of hatred flooded freely into the open. Fortuyn’s rise made headlines in the international press because it represented a clear break with the past, occurring in what many believed was the most liberal country in the world.

Fortuyn supporters overran the IEX message board with their vile and racist comments. So when someone created a new account on IEX, started posting, while suggesting he was a Turk to test the mood, others viciously attacked him. Fortuyn was openly gay, and his objection to Islam was that it didn’t agree with Western liberal values. He further pointed out crimes committed by immigrant youth, especially those of Moroccan descent. Racists and bigots jumped on his bandwagon. However, and that was where leftists like me got it wrong, the movement was more than just bigotry and racism. Tribal identities are obstacles to unity, not only internationally, but also within countries. It is as problematic as the existence of nation-states. Fortuyn picked up one ball while dropping several others.

A leftist poster with the avatar Kingie started a new website, BeursKings (MarketKings), with the help of. Danger Money. A small group left IEX and joined the new message board. I was among them. I was part of the so-called Leftist Church and had tried to rein in the onslaught of bigotry. One of the IEX posters called me ‘vicar’ for my efforts to moralise. Had BeursKings not started, I would have remained on IEX, so it was not a case of fleeing. BeursKings remained in operation for several years. Kingie once posted several photographs of himself on the website. That was a shock. He looked like my double. In hindsight, that is remarkable because of his avatar name. Others who remained on IEX also joined the BeursKings message board.

Shortly before the elections, a left-wing loner assassinated Fortuyn. Fortuyn had already hinted at it. If something were to happen to him, he claimed, it would be because establishment politicians had demonised him. The socialist-in-name-only Marcel van Dam, who lived in a luxurious mansion far away from multicultural neighbourhoods, and who had always been eager to take the moral high ground, once called Fortuyn an ‘exceptionally inferior human.’ And so, you may ask yourself, who of the two was the most superb Nazi? Fortuyn gave a presentable at-your-service salute that might do well in some fascist circles, but his ‘inferior human’ remark gave Van Dam the edge.

Others called Fortuyn ‘extreme’ or ‘demolishing society’ because he was stirring up public sentiment. Fortuyn was a man of theatre, hyping the wrongs others did to him while being a jerk himself. The Netherlands is not a violent country. It was the first political assassination in 400 years, so no one saw it coming. The civil war didn’t arrive, but death threats to politicians have become common. The attitudes toward immigrants and Islam have also changed. Fifteen years later, the United States saw the rise of a similar leader.

Fortuyn’s assassin, Volkert van der Graaf, was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He was someone like me. To him, Fortuyn may have been a new Hitler on the rise. He feared Fortuyn would tear down Dutch society so that the weak, such as the poor and refugees, would suffer, and also animals, as he had been an animal rights activist. Van der Graaf drew a logical conclusion from the facts, or so he believed. The problem with this kind of thinking is that we don’t know the future. Mass immigration can destabilise a country. Van der Graaf had good intentions, but Fortuyn also believed he was serving the Netherlands. Yet, there was something evil about Fortuyn. I am not a trained psychologist, but Fortuyn was someone who wanted to be the centre of attention and wield power, and didn’t care about the consequences of his actions, much like Donald Trump.

Harry Mens, a Dutch real estate tycoon whom you might call the Dutch Donald Trump, had promoted Fortuyn on his television show, Business Class. So, like Trump, Mens had a television show. Fortuyn’s appearance on his show foreshadowed a new type of politics, common in the United States but not in the Netherlands, in which wealthy money men run puppet politicians. I found Mr Mens to be a questionable character, boasting and flaunting his wealth. At the time, I didn’t think of Trump, but there are parallels. His programme was about investments with people in suits and dresses promoting their investment services. A few advertisers on his show turned out to be frauds, such as Palm Invest.

I think of Pim Fortuyn and Donald Trump as narcissistic psychopaths. These are not official diagnoses, but personal impressions. However, some psychoanalysts concluded that Fortuyn was a narcissist, possibly because of feelings of inferiority that he needed to compensate for with praise. It was all about him, and other people were just utensils. His neurotic disturbances and unresolved personality flaws made Pim Fortuyn such a powerful force. One psychoanalyst said, ‘Imagine if he had to go on a state visit to US President Bush. He would exhibit Sun King-like behaviour.’1 To Fortuyn, the US President would have been a mere extra in the Pim Fortuyn show. Even though the psychoanalysts didn’t raise that particular issue, Pim Fortuyn seemed to enjoy hurting other people’s feelings, so I suppose he was a psychopath as well.

If you consider the characteristics of narcissistic psychopaths, you might discover they are the opposite of Asperger’s syndrome. I name a few: (1) thriving on chaos versus thriving in order, (2) desiring to be the centre of attention versus not wanting attention or praise, (3) manipulative and lying versus honest and forthright and (4) charming versus impolite. At first glance, Fortuyn and Trump seemed impolite rather than charming. That needs further explanation. First, you don’t have to check all the boxes to be autistic or a psychopath. And second, the impoliteness of the autistic person comes from being honest. By being rude, Fortuyn and Trump catered to the fear and anger of their supporters. They told them what they wanted to hear. What can make psychopaths successful as leaders is that they are willing to hurt people, which may be required to do what is necessary. With these words, I conclude my psychoanalysis session.

Life went on

Beurkings attracted a few posters who remained on IEX. One of them, Xzorro, didn’t believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories and thought that the success of the attacks was due to the incompetence of the American authorities. Yet, he believed the allegations that a high-ranking Dutch Prosecution official, Joris Demmink, had had sex with underage male prostitutes and that there was a conspiracy within the Dutch government to cover it up. An investigative journalist and conspiracy theorist, Micha Kat, had pursued the matter relentlessly for many years. In the 1990s, there had been a police investigation into possible child abuse by four high-ranking government officials.

The investigation had collapsed after someone had leaked information. During raids, the police found no evidence on the suspects. Fred Teeven, who had led the investigation, later stated that Demmink had not been a person of interest. The Dutch newspaper AD claimed that Demmink had contact in the 1980s with a pimp of underage boys. Kat was onto something, but he was a nutter. Kat later claimed that children buried in a Bodegraven cemetery were the victims of Satanic child abusers, which was nonsense and easy to disprove. And Kat had a conviction for making death threats to a fellow journalist.

Another poster on BeursKings, Gung Ho, who lived in the Dutch countryside, favoured traditional US conservatism and posted lengthy pieces copied from American websites, some about US Neoconservatives being Leninist agitators. He enthusiastically promoted a penny stock, Clifton Mining, and believed that colloidal silver was a cure against many diseases. That made him the subject of mockery, most notably by Amoricano, an American of Dutch origin who long had been on IEX. Gung Ho might have been in the military and had friends in the American military, or so his sparse remarks about his personal life suggested.

Gung Ho regularly posted comments about the Neoconservatives being chicken hawks, so cowards who send others to war while having done no military service themselves. His use of language was odd. He didn’t express himself as most people would. That made his lengthy texts amusing. The connection between Neoconservatism and Leninism seemed obscure. Like the Leninists, the Neoconservatives use Hegel’s dialectic to promote social progress via revolutions and wars. The conflict between the West and Islam was their latest project, founded on the clash-of-civilisations ideology, and the Iraq War was one of its consequences. Traditional conservatives like Gung Ho opposed these methods. Fortuyn adhered to the neoconservative clash-of-civilisations ideology as well.

There was also a psychiatrist on BeursKings. He had quit his job and tried to make a living by day trading. He posted under the name Kindval, a soccer player from the 1970s. He didn’t seem to like me. When someone attacked me personally or for my political views, he upvoted these comments. The day trading probably didn’t go well. Once, Gung Ho went loose on him by suggesting he had psychological issues. I upvoted that comment. It was a rare occasion for me to upvote a negative comment. Kindval became agitated about Gung Ho’s comment, but even more about my upvote. It made me think that he was, as Gung Ho implied, on his way to a nervous breakdown.

No gain without pain

Fortuyn’s rise had made me curious about the troubles in the multicultural society. The fallout of my student years of not fitting in had made me interested in cultural differences. My view was that the multicultural society had to work because you can’t go back to nation-states. They are a thing of the past. So, what stands in the way of success? Is there really an unbridgeable gap between Islamic and Western culture? It made me interested in Muslims and what they were thinking. In 2004, I joined the message board Maroc.nl for people with a Moroccan background. They are a disregarded minority and face discrimination. Most notably, young Moroccan men are a source of trouble. There are other minorities with similar issues, but somehow Moroccans get most of the attention. They have a serious likability problem.

So, when the nationalist politician Geert Wilders singled out one particular minority for deportation, he took the Moroccans in his infamous ‘fewer Moroccans’ quote, ‘Fewer Moroccans. Let us take care of that.’ The Dutch dislike Moroccans more than other minorities. As the most-hated child of the entire school, I have been there. It was not entirely my fault, but I was part of the problem. Many Moroccans would probably agree, but they are not the ones who cause trouble. The issues Moroccans in the Netherlands face, and how they see themselves and relate to society, compare to those of blacks in the United States. The message board was open. Everyone could join. It featured discussions about religion and social issues. Various people shared their opinions and discussed them with one another.

People came and went on the message board over the years. Occasionally, there were heated exchanges, with Moroccans complaining about the racism of the Dutch and the Dutch complaining about the misconduct of the Moroccans. There were a few agitators on both sides. But overall, the discussions were meaningful and insightful. That was probably because of the diversity of the posters. I suspect the message board had received a grant and was obliged to keep it open to a variety of opinions. There were Christians, Jews, Muslims, former Fortuyn supporters, and leftists.

There were also a few gays seeking to counter the hatred of LGBTQ people among Muslims because of street violence against LGBTQ people in areas where Moroccans lived. There was a diversity of opinions and an exchange of views. People argue over who is right and who is wrong. I didn’t need to have my own opinion to learn from others. I didn’t have strong views. I was more interested in the problem itself. I could watch others dispute and consider the merits of their opinions.

Traditional Muslims are strict on religion, much like conservative Christians. They have more in common with each other than with liberals. So, why many liberals like Muslims, and conservative Christians dislike them, is quite an enigma if you reason from their perspectives on life. Terrorists usually are young men high on testosterone who seek meaning in life and find it in Islam, and then fall prey to extremist preachers. There aren’t that many of them, but a few hundred can already become a serious threat. During my first year, there was uproar over the Dutch publicist Theo van Gogh, who was indeed kin to the famous Dutch painter. Under the guise of freedom of speech, he called Muslims ‘goat fuckers’ and Muhammad ‘a pimp’. The people on the message board didn’t care much about being called ‘goat fuckers,’ but insulting Muhammad was a red line that genuinely upset them.

Several posters also expressed fury about the Somali lady Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had left Islam for a liberal lifestyle, and had, together with Van Gogh, made the short film Submission about the suppression and mistreatment of women by Muslims. To Muslims, the film was blasphemous as it showed the bodies of abused women with Quran verses on them that the filmmakers claimed Muslims use to justify mistreating women. Hirsi Ali also had called Muhammad a ‘pervert’ and a ‘paedophile.’ She faced death threats. The anti-immigration and anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders also faced death threats and requires security to this day.

Hirsi Ali had escaped an arranged marriage. The Dutch police prevented her family from abducting her from an asylum seeker centre in Almelo. She later moved to the United States to work for the neoconservative think tank. Van Gogh paid for his Islam-insulting binge with his life. A youngster of Moroccan descent slit his throat, precisely 911 days after the Fortuyn assassination. That was on 2 November, which refers to the European emergency services telephone number 112, the European equivalent of 911. So, in the first year, the atmosphere on the message board was tense, perhaps explosive even.

Western interventions in the Middle East and Western support for Israel also angered people. Israel illegally occupied Palestinian land, and Palestinians kept on committing acts of terrorism. It has proven to be an unresolvable conflict due to violent extremists on both sides. Several posters on the message board viewed the West, including the Netherlands, as anti-Islamic. As I tried not to offend people with my opinions, I had positive karma on the message board. At first, I was making up my mind anyhow. It is a conflict between two worldviews with their own logic. There is an underlying truth, whatever that may be. In the first years, the American gangster heist called the Iraq War was still in progress. For me, the Iraq War became an unexpected mental dip. The Americans had tricked me into believing that Saddam Hussein had a stash of WMDs.

Once I saw live on CNN how the bombs fell on Baghdad and how gung-ho Americans invaded the country and murdered the defenceless Iraqis, my mood suddenly swung to dim. And then there were no WMDs. They had bombed a country into ruins and killed thousands for no good reason. Mission accomplished. Once again, Americans had confirmed the prejudice of being the trigger-happy cowboys who love their guns and shoot people for minor infringements like trespassing. And Iraq wasn’t even theirs. In the Wild West, it is the law of the gun, not the rule of law, that prevails.

The Netherlands has been a major contributor to the American war effort in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. The Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende had praised the Dutch VOC mentality of the former Dutch colonial enterprise that had invaded and looted the Indies under the guise of trade. The United States had merely copied that proud Dutch tradition of the looting oligarchic merchant republic of the Netherlands. The United States now has the VOC mentality. Shell was a Dutch company, so the Dutch had to be in on the action, or so Mr Balkenende may have reasoned.

Meanwhile, the American government told Americans it was their patriotic duty to purchase more planet-ruining gas-guzzling SUVs to make the scheme profitable. And of course, Americans are very patriotic when it comes to their excessive consumption. You can view the US dollar-based global economy as a scam that primarily benefits wealthy Americans. The whole world is subsidising their lavish lifestyles with their labour and resources. Western countries, including the Netherlands, benefited from this arrangement, as the American military provided peace and stability in Europe. But the world paid the Americans for it by using the US dollar as a reserve currency. The Americans were the leeches on the world’s dime, and they had the military to extort tribute.

That, and the liberal values, are reasons several posters found the West evil and hard to accept Dutch society. They may have used it as an excuse for their misconduct and crimes that they would have committed anyway. Some could easily get angry at you simply for being Dutch. Some Dutch came to the message board only to lecture the Moroccans about the backwardness of Islam or the misconduct of Moroccan youngsters. That didn’t work out so well. You wouldn’t change your mind when someone you have never seen before came out of the blue to tell you how stupid your religion is and that your community is a bunch of criminals. There was also a private messaging system. Over the years, two ladies contacted me as they preferred a Dutch husband and hoped that I was a Muslim.

Several posters wrote that they had been in prison. One of them posted from jail, so there was Internet there, or he had a smartphone. There definitely is a problem. It doesn’t mean that most Moroccans are criminals, but if the crime levels in their community, as the statistics suggest, are three times as high as among native Dutch, their community is a source of trouble. They would argue that you bear no blame for other people’s faults. Only that reasoning is a dead end. If your group’s culture includes values that contribute to these issues, it becomes a problem your community faces. There may be obstacles such as rejection and racism from the Dutch, but positive change begins with you. The West has its own issues to face, most notably the ethics of the merchant, which Balkenende proudly referred to as the ‘VOC mentality,’ so invading countries and robbing them under the guise of trade. We can only move forward if we deal with these issues.

The multicultural troubles weren’t constantly on my mind, but I couldn’t let the issue go. I remained on the Maroc.nl message board for two decades. In 2024, after more than twenty years, shortly after the Gaza War had started, the message board went offline permanently after being filled with anti-Israel messages. That was very suspicious indeed if you believe that the Jews are running this world. Jewish interest groups might have pulled some strings. By then, I had seen too many coincidences to believe that without evidence. And I had arrived at some conclusions. People aren’t willing to change. There will be no gain without pain, which I had already experienced firsthand as a student.

Featured image: Pim Fortuyn on 4 May 2002, two days before his assassination. Roy Beusker (2002). CC BY 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

1. Een heel vervelend geval. Joris van Casteren (2002). Groene Amsterdammer.

Cyclists. By FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands - Buitenleven / Country Life. Wikmedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Something Went Wrong Somewhere

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The bullshit economy

Today, few people produce all that we need. The remainder have found bullshit jobs in the bullshit economy. In several advanced economies, 1-3% of the population works in agriculture. In the past, that was over 90%. They produced barely enough for their own needs. Now these few per cent make the food for everyone, and more people suffer from obesity than famine, while the world’s population has increased from less than one billion to over eight billion. The efficiency increase is astounding. But if a few people do all that we need, then the rest are transforming energy and resources into waste and pollution by producing non-essential goods and services.

These activities make sense because they generate profits for investors or serve some common good. In the current political economy, some are essential, so you can’t simply terminate all these activities. The economic system is a system. Actions have consequences, many of which we can’t foresee. Still, we could manage without gadgets, social media, air travel, and many other things. It is hard to say precisely what the bullshit economy is, but most of it concentrates on the following areas:

  • law and consultancy;
  • communication, information and media;
  • policy making and bureaucracy;
  • management;
  • entertainment and tourism;
  • finance and trade;
  • technology, computers and software.

Usually, most of the attention goes to the government, so policy making, bureaucracy, and also welfare. That blinds us from what happens in the private sector. In ‘advanced’ economies, bullshit probably generates more than 50% of GDP, and it might be as much as 75%. And so a banker once noted,

A cyclist is a disaster for the country’s economy. He doesn’t buy cars and doesn’t borrow money to buy. He doesn’t pay for insurance policies. He doesn’t buy fuel or pay for maintenance and repairs. He doesn’t use paid parking. He doesn’t require multi-lane highways. He doesn’t get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor beneficial for the economy. They don’t buy medicine. They don’t go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing gets added to the country’s gross domestic product. On the contrary, every new McDonald’s restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietitians and nutritionists, and, obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself.

Now you get the picture. The bullshit economy is about making money, not providing needs. Returns in agriculture are meagre compared to those of tech giants. And we could survive without tech giants, but not without food. To illustrate the money-generating power of the bullshit economy, you can compare the returns on an investment in the Chinese stock markets versus the US stock markets. If you had invested $1,000 in the MSCI China in 2011, in a real economy that produces things, you would have had $1,670 by November 2025.

Had you instead put your money in the S&P 500, in a bullshit economy of social media, lawsuits, unaffordable healthcare, Hollywood, finance, vampire capital scams, marketing and sales, you would have had $6,700. And that was the timeframe during which China caught up to, or even overtook, the United States. At least, the rich are doing fine. The latest hype is artificial intelligence. Soon, capitalists may no longer need workers. That vision of a coming capitalist paradise may have kept the stock market going.

Social networks, retail and financial services depend on physical infrastructure, such as roads and electricity grids. Without concrete, copper and fibre optics, there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet, and no parcel deliveries. The bullshit economy depends on physical labour and infrastructure. But the money is not in physical labour and infrastructure. A few mega corporations, such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon, reap the benefits, while nothing they do is something anyone needed fifty years ago. Bullshit is where the money is. In this sense, the US economy has become the most ‘advanced’. It helped that the US has always been a nation of salespeople.

And so, yet another Wall Street wiz kid developed the Degenerate Economy Index, which tracks companies enabling gambling, day trading, and memecoin speculation. By October 2025, it had returned 130% since its inception in May 2023. The index includes 13 public companies providing computing power, mobile devices, cloud services, and social networks, as well as Bitcoin. The 130% return over 18 months occurred during a period of market uncertainty, rising interest rates, the collapse of regional banks, and the flailing commercial real estate market. The growth came from bullshit.1

In the Financial Times, a fellow named Tek Parikh claimed that fifty years ago, the assets held by the top 500 US companies were mainly tangible, such as factories, equipment, and inventory. Today, most of their assets are intangible, including intellectual property, brand value, and marketing networks. In the US, spending on intangible assets surpassed tangible investments as a share of GDP in the late 1990s. The gap has widened ever since. These intangibles drive US productivity growth. Parikh excitedly asserts that this transformation helps to explain the high concentration, exceptionalism and bubble-like valuations in the US stock market.

Information technology unlocks value, which is a marketing term for selling more bullshit or intensifying the competition. Buying a widget for €10 and selling it for €20 because you own a brand generates more wealth than labouring to make it for €8 and selling it for €10. A brand is capital that makes dirt look like gold to people willing to pay the price of gold for it, so it is something intangible, not a factory. Coca-Cola sells the same soda for five times the price to suckers who buy a ‘Coca-Cola feeling.’ The owners of the brands make producers compete, so producers have low margins, and their employees toil for low salaries in sweatshops. They hire a celebrity to tout the brand’s exclusiveness, and then they rake in the money. It costs a few euros to make a Gucci bag that sells for €2,500.

Social networks, retail and financial services depend on physical infrastructure, such as roads and electricity grids. Without concrete, copper and fibre optics, there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet, and no parcel deliveries. The bullshit economy depends on physical labour and infrastructure. But the money is not in physical labour and infrastructure. A few mega corporations, such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon, reap the benefits, while nothing they do is something anyone needed fifty years ago. Bullshit is where the money is. In this sense, the US economy has become one of the most ‘advanced,’ leaving Europe to bite the dust.

Yet another Wall Street wiz kid developed the Degenerate Economy Index, which tracks companies enabling gambling, day trading, and memecoin speculation. By October 2025, it had returned 130% since its inception in May 2023. The index includes 13 public companies providing computing power, mobile devices, cloud services, and social networks, as well as Bitcoin. The 130% return over 18 months occurred during a period of market uncertainty, rising interest rates, the collapse of regional banks, and the flailing commercial real estate market.

The current economic organisation squeezes producers of necessities to employ more people in the bullshit economy to make money for investors from transforming natural resources and energy into waste and pollution. Economists call it efficient and wealth creation. Genetic engineering may increase crop yields. That may benefit farmers, but competition in farming keeps average returns low. Most profits go to the corporations that engineered the crops. In a typical bullshit economy, migrants do the hard labour at low wages, as the native population occupies itself with value-creating activities in the bullshit economy because that is where the money is.

No limits to our desires

Humans don’t lack ambition and desires. The Bible tells that Eve and Adam wished to acquire the knowledge of the gods. There are no limits to our imagination. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have lived in someone’s personal fantasy world. When we have enough, we want more. It could be a larger home, a sports car, or an adventurous trip. Had that not been the case, we could have worked a few hours daily, had all we needed, and been content with what we had. Instead of living happily in Paradise, we work hard to make Earth a wasteland by turning energy and raw materials into waste and pollution until we can’t keep up, and robots and artificial intelligence will replace us.

More material wealth and new inventions haven’t made us happier, yet we still hope they will. Between 1970 and 2024, income per person in the US rose a whopping 265%.2 Still, about 40% of Americans can’t make ends meet. Many feel more miserable than their grandparents did fifty years ago. It is also a lifestyle problem that economic growth can’t fix. What was once a luxury or didn’t even exist has become a necessity. But it is not only that. The gains mostly went into the pockets of the rich, and many poor people are hardly better off. It is not the first time that humans sacrificed quality of life for growth.

Our distant forbears switched from hunter-gathering to growing crops and herding cattle. It increased food production. They thought that if they worked harder, they would have more food and a better life. More children survived, so they remained on the brink of famine. Even worse, they had less varied diets, hence poorer health. They lived in unhygienic settlements where they contracted more infectious diseases. They suffered more from violence as farmers had to defend their crops and animals against thieves. Peasants were more miserable than hunter-gatherers who lived before them.3

Since time immemorial, most people had barely enough, so frugality was a virtue and wastefulness a vice. Parents taught their children to be satisfied with what they had, which was not much. Few scraps remained unused. When my father wished for a toy, he would take a branch from a tree and turn it into a toy himself, at least when he had time to play and didn’t have to do chores at the farm. He didn’t know better and was quite satisfied with whatever toy he could create from a tree branch. His mother didn’t throw away food. And if his trousers had a hole, she would mend them. They were poor, but had enough.

Our virtues have evolved. Capitalism is the new religion. The economy must grow, so the excess production needs willing consumers to gobble it all up. Otherwise, investors lose money. To prevent this catastrophe, a new ethic appeared: consumerism. Businesses now use psychology, advertisements, and the media to convince us to indulge ourselves and make more purchases. It is our moral duty to buy more stuff. That is what we want to hear. Today, many children have mountains of toys they never play with. So, here is your bribe, your thirty pieces of silver for which you have betrayed Jesus.

As an ancient Persian story goes, the inventor of chess once presented the game to the king. The king, much impressed by it, offered the inventor any reward he desired. If there were ever to be a top three stupidest promises in the history of humankind, any reward someone wants will surely make it on that list. The inventor asked for a single grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard. Then, two grains for the second, four for the third, until the last square. The king, baffled by this seemingly small price, agreed. His treasurer later made the calculation and regretfully informed the king that it was impossible to pay the inventor. There wasn’t enough rice in the world. The king then did the only sensible thing and ordered the execution of this man for his greed.

Growth is exponential. Increases come on top of previous ones. Economic growth works like that. It is unsustainable. Economists may argue that efficiency improvements reduce resource and energy consumption, but they have been promising that for quite a while now. In reality, the opposite happens due to a secret they don’t tell you about, the Jevons Paradox. Efficiency improvements make products more affordable, allowing more people to purchase them. To add insult to injury, innovation brings new products to the market that we don’t need. In other words, the problem is the combination of efficiency improvements and innovation with our unlimited desires.

An extreme case is information technology. Since the 1970s, computers have become over a million times as powerful. Their capacity and numbers grew far more, perhaps over a trillion times, so computers consume over a million times more energy and resources than they did in the 1970s. And what for? We don’t need computers. Otherwise, people in the 1960s would have died horrible deaths from a lack of information technology. Okay, you may think you will die when TikTok and Snapchat go blank, but if you had studied history, you could have known that countless generations have survived without these apps. And here is where the economic growth nowadays comes from. Somehow, they create a productivity miracle by allowing influencers to sell us more stuff.

Our inner drives

Since the Industrial Revolution, schedules and appointments have determined people’s lives. We work at designated intervals. Trains must be on time. We save time by travelling faster, taking ready-to-eat meals, utilising cleaning services, and buying new items instead of mending them. And we still hurry because of schedules, appointments, and long working hours. As more nations are becoming ‘developed’, more people join the treadmill and become cogs in a system that is a force of its own, over which we have no control.

A 2025 report from Microsoft claims that employees are experiencing an ‘infinite workday’ of constant emails, meetings and notifications. They check their emails as early as 6 AM, juggle meetings through the afternoon and stay online well into the night. According to Microsoft’s data, employees are interrupted every 2 minutes by meetings, emails, or messages, and receive an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages each workday. As a result, people are feeling overwhelmed.4

Why can’t we have four workdays of six hours each weekly? Only, the Netherlands comes close with a 32-hour workweek. It must be possible. What is the point of working hard to turn the planet into a wasteland so that artificial intelligence will replace us? What is the point of what we are doing? And why the hurry? Time is money, so we live by the clock. A high standard of living requires capital, thus profits for its owners. Everyone must be present during working hours. A business is only profitable when operations run smoothly. Corporations lose money if raw materials, workers, or repair crews arrive late, and the competition will put them out of business.

Trade and finance drive the system. Economists tell us that trade and finance make products cheaper and provide us with more choices. There are shampoos for every hair type, from several brands. But we work harder or risk losing our jobs to provide better service at a lower cost. Traders buy where it is cheapest, and bankers move their money to where it yields the highest returns, resulting in a competition of everyone against everyone. It is also why several Western countries deindustrialised and became service economies, moving from producing to adding value, which is another term for bullshit.

We work so efficiently that a few people produce everything we need, leaving a surplus of labour in need of employment. Many of us work in bullshit jobs. We may work hard, but we waste resources and energy performing these jobs. Modern societies have become complex, so these jobs make economic sense. And so, you can make money without being useful. You can become an influencer or trade crypto. Free-market proponents say that value is subjective and that the market is the ultimate judge of usefulness, which is also subjective, so nothing more than opinion. It is a fatal mistake. If it is profitable to terminate us, free markets will ensure it will happen.

The system hooks into our inner drives, most notably our natural desires for security, comfort, and status. Squirrels gather and store nuts to get them through the winter. They pile up more nuts than needed. But they aren’t nuts. You can’t be sure what the winter will bring. A few more nuts can make the difference between perishing and survival. We save for a rainy day, retirement, or to give our children a good start in life. Our desire to pile up assets stems from our survival instinct. As you grow older and approach your destined appointment with that scythe-wielding fellow, that urge dissipates.

As a child, I had amassed over a thousand marbles. My gains came at the expense of the other children at school. Yet, I sought to win more. But what was the point? Why wasn’t I content with 60? I never thought of that. The more marbles, the better. Marbles are utterly useless, except that I could marvel at them like Scrooge McDuck could spend time looking at his money in his warehouse. Other children ended up without marbles. And so, I am not that different from a greedy billionaire. And unlike most, I haven’t lost my marbles. Now, that is not a coincidence. Like gold coins, they don’t take that much space.

We are social animals, and we compare ourselves to others. If you want to belong to a group, you often need the things others have or the things they do. If you are a fan of FC Barcelona, you buy items from the fan shop and attend soccer matches. Many of us seek status. For men, status gives mating opportunities. No matter how old, annoying or ugly a billionaire may be, he attracts good-looking fashion models. Those who can afford it buy Gucci bags, Ferrari cars, and Rolex watches, only to show others that they can. These items are as useless as marbles. But it would be a waste to give money to the poor, as that would make them lazy. I also didn’t hand out marbles to those who had lost them.

Our capitalist religion teaches us that we deserve a reward for our excellence in ruining God’s creation. After all, it is hard work. And if we buy these luxuries, some of that wealth will trickle down to the children working in the sweatshops that produce them. It is an inefficient way to end poverty and requires more resources than are available. Humanity’s current lifestyle already requires more than two Earths to sustain. And if everyone lived like the affluent, 80% of the people would have to die. But humans are not creatures of logic. We are social animals who cooperate based on fairy tales.

Ideally, you can achieve a higher status by being helpful to others or contributing to society. That motivates us to help and contribute. And we are thankful to those who bring food to the table. It is the businesspeople who pay for our groceries. You wouldn’t have anything to eat if they weren’t busy squeezing money out of something, even when we could do without that something, and even if it is slowly poisoning us. We would be starving in the capitalist economy if we didn’t make and trade all that useless stuff. And not everyone is fit to run a business. It is why we value entrepreneurs so much.

Tell me true, tell me why, was Jesus crucified?
Was it for this that Daddy died?
Was it you? Was it me?
Did I watch too much TV?
Is that a hint of accusation in your eyes?
If it wasn’t for the Nips
Being so good at building ships
The yards would still be open on the Clyde
And it can’t be much fun for them
Beneath the rising sun
With all their kids committing suicide
What have we done?

Pink Floyd, The Post War Dream

The Japanese have worked hard to get ahead, putting the British shipyards out of business, only to see their kids committing suicide. The Chinese are following suit. Why can’t we be happy? It is not that the Japanese didn’t have enough. When you have enough, you don’t need more. Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. The phrase ‘you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’ appeals to our deepest fears of a dismal future in which we starve while being fed propaganda. We prefer a fatal excess of material goods to the bliss of the needy North Koreans. Somehow, we think that the choice is between capitalism and socialism. Can’t there be something better?

Economic growth in the European Union has lagged behind that of the United States in recent decades. And due to its stellar growth, China has overtaken Europe. Europeans work fewer hours and retire earlier than Americans. Europe doesn’t innovate as much because Europeans are more risk-averse than Americans. Europe has fewer billionaire venture capitalists willing to take risks with their excess capital on new ideas that are usually products or services no one needs, but generate money for investors.

Europe has more regulations and fragmented markets. It lacks tech corporations like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Still, without the products of the Dutch corporation ASML, there would be no Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. And also no NVIDIA. The most crucial tech industry is still in Europe. Europeans have fewer children, so the population is ageing and close to declining. European worker productivity lags as Europe has fewer money-generating bullshit activities. European and US manufacturing output have fared similarly since 2000. And if you correct for purchasing power, European countries do better. Life in the US is more expensive, which boosts GDP.

Some say Europe is becoming an open-air museum, a place to visit for those who want to see how life was in the past. Still, Western Europe has less poverty than the US, and Europeans live longer. Europe looks more like Paradise than the United States or China. Are Europeans happier? The World Happiness Report puts eight European nations in the top ten. Only happiness is hard to measure. Finland is number one on the list, but it also has high alcoholism and suicide rates. Like Americans, Europeans increasingly fear the future and vote for fascist parties and leaders.

Will we never be satisfied, no matter how rich we are? Or do the statistics not reflect real life? Or is it perception because we live by stories rather than facts? Or do people sense that things are heading in the wrong direction? Discussing statistics is tricky. Talking about open-air museums. The Old Order Amish are happy people. They don’t need much to live in Paradise. And they don’t have statistics. Only a Paradise can’t do without a strong protector, thus an 800-pound gorilla who scares the hell out of potential invaders. Europe and the Pennsylvania Dutch could count on the protection of the US Army. But who will keep God’s Paradise safe? Captain Obvious has the answer.

Modernisation

You can only say that things are heading in the wrong direction if you expect disaster or when you have a vision of how things should be. Otherwise, there is no right or wrong direction. The ecological apocalypse may kill billions, and technological development could end humanity, but are these terrible things? It depends on whether you think humanity is precious, which is merely an opinion. Modernisation has had its critics. They weren’t that stupid, except for believing we have a choice and can change the system. We might if we are all on the same page, but that requires a miracle.

Mahatma Gandhi believed industrialisation wouldn’t solve the problems plaguing the Indian poor. He urged Indian villagers to remain self-sufficient in food, make their clothes, and avoid the temptation of mass-produced consumption goods. When Gandhi lived, most Indians were hardly better off than their forebears had been before British colonisation. Today, poverty in India has declined dramatically. The Unabomber claimed in his manifesto that the Industrial Revolution had initiated a process that would eventually destroy humanity through technology and end freedom by forcing us to adapt to machinery.

We shouldn’t romanticise the past. Billions are still poor, but poverty has declined. The Industrial Revolution created an engine of permanent change, driven by competition, economies of scale, and innovation. We have become cogs in a system over which we have no control. Communities disappeared, giving way to societies. And the competition never ends. Humans emerged as winners in a contest between species known as the struggle for survival. They then turned into the destroyers of other life on Earth.

Humans innovate faster than other species. We have eliminated the competition, taken over the planet and killed many of the plants and animals that once lived there. The remaining wildlife lives in a few reservations. Artificial intelligence will soon outcompete us. The driver of competition is trade. Without trade, two countries can’t compete, not even two villages, for that matter. And that is our ultimate challenge. The prospect of continued competition is mass destruction. So it would be better to stifle all innovation with red tape than to let things continue as they do. It is a matter of life and death.

Why things are getting more evil

What we see as good benefits something, and what we see as evil harms something. So what you think is good or evil depends on the something you have in mind, what you believe is beneficial and harmful, whether you believe intent matters, and what you think the consequences of choices are. And so there is room for debate. Intent is an interesting issue. You can make the same choice, such as euthanasia, out of compassion, out of cruelty, or based on a principle you believe in. Consequences may also matter. Evil intent can have favourable outcomes, while good intent can bring disaster. That has been an argument in defence of capitalism. The capitalism-socialism debate originates in divergent views on law and morality within the Western tradition.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, with the Common Law, individuals are sovereign, and ethical philosophy is pragmatic. It means that moral rules are a social agreement, so good and evil depend on popular sentiment; freedom is the ability to do as you please, and outcomes matter more than intent. In continental Europe, with Civil Law, the lawmaker is sovereign, thus the king or the people in a democracy, and idealism dominates ethical philosophy, most notably in Germany. It means that good and evil are absolute, freedom means liberating yourself from your lower urges, thus becoming rational and morally upright, and intent matters more than outcomes. Adam Smith was a pragmatist from Great Britain, while Karl Marx was an idealist from Germany.

Adam Smith, the founder of modern capitalist thought, argued in his book ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that self-interest in a market economy promotes overall economic well-being, as ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ In other words, self-interest rather than benevolence fills our stomachs. Conversely, socialist systems, despite being invented with good intentions, led to poverty and famine, so they are evil. Traditional moral systems regarded self-interest as evil and benevolence as good. Capitalism thus comes with an inversion of that morality, and it ultimately became greed is good. It reflects pragmatic moralism rather than an idealistic or absolutist take on ethics.

Capitalism rewards individuals for their ability to generate money by transforming natural resources and energy into waste and pollution, by producing things we don’t need in a competition that will end in disaster. Whatever intentions the greedy may have, their efforts bring about an apocalyptic catastrophe that some major religions have long predicted. We can be pragmatic and judge the greedy not by their intent but by the outcomes. And we can be idealistic or absolutist, arguing that markets have no morals. Individual market participants may possess moral values, but markets never do. There are always people willing to do the trade. When there is demand, there will be supply. The trader’s ethic is no ethics at all. Money corrupts everything, including the government, and that is why things are getting more evil.

Karl Marx wrote in his famous book that capital is dead labour that, like a vampire, only lives by sucking living labour. In capitalism, the dead eat the living, which eventually leads to a zombie apocalypse as predicted by ancient Christian prophets. The specifics of the events do not precisely match those in the Book of Revelation, and somehow they never do, despite the frantic efforts of religious people to prove otherwise. But every sizeable inheritance or successful launch of a new corporation that gets us hooked on things we don’t need is the birth of a new zombie.

And the innovation never stops. Vampire capital, or private equity, is the latest brainchild of capital owners to suck more money out of us. The giants, such as Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, and the Carlyle Group, control $8 trillion in assets. Over 18,000 private funds operate in the US, mainly investing in medium-sized companies. The figure grew by more than 50% in the last five years. According to McKinsey consultants, global private equity assets reached $13 trillion in 2023.5

Here comes just one example. There are countless others. About 70% of nursing homes in the United States are for-profit. They have increasingly merged into larger chains, often owned by private equity firms. Two-thirds of the nursing homes’ cash flow comes from Medicaid. The company Manor Care had 25,000 beds and was the second-largest nursing home chain in the country by 2017. A private equity firm, The Carlyle Group, acquired it in 2007 through a leveraged buyout.

Carlyle sold the land on which the nursing homes stood to a company specialising in providing real estate to healthcare providers. Carlyle pocketed the proceeds from the land sale and used them to pay off the debt incurred in acquiring Manor Care. Manor Care then had to pay rent using its Medicaid revenues, while Carlyle took the operating profits. With this new rent burden, Manor Care’s margins contracted. Carlyle then insisted on cutting positions and wages.5

The quality of care deteriorated as the chain struggled financially and laid off staff. In the wake of the private equity purchase of Manor Care, nurse staffing fell, and resident deaths increased by 11%. Bills, mainly to Medicare, increased by 8%.6 Code violations soared. Lawsuits from relatives spiralled, and Manor Care went bankrupt in 2018. That was a lot of money for lawyers, also. There are plenty of examples. When a private equity firm acquires a doctor’s practice, it starts employing profit-boosting strategies, including surprise billing. Private equity firms remove doctors from insurers’ networks, allowing them to bill patients for far more than insurers would pay.

Then there is Big Pharma. Pharmaceutical corporations pay doctors for prescribing their drugs. Their marketing efforts contributed to the opioid crisis in the United States. An example is Purdue Pharma, which developed, manufactured, and aggressively marketed opioids for decades, causing addiction and overdose deaths. After the settlement, the Sackler family, who long owned the corporation, walked away with billions. Many Americans don’t trust their healthcare system, nor do they trust pharmaceutical corporations. These feelings, the COVID-19 vaccine scare and conspiracy theories led to an estimated 200,000 fatalities in the US because of not taking these vaccines.7

Big Pharma funds healthcare research, so there is reason to be sceptical, or even distrustful. On the other hand, many ‘independent research’ and ‘independent magazines’ are a business model for quacks and snake-oil salespeople, who sell alternative treatments and sensational stories. Quackery is even more lethal and driven by that same profit motive. And the death toll of not taking the vaccines likely vastly outstripped the number of people who died from them. It is a sign of something more troubling. Money has corrupted US healthcare, along with the rest of US society, to the point that not only is trust in healthcare collapsing, but trust in society itself is as well. And with good reason. Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else, while they hardly live longer than Cubans, a destitute people suffering under a failed communist experiment.

We live by stories

Most of us wouldn’t be so depraved as to do what the private equity firms do. If you are rich already, how can you be so evil that you want to make money out of denying the elderly their care or defrauding unsuspecting patients? That is because markets have no morals, and the merchant’s ethics are no ethics at all. There is money in it, and it is legal, so it happens, because money is our highest value rather than caring for patients and the elderly. But it is profoundly evil. Jesus said that you can’t serve both God and money. The Dutch call this issue ‘the merchant and the vicar.’ You are either on the side of good or on the side of money. There is no compromise. So far, money always wins. In that sense, and some other ways as well, Marxism is Christianity without God. And that is no coincidence.

To change our course, we need a new foundation for our culture, values, and way of life, but that requires a new world religion. Traditional peoples saw nature as sacred. Likewise, we can see God’s creation as sacred. We are here to keep it rather than to destroy it. In 1854, the Native American Chief Seattle gave a speech when the US government wanted to buy their land. A redacted version of his oration became a rallying cry within the environmentalist movement. In that version, Seattle reportedly said,

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. We are part of the earth, and it is part of us. The white man does not understand our ways.

One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care.

We might understand if we knew what the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights, and what visions he burns into their minds so they will wish for tomorrow. But we are savages. The white man’s dreams remain hidden from us.

Chief Seattle and his people had lived simple lives in their own Eden. He saw that the white man was on a road to nowhere. He dreams, not much unlike the poor sobs who invented agriculture 10,000 years ago, that if he works hard, his life will be better. Today, nearly everyone else follows the white man’s path and many work even harder than the white man. Poverty is declining worldwide, but the Earth can’t sustain our lifestyles. And artificial intelligence may soon make us obsolete. Will we ride towards our destruction, or can we be content with having enough? And how do we get there? That is not merely an economic question. It begins with our values and the dreams we live by.

Featured image: Bicyclists. By FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands – Buitenleven / Country Life. Wikmedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

1. Investor Insanity? The Degenerate Economy Index Up 130%. Boaz Sobrado (2025). Forbes.
2. Real gross domestic product per capita in chained 2017 dollars (A939RX0Q048SBEA). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
3. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
4. American workers are stuck in an ‘infinite workday,’ according to Microsoft report: ‘People are feeling very burnt out’ Sophie Caldwell (2025). CNBC.com.
5. Private equity: vampire capital. Michael Roberts blog (2024).
6. Private equity: health care’s vampire. Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Schrier, and Hope Schwartz (2024). Statnews.com.
7. Estimated preventable COVID-19-associated deaths due to non-vaccination in the United States. National Library of Medicine. Katherine M Jia, William P Hanage, Marc Lipsitch, Amelia G Johnson, Avnika B Amin, Akilah R Ali, Heather M Scobie, and David L Swerdlow.

College Noetsele

School Newspaper

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When I was sixteen, the school newspaper retired. The editors lacked inspiration. It had become an infrequent occurrence, filled with political activism over cruise missiles, with little to do with the school itself. My experience with the funny newspaper made me figure that I could be a newspaper editor. My friend Arjen found it a good idea. Arjen contacted Erik to join the editorial board. Arjen believed Erik was a popular guy, which could help the newspaper. And even though I didn’t like him, I accepted him on the editorial board. Erik was a bully, and we had fought once. He proved to have good writing skills, and his editorials filled the first page.

We figured we could write six pages every three weeks instead of 100 pages once or twice a year. We named the paper Ikzwetsia after a humorous paper that circulated among the fifth-graders a few years earlier. Another guy in our class, Hendrik, added a few drawings. We filled the rag with juicy gossip about teachers and fabricated stories to make it more amusing. To give you a better insight into what our rag was like, I list a few gossip items,

Mr. Van den Brink’s lessons from economics are not particularly interesting. Remarks from pupils, such as, ‘The snow goes more up than down,’ make this clear.

During a heated discussion, the truth came out. ‘We teachers are not people,’ said Mr. Blaak from mathematics. We had always thought this, but never dared to publish it.

At the school’s back entrance, a garbage container has been defaced with the inscription ‘new janitors’. So far, no one has dared to open this container.

Mr. Nauta from business accounting recently walked to the emergency building 400 without glasses, while he was supposed to be in the main building. He explained this coincidence with the strange statement, ‘You can only see from the inside if someone is crazy.’ Mr. Nauta forgot to mention that this can also be noticed in someone’s words.

There were also some rude jokes, like,

There is a particularly great interest in Mr. W in Hollywood. This interest has been the case since it became known that the ET doll is broken.

Some teachers were in a difficult spot. If we were aware of that, we didn’t make jokes about them, or we complimented them in disguise,

Mr. Kamps, from religion, does not believe in paranormal phenomena. So, we have at least one normal teacher walking around the school.

Mr Kamps had lost his son. These news items were facts mixed with fiction. There had never been any interest in Mr W in Hollywood, but somebody had written ‘new janitors’ on a garbage container. The part about no one daring to open it was a joke. Mr Kamps definitely said he didn’t believe in paranormal phenomena. Finally, Mr Nauta likely had forgotten his glasses while ending up in the wrong building and did explain the coincidence with that bizarre remark, but I wasn’t there when it happened.

There was a film section. A group of film enthusiasts who considered themselves cultured organised film evenings at school. Their film selection centred on artistic content. Not all of these films proved suitable for a conservative Protestant school. One of them, Narayama, featured a scene in which a man had sex with a dog. It generated a lot of ado, or, as Erik put it, the suspense became too much for some people. Art must shock people for some reason. Otherwise, there needs to be a deeper meaning.

Geraldine wrote some of the film commentaries. She was a girl in my class with a striking hairdo, was a bit alternative, dressed outspokenly, and flaunted her interest in art and literature. She had written a particularly lengthy commentary about the classic All About Eve. To fit the page, I shortened it a bit, which offended her, probably because she believed the editing violated her artistic integrity. I didn’t see my writing as art, so it had to fit the available space, but she did, and she believed the space had to adapt to her writing. Marilyn Monroe, who was building her career, played a small part in the film All About Eve.

I indulged myself in writing an imaginary story about the school, a crime detective series with the Cultural Council, which had, amongst its tasks, overseeing the school newspaper. It had a secret service stealing the newspaper’s secrets. The editors were the police detectives solving the crime. It was a loony story featuring a teacher disguised as a standing twilight lamp, a preparation for a theatrical play that looked like a love affair between two teachers, a wild-west-style shoot-out and a dangerous-looking Basset hound with a degree in psychology. And it contained witticisms like, ‘He lay there as lifeless as a soccer match in Enter.’ Some children came from Enter, a village near Rijssen, and the guys were fanatic supporters of the local soccer club Enter Vooruit (Enter Forwards). So, apart from them, everyone had a good laugh.

Ikzwetsia became popular very fast and was a headache for the school board. Children brought copies home. Some parents complained, while other parents enjoyed reading the rag. We presumed the name Ikzwetsia would be telling enough, as it referred to the Dutch word for talking nonsense. But some people took it seriously nonetheless, so we added a cautionary note on the front page, saying, ‘Whoever takes this rag seriously is not taken seriously.’ Unlike the previous school paper, we didn’t need money from the school board because I had prepared a budget. We covered the expenses with subscription fees.

Featured image: College Noetsele by Historische Kring Hellendoorn-Nijverdal, from MijnStadMijnDorp, CC-BY 4.0

1919 Cover of The Natural Economic Order

Feasibility of Interest-Free Demurrage Currency

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Setup

Natural Money is an interest-free demurrage currency. It features a holding fee on currency and a maximum interest rate of zero on money and loans. The Natural Money currency is an accounting unit only, as the holding fee, which may range from 0.5% to 1% per month, makes the currency unattractive to hold. Therefore, the currency will not circulate, nor will someone invest in it. Cash, bank deposits, bonds, stocks, real estate, and other investments aren’t currency and therefore not subject to the holding fee. Not paying the holding fee and the curtailment of credit, and thereby inflation, caused by the maximum interest rate, can make lending at negative interest rates attractive.

Natural Money features a separation between regular banking, also known as commercial banking, which involves lending and borrowing, and investment banking, also referred to as participation banking, which involves participating in businesses. Regular banks guarantee returns to their depositors and use their capital to cover losses. Participating banks have shareholders who share in the profits and the losses. These two bank types should remain separated, even though one bank might offer both in distinct accounts. A commercial bank’s funds should be used only for lending. The maximum interest rate limits lending, allowing equity to replace debt in the financial system.

Evidence from history

There is little historical data on the subject of interest-free demurrage currency. Financial systems founded on interest-free money with a holding fee have never existed. There were holding fees and interest bans, but the combination of both has never existed. More importantly, a usury-free financial system requires a high-trust society founded on moral values where investments are safe, and is only feasible with the help of several relatively modern financial innovations. That all seems too good to be true, but we can have dreams. And so, the evidence from history is of limited value.

Several ancient societies have seen usury-induced economic crises. Extreme wealth inequality, often accelerated by usurious lending, regularly coincided with societal collapses. It is a recurring pattern that has existed since time immemorial. The Sumerians were already familiar with charging interest and its disastrous social consequences. Sumerian rulers began implementing debt jubilees as early as 2,400 BC, cancelling debts and freeing debt slaves. Other cultures, such as those in Israel, have banned charging interest. Israel also had debt jubilees every fifty years.

The Egyptian grain-backed currency existed for over 1,000 years, suggesting it provided monetary stability. Nevertheless, ancient Egypt has seen economic crises, often due to droughts causing crop failures, high taxation during warfare, or a weakening central government. The government mitigated famines with its grain reserves, but prolonged famines depleted these facilities, leading to civil unrest and, sometimes, a collapse of order. There is no evidence of social benefits of this money for Egyptian society. Charging interest was common, and Egypt had debt cancellations.

In the Middle Ages, the Church forbade charging interest. Christians, like Jews, were each other’s brothers and couldn’t charge each other interest. When economic life became more developed, the ban on interest became difficult to enforce. In the 14th century, partnerships emerged where creditors received a share of the profits from a business venture. As long as the share remained profit-dependent, it was not illegal, as it was a participation in a business rather than lending at interest.1 Islamic finance works with similar principles.2

In the 17th and 18th centuries, interest ceilings replaced bans. To circumvent the interest ceilings, a creditor and debtor could secretly agree on a fraud, whereby the creditor handed over less money than stated in the loan contract, so that the borrower actually paid more interest.3 More recent experiences with Regulation Q in the United States, which imposed maximum interest rates on bank accounts, suggest that a maximum interest rate is enforceable only if it does not significantly impact the bulk of borrowing and lending.4

An effective ban on usury requires a society grounded in moral values rather than profit. It requires us to live modestly and within the planet’s limits. It also requires societies to care for vulnerable individuals, so that they don’t fall prey to usurers. You shouldn’t charge interest, not merely because it is illegal, but because it contributes to something profoundly evil. That points to a broader problem. We should care about the world and consider the consequences of our actions. Even when what we do is legal, it doesn’t mean that it is good.

Implementation

To implement Natural Money, interest rates must already be low or negative. Attempting to lower interest rates when market conditions don’t justify that move would likely scare investors. Low interest rates require trust, which requires financial discipline, including fiscal discipline from governments. That doesn’t equal austerity, since governments earn interest on their debts when interest rates are negative. The transition preferably is a gradual process that the authorities communicate in advance. Whether that is possible at all remains to be seen, as the implementation may occur in exceptional times.

If there is still a functional currency, the first step is for the government to balance the budget. The second step is to decouple cash currency from the administrative or central bank currency. The move encompasses retiring central bank-issued banknotes and replacing them with treasury-issued banknotes. Not everyone will hurry to a local bank office to exchange banknotes, so the central bank-issued banknotes must be exchangeable at par for the new banknotes for a considerable period.

As long as interest rates are significantly above zero, a holding fee won’t bring them down. Setting a maximum interest rate can lower interest rates by curtailing credit, thereby cooling the economy. To avoid disrupting financial markets, the implementation must be gradual. The maximum interest rate should be high enough to avoid disrupting the economy. Initially, authorities could set the holding fee at a low percentage, or not at all. As interest rates fall, authorities can lower them.

The zero lower bound is a minimum interest rate. It operates like a price control by preventing interest rates from moving freely to the rate where supply and demand for money and capital balance. That is to the advantage of the wealthy, as they can take the economy hostage by demanding a minimum return on their investments. When returns are low, investors may prefer cash over investments, which can hinder an economic recovery. Economists call it liquidity preference.

Low interest rates can prompt lenders to seek higher yields and take on more risk. Low interest rates allow borrowers to take on more debt. Low interest rates can promote investments that become unprofitable when the economy slows down. A maximum interest rate can prevent these situations from happening. A maximum interest rate caps the risk lenders are willing to take and promotes a deleveraging of balance sheets, so that even low-yielding ventures don’t go bankrupt because of interest-bearing debts.

Issues with the maximum interest rate

A holding fee will cause few difficulties, but a maximum interest rate is more problematic. Insofar as the maximum interest rate affects questionable segments of credit, such as credit card debt and subprime lending, this is beneficial overall. More serious issues can emerge with financing small and medium-sized businesses. Partnership schemes can fill in the gap, but it is hard to predict how that will play out. The maximum yield on loans is zero, making partnerships more attractive, as they can offer higher returns.

There may be objections to the limits Natural Money imposes on consumer credit. Still, there is little doubt that a maximum interest rate can improve consumers’ purchasing power, as borrowers won’t have to pay interest. As a result, there are fewer borrowing options, which may lead to the emergence of black markets. To make illegal schemes unattractive for lenders, lenders who charge interest could lose the money they have lent.

Zero is the only non-arbitrary number, making it more difficult to change the maximum interest rate. That may happen for political or other reasons. The salespeople of usury can find plenty. If it is one, why not two? Zero is a clear line. A positive interest rate, no matter how small, contributes to financial instability. All positive growth rates compound to infinity, so once we start the fire of usury, it will eventually consume us.

A maximum interest rate seems feasible if it is above the rate at which most borrowing and lending occur, thereby limiting the effects on liquidity in the fixed-income market. A maximum interest rate creates room for alternatives, such as private equity and partnership schemes. These alternatives can supplement the fixed-income market and mitigate the effects of the maximum interest rate. A maximum interest rate is beneficial overall if it mainly affects questionable segments of credit, such as subprime lending.

In the case of bonds, the maximum interest rate of zero applies at the time of issuance. Due to economic circumstances or issues with the debtor, the interest rate may rise and enter positive territory. Likewise, governments may issue long-term bonds that may have positive yields if interest rates rise later on. That is not a serious issue, as long as the interest rate was zero or lower at the time of issuance.

A more serious issue is the risk of liquidity problems. When interest rates rise, less credit becomes available at interest rates of zero or lower. Interest rates might increase due to a strong economy with inflationary pressures. There are always economic agents that must borrow at all costs to meet their present obligations, so if they can’t borrow, they might go bankrupt. Businesses and individuals need to deleverage and arrange credit in advance, such as an overdraft facility, with their banks.

Another equally serious question is the profitability of banks with Natural Money. The lending business of banks will likely shrink significantly. The assumption is that risk-free lending will be profitable. But what if it isn’t? In that case, banks may need to lower the interest rates on deposit accounts to a level below the interest rate on short-term government debt. In that case, the cash interest rate may need to be lower than the interest rate on short-term government debt to make it work.

Inherent stability

Ending usury is impossible without investors having trust in the political economy or the political and economic institutions of the polity issuing the currency. The most trusted political economies have the lowest interest rates because their governments are fiscally responsible. Natural Money requires taking it to the next level. With Natural Money, to borrow, the government must find lenders willing to lend in the currency at negative interest rates. The government will be better off borrowing at negative interest rates, which provides an incentive for budgetary discipline. That is the foundation of stability.

Extracting a fixed income from a variable income stream contributes to financial instability. Fixed interest payments can bankrupt a corporation even when it is profitable overall. Interest contributes to moral hazard, as it serves as a reward for taking risks. Investors expect to earn higher yields on riskier debt, so lenders take on these risks. The more uncertain an income source, the higher the interest rate needs to be to compensate for the risk of lending, but the higher the fixed interest rate, the more likely failure becomes, which reveals the destructive consequence of interest being a reward for taking risks.

All parts of the financial system are intertwined. Individual banks can transfer these risks to the system. And so, the risk management of individual agents can increase the overall level of risk in the system. The payment and lending system is a key public interest, so governments and central banks back it. Banks take risks and reap rewards in the form of interest, while public guarantees back up the financial system. The arrangement leads to moral hazard, a mispricing of risk and private profits at the expense of the public. A maximum interest rate can end these problems.

A maximum interest rate causes a deleveraging and a reduction in problematic debts, which has a stabilising effect on the financial system and the economy. Individuals and businesses must already take action before their debts become problematic. Maximum interest rates can distort financial markets. Most notably, there will be fewer options for smaller firms to borrow. Partnership schemes should fill that void.

Interest payments also affect business cycles. The mainstream view is that central banks should raise interest rates during economic booms to curb investment and spending, thereby preventing the economy from overheating. A rosy view of the future prevails during a boom, so higher interest rates seem justified and borrowing continues for some time. When the bust sets in, the picture alters, and an overhang of debt at high interest rates worsens the woes. It would have been better if these debts hadn’t existed in the first place.

That makes a usury-based financial system inherently unstable. Natural Money changes this dynamic. When the economy improves, higher interest rates increase the attractiveness of equity investments relative to debt. That reduces the funds available for lending. The curtailment of credit will prevent the economy from overheating and avoid a debt overhang. When the economy slows, negative interest rates provide stimulus. In the absence of a debt overhang, the economy is likely to recover soon. A Natural Money financial system is inherently stable.

Featured image: 1919 Cover of The Natural Economic Order. Wikimedia Commons.

1. Simon Smith Kuznets, Stephanie Lo, Eric Glen Weyl (2009). The Doctrine of Usury in the Middle Ages. Simon Smith Kuznets, transcribed by Stephanie Lo. An appendix to Simon Kuznets: Cautious Empiricist of the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora.
2. Sekreter, Ahmet (2011). Sharing of Risks in Islamic Finance. IBSU Scientific Journal, 5(2): 13-20.
3. K. Samuelsson (1955). International Payments and Credit Movements by the Swedish Merchant Houses, 1730-1815. Scandinavian Economic History Review.
4. R. Alton Gilbert (1986). Requiem for Regulation Q: What It Did and Why It Passed Away. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Amish family, Lyndenville, New York. Public domain.

Economic Development

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Before the Industrial Revolution

Before the Industrial Revolution began in England, European crafts and sciences had already advanced. During the Middle Ages, inventions such as gunpowder, eyeglasses, the compass, the printing press, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the spinning wheel had reached Europe from China or the Middle East. What made Europe culturally different was its individualism. In the 14th and 15th centuries, a new spirit emerged in Italian merchant towns like Venice, Florence, and Genoa. It was the spirit of the merchant which subsequently spread throughout Europe.

And so, Europeans gradually abandoned their traditional Christian values and developed a capitalist spirit by pursuing worldly wealth and pleasure rather than modesty and bliss in the afterlife. There were merchants elsewhere, but the populace held them in low regard because of their depraved ethics, as greed was their core value. It was the pursuit of profit that drove European explorations and colonialism. Making money became the new moral virtue, alongside inquisitiveness, creating a dynamic that would change the world.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans explored the world and invented the microscope, the steam turbine, the telescope, and the steam pump. Modern science began when Nicolaus Copernicus calculated the trajectories of the planets by assuming that they revolved around the Sun. Isaac Newton later formulated the laws of motion. Europeans expanded their colonial empires, thereby increasing the size of their markets, a prerequisite for the mass production that industrialisation was to bring.

The British were the most successful. Supported by a strong navy, they built the largest colonial empire. They also invented modern banking, creating money out of thin air or financing capital by imagining future revenues. In 1689, the British had the Glorious Revolution, which, like many revolutions, was about taxation. Businesspeople then took over the government. Taxation henceforth required the consent of the taxed, thus, property owners. And the state became a venture of the propertied classes, like the Dutch Republic, the wealthiest nation at the time, already was.

The taxpayers didn’t like to pay for ineptitude and corruption, so the quality of the British state improved, and the state used its military to support the colonial business ventures of the propertied classes. Great Britain had easily accessible coal deposits and developed a large coal mining industry. Due to a lack of firewood, coal had become England’s primary heating source. As mine pits grew deeper, they became prone to flooding. With no transport costs, a coal-fired steam engine to pump water out of the mine became cheaper than manually pumping with buckets.

Ignition

Trade with the colonies promoted British industries, resulting in high living standards and wages in England. In England, coal was easily accessible, so energy was cheap. In Great Britain, the aristocracy had an entrepreneurial spirit and paid taxes, making the British government a reliable borrower. Banking innovations, most notably the creation of money, made British capital markets more efficient. And so, Great Britain had low interest rates, so a low price for capital. The first machines were clumsy and inefficient, but high wages, cheap capital and affordable energy made them profitable.

This combination of factors is why the Industrial Revolution started in England rather than elsewhere. Wages in France were lower, while the banking system was less developed. The rent-seeking French aristocracy didn’t pay taxes, making the French government an unreliable borrower. Thus, interest rates in France were higher. Once the first machines were in operation, inventing new ones or improving existing ones became profitable, so British engineers got busy enhancing the steam engine’s efficiency and inventing contraptions like the spinning jenny and the cotton gin.

The fuel consumption of steam engines dropped from 44 pounds of coal per horsepower-hour in 1727 to 3 pounds in 1847, making it economical to use the steam engine for other purposes, such as trains. The dramatically improved fuel efficiency, combined with other improvements, made it economical to mechanise production elsewhere where wages were lower, interest rates were higher, or energy was more expensive. That allowed the Industrial Revolution to spread to other countries.1

It was a watershed moment. Until then, inventions were rare. Scientists made them out of curiosity. However, from then on, the profit motive generated a permanent drive to pursue knowledge and new technologies and to invent new products. In this way, economising through innovation and scale became a constant, unstoppable process that economists call creative destruction. Factories needed scale to operate profitably, while inventions birthed new industries and made others obsolete.

Humans have started a fire in their midst that continues to grow. We can’t stop it. A classic book on the Industrial Revolution used at universities is David Landes’ The Unbound Prometheus. According to Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. The Greek supreme deity, Zeus, punished him for his act. The story parallels the biblical story of the Fall. The Industrial Revolution unleashed the unlimited fire of the gods that will devour us.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the general level of opulence has risen dramatically, though it was hardly noticeable at first. Industrialisation made craftspeople in the clothing industry destitute as they couldn’t compete with factories. Everyone else profited from cheaper cloth. Mechanisation made existing products like cloth more affordable, so people had money to spend on new products like light bulbs, making investing in new inventions profitable. Economists call it Say’s Law. More supply generates new demand.

Due to these innovations, production costs decreased, and industrialisation became profitable where wages were lower, energy was more expensive or interest rates were higher. Industrialisation first took off in Europe and North America, but not elsewhere. One reason is that Europeans had become innovation-minded and eagerly adopted new technologies like railroads and telegraphs. These first technologies were simple, thus easy to apply, but the Chinese and others remained reluctant to use them.2

Standard development recipe

Western Europe followed quickly, helped by the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte’s reforms. The French Revolution wiped out the corrupt old French regime and replaced it with a modernised, efficient bureaucracy. The aristocrats lost their power. The French introduced civil registries, rationalised the law code, standardised weights and measures by introducing the metric system with kilograms and metres, and made everyone drive on the right side of the road. Napoleon’s armies then spread these reforms over Europe. Napoleon did to Europe what the first Chinese emperor did to China 2,000 years earlier. Both reigned shortly but left a lasting legacy.

Countries Napoleon didn’t conquer, such as Great Britain, continued to drive on the wrong side of the road and use arcane measures like miles and ounces. And only in Great Britain do aristocrats still influence politics through the House of Lords. To catch up, Western Europe and the United States followed a standard recipe consisting of the following elements:

  • Creating a national market by eliminating internal tariffs and building railroads.
  • Developing domestic industries by using external tariffs.
  • Instituting banks to finance investments and stabilise the national currency.
  • Establishing a mass education system to upgrade the labour force.

These measures had enormous social consequences, which we now refer to as modernisation. Societies came to replace communities. It was the age of nationalism. With the help of mass education, everyone learned the national language, and local dialects disappeared. People learned to identify with their nation rather than their kin and village. The outcome was that modern humans rely on markets and the state more than on their family and community.

Other countries implemented the same recipe but with modifications due to local economic factors. Factory layouts that operated at a profit in Europe were loss-making elsewhere. If energy were expensive, the operation would become more cost-effective using fewer machines and more labour. Japan was the first non-Western country to follow. The Japanese had to deal with local circumstances. High interest rates made investment capital expensive, so Japanese factories held no stockpiles of raw materials and semi-finished products but let their suppliers make them when needed. So, when interest rates rose in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Western industries couldn’t compete with Japan.

There are varying views on why industrialisation succeeded in some countries but not in others. If you dare to generalise, you can make the following observations:

  • East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and later China modernised successfully. They had a sense of nation and experience with rational government administration. Their bureaucrats and businesspeople successfully implemented modernisation projects.
  • Latin American countries were less successful. They were former colonies lacking national identities. Their white elites neglected the education of indigenous people. There were a few large estates and hardly any small-scale farmers. Wealth inequality prevented the development of a middle class.
  • The Soviet Union modernised with the help of state planning. Industrialisation of heavy industries succeeded, allowing the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany. Agricultural reforms were a disaster, and consumer products were of poor quality. By the 1970s, it became clear the Soviet Union couldn’t keep up with the West.
  • Several countries in the Middle East modernised with dictators implementing socialist development models based on the experiences in the Soviet Union. Some Arab countries became wealthy from oil revenues. Few countries in the Middle East have developed industries that compete in international markets.
  • Africa lagged. African borders didn’t match the tribes living there, so there was no sense of nationhood. There have never been states in most of Africa. European colonisers ended traditional forms of government and property rights, contributing to poor governance and corruption. Africans started with a disadvantage.

Industrial politics

There are requirements for a modern economy, though a country doesn’t need to meet all of them. A capable government and an educated workforce can turn a situation around. Japan has few natural resources, but has become one of the most advanced countries in the world. It was the first non-Western country to industrialise. Japan was also lucky. After World War II, it had access to US markets because it was a close ally of the United States, which needed it to help it export its way into prosperity. Argentina had fertile land and was one of the wealthiest countries by 1900, but it has since then gone downhill. To successfully modernise, a country probably needs:

  • a capable government that understands economics and is business-friendly
  • an educated workforce as workers must read, write and use technology
  • businesspeople, investment capital, and sufficiently ensured property rights
  • a large enough market, thus a sizeable middle class
  • an industrial policy, thus picking industries to compete in international markets, helping to develop them, and supporting them with tariffs or subsidies

There are several kinds of industrial politics. Neo-liberal politics aim to pursue economic growth by promoting trade, lowering taxes, and reducing regulations. Unrestricted trade allows areas and people to specialise and compete to produce more and better products, enhancing overall opulence. It also promotes a race to the bottom at the expense of our future. Industries go where wages are lowest or where they can dump their waste and avoid paying for government services.

Making the economy sustainable and people-friendly also requires industrial policies, such as reducing competition and introducing regulations and controls. And it requires ending imports from countries that don’t adhere to the same ethical standards. A sustainable, people-friendly economy can only exist on a level playing field with other economies that adhere to the same standards. These measures increase costs and reduce living standards. An extreme case is the Old Order Amish. They choose to be self-sufficient and live simple lives. Their economic model resembles community economics.

Community economics aims to enable people in a community to help each other by buying and selling goods and services using local currencies. It never became a worldwide success because communities lack the scale for self-sufficiency. There is also a lack of commitment, which is something the Amish do have. Few people barter their labour or goods in their community if they can get better deals elsewhere. Commitment is vital. Without it, there will be black markets with merchants smuggling in illicit goods.

Featured image: Amish family, Lyndenville, New York. Public domain.

1. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Robert C. Allen (2014). Cambridge University Press.
2. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.